Ezri (the server) is doing fine and somehow my ISP is decent enough that my downstream barely seems affected. But true enough, outgoing bandwidth (200kbit/s, pretty much dedicated at this hour of the European day) is fully used at the moment, so loading might take a while. Of course this only applies to the Atlantik URL, KSVG is hosted on one of those neat KDE servers.
Will adjust the stylesheet not to load the marble background images, that should help a bit.
The number of ports is extremely limited and it's not trivial how to "get one" for a service. Have you ever tried getting one assigned by IANA?
Almost every time a computer looks up a DNS record, it does so for a specific purpose in mind. Computers don't resolve at random, they do so because applications are looking for a HTTP service, SMTP service, MSN service, whatever. Including port information would greatly increase flexibility and allow administrators to allocate ports the way they see fit, and not IANA.
Well, that's just a side-effect of the broking "no MX record, use the A record" rule. What would be nice is a DNS where one can truly specify a purpose for the lookup in the domain as well, for example slashdot.org/http would return IP1:80 and slashdot.org/smtp could return IP2:25.
Hardcoding ports to services is one of the worst legacies of the Internet and it's a shame DNS never tackled that problem.
Website links are only a very small part of PageRank. If you still believe link whoring matters, you're sadly mistaken. Besides, if I were trying to inflate my page rank in such a way, it wouldn't make sense to link a *different* URL, would it?
Furthermore, "again" looks a bit silly given the fact my sites have had decent Google (and MSN Search) ratings for quite a while. We've been top ten for "governor schwarzenegger" for months without a single incoming link to said pages. Why? Because we've had regular updates on the recall elections with a diverse content in a technically organized manner.
Yes, I am aware that the way my I build my websites seems to be the way Googlebot likes them. And that's also what happened: I tuned my content engine to be more strict in what it sent, and Google picked up my efforts to be a responsible webmaster. I didn't trick Googlebot, it just happened to agree with the way I present my content.
I cannot speak for Neil, but I did not post that link, nor would I do so anonymously. You don't seem to know me at all. (especially not since I actually disagreed with Neil's opinion that KDE is full of anti-Americanism on SA)
Let me clarify a bit: Neil (and others, including myself) thought that the patent message did not belong on kde.org, certainly not in such a prominent way. KDE is supposed to be non-political and frankly, a boycott regarding a vote in the European Parliament is something that can be considered as being political. Noone ever had a problem with the anti-patent hotspot on the KDE website. (more: the KDE topic on my personal blog)
So, when the KDE community "agreed" this political statement was okay, Neil inserted his own political statement, which was almost immediately criticized and removed. Because of these double standards, Neil left KDE CVS. His software is still available.
Neil then complained about these double standards on Simply American, a site I operate and where both him and me post disjointed commentary on America with incredible diversity: from the California recall elections to the war on terrorism, from the Giants' victory march in the NL West to a mirror of Uruklink, the official Iraqi ministry of information. If you read the daily archives, you'll see that I personally do not believe there is an intentional wave of anti-Americanism within KDE, although I must admit that I understand how Neil came to that conclusion since his pro-American credits were banned even though those were not more or less political than the website blackout due to the patents boycott.
In the end, I believe it's a win-win situation as far as KDE is concerned: Neil will be much happier developing his KDE applications outside of CVS, the KDE core developers will be much happier without any criticism within the project and I won't have to be in the middle of fights between Neil and other developers anymore and it will be much easier for me to remain friends with all people I met (for the first time, or again) in Nove Hrady as well as Neil, whom I met in San Francisco last year.
Most of my interests or on-line. Most people who type search queries related to those interests will find my website. Thus, most IP addresses in my web server log should be useful.
And for those without a website, or a shitty one, there's Meetup.com.
Funny how scientist think it would be cool do something we've all be doing for years already.
Try again, get the latest release. I experienced problems but I think I went for an update and I haven't had any problems with any Flash site anymore ever since.
8 big modules required to install a full featured KDE desktop. 80 small modules required to install a halfway functional GNOME desktop.
Let's do some simple math here. KDE module = 20, GNOME module = 1. 20 * 8 = 160 1 * 160 = 160 End result: the same.
While I agree with you that a good packagement management tool makes the issue irrelevant, but I can do math too:
Permutations of GNOME dependencies: 80! = 7.1569457046e+118 Permutations of KDE dependencies: 8! = 40320
In reality qt/arts/kdelibs/kdebase are the only dependencies for the non-main modules, and kdeaddons sources optionally depend on kdegames/kdemultimedia.. and that's it! Last time I tried GNOME CVS, I couldn't even find out where to start compiling. Perhaps CVSGNOME solves that.
Of course, if you are using binaries, all our math makes no sense anymore because any distribution can bundle or split modules at will.
Coverage outside of the US
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Watching it in the Netherlands and it looks like the commercials here (at least the once so far, half-time might be different although I doubt we'll get the American ads) are the worst ever. People explicitely put effort into making them look like cheap Powerpoint presentations.
Game itself is not so exciting yet, had more fun during the World Series.
Most other browser will stay below 1% Market share. Don't get me wrong, but I think that Netscape 7.0 is installed on more computers than Mozilla. There's (of course) not a single (technical) reason for this, but, hey, what technical knowledge do you expect from a normal computer user?
I installed NS7 and not Mozilla on my Linux box for the simple reason it simply works, and Moz did not, when it comes to Java and Flash. NS6 was crap, but NS7 really had some QA behind it. So I downloaded both, tried both for a short while, and kept the one that worked best for me.
No doubt that Moz has since improved though, so I'll have to check it out again (I use it when I am making a complete clean KDE build and am left without Konq for an hr).
Quote: "When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus."
As a matter of fact, Gecko is more strict in its parsing than KHTML, which supports a number of IE extensions for real world sites.
So while technically Gecko might be more noble and "better", in real life Konqueror might very well work on more sites. From my experience, it ends up 50-50 anyway. On some sites Konq is faster or more accurate, on others Gecko wins, on most I couldn't tell.
Using Qt's native Aqua widgets might have been a huge factor too, instead of faking that look with XUL.
Right, but you do pay tax on these services: sales tax. 19% where I live, YMMV. If you use Cingular, that's more likely somewhat below the 10%, depending on the state you're in.
SMS is severly overpriced too, in Europe. Indeed, 15c per message is normal, even with an expensive subscription. It was "only" 5c a message on my Cingular *pre-paid* this summer.. go figure.
I don't have a true PDA, but the calender funciton of my cell phone (Motorola T720) is actually decent so I have started using it, even to my own surprise since I never had great experiences with mobile databank devices.
Perhaps some day a PDA is useful enough to justify the costs over pen and paper, although I see more future in the hybrid market (cell phones with PDA functionality). We all have a cell phone anyway and there's no need to carry a second devices for simple stuff as notes, calenders and addressbooks. For more serious stuff, I'd consider a laptop right away (where the tablet PC is indeed a cool hardware idea).
Except for using the phrase theft, which could be considered libel, I see no problem with this.
So I won't see the site.. not my loss but ultimately theirs as I can't/won't recommend it to anyone else. And sites might not show up in Google either using this kind of technology.
The idea of the Internet is that ultimately someone will build a better site.. anyone can publish something. If there's no useful site on a topic, some freak will stand up and make one that is better and more user-friendly. I know I have done so and I bet many others with me.
Or some browser developer might find a way to show the content after all. Not that I actually see people pay for this stuff to put it on their sites.
It will improve soon. We had a similar situation a few years ago in Europe.. you usually subscribe for a year and after that, you can cancel at any moment. And since you usually get a new phone with a new subscription, a lot of people switch after their subscription expires. Well, the tech savvy ones do anyway.
Of course here in the Netherlands (a little larger than Delaware, 16 million people) you can choose between 5 providers and there's a regulation where they must provide you with the option of keeping the same cell number. If there's less competition where you live, you might be screwed.
Karma:Excellent (CmdrTaco got tired of seeing Slashdot math: 50+1-1=49)
Unless you start posting crap on a regular basis, there is no difference between a karma rating of 49 or 50. Or even 48, 47, 46.. Therefore it doesn't matter Slashdot recalculates karma immediately instead of making a queue so you can keep the beloved 50.
So, if anything, the changes are an improvement because your exact karma rating doesn't really matter most of the time. But some people see problems where there just aren't any.
Proklam is a speech architecture for KDE. It is still under development and I have no idea what the progress is, but you can find it in the kdenonbeta CVS module (instructions) of the project.
"Proklam is a desktop service that will allow KDE applications (and other applications) to use speech synthetisers using a dcop interface."
The README file of the project has contact information, in case you'd like to get in touch with the developer.
Want me to add this to the TODO / planned features list of Atlantik? Seems like there is a large demand for customizing games (good thing you can already designed your own boards with a Designer app).
Quite the opposite, the bigger your team, the more you need that automated build and smoketest.But I thinkJoel [joelonsoftware.com] can say it better than I.
Joel's main argument for an automated system is:
"A tester finds a bug in the code, and reports the bug. The programmer fixes the bug. How long does it take before the tester gets the fixed version of the code? In some development organizations, this Report-Fix-Retest loop can take a couple of weeks, which means the whole organization is running unproductively. To keep the whole development process running smoothly, you need to focus on getting the Report-Fix-Retest loop tightened."
I still believe (based on experience) that this is not a problem for KDE. There is a very large group of people who build KDE from CVS or CVSup sources and have instant availability from the patch, which was quite possibly also sent to the respective bug report system (and mailed to the originator) and project mailinglist.
My experience tells me KDE is not one of the development organizations where this is a problem. Patches spread quickly within the KDE community itself, every major release (6-9 months) is followed by several minor releases with bugfixes only (every approx. 6 weeks, unless an urgent fix requires a faster release).
Maybe Mozilla did not have such an active community, but fortunately KDE has and it seems to work.
Of course there are some automation tools, such as build scripts in kdesdk, but those are still there to be used by end-users themselves. A community also scales the variety of compilers, platform and dependency versions over a much broader area than any automated system could. It would be a mere impossibility to maintain that variety.
Slashdot Mirror
That or we could sponsor the French space program.
Admit it, rather have them on the moon than across the Atlantic.
(s/Atlantic/channel/ if you're British, s/the Atlantic/Belgium/ if you're Dutch like me, work out your own variations)
Ezri (the server) is doing fine and somehow my ISP is decent enough that my downstream barely seems affected. But true enough, outgoing bandwidth (200kbit/s, pretty much dedicated at this hour of the European day) is fully used at the moment, so loading might take a while. Of course this only applies to the Atlantik URL, KSVG is hosted on one of those neat KDE servers.
Will adjust the stylesheet not to load the marble background images, that should help a bit.
The number of ports is extremely limited and it's not trivial how to "get one" for a service. Have you ever tried getting one assigned by IANA?
Almost every time a computer looks up a DNS record, it does so for a specific purpose in mind. Computers don't resolve at random, they do so because applications are looking for a HTTP service, SMTP service, MSN service, whatever. Including port information would greatly increase flexibility and allow administrators to allocate ports the way they see fit, and not IANA.
Well, that's just a side-effect of the broking "no MX record, use the A record" rule. What would be nice is a DNS where one can truly specify a purpose for the lookup in the domain as well, for example slashdot.org/http would return IP1:80 and slashdot.org/smtp could return IP2:25.
Hardcoding ports to services is one of the worst legacies of the Internet and it's a shame DNS never tackled that problem.
For the last time (not!): it's the Klingon Desktop Environment. Only ~130 strings translated though, if only I'd get some help!
Website links are only a very small part of PageRank. If you still believe link whoring matters, you're sadly mistaken. Besides, if I were trying to inflate my page rank in such a way, it wouldn't make sense to link a *different* URL, would it?
Furthermore, "again" looks a bit silly given the fact my sites have had decent Google (and MSN Search) ratings for quite a while. We've been top ten for "governor schwarzenegger" for months without a single incoming link to said pages. Why? Because we've had regular updates on the recall elections with a diverse content in a technically organized manner.
Yes, I am aware that the way my I build my websites seems to be the way Googlebot likes them. And that's also what happened: I tuned my content engine to be more strict in what it sent, and Google picked up my efforts to be a responsible webmaster. I didn't trick Googlebot, it just happened to agree with the way I present my content.
I cannot speak for Neil, but I did not post that link, nor would I do so anonymously. You don't seem to know me at all. (especially not since I actually disagreed with Neil's opinion that KDE is full of anti-Americanism on SA)
Let me clarify a bit: Neil (and others, including myself) thought that the patent message did not belong on kde.org, certainly not in such a prominent way. KDE is supposed to be non-political and frankly, a boycott regarding a vote in the European Parliament is something that can be considered as being political. Noone ever had a problem with the anti-patent hotspot on the KDE website. (more: the KDE topic on my personal blog)
So, when the KDE community "agreed" this political statement was okay, Neil inserted his own political statement, which was almost immediately criticized and removed. Because of these double standards, Neil left KDE CVS. His software is still available.
Neil then complained about these double standards on Simply American, a site I operate and where both him and me post disjointed commentary on America with incredible diversity: from the California recall elections to the war on terrorism, from the Giants' victory march in the NL West to a mirror of Uruklink, the official Iraqi ministry of information. If you read the daily archives, you'll see that I personally do not believe there is an intentional wave of anti-Americanism within KDE, although I must admit that I understand how Neil came to that conclusion since his pro-American credits were banned even though those were not more or less political than the website blackout due to the patents boycott.
In the end, I believe it's a win-win situation as far as KDE is concerned: Neil will be much happier developing his KDE applications outside of CVS, the KDE core developers will be much happier without any criticism within the project and I won't have to be in the middle of fights between Neil and other developers anymore and it will be much easier for me to remain friends with all people I met (for the first time, or again) in Nove Hrady as well as Neil, whom I met in San Francisco last year.
Most of my interests or on-line. Most people who type search queries related to those interests will find my website. Thus, most IP addresses in my web server log should be useful.
And for those without a website, or a shitty one, there's Meetup.com.
Funny how scientist think it would be cool do something we've all be doing for years already.
Maybe it will, but you'll have to wait a bit: no new major KDE release any-time soon, I'm afraid.
I'm all for developer meetings, been there, done that. But when they start to dictate release cycles, that worries me a little.
Try again, get the latest release. I experienced problems but I think I went for an update and I haven't had any problems with any Flash site anymore ever since.
8 big modules required to install a full featured KDE desktop.
80 small modules required to install a halfway functional GNOME desktop.
Let's do some simple math here.
KDE module = 20, GNOME module = 1.
20 * 8 = 160
1 * 160 = 160
End result: the same.
While I agree with you that a good packagement management tool makes the issue irrelevant, but I can do math too:
Permutations of GNOME dependencies: 80! = 7.1569457046e+118
Permutations of KDE dependencies: 8! = 40320
In reality qt/arts/kdelibs/kdebase are the only dependencies for the non-main modules, and kdeaddons sources optionally depend on kdegames/kdemultimedia.. and that's it! Last time I tried GNOME CVS, I couldn't even find out where to start compiling. Perhaps CVSGNOME solves that.
Of course, if you are using binaries, all our math makes no sense anymore because any distribution can bundle or split modules at will.
Watching it in the Netherlands and it looks like the commercials here (at least the once so far, half-time might be different although I doubt we'll get the American ads) are the worst ever. People explicitely put effort into making them look like cheap Powerpoint presentations.
Game itself is not so exciting yet, had more fun during the World Series.
Most other browser will stay below 1% Market share. Don't get me wrong, but I think that Netscape 7.0 is installed on more computers than Mozilla. There's (of course) not a single (technical) reason for this, but, hey, what technical knowledge do you expect from a normal computer user?
I installed NS7 and not Mozilla on my Linux box for the simple reason it simply works, and Moz did not, when it comes to Java and Flash. NS6 was crap, but NS7 really had some QA behind it. So I downloaded both, tried both for a short while, and kept the one that worked best for me.
No doubt that Moz has since improved though, so I'll have to check it out again (I use it when I am making a complete clean KDE build and am left without Konq for an hr).
Here's why.
Quote:
"When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus."
I too cant believe they used KHTML. I think they use Gecko.
nope .
As a matter of fact, Gecko is more strict in its parsing than KHTML, which supports a number of IE extensions for real world sites.
So while technically Gecko might be more noble and "better", in real life Konqueror might very well work on more sites. From my experience, it ends up 50-50 anyway. On some sites Konq is faster or more accurate, on others Gecko wins, on most I couldn't tell.
Using Qt's native Aqua widgets might have been a huge factor too, instead of faking that look with XUL.
Right, but you do pay tax on these services: sales tax. 19% where I live, YMMV. If you use Cingular, that's more likely somewhat below the 10%, depending on the state you're in.
SMS is severly overpriced too, in Europe. Indeed, 15c per message is normal, even with an expensive subscription. It was "only" 5c a message on my Cingular *pre-paid* this summer.. go figure.
No, but this new theory does seem to imply life might be more widespread than we believe, because the conditions are more widespread.
I don't have a true PDA, but the calender funciton of my cell phone (Motorola T720) is actually decent so I have started using it, even to my own surprise since I never had great experiences with mobile databank devices.
Perhaps some day a PDA is useful enough to justify the costs over pen and paper, although I see more future in the hybrid market (cell phones with PDA functionality). We all have a cell phone anyway and there's no need to carry a second devices for simple stuff as notes, calenders and addressbooks. For more serious stuff, I'd consider a laptop right away (where the tablet PC is indeed a cool hardware idea).
Except for using the phrase theft, which could be considered libel, I see no problem with this.
So I won't see the site.. not my loss but ultimately theirs as I can't/won't recommend it to anyone else. And sites might not show up in Google either using this kind of technology.
The idea of the Internet is that ultimately someone will build a better site.. anyone can publish something. If there's no useful site on a topic, some freak will stand up and make one that is better and more user-friendly. I know I have done so and I bet many others with me.
Or some browser developer might find a way to show the content after all. Not that I actually see people pay for this stuff to put it on their sites.
It will improve soon. We had a similar situation a few years ago in Europe.. you usually subscribe for a year and after that, you can cancel at any moment. And since you usually get a new phone with a new subscription, a lot of people switch after their subscription expires. Well, the tech savvy ones do anyway.
Of course here in the Netherlands (a little larger than Delaware, 16 million people) you can choose between 5 providers and there's a regulation where they must provide you with the option of keeping the same cell number. If there's less competition where you live, you might be screwed.
Karma:Excellent (CmdrTaco got tired of seeing Slashdot math: 50+1-1=49)
Unless you start posting crap on a regular basis, there is no difference between a karma rating of 49 or 50. Or even 48, 47, 46.. Therefore it doesn't matter Slashdot recalculates karma immediately instead of making a queue so you can keep the beloved 50.
So, if anything, the changes are an improvement because your exact karma rating doesn't really matter most of the time. But some people see problems where there just aren't any.
Proklam is a speech architecture for KDE. It is still under development and I have no idea what the progress is, but you can find it in the kdenonbeta CVS module (instructions) of the project.
"Proklam is a desktop service that will allow KDE applications (and other applications) to use speech synthetisers using a dcop interface."
The README file of the project has contact information, in case you'd like to get in touch with the developer.
Want me to add this to the TODO / planned features list of Atlantik? Seems like there is a large demand for customizing games (good thing you can already designed your own boards with a Designer app).
Quite the opposite, the bigger your team, the more you need that automated build and smoketest.But I thinkJoel [joelonsoftware.com] can say it better than I.
Joel's main argument for an automated system is:
"A tester finds a bug in the code, and reports the bug. The programmer fixes the bug. How long does it take before the tester gets the fixed version of the code? In some development organizations, this Report-Fix-Retest loop can take a couple of weeks, which means the whole organization is running unproductively. To keep the whole development process running smoothly, you need to focus on getting the Report-Fix-Retest loop tightened."
I still believe (based on experience) that this is not a problem for KDE. There is a very large group of people who build KDE from CVS or CVSup sources and have instant availability from the patch, which was quite possibly also sent to the respective bug report system (and mailed to the originator) and project mailinglist.
My experience tells me KDE is not one of the development organizations where this is a problem. Patches spread quickly within the KDE community itself, every major release (6-9 months) is followed by several minor releases with bugfixes only (every approx. 6 weeks, unless an urgent fix requires a faster release).
Maybe Mozilla did not have such an active community, but fortunately KDE has and it seems to work.
Of course there are some automation tools, such as build scripts in kdesdk, but those are still there to be used by end-users themselves. A community also scales the variety of compilers, platform and dependency versions over a much broader area than any automated system could. It would be a mere impossibility to maintain that variety.