Perhaps the community should be asking whether it's more important that we add a fun new Swirl effect to switch to another desktop or if people would rather have a sane and complete GL API. Do we need the entire desktop to be rethought or should we simply settle for having a sane and unified sound solution?
I take your point but you have to remember that it's not one big community, collectively deciding what's most important. It's lots of little communities each doing the thing that interests them.
The guys writing bling for compiz are doing it, for free, because they enjoy it. They don't want to work on the Open GL API (I'm guessing).
The guys playing around with new desktop metaphors are doing that, for free, because it interests them. They aren't interested in sound sub-systems.
To say that people should work on X rather than Y is an interesting wish, but completely misunderstands the development model of open source. To make it work you need a different development model, like say, a company with product managers and paid developers.
If you want fewer releases use a long term support release.
For Ubuntu they are marked LTS and come out every two years. The last was 8.04 (Hardy)
For Fedora / RedHat they are the RedHat Enterprise Linux releases, and are about every three years, or the free CentOS copy of same.
And I don't remember anyone bitching about Win 7 coming out. Despite the bias towards linux around here I think most people will be glad to see the back of Vista.
Agreed. The whiteboard is a great idea but any visible trouble-ticket queue would work. I'm guessing that the problem is that each person views you as their sole resource. They need to see that they are one of many. A formal trouble-ticket system goes a long way to alleviating that.
The other option (although you might be too small a group for this) is that all requests go through your manager. I've managed IT teams and when all requests have to go through me then I can be the bastard and the guys doing the actual work can be nice. If they need to bounce something they can just refer the trouble-maker to me.
The key is to put something - a system or a person - between the requests coming in and the effort going out.
Although we call it preferential voting. It you don't get your first preference (because no-one else likes them) then your vote counts towards your second, etc.
And it's also counted by hand. Doesn't seem to be a problem with doing that.
This is a big topic, and there are lots of different "right" answers. The best one for you depends a lot on you, your project, your workplace, and your future team.
Try to find someone that you can talk to face-to-face for 30 minutes over a coffee or beer. You'll learn a lot more from their experience in that time than any amount of reading and you'll then have a better idea of which way to direct your energies and further research.
Ideally someone with a similar project to yours, but really, anyone with a bit of experience (the more the better, as they would have seen more methodologies) can help.
Includes such priceless gems as "Google will spend more than $2 million dollars daily -- to be exact, up to $2,064,054 a day" and then goes on to show a calculation with:
Bandwidth: $1,000,000
Talk about pulling figures out of your arse.
With 375 million unique visitors (let's take that on face value) that's about 1 million a day so he claims that each and every visitor to YouTube sucks down a dollar's worth of bandwidth. I find that pretty implausible.
In theory, this is a good idea. Unfortunately, the whole philosophy of the iPhone is that Apple knows better than the owner of the device (which is probably true in the case of a lot of the users...) so there is no way of overriding this.
Also better than a lot of developers (isn't there something like 25000 apps in the app store now?) who are brand new to mobile phone development and don't understand it's constraints (e.g. battery life)
You misinterpreted his comments about infant learning. He didn't say that you need _these_ interactive blocks to learn, he said that physical things like blocks are instrumental to learning. The point being that our brains are better wired to deal with spatial relationship than abstract numbers and the like.
That kid was pretty young and I don't think anyone was expecting him to create a symphony. He did exactly what you'd expect a child of that age to do.
It well understood that x.0.0 is _supposed_ (although perhaps not always) the production-ready version.
If it was a developer pre-release then it should have been numbered as so, in line with common convention. To do otherwise was a grave mistake on the part of the KDE team.
It's slightly depressing sometimes, because you've put a year or more of work into a product, and you've still only produced enough content to last a long weekend.
Authors seem to cope okay with this. Years to write and a few hours to read.
Movie developers don't seem too hung up about it either.
Which is exactly why it's good that there are two major desktops. You get to use KDE. I get to use Gnome. For me Gnome is superior because it aligns better with the way I work. I don't care that it doesn't have a gazillion options because I'm not going to be twiddling them anyway.
They feel like they are buying into a game of control that is unfounded in reality and ultimately to their detriment (since they have to pay money for something that doesn't cost anything to produce *at this point* (excluding initial development costs).
Slashdot Mirror
So out of curiosity, how do you spell McDonalds, Campbells and Ford when discussing their merits or shortcomings?
Perhaps the community should be asking whether it's more important that we add a fun new Swirl effect to switch to another desktop or if people would rather have a sane and complete GL API. Do we need the entire desktop to be rethought or should we simply settle for having a sane and unified sound solution?
I take your point but you have to remember that it's not one big community, collectively deciding what's most important. It's lots of little communities each doing the thing that interests them.
The guys writing bling for compiz are doing it, for free, because they enjoy it. They don't want to work on the Open GL API (I'm guessing).
The guys playing around with new desktop metaphors are doing that, for free, because it interests them. They aren't interested in sound sub-systems.
To say that people should work on X rather than Y is an interesting wish, but completely misunderstands the development model of open source. To make it work you need a different development model, like say, a company with product managers and paid developers.
So just the cows then
If you want fewer releases use a long term support release.
For Ubuntu they are marked LTS and come out every two years. The last was 8.04 (Hardy)
For Fedora / RedHat they are the RedHat Enterprise Linux releases, and are about every three years, or the free CentOS copy of same.
And I don't remember anyone bitching about Win 7 coming out. Despite the bias towards linux around here I think most people will be glad to see the back of Vista.
Agreed. The whiteboard is a great idea but any visible trouble-ticket queue would work. I'm guessing that the problem is that each person views you as their sole resource. They need to see that they are one of many. A formal trouble-ticket system goes a long way to alleviating that.
The other option (although you might be too small a group for this) is that all requests go through your manager. I've managed IT teams and when all requests have to go through me then I can be the bastard and the guys doing the actual work can be nice. If they need to bounce something they can just refer the trouble-maker to me.
The key is to put something - a system or a person - between the requests coming in and the effort going out.
One word: kdawson
The reason is simple, I can bring food, and get fed on the airline (usually). I can't bring wifi.
(wireless modems excepted)
Although we call it preferential voting. It you don't get your first preference (because no-one else likes them) then your vote counts towards your second, etc.
And it's also counted by hand. Doesn't seem to be a problem with doing that.
This is a big topic, and there are lots of different "right" answers. The best one for you depends a lot on you, your project, your workplace, and your future team.
Try to find someone that you can talk to face-to-face for 30 minutes over a coffee or beer. You'll learn a lot more from their experience in that time than any amount of reading and you'll then have a better idea of which way to direct your energies and further research.
Ideally someone with a similar project to yours, but really, anyone with a bit of experience (the more the better, as they would have seen more methodologies) can help.
I said to my wife-to-be (yes, true, I have a fiancee; I'm an atypical nerd that has managed to develop a few social skills)
Maybe you or your colleagues are just young. Every developer I know has a wife, girlfriend, or family.
Yeah. Definitely doesn't add up.
Includes such priceless gems as "Google will spend more than $2 million dollars daily -- to be exact, up to $2,064,054 a day" and then goes on to show a calculation with:
Bandwidth: $1,000,000
Talk about pulling figures out of your arse.
With 375 million unique visitors (let's take that on face value) that's about 1 million a day so he claims that each and every visitor to YouTube sucks down a dollar's worth of bandwidth. I find that pretty implausible.
That's just about nothing but criticism.
And it drives the kernel forward very effectively.
And me?
In theory, this is a good idea. Unfortunately, the whole philosophy of the iPhone is that Apple knows better than the owner of the device (which is probably true in the case of a lot of the users...) so there is no way of overriding this.
Also better than a lot of developers (isn't there something like 25000 apps in the app store now?) who are brand new to mobile phone development and don't understand it's constraints (e.g. battery life)
That's a mailto: which is not even pointing at the same server (it will go to an smtp server, not the http server).
That might still be a limitation of IE6, but get your GETs and POSTs and mailto's straight.
You misinterpreted his comments about infant learning. He didn't say that you need _these_ interactive blocks to learn, he said that physical things like blocks are instrumental to learning. The point being that our brains are better wired to deal with spatial relationship than abstract numbers and the like.
That kid was pretty young and I don't think anyone was expecting him to create a symphony. He did exactly what you'd expect a child of that age to do.
Then they used the wrong numbering convention.
It well understood that x.0.0 is _supposed_ (although perhaps not always) the production-ready version.
If it was a developer pre-release then it should have been numbered as so, in line with common convention. To do otherwise was a grave mistake on the part of the KDE team.
What weaknesses are you referring to?
It's slightly depressing sometimes, because you've put a year or more of work into a product, and you've still only produced enough content to last a long weekend.
Authors seem to cope okay with this. Years to write and a few hours to read.
Movie developers don't seem too hung up about it either.
Is that you Joel?
If you had to teach them how to use it, that's poor interface design.
returns some hotel in France.
Actually, he said you _might_ not need CMYK support. And if you do, he gave a link for a plugin.
Pretty reasonable answer I think.
Which is exactly why it's good that there are two major desktops. You get to use KDE. I get to use Gnome. For me Gnome is superior because it aligns better with the way I work. I don't care that it doesn't have a gazillion options because I'm not going to be twiddling them anyway.
You can twiddle to your hearts content on KDE.
Isn't choice wonderful?
So who pays for the initial development costs?