Really and truly, Alt-F2 is the Katapult replacement.
I'll have to map it to Alt+Space, then. Or something.
I suppose half my dislike for Alt+F2 is the awkwardness of typing it, especially on this keyboard.
[sarcasm] Every bit as wonderful as it always was. [/sarcasm] Not especially great.
I can sort of live with it being a little slow -- I started archiving things, because I decided that was less of a nuisance than switching to Thunderbird.
What bugs me are the occasional crashes, and the corruption of the local cache, to where I often (several times a week, it seems) have to "rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/imap" -- which, of course, means it has to fetch all the messages again.
That's not horrible, given that the IMAP server is reached via gigabit crossover. But it's still annoying.
I think the real lesson here is simply that input over the network cannot ever be trusted.
It is their network, and S3 is built on tech which is explicitly designed to not have any kind of security built-in. The security is applied at the API level, but any misbehaving machine within the S3 cluster could cause some serious damage.
I actually agree with this philosophy, to an extent. After all, this is essentially a large number of computers acting as a hard disk. How would you approach talking to a hard disk in your own machine? Do you assume that everything is corrupt, untrusted, or wrong?
Well, technically speaking, there isn't an apology there:
Finally, we want you to know that we are passionate about providing the best storage service at the best price so that you can spend more time thinking about your business rather than having to focus on building scalable, reliable infrastructure. Though we're proud of our operational performance in operating Amazon S3 for almost 2.5 years, we know that any downtime is unacceptable and we won't be satisfied until performance is statistically indistinguishable from perfect.
Allow me to translate:
We screwed up. We'll do better next time.
Nowhere in the document do the words "I'm sorry" appear. That's entirely implied.
Encoding things for iPod or iPhone? There's Handbrake, iTunes itself, faac... just off the top of my head. All free software (if not in speech, then as in beer.) Barrier to entry? Pfft.
I am talking about commercial entities. I believe the standard license for h.264 is about $2500 per CPU used to encode. Obviously, there are specific deals for desktop software (iTunes can do it, I assume), but it's not insignificant.
what benefit does Apple derive from supporting Ogg and-or FLAC?
How about: Fewer licensing fees, better support for their users, and lower barrier of entry to anyone who has to encode something for either iPod or iPhone?
It's great if you work in an environment where you can personally make changes to running code in a few minutes and aren't expected to support any given feature or your code ever again,
I didn't say that.
I can personally make changes to version control in a few minutes. They don't make it to running code immediately, and they will be supported.
My point was, you are making any support at all much more complicated than it needs to be. Without taking too much time...
you have to MAINTAIN support for it over time, provide security fixes
The community is doing that.
It means interacting with the user interface people to figure out how to expose the feature to users
They already support multiple codecs. Adding another would be as simple as adding a checkbox, or an item in a dropdown.
it means someone explaining to the marketing people what these features mean so they can advertise them properly.
Not every feature needs to be marketed.
Adding new code means working with database fields (we are dealing with a huge metadata database when talking about iTunes).
Only if the container format is changed.
I could go on...
Keep in mind that with the state of the company right now, what Steve Jobs says goes. If he actually wanted to follow through on "Thoughts On Music", he could -- even assuming everything you've said is true.
I thought that one of the mainstays of free software is "if you have an itch you have the ability to scratch it".
Unless, of course, we're talking about a chunk of proprietary software -- that is, iTunes and the iPod firmware. And the iPhone, which seems downright hostile towards free software at all.
Furthermore, the usual "scratch" is to install RockBox, or to buy another player -- not to fix Apple's shortcomings for them.
Well, actually, that doesn't explicitly mention patents -- but this does.
âoeAs far as you knowâ probably isn't far enough for a company with deep pockets that has several new suits against it every week.
However, Theora at least was formerly commercial, so it's had some scrutiny -- and deep pockets would suggest that they can defend themselves well enough.
Nothing takes Ãoeone engineer maybe two hoursà to add support for. Software engineering in a professional environment just doesn't work that way.
Maybe that suggests something is very wrong with that "professional environment"?
Last week, at work, I decided to see if I could fix a problem with our web app on Linux. (Only affected Firefox on Linux, worked elsewhere.)
And you know what? Took me less than two hours. Ended up being a one-line fix, more like half an hour to one hour, and I hadn't worked on that particular app at all yet.
Yes, there's testing, and deploying to staging, and testing some more, and reviewing, and deploying to production, and so on. But we're doing all of that anyway, unless development stops -- my one line fix doesn't make that take any more or less time.
if anybody was going to decide that, actually, maybe one of them DOES infringe on a patent or two, who better to target than Apple?
And... What? Demand that Apple remove support for them? At that point, fine -- it took two hours to add support, it'll take maybe 20 minutes to remove support.
you've likely spent far more money than you'd make back selling the iPhone to the three people who care deeply about Ogg Vorbis support
I realize you may not be the same person who is making comment about "DoS attacks", but I hope you realize you can't have it both ways.
Either these people in the Genius Bars aren't going to have any impact, or there's far more than three people who care about Vorbis support.
Consider, also, those developing apps for the iPhone, or services meant to be used on the iPhone. Having support for those formats means we don't need to spend many thousands of dollars per CPU to encode to AAC, MP3, h.264, and so on.
A link that I got in my email, to the full text of what the FSF is doing here.
From TFA:
Because this is the only way to get the entertainment industry to agree to allow its content to be distributed as openly as it has with Apple, and because Apple wants to make sure it makes money.
From the link:
Jobs is the largest individual shareholder at Disney, and he could insist that its films be DRM-free.
From TFA:
As to the third question, no one cares where you go. Get over it.
Anyone who believes this, where are you right now? Boxers or briefs? How long is your penis / how big are your tits?
If you feel uncomfortable sharing these details with me, keep in mind, you at least have some idea who I am. You have no idea who's tracking you at Apple or AT&T.
What's the recourse if this douche is wrong?
The fourth question? It's not a question. At least put a question mark at the end to pretend.
That's only because you didn't read the whole question. Again, from the FSF:
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
I think this is kind of an extreme action, and I can't really support it. But then, maybe extreme actions are exactly what's needed. (And maybe that's just Dark Knight rubbing off on me.)
That is a credible reason - whats the point of having the desktop ready with no apps for it?
There are many ways that could have been accomplished other than calling it 4.0 -- and developers, in general, are more likely to be sensitive to such subtleties than end-users, who would simply blindly upgrade, if they're going to upgrade at all.
I would also like to point out that Konqueror was "replaced" by Dolphin, which in my opinion was a bad decision.
Given that the file management capabilities of Dolphin are exactly duplicated in Konqueror, you aren't forced to use Dolphin.
The point of Dolphin, I think, was to make things easier for newbies, and to provide a lighter-weight option for people who don't use Konqueror as a web browser.
The KDE development team elaborated very well their reasons for releasing 4.0.0 on the schedule and in the manner that they did.
I said "no credible reason", not "no reason". Perhaps I should've simply said "no good reason".
The simplest answer I have heard is, they released it as 4.0 to get developers to start using it.
In other words, it was a simple publicity stunt, and they did, in fact, want to trick users into trying it, even though it wasn't ready. And it's kind of imploded on them -- many users (myself included) reacted badly, so not that great of a publicity stunt.
Regarding the following: Bear in mind that these are based on impressions from very close after the 4.0.0 release. Some things may have improved.
Katapult's not there anymore.
Was the idea to replace it with alt+f2?
Kontact is there. I have it open on another desktop right now.
Wasn't there for 4.0. Good to hear it is now.
Konsole looks pretty much the same to me as it always has.
The character spacing has changed, to make it more readable. So I have to choose between shrinking the font a bunch, or enlarging the window, to get a konsole of the same size. I like to fit a lot of konsoles on the screen at once, so this really sucks for me.
And, as usual, no way to revert to the old behavior, or at least none that I could find from the GUI.
You can change the panel size, this functionality has been there now for months.
Now that I remember, I was plain wrong here, sorry.
The problem is that changing the panel size to "tiny" introduced a brand-new bug, at least on Kubuntu-KDE4: The menu now wrapped around to the top of the screen. Meaning that if I click the lower-left (no keyboard-shortcut, because that would make too much sense), the menu appears in the upper left.
If you don't like the new menu, use the old one. It's still there.
I like the new menu well enough, I just think it's not a satisfactory replacement for the old menu -- and I don't think either will open with a keyboard shortcut.
That would be a killer feature -- because the new menu could actually function very well as a Katapult replacement.
Alt-F2 is the replacement for Katapult.
Alt+F2 does more and less than Katapult did. I think typing into the new menu is actually closer, last I looked.
Thing about Alt+F2 -- I use that in KDE when I have a specific command I want to run without opening a konsole for it. I use Katapult for running common apps, which I really should be building custom shortcuts for.
Which is good. Katapult had more bugs than a badger's asshole.
Except that, in typical KDE4 fashion, there's no KDE4-compatible Katapult clone, or Katapult rewrite. There's a Katapult re-imagining, and not all of us prefer it to Katapult itself.
I have had Kopete open on this machine for weeks on end, it has not once crashed out on me.
I don't remember whether it crashed on KDE4. I do know that it crashes on KDE3.
It's not entirely frequent, and it seems somewhat behavior-driven, like the Konqueror crashes. In fact, I would guess it's something to do with the text editing widget. It seems to happen the most when editing, which really sucks for Slashdot comments.
It doesn't make it unusable, and I still use Kopete instead of Pidgin. Point is, IM is not performance-intensive, which means we don't need to be writing it in C++. I tend to get cranky when apps like that crash on me, because it seems like segfaults, at least, could be prevented by simply using a mature scripting language.
On the flip side, Kontact puked all over the place on a daily basis for me on KDE 3.5, and it's much more stable now.
Well, let me put it this way: 2.6 underwent quite a lot of development as 2.5, before it was released as a stable 2.6.
More relevantly: If Linux 2.6 had been released without, say, support for proper Unix permissions -- if all files were mode 0777 -- people would complain. That's the kind of basic functionality that's utterly missing from KDE 4.0, which was trivially found in a GUI in 3.5.
so you are the kind of user that started XP without waiting for SP1?
Well, you see, most open source projects don't have this problem. Most Ubuntu releases are at least better than the previous version, and the major issues are usually fixed within a few weeks of release.
The only issues are with large, well-established projects -- and then, only with porting third-party development to the new version. That is: Apache2 was rock-solid at release, but mod_perl was only stable on Apache1 for a very long time.
I could forgive KDE4 if it was just that apps hadn't been ported -- which many haven't (Kmail? Amarok? You know, some of the main reasons I use KDE at all??) -- I could probably even forgive them if it was somewhat unstable. But the core desktop environment not only isn't stable, it isn't even half as functional. Example: The panel is HUGE, and no way to fix it, until 4.1.
ok sorry this is not OSS but still the concepts hold
Only in poorly-managed projects -- which we all should realize that KDE is.
And while we're at it -- in pre-SP1 XP, couldn't you still put the GUI in Classic Mode, including the Control Panel? It might not have been as stable as 2K, but it was certainly as usable.
I DO blame the maintainers of Kubuntu for making it the default for 8.04.
They didn't, unless you went out of your way to download the "KDE4 Remix", which pretty clearly states it's experimental.
They might use it for 8.10, if it's ready by then. But at the current rate, by then, we'll have KDE 4.5, or even KDE 5.0, and 3.5 will still be better.
Well, would you rather they wait for now to release 4.0?
Well, yes. Even this might qualify as 3.95 or somesuch.
In the gaming industry, and with Microsoft, people often release a dot-oh package which requires extensive patching later on to bring it up to a reasonable standard. The rest of the software world, particularly open source, is usually more reliable -- Wine released 1.0 after 15 years of development, and Google keeps things in Beta indefinitely.
If you think the confusion is something Slashdot manufactured, think again -- I've got a reasonably tech-savvy friend using Kubuntu, and he saw various kde4 packages start to pop up in the repositories. He figured, 4.0 is higher than 3.5, and it was a stable release, so it must be an upgrade.
He uninstalled it right away, and now he hates kde4. Given time, that hate might well extend to KDE as a whole.
KDE had no credible reason for releasing it as 4.0, and every reason for releasing it as something else, like 3.9, or 4.0 Alpha. They've instead chosen a release pattern very similar to Vista -- first release is unusable, and even after a service pack, it's still not going to be an upgrade to the old version (XP or KDE3).
But KDE3 is old tech and it's starting to show its age IMHO.
Yes, which is why I'm seriously considering using GNOME, or going back to FluxBox or raw Beryl (without a DE). I'm stuck between something which really is showing its age (why, exactly, doesn't pagedown in KPDF flip an entire page? Why does it, instead, flip like 98% of a page? And why can't I fill out a PDF form?)...
Stuck between that and a downgrade. (Where's Katapult? Where's Kmail/Kontact? Where's Amarok? Why is Konsole huge? Why's everything huge, including the panel, with no way to reduce it? Why is the menu so weird -- and if this is a replacement for Katapult, why can't I open it with a keystroke?)
And worse, both still have major apps like Konqueror, Kopete, and Amarok simply crash, and frequently.
Foxconn isn't the only one with faulty DSDTs -- and this is one place where Linux can hardly be blamed when something is specifically claiming to support Linux -- and hey, here's the code for it! -- but the Linux version is faulty, while the Windows version is fine.
I've fixed at least one problem by literally pasting DSDT code from one of the Windows sections to the Linux section.
Without patents, a person with a great idea for a new feature can't enter an existing market because the existing market players will simply and rightfully rip off the idea.
If the existing market players are actually nimble enough to pull that off, good for them. Often, they're not, because...
Also, there is little incentive for a dominant market player to introduce new features on their own. They are better off slowwwwly introducing new features and enhancements in accordance with a planned obsolescence program to ensure a steady income stream.
If they're used to playing that game, they really won't be ready for a young startup who can do everything they can, faster, better, and with more features.
New market participants, bolstered by patents, can disrupt this scenario
And move on to be the dominant player, because they have the absolute must-have feature, and no one else can make a move.
Well, unless the big competitors steal the idea, in which case:
compete knowing that if big competitors steal their idea, they can at least sue.
The courts are largely a game of money. The "new market participant" will run out of money before the case is over. The "big competitor" can usually offer a sweet settlement deal that will leave the CEO of the "new market participant" rich and happy, and the overall market situation as stagnant as ever.
Oh, but it does mean that a small company, filled entirely with lawyers, can take a semi-valid-looking patent around to other small companies and sue them. This is called "patent trolling", and it's interesting in that it only hurts mom&pop shops, never the big competitors.
The argument isn't whether patents cause any good at all -- though some convincing arguments have been written to suggest that they don't.
The argument is whether patents cause more good than harm -- whether they have a net positive impact on society. I'm not sure that's true.
The be all end all is that botting was helping to ruin the game for honest customers.
Which sucks, I know -- but you aren't legally entitled to a fun game. Which matters more to you -- fairness in WoW, or fairness in real life?
I cant predict if this will set any kind of "dangerous" precedent.
I will, then.
I do know that most people who are unhappy with this decision are most likely botters themselves.
Wow. A "with us or with the terrorists" post? Really?
You sound exactly like a politician. "I do know that most people who are unhappy with the blocking of Usenet are most likely child pornographers themselves. And to you I say..."
That is... until they come out with a new bot. In the end this will change nothing.
So you're willing to risk a massive legal precedent -- one which you can't predict -- in order to change nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Really and truly, Alt-F2 is the Katapult replacement.
I'll have to map it to Alt+Space, then. Or something.
I suppose half my dislike for Alt+F2 is the awkwardness of typing it, especially on this keyboard.
[sarcasm] Every bit as wonderful as it always was. [/sarcasm] Not especially great.
I can sort of live with it being a little slow -- I started archiving things, because I decided that was less of a nuisance than switching to Thunderbird.
What bugs me are the occasional crashes, and the corruption of the local cache, to where I often (several times a week, it seems) have to "rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/imap" -- which, of course, means it has to fetch all the messages again.
That's not horrible, given that the IMAP server is reached via gigabit crossover. But it's still annoying.
I think the real lesson here is simply that input over the network cannot ever be trusted.
It is their network, and S3 is built on tech which is explicitly designed to not have any kind of security built-in. The security is applied at the API level, but any misbehaving machine within the S3 cluster could cause some serious damage.
I actually agree with this philosophy, to an extent. After all, this is essentially a large number of computers acting as a hard disk. How would you approach talking to a hard disk in your own machine? Do you assume that everything is corrupt, untrusted, or wrong?
Well, technically speaking, there isn't an apology there:
Finally, we want you to know that we are passionate about providing the best storage service at the best price so that you can spend more time thinking about your business rather than having to focus on building scalable, reliable infrastructure. Though we're proud of our operational performance in operating Amazon S3 for almost 2.5 years, we know that any downtime is unacceptable and we won't be satisfied until performance is statistically indistinguishable from perfect.
Allow me to translate:
We screwed up. We'll do better next time.
Nowhere in the document do the words "I'm sorry" appear. That's entirely implied.
Encoding things for iPod or iPhone? There's Handbrake, iTunes itself, faac... just off the top of my head. All free software (if not in speech, then as in beer.) Barrier to entry? Pfft.
I am talking about commercial entities. I believe the standard license for h.264 is about $2500 per CPU used to encode. Obviously, there are specific deals for desktop software (iTunes can do it, I assume), but it's not insignificant.
what benefit does Apple derive from supporting Ogg and-or FLAC?
How about: Fewer licensing fees, better support for their users, and lower barrier of entry to anyone who has to encode something for either iPod or iPhone?
It's great if you work in an environment where you can personally make changes to running code in a few minutes and aren't expected to support any given feature or your code ever again,
I didn't say that.
I can personally make changes to version control in a few minutes. They don't make it to running code immediately, and they will be supported.
My point was, you are making any support at all much more complicated than it needs to be. Without taking too much time...
you have to MAINTAIN support for it over time, provide security fixes
The community is doing that.
It means interacting with the user interface people to figure out how to expose the feature to users
They already support multiple codecs. Adding another would be as simple as adding a checkbox, or an item in a dropdown.
it means someone explaining to the marketing people what these features mean so they can advertise them properly.
Not every feature needs to be marketed.
Adding new code means working with database fields (we are dealing with a huge metadata database when talking about iTunes).
Only if the container format is changed.
I could go on...
Keep in mind that with the state of the company right now, what Steve Jobs says goes. If he actually wanted to follow through on "Thoughts On Music", he could -- even assuming everything you've said is true.
When was the last time you heard someone say "Wow, PETA's right! I'm going vegan!"?
You know, I think it was right around when nobody knew PETA existed.
The iPod uses a hardware decoder for MP3, AAC, etc.
And what does the iPhone use?
I thought that one of the mainstays of free software is "if you have an itch you have the ability to scratch it".
Unless, of course, we're talking about a chunk of proprietary software -- that is, iTunes and the iPod firmware. And the iPhone, which seems downright hostile towards free software at all.
Furthermore, the usual "scratch" is to install RockBox, or to buy another player -- not to fix Apple's shortcomings for them.
Patent free? An interesting claim.
Not mine, theirs.
Well, actually, that doesn't explicitly mention patents -- but this does.
âoeAs far as you knowâ probably isn't far enough for a company with deep pockets that has several new suits against it every week.
However, Theora at least was formerly commercial, so it's had some scrutiny -- and deep pockets would suggest that they can defend themselves well enough.
It probably doesn't apply to the newer generation of iPods
This question was specifically about the iPhone.
think there is an Ogg Vorbis Quicktime plugin, so you can listen to them in iTunes, but they're not going to go out of their way to support it.
By "out of their way", I'm talking about picking up that Quicktime plugin that already exists, and deploying it on the iPhone and the new iPods.
So Apple gets no real increase in sales while at the same time having to write and maintain the code to support them.
Except others already do write and maintain that code. All Apple has to do is plug it into iTunes.
Nothing takes Ãoeone engineer maybe two hoursà to add support for. Software engineering in a professional environment just doesn't work that way.
Maybe that suggests something is very wrong with that "professional environment"?
Last week, at work, I decided to see if I could fix a problem with our web app on Linux. (Only affected Firefox on Linux, worked elsewhere.)
And you know what? Took me less than two hours. Ended up being a one-line fix, more like half an hour to one hour, and I hadn't worked on that particular app at all yet.
Yes, there's testing, and deploying to staging, and testing some more, and reviewing, and deploying to production, and so on. But we're doing all of that anyway, unless development stops -- my one line fix doesn't make that take any more or less time.
if anybody was going to decide that, actually, maybe one of them DOES infringe on a patent or two, who better to target than Apple?
And... What? Demand that Apple remove support for them? At that point, fine -- it took two hours to add support, it'll take maybe 20 minutes to remove support.
you've likely spent far more money than you'd make back selling the iPhone to the three people who care deeply about Ogg Vorbis support
I realize you may not be the same person who is making comment about "DoS attacks", but I hope you realize you can't have it both ways.
Either these people in the Genius Bars aren't going to have any impact, or there's far more than three people who care about Vorbis support.
Consider, also, those developing apps for the iPhone, or services meant to be used on the iPhone. Having support for those formats means we don't need to spend many thousands of dollars per CPU to encode to AAC, MP3, h.264, and so on.
Advertising on their website has not worked. For years, it hasn't worked.
Going from "no one notices" to "everyone hates you" can't be bad -- it's worth a shot, anyway.
A link that I got in my email, to the full text of what the FSF is doing here.
From TFA:
Because this is the only way to get the entertainment industry to agree to allow its content to be distributed as openly as it has with Apple, and because Apple wants to make sure it makes money.
From the link:
Jobs is the largest individual shareholder at Disney, and he could insist that its films be DRM-free.
From TFA:
As to the third question, no one cares where you go. Get over it.
Anyone who believes this, where are you right now? Boxers or briefs? How long is your penis / how big are your tits?
If you feel uncomfortable sharing these details with me, keep in mind, you at least have some idea who I am. You have no idea who's tracking you at Apple or AT&T.
What's the recourse if this douche is wrong?
The fourth question? It's not a question. At least put a question mark at the end to pretend.
That's only because you didn't read the whole question. Again, from the FSF:
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
I think this is kind of an extreme action, and I can't really support it. But then, maybe extreme actions are exactly what's needed. (And maybe that's just Dark Knight rubbing off on me.)
That is a credible reason - whats the point of having the desktop ready with no apps for it?
There are many ways that could have been accomplished other than calling it 4.0 -- and developers, in general, are more likely to be sensitive to such subtleties than end-users, who would simply blindly upgrade, if they're going to upgrade at all.
Simple example: Call it KDE 3.9, and KDELibs 4.0.
I would also like to point out that Konqueror was "replaced" by Dolphin, which in my opinion was a bad decision.
Given that the file management capabilities of Dolphin are exactly duplicated in Konqueror, you aren't forced to use Dolphin.
The point of Dolphin, I think, was to make things easier for newbies, and to provide a lighter-weight option for people who don't use Konqueror as a web browser.
The KDE development team elaborated very well their reasons for releasing 4.0.0 on the schedule and in the manner that they did.
I said "no credible reason", not "no reason". Perhaps I should've simply said "no good reason".
The simplest answer I have heard is, they released it as 4.0 to get developers to start using it.
In other words, it was a simple publicity stunt, and they did, in fact, want to trick users into trying it, even though it wasn't ready. And it's kind of imploded on them -- many users (myself included) reacted badly, so not that great of a publicity stunt.
Regarding the following: Bear in mind that these are based on impressions from very close after the 4.0.0 release. Some things may have improved.
Katapult's not there anymore.
Was the idea to replace it with alt+f2?
Kontact is there. I have it open on another desktop right now.
Wasn't there for 4.0. Good to hear it is now.
Konsole looks pretty much the same to me as it always has.
The character spacing has changed, to make it more readable. So I have to choose between shrinking the font a bunch, or enlarging the window, to get a konsole of the same size. I like to fit a lot of konsoles on the screen at once, so this really sucks for me.
And, as usual, no way to revert to the old behavior, or at least none that I could find from the GUI.
You can change the panel size, this functionality has been there now for months.
Now that I remember, I was plain wrong here, sorry.
The problem is that changing the panel size to "tiny" introduced a brand-new bug, at least on Kubuntu-KDE4: The menu now wrapped around to the top of the screen. Meaning that if I click the lower-left (no keyboard-shortcut, because that would make too much sense), the menu appears in the upper left.
If you don't like the new menu, use the old one. It's still there.
I like the new menu well enough, I just think it's not a satisfactory replacement for the old menu -- and I don't think either will open with a keyboard shortcut.
That would be a killer feature -- because the new menu could actually function very well as a Katapult replacement.
Alt-F2 is the replacement for Katapult.
Alt+F2 does more and less than Katapult did. I think typing into the new menu is actually closer, last I looked.
Thing about Alt+F2 -- I use that in KDE when I have a specific command I want to run without opening a konsole for it. I use Katapult for running common apps, which I really should be building custom shortcuts for.
Which is good. Katapult had more bugs than a badger's asshole.
Except that, in typical KDE4 fashion, there's no KDE4-compatible Katapult clone, or Katapult rewrite. There's a Katapult re-imagining, and not all of us prefer it to Katapult itself.
I have had Kopete open on this machine for weeks on end, it has not once crashed out on me.
I don't remember whether it crashed on KDE4. I do know that it crashes on KDE3.
It's not entirely frequent, and it seems somewhat behavior-driven, like the Konqueror crashes. In fact, I would guess it's something to do with the text editing widget. It seems to happen the most when editing, which really sucks for Slashdot comments.
It doesn't make it unusable, and I still use Kopete instead of Pidgin. Point is, IM is not performance-intensive, which means we don't need to be writing it in C++. I tend to get cranky when apps like that crash on me, because it seems like segfaults, at least, could be prevented by simply using a mature scripting language.
On the flip side, Kontact puked all over the place on a daily basis for me on KDE 3.5, and it's much more stable now.
How's Kmail? Especially on large IMAP folders?
I suppose the same was also said of Kernel 2.6?
Well, let me put it this way: 2.6 underwent quite a lot of development as 2.5, before it was released as a stable 2.6.
More relevantly: If Linux 2.6 had been released without, say, support for proper Unix permissions -- if all files were mode 0777 -- people would complain. That's the kind of basic functionality that's utterly missing from KDE 4.0, which was trivially found in a GUI in 3.5.
so you are the kind of user that started XP without waiting for SP1?
Well, you see, most open source projects don't have this problem. Most Ubuntu releases are at least better than the previous version, and the major issues are usually fixed within a few weeks of release.
The only issues are with large, well-established projects -- and then, only with porting third-party development to the new version. That is: Apache2 was rock-solid at release, but mod_perl was only stable on Apache1 for a very long time.
I could forgive KDE4 if it was just that apps hadn't been ported -- which many haven't (Kmail? Amarok? You know, some of the main reasons I use KDE at all??) -- I could probably even forgive them if it was somewhat unstable. But the core desktop environment not only isn't stable, it isn't even half as functional. Example: The panel is HUGE, and no way to fix it, until 4.1.
ok sorry this is not OSS but still the concepts hold
Only in poorly-managed projects -- which we all should realize that KDE is.
And while we're at it -- in pre-SP1 XP, couldn't you still put the GUI in Classic Mode, including the Control Panel? It might not have been as stable as 2K, but it was certainly as usable.
I DO blame the maintainers of Kubuntu for making it the default for 8.04.
They didn't, unless you went out of your way to download the "KDE4 Remix", which pretty clearly states it's experimental.
They might use it for 8.10, if it's ready by then. But at the current rate, by then, we'll have KDE 4.5, or even KDE 5.0, and 3.5 will still be better.
Well, would you rather they wait for now to release 4.0?
Well, yes. Even this might qualify as 3.95 or somesuch.
In the gaming industry, and with Microsoft, people often release a dot-oh package which requires extensive patching later on to bring it up to a reasonable standard. The rest of the software world, particularly open source, is usually more reliable -- Wine released 1.0 after 15 years of development, and Google keeps things in Beta indefinitely.
If you think the confusion is something Slashdot manufactured, think again -- I've got a reasonably tech-savvy friend using Kubuntu, and he saw various kde4 packages start to pop up in the repositories. He figured, 4.0 is higher than 3.5, and it was a stable release, so it must be an upgrade.
He uninstalled it right away, and now he hates kde4. Given time, that hate might well extend to KDE as a whole.
KDE had no credible reason for releasing it as 4.0, and every reason for releasing it as something else, like 3.9, or 4.0 Alpha. They've instead chosen a release pattern very similar to Vista -- first release is unusable, and even after a service pack, it's still not going to be an upgrade to the old version (XP or KDE3).
But KDE3 is old tech and it's starting to show its age IMHO.
Yes, which is why I'm seriously considering using GNOME, or going back to FluxBox or raw Beryl (without a DE). I'm stuck between something which really is showing its age (why, exactly, doesn't pagedown in KPDF flip an entire page? Why does it, instead, flip like 98% of a page? And why can't I fill out a PDF form?)...
Stuck between that and a downgrade. (Where's Katapult? Where's Kmail/Kontact? Where's Amarok? Why is Konsole huge? Why's everything huge, including the panel, with no way to reduce it? Why is the menu so weird -- and if this is a replacement for Katapult, why can't I open it with a keystroke?)
And worse, both still have major apps like Konqueror, Kopete, and Amarok simply crash, and frequently.
Foxconn isn't the only one with faulty DSDTs -- and this is one place where Linux can hardly be blamed when something is specifically claiming to support Linux -- and hey, here's the code for it! -- but the Linux version is faulty, while the Windows version is fine.
I've fixed at least one problem by literally pasting DSDT code from one of the Windows sections to the Linux section.
Without patents, a person with a great idea for a new feature can't enter an existing market because the existing market players will simply and rightfully rip off the idea.
If the existing market players are actually nimble enough to pull that off, good for them. Often, they're not, because...
Also, there is little incentive for a dominant market player to introduce new features on their own. They are better off slowwwwly introducing new features and enhancements in accordance with a planned obsolescence program to ensure a steady income stream.
If they're used to playing that game, they really won't be ready for a young startup who can do everything they can, faster, better, and with more features.
New market participants, bolstered by patents, can disrupt this scenario
And move on to be the dominant player, because they have the absolute must-have feature, and no one else can make a move.
Well, unless the big competitors steal the idea, in which case:
compete knowing that if big competitors steal their idea, they can at least sue.
The courts are largely a game of money. The "new market participant" will run out of money before the case is over. The "big competitor" can usually offer a sweet settlement deal that will leave the CEO of the "new market participant" rich and happy, and the overall market situation as stagnant as ever.
Oh, but it does mean that a small company, filled entirely with lawyers, can take a semi-valid-looking patent around to other small companies and sue them. This is called "patent trolling", and it's interesting in that it only hurts mom&pop shops, never the big competitors.
The argument isn't whether patents cause any good at all -- though some convincing arguments have been written to suggest that they don't.
The argument is whether patents cause more good than harm -- whether they have a net positive impact on society. I'm not sure that's true.
The be all end all is that botting was helping to ruin the game for honest customers.
Which sucks, I know -- but you aren't legally entitled to a fun game. Which matters more to you -- fairness in WoW, or fairness in real life?
I cant predict if this will set any kind of "dangerous" precedent.
I will, then.
I do know that most people who are unhappy with this decision are most likely botters themselves.
Wow. A "with us or with the terrorists" post? Really?
You sound exactly like a politician. "I do know that most people who are unhappy with the blocking of Usenet are most likely child pornographers themselves. And to you I say..."
That is... until they come out with a new bot. In the end this will change nothing.
So you're willing to risk a massive legal precedent -- one which you can't predict -- in order to change nothing.