I'd say it's turning out to be more work than anyone anticipated... and now rather than face down the bugs that seem to run wild, they're running away to cover it up with more features.
I've been trying out KDE 4 on and off since 4.0 was released a year ago. I think they've rectified a lot of what was wrong. I remember that in 4.0 it didn't even track mouse movements to correctly highlight/unhighlight things on the desktop. But there is so, SO much more to do before any more features get added. If anything, KDE needs to gut 4.2's features until it gets a stable base to work out of.
Novelty and eye candy come and go; Stability is forever. Most of KDE 4's prospective users will be coming from KDE 3.5 - a mature, fast, rock-solid desktop. We expect KDE 4 to be, if not as stable as old reliable, then at least able to walk without assistance. Instead, I was treated to half a dozen crashes each of Konqueror and Plasma within a few hours of surfing fark.com!
Jello windows, transparency, 3D desktops, draw-on-desktop, etc are neato when I first use them. Once they become routine, I just get sick of the instability. I love most of KDE 4. I really, really want to use KDE 4. I love all the new spiffiness. But until the underlying foundation is fixed, I won't, and neither will others.
There is no way you will be able to just toss a computer in a sealed capsule for half a century and expect it to work when unsealed and powered. Modern components simply are not engineered to this level of reliability, and for good reason - they're going to be obsolete in 5 years, so it makes no economic sense. You'll have to do at a lot of detail work to try and assure that the machine will even start:
You will have to replace every single electrolytic capacitor (in everything - mainboard, PSU, every drive, monitor, mouse, keyboard and speaker amp) with solid-state versions. Electrolytics dry out and it's very unlikely that anyone other than a computer historian would think of this before powering the computer up. Altair 8800s and Imsai 8080s from the late 1970s are now to the point that their power supplies and electrolytics must be replaced for them to work reliably - don't expect your machine to fare any better.
It's also a safe assumption that the lubrication in any rotating media drive will be gone by 2060 - not sure how to deal with that other than providing lube in a hermetically sealed package along with instructions to disassemble the CD drive and apply it.
How are you going to have your data last? Tapes and hard drives will demagnetize by 2060. Flash may have a prayer; Your best bet is to get some extremely long-lasting batteries and interface a microcontroller with a plugged-in thumb drive. Store the data along with error-correction codes on the drive. Have the system wake up every ten or twenty years and "scrub" the drive, reading every block and writing it back. Do the same with the system's bios EEPROM - the system will be useless if that gets killed by a cosmic ray. You should also pay to have data CDs gold-mastered - redundancy is the only way to go here.
The display is another problem. The only technology I'd really trust to just work without needing any repair is an LED display; LEDs can run continuously for decades. After the LEDs, a CRT is probably the best bet (despite a decent one having hundreds of precision electrolytics that'll need replacing) - After all, we've got examples of working CRTs from the 50s and 60s. Newer technologies haven't been around long enough to prove themselves yet.
Get a corrosion resistant, hermetically sealed package for the whole kit and kaboodle and flood it with a dense inert gas like SF6 to keep anything from growing. Thoroughly sterilize every square millimeter with a hard UV light just to be safe. Put the HDD in its own sealed bag full of nitrogen if you include one.
For power, your best bet is probably a primary battery (Mg-Cu) with seperately-stored electrolyte feeding an inverter - The shelf-life is "forever until mixed," at which point the machine will probably have a few hours of power depending on how much you include.
Assume that the people who recover the device will still speak your local language and have libraries where they can look up terms such as volt/byte/etc. If they can't, I doubt there will be enough of civilization left to care about some artifact from before The Fall. I think that it will take far more time and money than you're prepared to casually expend if you want to entomb a computer and have any reasonable probability of it turning on and actually working after 5 decades alone, rather than just popping a PSU capacitor or being a dead relic.
Star Trek's Borg, despite supposedly being on a quest to assimilate the best of everything everywhere, go nowhere. They supposedly had interstellar travel 100000 years ago, but despite enough time to cross the entire galaxy at sublight speed having passed they have not accomplished this goal. Apparently they have/had a network of transwarp conduits that grants/granted them near-immediate (years or less transit time) access to anywhere in the galaxy, but still haven't assimilated everything. How can this be? They're not actually out to do that anymore... The Collective has become their perfect little gem and they're content to sit there and polish it.
A lot of FOSS projects fall into a similar mentality and lose sight of their objectives. Rather than writing a great program for the community, it's a great program for the core users. It doesn't matter if the project doesn't serve the needs of anyone else - screw them, they aren't part of the Collective. I call it Borg Syndrome - ostensibly community-oriented projects that refuse to listen to outside input (esp. "write your own patch"-ers) yet can't understand why hardly anyone in the community uses their software.
I'm not certain that OoO has fallen into this insidious trap; I really wrote more in reply to parent's second line than anything else - until we fight back Borg Syndrome there's a whole lot of software that's going nowhere.
ps: Is konqueror ever going to be fixed so preview works on/.?
I think you need to work on reading comprehension, he stated exactly what's wrong: It's slower than molasses, and I agree with him.
Start OO writer. Mash the keyboard, perhaps inputting FGSFDS. Hit save, enter "fgsfds.odt" as the filename. Press enter. Why does it take a significant fraction of a second to save this? Kword and Abiword both save and are ready to type again in about the time I can blink twice. Last time I tried with OOo I seem to recall being able to follow a progress bar in the lower status display.
This is supposed to be one of the flagship FOSS programs, and it's so slow to save things it's embarassing.
/Doesn't really have a dog in this fight //LaTeX > *
At some point the fraction of worldlines that lead to "Chu won't have any more breakthroughs and will becomes SecEnergy tomorrow" becomes close enough to 1 that acknowledging alternatives is no longer meaningful, in the same sense that acknowledging alternatives to the hypothesis of the Sun rising tomorrow morning isn't meaningful.
QM doesn't demonstrate that GR is wrong. All we know is that they are fundamentally incompatible, despite both having passed every test devised for them. Almost certainly both are wrong and/or simplifying limits when viewed from the perspective of the "true" theory.
These projects track the download and upgrade habits of their respective distributions' users, revealing â" no surprise here â" that Ubuntu users are more likely to be newbies than Debian users. The numbers reveal, for instance, that 86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines do.
And we wonder why Linux can't seem to make inroads onto the desktop, when the headline and no small number of posters here are not at all subtle about looking down their noses at anyone who isn't dedicated enough to an ideology to intentionally cripple their machine's 3D performance.
Face facts: 95% of people who use X do not and never will care about the ideology behind X for all X in Software. If you insist on demeaning them or inconveniencing them with your ideology, they won't use your software. I'm going to go play a 3D game that's not a slideshow now...
Step back and look in a goddamn mirror: You're trying to come up with some legalese to excuse doing the same thing we executed Japanese commanders for after WWII.
But Madoff never threatened anyone with violence! It's just white-collar crime, nothing on the same level as dirty criminals beating bank employees up.
Those are radioisotope thermoelectric generators which power themselves from the decay heat of kilograms of Strontium-90; They were designed for remote zero-service locations such as lighthouses. They'd would happily run unattended for 20 years until falling to half their original power output, at which point the equipment they powered generally shut down.
According to Wiki there have been several cases of both innocent travellers and thieves being irradiated to death - the travellers slept by them for the tens of thousands of watts of heat they throw off, the thieves while trying to steal materials from them.
Nuclear power companies in the West have safety records and standards that would put any other power company and for that matter almost any other organization to shame (One significant incident at the outset in Britain, one minor incident in the US in '79, and a few messes of note in Japan) but any statements to the effect that it's safe, even if it's clearly impossible for a meltdown to occur, are prefixed with a clear suggestion of "But you should still be terrified of the Nuclear Bomb In Waiting."
But America gets half its power from coal, which dumps literally tons of thorium and uranium and mercury into the air due to fly ash every year.
At risk of bringing down the hate of/. upon myself, I'm going to say this: KDE4's problems seem to be symptomatic of "pulling a Vista." By that I mean that they bit off more than they could chew in terms of rewriting and changes in the time they allotted themselves. The release date kept slipping and slipping, features got dropped, and eventually they had to push what they had out the door before people started jumping ship.
KDE4 isn't as much a Vista as Vista, but its launch was definitely flubbed. I remember how ecstatic I was when I first got 4.0 built and installed, and oh it looked/so/ good starting up, but there were just too many unpolished edges and unshined surfaces for me to stay.
Now, I'll admit that I don't have a problem with 4.2 for the most part. Ultimately, I had to just step through every configuration menu and set things right, bluffing along half the way (Oh, another usability fail: at least drop a reminder in kcontrol saying "to configure KDE 4, use..." or make the central configuration app obvious). Browse the web, use konsole, play knetwork, and use my handful of specialty apps - It's mostly harmless. Mostly.
KDE4's panel is one of those things that you figure out and then say "WhereTF was the tutorial for this?" That is, after you figure out that you have to manually add it because it's not there by default. You can right-click where it doesn't have any programs or on the edge, and there's a rectangle you can click+hold and drag to change size I think.
I've got my fair share of complaints about KDE4. kwrite's tabbing - dude, WTF went wrong here? Konqueror's default icon view - Tiny icons AND shitloads of whitespace - sucks, and my sane settings won't seem to save Its file-management performace is heartbreakingly bad. Konq 3.5 and 4 both take some time to generate previews for the 4000 lolcats floating around my documents dir; 3.5 smoothly scrolls while doing so - I right well expect OpenGl-accelerated 4.2beta to. And please, God, make it so that when I switch to konqueror tab Y typing resumes going where it was if I had a textbox selected.
And since you mention Amarok 2 I'll join you in crying about that disappointment. 2.0, to be blunt, stunk, and it really turned me off to KDE4 since 1.4 won't start due to different audio architectures. In hindsight, I think it was the dealbreaker. mp3blaster is nice and mplayer -loop 1000 works, but I like being able to hit meta-z/c/b to go through things.
A full third of the window is taken by an about-song panel with no obvious way to get rid of it. 1.4 does it right by letting you click an unobtrusive context label on the sidebar.
Totally screwed up playlist display. Different entries are different sizes? They look like they're vaguely trying to group themselves, but failing. WTH, over! One song = one 12-point bar with name, serial number and rank. And due to the aforementioned about-song taking 1/3 of the screen, I can't get my song info all on one line.
Gives up too easily. I recently pulled half a gig of random classical MP3s down and tossed 'em into Amarok so I could get a feel. Knowing how p2p is, several were corrupt. Amarok 1.4 will keep trying to play (skipping whatever it can't) until hell freezes over. 2.0 pops up a "too many errors" message inside its window (which will not be seen if it's minimized) and gives up. If it's going to give up that easily, at least make it grab my attention and say why my music keeps stopping.
My pause button doesn't work! How in the fuck did it get to alpha, let alone release, with a broken pause button? I hit pause, it blinks and goes right back to playing.
Now, I really like KDE 3. I've been using it since whatever came with Mandrake 8.2 was new. I knew KDE 4 would be different, it being a total rework and all. And there are a lot of things I really like that were done really well. The windowing system (sans a few configuration menu fubars), the scribble-on-desktop applet, the color scheme and widgets - awesome job. Konqueror 4 (as long as I don't try to save a file or browse my porn) - awesome job. Yep, that plus Konsole covers 9/10 of what I do. But until at least some of the issues I join SanityInAnarchy in ranting about are fixed, I'm not going to make the full leap (marked by copying my email from ~/.kde to ~/.kde4.
In short, my KDE4 trial left me with the same handful of "If they would just fix this damn annoying thing" complaints that so many would-be Windows users walk away from Linux with. Which is a shame, because as of 4.2beta2 they've got about 90+% of "it" nailed as well as or better than 3.5. I truly think that most of these shenanigans could have been avoided if they'd tested the final RC on 100 people who'd never used the alphas or betas before and fixed the top ten complaints, whatever they were, before going gold.
Make the idiot masses panic with a spectacular, loud, but in all honestly tiny (a few psychopaths with boats and guns) action. Foolish laws are drawn up despite everyone "knowing" where they go. If there's any sign that the society is not going there, repeat to set it back on course to its own destruction if possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't load that link except with wget.
I'd say it's turning out to be more work than anyone anticipated... and now rather than face down the bugs that seem to run wild, they're running away to cover it up with more features.
I've been trying out KDE 4 on and off since 4.0 was released a year ago. I think they've rectified a lot of what was wrong. I remember that in 4.0 it didn't even track mouse movements to correctly highlight/unhighlight things on the desktop. But there is so, SO much more to do before any more features get added. If anything, KDE needs to gut 4.2's features until it gets a stable base to work out of.
Novelty and eye candy come and go; Stability is forever. Most of KDE 4's prospective users will be coming from KDE 3.5 - a mature, fast, rock-solid desktop. We expect KDE 4 to be, if not as stable as old reliable, then at least able to walk without assistance. Instead, I was treated to half a dozen crashes each of Konqueror and Plasma within a few hours of surfing fark.com!
Jello windows, transparency, 3D desktops, draw-on-desktop, etc are neato when I first use them. Once they become routine, I just get sick of the instability. I love most of KDE 4. I really, really want to use KDE 4. I love all the new spiffiness. But until the underlying foundation is fixed, I won't, and neither will others.
Compatible emphatically does NOT imply monoculture.
That is the whole point of open standards.
I keep pulling down latest svn version of KDE4 every few weeks to try out. It's getting there, but it's been a rocky road.
And who the hell raped kwrite's tab formatting in 4.x?
There is no way you will be able to just toss a computer in a sealed capsule for half a century and expect it to work when unsealed and powered. Modern components simply are not engineered to this level of reliability, and for good reason - they're going to be obsolete in 5 years, so it makes no economic sense. You'll have to do at a lot of detail work to try and assure that the machine will even start:
You will have to replace every single electrolytic capacitor (in everything - mainboard, PSU, every drive, monitor, mouse, keyboard and speaker amp) with solid-state versions. Electrolytics dry out and it's very unlikely that anyone other than a computer historian would think of this before powering the computer up. Altair 8800s and Imsai 8080s from the late 1970s are now to the point that their power supplies and electrolytics must be replaced for them to work reliably - don't expect your machine to fare any better.
It's also a safe assumption that the lubrication in any rotating media drive will be gone by 2060 - not sure how to deal with that other than providing lube in a hermetically sealed package along with instructions to disassemble the CD drive and apply it.
How are you going to have your data last? Tapes and hard drives will demagnetize by 2060. Flash may have a prayer; Your best bet is to get some extremely long-lasting batteries and interface a microcontroller with a plugged-in thumb drive. Store the data along with error-correction codes on the drive. Have the system wake up every ten or twenty years and "scrub" the drive, reading every block and writing it back. Do the same with the system's bios EEPROM - the system will be useless if that gets killed by a cosmic ray. You should also pay to have data CDs gold-mastered - redundancy is the only way to go here.
The display is another problem. The only technology I'd really trust to just work without needing any repair is an LED display; LEDs can run continuously for decades. After the LEDs, a CRT is probably the best bet (despite a decent one having hundreds of precision electrolytics that'll need replacing) - After all, we've got examples of working CRTs from the 50s and 60s. Newer technologies haven't been around long enough to prove themselves yet.
Get a corrosion resistant, hermetically sealed package for the whole kit and kaboodle and flood it with a dense inert gas like SF6 to keep anything from growing. Thoroughly sterilize every square millimeter with a hard UV light just to be safe. Put the HDD in its own sealed bag full of nitrogen if you include one.
For power, your best bet is probably a primary battery (Mg-Cu) with seperately-stored electrolyte feeding an inverter - The shelf-life is "forever until mixed," at which point the machine will probably have a few hours of power depending on how much you include.
Assume that the people who recover the device will still speak your local language and have libraries where they can look up terms such as volt/byte/etc. If they can't, I doubt there will be enough of civilization left to care about some artifact from before The Fall. I think that it will take far more time and money than you're prepared to casually expend if you want to entomb a computer and have any reasonable probability of it turning on and actually working after 5 decades alone, rather than just popping a PSU capacitor or being a dead relic.
Star Trek's Borg, despite supposedly being on a quest to assimilate the best of everything everywhere, go nowhere. They supposedly had interstellar travel 100000 years ago, but despite enough time to cross the entire galaxy at sublight speed having passed they have not accomplished this goal. Apparently they have/had a network of transwarp conduits that grants/granted them near-immediate (years or less transit time) access to anywhere in the galaxy, but still haven't assimilated everything. How can this be? They're not actually out to do that anymore... The Collective has become their perfect little gem and they're content to sit there and polish it.
/.?
A lot of FOSS projects fall into a similar mentality and lose sight of their objectives. Rather than writing a great program for the community, it's a great program for the core users. It doesn't matter if the project doesn't serve the needs of anyone else - screw them, they aren't part of the Collective. I call it Borg Syndrome - ostensibly community-oriented projects that refuse to listen to outside input (esp. "write your own patch"-ers) yet can't understand why hardly anyone in the community uses their software.
I'm not certain that OoO has fallen into this insidious trap; I really wrote more in reply to parent's second line than anything else - until we fight back Borg Syndrome there's a whole lot of software that's going nowhere.
ps: Is konqueror ever going to be fixed so preview works on
I think you need to work on reading comprehension, he stated exactly what's wrong: It's slower than molasses, and I agree with him.
/Doesn't really have a dog in this fight
//LaTeX > *
Start OO writer. Mash the keyboard, perhaps inputting FGSFDS. Hit save, enter "fgsfds.odt" as the filename. Press enter. Why does it take a significant fraction of a second to save this? Kword and Abiword both save and are ready to type again in about the time I can blink twice. Last time I tried with OOo I seem to recall being able to follow a progress bar in the lower status display.
This is supposed to be one of the flagship FOSS programs, and it's so slow to save things it's embarassing.
At some point the fraction of worldlines that lead to "Chu won't have any more breakthroughs and will becomes SecEnergy tomorrow" becomes close enough to 1 that acknowledging alternatives is no longer meaningful, in the same sense that acknowledging alternatives to the hypothesis of the Sun rising tomorrow morning isn't meaningful.
QM doesn't demonstrate that GR is wrong. All we know is that they are fundamentally incompatible, despite both having passed every test devised for them. Almost certainly both are wrong and/or simplifying limits when viewed from the perspective of the "true" theory.
Thank the robber-baron era Supreme Court ruling that money is speech.
Use Tempest for Eliza and it'll transmit radio at you for real rather than generating a minor html error :P
Old shit is old.
0/10, please see me after class so I can show you how to properly an hero.
And we wonder why Linux can't seem to make inroads onto the desktop, when the headline and no small number of posters here are not at all subtle about looking down their noses at anyone who isn't dedicated enough to an ideology to intentionally cripple their machine's 3D performance.
Face facts: 95% of people who use X do not and never will care about the ideology behind X for all X in Software. If you insist on demeaning them or inconveniencing them with your ideology, they won't use your software. I'm going to go play a 3D game that's not a slideshow now...
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
Step back and look in a goddamn mirror: You're trying to come up with some legalese to excuse doing the same thing we executed Japanese commanders for after WWII.
But Madoff never threatened anyone with violence! It's just white-collar crime, nothing on the same level as dirty criminals beating bank employees up.
<barf>
Come on in, folks! Come on in, it's the epic Battle of the Stupids. Which is stupider? Come and see!
In this corner, moonbats claiming that Trig isn't actually Palin's son.
And in this corner, wingnuts who claim Obama hasn't released his birth certificate despite the Hawaiian government having released it.
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
Seems to scale OK as long as everyone stays within the same light-cone.
You can tell its scripting is feature complete because the nerds have gone out and written virtual computers that run on top of the game.
How do you steal or break into a buried 20-ton bank vault without someone noticing?
Those are radioisotope thermoelectric generators which power themselves from the decay heat of kilograms of Strontium-90; They were designed for remote zero-service locations such as lighthouses. They'd would happily run unattended for 20 years until falling to half their original power output, at which point the equipment they powered generally shut down.
According to Wiki there have been several cases of both innocent travellers and thieves being irradiated to death - the travellers slept by them for the tens of thousands of watts of heat they throw off, the thieves while trying to steal materials from them.
Nuclear power companies in the West have safety records and standards that would put any other power company and for that matter almost any other organization to shame (One significant incident at the outset in Britain, one minor incident in the US in '79, and a few messes of note in Japan) but any statements to the effect that it's safe, even if it's clearly impossible for a meltdown to occur, are prefixed with a clear suggestion of "But you should still be terrified of the Nuclear Bomb In Waiting."
But America gets half its power from coal, which dumps literally tons of thorium and uranium and mercury into the air due to fly ash every year.
Just get her to sign the treaty.
At risk of bringing down the hate of /. upon myself, I'm going to say this: KDE4's problems seem to be symptomatic of "pulling a Vista." By that I mean that they bit off more than they could chew in terms of rewriting and changes in the time they allotted themselves. The release date kept slipping and slipping, features got dropped, and eventually they had to push what they had out the door before people started jumping ship.
/so/ good starting up, but there were just too many unpolished edges and unshined surfaces for me to stay.
KDE4 isn't as much a Vista as Vista, but its launch was definitely flubbed. I remember how ecstatic I was when I first got 4.0 built and installed, and oh it looked
Now, I'll admit that I don't have a problem with 4.2 for the most part. Ultimately, I had to just step through every configuration menu and set things right, bluffing along half the way (Oh, another usability fail: at least drop a reminder in kcontrol saying "to configure KDE 4, use..." or make the central configuration app obvious). Browse the web, use konsole, play knetwork, and use my handful of specialty apps - It's mostly harmless. Mostly.
I've got my fair share of complaints about KDE4. kwrite's tabbing - dude, WTF went wrong here? Konqueror's default icon view - Tiny icons AND shitloads of whitespace - sucks, and my sane settings won't seem to save Its file-management performace is heartbreakingly bad. Konq 3.5 and 4 both take some time to generate previews for the 4000 lolcats floating around my documents dir; 3.5 smoothly scrolls while doing so - I right well expect OpenGl-accelerated 4.2beta to. And please, God, make it so that when I switch to konqueror tab Y typing resumes going where it was if I had a textbox selected.
And since you mention Amarok 2 I'll join you in crying about that disappointment. 2.0, to be blunt, stunk, and it really turned me off to KDE4 since 1.4 won't start due to different audio architectures. In hindsight, I think it was the dealbreaker. mp3blaster is nice and mplayer -loop 1000 works, but I like being able to hit meta-z/c/b to go through things.
Now, I really like KDE 3. I've been using it since whatever came with Mandrake 8.2 was new. I knew KDE 4 would be different, it being a total rework and all. And there are a lot of things I really like that were done really well. The windowing system (sans a few configuration menu fubars), the scribble-on-desktop applet, the color scheme and widgets - awesome job. Konqueror 4 (as long as I don't try to save a file or browse my porn) - awesome job. Yep, that plus Konsole covers 9/10 of what I do. But until at least some of the issues I join SanityInAnarchy in ranting about are fixed, I'm not going to make the full leap (marked by copying my email from ~/.kde to ~/.kde4.
In short, my KDE4 trial left me with the same handful of "If they would just fix this damn annoying thing" complaints that so many would-be Windows users walk away from Linux with. Which is a shame, because as of 4.2beta2 they've got about 90+% of "it" nailed as well as or better than 3.5. I truly think that most of these shenanigans could have been avoided if they'd tested the final RC on 100 people who'd never used the alphas or betas before and fixed the top ten complaints, whatever they were, before going gold.
Ooooooooooooooooooh? YOU have NO idea. Ready, normal people?
Ready!
Ready!
Ready!
LEMME HEAR IT!
Make the idiot masses panic with a spectacular, loud, but in all honestly tiny (a few psychopaths with boats and guns) action. Foolish laws are drawn up despite everyone "knowing" where they go. If there's any sign that the society is not going there, repeat to set it back on course to its own destruction if possible.