But you can do exactly this type of thing with most of the main distributions. OK the functionality is not strictly a part of the KDE Desktop, but the integration into KDE is as good as the distribution vendor makes it. With SUSE the integration is pretty good. With Kubuntu everything on my system was just detected automatically and configured, without any intervention. With Gentoo it's similar. If I add new hardware to my Suse system, a box pops up asking if I want to configure it. I click Yes, and 90% of the time it configures it without any further user intervention.
I dreaded it when I moved my Suse-loaded hard drive into a new PC with new motherboard as the hardware was totally different. After clicking maybe a dozen such buttons (one for each item that was different) it all worked, the only intervention I needed was to tell it which of the two network cards was the external one. It's a hell of a lot harder than this on MS Windows.
The big ad campaign was in the New York Times - fine if you live in New York. But in Europe we've got greater uptake of Firefox without having these ads. I suspect this is partly in line with the higher uptake of Linux in Europe - which I've heard is the case but don't have any figures to back it up at the moment. Anyone got these figures?
The point is, that as long as simple issues like playing a video become mammoth tasks, then the average person will just stick with something simpler. Hell, 90% of the time I can just install Windows and everything will work right out of the box.
You are blaming this on KDE, whereas primarily you should be blaming the hardware manufacturers for not providing support for their hardware, on people who ship their media in proprietary formats, and on the peddlers of those proprietary formats for not providing decoding software for Linux (OK, some do, I know). I have found that these issues aside, KDE just works, with very few exceptions. The exceptions that I do find are no more common than the exceptions that I find with MS Windows which, contrary to popular opinion, is not a "just works" OS. I haven't yet found a "just works" operating system, but the issues I have with my KDE-based GNU/Linux systems are on the same level as with MS Windows.
This is what needs to be worked on. While all the technical side of things on Linux just rocks, I doubt that many people have worked on the 'end user experiance' because at the moment, it just sucks.
You've obviously not used KDE for at least a year then, as if you had you would realise that a whole load of effort has been put into making KDE more usable recently. 3.4.2 and 3.5 beta knock the pants off even 3.3 in terms of polish and usability. There is still work to be done but I already find it far more usable than WinXP.
Actually, I am better off when I have a problem with KDE, because at least I stand a chance of fixing it myself. With MS Windows, I am totally at the mercy of Microsoft to fix them for me, which they may or not do according to whether it suits their finances. Even if I don't fix the issues myself, usually someone else does according to their own needs, and lets me have the fix via whatever route.
If Microsoft wins and Linux loses, there is no competition left, only a monopoly. That is not good for anyone (except the monopoly).
However, if Linux wins and Microsoft loses, there are still N-1 companies competing in the OS market, where the -1 is the loss of Microsoft. So still (almost) as much competition as before, and it's still good for everyone.
I want NVidia and ATi both to succeed as while they are both there, there is real competition. Linux doesn't work that way, it's not a good analogy.
That's the beauty of the GPL. It's all in the licence, stupid.
In France, most cars aren't powered by petrol (gasoline) in any case, but by Diesel. In Europe as a whole, I believe it is 60% petrol 40% diesel, and is swinging slowly and surely in favour of diesel because it's just so much more efficient and cheaper overall.
This is where biodiesel comes in. It can be produced from waste oil and here the energy balance is much more favourable than for ethanol. What's more, it can be poured straight into the tanks of most diesel-powered cars without requiring any modifications. I think this is where the motor industry is moving medium term (next 5 - 20 years).
Of course commercial growing of oilseed rape and other oil crops is not without other problems, such as lack of biodiversity. But at least there are many different sources of oil available and production is not confined to a small handful of politically unstable countries.
This refers to the fact that 40% of homes have digital TV capability. However a much smaller proportion of televisions are capable of receiving digital, as most homes have more than one TV. So even if 100% of homes have digital TV, there will still be a public outcry when they switch off analogue transmissions.
I used to use Gentoo - in fact I'm only a non-Gentoo user currently because the box on which it was installed is broken (a laptop, I can't seem to find a replacement fan that small anywhere). While Gentoo has served me brilliantly, it would be frustratingly slow to install on slower boxes (yes I know I could use distcc to assist compiling, but the point is still valid). I was looking for a distro that allowed a continual upgrade process but was distributed as binaries. I realised that Debian was the way forward here, but (K)Ubuntu beat Debian for me because it's just so polished as a Desktop. Debian (at least stable) is a server OS, not a desktop OS.
I have done my own mini-review of KUbuntu, also an analysis of why I think Ubuntu will succeed where commercial distros have failed.
You miss my point - the construction of the infrastructure is a small part of the total energy balance, although yes for railways I'm sure it is bigger than for airports. But we could argue that this is only because the railway network covers far more towns and cities (and villages even) than the air network.
Damage to the track only disables the line on which it occurs, and when it does occur it is a real pain. However on well-maintained routes this is actually fairly rare, significantly rarer than flights get cancelled due to bad weather.
No I couldn't have made the trip in 45 minutes. It breaks down something like this:
Travel to airport 1 hour Checkin 2 hours Waiting on plane plus journey itself 1hr 15min getting off plane and getting luggage 30 minutes travel from airport to city centre 1 hr delay in flight 15 minutes
Out of these, you could arguably reduce the checkin time to about 30 minutes if you are checking in luggage. An efficient luggage retrieval system would save 15 minutes. And no delay to flight would have saved another 15.
Journeys to and from airport were both taken by train (!!) and there is little you can do to reduce this. OK the Heathrow express is supposed to take 15 minutes, but leaves me in the wrong part of town so there is no saving over all.
That makes a saving of 2 hours, still giving a total of 4 hours which is more than the train. So you only really get savings with the plane on longer distances. And even then, the quickest way to the city centre by far is on the train, at least in most European cities.
As opposed to the pollution and environmental disruption involved with building and maintaining thousands of acres of runway, terminal buildings and the like?
Over the long term, these become insignificant compared to the energy costs of running the vehicles that use them. And flights use vastly more energy than trains. I forget the exact figures, but over a long distance (say London to New York) a Boeing 747 will use as much fuel as if every single passenger drove their own car the 3000 miles between them (OK I'm ignoring the Atlantic ocean here, assuming this distance is over land). A train will use something like a quarter of this amount of energy per passenger. There is no contest between them in terms of energy use, trains win hands down. In terms of journey times, planes only become faster over distances of more than about a 300 miles. I once flew from London to Paris - 300 miles, 45 minutes flight time but an overall journey time of 6 hours. I've driven this journey in 5 hours, including crossing the channel! On the train it takes 2 hours 50 minutes, city centre to city centre. Allow 30 minutes' checkin time, it's still a lot quicker.
My conjecure, but maybe every person they give a key to gets a different key. And this leaves the unencrypted file with a watermark (i.e. variations in the output sound that are undetectable to the human ear) but which can be used to determine what decryption key was used to decrypt it - hence who has made their copy available publicly. They've got your email address and presumably other details, so if that file turns up on P2P sites they know exactly where to place the blame.
I think the question of which technology uses energy more efficiently has no clear-cut answer. When you consider that more energy is generally used in manufacturing a car than it will use in fuel in its entire lifetime, this sheds a new light on things. We need to ask how much energy is used in manufacturing an electric vehicle (plus the infrastructure needed to run it) versus for an oil-burning vehicle. Diesel engines will happily run for 200,000 miles without needing replacing. I don't think batteries last anything like as long as this at the moment. And with the rate at which Diesel engines are advancing at the moment, my bet is that they will for a long time remain the dominant road-fuel technology they are rapidly becoming.
There is a lot of discussion here saying that the real limiting factor is the batteries, not the motor. However batteries are OK at the moment for storing energy - not as good as storing the energy in a carbohydrate, but OK. The real problem is that the energy has to come from somewhere in the first place, then be delivered to the battery. Imagine a Friday night when everyone wants to refuel, waiting no longer than 5 minutes for it to complete. The power required to do this is immense, and currently would not be feasible. Overnight charging would be fine for many people, but there will always be occasions when you'd get caught out.
The energy would still need to come from somewhere too, the most likely candidate being, you guessed it, oil.
The best solution at the moment is a clean, efficient diesel engine. This has the advantages that you can put biodiesel in it without modification, and the entire infrastructure is already there. Until we find an environmentally-friendly and cheap way of generating electricity in the quantities required to run cars, talk of motors and batteries is just noise.
I think for this reason it is an extremely smart move of Mandrakesoft. It gives them prime access to a huge market that previously they were a much smaller player in.
Can't RTFA because it's/.ed, but it looks to me like they have increased the power capability by increasing the surface area within a given volume so that it can produce a larger current, much in the same way that the lungs can produce a large exchange of O2 and CO2 due to their large surface area.
This has nothing to do with capacity, which presumably is unchanged from more conventional technology.
Not a bad thing in itself of course, if it expands the market for which LiIon is suitable.
Yes, indeed. However as far as I know, the FSF doesn't have any intention of re-licensing the software under a proprietary licence, which is in stark contrast to what Sun does with OpenOffice.org.
I think the phrase "Almost free" describes it accurately. Sun doesn't really believe in Free, it believes in Free*, where the * denotes a footnote that means it isn't really what it appears to be.
In fact the whole of Sun's approach seems to work like this. Java is not Free (although their implementation is free, as in zero cost). Even OpenOffice has some strings attached, as all contributions to the project have to have their copyrights assigned to Sun, so they can then use them in the proprietary Star Office. There is in this case however no reason why someone can't take this under the GPL and fork it, hence not assignin g the copyrights to Sun. You could then call this "ReallyOpenOffice" or similar (although that might infringe their trademark).
I've just had a good look at their website, and I can't find licensing information _anywhere_. I guess if I download the source code it probably has the licence in it, but I can't be bothered to download 5MB just to read a few k's worth of licence.
Slashdot Mirror
If you put it in the recycle bin it can be retrieved/reused - not what you want!
I dreaded it when I moved my Suse-loaded hard drive into a new PC with new motherboard as the hardware was totally different. After clicking maybe a dozen such buttons (one for each item that was different) it all worked, the only intervention I needed was to tell it which of the two network cards was the external one. It's a hell of a lot harder than this on MS Windows.
You are blaming this on KDE, whereas primarily you should be blaming the hardware manufacturers for not providing support for their hardware, on people who ship their media in proprietary formats, and on the peddlers of those proprietary formats for not providing decoding software for Linux (OK, some do, I know). I have found that these issues aside, KDE just works, with very few exceptions. The exceptions that I do find are no more common than the exceptions that I find with MS Windows which, contrary to popular opinion, is not a "just works" OS. I haven't yet found a "just works" operating system, but the issues I have with my KDE-based GNU/Linux systems are on the same level as with MS Windows.
This is what needs to be worked on. While all the technical side of things on Linux just rocks, I doubt that many people have worked on the 'end user experiance' because at the moment, it just sucks.
You've obviously not used KDE for at least a year then, as if you had you would realise that a whole load of effort has been put into making KDE more usable recently. 3.4.2 and 3.5 beta knock the pants off even 3.3 in terms of polish and usability. There is still work to be done but I already find it far more usable than WinXP. Actually, I am better off when I have a problem with KDE, because at least I stand a chance of fixing it myself. With MS Windows, I am totally at the mercy of Microsoft to fix them for me, which they may or not do according to whether it suits their finances. Even if I don't fix the issues myself, usually someone else does according to their own needs, and lets me have the fix via whatever route.
However, if Linux wins and Microsoft loses, there are still N-1 companies competing in the OS market, where the -1 is the loss of Microsoft. So still (almost) as much competition as before, and it's still good for everyone.
I want NVidia and ATi both to succeed as while they are both there, there is real competition. Linux doesn't work that way, it's not a good analogy.
That's the beauty of the GPL. It's all in the licence, stupid.
What, tastes a bit like chicken, you mean?
What happens to the material removed when people have lipsuction? I'd have thought this would be a good source of fuel......
This is where biodiesel comes in. It can be produced from waste oil and here the energy balance is much more favourable than for ethanol. What's more, it can be poured straight into the tanks of most diesel-powered cars without requiring any modifications. I think this is where the motor industry is moving medium term (next 5 - 20 years).
Of course commercial growing of oilseed rape and other oil crops is not without other problems, such as lack of biodiversity. But at least there are many different sources of oil available and production is not confined to a small handful of politically unstable countries.
How do you pronounce negible?
This refers to the fact that 40% of homes have digital TV capability. However a much smaller proportion of televisions are capable of receiving digital, as most homes have more than one TV. So even if 100% of homes have digital TV, there will still be a public outcry when they switch off analogue transmissions.
I personally don't have either......
I have done my own mini-review of KUbuntu, also an analysis of why I think Ubuntu will succeed where commercial distros have failed.
You missed out the most important of all.
You miss my point - the construction of the infrastructure is a small part of the total energy balance, although yes for railways I'm sure it is bigger than for airports. But we could argue that this is only because the railway network covers far more towns and cities (and villages even) than the air network.
Damage to the track only disables the line on which it occurs, and when it does occur it is a real pain. However on well-maintained routes this is actually fairly rare, significantly rarer than flights get cancelled due to bad weather.
No I couldn't have made the trip in 45 minutes. It breaks down something like this:
Travel to airport 1 hour
Checkin 2 hours
Waiting on plane plus journey itself 1hr 15min
getting off plane and getting luggage 30 minutes
travel from airport to city centre 1 hr
delay in flight 15 minutes
Out of these, you could arguably reduce the checkin time to about 30 minutes if you are checking in luggage. An efficient luggage retrieval system would save 15 minutes. And no delay to flight would have saved another 15.
Journeys to and from airport were both taken by train (!!) and there is little you can do to reduce this. OK the Heathrow express is supposed to take 15 minutes, but leaves me in the wrong part of town so there is no saving over all.
That makes a saving of 2 hours, still giving a total of 4 hours which is more than the train. So you only really get savings with the plane on longer distances. And even then, the quickest way to the city centre by far is on the train, at least in most European cities.
As opposed to the pollution and environmental disruption involved with building and maintaining thousands of acres of runway, terminal buildings and the like?
Over the long term, these become insignificant compared to the energy costs of running the vehicles that use them. And flights use vastly more energy than trains. I forget the exact figures, but over a long distance (say London to New York) a Boeing 747 will use as much fuel as if every single passenger drove their own car the 3000 miles between them (OK I'm ignoring the Atlantic ocean here, assuming this distance is over land). A train will use something like a quarter of this amount of energy per passenger. There is no contest between them in terms of energy use, trains win hands down. In terms of journey times, planes only become faster over distances of more than about a 300 miles. I once flew from London to Paris - 300 miles, 45 minutes flight time but an overall journey time of 6 hours. I've driven this journey in 5 hours, including crossing the channel! On the train it takes 2 hours 50 minutes, city centre to city centre. Allow 30 minutes' checkin time, it's still a lot quicker.
Er, they don't pollute the environment anything like as much? They take you from city centre to city centre, hence are much quicker over all?
My conjecure, but maybe every person they give a key to gets a different key. And this leaves the unencrypted file with a watermark (i.e. variations in the output sound that are undetectable to the human ear) but which can be used to determine what decryption key was used to decrypt it - hence who has made their copy available publicly. They've got your email address and presumably other details, so if that file turns up on P2P sites they know exactly where to place the blame.
I think the question of which technology uses energy more efficiently has no clear-cut answer. When you consider that more energy is generally used in manufacturing a car than it will use in fuel in its entire lifetime, this sheds a new light on things. We need to ask how much energy is used in manufacturing an electric vehicle (plus the infrastructure needed to run it) versus for an oil-burning vehicle. Diesel engines will happily run for 200,000 miles without needing replacing. I don't think batteries last anything like as long as this at the moment. And with the rate at which Diesel engines are advancing at the moment, my bet is that they will for a long time remain the dominant road-fuel technology they are rapidly becoming.
There is a lot of discussion here saying that the real limiting factor is the batteries, not the motor. However batteries are OK at the moment for storing energy - not as good as storing the energy in a carbohydrate, but OK. The real problem is that the energy has to come from somewhere in the first place, then be delivered to the battery. Imagine a Friday night when everyone wants to refuel, waiting no longer than 5 minutes for it to complete. The power required to do this is immense, and currently would not be feasible. Overnight charging would be fine for many people, but there will always be occasions when you'd get caught out.
The energy would still need to come from somewhere too, the most likely candidate being, you guessed it, oil.
The best solution at the moment is a clean, efficient diesel engine. This has the advantages that you can put biodiesel in it without modification, and the entire infrastructure is already there. Until we find an environmentally-friendly and cheap way of generating electricity in the quantities required to run cars, talk of motors and batteries is just noise.
In other words, your compiler runs on the same CPU as your wit generator?!
I think for this reason it is an extremely smart move of Mandrakesoft. It gives them prime access to a huge market that previously they were a much smaller player in.
Can't RTFA because it's /.ed, but it looks to me like they have increased the power capability by increasing the surface area within a given volume so that it can produce a larger current, much in the same way that the lungs can produce a large exchange of O2 and CO2 due to their large surface area.
This has nothing to do with capacity, which presumably is unchanged from more conventional technology.
Not a bad thing in itself of course, if it expands the market for which LiIon is suitable.
Yes, indeed. However as far as I know, the FSF doesn't have any intention of re-licensing the software under a proprietary licence, which is in stark contrast to what Sun does with OpenOffice.org.
I think the phrase "Almost free" describes it accurately. Sun doesn't really believe in Free, it believes in Free*, where the * denotes a footnote that means it isn't really what it appears to be.
In fact the whole of Sun's approach seems to work like this. Java is not Free (although their implementation is free, as in zero cost). Even OpenOffice has some strings attached, as all contributions to the project have to have their copyrights assigned to Sun, so they can then use them in the proprietary Star Office. There is in this case however no reason why someone can't take this under the GPL and fork it, hence not assignin g the copyrights to Sun. You could then call
this "ReallyOpenOffice" or similar (although that might infringe their trademark).
Ads on the page? So that would be those things that MS Internet Explorer users get, I presume.
I've just had a good look at their website, and I can't find licensing information _anywhere_. I guess if I download the source code it probably has the licence in it, but I can't be bothered to download 5MB just to read a few k's worth of licence.