If you say so, but most other parts of the stack don't suffer from this sort of API war.
The rest of the stack has little to do with the user's visual interface.
set out first to wipe CDE off the map, and then switched to Gnome.
"Mommy, mommy, that bad man scared me!" We weren't talking about CDE. "BOO!"
should have welcomed a more open approach to the desktop
How exactly does this same complaint not apply to GNOME as well? After all GNOME came late to the game and chose to build their own silo too. Sorry, but your one-sided diatribe against KDE so far hasn't impressed me at all.
QT does theming and a lot of other integration bits on Windows and Mac, and could easily do the same to fit in better on a Gnome desktop
Did you understand my last post? Most of GNOME is constituted using GTK/GLIB/PANGO/etc, which collectively DUPLICATES most of QT's functionality, but in C, not C++. QT can't "fit in", because there is, quite deliberately, no space for it. You're obviously not a programmer, at least not C/C++, otherwise you'd realize how silly your statement about reorienting QT really is.
having a Desktop War wasn't a historical inevitability.
On an open system not controlled by a single authority and lacking a lot of standard infrastructure for advanced graphical applications, multiple desktop environments are inheriently inevitable.
It happened because both projects set out to make it happen,
It happened because you can't build commercial apps for KDE due to QT originally being non-free and later being released under the GPL instead of the LGPL, thus it should be obvious to everyone why commercial interests are gravitating to GNOME instead of KDE.
and emphasizing differences to the end user that are simply unimportant to that audience.
Who the hell do you think the KDE folks wrote KDE for? They wrote KDE for themselves not for whatever your definition is of a typical end user. Its the GNOME project that is now being deliberately written for the corporate desktop and the typical corporate end-user, since that is what the primary backers of GNOME today want GNOME to be. The KDE project began as a purely user-oriented community, and despite SUSE, it remains so. As for TT, their interest in KDE is only as a showcase for their QT library, TT isn't interested in controlling KDE's direction, and doesn't do so (and couldn't if they really wanted to - only a few of the KDE devs work for TT)
Both projects set out to wipe the other one off the map
How could KDE have started that way when GNOME didn't even exist then? How did KDE change course after GNOME was born in order to kill GNOME? Answer: They didn't change a thing. Destroying the other is not and never has been the goal of either project. Most of this "Desktop War" you refer to, is really the creation of slashdot flame warriors who needed something to fight about.
and it looks like Gnome is succeeding at that
Hogwash. This would only make sense if you believe the KDE project was aimed at the corporate desktop from the very beginning. It wasn't, and neither was GNOME when it first started for that matter.
And I agree that Trolltech will probably eventually re-orient QT around Gnome infrastructure.
LOL! What is the GNOME "infrastructure"? GTK+. What is GTK+? Answer: A replacement for QT written in C. What is QT? Answer: Its TTs commercial product that they make their entire revenue stream from thats written in C++. TrollTech isn't going to "reorient" a damn thing in QT to use GNOME "infrastructure" because QT and GNOME are written in different languages, never mind that TT isn't in the corporate desktop environment business, they're in the cross-platform GUI application building business which is inheriently and deliberately neutral when it comes to desktop environments! LOL!
It was deliberately designed to be inseperable by the KDE core developers (many of whom work for TrollTech). Until you understand this...
Speaking of understanding, none of the people who began the KDE project worked for TrollTech at that time. TT has hired some of them since then, but when the KDE project first begin, there wasn't a connection to TT.
Second, what exactly do you mean by "deliberately designed"? Any program that uses functions from a library is "deliberately designed" to use that library. GNOME is "deliberately designed" to use GTK. So?
Third, GNOME began because at the time QT was under a non-free license, never mind the GPL. It was only after QT became GPL that the "argument" switched to LGPL v. GPL. The point is there was nothing "deliberate" done at the time because the KDE people didn't know that TT would later release QT under the GPL specifically.
I had no idea a SMALL fraction of people get addicted to nicotine so slightly, that they APPEAR to be able to "take or leave" cigarettes.
Yes, I saw a program on addiction which brought this up many years ago and was suprised myself, to learn this. This happens for the same reason many people can drink "socially" but not become alcoholics (addicted). This is where the physiology of addiction comes into play. Not only do chemical addictions like this literally alter the brain's chemistry (which generates the craving for more), but scientists have identified a gene which seems to make its carrier far more likely to become an alcoholic than a non-carrier, so genetics are involved to some degree in the issue as well, at least its a sign that addiction has been a problem for humans for a long, long time. And just as they've recently discovered people who are apparently immune to AIDS, there is also a lucky portion of the population that is "immune" to some chemical addictions, that a person's ability to withstand addiction involves more than willpower alone.
No, it's not nicotine, it's the psychological effects of smoking.
Well, its both really. The "routine" of smoking can become a "habit" thats hard to break even without the physiological addiction. For the "heavy" smokers though (the ones who smoke a lot and aren't able to quit), the primary problem is the physical addiction to the nicotine, a substance which, according to some doctors, is as addictive as cocaine.
if I don't like the file manager, I can rip it out and replace it with something different, no problems.
GNOME's revolving door of window managers is primarily because they chose not to have a standard one. There's nothing stopping that from being done with KDE, except that so far no one has gotten so upset with the current standard WM, KWin, that they've felt the need to create an alternative.
It has a lot of options, but the options I want include hiding them
Wait, let me get this straight, you're now saying KDE isn't as configurable as GNOME because it doesn't include an option to hide all the other options it has that GNOME doesn't?:) Look, the rest of your post is just a typical response that some people have about their personal preferences in a desktop environment. Obviously KDE isn't your thing, too many buttons and shiny things, that's ok, because GNOME exists precisely for folks like you. Use it, or whatever you prefer instead, and be happy! My post said nothing about one DE being better than another, the neverending KDE vs. GNOME war is inheriently pointless IMO. My only point was that when it comes to the "user interface", there is no such thing as a single UI that can keep everyone happy. That's why there will always be KDE and GNOME along with a half-dozen or so lesser known DEs, and quite possibly variants/forks of KDE/GNOME as well, in the future.
On a side note, have you noticed that most Linux commercial applications lately are also favouring Gtk and GNOME?
Which has what, exactly, to do with anything? You already pointed out earlier that distros are often including the base libraries for both Desktop Environments so apps from either DE will work no matter which DE the user is using. Choosing one DE to use does not in any way restrict the apps you can run.
because they see that GNOME is a de facto standard for a Linux desktop these days.
Its a de-facto standard for the corporate desktop not "a Linux desktop", because "a Linux desktop" is very much in the eyes of the beholder. What drives many people to Linux is choice, and what drives many to KDE is basically the same thing: flexibility, customization, uncommon but beneficial features, i.e., choice. As for the corporate desktop, KDE is not going to go away if all the corporate distros use GNOME, for the same reason Linux will never go away if all the corporations decided to switch back to Windows. To see why, just look at Ubuntu: What was the first major development to occur in the Ubuntu user community after Ubuntu became fairly popular? Answer: Kubuntu. For an awful lot of people, a minimalist "corporate desktop" is not their idea of an ideal desktop environment, KDE is.
Because of this, the prior poster hoping for "a single, standard" DE, is just dreaming. Not going to happen. You have as much chance of getting a single standard user interface for the open Linux system as you have of convincing all women that they only need one kind of dress, in any color as long as its black.:)
To make this an authentic/. post, my outrageous prediction: GNOME conquers the "corporate" desktop, and KDE konquers the "home" desktop.
what with the pathetic number of IPv4 addresses allocated to them (amusing considering the amount that IBM and GE etc. own with having entire blocks of class A),
If the internet had been designed from the beginning to be a global service, this criticism might make sense, but the internet started, and existed for many, many years afterwards, as an *internal*, US creation. Only in *hindsight* do those IPv4 allocations look wrong now.
When the baby boomers actually start to die off, you're going to see a LOT of empty houses.
Having read down to this point some comments:
1) This entire argument is fairly irrelevant to TFA because TFA is about changes detected in the human race at least 5000 years ago, whereas the argument here is about a change in the human race, or rather, our society, only beginning within the last 1000 years or so. We should put this argument on hold for about 4,000 years until we can find, if any, genetic evidence of our species' most recent changes.:)
2) About evolution continuing in the last 1000 years: When those usual selection pressures are no longer accurate predictions of a person's likelyhood to successfully procreate, then its hard to argue that evolution, even if the *mechanics* of that genetic process continue, are anywhere near as important now as compared to human society's actions which are affecting who's genes are being passed on versus those that don't. And don't get caught up in the smart vs. dumb argument, the actual situation is a little more complex than that, because its not just "smart" people who are avoiding procreation in the Western world, there are a lot of "ordinary" people who realize they can't afford a nice life AND children at the same time. It is only the extreme poor, who have nothing to lose in having children, who are doing so, and being smart, or at least not being dumb, DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL AVOID POVERTY IN THIS WORLD. All the studies of this have shown the children with the best chance of success are those born to parents with means. People who are born into poverty tend to remain in poverty, NO MATTER HOW "SMART" THEY ARE. It is really the selection pressures of our society that are mucking up evolution's mechanisms, more than it is individuals, smart or dumb, that are doing so.
3) About population decrease: I don't know where you guys are getting your numbers, but the US in particular is expected to have a dramatically *increasing* population in the decades ahead (I've read articles from Germany and France about their dilemma and all those articles mentioned the US being an exception). Heck, just google for "us population growth" and you'll find what I just did. Hmmm, a net gain of one new American every 10 seconds! How did you get the math to make that a net decrease!?! Is this the "New Math" I've heard of?:) In fact, we are the lone exception to the rest of the Western world, but only temporarily, because that exception itself will not stand for very long once the issue becomes serious to the other individual nations of the West. Why? Because our exception is based on a much higher immigration than most European countries currently have (a new net immigrant every 26 seconds, see link above), and when the pressure on those countries rises to significant levels, they too will "solve" the problem by raising immigration from the rest of the world. So no, we won't have any "empty homes", we will just replace the population that our domestic population does not provide by procreation, with a "fresh and new" IMPORTED population. The long AND short term problem humanity is facing is *still* the problem of population *GROWTH*, not decline.
(Although I think you accidentally got off on a tangent arguing against Microsoft's XML and document formats instead of an 'open' solution, but that was not my point or my argument.)
In that case, I'm not sure what your point is. My point was open formats can be used to do everything MS claims they have to have their own mother-of-all-document-format to do. What they really are doing is trying to maintain lock-in using proprietary formats (and the continual extension/revision thereof). If your point about "people wanting it (all) in the document" is not about the technical layout of the document file, then I don't see the point. Open, standard formats can be used to "keep it all in one document" from the user's point of view, so the only difference is that MS's format is proprietary while OpenDocument is an open standard. Open formats CAN DO what MS claims they need proprietary formats for.
about how on-line life will make our children more creative than us.
*If* we can keep the predators out there away from them long enough.... sorry for being an incorrigible pessimist, but we all *know* "they're" out there.... How do you give kids enough freedom to become creative *and* keep them safe at the same time?
Your comment about "the wall that we're about to hit head-on" has been the recurring bleat of hopelessness that has sounded through the decades for energy sources from whale oil to wood to coal. None of those disaster scenarios ever materialized.
Now this is silly. In the history of the human race, we've never had a society and a civilization so dependent on a single source of cheap energy as we do now. The infrastructure of our advanced world relies on fossil fuels to function now. The wall we're about to hit isn't the running out of oil, its the running out of *cheap* oil. Once we're paying 4 to 5 times as much for oil as we are now, and the costs keep rising, much of what we take for granted now will become too expensive to operate. And this time, we DON'T HAVE a cheap alternative we can switch to.
"There is no requirement that oil development be contiguous."
Just look at the oil fields in Alaska's North Slope adjacent to ANWR, genius. IT WON'T BE CONTIGUOUS.
The caribou argument is a total con job.
I'll be sure to tell the caribou of your opinion.
Not once in that time has the proposed drilling area
There won't be "one" drilling area, that's the problem.
which inhabits the region where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs,
Apples to Oranges. One single pipeline is not the same thing as dozens, probably hundreds, of drill sites and other operations centers spread out in a wilderness area. We know from the adjacent oil fields that spills will be frequent and their cumulative effect will be significant.
And if you're going to mention putting presidents in jail, there's always the subject of perjury and official misconduct.
Given the choice between a POTUS that lies about a personal affair, a lie where the only person hurt is his wife, versus a POTUS that lies and misleads a country into going to war, getting thousands of people killed, then lies about his own administration's mistakes and stupidity, I believe an impeachment of the latter makes much more sense than impeaching the former. But lies are now just the beginning, our current POTUS is guilty of outright dereliction of duty. I know nothing will happen of course, given Rep control of Congress, Bush would have to spit in one of those N.O. refugee's faces before his own party would act against him... and maybe not even then.
You keep right on trying to make Clinton sound like he's worse than the current imbecile in charge. Everyone with half a brain knows that's ridiculous, and to them you just look like a fool for bashing on Clinton in the middle of the current POTUS's abject incompetence.
Too many in this country have a dangerously naive view of what "pure" capitalism is really like, perhaps because we haven't actually exercised "pure" capitalism here in nearly 2 centuries, and for good reason.
At the risk of sounding like a dick (which I am, make no mistakes
Mistake avoided, as its fairly obvious
I'm finding whatever means of transportation I can find and heading to the hills.
Spoken like someone who has never spent a significant part of their life without a car in a country where a car is virtually a necessity.
What transportation are you going to "find" if you can't afford any? Even if you got a couple hundred dollars, so you blow it on a rental or a taxi to get to the next major city. Now you're out of money in a city where you know no one, where no one is obligated to help you ("why didn't you do what your own city officials told you to do, instead of coming here with no money, no way to feed yourself, and no way to leave?") What then, genius?
Look jackass, these people did the perfectly rationale logical thing: the 1/4 of the population that didn't have a car either went to a shelter or stayed home because there was no other way for them to leave the city (no there weren't nearly enough buses to take them out before the hurricane - we're talking nearly 130,000 people without transportation - just look how long it took to get the 20,000 out of the Superdome - and for the buses they did have, they didn't have enough volunteer drivers for). They did what the officials told them to do, which was to go to the designated shelters because they were told they would be SAFE there. The officials assumed they'd be safe there because EVERYONE expected the military/FEMA to be in there within 48 hours. NO ONE EXPECTED HELP TO TAKE 5 FRICKIN' DAYS, ESPECIALLY TO THE SHELTERS! And a lot of those people didn't expect the water to start rising AFTER the hurricane had passed through which is why so many were caught by the water still at their homes or trying to get to a shelter. Jeez, you'll say anything to defend the moron we have for a POTUS.... China can move a million people out of the way of a typhoon in less than a week, but the richest country in the world can't move a 100,000 car-less people out of a single coastal city. Now there's something to be proud of... GOD BLESS AMERICA!
What you've basically said here is that its their fault for dying because they were too poor to get out the way all the rich folk did. The poor are therefore expendable, and that pretty much makes you a fascist. Sieg Heil, Herr Grasshoppa!
(All you other fascists, go ahead and mod me down, it won't change the facts on the ground - the car-less poor NEVER get out of the way of a hurricane WITHOUT HELP and NO is probably THE poorest coastal city we have on the East or Gulf Coasts, and my karma will recover, unlike the thousands of dead still floating in the stinking water down there.... you idiots....)
Some evidence of that can even be seen with the rise of Linux and the Open Source movement,
The only reason FOSS has had success against MS is because they don't follow the normal rules of commercial software. If they had the same vulnerabilities as commercial software MS would have destroyed them long ago.
I submit that if FOSS is the only software left in a market competing against a dominant player, then its proof that commercial competition is no longer viable and that dominant player now holds a monopoly in that market.
As I see it, FOSS isn't evidence of the market working, the mere *existence* of FOSS, as well as its lonely presence in a market otherwise controlled by a few or a single player is evidence that that market is *dysfunctional* (non-competitive).
New Orleans is simply showing us how close the tipping point is between supply and demand. Anything in the world that affects global oil production by more than 1 or 2 percent now sends panic through the markets. Why? Because the markets already know demand is beginning to rapidly outpace supply, and *they* know what that inevitably leads too. That's why they're panicky.
As for Bush, considering the oil industry friendly pork in the last energy bill (when you follow the money, his true allegiances are crystal clear - all the latest increases in alternative energies funding haven't even brought the levels back to what they were before Bush slashed them in his first 4 years - the rest of the money goes to an oil industry that is now raking in record profits), and the oil price increases that were happening long before New Orleans, and will *continue* long after New Orleans is rebuilt, a war in Iraq that has resulted in around 3 billion USD, PER MONTH, going in, with almost no oil coming out, yea, I think Bush can carry a lot of the blame for our current brain-dead energy policy. And sadly, this doesn't require sarcasm, its just the plain truth, even if it will take years for some people to finally admit it. Years of stubborn denial, gosh that sounds familiar....
Don't know about Teddy, but I'm sure he's not representative of all idiot liberals when it comes to using wind power. As for ANWR though, even if the optimists are right, it'll only run the country for about a year going by the mean average of the estimates, if the actual amount ends up in the low end we're talking about just 6 months of gas. US consumption is ~8 billion barrels per year, mean average in ANWR is 7.7 billion with a low of 4.3 and a high of 11.8. Even if the high end is right we're still talking less than 2 years. US consumption is escalating while domestic production continues to fall, and we haven't even mentioned China yet, whose middle class is already bigger than our entire population, with a desire for the same kind of lifestyle we have now, and they're importing the oil to make it happen. By 2020 China will be consuming more energy than us. So gunning for ANWR to us idiot liberals looks like a a doctor suggesting a band-aid for a patient with a ruptured aorta. Global demand and consumption has now so far outstripped all known supply, that there is no silver bullet anywhere left that can rescue us. No mythical multi-trillion barrel oil deposits that can save us from the wall we're about hit head on (no new major finds in nearly a decade now). We have got to kick the oil addiction completely, starting now, period. Raping what's left of the planet for those last few drops of cheap oil, knowing it only delays the final reckoning instead of avoiding it, is the act of a desperate addict who no longer cares about the consequences of his actions. We usually put people like that in jail (unless you're POTUS of course).
PS: 2000 acres of desolate land is a bald-faced lie sir. Its not 2000 contiguous acres, its 2000 acres spread out over a much larger area (that would require hundreds of miles of crisscrossing pipes and service roads - no roads exist in ANWR right now, none) which is far from desolate considering the tens of thousands of caribou and moose and various other creatures that move into that area during the summer, along with the predators that depend on them. That's why its critical: those open fields next to the Artic Sea is a lynchpin location for the entire ecosystem of Alaska's Northern Slope. I don't see the point of destroying that for less than a year's worth of gas. By just putting off the pain, we're only making the pain worse when it finally does arrive. In fact, this idiot liberal actually suspects, due to your willfull refusal to think beyond your next tank of gas, that your IQ is somewhere south of his own.
Was I the only one noticing that most of MS's money comes from software, which has a very low barrier to entry?
which HAD a very low barrier to entry. Those rules only apply to a market with open competition. Once the first monopoly manages to establish itself, you're now in the grip of the black hole's event horizon where normal market rules don't apply. For someone considering trying to compete with MS's CURRENT stranglehold on Office software, the barrier to entry is HUGE, the chance for profits in the near term are dismal, and the chance for failure in the long term very high. That's why no one, except those backing open source office software, are even bothering to try, much less succeeding.
Once the monopoly is achieved, and the government chooses not to act, then *only* an open-source collaborative effort has any chance of upending the monopoly because open-source has nearly infinite staying power in an environment which would normally be toxic to commercial competition. Couple that staying power with a license like the GPL and it can't even be co-opted or embraced-and-extended or bought out or sued into oblivion either. That's why MS is so scared, they can't kill it like they would normal commercial competition.
There are REASONS people would want this information in a Document
No, there are reasons people will want to be able to *synchronize* that data together, but that has nothing to do with the idea that you need one mother-of-all-document-format to store that different data in the same file.
The sane thing to do would be to store the video in a (common, open) video format, and your (textual) notes hold a time index into the video for synchronization, thus the text and video are separate from each other, *and* in standardized formats, *and* held in the same file using a standardized container format like a zip file. So you can still use open standards which keep your own options open, and keep your synchronization too.
Unless of course you're a company who's income depends on keeping your customers locked in to your proprietary formats (forcing them to use your, and ONLY your, apps to access the THEIR OWN data), in which case, "innovating" a brand new (proprietary, redundant) format to store text and video in the same file makes perfect "sense"....
They aren't going to stop there though. The RIAA and Co. consider the Constitution's Fair Use provisions to be their Public Enemy #1. When you listen to **IA execs talking about "if it breaks, you should buy another one from us" speech, that is in direct contradiction to Fair Use which explicitly allows a copy to avoid breakage.
In fact, part of the DMCA is technically in contradiction with Fair Use, as the DMCA says its illegal to circumvent copy-protection, even if it is to create a legal backup copy as Fair Use allows.
I'm certainly no fan of commercial thieves, and I don't download music illegally, but mark my word folks, the RIAA will not stop with the theives and the P2P's, their idea of a nirvana *requires* the destruction or neutralization of the Fair Use provisions of the Copyright Amendment. Like all obsolete industries in the past, they will desperately try to keep their high-return industry going for as long as they can, and like many of those past obsolete industries, they're going to try to buy a rejuvenated monopoly with the help of the government (read: buying Congressional representatives).
If they get their way, you will have to come to them when the CDs wear out because you won't legally be allowed to make copies, and I got a buck that says as soon as this happens, the quality (read: longevity) of CDs will mysteriously decline throughout the industry.....
"breeder" still manages to refer to several different types, so there isn't a blanket answer. Ordinary "breeders" still have that same *potential* problem, but we don't just have "ordinary" breeders anymore.
While the current fad seems to be over PBMRs, maybe because of the neat name I guess, my favorite still remains the Integral Fast Reactor, not only because of safety features, but because these could run for decades just by burning all the spent fuel from our conventional reactors. Newflash: we don't *need* a hole in the ground for most nuclear waste, just chuck it into an IFR.
In other words, wait for a silver bullet? A: Isn't that basically the same argument for doing nothing about Global Warming? B: The lead time for a nuclear reactor is a decade or so from drawing board to operation, and here in the US we're already hitting problems of demand dominating supply. We have to start building *something* **NOW**, to keep from having to live with perpetual brownouts in 15 years.
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Those who needed Him the most: early humans.
The rest of the stack has little to do with the user's visual interface.
"Mommy, mommy, that bad man scared me!" We weren't talking about CDE. "BOO!"
How exactly does this same complaint not apply to GNOME as well? After all GNOME came late to the game and chose to build their own silo too. Sorry, but your one-sided diatribe against KDE so far hasn't impressed me at all.
Did you understand my last post? Most of GNOME is constituted using GTK/GLIB/PANGO/etc, which collectively DUPLICATES most of QT's functionality, but in C, not C++. QT can't "fit in", because there is, quite deliberately, no space for it. You're obviously not a programmer, at least not C/C++, otherwise you'd realize how silly your statement about reorienting QT really is.
On an open system not controlled by a single authority and lacking a lot of standard infrastructure for advanced graphical applications, multiple desktop environments are inheriently inevitable.
It happened because you can't build commercial apps for KDE due to QT originally being non-free and later being released under the GPL instead of the LGPL, thus it should be obvious to everyone why commercial interests are gravitating to GNOME instead of KDE.
Who the hell do you think the KDE folks wrote KDE for? They wrote KDE for themselves not for whatever your definition is of a typical end user. Its the GNOME project that is now being deliberately written for the corporate desktop and the typical corporate end-user, since that is what the primary backers of GNOME today want GNOME to be. The KDE project began as a purely user-oriented community, and despite SUSE, it remains so. As for TT, their interest in KDE is only as a showcase for their QT library, TT isn't interested in controlling KDE's direction, and doesn't do so (and couldn't if they really wanted to - only a few of the KDE devs work for TT)
How could KDE have started that way when GNOME didn't even exist then? How did KDE change course after GNOME was born in order to kill GNOME? Answer: They didn't change a thing. Destroying the other is not and never has been the goal of either project. Most of this "Desktop War" you refer to, is really the creation of slashdot flame warriors who needed something to fight about.
Hogwash. This would only make sense if you believe the KDE project was aimed at the corporate desktop from the very beginning. It wasn't, and neither was GNOME when it first started for that matter.
LOL! What is the GNOME "infrastructure"? GTK+. What is GTK+? Answer: A replacement for QT written in C. What is QT? Answer: Its TTs commercial product that they make their entire revenue stream from thats written in C++. TrollTech isn't going to "reorient" a damn thing in QT to use GNOME "infrastructure" because QT and GNOME are written in different languages, never mind that TT isn't in the corporate desktop environment business, they're in the cross-platform GUI application building business which is inheriently and deliberately neutral when it comes to desktop environments! LOL!
Speaking of understanding, none of the people who began the KDE project worked for TrollTech at that time. TT has hired some of them since then, but when the KDE project first begin, there wasn't a connection to TT.
Second, what exactly do you mean by "deliberately designed"? Any program that uses functions from a library is "deliberately designed" to use that library. GNOME is "deliberately designed" to use GTK. So?
Third, GNOME began because at the time QT was under a non-free license, never mind the GPL. It was only after QT became GPL that the "argument" switched to LGPL v. GPL. The point is there was nothing "deliberate" done at the time because the KDE people didn't know that TT would later release QT under the GPL specifically.
Yes, I saw a program on addiction which brought this up many years ago and was suprised myself, to learn this. This happens for the same reason many people can drink "socially" but not become alcoholics (addicted). This is where the physiology of addiction comes into play. Not only do chemical addictions like this literally alter the brain's chemistry (which generates the craving for more), but scientists have identified a gene which seems to make its carrier far more likely to become an alcoholic than a non-carrier, so genetics are involved to some degree in the issue as well, at least its a sign that addiction has been a problem for humans for a long, long time. And just as they've recently discovered people who are apparently immune to AIDS, there is also a lucky portion of the population that is "immune" to some chemical addictions, that a person's ability to withstand addiction involves more than willpower alone.
Well, its both really. The "routine" of smoking can become a "habit" thats hard to break even without the physiological addiction. For the "heavy" smokers though (the ones who smoke a lot and aren't able to quit), the primary problem is the physical addiction to the nicotine, a substance which, according to some doctors, is as addictive as cocaine.
GNOME's revolving door of window managers is primarily because they chose not to have a standard one. There's nothing stopping that from being done with KDE, except that so far no one has gotten so upset with the current standard WM, KWin, that they've felt the need to create an alternative.
Wait, let me get this straight, you're now saying KDE isn't as configurable as GNOME because it doesn't include an option to hide all the other options it has that GNOME doesn't?
Which has what, exactly, to do with anything? You already pointed out earlier that distros are often including the base libraries for both Desktop Environments so apps from either DE will work no matter which DE the user is using. Choosing one DE to use does not in any way restrict the apps you can run.
Its a de-facto standard for the corporate desktop not "a Linux desktop", because "a Linux desktop" is very much in the eyes of the beholder. What drives many people to Linux is choice, and what drives many to KDE is basically the same thing: flexibility, customization, uncommon but beneficial features, i.e., choice. As for the corporate desktop, KDE is not going to go away if all the corporate distros use GNOME, for the same reason Linux will never go away if all the corporations decided to switch back to Windows. To see why, just look at Ubuntu: What was the first major development to occur in the Ubuntu user community after Ubuntu became fairly popular? Answer: Kubuntu. For an awful lot of people, a minimalist "corporate desktop" is not their idea of an ideal desktop environment, KDE is.
Because of this, the prior poster hoping for "a single, standard" DE, is just dreaming. Not going to happen. You have as much chance of getting a single standard user interface for the open Linux system as you have of convincing all women that they only need one kind of dress, in any color as long as its black.
To make this an authentic
If the internet had been designed from the beginning to be a global service, this criticism might make sense, but the internet started, and existed for many, many years afterwards, as an *internal*, US creation. Only in *hindsight* do those IPv4 allocations look wrong now.
Having read down to this point some comments:
1) This entire argument is fairly irrelevant to TFA because TFA is about changes detected in the human race at least 5000 years ago, whereas the argument here is about a change in the human race, or rather, our society, only beginning within the last 1000 years or so. We should put this argument on hold for about 4,000 years until we can find, if any, genetic evidence of our species' most recent changes.
2) About evolution continuing in the last 1000 years: When those usual selection pressures are no longer accurate predictions of a person's likelyhood to successfully procreate, then its hard to argue that evolution, even if the *mechanics* of that genetic process continue, are anywhere near as important now as compared to human society's actions which are affecting who's genes are being passed on versus those that don't. And don't get caught up in the smart vs. dumb argument, the actual situation is a little more complex than that, because its not just "smart" people who are avoiding procreation in the Western world, there are a lot of "ordinary" people who realize they can't afford a nice life AND children at the same time. It is only the extreme poor, who have nothing to lose in having children, who are doing so, and being smart, or at least not being dumb, DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL AVOID POVERTY IN THIS WORLD. All the studies of this have shown the children with the best chance of success are those born to parents with means. People who are born into poverty tend to remain in poverty, NO MATTER HOW "SMART" THEY ARE. It is really the selection pressures of our society that are mucking up evolution's mechanisms, more than it is individuals, smart or dumb, that are doing so.
3) About population decrease: I don't know where you guys are getting your numbers, but the US in particular is expected to have a dramatically *increasing* population in the decades ahead (I've read articles from Germany and France about their dilemma and all those articles mentioned the US being an exception). Heck, just google for "us population growth" and you'll find what I just did. Hmmm, a net gain of one new American every 10 seconds! How did you get the math to make that a net decrease!?! Is this the "New Math" I've heard of?
In that case, I'm not sure what your point is. My point was open formats can be used to do everything MS claims they have to have their own mother-of-all-document-format to do. What they really are doing is trying to maintain lock-in using proprietary formats (and the continual extension/revision thereof). If your point about "people wanting it (all) in the document" is not about the technical layout of the document file, then I don't see the point. Open, standard formats can be used to "keep it all in one document" from the user's point of view, so the only difference is that MS's format is proprietary while OpenDocument is an open standard. Open formats CAN DO what MS claims they need proprietary formats for.
*If* we can keep the predators out there away from them long enough.... sorry for being an incorrigible pessimist, but we all *know* "they're" out there.... How do you give kids enough freedom to become creative *and* keep them safe at the same time?
Now this is silly. In the history of the human race, we've never had a society and a civilization so dependent on a single source of cheap energy as we do now. The infrastructure of our advanced world relies on fossil fuels to function now. The wall we're about to hit isn't the running out of oil, its the running out of *cheap* oil. Once we're paying 4 to 5 times as much for oil as we are now, and the costs keep rising, much of what we take for granted now will become too expensive to operate. And this time, we DON'T HAVE a cheap alternative we can switch to.
Just look at the oil fields in Alaska's North Slope adjacent to ANWR, genius. IT WON'T BE CONTIGUOUS.
I'll be sure to tell the caribou of your opinion.
There won't be "one" drilling area, that's the problem.
Apples to Oranges. One single pipeline is not the same thing as dozens, probably hundreds, of drill sites and other operations centers spread out in a wilderness area. We know from the adjacent oil fields that spills will be frequent and their cumulative effect will be significant.
Given the choice between a POTUS that lies about a personal affair, a lie where the only person hurt is his wife, versus a POTUS that lies and misleads a country into going to war, getting thousands of people killed, then lies about his own administration's mistakes and stupidity, I believe an impeachment of the latter makes much more sense than impeaching the former. But lies are now just the beginning, our current POTUS is guilty of outright dereliction of duty. I know nothing will happen of course, given Rep control of Congress, Bush would have to spit in one of those N.O. refugee's faces before his own party would act against him... and maybe not even then.
You keep right on trying to make Clinton sound like he's worse than the current imbecile in charge. Everyone with half a brain knows that's ridiculous, and to them you just look like a fool for bashing on Clinton in the middle of the current POTUS's abject incompetence.
Well said sir, if I had mod points....
Too many in this country have a dangerously naive view of what "pure" capitalism is really like, perhaps because we haven't actually exercised "pure" capitalism here in nearly 2 centuries, and for good reason.
Mistake avoided, as its fairly obvious
Spoken like someone who has never spent a significant part of their life without a car in a country where a car is virtually a necessity.
What transportation are you going to "find" if you can't afford any? Even if you got a couple hundred dollars, so you blow it on a rental or a taxi to get to the next major city. Now you're out of money in a city where you know no one, where no one is obligated to help you ("why didn't you do what your own city officials told you to do, instead of coming here with no money, no way to feed yourself, and no way to leave?") What then, genius?
Look jackass, these people did the perfectly rationale logical thing: the 1/4 of the population that didn't have a car either went to a shelter or stayed home because there was no other way for them to leave the city (no there weren't nearly enough buses to take them out before the hurricane - we're talking nearly 130,000 people without transportation - just look how long it took to get the 20,000 out of the Superdome - and for the buses they did have, they didn't have enough volunteer drivers for). They did what the officials told them to do, which was to go to the designated shelters because they were told they would be SAFE there. The officials assumed they'd be safe there because EVERYONE expected the military/FEMA to be in there within 48 hours. NO ONE EXPECTED HELP TO TAKE 5 FRICKIN' DAYS, ESPECIALLY TO THE SHELTERS! And a lot of those people didn't expect the water to start rising AFTER the hurricane had passed through which is why so many were caught by the water still at their homes or trying to get to a shelter. Jeez, you'll say anything to defend the moron we have for a POTUS.... China can move a million people out of the way of a typhoon in less than a week, but the richest country in the world can't move a 100,000 car-less people out of a single coastal city. Now there's something to be proud of... GOD BLESS AMERICA!
What you've basically said here is that its their fault for dying because they were too poor to get out the way all the rich folk did. The poor are therefore expendable, and that pretty much makes you a fascist. Sieg Heil, Herr Grasshoppa!
(All you other fascists, go ahead and mod me down, it won't change the facts on the ground - the car-less poor NEVER get out of the way of a hurricane WITHOUT HELP and NO is probably THE poorest coastal city we have on the East or Gulf Coasts, and my karma will recover, unlike the thousands of dead still floating in the stinking water down there.... you idiots....)
The only reason FOSS has had success against MS is because they don't follow the normal rules of commercial software. If they had the same vulnerabilities as commercial software MS would have destroyed them long ago.
I submit that if FOSS is the only software left in a market competing against a dominant player, then its proof that commercial competition is no longer viable and that dominant player now holds a monopoly in that market.
As I see it, FOSS isn't evidence of the market working, the mere *existence* of FOSS, as well as its lonely presence in a market otherwise controlled by a few or a single player is evidence that that market is *dysfunctional* (non-competitive).
(agree with rest of your post)
Hi Steve!
New Orleans is simply showing us how close the tipping point is between supply and demand. Anything in the world that affects global oil production by more than 1 or 2 percent now sends panic through the markets. Why? Because the markets already know demand is beginning to rapidly outpace supply, and *they* know what that inevitably leads too. That's why they're panicky.
As for Bush, considering the oil industry friendly pork in the last energy bill (when you follow the money, his true allegiances are crystal clear - all the latest increases in alternative energies funding haven't even brought the levels back to what they were before Bush slashed them in his first 4 years - the rest of the money goes to an oil industry that is now raking in record profits), and the oil price increases that were happening long before New Orleans, and will *continue* long after New Orleans is rebuilt, a war in Iraq that has resulted in around 3 billion USD, PER MONTH, going in, with almost no oil coming out, yea, I think Bush can carry a lot of the blame for our current brain-dead energy policy. And sadly, this doesn't require sarcasm, its just the plain truth, even if it will take years for some people to finally admit it. Years of stubborn denial, gosh that sounds familiar....
Don't know about Teddy, but I'm sure he's not representative of all idiot liberals when it comes to using wind power. As for ANWR though, even if the optimists are right, it'll only run the country for about a year going by the mean average of the estimates, if the actual amount ends up in the low end we're talking about just 6 months of gas. US consumption is ~8 billion barrels per year, mean average in ANWR is 7.7 billion with a low of 4.3 and a high of 11.8. Even if the high end is right we're still talking less than 2 years. US consumption is escalating while domestic production continues to fall, and we haven't even mentioned China yet, whose middle class is already bigger than our entire population, with a desire for the same kind of lifestyle we have now, and they're importing the oil to make it happen. By 2020 China will be consuming more energy than us. So gunning for ANWR to us idiot liberals looks like a a doctor suggesting a band-aid for a patient with a ruptured aorta. Global demand and consumption has now so far outstripped all known supply, that there is no silver bullet anywhere left that can rescue us. No mythical multi-trillion barrel oil deposits that can save us from the wall we're about hit head on (no new major finds in nearly a decade now). We have got to kick the oil addiction completely, starting now, period. Raping what's left of the planet for those last few drops of cheap oil, knowing it only delays the final reckoning instead of avoiding it, is the act of a desperate addict who no longer cares about the consequences of his actions. We usually put people like that in jail (unless you're POTUS of course).
PS: 2000 acres of desolate land is a bald-faced lie sir. Its not 2000 contiguous acres, its 2000 acres spread out over a much larger area (that would require hundreds of miles of crisscrossing pipes and service roads - no roads exist in ANWR right now, none) which is far from desolate considering the tens of thousands of caribou and moose and various other creatures that move into that area during the summer, along with the predators that depend on them. That's why its critical: those open fields next to the Artic Sea is a lynchpin location for the entire ecosystem of Alaska's Northern Slope. I don't see the point of destroying that for less than a year's worth of gas. By just putting off the pain, we're only making the pain worse when it finally does arrive. In fact, this idiot liberal actually suspects, due to your willfull refusal to think beyond your next tank of gas, that your IQ is somewhere south of his own.
No, there are reasons people will want to be able to *synchronize* that data together, but that has nothing to do with the idea that you need one mother-of-all-document-format to store that different data in the same file.
The sane thing to do would be to store the video in a (common, open) video format, and your (textual) notes hold a time index into the video for synchronization, thus the text and video are separate from each other, *and* in standardized formats, *and* held in the same file using a standardized container format like a zip file. So you can still use open standards which keep your own options open, and keep your synchronization too.
Unless of course you're a company who's income depends on keeping your customers locked in to your proprietary formats (forcing them to use your, and ONLY your, apps to access the THEIR OWN data), in which case, "innovating" a brand new (proprietary, redundant) format to store text and video in the same file makes perfect "sense"....
They aren't going to stop there though. The RIAA and Co. consider the Constitution's Fair Use provisions to be their Public Enemy #1. When you listen to **IA execs talking about "if it breaks, you should buy another one from us" speech, that is in direct contradiction to Fair Use which explicitly allows a copy to avoid breakage.
In fact, part of the DMCA is technically in contradiction with Fair Use, as the DMCA says its illegal to circumvent copy-protection, even if it is to create a legal backup copy as Fair Use allows.
I'm certainly no fan of commercial thieves, and I don't download music illegally, but mark my word folks, the RIAA will not stop with the theives and the P2P's, their idea of a nirvana *requires* the destruction or neutralization of the Fair Use provisions of the Copyright Amendment. Like all obsolete industries in the past, they will desperately try to keep their high-return industry going for as long as they can, and like many of those past obsolete industries, they're going to try to buy a rejuvenated monopoly with the help of the government (read: buying Congressional representatives).
If they get their way, you will have to come to them when the CDs wear out because you won't legally be allowed to make copies, and I got a buck that says as soon as this happens, the quality (read: longevity) of CDs will mysteriously decline throughout the industry.....
"breeder" still manages to refer to several different types, so there isn't a blanket answer. Ordinary "breeders" still have that same *potential* problem, but we don't just have "ordinary" breeders anymore.
While the current fad seems to be over PBMRs, maybe because of the neat name I guess, my favorite still remains the Integral Fast Reactor, not only because of safety features, but because these could run for decades just by burning all the spent fuel from our conventional reactors. Newflash: we don't *need* a hole in the ground for most nuclear waste, just chuck it into an IFR.
And as usual, we'll be on the back-end of that curve about to go into free-fall before the chickens realize the sky is falling. Sigh.
In other words, wait for a silver bullet? A: Isn't that basically the same argument for doing nothing about Global Warming? B: The lead time for a nuclear reactor is a decade or so from drawing board to operation, and here in the US we're already hitting problems of demand dominating supply. We have to start building *something* **NOW**, to keep from having to live with perpetual brownouts in 15 years.