Apart from the people that never would have bought it in the first place, there's a problem here - laziness.
I'm buying games more out of principle, first, and, second, because I'm myself software developer. Some knowledge on how it works inside - and how some people manage to earn for their living - kind of keeps me in check. (At different times had relations with both gaming company and indie shareware developers.)
But if I'm angry about being ripped (e.g. as in my case with Nintendo DS and bunch of overrated games I have tried), then I do not really care about buying games. After all most money go to publishers anyway. (Actually because it is such stupid business model, console games on average suck terribly.) Luckily for me too, since I live in Europe, many good games are never released in EU. So I have stopped bothering myself trying to buy DS games I had played.
The only reason that my girlfriend and I are planning on buying one is that the Fatal Frame series is being continued on the Wii.
F*cking exclusively I might add.
I have impression that many 3rd parties jumping right now on Wii/DS ship because development costs are much lower. Add here greater install base and you have much better business plan. Business is business.
I frankly stopped buying PC games. Or to put it better I have improved my game buying routine:
1. Go to review sites and pick game which has good user comments. Official reviews are written by some score-whores and rarely reflect actual gaming experience.
2. Go to torrent site of your choosing and download the game. If game downloads fast: +1
3. Try to install and play game. If it plays without crack: +5 (== the game is popular) If crack is needed - continue.
4. Find a working crack. If crack is found easily: +5 If no crack is found or cracks are not working: throw away the game. If it wasn't worth time to crack, doubtfully it would be worth my time to play it.
5. Actually play the game. If game is good: +10
6. If games plays good (with easy to find crack), buy it.
Now it all boils down to simple fact: was game compromised with DRM or devels instead choose to make game better and not waste their time on crippling users' experience.
Since I work in 3rd tier support now, let me translate that into human language:
The working fix was removed as soon as management of department responsible for actually releasing fixes complained very loud. The matter is being thoroughly investigated, but as of now no easy scapegoat can be found, since "fix" actually worked. Also, manager of sales asked me to retype here the stuff from our business booklet: "we do no support or condone copy protection circumvention methods." Nice. Gamers have to thank some poor chap from support department who put the fix up so that gamers can play the game they have paid money for, but please remember, since you already paid to Ubi, we can care less whether you can play the game or not. Ha-ha.
My theory would be that Ubi support manager had authorized that one of his subordinates would put fix on their site. Because they had a flood of complaints and they had to respond to customers. Luckily, support departments are least responsible for anything. Since it takes that long, the dispute between support, development and D2D folks really heated up. From my experience, I'd say, some manager had intentionally authorized that - just to have a chance to say something (probably about game quality) aloud.
On most (all?) other distros it works perfectly. I had Debian for ages in production (supporting piles of services) with apt-get update/upgrade running regularly. SuSE and Gentoo also do good job keeping you informed about changes in updates and if post-update human interaction is needed.
The crucial difference here is mindset of RH. It didn't changed the damm yota in the decade. The very same problem why I threw away RH6/7 in past from production, the very same stupidity of RH, is still there.
RH is only distro I have ever tried - and I tried many of them - would silently without any warning or prompt replace your config files with shipped version. It took them ages to learn that files can be renamed - yet it didn't went thru completely it seems.
This is not a single mistake. This is happening now for more than a decade now: RH during maintenance can and does override your configuration. The RH folks simply have no trivial respect to their users...
But if that would happen, then Sony would politely ask Toshi (in deal, for undisclosed amount of money) to cease production of the laptops. You can bet.
For second - HD video decoding - to be any efficient, it has to be done very close to video output. Otherwise, HD video might take up some huge chunk of internal buses bandwidth. After all you first have to transfer data from RAM to Cell, then from Cell to video adapter. (*) That can get really messy without proper integration of Cell into computer architecture. And as long as Cell isn't main CPU, the problem would remain. PS3 doesn't have this problem because Cell is used (and wired) as main processor. That's not the fact for PC hardware, where all vendors have to be Windows compatible.
Also I think Cell in large is competitor to nVidia/ATI solutions for CPU accelerations - not companion.
(*) Fact: CPUs for quite some time are capable of decoding HD video in real time - it's the transfer (1) to/from RAM and (2) video hardware which takes most of the time.
TerrSoft was one of the initial (and major) developers of Cell support on Linux. As well they were more or less official supplier of Linux for PS3.
They as well remain one of the major PowerPC/POWER supporters and developers of Linux on PPC*/POWER*. (Largest PPC users now are in embedded market - not in desktop/workstation market where TerraSoft is working.)
Rest of distros, in large part, merely have used the GPLed work done by TerraSoft.
That might sound like shilling, but the guys deserve credit for their hard work.
Chances are big that the laptop would remain an expensive toy for rich geeks.
Linux main driving force are people who try to make out of literally junk computers something usable (and at large they succeed). Majority of people are those who can't afford computers nor proprietary OSs - and they have natural interest in such stuff.
I'd say that if the laptop costs below $600 mark - then it might have chance. But something tells me that at $1600 it would find few followers.
P.S. But you might expect rabid adoption rate among scholars or even Universities buying the laptop for their stuff. The guys can code up whatever they need.
In worst times, I had seen one exploit attempt per 10 seconds on average. Since I have seen this all from pov of Linux router/firewall for sub-C net with 30 IPs, the logs were pretty messy and I had to do special script to clean syslog.
Right now my friend was setting up for himself firewall too and was seeing about 1 exploit attempt per 1-2 minutes.
That's Windows side.
On Linux side this isn't much prettier. In past some botnets from South Korea were dumbly scanning whole net trying to probe well known services (ssh, rsh, telnet, mysql, etc) as root with well knows passwords. I had something like 20-30 "auth failed" per minute in my syslog. Right now still some botnets try to scan *nix systems with weak passwords continuously. It is not as bad as it was with attack from SK, still I'm not leaving SSH running on port 22 anymore (just in case).
From point of view of KDE developers - it is true. They have finished their work.
KDE is not monolithic corporate-supported project (e.g. Gnome). It is developed by many many people. KDE devels finished their work - so that everybody else in KDE development community can start porting their applications to KDE4.
KDE devels != KDE developer community. And their intersection (unlike in Gnome, where most work is paid by Novell and Sun) is very small.
Do simple test and check "About" dialog boxes of KDE applications: you would find many many apps whose author has no relation to kde.org.
People who go to kde.org are mainly developers and distro maintainers. Few end-users (i think none) are getting their KDE off kde.org.
From that point of view, moving kde3 into legacy is right choice for kde.org.
P.S. That reminds me constantly the discussions about new KDE start menu. Many people complained that it sucks. But then on devel on blog asked: "how many pro/advanced users are using the menu?" The point was that new menu was optimized for end-users. For pro/advanced camp, KDE has a lot of better ways to start programs - starting from Alt-F2 dialog to Katapult. And in fact, comments to the blog post confirmed: yes, pro users use KDE start menu rarely. But end-users use it constantly. That's why the change was put in the default setup. More or less direct analogy to the kde.org and KDE3 and KDE4 - they optimize for frequent visitors, not ultra vocal whiners/bloggers.
I'm a developer on a major Linux distribution. I can tell that everytime more people shows up on the official IRC channels with the "Feature X is b0rken, you suck!" attitude.
That's the price one pays for taking Linux mainstream.
Mainstream users do not care about opensourseness - they just want their system work and do what they want to do it. And with KDE4 at moment nothing works as people expect - if it works at all.
In Windows land it is different: there is nobody you can complain. Normally you have to call support or local technician or friend hoping that they can fix it for you. Linux at moment lacks such "local technician or friend" option. Also, people do not want to pay for support (which comes bundled with Windows).
Add here the overall mess PC hardware market is and you have recipe for huge long-term problems.
And KDE4 shows clearly the conceptual divide between what mainstream expects and how F/LOSS function. On one side they published raw unfinished environment as they had to as open source project ("talk is cheap. show me the code." thing). On another side many distros to get on a bleeding edge rushed to include it as KDE3 replacement. This is dead-end for normal PC users - and Ubuntu already has bunch of them. It would take some serious explaining that they can go back to KDE3, because for them what is installed is what they get.
The only solution I can see (and it was suggested many times already) is for Ubuntu (and other Linux vendors) start selling PCs/laptops under their own brand. I could never understand what held Red Hat in past - nor do I understand now why Novell/Ubuntu (while keeping desktop on their roadmaps) do not want to go vertical. After all their primary focus (and Linux focus at large) remains server space where it is not critical. For desktop to know precisely whom you can report your problem is crucial: end-users do know little about IRC, forums and mail lists - nor do they want to get involved. They just want it to work.
After all, vertical integration worked (and works) for YDL (from TerraSoft) and YDL is older than Ubuntu and has many users. And hey - it really works well.
Reminded saying heard long time ago. [ Probably native speaker can give original saying for my memory is bad with such things. ]
When process is against you - argue facts
When facts against you - argue procedure.
Facts are against ISO. So they are pushing the procedure thing. After all procedure was so to say followed and voting on the so called standard so to say have happened. Or probably "had been happened" is more appropriate wording in the context??
Last time I was trying to play HD video on my Ubuntu - with both Xine and Mplayer - I hadn't noticed that there was performance problem related to lack of HW acceleration. (I didn't tried VLC - it can't even playback smoothly HD video on Windows where such acceleration is already available.)
While CPU load was remaining low (~25% on dual core CPU), 720p video still was playing with terrible jitter. In Mplayer few minutes later A/V sync (as usually) went south. Xine started dropping frames. All that while nor CPU load, nor kernel times where displaying any anomaly.
I'd say that problem lies elsewhere and HW accel (though welcome) might not solve the video playback problems.
P.S. At least when there would be HW accel, it would be easier to bash the server/hpc/oracle folks who now monopolize completely LKML. Probably then they would start paying attention to desktop Linux needs. Quoter of the attention they spent discussion fresh Oracle benchmarks would be more than enough.
P.P.S. Tests (actually I was just trying to watch my anime on Linux) where done on AMD 4200+ X2 + nVidia gf7800gt (evil proprietary drivers are installed) + RAM 2GB DDR CL2.
No mouse pad. Keyboard looks... bad. No mention which browser is installed. No mention whether one can install his own Linux software or change distro.
[merge any new._cfgNNNN files using your favourite tool or manually]
That's actually what turned me off Gentoo - the thing with/etc/.
If you add couple of lines into config of popular and often (re)build package, you start feeling that you waste more time copy-pasting the lines into new version of config than actually compiling the system.
No 3 way merge function for you. At least it wasn't there 2 years ago.
Privacy (esp in public places) is interesting point.
But honestly, my first association with notebooks somehow now is "desktop replacement". I use right now laptops at home and in office. (And frankly, have no wish to carry one around - I get enough of computer everywhere else. YMMV.)
What we do right now with laptops and more importantly how we do it, would change in coming years. Think of text/image/video-blogging - that is mostly public activity anyway and doesn't require privacy. Though yes, lack of physical entity has implication for privacy and security if such is needed. (e.g. Wi-Fi didn't yet sorted out all the problems with misuse and abuse - and all they did was to move from physical material media (wire) to immaterial media (radio waves).)
One can imaging devices now under development which try to project image right into ones retina. And - OMG - they already have wikipedia page:
A "virtual retinal display" (VRD), also known as a "retinal scan display" (RSD)
Should be nice solution to privacy problem. (If it doesn't burn out one's eyes, of course.)
For corporate lappy, privacy is must. Do not see solution other than having "physical laptop." Do not want my manager to see what I am really doing with my time in office;)
I hope by 2015 notebooks would have no moving parts - no sliding things either.
I just want a normal notebook. Just normal notebook from Sci-Fi: no physical parts, voice interface, 3D projector and virtual keyboard. All that packed into watch.
Google can't find images - but something like it was in Heroic Age anime.
ZOMG. KDE folks stopped repeating this - because they got tired repeating this.
Nobody takes away from you KDE 3.x - if it's better to you, then use it. It is stable. It runs. It has uncountable number of features. Use it.
Precisely because KDE 3.x works that well, KDE devels decided to use the opportunity to solve many long-standing problems and give a UI major lift up. Seeing how long it took KDE2/KDE3 to stabilize, I personally didn't expect that KDE4 release would be any faster in that aspect. That's experimental stuff, that's new stuff - more than any KDE was before. Software has to be redeveloped more or less completely for KDE4.
So why is everybody so surprised that KDE4 doesn't work on par with KDE3??
KDE4 and Qt4 provide better (technical) foundation for development - more features, stability, applications - more of all that to come. But do not expect it just overnight.
KDE4.0 was seen mainly by developers. Main goal of KDE4.1 release was to deliver something somewhat usable to wider audience and receive feedback. Nothing more.
You do not like actual KDE4? Do not use it. KDE4 is not like Vista which is pushed on innocent customers by simply removing other options (WinXP). Grab fresh KDE3 and use it instead. It is there, it works and it is supported and it will be supported.
Well, I'm too lazy to dig up links for you (I'm sure GrokLaw has archived something on that) but the money transfers to M$ business partners came up during antitrust case (the M$ vs. DoJ). This is a fact backed by evidence, part of antitrust proceedings.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the people that never would have bought it in the first place, there's a problem here - laziness.
I'm buying games more out of principle, first, and, second, because I'm myself software developer. Some knowledge on how it works inside - and how some people manage to earn for their living - kind of keeps me in check. (At different times had relations with both gaming company and indie shareware developers.)
But if I'm angry about being ripped (e.g. as in my case with Nintendo DS and bunch of overrated games I have tried), then I do not really care about buying games. After all most money go to publishers anyway. (Actually because it is such stupid business model, console games on average suck terribly.) Luckily for me too, since I live in Europe, many good games are never released in EU. So I have stopped bothering myself trying to buy DS games I had played.
The only reason that my girlfriend and I are planning on buying one is that the Fatal Frame series is being continued on the Wii.
F*cking exclusively I might add.
I have impression that many 3rd parties jumping right now on Wii/DS ship because development costs are much lower. Add here greater install base and you have much better business plan. Business is business.
I frankly stopped buying PC games. Or to put it better I have improved my game buying routine:
1. Go to review sites and pick game which has good user comments. Official reviews are written by some score-whores and rarely reflect actual gaming experience.
2. Go to torrent site of your choosing and download the game. If game downloads fast: +1
3. Try to install and play game. If it plays without crack: +5 (== the game is popular)
If crack is needed - continue.
4. Find a working crack. If crack is found easily: +5
If no crack is found or cracks are not working: throw away the game. If it wasn't worth time to crack, doubtfully it would be worth my time to play it.
5. Actually play the game. If game is good: +10
6. If games plays good (with easy to find crack), buy it.
Now it all boils down to simple fact: was game compromised with DRM or devels instead choose to make game better and not waste their time on crippling users' experience.
Since I work in 3rd tier support now, let me translate that into human language:
The working fix was removed as soon as management of department responsible for actually releasing fixes complained very loud. The matter is being thoroughly investigated, but as of now no easy scapegoat can be found, since "fix" actually worked. Also, manager of sales asked me to retype here the stuff from our business booklet: "we do no support or condone copy protection circumvention methods." Nice. Gamers have to thank some poor chap from support department who put the fix up so that gamers can play the game they have paid money for, but please remember, since you already paid to Ubi, we can care less whether you can play the game or not. Ha-ha.
My theory would be that Ubi support manager had authorized that one of his subordinates would put fix on their site. Because they had a flood of complaints and they had to respond to customers. Luckily, support departments are least responsible for anything. Since it takes that long, the dispute between support, development and D2D folks really heated up. From my experience, I'd say, some manager had intentionally authorized that - just to have a chance to say something (probably about game quality) aloud.
On most (all?) other distros it works perfectly. I had Debian for ages in production (supporting piles of services) with apt-get update/upgrade running regularly. SuSE and Gentoo also do good job keeping you informed about changes in updates and if post-update human interaction is needed.
The crucial difference here is mindset of RH. It didn't changed the damm yota in the decade. The very same problem why I threw away RH6/7 in past from production, the very same stupidity of RH, is still there.
RH is only distro I have ever tried - and I tried many of them - would silently without any warning or prompt replace your config files with shipped version. It took them ages to learn that files can be renamed - yet it didn't went thru completely it seems.
This is not a single mistake. This is happening now for more than a decade now: RH during maintenance can and does override your configuration. The RH folks simply have no trivial respect to their users...
[/rants]
+10.
Why I didn't think of the option!!
But if that would happen, then Sony would politely ask Toshi (in deal, for undisclosed amount of money) to cease production of the laptops. You can bet.
My guess would be - Yes, No, Yes.
For second - HD video decoding - to be any efficient, it has to be done very close to video output. Otherwise, HD video might take up some huge chunk of internal buses bandwidth. After all you first have to transfer data from RAM to Cell, then from Cell to video adapter. (*) That can get really messy without proper integration of Cell into computer architecture. And as long as Cell isn't main CPU, the problem would remain. PS3 doesn't have this problem because Cell is used (and wired) as main processor. That's not the fact for PC hardware, where all vendors have to be Windows compatible.
Also I think Cell in large is competitor to nVidia/ATI solutions for CPU accelerations - not companion.
(*) Fact: CPUs for quite some time are capable of decoding HD video in real time - it's the transfer (1) to/from RAM and (2) video hardware which takes most of the time.
Actually to me it looked moke like Toshi, while the giants - nVidia/ATI/Intel - are wrestling on GPU-CPU split, tries to stab them in a back.
If they had ever tried to deliver on promise of cheap Cell, they might have already won the ongoing CPU acceleration war.
[...] and Slashdot shills for Terra Soft.
TerrSoft was one of the initial (and major) developers of Cell support on Linux. As well they were more or less official supplier of Linux for PS3.
They as well remain one of the major PowerPC/POWER supporters and developers of Linux on PPC*/POWER*. (Largest PPC users now are in embedded market - not in desktop/workstation market where TerraSoft is working.)
Rest of distros, in large part, merely have used the GPLed work done by TerraSoft.
That might sound like shilling, but the guys deserve credit for their hard work.
Chances are big that the laptop would remain an expensive toy for rich geeks.
Linux main driving force are people who try to make out of literally junk computers something usable (and at large they succeed). Majority of people are those who can't afford computers nor proprietary OSs - and they have natural interest in such stuff.
I'd say that if the laptop costs below $600 mark - then it might have chance. But something tells me that at $1600 it would find few followers.
P.S. But you might expect rabid adoption rate among scholars or even Universities buying the laptop for their stuff. The guys can code up whatever they need.
Wasn't measuring recently.
In worst times, I had seen one exploit attempt per 10 seconds on average. Since I have seen this all from pov of Linux router/firewall for sub-C net with 30 IPs, the logs were pretty messy and I had to do special script to clean syslog.
Right now my friend was setting up for himself firewall too and was seeing about 1 exploit attempt per 1-2 minutes.
That's Windows side.
On Linux side this isn't much prettier. In past some botnets from South Korea were dumbly scanning whole net trying to probe well known services (ssh, rsh, telnet, mysql, etc) as root with well knows passwords. I had something like 20-30 "auth failed" per minute in my syslog. Right now still some botnets try to scan *nix systems with weak passwords continuously. It is not as bad as it was with attack from SK, still I'm not leaving SSH running on port 22 anymore (just in case).
From point of view of KDE developers - it is true. They have finished their work.
KDE is not monolithic corporate-supported project (e.g. Gnome). It is developed by many many people. KDE devels finished their work - so that everybody else in KDE development community can start porting their applications to KDE4.
KDE devels != KDE developer community. And their intersection (unlike in Gnome, where most work is paid by Novell and Sun) is very small.
Do simple test and check "About" dialog boxes of KDE applications: you would find many many apps whose author has no relation to kde.org.
People who go to kde.org are mainly developers and distro maintainers. Few end-users (i think none) are getting their KDE off kde.org.
From that point of view, moving kde3 into legacy is right choice for kde.org.
P.S. That reminds me constantly the discussions about new KDE start menu. Many people complained that it sucks. But then on devel on blog asked: "how many pro/advanced users are using the menu?" The point was that new menu was optimized for end-users. For pro/advanced camp, KDE has a lot of better ways to start programs - starting from Alt-F2 dialog to Katapult. And in fact, comments to the blog post confirmed: yes, pro users use KDE start menu rarely. But end-users use it constantly. That's why the change was put in the default setup. More or less direct analogy to the kde.org and KDE3 and KDE4 - they optimize for frequent visitors, not ultra vocal whiners/bloggers.
I'm a developer on a major Linux distribution. I can tell that everytime more people shows up on the official IRC channels with the "Feature X is b0rken, you suck!" attitude.
That's the price one pays for taking Linux mainstream.
Mainstream users do not care about opensourseness - they just want their system work and do what they want to do it. And with KDE4 at moment nothing works as people expect - if it works at all.
In Windows land it is different: there is nobody you can complain. Normally you have to call support or local technician or friend hoping that they can fix it for you. Linux at moment lacks such "local technician or friend" option. Also, people do not want to pay for support (which comes bundled with Windows).
Add here the overall mess PC hardware market is and you have recipe for huge long-term problems.
And KDE4 shows clearly the conceptual divide between what mainstream expects and how F/LOSS function. On one side they published raw unfinished environment as they had to as open source project ("talk is cheap. show me the code." thing). On another side many distros to get on a bleeding edge rushed to include it as KDE3 replacement. This is dead-end for normal PC users - and Ubuntu already has bunch of them. It would take some serious explaining that they can go back to KDE3, because for them what is installed is what they get.
The only solution I can see (and it was suggested many times already) is for Ubuntu (and other Linux vendors) start selling PCs/laptops under their own brand. I could never understand what held Red Hat in past - nor do I understand now why Novell/Ubuntu (while keeping desktop on their roadmaps) do not want to go vertical. After all their primary focus (and Linux focus at large) remains server space where it is not critical. For desktop to know precisely whom you can report your problem is crucial: end-users do know little about IRC, forums and mail lists - nor do they want to get involved. They just want it to work.
After all, vertical integration worked (and works) for YDL (from TerraSoft) and YDL is older than Ubuntu and has many users. And hey - it really works well.
Reminded saying heard long time ago. [ Probably native speaker can give original saying for my memory is bad with such things. ]
When process is against you - argue facts
When facts against you - argue procedure.
Facts are against ISO. So they are pushing the procedure thing. After all procedure was so to say followed and voting on the so called standard so to say have happened. Or probably "had been happened" is more appropriate wording in the context??
You say that MPEG2 works.
That might tell that it is support for MP4 and MKV containers - or H.264 codec - isn't well implemented.
I have to check MythTV by myself. This is long overdue - maily because I do not watch TV at all. Not a target audience of MythTV so to say.
I use the power DVD codec for on board decoding. and have the cccp one installed as well.
Well, I have that under WinXP too. MPC/Haali/DirectVobSub combo rules. CCCP is nice finishing touch.
But my post was - and RTFA is - about Linux support, not Windows.
Can you elaborate on kind of HD content you playing? codecs? container formats?
I have mainly 720p .MKV files with H.264 video, OGG or AC3 (sometime dual) audio and ASS/SSA subtitles. File sizes range from 1 to 8GB.
P.S. Forgot to mention that with Xine based players changing of audio track doesn't work. After first/second change, sound just disappears.
Last time I was trying to play HD video on my Ubuntu - with both Xine and Mplayer - I hadn't noticed that there was performance problem related to lack of HW acceleration. (I didn't tried VLC - it can't even playback smoothly HD video on Windows where such acceleration is already available.)
While CPU load was remaining low (~25% on dual core CPU), 720p video still was playing with terrible jitter. In Mplayer few minutes later A/V sync (as usually) went south. Xine started dropping frames. All that while nor CPU load, nor kernel times where displaying any anomaly.
I'd say that problem lies elsewhere and HW accel (though welcome) might not solve the video playback problems.
P.S. At least when there would be HW accel, it would be easier to bash the server/hpc/oracle folks who now monopolize completely LKML. Probably then they would start paying attention to desktop Linux needs. Quoter of the attention they spent discussion fresh Oracle benchmarks would be more than enough.
P.P.S. Tests (actually I was just trying to watch my anime on Linux) where done on AMD 4200+ X2 + nVidia gf7800gt (evil proprietary drivers are installed) + RAM 2GB DDR CL2.
Elonex Onet+
No mouse pad. Keyboard looks ... bad. No mention which browser is installed. No mention whether one can install his own Linux software or change distro.
Has Wi-Fi. Has FastEthernet. Has USB.
Looks not bad over all.
[merge any new ._cfgNNNN files using your favourite tool or manually]
That's actually what turned me off Gentoo - the thing with /etc/.
If you add couple of lines into config of popular and often (re)build package, you start feeling that you waste more time copy-pasting the lines into new version of config than actually compiling the system.
No 3 way merge function for you. At least it wasn't there 2 years ago.
Privacy (esp in public places) is interesting point.
But honestly, my first association with notebooks somehow now is "desktop replacement". I use right now laptops at home and in office. (And frankly, have no wish to carry one around - I get enough of computer everywhere else. YMMV.)
What we do right now with laptops and more importantly how we do it, would change in coming years. Think of text/image/video-blogging - that is mostly public activity anyway and doesn't require privacy. Though yes, lack of physical entity has implication for privacy and security if such is needed. (e.g. Wi-Fi didn't yet sorted out all the problems with misuse and abuse - and all they did was to move from physical material media (wire) to immaterial media (radio waves).)
One can imaging devices now under development which try to project image right into ones retina. And - OMG - they already have wikipedia page:
A "virtual retinal display" (VRD), also known as a "retinal scan display" (RSD)
Should be nice solution to privacy problem. (If it doesn't burn out one's eyes, of course.)
For corporate lappy, privacy is must. Do not see solution other than having "physical laptop." Do not want my manager to see what I am really doing with my time in office ;)
I hope by 2015 notebooks would have no moving parts - no sliding things either.
I just want a normal notebook. Just normal notebook from Sci-Fi: no physical parts, voice interface, 3D projector and virtual keyboard. All that packed into watch.
Google can't find images - but something like it was in Heroic Age anime.
Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake
ZOMG. KDE folks stopped repeating this - because they got tired repeating this.
Nobody takes away from you KDE 3.x - if it's better to you, then use it. It is stable. It runs. It has uncountable number of features. Use it.
Precisely because KDE 3.x works that well, KDE devels decided to use the opportunity to solve many long-standing problems and give a UI major lift up. Seeing how long it took KDE2/KDE3 to stabilize, I personally didn't expect that KDE4 release would be any faster in that aspect. That's experimental stuff, that's new stuff - more than any KDE was before. Software has to be redeveloped more or less completely for KDE4.
So why is everybody so surprised that KDE4 doesn't work on par with KDE3??
KDE4 and Qt4 provide better (technical) foundation for development - more features, stability, applications - more of all that to come. But do not expect it just overnight.
KDE4.0 was seen mainly by developers. Main goal of KDE4.1 release was to deliver something somewhat usable to wider audience and receive feedback. Nothing more.
You do not like actual KDE4? Do not use it. KDE4 is not like Vista which is pushed on innocent customers by simply removing other options (WinXP). Grab fresh KDE3 and use it instead. It is there, it works and it is supported and it will be supported.
Well, I'm too lazy to dig up links for you (I'm sure GrokLaw has archived something on that) but the money transfers to M$ business partners came up during antitrust case (the M$ vs. DoJ). This is a fact backed by evidence, part of antitrust proceedings.