My completely non-technical gf uses Kde4.3 daily for browsing, email, music, pictures (digikam), watching tv (myth) and finds it okay to use. The only real problem she ran into was with kmail, as one of its bugs started eating all her email before she could read them. (I'm banned from using kmail at work for the same reason). She doesn't change settings much but she knows how to go look for them if she wants something. To her its just another computer like those at her work (Windows XP).
Last year I used KDE, OS-X (Snow Leopard) and XP. I find them all quite capable and usable. Each one has its irks, quirks and annoyances but overall I'm leaning towards KDE. I'm faster (less mouse travel) with KDE on multiple monitors than on OS-X. Its all good however, keep up the good work.
The demo's shown on the home page don't show a load.
http://www.g9toengineering.com/backemf/demonstration.htm
Its all talk about acceleration but not under load. As long as you apply a minimal force, a motor with hardly any friction can be accelerated enormously. Back EMF or no back EMF. Maybe the back emf changes the phase of the force applied so that it applies more efficiently. With only the friction to overcome this doesn't mean much.
I'd like to see the same effect on a system under measured (non inductive) load.
Pardon me for being sceptical about the actual commercial feasability of this.
Over the last decade quite a few of these wonderful improvements have been announced yet the commercially available solar-cell still has an efficiency of less than 15% and the price hasn't changed that much either.
I wonder if these announcements are more motivated by an upcoming investment round...
God knows we could use them, but when do we get to see them?
This is excellent news.
Linux application developers write their applications against a particular distribution. Some add code to detect what distro the installation is for and adjust their paths accordingly.
All other distro's have to spend time to write an installer to map that configuration to their distribution's file system layout. This is repeated every time a new release of a package comes out.
With 100,000+ packages, that is a lot of work. Take Gentoo's ebuild system. Can you image how much effort it takes to maintain all those ebuilds?
Any standardization of the Linux filesystem layout will reduce this effort and saves countless hours. Hours now can be used to improve applications themselves.
Good news indeed:)
Tools are there to facilitate the developer.
If the tool doesn't force you to look in depth at the code it generates it can be more productive than tools that do force you to look at auto generated code. This has nothing to do with proper software engineering practise.
A good software engineer will first think about use cases, requirements, design before touching the tool.
So don't blame the tool for bad development practise.
Lets not forget why there are spammers. Spam exists because there are advertisers and because we make it work.
What else could help to deterr spam?
Legislation could be more effective if advertising through spamming was also illegal.
Also, if we, the end users, would more easily see what companies are advertising through spam than that would hurt the company's image and be a deterrent. An idea for a browser plugin maybe?
Also adding to effectiveness would be to block sites of advertisers that are on the spammers list. For example, a firefox plugin could automatically check if url's are spam url's and hide the URL and the sites, if the user chooses to.
We need more than just legislation against spamming, the driving source of spam are the advertisers!
Slashdot Mirror
It is hard enough to deal with rogue drivers here on the planet. Now I have to look out for rogue planets and stars too! Whats next, rogue fish?
My completely non-technical gf uses Kde4.3 daily for browsing, email, music, pictures (digikam), watching tv (myth) and finds it okay to use. The only real problem she ran into was with kmail, as one of its bugs started eating all her email before she could read them. (I'm banned from using kmail at work for the same reason). She doesn't change settings much but she knows how to go look for them if she wants something. To her its just another computer like those at her work (Windows XP). Last year I used KDE, OS-X (Snow Leopard) and XP. I find them all quite capable and usable. Each one has its irks, quirks and annoyances but overall I'm leaning towards KDE. I'm faster (less mouse travel) with KDE on multiple monitors than on OS-X. Its all good however, keep up the good work.
The demo's shown on the home page don't show a load. http://www.g9toengineering.com/backemf/demonstration.htm Its all talk about acceleration but not under load. As long as you apply a minimal force, a motor with hardly any friction can be accelerated enormously. Back EMF or no back EMF. Maybe the back emf changes the phase of the force applied so that it applies more efficiently. With only the friction to overcome this doesn't mean much. I'd like to see the same effect on a system under measured (non inductive) load.
Over the last decade quite a few of these wonderful improvements have been announced yet the commercially available solar-cell still has an efficiency of less than 15% and the price hasn't changed that much either.
I wonder if these announcements are more motivated by an upcoming investment round...
God knows we could use them, but when do we get to see them?
This is excellent news. Linux application developers write their applications against a particular distribution. Some add code to detect what distro the installation is for and adjust their paths accordingly. All other distro's have to spend time to write an installer to map that configuration to their distribution's file system layout. This is repeated every time a new release of a package comes out. With 100,000+ packages, that is a lot of work. Take Gentoo's ebuild system. Can you image how much effort it takes to maintain all those ebuilds? Any standardization of the Linux filesystem layout will reduce this effort and saves countless hours. Hours now can be used to improve applications themselves. Good news indeed :)
Tools are there to facilitate the developer. If the tool doesn't force you to look in depth at the code it generates it can be more productive than tools that do force you to look at auto generated code. This has nothing to do with proper software engineering practise. A good software engineer will first think about use cases, requirements, design before touching the tool. So don't blame the tool for bad development practise.
What else could help to deterr spam?
Legislation could be more effective if advertising through spamming was also illegal.
Also, if we, the end users, would more easily see what companies are advertising through spam than that would hurt the company's image and be a deterrent. An idea for a browser plugin maybe?
Also adding to effectiveness would be to block sites of advertisers that are on the spammers list. For example, a firefox plugin could automatically check if url's are spam url's and hide the URL and the sites, if the user chooses to.
We need more than just legislation against spamming, the driving source of spam are the advertisers!
Hahaha, nice one :)