Hmm, I've never heard of ConTeXt before. My distribution doesn't seem to have a package for it either. How is it different/better than LaTeX (if you don't have the time, feel free to tell me to look it up on my own:))?
To get the text, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. Slightly faster now, but not much. To get the graphics, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. There would be quite a difference in speed, but not because of cpu or memory, but because od modem speed. To lay out the newsletter, I would use TeX now just as 10--15 years ago. There are some new packages available, so it would be somewhat easier now, but again, that has nothing to do with the cpu or memory. The syntax highlighting in vim today is somewhat more powerful than in jed 10 years ago, and it does use more cpu and memory, so that would help me a little. The real speed improvement would come from actually running TeX and printing the thing. 15 years ago, it would take about the same time as the rest of the work, maybe an hour or so on a very slow machine. Now that would be just few seconds. So overall, the whole process would be about 5 times faster at most, if I rwally exagerate.
Are you sure about all that?
For example: Why would you use lynx to get the graphics today? Assuming you want graphics relevant to some sort of topic (instead of the first 10 random pictures you come across), say, pictures of oranges. You go to Google images and search for orange. Now, on the first page, there are only six pictures of oranges (I'm giving the peel the benefit of the doubt). Using Konqueror (or graphical browser of your choice), you know that immediately, because they're displayed. Using lynx, you need to download all 20 images by hand and use an external program to view them.
Meanwhile the Konqueror guy has drag-dropped the images to his hard disk, along with the rest of his needed pictures. By my count you need to browse to page 6 of the results to get enough pictures of oranges, so with lynx you need to download and view 120 images separately. Maybe after the third page you decide to revise your query to "orange fruit," but figuring out that "orange" isn't a good query takes like 10 seconds on a graphical browser, and significantly longer on lynx, even assuming we use today's computers in both cases.
Also, people of today wouldn't use TeX for their layout. It's good when you want your documents to look like they came from a professional printer, and I use it for my papers at school, but if you're just making a newsletter for your club meeting with some pasted text, it's almost certainly faster to fire up Word (or some equivalent), copy-and-paste, insert your graphics and drag them around to appropriate positions.
For example, you don't need to keep recompiling because you didn't get the scale factor of \includegraphics just right; you just drag the image handlebars to the appropriate size. You don't need to recompile your document because you changed the font size/face of your headers and you want to see if they look good.
Oh, and you are using a fancy font where all the 'O's look like oranges, aren't you (is it even possible to have random TTF fonts in a LaTeX document)? This isn't a technical manual you're writing here, it's your fancy Orange Eating Club newsletter.
In other words, part of the reason that your solution to the stated problem isn't much different is that you're using the exact same inefficient process as you were 15 years ago. Speeding up the hardware by a factor of 1000 doesn't let you type any faster. Then again, you won't be using many more resources either. If you'd spend more power and use some of the tools that have been developed to actually make performing the stated task easier, you'd notice more of a speedup.
Your example is akin to someone saying, "modern languages allow programmers to develop programs in one tenth the time that it would take them 20 years ago," and another saying, "Well, today, I would use C, and use only APIs that were available 20 years ago. Vim has better syntax hilighting, and compiling is a little faster... I don't see much of a speedup."
Good, this story didn't have enough Mac Mini content. I'm glad we're back to normal now.:)
So what you're saying is: some people here like to see how far they can stretch their money, and they should not talk about their preferences (note: I'm just playing devil's advocate and exaggerating).
In your example specifically, there are plenty of people here creaming all over the Mac Mini. Go check out the GNUSTEP article or the Gnome article, and you'll find a not insignificant number of posts saying, "GNUStep is nice, but I'm getting a Mac Mini," or "Gnome is ugly. OS X is better, and that's why I'm getting a Mac Mini." They're not concerned with the fact that OS X and Macs are, at best, tangentially related to the story.
There are at least as many people who talk about Mac Minis and OS X in any article they can conceivably tie it in to as there are people saying, "Just get a big-ass (in comparison) Dell computer and save $50." The Dell people may just be more visible because you disagree with them.
But it takes 20 minutes to start because it needs to generate all sorts of textures, and crashes because it's filling up memory with dynamically generated versions of stuff that most games store on the hard drive.
At least, that's the experience I had last time I tried it. Sure you can download it in a split second, but waiting for half an hour between double-click and gameplay isn't exactly my idea of a good time.
Yeah, it would be hard for them to prove anything, and I suppose refusing to sell a license based on their suspicions alone would seem unreasonable and give them bad press.
I'm not sure I understand why they do it either. I imagine it has to do with the per-seat licensing scheme. If you can develop with the GPL version, and then go commercial, it might be easier to claim that you're using less developers ("we only need 2 people to maintain, instead of the 10 people who initially developed"), so Trolltech would get less money.
It does seem a bit unreasonable. I could see a situation where someone develops an in-house app that they never plan to go commercial with, but end up doing so. It's silly to expect someone to buy an expensive license "just-in-case," because a lot of the time that would end up being wasted money. Perhaps that's part of the idea, too.
Then again, I doubt that the person in the original screenshot had trouble using his system. The only specific thing I'd find problematic with that particular desktop is that he has way too many windows open on that one desktop (assuming he restored all those iconified windows), but they're probably on separate desktops normally.
Even I put more windows in a screenshot than I usually have on a desktop, because otherwise it's almost like posting a picture of my wallpaper.
Their license states that if you develop using Qt/GPL, they will refuse to sell you a Qt/Commercial license. In order to dual license your code, you'd need to buy a Qt/Commercial license when you started development, not as an afterthought.
I ask Trolltech for a closed-source license so I can distribute my program as closed source
Trolltech says no
That's all that's required to 'enforce' this license. They aren't legally required to license their source to you, so if they even suspect you of pulling a switcheroo, they can just refuse to license Qt under the commercial license, even if they're wrong.
That's about all the clause says; "If you try to cheat us, we won't sell you a license."
Or hey, maybe Gnome's mission is to take away as many options from users as possible, and to hide the ones that are still there in a Windows registry look-alike program.
See? I can be a troll, too. All I have to do is spew out tired stereotypes. But then again, I don't really believe what I just said.
Do you really think that KDE isn't Free (note the capital F)? Is the GPL no longer Free?
Well, okay, I suppose I was a bit mistaken (I've never used SuSE myself, only heard this from other people), but the concept is the same. You can fetch and install the proprietary driver from their default update environment. This is no different from how Gentoo does things. The driver isn't strictly necessary, so there's no reason to install it by default for everyone.
The fact remains that it is possible for a distribution to make the closed-source drivers available easily. The fact that Debian (?) or whoever doesn't provide those packages by default (without adding extra repositories?) is a reflection of Debian's strict ethical policy, not on whether or not the drivers can be provided.
And it's entirely possible that a SuSE user could claim that Debian is a "zealot distro" for refusing to distribute a program that they are quite within their rights to redistribute. Instead, the original poster decided to interpret his parent as a Gentoo user claiming that Gentoo is the solution to every problem, which I think is quite a stretch, considering that the post doesn't mention Gentoo, or anything besides licensing for that matter. But it's all right; he's a self-loathing Gentoo user, so he's allowed to perpetuate the stereotype that Gentoo users are all ranting idiots who slander other distributions for no reason other than their own ignorance.
Prettier than what? There are tons of themes out there for both Gnome and KDE, and many of them are quite pretty. In fact, I like KDE's plastik widgets more than Aqua.
But if you think that Aqua is the pinnacle of widget looks, then there are plenty of themes that make KDE and Gnome widgets look exactly like Aqua widgets.
Perhaps Gnome could use a sleeker default theme, but saying that Linux desktops aren't 'purty' is non-sense.
SuSE includes the nVidia binary drivers as well, and gives people the option to install them during the install, I believe. Gentoo is not the only distribution that doesn't have moral problems with the nVidia proprietary drivers.
Actually, I'm an aspiring beer snob as well. It was the guy above me that implied that all beers are the same. That's sort of what I meant when I said that the differences between Linux distributions or between Linux and Windows are no greater than the differences between beers out there.
There are thousands of beers to choose from, and they're all slightly or very different from one another, but only people who go looking actually see all the variety. If all you do is go to your grocery store, you're likely to see only a few brands that are all about the same.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll stop now. Any recommendations for something to try? I'm most partial to stouts and wheat beers, if you know any good ones.
MS and Apple didn't 'get it right' by making the interface shinier first and worrying about the core second. That doesn't alleviate the fact that installing an operating system is hard (which you cite as a problem).
The only reason people can use Windows and MacOS, but they "can't" use Linux is that Linux doesn't come pre-installed on a desktop system from any of the major players. People never have to install OSX or Windows, and that's a major advantage.
Ordinary people are perfectly capable of using a modern Linux desktop once it's installed. There are plenty of people here giving testimonials like, "my mom uses Linux, now that I set her up with it." The problem is that 99% of PCs are sold with Windows installed, and 100% of Macs have MacOS (assuming you want Linux to take over there, though I don't know why you would).
If Linux had 95% of the PC marketshare and came preinstalled on all PCs, and Windows were struggling, and nothing else were changed from how it currently is,* I doubt you'd see people having terrible problems, and people would be talking about how 'Joe Sixpack' can't handle Windows because it's too hard to install it separately and it's 'non-standard' so it's hard for people to use. "It doesn't look like Linux, so no one will ever switch."
KDE and Gnome aren't unusable by any reasonable standard. They're not even that different from Windows and OSX. At least, they're not any more different than the differences between cars or beers. We don't have radically different paradigms for web browsing and word processing on Linux. They just look a little different and shuffle the menus around, and that's not anything you can't get used to quickly.
Linux doesn't deliver. What it delivers is an ugly conglomeration of strange actions and odd command lines.
I don't know where you got this idea, but it's bullshit. If you're doing what everyday people are doing, you can do it in one, consistent environment (pick KDE or Gnome, I don't care which), and without a command line. Hell, I could do most of my 'power user' stuff without a command line if I wanted.
* Well, maybe change the fact that most hardware manufacturers would rather shove bamboo under their fingernails than release specifications for their hardware so that open source people can support it, rather than spending their time reverse-engineering the interfaces. I bet people could swing that if Linux had 95% marketshare.**
** Anal-retentive hardware companies are probably the #1 reason Linux users want other people to use Linux (other than altruism or something). I know that if hardware companies wouldn't be such bastards about releasing specs (they don't even need to write drivers), I wouldn't even consider caring what other people use (not that I care a lot now).
You missed the entire point of the post you replied to.
The point is, whether or not there are 50 forked versions of a project for geeks, there will likely be one that stands out and is on the common distribution for the common guy. You don't need to choose, because Red Hat chooses for you with its defaults.
There are thousands of programs that do the same thing on Windows, and people just use the most popular or whatever came with their computer. It's not a problem that the other programs exist, and it's not a problem on Linux either.
Not to mention the fact that people can't seem to understand that a lot of the people actually working on and maintaining projects aren't the armchair philosophers who want to destroy Microsoft at all costs and see Linux rule the world. They're just people who enjoy writing software that fulfills their and other like-minded people's visions. Not everyone gives a shit about what 'Joe Sixpack' does.
The point is, he had fun doing it. It was an interesting project for him, even if he failed.
All the stuff you listed is pointless, too, if you look at a big enough picture. But you, personally, get some enjoyment out of either doing it, or out of what doing it provides.
Presumably this guy likes tinkering with electronics. If that's the case, then that's the only motivation he needs. Is that really so hard to understand?
Masturbation is pointless, but that doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable.
Windows: Go to store. Buy hardware. (30 minutes) Windows: Install hardware. (15 minutes) Windows: Insert drivers CD and install drivers (15 minutes) Windows: Reboot machine. (4 minutes) Windows: Shit. Now I have 6 cd-rom drives (should have 1), and none of them work. (5 minutes) Windows: Fool around in control panel trying to find out where things went wrong. (10 minutes) Windows: IDE controllers are double installed. I guess I'll revert to the generic MS drivers. (5 minutes) Windows: I'm not allowed to uninstall the IDE controller devices with the custom vendor drivers, so I need to reinstall Windows (2.5 hours) Windows: Reinstall all of my software (4 hours) Windows: Your device works! But now for some reason the machine randomly turns off when your network card is plugged in...
So let's not pretend that everything always goes 100% correct the first time in Windows.
Based on the fact that she can't handle a picture of her car being taken, I'd say she is a 'fucking bitch.' You and the woman are both over reacting.
Or can I assume that you never speak in a negative manner about anyone with whom you're not very familiar with? That post is on a blog, which, most likely, only his friends read (and anyone here on slapdash with no life, like us). You've never been hanging out with your friends and said, "I saw some asshole who took up four spots with his Escalade today"? The only difference here is that the guy snapped a picture (and it doesn't even have the woman's license plate; it's just a picture of some Escalade).
Quit being so over-sensitive. You may just live a happier life.
Well, that's hardly a complete list. Most developers aren't thinking about KDE 4.0 yet, because they're working on KDE 3.4. Once 3.4 is released, and all the stuff from the 3.4 feature plan that couldn't be completed is pushed to the 4.0 plan, and everyone makes their new forecasts for 4.0, you can then comment on the amount of new features.
KDE 4.0 will be based off of Qt 4.0, so that's already a major jump right there, and it means that things like pluggable rendering backends including an OpenGL backend will be included, at some point at least. KDE 4.0 will have significant differences from 3.x.
Does this mean that you want Firefox to be called Mozilla 2.0 instead? Or that you want Firefox to be modified to have all the features that Mozilla has by default? Or that you cannot conceive of someone wanting the features/integration of Mozilla, and that having both around doesn't harm you as a Firefox et al. user?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I've never heard of ConTeXt before. My distribution doesn't seem to have a package for it either. How is it different/better than LaTeX (if you don't have the time, feel free to tell me to look it up on my own :))?
To get the text, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. Slightly faster now, but not much.
To get the graphics, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. There would be quite a difference in speed, but not because of cpu or memory, but because od modem speed. To lay out the newsletter, I would use TeX now just as 10--15 years ago. There are some new packages available, so it would be somewhat easier now, but again, that has nothing to do with the cpu or memory. The syntax highlighting in vim today is somewhat more powerful than in jed 10 years ago, and it does use more cpu and memory, so that would help me a little. The real speed improvement would come from actually running TeX and printing the thing. 15 years ago, it would take about the same time as the rest of the work, maybe an hour or so on a very slow machine. Now that would be just few seconds. So overall, the whole process would be about 5 times faster at most, if I rwally exagerate.
Are you sure about all that?
For example: Why would you use lynx to get the graphics today? Assuming you want graphics relevant to some sort of topic (instead of the first 10 random pictures you come across), say, pictures of oranges. You go to Google images and search for orange. Now, on the first page, there are only six pictures of oranges (I'm giving the peel the benefit of the doubt). Using Konqueror (or graphical browser of your choice), you know that immediately, because they're displayed. Using lynx, you need to download all 20 images by hand and use an external program to view them.
Meanwhile the Konqueror guy has drag-dropped the images to his hard disk, along with the rest of his needed pictures. By my count you need to browse to page 6 of the results to get enough pictures of oranges, so with lynx you need to download and view 120 images separately. Maybe after the third page you decide to revise your query to "orange fruit," but figuring out that "orange" isn't a good query takes like 10 seconds on a graphical browser, and significantly longer on lynx, even assuming we use today's computers in both cases.
Also, people of today wouldn't use TeX for their layout. It's good when you want your documents to look like they came from a professional printer, and I use it for my papers at school, but if you're just making a newsletter for your club meeting with some pasted text, it's almost certainly faster to fire up Word (or some equivalent), copy-and-paste, insert your graphics and drag them around to appropriate positions.
For example, you don't need to keep recompiling because you didn't get the scale factor of \includegraphics just right; you just drag the image handlebars to the appropriate size. You don't need to recompile your document because you changed the font size/face of your headers and you want to see if they look good.
Oh, and you are using a fancy font where all the 'O's look like oranges, aren't you (is it even possible to have random TTF fonts in a LaTeX document)? This isn't a technical manual you're writing here, it's your fancy Orange Eating Club newsletter.
In other words, part of the reason that your solution to the stated problem isn't much different is that you're using the exact same inefficient process as you were 15 years ago. Speeding up the hardware by a factor of 1000 doesn't let you type any faster. Then again, you won't be using many more resources either. If you'd spend more power and use some of the tools that have been developed to actually make performing the stated task easier, you'd notice more of a speedup.
Your example is akin to someone saying, "modern languages allow programmers to develop programs in one tenth the time that it would take them 20 years ago," and another saying, "Well, today, I would use C, and use only APIs that were available 20 years ago. Vim has better syntax hilighting, and compiling is a little faster... I don't see much of a speedup."
Good, this story didn't have enough Mac Mini content. I'm glad we're back to normal now. :)
So what you're saying is: some people here like to see how far they can stretch their money, and they should not talk about their preferences (note: I'm just playing devil's advocate and exaggerating).
In your example specifically, there are plenty of people here creaming all over the Mac Mini. Go check out the GNUSTEP article or the Gnome article, and you'll find a not insignificant number of posts saying, "GNUStep is nice, but I'm getting a Mac Mini," or "Gnome is ugly. OS X is better, and that's why I'm getting a Mac Mini." They're not concerned with the fact that OS X and Macs are, at best, tangentially related to the story.
There are at least as many people who talk about Mac Minis and OS X in any article they can conceivably tie it in to as there are people saying, "Just get a big-ass (in comparison) Dell computer and save $50." The Dell people may just be more visible because you disagree with them.
Yeah, it's 64k on disk...
But it takes 20 minutes to start because it needs to generate all sorts of textures, and crashes because it's filling up memory with dynamically generated versions of stuff that most games store on the hard drive.
At least, that's the experience I had last time I tried it. Sure you can download it in a split second, but waiting for half an hour between double-click and gameplay isn't exactly my idea of a good time.
KDE has gotten faster over the course of the 3.x versions. They must be 'bucking the trend' as well.
Yeah, it would be hard for them to prove anything, and I suppose refusing to sell a license based on their suspicions alone would seem unreasonable and give them bad press.
I'm not sure I understand why they do it either. I imagine it has to do with the per-seat licensing scheme. If you can develop with the GPL version, and then go commercial, it might be easier to claim that you're using less developers ("we only need 2 people to maintain, instead of the 10 people who initially developed"), so Trolltech would get less money.
It does seem a bit unreasonable. I could see a situation where someone develops an in-house app that they never plan to go commercial with, but end up doing so. It's silly to expect someone to buy an expensive license "just-in-case," because a lot of the time that would end up being wasted money. Perhaps that's part of the idea, too.
Does this look all right to you?
Link
I assure you, it's plenty easy to use.
Then again, I doubt that the person in the original screenshot had trouble using his system. The only specific thing I'd find problematic with that particular desktop is that he has way too many windows open on that one desktop (assuming he restored all those iconified windows), but they're probably on separate desktops normally.
Even I put more windows in a screenshot than I usually have on a desktop, because otherwise it's almost like posting a picture of my wallpaper.
Their license states that if you develop using Qt/GPL, they will refuse to sell you a Qt/Commercial license. In order to dual license your code, you'd need to buy a Qt/Commercial license when you started development, not as an afterthought.
How would it not be enforceable?
That's all that's required to 'enforce' this license. They aren't legally required to license their source to you, so if they even suspect you of pulling a switcheroo, they can just refuse to license Qt under the commercial license, even if they're wrong.
That's about all the clause says; "If you try to cheat us, we won't sell you a license."
Yep, no one uses split pane file managers.
Or hey, maybe Gnome's mission is to take away as many options from users as possible, and to hide the ones that are still there in a Windows registry look-alike program.
See? I can be a troll, too. All I have to do is spew out tired stereotypes. But then again, I don't really believe what I just said.
Do you really think that KDE isn't Free (note the capital F)? Is the GPL no longer Free?
Well, okay, I suppose I was a bit mistaken (I've never used SuSE myself, only heard this from other people), but the concept is the same. You can fetch and install the proprietary driver from their default update environment. This is no different from how Gentoo does things. The driver isn't strictly necessary, so there's no reason to install it by default for everyone.
The fact remains that it is possible for a distribution to make the closed-source drivers available easily. The fact that Debian (?) or whoever doesn't provide those packages by default (without adding extra repositories?) is a reflection of Debian's strict ethical policy, not on whether or not the drivers can be provided.
And it's entirely possible that a SuSE user could claim that Debian is a "zealot distro" for refusing to distribute a program that they are quite within their rights to redistribute. Instead, the original poster decided to interpret his parent as a Gentoo user claiming that Gentoo is the solution to every problem, which I think is quite a stretch, considering that the post doesn't mention Gentoo, or anything besides licensing for that matter. But it's all right; he's a self-loathing Gentoo user, so he's allowed to perpetuate the stereotype that Gentoo users are all ranting idiots who slander other distributions for no reason other than their own ignorance.
Prettier than what? There are tons of themes out there for both Gnome and KDE, and many of them are quite pretty. In fact, I like KDE's plastik widgets more than Aqua.
But if you think that Aqua is the pinnacle of widget looks, then there are plenty of themes that make KDE and Gnome widgets look exactly like Aqua widgets.
Perhaps Gnome could use a sleeker default theme, but saying that Linux desktops aren't 'purty' is non-sense.
How do you know he's a Gentoo user?
SuSE includes the nVidia binary drivers as well, and gives people the option to install them during the install, I believe. Gentoo is not the only distribution that doesn't have moral problems with the nVidia proprietary drivers.
"Learnt" is fine. It's uncommon in American English, but probably the standard spelling in British English.
Maybe you should study English a little more.
Actually, I'm an aspiring beer snob as well. It was the guy above me that implied that all beers are the same. That's sort of what I meant when I said that the differences between Linux distributions or between Linux and Windows are no greater than the differences between beers out there.
There are thousands of beers to choose from, and they're all slightly or very different from one another, but only people who go looking actually see all the variety. If all you do is go to your grocery store, you're likely to see only a few brands that are all about the same.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll stop now. Any recommendations for something to try? I'm most partial to stouts and wheat beers, if you know any good ones.
MS and Apple didn't 'get it right' by making the interface shinier first and worrying about the core second. That doesn't alleviate the fact that installing an operating system is hard (which you cite as a problem).
The only reason people can use Windows and MacOS, but they "can't" use Linux is that Linux doesn't come pre-installed on a desktop system from any of the major players. People never have to install OSX or Windows, and that's a major advantage.
Ordinary people are perfectly capable of using a modern Linux desktop once it's installed. There are plenty of people here giving testimonials like, "my mom uses Linux, now that I set her up with it." The problem is that 99% of PCs are sold with Windows installed, and 100% of Macs have MacOS (assuming you want Linux to take over there, though I don't know why you would).
If Linux had 95% of the PC marketshare and came preinstalled on all PCs, and Windows were struggling, and nothing else were changed from how it currently is,* I doubt you'd see people having terrible problems, and people would be talking about how 'Joe Sixpack' can't handle Windows because it's too hard to install it separately and it's 'non-standard' so it's hard for people to use. "It doesn't look like Linux, so no one will ever switch."
KDE and Gnome aren't unusable by any reasonable standard. They're not even that different from Windows and OSX. At least, they're not any more different than the differences between cars or beers. We don't have radically different paradigms for web browsing and word processing on Linux. They just look a little different and shuffle the menus around, and that's not anything you can't get used to quickly.
Linux doesn't deliver. What it delivers is an ugly conglomeration of strange actions and odd command lines.
I don't know where you got this idea, but it's bullshit. If you're doing what everyday people are doing, you can do it in one, consistent environment (pick KDE or Gnome, I don't care which), and without a command line. Hell, I could do most of my 'power user' stuff without a command line if I wanted.
* Well, maybe change the fact that most hardware manufacturers would rather shove bamboo under their fingernails than release specifications for their hardware so that open source people can support it, rather than spending their time reverse-engineering the interfaces. I bet people could swing that if Linux had 95% marketshare.**
** Anal-retentive hardware companies are probably the #1 reason Linux users want other people to use Linux (other than altruism or something). I know that if hardware companies wouldn't be such bastards about releasing specs (they don't even need to write drivers), I wouldn't even consider caring what other people use (not that I care a lot now).
You missed the entire point of the post you replied to.
The point is, whether or not there are 50 forked versions of a project for geeks, there will likely be one that stands out and is on the common distribution for the common guy. You don't need to choose, because Red Hat chooses for you with its defaults.
There are thousands of programs that do the same thing on Windows, and people just use the most popular or whatever came with their computer. It's not a problem that the other programs exist, and it's not a problem on Linux either.
Not to mention the fact that people can't seem to understand that a lot of the people actually working on and maintaining projects aren't the armchair philosophers who want to destroy Microsoft at all costs and see Linux rule the world. They're just people who enjoy writing software that fulfills their and other like-minded people's visions. Not everyone gives a shit about what 'Joe Sixpack' does.
The point is, he had fun doing it. It was an interesting project for him, even if he failed.
All the stuff you listed is pointless, too, if you look at a big enough picture. But you, personally, get some enjoyment out of either doing it, or out of what doing it provides.
Presumably this guy likes tinkering with electronics. If that's the case, then that's the only motivation he needs. Is that really so hard to understand?
Masturbation is pointless, but that doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable.
Slashdot has had meta-moderation for years.
Windows: Go to store. Buy hardware. (30 minutes)
Windows: Install hardware. (15 minutes)
Windows: Insert drivers CD and install drivers (15 minutes)
Windows: Reboot machine. (4 minutes)
Windows: Shit. Now I have 6 cd-rom drives (should have 1), and none of them work. (5 minutes)
Windows: Fool around in control panel trying to find out where things went wrong. (10 minutes)
Windows: IDE controllers are double installed. I guess I'll revert to the generic MS drivers. (5 minutes)
Windows: I'm not allowed to uninstall the IDE controller devices with the custom vendor drivers, so I need to reinstall Windows (2.5 hours)
Windows: Reinstall all of my software (4 hours)
Windows: Your device works! But now for some reason the machine randomly turns off when your network card is plugged in...
So let's not pretend that everything always goes 100% correct the first time in Windows.
(Also based on a true story)
Based on the fact that she can't handle a picture of her car being taken, I'd say she is a 'fucking bitch.' You and the woman are both over reacting.
Or can I assume that you never speak in a negative manner about anyone with whom you're not very familiar with? That post is on a blog, which, most likely, only his friends read (and anyone here on slapdash with no life, like us). You've never been hanging out with your friends and said, "I saw some asshole who took up four spots with his Escalade today"? The only difference here is that the guy snapped a picture (and it doesn't even have the woman's license plate; it's just a picture of some Escalade).
Quit being so over-sensitive. You may just live a happier life.
Companies like the University of Maryland and Princeton?
Well, that's hardly a complete list. Most developers aren't thinking about KDE 4.0 yet, because they're working on KDE 3.4. Once 3.4 is released, and all the stuff from the 3.4 feature plan that couldn't be completed is pushed to the 4.0 plan, and everyone makes their new forecasts for 4.0, you can then comment on the amount of new features.
KDE 4.0 will be based off of Qt 4.0, so that's already a major jump right there, and it means that things like pluggable rendering backends including an OpenGL backend will be included, at some point at least. KDE 4.0 will have significant differences from 3.x.
Does this mean that you want Firefox to be called Mozilla 2.0 instead? Or that you want Firefox to be modified to have all the features that Mozilla has by default? Or that you cannot conceive of someone wanting the features/integration of Mozilla, and that having both around doesn't harm you as a Firefox et al. user?