If you have one in your area, Micro Center has always been good to me. They have decent prices for a retail shop, usually a great selection of books, and a wider selection on pretty much any computer component than any store I've been to. Plus, (at least in my area) they seem to hire more geeks than your average Best Buy/CompUSA, so it's a good place to go if you want to shoot the bull about how the new Microsoft mouse looks like it was designed for a Mac, or something like that.
As for online stores, I second the vote for newegg. They consistently have among the best prices of any reputable online reseller, and their service is always top notch.
Dan Rather (or rather, his underlings) conduct research, interviews, etc. and write news reports.
Google finds news reports from CBS, BBC, etc. and links to them.
Google doesn't write their own news reports.
Sorry, I should have said "writing," but I didn't think that the word "produce" was so ambiguous in that context. Then again, I could have been writing about some huge conspiracy theory where CBS makes up its own fictional news.
The post I replied to gave the reasonable explanation of the situation. But, in case you can't be bothered to go and read it, I'll post it here in reply to yours.
Google's image index is, in general, far out of date. The only current images are pulled in from the news index. When news isn't current anymore, it falls out of the news index, and consequently falls out of the image index.
That explains this whole situation. It's reasonable, and far more likely than the "Google is censoring random stuff" theory.
However, when a story like this gets posted, you'll see one or two replies with the reasonable explanation, and the rest will be, "Google is censoring!" and "public corporations are evil, so Google is turning evil!" They have no evidence either, and the events can be more reasonably explained by non-conspiracy theories, but that's not what gets moderated up easily, and not what most people here want to believe.
Lots of people gather here to bash Microsoft and other large corporations, and talk about how they all want to oppress us, and to some extent, I agree -- corporations have too much control over governmental policy and such. However, since Google has become publicly traded, there have been lots of people around here promoting the idea that Google is suddenly becoming evil, and lots of people readily agreeing with them with no other evidence than, "corporations bad!"
I'm not a Google fanboy, or the fanboy of any other big, oppressive corporation. I probably shouldn't even care what people here think, because it's too small a population to make any real difference one way or another for most things. But the behavior here is very similar to branding people "unpatriotic cowards" as you suggest, and that behavior annoys me.
Group think? Alarmism? I think you've got your terms mixed up. If anything, they're antonyms, where in the latter serves to counteract the former.
Oh? They're antonyms? "Google is turning evil and trying to censor our information!" That's pretty alarmist, and there's also plenty of people here willing to believe it based solely on the fact that "publicly traded corporations are EVIL!" which is group think. In this case, the former reinforces the latter. And frankly, around here, it happens that way far more than the opposite.
As for logic, I think your lack of any logical argument elaborating on why you think censorship isn't important speaks for itself.
I didn't say censorship isn't important. I said that in this case, it's not happening. Google's image cache is far out of date. Further, people have demonstrated that the only up-to-date pictures in the image index are those that are pulled in from the news section. That means that current news pictures may be found, but anything that's not current will expire from the news index and not show up in images any more either.
Those two facts easily explain this whole situation, as well as why Google would be "censoring" totally random things, like positive pictures of George W. Bush (no, wait, they're censoring both pro-Bush AND anti-Bush photos!!!!).
The sky is not falling. Google hasn't fallen into pure evil simply because they're a publicly traded corporation now (despite what many highly scored posts here would have you believe). But people here love to freak out and preach about the evils of capitalism, so this kind of story is Grade-A material.
Google is getting very big, and they just became a publicly traded company. That means it's becoming fashionable (on Slashdot) to lambast Google based on whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. Obivously they're censoring, and we should all complain about how news sources have a responsibility to report unbiased versions of the news and both sides of the story. Never mind that Google doesn't really produce news reports, and that there's no such thing as an unbiased news source that reports all sides of the story, and that there's probably a reasonable explanation besides censorship in this case.
Please, let's not let logic enter into this. Groupthink and alarmism is much easier, and more accepted around here.
Look how Dell's growing by leaps and bounds - and they're not exactly a bastion of product innovation.
Believe it or not, Dell does develop stuff of their own. I had a summer job a couple years ago working with deployment of corporate PCs, and one day I was able to attend Dell's pitch of some of their new product lines.
They may seem like just some reseller, but they actually do a lot of in-house development of software to ease deployment and system recovery in a corporate setting. We did a survey of how we and various other companies handled disk images, patches, backups and other such things, and Dell was far and away the most advanced, using several tools that were only available to Dell or perhaps their larger customers.
Dell may not be terribly exciting as far as their primary product line is concerned, but their supporting technologies are interesting, and they actually do a lot of work in that area. Don't be too quick to spit on them.
FYI: He was probably making a joke about Symphony of the Night (I hope). Go rent it some time and play it around your friends. The dialog and voice acting are hilariously bad. I guarantee that afterward you'll be able to randomly quote lines from the game and make your friends laugh.
The game itself is excellent, but the voice acting is little more than comical.
A 16x NEC DVD burner is under $70. A spindle of 100 DVD+Rs is $47 according to Newegg -- same brand I use. They're 4x, but that's plenty fast for infrequent harddrive release for me, and faster media is only just a matter of time.
That's $120, which is probably within $10 of a 200 GB hard drive. This gets you 470 GB of storage (using the same 1000 MB = 1 GB the hard drive does), and I'd almost guarantee that it can burn all 100 discs, unless you get a defective drive. Even if you burn everything twice, you're still probably getting more for your money.
Now, I'm sure i've burned over 100 CDs on my 4 year old drive, and it's still going strong. I'd expect similar longevity for the DVD burner, but I don't know any statistics on how long they actually last. Being able to burn hundreds of discs wouldn't surprise me, in which case the cost of the drive is pretty spread out.
I don't have SATA, so I can't comment on that. Personally I'd feel like I'm wasting an SATA port on the DVD burner. They can't come close to saturating the bandwidth, and most motherboards only come with 2 or 4 channels, so I'd feel like I'm wasting them where they could be better reserved for new hard drives when I need them (I still like having tons of hard drive space for stuff I'm going to use; I only burn to DVDs when I'm puting it in storage), which can make better use of SATA's capabilities.
I recently got a DVD burner and dumped a bunch of stuff off my hard drives (I have a combined total of 320 gigs, and sadly it was almost full). This was a few months ago, but even then I was able to get media for 50 cents/disc, which is like 11 cents/gig.
I've been pricing hard drives off and on as well (I like to stay informed for when I'll get a new computer). The best price/size ratio I've seen in an internal hard drive is 50 cents/gig, and external hard drives are more expensive. That means that to equalize the cost, 4/5 of your DVDs would have to end up as coasters, and I personally have never burnt a coaster.
So currently, DVDs cost 1/5 of the price for equivalent amounts of space (and even if you make double copies of everything, it's still significantly cheaper), and that's likely to swing more towards DVDs as time goes on. An external hard drive may be more convenient for you (not sure if it would be for me, but to each his own), but price/size isn't a valid argument for hard drives over DVDs.
The advantage there is that you could get region-free firmware for your drive.
From what I hear, most drives have a set number of times you can change the region, and it automatically changes when you put in an alternate region disc. Then, when the number of changes are up, it locks the drive into a given region, so if you're using various different regions, you're up a creek.
I don't know if all drives do it this way, but installing region-free firmware can get around this.
There are probably other interesting and geeky things you can do with hackable firmware that I'm forgetting right now, but that's one example. You can probably find more by googling for firmware hack sites (they're around) for various drives.
The reason it used to work fast and now it isn't is because a year ago, there were many, many less packages than there are today in the portage tree.
Yes, "emerge -s" has design flaws. It opens up thousands of tiny files. If you want to fix that, you can try using the database backend for portage (search the forums for how), or you can use esearch.
As an analogy, "emerge -s" is to "esearch" as "find / -name" is to "locate". They're fundamentally different approaches to the problem with different tradeoffs (locate needs to make snapshots while find gives you always-up-to-date information). Using a database backend gives you something in between, but I imagine you'll complain about the 'cruft' of using a database system for the backend as well.
Clarification: When I mentioned "non-Free software," I should have extended that to say "non-Free/legally questionable software." Given the patents on mp3 and the like, the status even of Free implementations of the mp3 codec could be up in the air, so it's cleaner from an ideological perspective to lump it in with non-Free software.
However, there are distributions which have no problems paying/ignoring patent fees, and you can certainly play mp3s out of the box with them.
I should have previewed more thoroughly, it seems. Apologies.
Isn't Fedora specifically trying to avoid any non-Free software (ala Debian)? That would be why there is no mp3 player by default. There are numerous desktop oriented Linux distributions that include mp3 playing by default.
Properly set up, a Linux computer can do pretty much anything you said above. I can just click around in Konqueror, click on my office files and edit them. I can send e-mail, play music, whatever. I don't have to think at all. I don't need to worry about Konqueror not being able to see a Windows share (whatever you mean by that).
And don't tell me that setting it up is a sticking point, because granny isn't setting up her Windows PC or Mac either.
Also, what exactly do you mean by, "people [need to] stop supporting their favorite distro and begin to support common software"? I'd make a response to that statement, but quite frankly I don't know what it means.
I'll stick with my Linux machine. I don't worry about any of the stuff you listed either.
1) I just installed Ubuntu on a friend's computer, and by default it comes with Gnome 2.8, which has just about 1 program for any given thing you'd do. I imagine other desktop distributions do similar things. KDE is a bit of an offender in this regard, but a good distribution could strip out redundant programs quite easily (and if they're smart, they do).
2) What clipboard issues are you talking about? Clipboards work fine in KDE and Gnome and between the two. If you're having problems, you're probably using a program that wouldn't be on some 'default desktop Linux' installation anyway.
I apologize. "Clean" is a pretty ambiguous word. I suppose what I mean is transparent and automatic.
For example, "cd ftp://ftp.foo.org/pub" should automatically mount the ftp server appropriately. "cd foo.iso" should automatically mount the cd image and let me see its contents.
I realize that all of this is possible in Linux today, but it's not automatic. KDE makes those sorts of things automatic, and it can be a real boon. I think an analogy is to cd-roms. Sure, you can access cds from Linux, but you need to insert it into the drive and mount it manually. Now with HAL and gnome volume manager, you can insert a cd and it will auto-mount and pop up a window, and unmounting and ejecting a cd is as simple as clicking a button in a context menu.
It's not that mounting a gmail account isn't possible at the filesystem level, it's that you can't just browse to it on the fly. You have to set it up yourself. KDE's ioslaves go a long way towards making such things automatic and transparent, which is what you need for them to be useful for everyday use.
File-as-directory semantics make some of this stuff easier when working at the filesystem level. For example, suppose you have some sort of automounting daemon. Now I do 'cd foo.tar.gz'. Now, your daemon sees that it's a tarball, so it needs to mount a filesystem appropriately. Where do you mount it? I suppose you could put it somewhere like/mnt/dynamic/0001/ or whatever naming scheme you want to come up with, but that's messy, and you still need to tell cd that what it wants is now "/mnt/dynamic/0001/" instead of "/foo/bar/foo.tar.gz/". Isn't it easier to make foo.tar.gz both a file and a directory, and mount the new filesystem there? (Note: with file-as-directory semantics, you can do other interesting stuff, like metadata-as-files, so the actual path would probably be more like "/foo/bar/foo.tar.gz/content/" but the idea is the same.)
I don't doubt that some level of this functionality is currently possible in Linux, and that this sort of functionality should ultimately end up at the filesystem level (although convincing all the higher-ups of that may be a challenge). But currently it's not possible to do all this as transparently as KDE with ioslaves, and without that transparency, it's much less useful.
Well, technically there is a VFS layer in the kernel, that abstracts the idea of a filesystem away from the implementation. So you use all the same calls for accessing ext2, reiserfs and smbfs.
In the big reiser4 flamewar on the kernel mailing list, there was talk of extending the Linux vfs (where the stuff belongs, rather than in any specific filesystem) with file-as-directory stuff and so on, which could help with the browsing zip files and stuff. There's a lot of resistance to that kind of thing, though.
It's not so much an issue of whether it could be done in the kernel; it's a question of whether the vocal people involved will let it happen, and that's not likely right now.
Some of the remote mounting could probably be done today (lufs? autofs? not sure really), but it probably wouldn't be as clean as it works out in KDE.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that - the quick launch toolbar, while always alongside the taskbar, is seperate in terms of size - one cannot squash the other. Further, while not what you want I suspect, I just dragged mine off onto the desktop - it's now a separate window, and can be set to be always on top.
I believe he wants multiple panels. You only get one in Windows. Having multiple panels is quite handy.
You can see it everywhere with KDE...starting with their braindamaged way of not using separate tarballs for every app and instead bundling the apps to arbitary categories which can be quite frustrating for people not using KDE wanting to use only a single app.
Maybe you should get a distribution that breaks up the packages into individual apps.
The only way to get this across every single application is to include it at the filesystem level. First, the KDE developers aren't kernel hackers, so they probably don't have the expertise to write such an extension.
Second, even if they did, it would probably incite a giant debate in the Linux kernel mailing list when they presented it (like with Reiser4), and the net result would be that it wouldn't be in anyway. So it'd be a bunch of patches and you'd have to use a special kernel to use KDE, which would be awful.
The KDE developers aren't going to rewrite every single application out there to use their functionality (and if they did, people would complain because pine depends on KDE).
In other words, don't choose to use a hodgepodge of programs, and then complain that it works like a hodgepodge of programs.
Like what? The only thing I can recall recently is the "shell://" URL handler, which is a way to execute arbitrary commands. That is a bad idea, and as far as I know, KDE has no equivalent.
Yeah, if you want transparent access across the whole system, you need it at the filesystem level. That would be one of the possible advantages of, say, the Reiser4 filesystem.
Now, as you may or not recall, a couple months ago there was a giant flamewar on the Linux kernel mailing list about Reiser4, files-as-directories, plugins, and all the stuff that would make such things transparent at the filesystem level, and the net result was, "it's not going in right now."
KDE programmers aren't kernel hackers, and even if they were, this stuff probably wouldn't make it into the kernel, so it would be a set of messy KDE kernel patches. Until then, KDE's handling of many different URL protocols is probably the best you'll get.
Are people putting a gun to your head and forcing you to run firefox? Maybe you should call the police, if you can reach the phone.
Firefox is beta software, so it breaks some stuff between versions. Unfortunately, it's also better than the 6th revision of the competitor with 80 - 90% marketshare.
If anyone's pushing firefox down your throat, it's Microsoft. Give them a call and tell them to get their act together. Bitching at people here does nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have one in your area, Micro Center has always been good to me. They have decent prices for a retail shop, usually a great selection of books, and a wider selection on pretty much any computer component than any store I've been to. Plus, (at least in my area) they seem to hire more geeks than your average Best Buy/CompUSA, so it's a good place to go if you want to shoot the bull about how the new Microsoft mouse looks like it was designed for a Mac, or something like that.
As for online stores, I second the vote for newegg. They consistently have among the best prices of any reputable online reseller, and their service is always top notch.
Dan Rather (or rather, his underlings) conduct research, interviews, etc. and write news reports.
Google finds news reports from CBS, BBC, etc. and links to them.
Google doesn't write their own news reports.
Sorry, I should have said "writing," but I didn't think that the word "produce" was so ambiguous in that context. Then again, I could have been writing about some huge conspiracy theory where CBS makes up its own fictional news.
Thanks for calling me on that.
The post I replied to gave the reasonable explanation of the situation. But, in case you can't be bothered to go and read it, I'll post it here in reply to yours.
Google's image index is, in general, far out of date. The only current images are pulled in from the news index. When news isn't current anymore, it falls out of the news index, and consequently falls out of the image index.
That explains this whole situation. It's reasonable, and far more likely than the "Google is censoring random stuff" theory.
However, when a story like this gets posted, you'll see one or two replies with the reasonable explanation, and the rest will be, "Google is censoring!" and "public corporations are evil, so Google is turning evil!" They have no evidence either, and the events can be more reasonably explained by non-conspiracy theories, but that's not what gets moderated up easily, and not what most people here want to believe.
Lots of people gather here to bash Microsoft and other large corporations, and talk about how they all want to oppress us, and to some extent, I agree -- corporations have too much control over governmental policy and such. However, since Google has become publicly traded, there have been lots of people around here promoting the idea that Google is suddenly becoming evil, and lots of people readily agreeing with them with no other evidence than, "corporations bad!"
I'm not a Google fanboy, or the fanboy of any other big, oppressive corporation. I probably shouldn't even care what people here think, because it's too small a population to make any real difference one way or another for most things. But the behavior here is very similar to branding people "unpatriotic cowards" as you suggest, and that behavior annoys me.
Group think? Alarmism? I think you've got your terms mixed up. If anything, they're antonyms, where in the latter serves to counteract the former.
Oh? They're antonyms? "Google is turning evil and trying to censor our information!" That's pretty alarmist, and there's also plenty of people here willing to believe it based solely on the fact that "publicly traded corporations are EVIL!" which is group think. In this case, the former reinforces the latter. And frankly, around here, it happens that way far more than the opposite.
As for logic, I think your lack of any logical argument elaborating on why you think censorship isn't important speaks for itself.
I didn't say censorship isn't important. I said that in this case, it's not happening. Google's image cache is far out of date. Further, people have demonstrated that the only up-to-date pictures in the image index are those that are pulled in from the news section. That means that current news pictures may be found, but anything that's not current will expire from the news index and not show up in images any more either.
Those two facts easily explain this whole situation, as well as why Google would be "censoring" totally random things, like positive pictures of George W. Bush (no, wait, they're censoring both pro-Bush AND anti-Bush photos!!!!).
The sky is not falling. Google hasn't fallen into pure evil simply because they're a publicly traded corporation now (despite what many highly scored posts here would have you believe). But people here love to freak out and preach about the evils of capitalism, so this kind of story is Grade-A material.
Shhh.
Google is getting very big, and they just became a publicly traded company. That means it's becoming fashionable (on Slashdot) to lambast Google based on whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. Obivously they're censoring, and we should all complain about how news sources have a responsibility to report unbiased versions of the news and both sides of the story. Never mind that Google doesn't really produce news reports, and that there's no such thing as an unbiased news source that reports all sides of the story, and that there's probably a reasonable explanation besides censorship in this case.
Please, let's not let logic enter into this. Groupthink and alarmism is much easier, and more accepted around here.
Look how Dell's growing by leaps and bounds - and they're not exactly a bastion of product innovation.
Believe it or not, Dell does develop stuff of their own. I had a summer job a couple years ago working with deployment of corporate PCs, and one day I was able to attend Dell's pitch of some of their new product lines.
They may seem like just some reseller, but they actually do a lot of in-house development of software to ease deployment and system recovery in a corporate setting. We did a survey of how we and various other companies handled disk images, patches, backups and other such things, and Dell was far and away the most advanced, using several tools that were only available to Dell or perhaps their larger customers.
Dell may not be terribly exciting as far as their primary product line is concerned, but their supporting technologies are interesting, and they actually do a lot of work in that area. Don't be too quick to spit on them.
FYI: He was probably making a joke about Symphony of the Night (I hope). Go rent it some time and play it around your friends. The dialog and voice acting are hilariously bad. I guarantee that afterward you'll be able to randomly quote lines from the game and make your friends laugh.
The game itself is excellent, but the voice acting is little more than comical.
You steal men's souls, and make them your slaves!
That game has, by far, the best voice acting of any video game ever made, not to mention the writing. Hours of entertainment.
Behold my true form, and despair!
You didn't read. The person above the person you are replying to was suggesting 1 electoral vote per state. That would be ridiculous.
A 16x NEC DVD burner is under $70. A spindle of 100 DVD+Rs is $47 according to Newegg -- same brand I use. They're 4x, but that's plenty fast for infrequent harddrive release for me, and faster media is only just a matter of time.
That's $120, which is probably within $10 of a 200 GB hard drive. This gets you 470 GB of storage (using the same 1000 MB = 1 GB the hard drive does), and I'd almost guarantee that it can burn all 100 discs, unless you get a defective drive. Even if you burn everything twice, you're still probably getting more for your money.
Now, I'm sure i've burned over 100 CDs on my 4 year old drive, and it's still going strong. I'd expect similar longevity for the DVD burner, but I don't know any statistics on how long they actually last. Being able to burn hundreds of discs wouldn't surprise me, in which case the cost of the drive is pretty spread out.
I don't have SATA, so I can't comment on that. Personally I'd feel like I'm wasting an SATA port on the DVD burner. They can't come close to saturating the bandwidth, and most motherboards only come with 2 or 4 channels, so I'd feel like I'm wasting them where they could be better reserved for new hard drives when I need them (I still like having tons of hard drive space for stuff I'm going to use; I only burn to DVDs when I'm puting it in storage), which can make better use of SATA's capabilities.
I recently got a DVD burner and dumped a bunch of stuff off my hard drives (I have a combined total of 320 gigs, and sadly it was almost full). This was a few months ago, but even then I was able to get media for 50 cents/disc, which is like 11 cents/gig.
I've been pricing hard drives off and on as well (I like to stay informed for when I'll get a new computer). The best price/size ratio I've seen in an internal hard drive is 50 cents/gig, and external hard drives are more expensive. That means that to equalize the cost, 4/5 of your DVDs would have to end up as coasters, and I personally have never burnt a coaster.
So currently, DVDs cost 1/5 of the price for equivalent amounts of space (and even if you make double copies of everything, it's still significantly cheaper), and that's likely to swing more towards DVDs as time goes on. An external hard drive may be more convenient for you (not sure if it would be for me, but to each his own), but price/size isn't a valid argument for hard drives over DVDs.
The advantage there is that you could get region-free firmware for your drive.
From what I hear, most drives have a set number of times you can change the region, and it automatically changes when you put in an alternate region disc. Then, when the number of changes are up, it locks the drive into a given region, so if you're using various different regions, you're up a creek.
I don't know if all drives do it this way, but installing region-free firmware can get around this.
There are probably other interesting and geeky things you can do with hackable firmware that I'm forgetting right now, but that's one example. You can probably find more by googling for firmware hack sites (they're around) for various drives.
The reason it used to work fast and now it isn't is because a year ago, there were many, many less packages than there are today in the portage tree.
Yes, "emerge -s" has design flaws. It opens up thousands of tiny files. If you want to fix that, you can try using the database backend for portage (search the forums for how), or you can use esearch.
As an analogy, "emerge -s" is to "esearch" as "find / -name" is to "locate". They're fundamentally different approaches to the problem with different tradeoffs (locate needs to make snapshots while find gives you always-up-to-date information). Using a database backend gives you something in between, but I imagine you'll complain about the 'cruft' of using a database system for the backend as well.
Clarification: When I mentioned "non-Free software," I should have extended that to say "non-Free/legally questionable software." Given the patents on mp3 and the like, the status even of Free implementations of the mp3 codec could be up in the air, so it's cleaner from an ideological perspective to lump it in with non-Free software.
However, there are distributions which have no problems paying/ignoring patent fees, and you can certainly play mp3s out of the box with them.
I should have previewed more thoroughly, it seems. Apologies.
Isn't Fedora specifically trying to avoid any non-Free software (ala Debian)? That would be why there is no mp3 player by default. There are numerous desktop oriented Linux distributions that include mp3 playing by default.
Properly set up, a Linux computer can do pretty much anything you said above. I can just click around in Konqueror, click on my office files and edit them. I can send e-mail, play music, whatever. I don't have to think at all. I don't need to worry about Konqueror not being able to see a Windows share (whatever you mean by that).
And don't tell me that setting it up is a sticking point, because granny isn't setting up her Windows PC or Mac either.
Also, what exactly do you mean by, "people [need to] stop supporting their favorite distro and begin to support common software"? I'd make a response to that statement, but quite frankly I don't know what it means.
I'll stick with my Linux machine. I don't worry about any of the stuff you listed either.
1) I just installed Ubuntu on a friend's computer, and by default it comes with Gnome 2.8, which has just about 1 program for any given thing you'd do. I imagine other desktop distributions do similar things. KDE is a bit of an offender in this regard, but a good distribution could strip out redundant programs quite easily (and if they're smart, they do).
2) What clipboard issues are you talking about? Clipboards work fine in KDE and Gnome and between the two. If you're having problems, you're probably using a program that wouldn't be on some 'default desktop Linux' installation anyway.
I apologize. "Clean" is a pretty ambiguous word. I suppose what I mean is transparent and automatic.
/mnt/dynamic/0001/ or whatever naming scheme you want to come up with, but that's messy, and you still need to tell cd that what it wants is now "/mnt/dynamic/0001/" instead of "/foo/bar/foo.tar.gz/". Isn't it easier to make foo.tar.gz both a file and a directory, and mount the new filesystem there? (Note: with file-as-directory semantics, you can do other interesting stuff, like metadata-as-files, so the actual path would probably be more like "/foo/bar/foo.tar.gz/content/" but the idea is the same.)
For example, "cd ftp://ftp.foo.org/pub" should automatically mount the ftp server appropriately. "cd foo.iso" should automatically mount the cd image and let me see its contents.
I realize that all of this is possible in Linux today, but it's not automatic. KDE makes those sorts of things automatic, and it can be a real boon. I think an analogy is to cd-roms. Sure, you can access cds from Linux, but you need to insert it into the drive and mount it manually. Now with HAL and gnome volume manager, you can insert a cd and it will auto-mount and pop up a window, and unmounting and ejecting a cd is as simple as clicking a button in a context menu.
It's not that mounting a gmail account isn't possible at the filesystem level, it's that you can't just browse to it on the fly. You have to set it up yourself. KDE's ioslaves go a long way towards making such things automatic and transparent, which is what you need for them to be useful for everyday use.
File-as-directory semantics make some of this stuff easier when working at the filesystem level. For example, suppose you have some sort of automounting daemon. Now I do 'cd foo.tar.gz'. Now, your daemon sees that it's a tarball, so it needs to mount a filesystem appropriately. Where do you mount it? I suppose you could put it somewhere like
I don't doubt that some level of this functionality is currently possible in Linux, and that this sort of functionality should ultimately end up at the filesystem level (although convincing all the higher-ups of that may be a challenge). But currently it's not possible to do all this as transparently as KDE with ioslaves, and without that transparency, it's much less useful.
The user just wants to install SUSE (for example) and have it work; users don't care that Linux and KDE are separate fiefdoms.
Good. If they just install SuSE, then it will all work, because they'll be using all KDE apps.
Now why is KDE doomed?
Well, technically there is a VFS layer in the kernel, that abstracts the idea of a filesystem away from the implementation. So you use all the same calls for accessing ext2, reiserfs and smbfs.
In the big reiser4 flamewar on the kernel mailing list, there was talk of extending the Linux vfs (where the stuff belongs, rather than in any specific filesystem) with file-as-directory stuff and so on, which could help with the browsing zip files and stuff. There's a lot of resistance to that kind of thing, though.
It's not so much an issue of whether it could be done in the kernel; it's a question of whether the vocal people involved will let it happen, and that's not likely right now.
Some of the remote mounting could probably be done today (lufs? autofs? not sure really), but it probably wouldn't be as clean as it works out in KDE.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that - the quick launch toolbar, while always alongside the taskbar, is seperate in terms of size - one cannot squash the other. Further, while not what you want I suspect, I just dragged mine off onto the desktop - it's now a separate window, and can be set to be always on top.
I believe he wants multiple panels. You only get one in Windows. Having multiple panels is quite handy.
You can see it everywhere with KDE...starting with their braindamaged way of not using separate tarballs for every app and instead bundling the apps to arbitary categories which can be quite frustrating for people not using KDE wanting to use only a single app.
Maybe you should get a distribution that breaks up the packages into individual apps.
That's not the job of the KDE developers.
Then use Konqueror, and KMail.
The only way to get this across every single application is to include it at the filesystem level. First, the KDE developers aren't kernel hackers, so they probably don't have the expertise to write such an extension.
Second, even if they did, it would probably incite a giant debate in the Linux kernel mailing list when they presented it (like with Reiser4), and the net result would be that it wouldn't be in anyway. So it'd be a bunch of patches and you'd have to use a special kernel to use KDE, which would be awful.
The KDE developers aren't going to rewrite every single application out there to use their functionality (and if they did, people would complain because pine depends on KDE).
In other words, don't choose to use a hodgepodge of programs, and then complain that it works like a hodgepodge of programs.
Like what? The only thing I can recall recently is the "shell://" URL handler, which is a way to execute arbitrary commands. That is a bad idea, and as far as I know, KDE has no equivalent.
Yeah, if you want transparent access across the whole system, you need it at the filesystem level. That would be one of the possible advantages of, say, the Reiser4 filesystem.
Now, as you may or not recall, a couple months ago there was a giant flamewar on the Linux kernel mailing list about Reiser4, files-as-directories, plugins, and all the stuff that would make such things transparent at the filesystem level, and the net result was, "it's not going in right now."
KDE programmers aren't kernel hackers, and even if they were, this stuff probably wouldn't make it into the kernel, so it would be a set of messy KDE kernel patches. Until then, KDE's handling of many different URL protocols is probably the best you'll get.
Are people putting a gun to your head and forcing you to run firefox? Maybe you should call the police, if you can reach the phone.
Firefox is beta software, so it breaks some stuff between versions. Unfortunately, it's also better than the 6th revision of the competitor with 80 - 90% marketshare.
If anyone's pushing firefox down your throat, it's Microsoft. Give them a call and tell them to get their act together. Bitching at people here does nothing.