MPAA ratings are only enforceable at actual movie theaters, though, since they're not laws. It's up to you if you want to buy your kid an NC-17 movie for viewing in your own home. No one's going to arrest you for doing so. So when you look at the portion of the movie market that's actually analogous to video games, the parents are ultimately responsible in all cases, so there's no grounds to say that Rockstar should be responsible based on that case.
When there are big gaming complexes set up that allow kids to play M games with parental supervision, but restrict AO games to people 18 and over, and somehow an AO game slips into the M section, that line of argument might hold some water.
Until then, it's still just an analogy to a completely separate rating system, where the only connection between them is that, "they're both rating systems." Drawing any conclusions based on that connection alone would be pretty good grounds for people shouting "logical fallacy."
In any case, a jury deciding something about the ESRB rating system based on the MPAA rating system would be stupid.
It is more clear, but your conclusion is still bogus.
The Pew article states that teenagers prefer IM over e-mail for conversations among their friends. Do you know why? Because e-mail is a terrible medium over which to have a casual conversation.
The Pew report says that young people see e-mail "as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information." That is, essentially, what it is. Your original post contained an example of a "thank you note." That's a good case for e-mail, or realistically, regular mail, and I think the article implies that kids understand that. In fact, since they use e-mail for "communication with adults," that's probably exactly what they'd use for such a purpose.
Kids hold mostly casual conversations with one another, and IM is ideal for that. When kids communicate with adults, or institutions, it's usually a more lengthy, detailed process, in which you don't need instant response. Therefore, they use e-mail. Thus, this article is, in essence, supporting the notion that kids have figured out that these two forms of communication aren't equivalent, and have identified the strengths and weaknesses of both. It does not show that they are shunning one completely. The yahoo summary even says that 90% of kids still use e-mail.
IM is not going to destroy the ability of kids to communicate thoughtfully any more than casual conversation will. You just, apparently, have a comically low opinion of kids, and haven't actually read the referenced articles. Of course, you've already formed your opinions based on the Slashdot headline, apparently, and we shouldn't let the actual content of the articles get in the way of that.
The IM issue implies a certain amount of hovering around waiting to chit-chat
Not it doesn't. That appears to be your main point, but it's wrong. IM is for chatting with people while you're on your computer. You know, people surf the internet, play games, do their taxes, et cetera. Then they notice Bobby's on, and they want to chat, so they do. Or Sally sends them a message, and they talk for a while.
You seem to imply that using IM implies that people sit around staring at their fucking screen waiting for people to talk to them. That's ludicrous. That's just as ludicrous as my saying that having a phone in my house means that I just sit in it and stare at the phone waiting for people to call, and that everything else I do in his house is shit I do to distract myself while I'm waiting for telephone calls.
No amount of crap about voice mail is going to make that point accurate. Instant messaging is in almost every way analogous to telephones. Do you actually use IM? It seems you have a very poor understanding of how it's actually used.
Face-to-face conversation destroys productivity by encouraging people to have dumb, pointless conversations. Everyone should be locked in a box from 9 AM to 5 PM for maximum productivity. They should communicate by chiseling messages on stone tablets and sending them through suction tubes like the ones in Brazil. That way, only messages of consequence will be sent, because they're so hard to send.
In other words, your argument was ridiculous, just like when the other 3,000 people here made it.
Re:Different technologies, different purpose
on
E-mail Is For Old People
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's crap.
The mindset of e-mail is presentation, hence why e-mail clients have spell checkers.... People usually speak proper English in e-mail
Yeah? I get emails from all sorts of people with poor spelling and use of crazy abbreviations. My mother does this.
On the other hand, I use IM to communicate with all my college friends, and we all write reasonably correct, if conversational English when using it, just as we do in e-mails.
Both IM and e-mail, when used in the hands of children, will contain bastardized English. When used for business purposes, or by people who give a shit, it will contain proper English.
One day, kids will learn that the way they're writing makes them looks like idiots, just like whatever generation you're in learned how stupid a lot of the stuff they were doing is. The world isn't going to hell in a hand-basket, and IM isn't going to be the downfall of civilization, any more than the telephone was when letter writing was the primary form of communication. You can get off your high horse now.
The funny part of that situation is that it's the adults who push for these no-learning-curve, instant-satisfaction, short games. "I don't have time to play through a long story, especially if I might fail to beat a level from time to time. Make it short and easy."
The youngsters---the same ones who are being accused of requiring instant satisfaction---are the main ones who buy the 200 hour games. The mature, older gamers who've apparently learned to put off their need for gratification are the ones requesting instant gratification games.
Sounds like everyone wants their instant gratification in different scenarios. Of course, that's not going to get you any bullshit psych grant money.
Almost everything anyone does as a human being, whether they know it or not, is ultimately intended to raise their position in the social structure and/or score, because they are life forms whose overriding goal is to pass on their genetic material to the next generation as much as possible.
What do you talk about? The meaning of life? Eternal salvation? Your projects at work? It's all bullshit. You're just an egotistical asshole who thinks that whatever he believes is important is, in fact, important. It's about the same as when you were a teenager, except your perspective has shifted a little.
It'd be nice if Microsoft would use some of their huge market dominance to push some good languages, like a Lisp or ML variant, rather than stuff like C# (and in turn, Java) which is tuned towards allowing you to throw hordes of mediocre programmers at a problem, and coming away with something that may actually work most of the time.
Then again, I suppose it wouldn't work out, since most companies these days want to produce their software by throwing hordes of mediocre programmers at the problem. It'd be nice if they at least tried to expose more people to these sorts of languages. Perhaps then there wouldn't be so many people who believe that C and C++ are the epitome of good language design.
I wouldn't be surprised if that makes it into 3.5. They announced that the trunk version passed a month or two ago, which seems like plenty of notice to make it into 3.5.
KDE is no more cloning Windows than it is cloning OS X, or any other GUI system (in fact, KDE is customizable enough to look like just about any GUI you choose). I suspect the same is true of Gnome. How is XFCE wildly different? It has a panel, a window manager, a file manager, a menu to start programs.... Sounds like Windows, or any other WIMP GUI made in the last ten years.
Further, KDE, at least, is attempting to break into new directions with KDE 4 and Plasma. I'm sure the Gnome guys aren't slacking off either.
You can't just change everything and do the exact opposite of Windows (whatever that means) for the hell of it. There are some decent ideas in Windows (and nearly every other GUI), and throwing them out simply to not be "copying" is foolish. Not everything has to be totally original.
What languages do you know? Ruby's blocks make for good implicit iterators, and are used to great effect in the language. For instance:
10.times do
something end
Although short examples like that are meaningless.
Modern functional languages typically come with fold, which is (if memory serves) a generalization of everything you can do with iteration:
foldl1 (\i j -> something) [1..10]
And then there's logic languages, which, in the purest sense, do away with any sort of sequential operation whatsoever, and allow you to construct your programs in terms of what is true and false about various things, rather than listing a process.
People have been experimenting with ways of programming other than the traditional imperative model for a while now, but you won't hear about it much from the average software development crowd, because almost everyone's been trained on C and its children, and they're not interested in learning something wildly different.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it was the sole fault of the actors (in fact, what you quoted was actually my summary of the original guy's point). I figured it ultimately has to do with the fact that anime has limited popularity (even if it's expanding these days), so they're not going to get a Disney or a Fox cartoon budget. Therefore, you fall into all the difficulties that you mentioned.
I was merely saying that, for whatever reason, the average dub turns out to be a little disappointing, from what I've seen, so I'm not surprised when I see people talking about how they think subbed anime is better, especially since there are quite a few very good fansub groups out there (some people even prefer fansubs to official subs, which is another point the original guy implied, but the guy below him missed).
I don't doubt it's a hard job, and it's a shame they don't have the time/budget to do it better. I was just trying to point out that you don't have to be a "Japanese is better than English" dork to appreciate subtitles over dubs, at least in the average case.
Oh yeah it's soooo horrific. Because it's in English. Japanese is such a better language...
Perhaps I'm reading incorrectly, but as far as I can tell, his argument wasn't, "OMG, Japanese is teh superior language!" It appears to be that the people they generally get to do the English voice acting aren't too great. I can't say I've done an extensive survey of dubbed anime, but I'd agree that several I have watched aren't stellar, and the good ones have been the few. It certainly isn't impossible to produce good results; plenty of American animation/video games have good voice acting, and I have seen anime that has good dubbing. It just doesn't seem to be the norm.
The Japanese voice acting may be equally bad, but I can't tell, because I don't speak Japanese.
KDE is quite capable of displaying the programs menu (or many other menus, for that matter) when you right click on the desktop, just like Enlightenment.
All "Open" and "Save as..." dialog box looks the same in Windows. I can't say the same in Linux (even in Ubuntu, that has some integration work done).
Most Print dialog bos in Windows looks the same (or very similar), but in Linux, OO, PDF reader, FF and other they ALL LOOK VERY DIFERENT.
Okay, you picked OO, (Adobe?) PDF reader and Firefox. Those all use different toolkits. How about I pick a Java Swing application, a TCL/TK application, a GTK application and Open Office, and compare Windows Save/Print dialogs based on those?
I told you exactly how to achieve consistency on Linux. Pick either KDE or Gnome, and use the one you pick. It's not hard. Almost anyone can do it. All the interfaces will be consistent, because that's what they're designed for.
On the other hand, let's look at Office. Last time I used it (Office 2003, perhaps?), Word opened each document in a new window. If you pushed the X on one window, it would close that document. In short, it was an SDI application. By contrast, Excel opened each document in a separate window, but when I pushed the X on one window, they'd all be closed. In short, the UI tricked me into thinking it was an SDI application, when it was, in fact, not. That's a much more significant problem than different looking save dialogs.
So, let's not play like Windows is all consistent. Open/Save/Print dialogs are small parts of any application. Are you suggesting that people would stop ranting about KDE vs. Gnome consistency if they both used the same dialogs? Excuse me if I don't believe you. The fact is, there are just as many toolkits in use on Windows as there are on Linux, yet nobody cares about the former, or suggests it's some major problem for the users. That's most likely because it isn't.
Jesus, those are just mockups by one artist of his ideas. There are 2 or 3 other artists that regularly post on kde-artists.org, and a whole bunch of other people also contributing ideas.
Calm down a little and don't jump to conclusions. Do you really think that Plasma will only have one theme, and that single theme will be pure monochrome? Making judgments of the final product based on one guy's preliminary ideas is ridiculous.
If those are the appropriate links, then the things listed as "plasma screenshots" are actually mockups.
As far as I know (and I've been following this pretty closely), there is no plasma yet. It's still separated superkaramba, kicker and kdesktop, which they are now porting to Qt 4, and will later combine and alter into what will be plasma. Thus, there are no screenshots, as they're not far enough along yet.
There's lots of interesting mockups at kde-artists.org, though.
At present, there are simply too many widget toolkits and desktop environments present. Motif, GTK, QT, KDE, Gnome..
Your list is inflated. KDE builds on top of Qt. Gnome builds on top of GTK. Whether an application is KDE versus Qt, or Gnome versus GTK is more a question of degree of integration with a desktop than it is a fundamental difference in toolkits.
Motif is so seldom used as to be negligible.
and none of these are strong enough for there to be a clear winner.
Both KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK are fine. There are nearly comprehensive desktop environments based on each. The fact that there are two also allows for experimentation in different directions, and competition, which is an incentive to improve. I fail to see how these are bad things.
They are all tied to X, and perhaps that in itself is a problem.
Qt and GTK both run on Windows without X11, and I believe Qt does so on MacOS (not sure about GTK; I think someone's porting it to cocoa). I doubt this would be a huge problem even if it were true.
A single, unified, high quality toolkit is needed
Why?
So it can be consistent like Windows, where Microsoft itself has several different widget sets (IE, WMP, Visual Studio and Office all look different), and tons of third party applications roll their own UI designs? Windows is only consistent in the fact that many applications look/act differently from all the rest. That's not driving users away.
Consistency can be achieved relatively easily by users of Linux systems. Here's the method: 1) pick either Gnome or KDE; 2) Done. I don't even have GTK installed on my machine; it is possible. The fact that most Linux users today feel compelled to mix-and-match, and use Bill's Random Tweaker written in Motif doesn't imply that it's necessary to do that.
GTK looks terrible.
Many people disagree with you. This is your opinion.
QT is nice, but it's a fully blown development environment.
I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean. Are you suggesting that Qt would be better if your only option were to hack out stuff in emacs? Does Windows suck because they sell Visual Studio?
Most OSS QT apps are KDE apps, which places a dependency on KDE, which is also undesirable.
Oh, you'd rather have every open source application use just Qt, and re-implement all the functionality that KDE provides from scratch (spell checking, io-slaves, embeddable parts, etc.)?
But as a desktop solution, it's weak.
Yeah, it's still weak. However, most of the problems you list are dubious at best. Perhaps if you keep waving your hands, though, they'll gain more validity.
What I don't like is how much wasted effort is spent on "packaging" (which is a concept that doesn't really exist on other operating systems).
That's because other operating systems (I assume you mean Windows and OS X) don't provide the functionality in this area that Linux distributions do. Can Windows tell you when some random program you've installed has an update? Can OS X? They can tell you when some core package requires an update or security patch, but other than that, it's up to every individual program to implement some sort of update checker. Or you have to check every website yourself. How is that not duplication of work?
At the very least, there are automated tools for creating packages for various distributions. Most distributions are differentiated (at the package level) by the filesystem layout, and the versions of installed libraries. Producing correct packages isn't much harder, in most cases, than compiling the software on a particular distribution, with the appropriate configuration parameters. That's not too hard, and is certainly easier than writing an update checker yourself.
You buy a DVD+-R drive today, and then in 5 years, you buy either a blu-ray or hd-dvd drive, and then 5 years after that, you buy whatever comes out on top after them.
What's wrong with waiting until one wins to buy it? That way you get the additional benefit of being able to buy a faster drive for $60 instead of the slow $300+ model that early adopters will buy. It's not feasible for most people to buy these drives the moment they're announced anyway, whether there is one standard or five.
Or is it that you need more than 8 GiB/disc today (assuming DL media, which is still quite expensive, unfortunately)?
Ah, okay, granted. However, there does seem to be a significant shift towards usability in the larger camps (Gnome, KDE). I don't expect it to reach down into the Joe's Utility X, though.
In your opinion, what percentage of the people making the comments you mention are actual Free Software developers working on relevant projects, rather than random people who think that using Linux makes them cool, and are content to spend their free time posting on Slashdot about how great they are and how none of these are really problems?
What percentage of actual Open Source developers do you think spend their time whining, defending themselves on or even religiously reading Slashdot, rather than actually working on their software, and fixing these problems that they, most likely, already know exist?
In other words, who exactly do you think you're rebuking?
Slashdot Mirror
MPAA ratings are only enforceable at actual movie theaters, though, since they're not laws. It's up to you if you want to buy your kid an NC-17 movie for viewing in your own home. No one's going to arrest you for doing so. So when you look at the portion of the movie market that's actually analogous to video games, the parents are ultimately responsible in all cases, so there's no grounds to say that Rockstar should be responsible based on that case.
When there are big gaming complexes set up that allow kids to play M games with parental supervision, but restrict AO games to people 18 and over, and somehow an AO game slips into the M section, that line of argument might hold some water.
Until then, it's still just an analogy to a completely separate rating system, where the only connection between them is that, "they're both rating systems." Drawing any conclusions based on that connection alone would be pretty good grounds for people shouting "logical fallacy."
In any case, a jury deciding something about the ESRB rating system based on the MPAA rating system would be stupid.
It is more clear, but your conclusion is still bogus.
The Pew article states that teenagers prefer IM over e-mail for conversations among their friends. Do you know why? Because e-mail is a terrible medium over which to have a casual conversation.
The Pew report says that young people see e-mail "as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information." That is, essentially, what it is. Your original post contained an example of a "thank you note." That's a good case for e-mail, or realistically, regular mail, and I think the article implies that kids understand that. In fact, since they use e-mail for "communication with adults," that's probably exactly what they'd use for such a purpose.
Kids hold mostly casual conversations with one another, and IM is ideal for that. When kids communicate with adults, or institutions, it's usually a more lengthy, detailed process, in which you don't need instant response. Therefore, they use e-mail. Thus, this article is, in essence, supporting the notion that kids have figured out that these two forms of communication aren't equivalent, and have identified the strengths and weaknesses of both. It does not show that they are shunning one completely. The yahoo summary even says that 90% of kids still use e-mail.
IM is not going to destroy the ability of kids to communicate thoughtfully any more than casual conversation will. You just, apparently, have a comically low opinion of kids, and haven't actually read the referenced articles. Of course, you've already formed your opinions based on the Slashdot headline, apparently, and we shouldn't let the actual content of the articles get in the way of that.
The IM issue implies a certain amount of hovering around waiting to chit-chat
Not it doesn't. That appears to be your main point, but it's wrong. IM is for chatting with people while you're on your computer. You know, people surf the internet, play games, do their taxes, et cetera. Then they notice Bobby's on, and they want to chat, so they do. Or Sally sends them a message, and they talk for a while.
You seem to imply that using IM implies that people sit around staring at their fucking screen waiting for people to talk to them. That's ludicrous. That's just as ludicrous as my saying that having a phone in my house means that I just sit in it and stare at the phone waiting for people to call, and that everything else I do in his house is shit I do to distract myself while I'm waiting for telephone calls.
No amount of crap about voice mail is going to make that point accurate. Instant messaging is in almost every way analogous to telephones. Do you actually use IM? It seems you have a very poor understanding of how it's actually used.
Face-to-face conversation destroys productivity by encouraging people to have dumb, pointless conversations. Everyone should be locked in a box from 9 AM to 5 PM for maximum productivity. They should communicate by chiseling messages on stone tablets and sending them through suction tubes like the ones in Brazil. That way, only messages of consequence will be sent, because they're so hard to send.
In other words, your argument was ridiculous, just like when the other 3,000 people here made it.
That's crap.
... People usually speak proper English in e-mail
The mindset of e-mail is presentation, hence why e-mail clients have spell checkers.
Yeah? I get emails from all sorts of people with poor spelling and use of crazy abbreviations. My mother does this.
On the other hand, I use IM to communicate with all my college friends, and we all write reasonably correct, if conversational English when using it, just as we do in e-mails.
Both IM and e-mail, when used in the hands of children, will contain bastardized English. When used for business purposes, or by people who give a shit, it will contain proper English.
One day, kids will learn that the way they're writing makes them looks like idiots, just like whatever generation you're in learned how stupid a lot of the stuff they were doing is. The world isn't going to hell in a hand-basket, and IM isn't going to be the downfall of civilization, any more than the telephone was when letter writing was the primary form of communication. You can get off your high horse now.
The funny part of that situation is that it's the adults who push for these no-learning-curve, instant-satisfaction, short games. "I don't have time to play through a long story, especially if I might fail to beat a level from time to time. Make it short and easy."
The youngsters---the same ones who are being accused of requiring instant satisfaction---are the main ones who buy the 200 hour games. The mature, older gamers who've apparently learned to put off their need for gratification are the ones requesting instant gratification games.
Sounds like everyone wants their instant gratification in different scenarios. Of course, that's not going to get you any bullshit psych grant money.
Almost everything anyone does as a human being, whether they know it or not, is ultimately intended to raise their position in the social structure and/or score, because they are life forms whose overriding goal is to pass on their genetic material to the next generation as much as possible.
What do you talk about? The meaning of life? Eternal salvation? Your projects at work? It's all bullshit. You're just an egotistical asshole who thinks that whatever he believes is important is, in fact, important. It's about the same as when you were a teenager, except your perspective has shifted a little.
It'd be nice if Microsoft would use some of their huge market dominance to push some good languages, like a Lisp or ML variant, rather than stuff like C# (and in turn, Java) which is tuned towards allowing you to throw hordes of mediocre programmers at a problem, and coming away with something that may actually work most of the time.
Then again, I suppose it wouldn't work out, since most companies these days want to produce their software by throwing hordes of mediocre programmers at the problem. It'd be nice if they at least tried to expose more people to these sorts of languages. Perhaps then there wouldn't be so many people who believe that C and C++ are the epitome of good language design.
A man can dream, can't he?
I wouldn't be surprised if that makes it into 3.5. They announced that the trunk version passed a month or two ago, which seems like plenty of notice to make it into 3.5.
http://www.badgirlsblog.com/
http://search.boobdex.com/?special=preview
http://godisdreaming.blogspot.com/
http://www.cartoonella.com/
KDE is no more cloning Windows than it is cloning OS X, or any other GUI system (in fact, KDE is customizable enough to look like just about any GUI you choose). I suspect the same is true of Gnome. How is XFCE wildly different? It has a panel, a window manager, a file manager, a menu to start programs.... Sounds like Windows, or any other WIMP GUI made in the last ten years.
Further, KDE, at least, is attempting to break into new directions with KDE 4 and Plasma. I'm sure the Gnome guys aren't slacking off either.
You can't just change everything and do the exact opposite of Windows (whatever that means) for the hell of it. There are some decent ideas in Windows (and nearly every other GUI), and throwing them out simply to not be "copying" is foolish. Not everything has to be totally original.
Modern functional languages typically come with fold, which is (if memory serves) a generalization of everything you can do with iteration:And then there's logic languages, which, in the purest sense, do away with any sort of sequential operation whatsoever, and allow you to construct your programs in terms of what is true and false about various things, rather than listing a process.
People have been experimenting with ways of programming other than the traditional imperative model for a while now, but you won't hear about it much from the average software development crowd, because almost everyone's been trained on C and its children, and they're not interested in learning something wildly different.
It appears to me that he was blathering on about the past of technology, not the future. Anyone can look that up; it doesn't require an oracle.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it was the sole fault of the actors (in fact, what you quoted was actually my summary of the original guy's point). I figured it ultimately has to do with the fact that anime has limited popularity (even if it's expanding these days), so they're not going to get a Disney or a Fox cartoon budget. Therefore, you fall into all the difficulties that you mentioned.
I was merely saying that, for whatever reason, the average dub turns out to be a little disappointing, from what I've seen, so I'm not surprised when I see people talking about how they think subbed anime is better, especially since there are quite a few very good fansub groups out there (some people even prefer fansubs to official subs, which is another point the original guy implied, but the guy below him missed).
I don't doubt it's a hard job, and it's a shame they don't have the time/budget to do it better. I was just trying to point out that you don't have to be a "Japanese is better than English" dork to appreciate subtitles over dubs, at least in the average case.
Oh yeah it's soooo horrific. Because it's in English. Japanese is such a better language...
Perhaps I'm reading incorrectly, but as far as I can tell, his argument wasn't, "OMG, Japanese is teh superior language!" It appears to be that the people they generally get to do the English voice acting aren't too great. I can't say I've done an extensive survey of dubbed anime, but I'd agree that several I have watched aren't stellar, and the good ones have been the few. It certainly isn't impossible to produce good results; plenty of American animation/video games have good voice acting, and I have seen anime that has good dubbing. It just doesn't seem to be the norm.
The Japanese voice acting may be equally bad, but I can't tell, because I don't speak Japanese.
KDE is quite capable of displaying the programs menu (or many other menus, for that matter) when you right click on the desktop, just like Enlightenment.
Or were you referring to something else?
All "Open" and "Save as..." dialog box looks the same in Windows. I can't say the same in Linux (even in Ubuntu, that has some integration work done).
Most Print dialog bos in Windows looks the same (or very similar), but in Linux, OO, PDF reader, FF and other they ALL LOOK VERY DIFERENT.
Okay, you picked OO, (Adobe?) PDF reader and Firefox. Those all use different toolkits. How about I pick a Java Swing application, a TCL/TK application, a GTK application and Open Office, and compare Windows Save/Print dialogs based on those?
I told you exactly how to achieve consistency on Linux. Pick either KDE or Gnome, and use the one you pick. It's not hard. Almost anyone can do it. All the interfaces will be consistent, because that's what they're designed for.
On the other hand, let's look at Office. Last time I used it (Office 2003, perhaps?), Word opened each document in a new window. If you pushed the X on one window, it would close that document. In short, it was an SDI application. By contrast, Excel opened each document in a separate window, but when I pushed the X on one window, they'd all be closed. In short, the UI tricked me into thinking it was an SDI application, when it was, in fact, not. That's a much more significant problem than different looking save dialogs.
So, let's not play like Windows is all consistent. Open/Save/Print dialogs are small parts of any application. Are you suggesting that people would stop ranting about KDE vs. Gnome consistency if they both used the same dialogs? Excuse me if I don't believe you. The fact is, there are just as many toolkits in use on Windows as there are on Linux, yet nobody cares about the former, or suggests it's some major problem for the users. That's most likely because it isn't.
Jesus, those are just mockups by one artist of his ideas. There are 2 or 3 other artists that regularly post on kde-artists.org, and a whole bunch of other people also contributing ideas.
Calm down a little and don't jump to conclusions. Do you really think that Plasma will only have one theme, and that single theme will be pure monochrome? Making judgments of the final product based on one guy's preliminary ideas is ridiculous.
"Bloated" is geek slang for "does useful things."
If those are the appropriate links, then the things listed as "plasma screenshots" are actually mockups.
As far as I know (and I've been following this pretty closely), there is no plasma yet. It's still separated superkaramba, kicker and kdesktop, which they are now porting to Qt 4, and will later combine and alter into what will be plasma. Thus, there are no screenshots, as they're not far enough along yet.
There's lots of interesting mockups at kde-artists.org, though.
At present, there are simply too many widget toolkits and desktop environments present. Motif, GTK, QT, KDE, Gnome..
Your list is inflated. KDE builds on top of Qt. Gnome builds on top of GTK. Whether an application is KDE versus Qt, or Gnome versus GTK is more a question of degree of integration with a desktop than it is a fundamental difference in toolkits.
Motif is so seldom used as to be negligible.
and none of these are strong enough for there to be a clear winner.
Both KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK are fine. There are nearly comprehensive desktop environments based on each. The fact that there are two also allows for experimentation in different directions, and competition, which is an incentive to improve. I fail to see how these are bad things.
They are all tied to X, and perhaps that in itself is a problem.
Qt and GTK both run on Windows without X11, and I believe Qt does so on MacOS (not sure about GTK; I think someone's porting it to cocoa). I doubt this would be a huge problem even if it were true.
A single, unified, high quality toolkit is needed
Why?
So it can be consistent like Windows, where Microsoft itself has several different widget sets (IE, WMP, Visual Studio and Office all look different), and tons of third party applications roll their own UI designs? Windows is only consistent in the fact that many applications look/act differently from all the rest. That's not driving users away.
Consistency can be achieved relatively easily by users of Linux systems. Here's the method: 1) pick either Gnome or KDE; 2) Done. I don't even have GTK installed on my machine; it is possible. The fact that most Linux users today feel compelled to mix-and-match, and use Bill's Random Tweaker written in Motif doesn't imply that it's necessary to do that.
GTK looks terrible.
Many people disagree with you. This is your opinion.
QT is nice, but it's a fully blown development environment.
I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean. Are you suggesting that Qt would be better if your only option were to hack out stuff in emacs? Does Windows suck because they sell Visual Studio?
Most OSS QT apps are KDE apps, which places a dependency on KDE, which is also undesirable.
Oh, you'd rather have every open source application use just Qt, and re-implement all the functionality that KDE provides from scratch (spell checking, io-slaves, embeddable parts, etc.)?
But as a desktop solution, it's weak.
Yeah, it's still weak. However, most of the problems you list are dubious at best. Perhaps if you keep waving your hands, though, they'll gain more validity.
What I don't like is how much wasted effort is spent on "packaging" (which is a concept that doesn't really exist on other operating systems).
That's because other operating systems (I assume you mean Windows and OS X) don't provide the functionality in this area that Linux distributions do. Can Windows tell you when some random program you've installed has an update? Can OS X? They can tell you when some core package requires an update or security patch, but other than that, it's up to every individual program to implement some sort of update checker. Or you have to check every website yourself. How is that not duplication of work?
At the very least, there are automated tools for creating packages for various distributions. Most distributions are differentiated (at the package level) by the filesystem layout, and the versions of installed libraries. Producing correct packages isn't much harder, in most cases, than compiling the software on a particular distribution, with the appropriate configuration parameters. That's not too hard, and is certainly easier than writing an update checker yourself.
Is that really a big problem, though?
You buy a DVD+-R drive today, and then in 5 years, you buy either a blu-ray or hd-dvd drive, and then 5 years after that, you buy whatever comes out on top after them.
What's wrong with waiting until one wins to buy it? That way you get the additional benefit of being able to buy a faster drive for $60 instead of the slow $300+ model that early adopters will buy. It's not feasible for most people to buy these drives the moment they're announced anyway, whether there is one standard or five.
Or is it that you need more than 8 GiB/disc today (assuming DL media, which is still quite expensive, unfortunately)?
Ah, okay, granted. However, there does seem to be a significant shift towards usability in the larger camps (Gnome, KDE). I don't expect it to reach down into the Joe's Utility X, though.
Allow me to pose some questions to you.
In your opinion, what percentage of the people making the comments you mention are actual Free Software developers working on relevant projects, rather than random people who think that using Linux makes them cool, and are content to spend their free time posting on Slashdot about how great they are and how none of these are really problems?
What percentage of actual Open Source developers do you think spend their time whining, defending themselves on or even religiously reading Slashdot, rather than actually working on their software, and fixing these problems that they, most likely, already know exist?
In other words, who exactly do you think you're rebuking?