The Novell/Ximian Connector goes a long way towards integrating Linux into a Windows-heavy business environment. However, it doesn't go as far as many here seem to think. Just because you have Connector does not mean that you will be able to use Evolution with Exchange at work... at least, not in all cases.
Specifically, Connector only works if Outlook Web Access is enabled on Exchange. There are a few problems with this approach in the real world.
First, OWA isn't enabled by default in Exchange. That is because, secondly, OWA costs extra for each user. Third, as a result, all places I've worked that used Exchange either disallowed using OWA at all or severly limited its use.
For instance, at my current company, OWA is enabled but only has a few client licenses and is therefore blocked from all internal IPs. It's intended use is for people that are traveling that want to access their email via a web browser.
So, yeah, Connector is very slick and very useful... just not as slick and as useful as the euphoric posts here seem to indicate!
I used to read The Spot back in '95. Back then, there were no reality TV shows (except maybe "Cops") and "blogs" wouldn't be a word for years. At first, it wasn't at all clear that it was all scripted. At least, I was fooled into thinking it was real. After learning that it was all made up, I bailed (along with everybody else, it seems).
Still, the one thing that sticks in my memory about The Spot was their site design. It was somewhat similar to what they have now but a bit more primitive. Same idea, though. Back then, though, sites were full of BLINK tags, purple links on pages with grey backgrounds, and full of frames. The Spot's site actually looked nice! It was a breath of fresh air. I remember trying to make my own personal home page look like it.
The fact that the site looked so professionally done back in the day when nearly all sites were clearly slapped together by design-challenged geeks probably should have clued me in that it wasn't as real as they claimed it was.
Last I checked, yes you can [build fast, non-scripted, closed source apps for KDE..without paying for Qt]. The requirement from Qt is non-commercial, not open source
This is wishful thinking at best and outright deceptive at worst. The only versions of Qt that you can legally develop with without paying for are licensed with either the GPL or QPL. Both the GPL and QPL require that your application be Open Source.
If your application is closed source, then it cannot use a GPLed or QPLed Qt and thus, you must pay for the developer license.
I wrote the following back in the KDE 2.0 days and it still holds true today:
It's a mistake to think that they are putting "more and more give-aways" in newer trailers. In fact, if you go back to movies made in the late 60's and early 70's, you'll see that modern trailers show next to nothing about the plot compared to then.
The canonical example would be the original theatrical trailer for "The Graduate" (1967). The trailer was three minutes long and included EVERY detail of the plot from beginning to end!
This was par for course back. It wasn't until the later 70s that directors starting resisting a bit and not letting the studio give away the entire plot in the trailer.
No, you don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to another DVD.. but I wonder if that's what they (the smart ones, anyway) are really worried about. The MPAA complains about losing millions of dollars due to piracy. Where and how? I wouldn't have the first clue how to get a pirated DVD even if I wanted to.
I think the key here is location. From what I've heard, most movie piracy at this scale is done in the Pacific Rim countries. And from my SVCD/VCD encoding days, I further remember that those two formats were very very popular in China and maybe Japan.
Summarizing the facts: 1. You don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to a DVD 2. DVD copies are (relatively) expensive 3. SVCD and VCDs are cheap (media and player-wise) 4. Pacific Rim countries are "hotbeds" of piracy 5. SVCD/VCD are very popular in the the Pacific Rim countries 6. DeCSS *IS* needed to recode a DVD to SVCD or VCD
Conclusion: The MPAA isn't afraid of home users copying DVDs using DeCSS, they are afraid of mass re-encoding of DVDs into SVCDs for sale overseas. But since they are as jackbooted an organization as exists, they don't care that they step on home users on the way.
2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg.
FWIW, this doesn't have to mean that ripping and encoding to Ogg Vorbis is any harder than for MP3. I recently ripped a few hundred tracks to ogg using the following method:
Insert CD into CD-ROM drive
Start Konqueror and click on AudioCD Services
Select all the songs I want to rip in the Ogg Vorbis folder (they look like normal files and selecting them works like you expect)
Drag the selected files to/space/music
That's it. Konqueror (using the kio_audiocd ioslave) takes care of ripping the track from CD, encoding it as Ogg Vorbis, and copying it over to my final location.
So basically the standard Newton quote was a typically nasty, snide put-down to Hooke, saying "even if I did steal these ideas, I certainly didn't steal them from a dwarf like you"
Not necessarily. The idea that his quote was an insult never appeared in any print at the time. That is, there is no response from Hooke claiming insult or no further nasty letters from either side. The idea that it was an insult first surfaced in "Portrait of Isaac Newton" published in 1968... nearly 300 years after the fact!
That doesn't mean that it wasn't an insult.. it's just not as obvious as you make it sound.
The two main arguments that it was an honest compliment go like so:
The letters, read in their entirety, are not insulting or defamatory at all. They spend most of their time praising what the other has done
Newton wasn't one for "beating around the bush". When he insulted people (which he did frequently), he was crystal clear in doing so. Insulting by sarcasm was possible, but quite out of character for him
I realize that it is implied.. that is why I replied to Joseph's post. That implication is, however, incorrect. I am now stating that he was NOT speaking on behalf of KDE and the laywer he is referring to is NOT one of KDE's lawyers.
I am not prepared or qualified to comment on the specifics of Waldo's comments. It was a private email from an individual to an individual. If you want more clarification, you need to approach Mr Bastian and Mr Carter individually.
I will say again, though, that this email was and is not an official communication from the KDE Core Team.
This topic for this thread is a bit misleading. KDE has not in any way tried to silence Mr Carter. This email was from Waldo Bastian who, while a member of the KDE Core Team, was acting on his own in sending the letter. When or if the KDE Core Team ever issues any official opinions on this issue, you can be assured that they will not be in private email.
I don't think it's fair to ask "how many hours do you work?" without asking "are you happy with these hours?" It's entirely likely that many geeks are more then happy to work an incredible amount of hours.
I used to work as a corporate drone for a very large technology company. I was given a number (p28901) and took my place among the other 150,000 soul-less autonoma. I was bored silly every hour that I was there... and you're out of your mind if you think I would work on MINUTE more then 40 hours at that job.
Fast forward to the present. I get paid to work on my hobby -- a leading Open Source project. I set what I want to do and when I want to work on it. As a result, the line between what is my job and what is my hobby has completely disappeared... they are one and the same. I "work" during the day and significant parts of the night and during boring shows on TV and during commercials and on Saturdays and Sundays... probably around 60-80 hours a week (depending on what project I'm working on). But I'm loving it! This is incredibly fun stuff!
Moral of the story: I'd only worry about this issue if the majority of knowledge workers worked more then 40 hours a week because they "had to" not because they "wanted to"
I wonder how many Y2K related pranks are going to be pulled in the next 24 hours? I can see this happening over and over:
A large group of friends and family gather together to celebrate the new year. The countdown commences.. 10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1.. HAPPY.. and the power goes out! Some prankster hanging around the circuit box had cut the power. A portable air raid siren could only help matters at this time.
Can you imagine the reaction? I think that will prove irresistable to some people.
So, my theory is, why not write a Qt theme for GTK, which actually *invokes the current default Qt theme engine* which does all the work of making sure everything is themed correctly. You could of course do exactly the same thing in reverse and write a GTK theme for Qt which invokes the current default GTK engine. Then you could use themes for either and all your applications would look the same, regardless of which toolkit they were using.
When I first read this, I thought "huh? that's what I said".. and then I noticed that my answer had been snipped on that question!
When I say that the themes probably won't be compatible, I am referring to the actual configuration files and such. There is work or plans in progress, though, that will create theme engines on both sides that will be able to read and "convert" (essentially) the themes dyamically. A GNOME engine that reads the KDE theme config files would allow me to run GNOME apps that looked very similar to (if not exactly like) KDE apps.
Now there might be some problems initially on some of the more advanced themes (I don't believe Gtk can currently handle the gradients that KDE can) but as time goes by, even those differences will likely smooth out.
Konq doesn't handle auto-completion, which annoys me.
Hmm.. I'm not sure if this is a typo or not. Konqueror does indeed handle auto-completion... are you referring to 'tab' (or similar) completion?
It's kind of ironic that you bring this up now as there is a rather lengthy discussion about completion on the kde devel lists right now. We intend to support both kinds of completion (auto and key-based) in nearly everything. Auto-completion is done where history matters (web browsing, for instance) and key completion where the files matter. By key completion, I mean hitting the TAB or End or CTRL-E or whatever key to match an existing file. Note that in KDE, we will match not only local files, but files on, say, an FTP server too.
Tom, what I find "terribly, terribly disappointing" is the fact that you have very clearly never tried using KDE.. yet find the time to jump to a lot of assumptions that could easily be proven wrong with just a few minutes of fooling around on the desktop.
It is no secret that we target Windows and Mac users -- after all, they are the ones that are moving to Linux/FreeBSD/etc in droves. Alienating them would be stupid. To claim that this means that we "don't care [about Unix people]" is laughable, though. Read what I said a bit more carefully.. what is included in KDE is entirely influenced by what the developers are used to and like. Do keep in mind that all KDE developers are "Unix people"
So what do you require? The ability to use the old X tools like xterm, xedit, etc? Go for it! KDE allows you to run any X app you want... and even conveniently puts links in the K Menu for a number of them. You want to use non-KDE apps as the default app for certain filetypes? Not a problem! I use gvim as the default editor on my KDE system. I click on a text file in konqueror and it opens up in gvim. You want to edit the config files by hand? Well, all config files are in ASCII text so fire up emacs and have at it.
What else do you want? The old crappy look of the Unix desktop? Okay, use TWM instead of the KDE window manager. Set the widget style to Motif.. and after 2.0, we can make it look like OpenLook or even Athena.
So I don't get it. What is missing from KDE that is "sensible to Unix people"?
I love the anectdote about Robix. Talk about a company trying to screw themselves over!
It gets good, though. Check out this article from Nov 14 in the Arizona Republic: http://www.azcentral.com/business/1114comdex14.s html
It has a small interview with the CEO of Robix. A relevant quote:
"We're introducing a product, and we have a very good reason for going to Comdex," Rosen said. "We're looking for a small number of partners. We have to sort through the thousands of people who say, `Gee, this is cool,' to find the two guys who want to buy."
Hehe.. looks like they found "the two guys who want to buy" and told them to "get lost":-)
It's never fun getting threatening letters from lawyers... and it's certainly tempting to respond in a similar way to yours. But it's NEVER a good idea!
The lawyers will accept exactly ONE answer "Yes, we have complied with your demands". That's it. You may be right and they may be wrong (although in this case, I'd guess that IDG has the advantage) but it doesn't matter at all at this point.
Questions concerning who is right are resolved in court. In a case like this (trademarks) where there is substantial legal precendent to support the lawyers, you can bet that they will go foward.
Now are you prepared to pay for the court costs? Do you even know how much the costs are? Is it worth paying those costs just to keep the title of an email?
I understand what you're going through right now and I'll admit that I get a similar reaction in the same situation. However, it is almost never worth getting dragged to court for something that you aren't willing to stand behind on principle.
I'm not entirely happy with SOAP either.. but for different reasons. It seems just a smidgen more complex then XML-RPC but I don't see any significant advantage over the latter. XML-RPC works just fine for me and it's just as cross-platform.
LDO, now, is probably as good as dead wrt to being any kind of standard. It is probably more efficient and/or "better" than XML-RPC/SOAP in many ways.. but it just doesn't have the momentum or backing to make it fly. I think it's telling that the lead author of LDO is one of the most active participants on the XML-RPC lists.
Hear hear! Xml-Rpc, in one form or another, is going to be very big in the coming months (and maybe years). It is soooo simple to implement at it's base level that it will be ubiquitous.
Of course, as another poster mentioned, there are still some issues to make it an object model... but those aren't impossible issues!
I should maybe mention, too, that KDE will soon have integrated XmlRpc. I don't think it will be ready for our upcoming KRASH release, but it will almost surely be in 2.0. Basically, *every* single KDE app will have the capability of being an XmlRpc server and/or client with very minimal amounts of coding -- in fact, the server part should be transparent to the majority of apps.
I am all for converting to metric -- it simply makes more sense! For whatever reason, we have an easy time thinking in multiples of 5 and 10 and the metric system is made explicitely to mimic that.
That is, all of the metric system but temperature. The celsius scale is just plain wrong!
Now all measurements are inherently arbitrary. We simply agree on a set reference point and go from there. Meters are the length of a light wave. A kilogram is the weight of some brick somewhere in France(?).. I think. In any event, that's all fine and dandy.
So why is it so wrong that celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water? Because temperature MATTERS to humans and the state changes of water have nothing at all to do with us.
When Farhenheit(sp?) was picking the reference points for his scale, he did the logical thing and picked points on the far ranges of livable temperature for humans. Anything less than 0 is *really* code and anything greater than 100 is incredibly hot (kinda... I'd peg 110 as being the upper limit if I did my own scale). We are used to dealing with a scale from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100 with 1 (or 0) being the lowest and 100 being the highest in whatever.
The celsius scale doesn't take this into account at all. The upper limit of what we can stand is around 45 or so. 45?? Where's the significance there?
This means that the entire USABLE range of celsius is -10 to 45. There are two problems with that: they are meaningless (remember: 1 - 10 or 1-100 makes sense -10 to 45 doesn't) and they don't have a fine enough grain.
That is, there is maybe 55 degrees that encompasses the entire usable scale. That's simply not enough to work with. We can feel a huge difference between 40 and 45 degrees C.. much bigger then is warranted by 5 units.
So, yay to converting to liters and meters and boo to converting to celsius!
I love all the people saying how "obvious" that it was that this was a hoax. This statement makes it crystal clear which/. readers are not familiar with the thought-process of fundamental Christians.
An analogy: Back when Einstein was first publishing his theories, many MANY people thought that he was clearly wrong. It was "obvious" to those people that space could not warp and that time was relative. If Einstein was proven wrong, they would have been trumpeting "How could anybody believe that? Clearly it was all a big joke?"
The only reason it was "obvious" to those people is because they were ignorant in that particular field of study. It was far from obvious to those who were familiar with it.
That's essentially what is happening here. Those of us who HAVE had considerable exposure to the thought process of fundamental Christians didn't think it was even remotely obvious that it was a hoax. This could very EASILY been real!
Now I'll admit that I was a bit skeptical when I read the part about renaming kill and the like... but everything else about it was stuff that I've heard before many many times.
Mark my words: THIS one turned out to be a joke... but don't count on the next one to be the same!
Okay.. I talked to a friend that has SpeedChoice and found out the following:
o Downlink is supposed to be between 1 and 3Mbs. Apparently this is spotty lately, though o Uplink is 256K. This seems pretty stable. o Connection is always on (dedicated) o static IP o Allow servers (maybe.. he's going to check his terms of agreement to make sure) o $200 setup + $55/month
All in all, this deal walks all over the Tucson deal. So I'm still wondering what I'm missing here...
Sorry, but this makes me very suspicious. 911 is so cirtical that I can't believe they'd risk using the setup they've described. Where's the hot swap failover for when something dies?
You'd think so, right? Oops! We forget that everything costs money. 911 is particulary expensive, so when cuts come, it is in the firing line really fast.
Case in point: I grew up in a very rural area (northern Michigan). They did not have 911 service at ALL until last year. Why? Because it was too expensive to implement. The only way they could afford to do it was to put a phone tax of $0.50 a month for everybody. For 10 years, it was voted down every time it came up.
So how likely do you think it is that they will implement it as a risk-tolerant system with 99.99999% reliability (a few minutes of downtime per year)? Right. Not a chance...
You will. The PerlQt port is lagging behind right now.. but that doesn't mean that it won't catch up again.
> I can't write python applications for KDE
Why not? Last I looked (yesterday), the python binding for KDE were quite complete.
> I can't write C applications for KDE
Would you even if there was a binding?
I think that this entire line of argument is a red herring. I hear this mostly from people who inherently don't like KDE and want to find something to pick on (now that the license issue is mostly a moot point, let's attack the lack of language support!)
The fact is that for all the talk, whenever language bindings *are* created, nobody uses them. You say you want to use perl with KDE. Okay.. a binding was created... but it fell behind since nobody used it! You say you want to use C. Fine enough. Why is it that when there *was* a C binding that nobody used it?
What it comes down to is this: if people really wanted to use other languages with KDE, then that binding would happen (e.g., python)!
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically, Connector only works if Outlook Web Access is enabled on Exchange. There are a few problems with this approach in the real world.
First, OWA isn't enabled by default in Exchange. That is because, secondly, OWA costs extra for each user. Third, as a result, all places I've worked that used Exchange either disallowed using OWA at all or severly limited its use.
For instance, at my current company, OWA is enabled but only has a few client licenses and is therefore blocked from all internal IPs. It's intended use is for people that are traveling that want to access their email via a web browser.
So, yeah, Connector is very slick and very useful... just not as slick and as useful as the euphoric posts here seem to indicate!
Still, the one thing that sticks in my memory about The Spot was their site design. It was somewhat similar to what they have now but a bit more primitive. Same idea, though. Back then, though, sites were full of BLINK tags, purple links on pages with grey backgrounds, and full of frames. The Spot's site actually looked nice! It was a breath of fresh air. I remember trying to make my own personal home page look like it.
The fact that the site looked so professionally done back in the day when nearly all sites were clearly slapped together by design-challenged geeks probably should have clued me in that it wasn't as real as they claimed it was.
Hrm. Just another random trip down memory lane!
This is wishful thinking at best and outright deceptive at worst. The only versions of Qt that you can legally develop with without paying for are licensed with either the GPL or QPL. Both the GPL and QPL require that your application be Open Source. If your application is closed source, then it cannot use a GPLed or QPLed Qt and thus, you must pay for the developer license.
I wrote the following back in the KDE 2.0 days and it still holds true today:
KDE Licensing Issues
It's a mistake to think that they are putting "more and more give-aways" in newer trailers. In fact, if you go back to movies made in the late 60's and early 70's, you'll see that modern trailers show next to nothing about the plot compared to then.
The canonical example would be the original theatrical trailer for "The Graduate" (1967). The trailer was three minutes long and included EVERY detail of the plot from beginning to end!
This was par for course back. It wasn't until the later 70s that directors starting resisting a bit and not letting the studio give away the entire plot in the trailer.
No, you don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to another DVD.. but I wonder if that's what they (the smart ones, anyway) are really worried about. The MPAA complains about losing millions of dollars due to piracy. Where and how? I wouldn't have the first clue how to get a pirated DVD even if I wanted to.
I think the key here is location. From what I've heard, most movie piracy at this scale is done in the Pacific Rim countries. And from my SVCD/VCD encoding days, I further remember that those two formats were very very popular in China and maybe Japan.
Summarizing the facts:
1. You don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to a DVD
2. DVD copies are (relatively) expensive
3. SVCD and VCDs are cheap (media and player-wise)
4. Pacific Rim countries are "hotbeds" of piracy
5. SVCD/VCD are very popular in the the Pacific Rim countries
6. DeCSS *IS* needed to recode a DVD to SVCD or VCD
Conclusion:
The MPAA isn't afraid of home users copying DVDs using DeCSS, they are afraid of mass re-encoding of DVDs into SVCDs for sale overseas. But since they are as jackbooted an organization as exists, they don't care that they step on home users on the way.
Am I off base, here?
FWIW, this doesn't have to mean that ripping and encoding to Ogg Vorbis is any harder than for MP3. I recently ripped a few hundred tracks to ogg using the following method:
- Insert CD into CD-ROM drive
- Start Konqueror and click on AudioCD Services
- Select all the songs I want to rip in the Ogg Vorbis folder (they look like normal files and selecting them works like you expect)
- Drag the selected files to
/space/music
That's it. Konqueror (using the kio_audiocd ioslave) takes care of ripping the track from CD, encoding it as Ogg Vorbis, and copying it over to my final location.Not necessarily. The idea that his quote was an insult never appeared in any print at the time. That is, there is no response from Hooke claiming insult or no further nasty letters from either side. The idea that it was an insult first surfaced in "Portrait of Isaac Newton" published in 1968... nearly 300 years after the fact!
That doesn't mean that it wasn't an insult.. it's just not as obvious as you make it sound.
The two main arguments that it was an honest compliment go like so:
- The letters, read in their entirety, are not insulting or defamatory at all. They spend most of their time praising what the other has done
- Newton wasn't one for "beating around the bush". When he insulted people (which he did frequently), he was crystal clear in doing so. Insulting by sarcasm was possible, but quite out of character for him
This essay summarizes all the arguments far better than I could ever:http://www.newton.org.uk/essays/Giants.html
Kurt Granroth
I realize that it is implied.. that is why I replied to Joseph's post. That implication is, however, incorrect. I am now stating that he was NOT speaking on behalf of KDE and the laywer he is referring to is NOT one of KDE's lawyers.
I am not prepared or qualified to comment on the specifics of Waldo's comments. It was a private email from an individual to an individual. If you want more clarification, you need to approach Mr Bastian and Mr Carter individually.
I will say again, though, that this email was and is not an official communication from the KDE Core Team.
This topic for this thread is a bit misleading. KDE has not in any way tried to silence Mr Carter. This email was from Waldo Bastian who, while a member of the KDE Core Team, was acting on his own in sending the letter. When or if the KDE Core Team ever issues any official opinions on this issue, you can be assured that they will not be in private email.
I don't think it's fair to ask "how many hours do you work?" without asking "are you happy with these hours?" It's entirely likely that many geeks are more then happy to work an incredible amount of hours.
I used to work as a corporate drone for a very large technology company. I was given a number (p28901) and took my place among the other 150,000 soul-less autonoma. I was bored silly every hour that I was there... and you're out of your mind if you think I would work on MINUTE more then 40 hours at that job.
Fast forward to the present. I get paid to work on my hobby -- a leading Open Source project. I set what I want to do and when I want to work on it. As a result, the line between what is my job and what is my hobby has completely disappeared... they are one and the same. I "work" during the day and significant parts of the night and during boring shows on TV and during commercials and on Saturdays and Sundays... probably around 60-80 hours a week (depending on what project I'm working on). But I'm loving it! This is incredibly fun stuff!
Moral of the story: I'd only worry about this issue if the majority of knowledge workers worked more then 40 hours a week because they "had to" not because they "wanted to"
I wonder how many Y2K related pranks are going to be pulled in the next 24 hours? I can see this happening over and over:
A large group of friends and family gather together to celebrate the new year. The countdown commences.. 10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1.. HAPPY.. and the power goes out! Some prankster hanging around the circuit box had cut the power. A portable air raid siren could only help matters at this time.
Can you imagine the reaction? I think that will prove irresistable to some people.
When I first read this, I thought "huh? that's what I said".. and then I noticed that my answer had been snipped on that question!
When I say that the themes probably won't be compatible, I am referring to the actual configuration files and such. There is work or plans in progress, though, that will create theme engines on both sides that will be able to read and "convert" (essentially) the themes dyamically. A GNOME engine that reads the KDE theme config files would allow me to run GNOME apps that looked very similar to (if not exactly like) KDE apps.
Now there might be some problems initially on some of the more advanced themes (I don't believe Gtk can currently handle the gradients that KDE can) but as time goes by, even those differences will likely smooth out.
Hmm.. I'm not sure if this is a typo or not. Konqueror does indeed handle auto-completion... are you referring to 'tab' (or similar) completion?
It's kind of ironic that you bring this up now as there is a rather lengthy discussion about completion on the kde devel lists right now. We intend to support both kinds of completion (auto and key-based) in nearly everything. Auto-completion is done where history matters (web browsing, for instance) and key completion where the files matter. By key completion, I mean hitting the TAB or End or CTRL-E or whatever key to match an existing file. Note that in KDE, we will match not only local files, but files on, say, an FTP server too.
And with everything, it's configurable.
It is no secret that we target Windows and Mac users -- after all, they are the ones that are moving to Linux/FreeBSD/etc in droves. Alienating them would be stupid. To claim that this means that we "don't care [about Unix people]" is laughable, though. Read what I said a bit more carefully.. what is included in KDE is entirely influenced by what the developers are used to and like. Do keep in mind that all KDE developers are "Unix people"
So what do you require? The ability to use the old X tools like xterm, xedit, etc? Go for it! KDE allows you to run any X app you want... and even conveniently puts links in the K Menu for a number of them. You want to use non-KDE apps as the default app for certain filetypes? Not a problem! I use gvim as the default editor on my KDE system. I click on a text file in konqueror and it opens up in gvim. You want to edit the config files by hand? Well, all config files are in ASCII text so fire up emacs and have at it.
What else do you want? The old crappy look of the Unix desktop? Okay, use TWM instead of the KDE window manager. Set the widget style to Motif.. and after 2.0, we can make it look like OpenLook or even Athena.
So I don't get it. What is missing from KDE that is "sensible to Unix people"?
I love the anectdote about Robix. Talk about a company trying to screw themselves over!
s html
:-)
It gets good, though. Check out this article from Nov 14 in the Arizona Republic:
http://www.azcentral.com/business/1114comdex14.
It has a small interview with the CEO of Robix. A relevant quote:
"We're introducing a product, and we have a very
good reason for going to Comdex," Rosen said.
"We're looking for a small number of partners.
We have to sort through the thousands of people
who say, `Gee, this is cool,' to find the two guys
who want to buy."
Hehe.. looks like they found "the two guys who want to buy" and told them to "get lost"
It's never fun getting threatening letters from lawyers... and it's certainly tempting to respond in a similar way to yours. But it's NEVER a good idea!
The lawyers will accept exactly ONE answer "Yes, we have complied with your demands". That's it. You may be right and they may be wrong (although in this case, I'd guess that IDG has the advantage) but it doesn't matter at all at this point.
Questions concerning who is right are resolved in court. In a case like this (trademarks) where there is substantial legal precendent to support the lawyers, you can bet that they will go foward.
Now are you prepared to pay for the court costs? Do you even know how much the costs are? Is it worth paying those costs just to keep the title of an email?
I understand what you're going through right now and I'll admit that I get a similar reaction in the same situation. However, it is almost never worth getting dragged to court for something that you aren't willing to stand behind on principle.
I'm not entirely happy with SOAP either.. but for different reasons. It seems just a smidgen more complex then XML-RPC but I don't see any significant advantage over the latter. XML-RPC works just fine for me and it's just as cross-platform.
LDO, now, is probably as good as dead wrt to being any kind of standard. It is probably more efficient and/or "better" than XML-RPC/SOAP in many ways.. but it just doesn't have the momentum or backing to make it fly. I think it's telling that the lead author of LDO is one of the most active participants on the XML-RPC lists.
Hear hear! Xml-Rpc, in one form or another, is going to be very big in the coming months (and maybe years). It is soooo simple to implement at it's base level that it will be ubiquitous.
Of course, as another poster mentioned, there are still some issues to make it an object model... but those aren't impossible issues!
I should maybe mention, too, that KDE will soon have integrated XmlRpc. I don't think it will be ready for our upcoming KRASH release, but it will almost surely be in 2.0. Basically, *every* single KDE app will have the capability of being an XmlRpc server and/or client with very minimal amounts of coding -- in fact, the server part should be transparent to the majority of apps.
They want to be the "easiest" distribution.. but they aren't using KDE (or even GNOME)?
I dunno who their beta testers have been but the newbies *I* know would freak out having to use WindowMaker or Enlightenment on their own...
I am all for converting to metric -- it simply makes more sense! For whatever reason, we have an easy time thinking in multiples of 5 and 10 and the metric system is made explicitely to mimic that.
That is, all of the metric system but temperature. The celsius scale is just plain wrong!
Now all measurements are inherently arbitrary. We simply agree on a set reference point and go from there. Meters are the length of a light wave. A kilogram is the weight of some brick somewhere in France(?).. I think. In any event, that's all fine and dandy.
So why is it so wrong that celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water? Because temperature MATTERS to humans and the state changes of water have nothing at all to do with us.
When Farhenheit(sp?) was picking the reference points for his scale, he did the logical thing and picked points on the far ranges of livable temperature for humans. Anything less than 0 is *really* code and anything greater than 100 is incredibly hot (kinda... I'd peg 110 as being the upper limit if I did my own scale). We are used to dealing with a scale from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100 with 1 (or 0) being the lowest and 100 being the highest in whatever.
The celsius scale doesn't take this into account at all. The upper limit of what we can stand is around 45 or so. 45?? Where's the significance there?
This means that the entire USABLE range of celsius is -10 to 45. There are two problems with that: they are meaningless (remember: 1 - 10 or 1-100 makes sense -10 to 45 doesn't) and they don't have a fine enough grain.
That is, there is maybe 55 degrees that encompasses the entire usable scale. That's simply not enough to work with. We can feel a huge difference between 40 and 45 degrees C.. much bigger then is warranted by 5 units.
So, yay to converting to liters and meters and boo to converting to celsius!
I love all the people saying how "obvious" that it was that this was a hoax. This statement makes it crystal clear which /. readers are not familiar with the thought-process of fundamental Christians.
An analogy: Back when Einstein was first publishing his theories, many MANY people thought that he was clearly wrong. It was "obvious" to those people that space could not warp and that time was relative. If Einstein was proven wrong, they would have been trumpeting "How could anybody believe that? Clearly it was all a big joke?"
The only reason it was "obvious" to those people is because they were ignorant in that particular field of study. It was far from obvious to those who were familiar with it.
That's essentially what is happening here. Those of us who HAVE had considerable exposure to the thought process of fundamental Christians didn't think it was even remotely obvious that it was a hoax. This could very EASILY been real!
Now I'll admit that I was a bit skeptical when I read the part about renaming kill and the like... but everything else about it was stuff that I've heard before many many times.
Mark my words: THIS one turned out to be a joke... but don't count on the next one to be the same!
Okay.. I talked to a friend that has SpeedChoice and found out the following:
o Downlink is supposed to be between 1 and 3Mbs. Apparently this is spotty lately, though
o Uplink is 256K. This seems pretty stable.
o Connection is always on (dedicated)
o static IP
o Allow servers (maybe.. he's going to check his terms of agreement to make sure)
o $200 setup + $55/month
All in all, this deal walks all over the Tucson deal. So I'm still wondering what I'm missing here...
So 2-way wireless 1.5Mbs for about $100 a month. Why so much? I'm clearly missing something here.
In Phoenix, there is a wireless 'net service called SpeedChoice that offers 10Mbs downlink and not quite so fast uplink for about $40/month.
What's the difference? Is the Tucson one 24x7 "instant/always on"? Is the upload also 1.5Mbs?
If neither is the case, I don't see how they can justify the cost...
You'd think so, right? Oops! We forget that everything costs money. 911 is particulary expensive, so when cuts come, it is in the firing line really fast.
Case in point: I grew up in a very rural area (northern Michigan). They did not have 911 service at ALL until last year. Why? Because it was too expensive to implement. The only way they could afford to do it was to put a phone tax of $0.50 a month for everybody. For 10 years, it was voted down every time it came up.
So how likely do you think it is that they will implement it as a risk-tolerant system with 99.99999% reliability (a few minutes of downtime per year)? Right. Not a chance...
> I can't write Ada programs for KDE
True
> I can't write graphical perl programs for KDE
You will. The PerlQt port is lagging behind right now.. but that doesn't mean that it won't catch up again.
> I can't write python applications for KDE
Why not? Last I looked (yesterday), the python binding for KDE were quite complete.
> I can't write C applications for KDE
Would you even if there was a binding?
I think that this entire line of argument is a red herring. I hear this mostly from people who inherently don't like KDE and want to find something to pick on (now that the license issue is mostly a moot point, let's attack the lack of language support!)
The fact is that for all the talk, whenever language bindings *are* created, nobody uses them. You say you want to use perl with KDE. Okay.. a binding was created... but it fell behind since nobody used it! You say you want to use C. Fine enough. Why is it that when there *was* a C binding that nobody used it?
What it comes down to is this: if people really wanted to use other languages with KDE, then that binding would happen (e.g., python)!