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Slashback: Cooperation, Gravity, Petite 199

Slashback with more (below) on KDE/GNOME cooperation (hint -- they're not renaming it "GNOMKDE"); the desert parachute nuts, a tiny P4 machine, and another chance to Ask Kevin Mitnick, at least if you're near Pittsburgh. Enjoy!

This is only making my biggest case look even bigger. Andrew Pakula of StealthPC writes: "A little while ago you posted about our Pentium 3 little pc, the size of a CD-ROM. ... Many of emails people sent us however were for people looking for a Pentium 4 little pc but at the time we didn't have anything to offer them with that power.

Well now we do have a Pentium 4 version, slightly taller than the Pentium 3 version it is still very, very small. You can take a look a look at it here. There are several pictures of it there as well as on the images page."

Just don't tell him your full real name. If your question didn't rise to the top of the recent Kevin Mitnick interview, here's your chance: Arvonn Tully points to this site (an activities listing for Carnegie Mellon University) writes "If you look at the bottom of the page you will see that Kevin Mitnick will be coming to Carnegie Mellon and lecturing on March 18th."

Those two are really joined at the XML! JP Schnapper-Casteras of the Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group writes about the post last week titled "KDE And Gnome Cooperate On Interface Guidelines," to clarify the extent of that cooperation: "We're going to co-locate, NOT combine the documents. This means that means there will be separate guidelines for GNOME and KDE in different chapters / sections of the same document. The current overview implies that KDE and GNOME will become stylistically similar, which is not the case. We're simply creating one site and mailing list where HIGs for all desktops can reside."

Lucy in the sky with a junker that's just begging to be dropped. Last September, we mentioned the fellows who like to abuse technology by dropping unusual things (manned automobiles, for one) from the backs of cargo planes for skydiving thrills. If that interested you, you will enjoy (and boggle at) the group's DVD documentary/video montage Good Stuff. I watched it with jaw unhinged; if this doesn't make you want to skydive, nothing will.

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Slashback: Cooperation, Gravity, Petite

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:07PM (#5275474)
    As an end user, who uses kde, and gtk apps, compatibllity is key. The kde team should write a wrapper for gtk to use kde widgets for gtk apps, so they look and feel the same.

    Geramik helps, but it would be kool to use the kde file dialog instead of the (yuck) gtk one.
  • Dedicated Servers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jpsowin ( 325530 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:08PM (#5275480) Homepage
    Those "little pc's" would be great for a bunch of dedicated servers in a compact space... I wonder if one could remove the CD drive and put a notebook HD in? That would be perfect...
  • by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:21PM (#5275555)
    Funny. A few friends of mine dropped some bowling balls off a rather tall building on campus when it was discovered that the doors to the roof were left unlocked. It bounced rather high several times. (They did have someone below checking to make sure no pedestrians were around).

    An other friend bought some bowling balls at a thrift store back in High School. They rolled it down the street to hit a curb where it would fly high up in the air - much to their amusement. They did this about 6 times until it smashed through the curb, flew off into the air and went through someones roof. Fortunately no one was home. But it taught them why dropping things isn't always a good idea.

    I've been hiking in the backcountry where some stupid mfer was rolling boulders down a mountain thinking no one was around. Unless you know exactly where you are dropping things and have scoped things out, dropping things from a plane isn't too smart. (IMO)

    BTW - there was an old B-movie staring Charlie Sheen where they do a cool stunt. Someone is locked in the trunk of a car and dropped out of a cargo plane. The stunt man dives after it, gets the keys out of the ignition, slides to the back, unlocks the trunk, gets the person out, clips them into their chute and then they tangent open together. Horrible movie but very cool stunt. Too bad today it would be handled via CGI. It seems like real stunts are becoming a thing of the past.

  • Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:32PM (#5275630)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?

    Grudges. KDE [kde.org] is based on Qt [trolltech.com], which wasn't Software Libre when the first version of KDE was released. (Which is why GNOME was started [gnome.org].)

    Also, as an example, I came in on the scene only five years ago, after Trolltech [trolltech.com] made Qt GPL. Oddly enough, I'm still annoyed at theKompany [thekompany.com], because I installed Kivio [thekompany.com] on my laptop so I could build circuit diagrams on my laptop. Come to find out, I have to buy the electronic schematics before I can use them in Kivio. Granted, they have the right to charge for extraneous material(which these extra stencils are), but I find, as a (P)oor (C)ollege (S)tudent, that free as in Beer is really, really advantageous. So I'm annoyed. I was really looking forward to built-in Python scripting, and, IMO, Dia [gnome.org] needs work before I can use it with much comfort.

    For the complete set of electronics symbols, at an average of $6 per stencil set [thekompany.com], I'd probably be paying out $60 this week. And if I wanted any other users on my laptop to be able to use those stencils, it's another $60 per person.

    And, as a final answer to your question, I gaurantee you I'll get at least one down-mod for badmouthing either GNOME [gnome.org] or KDE [koffice.org] office components. (Though I might not get modded at all as this is a rather old article now.)
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:33PM (#5275641)
    Those people who work on Konq just got more users than Mozilla might ever get when Apple picked KHTML over Safari. Why in the hell would they "give up the ghost" and go work on a Mozilla? Right now Konq and KHTML have a lot brighter future than Mozilla does.

    I personally use Mozilla or Phoenix on all my machines, but I'm also smart enough to realize the Mozilla project isn't doing to well these days. AOL laid off a bunch of staff last fall and 95% of users think Mozilla too slow and bloated(I stopped arguing with that fact). To make things worse, AOL has not pimped Netscape in the least. Netscape was always supposed to be the browser "for end users" and Mozilla was supposed to be "about technology". Well it sure as shit hasn't turned out that way.

    Where are all the OEM contracts? Why is Netscape or even Mozilla(who has no PR/marketing department) not shipping with any PC's?

    Mozilla isn't going anywhere. I still like and use it, but the fact remains AOL is a breath away from axing the project. Being that around 60% of the work on Mozilla is currently done by AOL employees this would be a big blow. Mozilla would still survive due to the fact its opensource, but the chance it ever(I'm not sure it even will) breaking into double digit market share will be gone.

  • Other Small PCs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OrangeHairMan ( 560161 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:44PM (#5275701)
    Most of these small PCs I've looked at have been >$300 (the one linked in the story doesn't list a price), and haven't been fast enough for my needs, so I looked and found a better solution: Mini-ITX.

    These motherboards are only 100 dollars and a little more than 6 inches square. They have integrated video, 800MHz VIA C3 processors, ethernet, TV out, sound, and 2 IDE busses. And the fact that they use C3 processors, they only consume 10 watts, for the whole motherboard! You can get more info here:

    http://mini-itx.com/ [mini-itx.com]
    http://shop2.outpost.com/product/3349552 [outpost.com]
    http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/mini_itx.jsp [via.com.tw]

    Orange
  • by BitHive ( 578094 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:52PM (#5275736) Homepage
    To me, a small mainboard means bad performance (i.e. memory throughput etc). Is this the case? I would gladly sacrifice expandability (PCI slots) if I was sure that the components that count (HDD, CPU, RAM) were still performing optimally. . .
  • by -tji ( 139690 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:27PM (#5275906) Journal
    This looks like a great board.. Integrated USB 2.0 and Firewire are great, especially with only one PCI slot to work with. But, how about a case to put it in?

    There are several good options for Mini-ITX motherboards.. If you don't need a lot of CPU power, the VIA EPIA motherboards - with the C3 processor - are a good option. They are low heat, which will help if you can find a small case.

    But, this P4 system could be quite challenging, given it's high power and heat dissipation requirements. Anyone have some good suggestions for a case for this thing?
  • Re:Skydiving (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @09:59PM (#5276163)
    Been there. Done that.

    Did a tandem jump. They bolt you to a person of far greater skill than you. My partner had done 4500+ jumps.

    For us, they videotaped us reading the "I am about to fling myself out of a pefectly good airplane" disclaimer on the permission sheet to ensure that there was no coercion or anything.

    I did the jump and was...disappointed.

    Perhaps I over rationalized the thing, but it wasn't any fun for me.

    First, unlike those free fall rides at amusement parks, there's no real "stomach" drop sensation, which makes sense because terminal velocity is 120ish MPH, and you're already going 100+ MPH in an airplace. You'll get the "Drop" if you leap out of a balloon or do base jumping.

    Second, there's no real sense of speed. You don't really know you're doing 120 MPH. All of your points of reference are pretty far away. I guess you'd get it if you zipped past someone who had already pulled their chute, but the mountains are to far away, and the ground is too far away as well.

    By the time you get the chute pulled (and encounter odd stresses in interesting places from the rigging straps), you're going much slower as you float to the ground, though the ground comes up pretty fast in the last 100 feet.

    Everybody else just had a blast, but for me it wasn't much more than sticking my head in a fast, cool, dry wind. I thought the thing in Vegas where you leap onto the column of air generated by a propeller was more interesting (dunno if that's still there or not).

    I do believe, though, that's it's safety is pretty good with an experienced partner. If you're at all inclined, then go for it. If nothing else it's a fun day out with your friends.

    Me? I'll stick to motorcycles, thanx. Whitewater rafting is also a blast. That's LOTS of fun.
  • by Osty ( 16825 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:16PM (#5276243)

    Could this be a new consequence of the Slashdot Effect? We all know about the damaging Slashdot Effect, where websites are literally blown out of existence by the huge amount of traffic Slashdot can generate. However, it seems very likely that theCarmack's change in luck so shortly after Slashdot's article had something to do with the Slashdot article. Maybe the widespread airing of his plight got back to the officials who were blocking him, or perhaps there are Slashdot readers involved in the same offices that turned around and decided to help rather than hinder.


    Just an interesting observation, is all. Good luck to theCarmack.

  • The solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by marm ( 144733 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:28PM (#5276314)

    Adjust the button order programmatically depending on what environment the app is running in.

    When running in KDE, GNOME/GTK+ programs should adopt the KDE button conventions (and possibly other UI choices).

    When running in GNOME, KDE/Qt programs should adopt the GNOME conventions.

    For KDE apps at least, this is relatively simple - much of the KDE user interface style is already programmatically enforced. Switching button order on dialogs (that inherit KDialogBase, and that's most of them) is a one-liner, a few more lines if it's to be run-time configurable. Similarly, changing menu and toolbar conventions/layout involves using a different XML file to merge with - hey presto, all the menus and toolbar buttons in all KDE apps are arranged differently.

    I don't know how easy this would be from a GNOME perspective - my guess is, at least for the button ordering, quite easy - the switch before GNOME2 was released didn't seem to take very long. As for menu/toolbar conventions, this depends on how many GNOME apps use GLADE rather than hardcoding their interface...

  • by CvD ( 94050 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @05:18AM (#5277895) Homepage Journal
    So what's freaky flying then? freak brother? As in sitflying? head up?

    I was in Perris this summer... jumped their skyvan a couple times... didn't do the hanging thing tho... next time maybe... :-)

    Have fun man! Wish I was there (weather really sucks right now here in the Netherlands).

    Cheers!
  • by Chiggy_Von_Richtoffe ( 565992 ) <F_dysonNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @09:14AM (#5278735)
    Pffft!!
    automobiles, shmautomobiles, real boffins dropp watermellons [worldwatchonline.com]!

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