Part of the «which one is worse, KDE4 or Windows 7?» usability experiment, I have installed KDE 4.3.0 under Windows XP. It (mostly) works, with a few minor bugs—such as Akregator believing that all the embedded images are weighting 4.0 GB.

I have then encountered a major annoyance. Dear Lazyweb, is this something that only happens under Windows, or KDE4 is so very much counterintuitive?

I have undocked (detached) the two side panels in Dolphin, and now I can’t move them at all!

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Unless X crashes a few more times in less than a week or so, I’ll stay with CentOS 5.3: I am too bored and unmotivated to proceed to any major switch. I am nevertheless trying to overcome my nausea and to «prepare for the (dark) future (of the operating systems)»…

XFCE 4.6.1 is boring (not a surprise, as I am already bored by default). And the daily builds of Xubuntu Karmic are still full of bugs. Nothing major, yet very annoying.

Surprisingly, Kubuntu’s daily builds are better. What I’ve tested had still KDE 4.3.0, not 4.3.1, but I couldn’t see any major breakages—ignoring, of course, the «broken usability by design» of KDE4. I can’t see why the fans of KDE4 say that Kubuntu is the worst incarnation of it. Maybe it was so before Karmic, eh?

I noticed that Karmic offers me to install the Broadcom STA driver which, frankly, works perfectly with BCM 4311… even in Kubuntu!

Here’s a nice idea: to use KDE 3.5.10 from Slackware 12.2 with Slackware 13.0.

How can they say the Linux kernel is mature, when they constantly invent new scheduling algorithms? Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler. Not to mention that you normally have to recompile the kernel with different configuration options (maybe this is why the desktop-optimized sidux kernels are much more responsive than the server-optimized Debian kernels), whereas in Windows this is a runtime-option (to optimize for applications or for services). Anyone knowing the situation in the BSD land?

I took some time to evaluate the usability of… Windows 7 Home Premium. Was it because I’ve enabled the automatic updates, or why was it able to automatically support my PC’s audio card? Windows 7 Ultimate needed me to feed it with a driver. Still, the XP version of the old ATI Radeon 9200 was mandatory.

I still don’t know which one is the least usable: Windows 7, or KDE4? One thing I found annoying in Windows 7 (except for the Vista-style Explorer) was the absence of the Quick Launch toolbar. Yeah, I know you can “pin” applications, but this is sheer idiocy: I don’t need Microsoft to tell me what I want, the same way I don’t expect the KDE team to know better than me my usability preferences. As a matter of fact, I’ve found in no time plenty of complaints on the missing Quick Launch toolbar, some of them with solutions (apparently not all the solutions are working with the RTM): #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, etc.

Ouch, they improved the file search, but… the sales of Advil will increase after October 22, as the MS-DOS style wildcards (*, ?) don’t work anymore as expected! Oh boy, how much happier I was in the times of MS-DOS, when there was no Internet and no glamor-only GUI design…

I’ve discover an official Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day Trial download. Caveat: «The 90-day Trial is the full working version of the Windows 7 Enterprise, the version most of you will be working with in your corporate environment. It will not require a product key (it is embedded with the download). After the 90-day Trial expires, if you wish to continue to use Windows 7 Enterprise, please note that you will be required to purchase and perform a clean installation of Windows 7, including drivers and applications. Please keep this in mind; Windows 7 Enterprise is not available through retail channels.»

P.S.: I forgot to mention that RHEL 5.4 was released.

I have tried for a couple of minutes Xubuntu Karmic Alpha-4 on the laptop. Once I installed mesa-utils, I was flabbergasted to see that glxgears on my cheap Intel 945GM video chip managed to get about 4600 FPS! Compare this to the original figures for Jaunty: 177 FPS with the official drivers, 420 FPS with the old drivers from a PPA, 1276 FPS with a newer kernel; for the record, RHEL5 clones give 1085 FPS at most.

I can’t tell anything about stability though.

Slackware 13.0 was unexpectedly released! Is Slackware still relevant in the world of Ubuntu, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard?

KDE 4.2.4 is not the best choice IMHO, it should have had KDE 4.3.0.

Then, Slackware remains a highly incomplete distro, even for what’s officially included. Say, it includes KDE, but it does not offer Kaffeine, albeit it comes with icons for Kaffeine in two other KDE packages. Then, it includes XFCE 4.6.1, but it’s barebone. No XFCE Goodies, nada. Instead, people should grab them from Robby Workman. And so on…

As there is no Slackware LiveCD, I can’t possibly know how much it likes the Intel video chips, but I noticed it comes with xf86-video-intel-2.8.0 by default, and then xf86-video-intel-2.7.1, xf86-video-intel-2.6.3 and xf86-video-intel-2.5.1 in extra/xf86-video-intel-alternate. It’s up to the user to fix the screwed X.Org…

I briefly tried yesterday… Windows 7 on my old PC, which only has 512 MB of RAM and a crappy ATI Radeon 9200SE. I was surprised to see that it installed rather quickly, and that it was performing very reasonably for 512 MB of RAM!

Of course, it has no support for the obsolete Radeon 9200. I had to find a driver for XP, then to point it to the folder where I extracted it (because the ATI setup fails). After a reboot, I was able to have a very nicely running Windows 7 with Radeon 9200!
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N-am nimic cu Tudor Galoş. Este băiat deştept, lucrează la Microsoft România, ceva cu Windows Business Group Lead, sau vânzări, sau marketing, sau dracu’ ştie, că eu sunt marxist şi mie poziţiile astea mi se par inutile (dacă nu este nevoie de mai multe pachete de Windows şi Office, foarte bine, să nu se vândă, care-i treaba, că nu-şi face Redmondu’ profiturile? mă doare’n pulă! ei, da, că cică n-ar mai avea bani de “softuer divelopmănt” fără vânzări, ete rahat), şi omul este destul de complex judecând după blogul său.

Sigur, gusturile sale nu-s şi ale mele, dar asta nu se pune. Ce se pune este că n-am înţeles din postarea lui mai veche despre Windows 7 Romanian cam cât dracu’ ar fi trebui să coste versiunea Home Premium: 120 sau 200 de euro? Cu sau fără TVA? Deci habar n-avea omul (dar cine să aibă habar, popa de la biserică?). Între timp, cică Redmondu’ s-a căcat în ventilator şi a zis că versiunea europeană cu “E” în nume şi fără MSIE nu o să mai existe (aşa o fi? dacă se schimbă schimbarea?), deci preţurile “anunţate” (sanchi, anunţate, dacă alea-s preţuri anunţate, cum or fi alea neanunţate?) nu mai sunt valabile, dar nu se cunosc alea finale. După cum vă spuneam, nu ştiu ce glandul calului fac ăştia de la divizia de bişniţă a muciînsoft, că cod nu scriu, buguri nu rezolvă, de vândut poate or vinde Dynamics (că tot este documentat pula pe site, aşa că musai să-ţi explice un “consultant” ce şi cum), şi nici de preţuri nu ştiu până nu le vine XLS-ul, iar când le-o veni XLS-ul de la HQ… de ce mai e nevoie de băieţii ăştia?

În fine, via articolul “Windows 7 to Cost Just Half the US Price in the UK”, am aflat că dacă mă duc aicea la Amazon UK pă sait, pot să precomand Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (cu ieşire pe 22 octombrie, şi ce dacă e în engleză şi nu în română, doar nu-s oligofren) pentru (numa’) 65 de lire (IVA incluido), ceea ce face cam 75,50 euroi!

Ah, că cică ăsta este pentru UK? Ia aruncaţi un ochişor acilea, unde la “Software” zice că se poate expedia către: «United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland (Republic of), Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.»

Deci, copii, dacă aveţi 65 de lire de aruncat (cu şipmănt face £76.74, recte cam 380 RON), ştiţi de unde să luaţi mai ieftin sloboz “Made by Microsoft”. Adică Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium UK, la preţ dă promo.

Galoş ie ocupat cu stinsul luminii.

Being in such a mood, I decided to ignore a lot of things and not to blog about them. The remainders of the previous days nevertheless include…

• From Slashdot: Microsoft Patents XML Word Processing Documents. Or rather the idea of storing in XML whatever data is needed by a word processing document. I am waiting for USPTO to grant Microsoft a patent on the idea of storing in a database whatever data needs to be stored in a database. And then the USPTO should grant to themselves a patent on a method and apparatus to transform the concept of patent in a major hindrance to innovation.
• From TIME’s Can China Save the World?
  

  There are certainly signs that some aspects of China’s recovery are ephemeral. Part of the reason China’s stock market has soared is that Chinese companies have received so much cheap financing that they have dumped proceeds into the equity market for lack of better alternatives. [...] Up to 30% of new bank lending this year has wound its way into equities. Why isn’t the money going into new businesses? The evidence suggests that in key parts of the economy growth remains anemic, particularly the important export-manufacturing sector, which continues to suffer from the reduction in global demand. According to a report from Fitch Ratings in the U.S., Chinese lending continues to accelerate even though corporate profits overall are shrinking — suggesting that China may be incubating its own financial crisis that could be triggered when the adrenal rush of the stimulus wears off.

  And (a Chinese Keynesianism?):

  According to a recent study by the World Bank, Beijing’s government spending will generate more than 80% of the country’s overall economic growth this year.

• For some reason, the NYT praises Microsoft: Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession. No kidding? Are the mediocre software portals the future?
• Listening these days: Francisco Tárrega – Integral de Guitarra, and Wes Montgomery – Goin’ Out Of My Head.
• Oh, wait, I still want to mention l’idiot du jour: it’s this guy, for inventing the wrong reasons to ditch Ubuntu: «GIMP just isn’t as easy to use as Paint.NET», «gEdit is nasty to look at, with a gimmicky font, oversized text and horrific colors», then… «Then, the biggest one for me: Cross-browser testing. I severely dislike IE (as a browser and as a development harness), but that doesn’t negate my need to test websites in it. Or Chrome, Safari, or Opera. Sadly, Ubuntu only natively supports Firefox. The rest are all workarounds.» Wow. Ubuntu doesn’t natively support MSIE and Safari. Who could have thought of that?

There is such a thing. Really. It’s part of the Microsoft DevLab Projects and it’s intended to corrupt the youngsters: Microsoft Small Basic.

Surprisingly, it’s not popular in the media. For once, Microsoft has been quiet on this “new, simplified reimplementation of Basic” that runs on .NET. I’ve found about it by chance, from the French magazine Micro Hebdo nº 585.

De 7 à 77 ans... La maladie d'amour version Microsoft?

Since everyone’s so extatic, I can’t ignore it: it is happening! Microsoft makes C# patent promise to unblock Mono:

Microsoft have announced that the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure will now come under the Microsoft Community Promise, a legally binding promise not to assert any patents or other rights related to the implementation of those standards. This means that the controversial issue of Mono, which at its core is an implementation of ECMA 334 and ECMA 335, should be clear of patent issues related to those standards.

Señor de Icaza is jubilating, fedora-mono is calling Boycott Novell names, plenty of people are optimistic, y compris on OSNews.com.

I am more than skeptical and cautious. First of all, only the ECMA-covered parts are “guaranteed not to bite”. That’s C# and CLI.
» Read more…

Before going down to whatever Linux issues might have affected my mind, here’s a Windows one, simply because I’ve experienced this stupid situation on a laptop while still in Utah:

• Forced updates plague Windows users worldwide
• It’s confirmed: Windows may update unexpectedly

The idea is that forced updates should not happen when the user has selected one of the following two options… yet they happen at times:

• Option 2: Download updates but prompt for review before installing them.
• Option 3: Check for updates but prompt before downloading or installing them.

Quote:

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• The bloody moron is now… two morons! Bryce Harrington has used the defective cells of his brain to declare with regards to the infamous Intel bug in Jaunty: “I think we can close this one now.  The issue is largely resolved in Karmic, and the commentary on this bug seems to have degenerated past usefulness.  Other bug reports are tracking kernel patches and other fixes proposed for Jaunty.” The shithead seems to be unable to understand that the bugs keeps being valid in Jaunty as long as there is no official fix for Jaunty, and the current release is Jaunty! “Largely resolved in Karmic” is a supreme arrogance.
• OK, I should really take into consideration ElRepo, once back home. I’m not familiar with the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) concept, and I don’t even want to understand it, but commander Dag has been very persuasive in providing a raison d’être of ElRepo: using kmod instead makes it much more convenient for the end user!
• It looks like Rahul has noticed Odiecolon.repo, and there is a short thread on epel-devel-list. I must find some time to explain them “the whys” and we’ll see then…
• I really tried Sugar on a Stick. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t find anything that could be beneficial to the kids, nor I could consider it as a brilliant design of anything. On the contrary, it only confirmed my preconception that Sugar is 100% shit and a waste of time and resources.
• That was a funny one, although constantly “innovating” (read: moving to some other place) the keyboard’s keys annoys me: Who moved my ‘Delete’ key? Lenovo did. Here’s why. So they made ESC and DEL huge. Now what?

I’ve just installed it on a junk laptop that runs XP. I can’t tell if it’s really doing something or not, I should probably wait for reports in the blogosphere about Microsoft Security Essentials failing to prevent an infection, etc.

As the official page stopped offering a download link, the guinea pigs Windows users willing to try it can download the installer from JCXP or from Vista123.net.

• This WTF really made my day: For Kids.
• Microsoft announces a limited public beta for a free antivirus, but the download page won’t work before Monday. Note that the first screen reads: “monitoring your system and helping to protect it”. It doesn’t claim to fully protect it!
• Having Yum for Breakfast was a relatively interesting read, although without a list of the actual packages there is no way to know how fair the comparison is. But Yum is slower than APT, that’s a known fact.

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Miscellanea:

• C’est de l’impensable. José Bové et Daniel Cohn-Bendit : Pour une relance démocratique de l’Europe : «Malgré ses évidentes imperfections, l’Europe est aujourd’hui le seul embryon fonctionnel d’une démocratie supranationale.»
• Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology: «In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.»
• Fast-food society, guaranteed ADHD: Beaten Into Submission.
• Succinct letter, striking message: The Health Insurance Labyrinth.
• SJVN’s Fedora 11’s best five features has raised a grammatical debate over which of the following is correct: «This is one of those changes that are invisible to most users…» or «This is one of those changes that is invisible to most users…». What do you think? If I translate the phrase into Romanian, the usage is to put it the first way (the plural for the verb), and I guess the same goes for French («Il s’agit d’un de ces changements qui sont invisibles pour la plupart des utilisateurs…»). Eh?!
• Naegleria fowleri and Dr. House: what kind of developed society is that of Homo Sapiens in the 21st century, if a bloody amoeba can kill you, and they usually find what was all about… post-mortem?!

Secţiunea “sloboz românesc”:

• Ministerul Educaţiei, Cercetării şi Inovării consideră religia drept materie obligatorie! Ministerul sulei răspunde: «religia fiind parte a trunchiului comun nu poate avea în nici un caz caracter opţional».
• Subscriu: trăim într-un căcat imens numit România: Asta-i tzara, mancatzash! A se citi cu atenţie şi pe inima goală.
• L-am ascultat şi eu o dată pe Boc, iar individul grăia: «Statul preia toate riscurile în limita a 60 de mii de euro, prin fondul de garantare.» Păi şi-atunci care mai este rolul băncilor în faimoasele împrumuturi cu dobândă redusă, pentru prima locuinţă? Dacă nu e vorba de nici un risc (deci nici de analiza de risc), la ce dracu’ mai iau băncile dobânda? Nu poa’ să dea Statul direct împrumuturile astea super-garantate, de pildă prin Trezorerie or something?

Software section:

• Some of the Blambot Comic Fonts are 100% free: Digital Strip; Letter-O-Matic; Creative Block;
  10¢ Soviet; etc.
• Windows users who dislike the latest SnagIt 9.0 can have a free SnagIt 7.25 with a legal key! Download — free key — via.

P.S. — Plans for Sunday: As I’ll be unavailable this Saturday, I hope I’ll be in the mood to decide whether I’ll move or not my Acer from Jaunty to CentOS on Sunday.

OSOR.EU: RO: Proprietary licence deal draws ire open source proponents:

The Romanian government announced its renewal of a framework software licence with Microsoft in the middle of May. The framework licence deal is worth 100 million euro in software licences to be used by government agencies between 2010 and 2012. Romania will also pay the software giant another 58 million euro this fall, as the final payment for the 2004 - 2009 framework licence agreement that expired last month.

» Read more…

FYI: I am not a fan of WinAmp, and even less a fan of skinning the applications. However, a friend has recommended me the cPro - cMP12 WinAmp skin, which looks surprisingly Vista-ish even on XP!

Not that bad, eh? What would be the Linux/BSD media player to offer a similar look and feel?
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Normally, I consider Windows Explorer to be marginally more usable than GNOME’s Nautilus, except that it can’t handle SFTP/SSH and it can’t build thumbnails for SVG files. With one important exception: sorting the files in a music or pictures folder.

Take the case of a folder with audio files. The sorting options don’t include sorting by the file modification date, but only by the “album’s release year”:
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No Conficker apocalypse, no poisson d’avril… and no reading of “news” today — except that F11-Beta was released yesterday, and CentOS 5.3 was indeed released today.

Bric-à-brac to follow… (bonus: Lawrence Lessig in Playboy).
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I am not very fond of the site Giveaway Of The Day, mainly because it features tons of worthless software, and then because such a software can only be installed in the respective day, because of a dumb locked installer who needs to “authorize” the license on a remote server (and no, it doesn’t know about proxies).

Maybe I should have visited it more often, because I discovered that not all of the giveaways are so thouroughly locked-up!

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It happened again — the same way it took place 4 months ago: about 40 hours with more than 38 deg. C, no matter how many pills I swallowed —, so I screwed my weekend, and today I’m feeling dizzy, plus my nose is congested and not very happy. But there is more screwage (screwiness?) to write about.
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I was indeed wrong. Mea culpa about that. Trend Micro Internet Security 2009 is not much smarter than Norton Internet Security 2009. It’s still a stupid, cupid piece of bloatware…

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