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Well, I love KDE, and have a 64-bit machine and no strong connection to my current distro, Kubuntu. Next time I get the itch (or something breaks), I think this will be the one I go to!

Thanks for posting it. The two reviews were good links, covering different aspects of the experience.

I'm looking forward to getting a 4k computer monitor. My phone and tablet both have sexy screens, why does my monitor have fewerpixels than it did 10 years ago? (was 1920x1200 now 1920x1080)

Both ASUS and Samsung now have reasonably priced models (under $600), but they are still TN and 27". The nice IPS 30" models are still in the thousands, so I'm eagerly waiting for their prices to drop a bit more.

Agreed; technology purchases end up not being "big," so I'd say a new (to me) car, some time in the next 6 months (probably before next summer, two summers in a row without A/C is too much).

I have no pressing tech needs that are not fulfilled.

Groceries

Probably a cup of coffee in the way in to work.

A new rear wheel for my tricycle.... now if the poll had said "my next big *technology* purchase will be..." then I might have chosen External Storage.

As a Java programmer all I can say is we'll have to take a wait and see approach. Oracle is really trying hard to split Java into a paid for enterprise version and a crap free version that will do less than 50% of the paid version. When that starts happening I think up-and-coming developers will move to free full featured languages like python. Soon finding a Java developer will be as easy as finding a COBOL developer, which I also am.

I think everyone here already knows that good ol' Zuck can reverse his decision at a moments notice and make everything on Facebook (that was previously claimed private) public again. If he changed direction once (as this article says), there's nothing stopping him from swinging back the other way in a year or two.

Heck, today, there's nothing stopping him from allowing you to mark something private while he sells it in the background without ever telling you about it.

Such is the way of "the cloud".

Putting you down as a "NFW GTFO OMDB" for using the new bitcoin atms then. Oh well. http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/business-technology/64806-bitcoin-atm-comes-to-canberra

You are on to something here. Use the eye scan plus a contact lens or glassed lens which together with a pin/passphrase/drawing/code is the key.Something you know. Something you have. I would prefer a usb key with a keychain + passphrase.Don't just think an idea sucks. Improve it.

Just another example why why users need root access to their device by default. Also a good case for inbuilt firewall and permissions denied by default.

Inspired by a tv show.. or demonstrated use of by the Bad Guys?

Isn't it funny when the government get's a taste of what a knee jerk reaction is like!

Which is to say, the editor's use of "password" in the headline rather than "single factor authentication key" is a smart, normal decision. Unlike the wacko shouting in bold about Minority Report, he or she isn't scared and under the compulsion to shout at people about the superiority of two and three factor auth every time he sees people boarding a train after swiping a card through a turnstile.

Good god/spaghetti monster what are you going on about? Have you ever had an RFID style badge to get in to work? Have you ever used an automated toll system? A subway payment card? A general admission ticket to a concert? A freaking metal door key?

None of those things require or assume passwords, and neither do retinal scans and similar tech. Just shut up already please.

Really, it's neither. It is sort of public, exceedingly difficult to copy, and cannot be replaced. But acting as a userID, it would still be needed for access. So even if they did get a password somehow, they would need to steal your eyes anyway.

New technology often isn't analogous to old ones.

Google already has everything else. If I give them this, they'll probably have enough to make a robot to replace me in my family!

Mistaking user ID for password has the potential for bodily harm. Didn't anyone see Minority Report? Do you really want to create a world where criminals want to steal your eyeballs? Thinking of biometrics as a replacement for passwords is one of the STUPIDEST and MOST DANGEROUS of all security mistakes!

User ID: Public, anyone can copy it, never changes, but you don't try to keep it secret because no one can hurt you with it; they would need your password.

Password: Secret, no one else should see it, must be replaced every six months.

You really want to replace your eyeballs every six months? THINK dammit before you spout nonsense.

Not to crush your dreams or nothing [CNN]...

With the profusion of cheap android tablets flooding the market (go ifive!) Intel's strategy here may well pan out for them.

Unless they do a Microsoft and completely cheese off their customer base with a rotten product.

and I learned something new today: Fogz is responsible for StackOverflow. No wonder it is so excellent.

Thanks for the thumbs up! I think once per week is about right - any more would be too much. I'm having fun discovering the new distros, anyway. If I find a little more free time I'll make an effort to install them in VMs to give them a spin first. Darned day job keeps getting in my way!

That's pretty darned impressive!

I love distro Fridays. Don't have much to say about the article subject matter, but it is well written.

Some of use here are just making grammatical edits

And the award for most ironic comment goes to...

The battery life seems to be comparable to that of other contenders, too. Asus claims run times up to nine hours on a single charge, which matches my subjective impressions based on casual use.

iPad mini Retina: 9.8 hours, 23.8 Wh battery
Memo Pad ME176C: ~9 hours, 15 Wh battery

Mainly due to Intel's lithography advantage. Bay trail at 22 nm vs Apple A5 at 32 nm

In a way you are right but again you are a minority. Most of us reading this are. Most of users will never find the extended toolbar or will never install the extension. Most of users will not even know those things exist. Most of users will not go searching for extensions.On the other hand I have seen people accidentally clicking a button in Excel and finding a function which saved them lots of time. Not only they used it again but they told other people in the office and soon everyone was using this. If this option was hidden, they would have never found it.The main purpose of dumbing down of interfaces is to sell it to the masses who otherwise would find it too complicated and would never used it. Everyone else loses but we have already bought into the product so we don't matter.Sorry about one long paragraph but I am typing this on my phone and when I click preview all newlines disappear.

You might save money by buying a cheapo tablet subsidized by Intel, but what about the battery consumption? ARM chips last so much longer without a recharge. I doubt Intel can match that.

"¦ everybody has two?

Don't forget your average staffer in the House is a recently-graduated person with a masters, and they're paid close to nothing. A lot do it for the experience, or for the cachi© of having worked in Congress. But the pay isn't great, and I'm told a huge number of House Reps are humongous assholes of the most arrogant sort. They are probably finding refuge in Wikipedia.

It does: have a look at the article. The dog is "Taco" and it's Joel's dog - and sort of, the entire office's dog now. If you use Trello, the dog is even part of the interface: whenever a new feature is released, Taco pops up and goes "Roo" to alert you to the news. It's either cute or annoying, depending on if you're a dog lover. In the article, Joel jokes, as Trello gained interest and funding ("got big"), Taco got big too. Cute mutt, anyway.

Very readable, unlike a lot of articles in specialized fields. And free, of course.

The main thing I'd hope for out of this acquisition is better integration into the Google world. The Twitch Android app is pretty embarrassing (no way at all to watch replays), and neither the app nor the website support Chromecast, despite it being one of the best possible fits for the device.

I am not sure that image has a whole lot to do with the story. :p

No doubt you will also be screaming for kids to get off of said lawn. :)

I don't think there's any argument for the ridiculousness of e-sports that can't be applied to real sports, to be honest. In both cases you are passively watching people much, much better than you compete together in some activity you like to engage in. People like to watch because they are able to marvel at the skill on display, discuss tactics and events with their friends, cheer for their favourites, and generally feel like some part of a community.

It's also crossing into the real world. There are many pubs around the world which will display e-sport events on their screens, and friends will gather to watch the games the same way they'd watch soccer or hockey

As far as the economics go, this is interesting. Valve's The International 4 event for DOTA 2, which was last week, had a prize pool of 10 million $ for the top 8 teams, but that was entirely founded through in-game purchases by the players. I think e-sports still have work to do to attract sponsors. Typically, computer hardware companies have been happy to contribute some money, but ideally you want events to be sponsored by the big ones: Coke, McDonalds, cable companies, etc. I think that with young people who have grown up on these games aging, this will soon be a reality.

However, that's just big events. Twitch is a whole lot more than that. There are many people who just watch players stream their gaming sessions because they want to improve their own play, learn about new games or generally just hang out with friends and chat, with the game being like a show running on a TV in the background. All these smaller streams taken together add up to a whole lot of advertising money. At any time there are hundreds of thousands of people watching stuff on Twitch. I think this is a great move by Google because they now essentially have a monopoly on this market. However, I fear their overzealous practices when it comes to copyright will ruin Twitch. I'm hoping someone else will start a service to compete, but given the dominance of youtube, a service that has been the source of many complaints recently, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't really think it's about not wanting to think, it's mostly about wanting to be able to find what you want as fast as possible. A program that includes everything will naturally add a lot of noise which will make it harder to find the option you need. Obviously you also need a basic set of features if you're gonna do any work, in that sense I perfectly understand the frustration with designers who make things "clean" at the cost of functionality.

The average user does want to think: he wants to think about the task at hand. I'd rather spend my brain's processing power dealing with whatever I wanted to do than to use it trying to figure out my tools. Yes, you can discover things you might not have expected when you are given complex tools, but an enterprising spirit would have sought out those advanced techniques anyway.

This is why I prefer to deal with those things using extensions, or simply choosing to install more advanced software if needed. To me a program like thunar is really striking the perfect balance: it does all that an average user might want, provides more niche functions in an unobtrusive fashion and is extensible as well

Isn't the unix philosophy to do one thing, and to do it well? I like that way of thinking. :)

With the latest style changes and cleanup, I think they can be taken more seriously. I'm fairly impressed after watching the videos. Now the only question is how's performance on older hardware. They stated they rewrote some major pieces. Hopefully it's leaner and meaner.

That guy's name was Konqi. He sort of came to be with the Konqueror web browser, file manager app. It was okay, but somewhat juvenile I suppose. The KDE guys are aging and getting more (cough) mature.

Why is it that they feel they have the time to remove "French Fries" links from the Wendy's Wikipedia entry? So they want to fsck up the web and our country?

It looks like they may have finally removed that dragon. I've got nothing against mascots, but I must say it didn't really fit the rest of the UI. He'd show up randomly at shutdown/logout.

(I always thought we were "Pipe Heads" ha ha ha but that brings up different imagery, I suppose).

Got to confess I don't get this purchase because I don't get this economy. Gaming I get, though I'm not really a gaming. But competitive game-watching seems kind of pathetic to me, and yet it's a huge, apparently billion dollar economy? Consider me mystified. 'Scuze me while I go cut the grass of my lawn using a push, bladed-reel lawnmower, apparently.

I haven't used KDE very much since 3.5. When KDE 4 came out it seemed more sluggish and bloated on one of my now well aged systems. I switched to XFCE for all systems, and have been quite pleased. I may give KDE 5 a try on one of my newer boxes.

They're like armpits!!!

Good comment! Different strokes for different folks, though. I actually prefer programs that astound you from the start with all the options. It impresses me with how much the thing can already do, and I make an effort to learn what those options are and how to use them.

I use Adobe Acrobat XI at work now (not Reader) and they just went through this philosophical shift from the last version. In the last version there were tons of tricks and functions, and that's how I learned that it was even possible to deskew slanted images, reduce the DPI resolution and/or the file size, downsample bitmaps, and the like. XI does all those things too but looking at the menu you'd be hardpressed to guess it's possible. Instead you have to enable "toolsets" and that makes different tools exposed. Point is: the old version showed you everything it could do, while the new version you have to suspect it's possible and then hunt for the place to make it happen. I prefer the former.

That said, I recognize I'm in the minority. It seems most "modern" computer users are trying as hard as possible to not have to think, and expect software to be simplified down/dumbed down to where its interface meets their lighter cognitive load (so to speak). Maybe it's a generational thing.

Also interesting blog on upcoming wayland support in KDE.

So is KDE5 available in the default package sources of Ubuntu based distros? Or do you have to wait until October? Or go through some exotic manual installation? Or maybe a PPA?

I guess you can tell I'm a vim user, not an emacs one. :)

I'll have you know, I was born without a nose and find this deeply offensive!

Fo' real though, I actually kind of dislike how cluttered most KDE apps are. I don't consider it a good thing to include everything and the kitchen sink into a program. I'd rather be given options for realistic use cases. So that's why I tend to prefer the Gnome stuff (that and the fact that they pull less libraries; have they fixed that?). If a piece of software doesn't do enough for me, I'll look XFCE's way or try to find a GTK non-gnome app that has what I need. So for example, they made nautilius pretty useless, so I'm running thunar. But when it comes to music players, I really just want a play button and a slider.... So the gnome player is fine by me.

I'd prefer if KDE programes were more extendable, rather than being cluttered by default.

OCaml, My Caml!!!