11 Strawmen About KDE4

 1. “KDE4 is finished”

 2. “Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake”

3. KDE needs a fork

4. “KDE needs to drop Plasma”

5. “Plasma lacks functionality”

6. “KDE4 cannot cure cancer”

7. “The whole KDE4 desktop interface is radically new”

8. “I am forced to use the KDE in the dark because my light is broken”

9. “The KDE team does not like llamas”

10. “KDE 4 vs 4.0 is confusing”

11. “KDE should just have told the truth and not pretended KDE 4 was ready and then articles like this would not have been necessary 6 months later”

To see rebuttals to all these strawmen and more, read the article over at groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Obviously Perspex Prop Skull

I know no-one will see this, but I feel it is my duty having just sat through 124minutes of Indy4 to inform you that it is complete and utter unmitigated SHITE. And not even in a funny way. Just in an annoying “oh fuck, its still going on” way.

Seriously, the Goonies is more believable and logical than this. And some of the acting is better too.

If you have a ticket, sell it, get your money back and spend 3 hours of your life on something else more worthwhile. Our only hope for the future is that Harrison Ford dies before George Lucas gets another dose of laxatives delivered to Skywalker Ranch.

Other Planet GNOME issues

planet.gnome.org (or Pogo as I will be referring to it as in an attempt to make it stick (teehee) and its a much cuter and easier to pronounce name than pgo or p.g.o or whathaveyou) has other interesting problems. I personally don’t care about who gets added to the planet at all, people say I should be there but I don’t want to be.

*I ALSO DON’T WANT TO BE ON Planet FIDO (my cute name for freedesktop.org come on people keep up here) IF YOU’RE READING THIS DANIEL!*

Anyway, man of the moment, Mr Rodney “Dobey” Dawes complained that his copyright was being infringed by his blog being aggregated there: “Since the planet software intentionally violates my copyright and freedom of speech by filtering content.” We’ll ignore the freedom of speech issue giving Rodney the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t really mean that.

He also created a wiki page to track issues with Pogo so that “we can catalogue  requests and track them more easily,(sic) rather than relying on Jeff’s personal mail, (sic) which he obviousy has problems replying to.”

Now, violation of copyright is a serious issue and so it was duly added to the wiki page so that we could track the issue along with other important issues like changing some icon to a different one, yaknow the important earth shattering maintainship stuff. But, it seems that although Rodney is happy to complain and rant about this issue, claiming, like Chicken Licken that the sky is falling on the idea “a sane web”, he doesn’t want to track this issue, reverting all attempts to add it and ignores all attempts to discuss it (I’ll not go into the threats of physical violence made because I don’t believe they were serious and I’m not too worried about Rodney trying to kick me in the groin but he can always join the queue if he wants behind the KDE guy who’s “stalking” me and the GPSD guys who’re pissed off with me too (and they may have guns)) Personally I think that allegations of copyright violation is far more serious than some French guy not having his blog added to Pogo.

There is a point to this though so bare with me. As I said above I don’t care who is on Pogo. I don’t care if Rodney’s blog is there or not. If it is then I’ll read it if I think its interesting or I’ll ignore it if I think that he’s talking shite. But you have to wonder about someone’s motivations if on one hand they’re screaming blue murder about copyright and free speech violations, but on the other they don’t want to do anything to stop these violations. People need to look carefully when choosing spokesmen for their cause…

Incidently, and this may shock some, I agree with Rodney on the copyright violations and think that the Planet concept has the potential to be a legal minefield. How do you get around having no-deriv licensed blogs on a Planet, which is clearly creating a derivative? And how do you have a share-alike blog aggregated with a more restrictive licensed blog? And in the case of Rodney’s blog there is no license which would mean that doing anything with his blog feed is in violation of his copyright.

Anyway enough of this frivolity can OSNews and ITWire write an article on me now please? I want my cheque of internet money!

Poisonous People

I’d like to formally and public announce before anyone else does that Iain Holmes is a poisonous person. In his 30 miserable godforsaken years  on this planet he has failed to live up to many of his promises and claims. In fact, most of them. Nearly all of them. He clearly cannot be trusted at all and you should not rely on him to do anything. At all. Just look at how often he tells people demanding features on metacity’s compositor. Fucking poisonous asshole. If we all shun him then maybe he’ll stop. Its the only way people learn.

Keeping things in perspective

““Motorists are being treated like they’ve committed murder every time they get in their car. It’s disgusting.” – Hugh Bladen (The Association of British Drivers) on parking meter charges like £3 for 5 hours in today’s Express. He truely knows what its like to be a convicted murderer.

Meanwhile celebrity chef Brian Turner says, “I believe if we stop celebrating St George’s Day and all that is great about our country, we will lose our distinctive identity in Europe.” Brian’s just annoyed we get St Paddy’s day of for a big pissup.