Submitted by “The KDE development team is working hard on the KDE 4 platform. KDE 4 will include many exciting new technologies which will greatly enhance the functionality of KDE. One of these new technologies is Decibel. We would like to give you an idea of what Decibel is all about.”
I used Sabayan Linux on my PC-BSD box yesterday. XGL worked out of the box, and translucent windows looked equal, or better than those of Vista’s.
With all the new stuff and projects coming off Linux and the 2 main DE’s, why shell a month’s worth of my salary here in Mexico for a new copy of Vista?
I agree that Sabayon Linux is an incredibly impressive distribution in a visual sense. I’m not sure I would want to use it day-to-day because a lot of its package and configuration management is quirky (to say the least). And this is coming from one a very early (pre-1.0) Gentoo adopter. But this is off-topic.
This article is horrible. I had to read halfway through it to get any sense of what Decibel is, and even then it only provides a very vague idea. The best I can tell without looking at the project homepage is that it’s some sort of glue relating to processing streaming media. This is after the first paragraph indicated that the purpose of this article is to give the reader a good sense of what Decibel does.
Seriously, I realize that blogs, wikis, forums, and the web in general has dramatically lowered the bar for written media. But sometimes this stuff is so poor it challenges my faith in our ability as humans to communicate in writing.
Edited 2007-02-09 20:21
How many more KDE topics do we need? is this OSNEWS or KDENews?
Edited 2007-02-09 20:00
Well, if KDE makes the tech news at such a pace , I’d say fair is fair.
Edited 2007-02-09 20:01
My guess is tha Thom is trying to fix up the mess he did with the article he wrote about the development of KDE 4.
Thom if you read this, you don’t need to kiss these trolls ass anymore.
Edited 2007-02-09 20:02
Well, looking at your comment score I think there are actually quite a lot of people who are intersted in the progress KDE is making.
That being said I would like to add that I don’t consider this _particular_ article to be very well written or informative. Anyway, looking forward to the next one!
Edited 2007-02-09 20:12
That being said I would like to add that I don’t consider this _particular_ article to be very well written or informative.
The article is actually the first part of an article series about Decibel, but the splitting might not be optimal.
Technical articles are often hard to split correctly since every reader might have other core interests and this first part tries to introduce the general concepts or ideas the project is based on first, so it is unfortunately also very light on details
Technical articles are often hard to split correctly since every reader might have other core interests and this first part tries to introduce the general concepts or ideas the project is based on first, so it is unfortunately also very light on details
I can understand that.
But main reason for that article to be poor is that first words describing what Decibel actually is about, are in 5th paragraph. And article has 8 paragraphs…
Ok, 4th paragraph is probably good intro to 5th, but first 3 look like some kind of annoying advertisement.
Edited 2007-02-09 21:09
Today we have quite a collection of computer aided communication channels: e-mail, chat, instant messaging, SMS, VoIP, etc.
Some of those communication channels provide feedback about the avilability of the communication parnter, e.g. presence information of IM clients.
The idea is to collect such information in a central place, combine it with other communication related data (e-mail address, phone number) and offer a list of such possibilities on request.
Further, policies likes “I prefer text based communication over voice” or “don’t call Joe on cell phone during office hours” can influence the sorting of such a list of choices or even not get them listed at all.
Basically an envision workflow is like this:
you have some application you use to interface with your possible communication partners, e.g. address book application, “buddy” applet, etc.
This application can then retrieve a list of communication options for you, sorted and filtered by polices as described above.
Upon making a choice the application might even be able to establish the communication channel if the medium supports it, e.g. open an e-mail composer window, a chat window or dialing the telephone number.
Edit:
And since this is based on shared infrastructure (D-Bus) and open specifications (e.g. Telepathy), this is not just a KDE thing. Communication channels and presence information can be provided by any client, e.g. GAIM, and interaction with the service manager “Houston” is most likely also not tied to using a KDE based GUI.
Edited 2007-02-09 21:25
You make more sense than the article!
Now I hope they will also think of LDAP integration and not just home users. It seems like it would be a powerful way to ease collaboration within a company.
You make more sense than the article!
Thank you
However I think the whole article, i.e. all four parts together, will make an even better job at explaining Decibel. We’ll just have to be patient.
Now I hope they will also think of LDAP integration and not just home users.
Quite likely. The information about contact options will alsmo certainly come from a specialized application, e.g. the mentioned address book client or a PIM framework like Akonadi and those usually have support for LDAP or groupware servers.
Edited 2007-02-09 21:44
I never got excited about the arrival of Windows XP or Vista, but so far I’m pretty excited about the new KDE.
For the first time in a long while I can’t wait to try a (fairly) new DE. ^.^ Especially since I’m convinced I can run it on the same old laptop I use now without fearing it’ll be too slow.
I get really sick of all these articles that throw around marketing nonsense where you have to wade through two or three paragraphs of terms like ‘experience’ or ‘without limits’ just to find out it’s YET ANOTHER marketspeat tossed atop an existing technology – like a chat and VoIP protocol.
When you have no idea what the article is from the text provided, then click on the ‘more info link’ and have to read three paragraphs JUST to get to the meat of what it is, that’s a /FAIL/ hard.
As to what it is – wow, just what we need, ANOTHER protocol. Color me unimpressed.
Edited 2007-02-09 22:52
Marketspeak even… Man, I can’t type today worth a damn.
As to what it is – wow, just what we need, ANOTHER protocol. Color me unimpressed.
Did you read the article?
It’s not just another protocol. It’s an API for simplified access to existing and future protocols. It’s about building a framework for real-time collaborative capabilities that applications can hook into without having to worry about yet another protocol. In other words, it addresses the very issue you’re implying, too many communication channels with not enough sanity or rationalization.
It may not impress you personally, but in the enterprise and commercial space, concepts like collaboration, presence/location awareness, unified messaging etc. are areas where tech is heading, so it’s only a matter of time before those concepts trickle down to the consumer/mass-market space. Out of all the buzz we’ve seen from KDE4, this is one of the most forward-looking components they’re building, despite the lack of bling-factor and headline-generating sex-appeal.
It’s a good thing(tm)
>> concepts like collaboration, presence/location awareness, unified messaging
The only part of that which seems the LEAST bit relevant is unified messaging… something I’ve been doing since 1998. The rest of that is throwing around buzzwords to pad it out and make it sound more important than it is.
>> It’s about building a framework for real-time collaborative capabilities
Sounds like proactive diversity for a business-centric next generation solution involving synergy between vendor leverage and Web 2.0, resulting in seamless integration of a paradigm shift in empowerment.
I say, I say, that’s a joke son. This is gonna cause more confusion than a mouse in a burlesque show.
The only part of that which seems the LEAST bit relevant is unified messaging… something I’ve been doing since 1998. The rest of that is throwing around buzzwords to pad it out and make it sound more important than it is.
Right. UM isn’t new, open UM is. You may prefer being tied to a single vendor, which is the current state, others don’t. One of the big inhibitors to UM is the inability of customers to forklift existing infrastructures to support it. Even Microsoft, for crying out loud, is looking for standardization here. (As long as it revolves around Outlook/Exchange, that is.)
As to the rest, if you think collaborative work isn’t something the IT industry is working towards, well, I’m not going to argue because you’re probably using a teletype to receive your news updates and it hasn’t spit anything out in the last 15 years.
Sounds like proactive diversity for a business-centric next generation solution involving synergy between vendor leverage and Web 2.0, resulting in seamless integration of a paradigm shift in empowerment.
I say, I say, that’s a joke son. This is gonna cause more confusion than a mouse in a burlesque show.
Ok, I get it, fancy words confuse. But dude, just cause you can’t figure it out, don’t discount the rest of the industry. Seriously, it’s a big wide world out there. Get out on the interweb and explore it a little bit.
At the end of the day, nobody’s going to force you to use it, anyways.
>> Ok, I get it, fancy words confuse.
No, you don’t get it… It’s not that they confuse, it’s that they don’t actually SAY anything – which was my point. On the “what it is about” page there is really only one paragraph that seems to have ANYTHING to do with the alleged topic… and even then what it actually is … well, isn’t really explained. It reeks of ‘lets have the marketing guy who doesn’t understand it write the article’. It reads like they are talking about a protocol, yet from what you’ve said it sounds more like IPC… in either case the intent of the article ends up drowned in 200+ words of so much nothing.