Teacher here. I have no idea what you are talking about. It certainly doesn't apply to mathematics at all. In fact the standards line up 95% with the previous state standards I used.

Teacher here and as a high school math teacher it has had very little impact on me or my students. The standards are almost the same as the previous State of Michigan standards and are close the NCTM standards. I'm using a book published in 1992. Lets not confuse the standards with crappy worksheets (because that is new) or with other different initiatives (and meddlers).

I'll absolutely agree that too many people have their fingers in the pie and that not only is not everyone going to be a coder, but the coders are going to be better served taking math and logic first. And the two tests different states are starting to use, while well intended, are an absolute disaster with little to no practicing teachers having input.

You might be. I thought they were the first to lose their minds.

Having taught in both inner city, predominantly black schools and rural, predominantly white schools I will cop to being paranoid about racism. I see the looks, and hear the comments when people hear where I have taught. I am well aware that many racists know that they can't explicitly verbalize their racist thoughts and so couch them in a slightly twisted way and give a nudge and a nod and a "you know what I mean." So I will cop to be a bit sensitive to matters of race (maybe even a bit paranoid). That said, I am consistently surprised by how naive and sheltered most of the Slashdot membership is about racism. Or maybe they will also tell me that the Confederate flag isn't a symbol or racism. I enjoy that one every damn school year. As for assuming the grandparent was racist, how the hell is that racist? It has nothing to do with the race of the grandparent, it has everything to do with what they said and how they said it.

And it is possible that I am missing a level of sarcasm and satire with the grandparent. Maybe they are actually advocating for gun locks with biometric recognition. That said, my experience with people who say "you know who I mean" has been universally negative. In an actual conversation I frequently need to wait for less than five minutes before you hear about how "those people don't know their place anymore."

You honestly read the grandparent and don't believe they weren't stereotyping? The fact that the grandparent was moderated to "funny" is a separate, disturbing fact in and of itself.

If they bring back my KDE 3 workflow I would be interested.

Kasbar was... amazing. I'm guessing the window preview part is back (and the first time I ever saw that was Kasbar on KDE but KDE 4 had to throw the baby out with the bath water). But I also miss being able to change window behavior / decoration with a right click on the task. Want to full screen an application? Right click on the task in taskbar and make it full screen. Right click again (because you could throw your mouse in the corner and get it kasbar back on top) and turn it off. Right click and that window is always on top. Right click and pin it across desktops. Right click and remove window decorations. Fucking powerful, fucking easy, fucking intuitive.

As a teacher with a 1 year old trying to fix up a foreclosure, my desire to have to resurrect something that worked just fine four years ago is... well screw it, I'll just use Windows 7 which sucks but less painful than using KDE 4.

Also: fuck beta. Soylnet News is shaping up ok.

I might, but it honestly isn't easy. I think of it like a restaurant. Your favorite restaurant changes owners. They then change from serving the food you like to trying to provide a "dining experience." You still go a handful of times but you get food poisoning twice and bad service a third time. You stop going, complain about losing your favorite place and start eating at the food truck that just isn't the same but at least you don't get sick. Now the owner doesn't "owe" you anything but you still get the feeling of regret and resentment every time you drive past.

The other issue is that Kasbar was by far my favorite piece of KDE 3 and it isn't back in KDE 4. I kind of wonder, what's the point without that?

But will I ever get Kasbar back?

I think we used it for a while. I tried at least KDE 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. When Sergio insisted to SVN that KDE 4.1 was better than 3.X it was the beginning of the end for me. It might be better now, it might be worse. I do know that it was far worse for me for years after KDE 4 came out and at some point you stop looking. And none of that changes that I miss KDE 3 and thought it was a wonderful desktop.

I don't want GNOME apps or KDE apps or Mate apps, I just want some nice apps that work well on Linux.

But you don't get credit for Mate and Unity and Cinnamon. All of them (well Unity is its own weird story) were created out of dislike of the GNOME experience. So now we have more fragmentation then before. GNOME has less influence then before. But GNOME developers and designers seem to think that they should get the same pull as before even though they have shed a great percentage of their users. You keep getting forked, it is silly to call that a good thing. It is also getting silly to point out that not everyone was happy with the transition to GNOME 2.0. That version was not forked. The press was not nearly as bad. And most telling, 3 years later peoples reactions to it was not still negative. Gnome 3: still most users, former users, and potential users are still complaining. Rather than claiming that there are a silent majority of happy users, you might want to take that as a _hint_.

PS: Sorry I keep coming at you. I'm starting to feel a bit like an ass. You do a great job engaging. To me you are the GNOME person that seems to at least is trying to listen to people who aren't happy with GNOME. The people who are representing GNOME on lwn.net could very much use lessons from you on engagement.

That's simple, there won't be _any_ extensions blessed by GNOME devs. (and yes I write that knowing that GNOME devs have written some of the extensions, doesn't mean it isn't true).

I'll give you credit for at least trying. I'm not persuaded by any stretch of the imagination. I think a couple of dozen well chosen checkboxes would be welcome. Data from the extensions website could be used to inform choices of what options to add, along with some common sense, and god forbid, usability testing. Extensions just have too many problems as I've enumerated elsewhere.

So now I have 8000 extensions I have to read and try?None of the 8000 extensions are organized. None of the extensions are tested or vetted and god knows how they interact with each other. I would happily take a checkbox that does 95% of the right thing with alt-tab than mess with extensions even if one of them works perfectly for me. You talk about clutter with preferences; what about the clutter that is the extension website.

Extensions have a great number of problems, the updating issue is only one of them. And I still haven't had anyone explain how extensions for preferences is in any way preferable to a damn checkbox. Honestly I don't think KDE has too many options, it has too few. But then again I stopped using it after 3.5 so I guess I don't know how it looked after 4.3 or 4.4. I certainly will not argue that KDE 4 is also a UI disaster. More generally, option clutter can be managed and with advanced tabs, hid. I also don't think everything needs to be an option, but there are a couple of dozen common sense options that would barely increase the clutter and made the thing more usable and more palatable.

Similar to you, the alt-tab default is certainly a poor choice for me. Moreover, I am not going to install a random beta extension to "fix" it. By the time I would have enough extensions installed to make the desktop fit me, I am bound to have interaction issues, slow downs, etc. And hunting through a flat website to play wack-a-mole to find all the extensions would waste more than enough time, thanks.