No, it is a model, because it's not what it is 'modeling', what I'm trying to say is that we can only use concepts (e.g. models) to understand what we call the world. There is a difference between map and the territory, map is divided to concepts to be comprehensible by the mind and the territory isn't. So only thing we can observe is the mapped representation of what we call case and effect and if it contradicts the model or confirms, we never see the actual world, because the mind sees only concepts and qualia not what they describe.

Please read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins to understand better what you're saying...

Please mod parent up!

It still amazes me that people tend to confuse the map with the territory (simulacra anyone?) "Life" is a meaningless concept on it's own, the meaning is made by context, if your context is based on romantic/Christian base it shifts towards the soul nonsense, but if your context is purely scientific - it depends only on definitions and facts.
IMHO life is gens, it's DNA in motion, it's the amino-acids that forms DNA and it's the particles that forms those amino-acids. Life is everything.
If someone want to divide their "territory", please go ahead, but please remember it's just in your mind. You create life with concept of "'I' that lives", of "'Me' that is living' and start to divide me/not-me, life/death, etc... but those are just concepts, they only 'exists' as representations of 'the world' that 'the mind' tries to understand in order to use or 'live in'.
So for me it's irrelevant if something is considered alive or not. E.g.: when there will be a computer system that can mimic the brain in it's functions - it'll be just as alive as former.

They probably realized by now it was a disaster ;)

"...While all that pervasive multithreading made for impressive technology demos and a great user experience, it could be extremely demanding on the programmer. BeOS was all about threads, going so far as to maintain a separate thread for each window. Whether you liked it or not, your BeOS program was going to be multithreaded."

"GCD embodies a philosophy that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from BeOS's "pervasive multithreading" design. Rather than achieving responsiveness by getting every possible component of an application running concurrently on its own thread (and paying a heavy price in terms of complex data sharing and locking concerns), GCD encourages a much more limited, hierarchical approach: a main application thread where all the user events are processed and the interface is updated, and worker threads doing specific jobs as needed."
Very good in-depth article btw. http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/1

According to the latest Ars Technica article about Snow Leopard, BeOS had used threads for everything and it didn't worked out quite well in the end unfortunately...

Please, it's Firefox _not_ FireFox nor fire fox, thank, you.

I did, after being supportive and forgiving from 4.0 to 4.3beta, I'm tired of KDE4 trying way too hard too reinvent everything, braking usability and killing my productivity.
Maybe after 4.5 it will be mature enough, like 3.5... oh wait

Away From The Keyboard? Unplugged? ;P

I hope you've reported those bugs to bugtracker ;) I've tried KUbuntu but it has tendency to give the worst KDE experience of all. I've switched to openSUSE, works great for me :)

Mod parent up! I'm sick and tired of people whining about "Linux Desktop" (whatever that term means), about it don't innovate enough, about they innovate too much, about fragmentation of "Linux Desktop", about not enough choice (because my feature X that I saw in Y os wasn't implemented) etc.
You know what? Linux and the whole Free/Libre Software is about _choice_ and _freedom_, if someone don't get it, he should just stfu and learn.
And about the "Linux Desktop" (WTF?): gnome and kde are available on: solaris, bsd, osx and there is even windows port of kde (dunno bout gnome), so do the research first if you don't want to look like an idiot.

I fully agree. When I first saw KDE 4.0 alpha, I was thinking "this is developer preview quality" and that's OK, but I saw the potential.
Then was the 4.1x when I started using it on daily basis, there were lots of rough edges, but that was the point, to help them out with at least bug reports and maybe some patches.
And here we are, I'm writing this from KDE 4.3 beta and this is gonna be great release!
And yes people are afraid of change (actually they're mostly afraid of everything), but I don't care that much, I love to drive innovation, even if my involvement is marginal (for now), life on cutting edge is fun!

On core 2 duo 1.7, but it's not the issue here probably. Some graphic cards perform really bad on linux, there were versions of graphics drivers that was buggy and slow, I've had issues with my nvidia chipset cause nvidia don't gave a frakk 'bout quality of their drivers for linux... So yes there was significant (and probably still are on the newer chips) performance issues but they have nothing to do with KDE nor Qt itself. And as I previously said there was significant performance boost from Qt4 itself (you can check troll's benchmarks if you want), so it should be noticeable. Also I've noticed that Kubuntu tends to have more issues (at least 4.2 had) than others, I recommend openSUSE, it have great support for KDE (traditionally).

Yes, I mostly agree, they should IMHO do it like: 4.0 pre-alpha devel preview, 4.1 alpha, 4.2 beta, 4.3 RC. I don't miss any feature of the KDE3, and since 4.2 it's less and less buggy, but remember it's community effort, so the more you give the more you get :) I e.g. always report bugs and try to patch them when I can. Anyway I think this was bold and necessary move to rewrite the codebase and we all will see effects soon in 4.3 and 4.4, cause now KDE4 is beginning to show it's potential, after all the major deep-in-the-libraries work has been done :D btw I use 4.3beta2 and it's frakkin' great ;)

KDE4 is ~30% faster than KDE3, mainly because of the Qt4 vs. Qt3 improvements and vast redesign of the KDE itself...