For anyone trying to start developing, even techbase is pretty horrible. They seem to feed you odds and ends of useful info and examples but leave you scratching your head at how to make the jump from making a basic plasmoid to doing something useful. For example, in 10 minutes of looking I can't find a nice, clear, well documented PyKDE4 API. I'm sure there has to be one somewhere

Using KDE in Kubuntu 9.04 (just upgraded to 9.10 today so can't comment on anything newer than Jaunty) at work as a software developer. I have to say, I'm not really sure what all the bad press has been about. The only issues I've had are when I tried to upgrade to the first KDE4 development version and was well aware that it wasn't for general consumption. After that I've not had any real issues with KDE on a dual display system. On occasion I find some of the plasmoids a little rough around the edges, so to speak, but that's down to the individual plasmoid developers, not KDE. On second thoughts, I lie, there was one issue which led the task bar to freeze for a few seconds whenever I got an IM in kopete but that disappeared in Jaunty.

I wouldn't say there are any glaring bugs or issues for day to day work. Heck, I use it here at home now as well and wouldn't say I've got issues with it when playing either. I think most of the big criticism comes from people who are still trying to use it like KDE3, haven't used it or are just trying to do odd things with it.

I get my work done and KDE doesn't get in my way. There are some things I don't like about it (dolphin, I'm looking at you) but that's personal preference. I'd suggest ignoring the peanut gallery and trying it out yourself, it's really the only way you'll figure out if you like it. Just try not to knock it for not being KDE3.

Even better, if you called yourself an artist and made up an explanation using some sociological BS as an excuse for why you smashed it up, you could probably sell a copy of that video as "art".

As a female in the tech industry I've found that most of the girls I know don't realise what's even involved in what I do. I've surprised many of my friends with descriptions of things that I do in my work and they actually seem quite interested. I think that one of the problems is that it's never actually explained to girls what's involved and unless they're like me and exposed to tech at a young age (my dad's an electronics engineer) they'll never find out enough to be interested.

Well, correct me if I'm wrong but the term "money talks" seems to have come from the US, so I guess that'd be the reason.

No, the US uses 110V*. It's Europe that uses 220V*. The article was quite correct.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_power_around_the_world or just do a simple Google search.

*They both actually use ranges of voltage but these are close enough for reference.

Ditto. I remember many people saying how good Vista was after the launch. I remember smart, technically inclined friends telling me it was great. I also remember them angrily reinstalling XP a couple of months later after the shineyness wore off.

I'd love to see Windows 7 be an operating system people can depend on, it'd save me time and effort fixing things in friends and families systems. I'm watching this space though since I have a long memory and know that positive comments made now can get reversed when the hype dies down.

I absolutely hate when women wave the flag of feminism when they're just being sexist asshats trying to get ahead of men. As a girl working in software development, it makes it all the harder to get accepted when male work colleagues are suspicious of my motives and being careful not to offend just in case I'm one of those idiots. I can't say I blame them either, it could ruin a mans career.

As for those women, please don't give them any credit by calling them feminists. They're sexists and should be called out as such. Maybe then the rest of us can get on and get some proper work done. /rant

What I was trying to get across was that they build a rendering engine just for IE. I wasn't suggesting that IE came before the engine, that would be silly, but that they built MSHTML for their browser, not specifically for being a nice, standards compliant, general purpose HTML rendering engine, which is what they are now using it as by tying all sorts of things like the help system into it. It's also been tied into the OS so tightly that an insecurity in MSHTML means that the whole system in vulnerable. That's just not good design.

IIRC firefox uses gecko, safari uses WebKit, Opera uses presto and the others all have various rendering engines of their own. I think IE may be by itself in using the MSHTML engine and there's been a lot of talk over the past year about competing javascript libraries. I agree that it'd be odd to write some things from scratch when they are already there in the OS but I think very few browsers actually use Microsofts web rendering libraries.

I heard that advice when I first started sending out CVs. Every interviewer asked why it was so short and I told them that this was the advice I had been given. Turns out that it's not true and that a short 1-2 page CV should only ever be used a quick taster of your real, 5+ page CV. Hiring managers really want a fuller picture of what you can do which can't be presented in a 1-2 page CV.

Or perhaps you know, Microsoft could better design their OS to not break when one component is removed.

They seem to have taken IE, tied it into everything and they decided that they better make it into a library for convenience sake, rather than build a library and use it. I'm designing a library at the moment that requires another library to function. I've designed it in such a way that if there's a better library option in the future I can remove a single file (that contains the code for interacting with the dependency) and replace it with another. One of the first things I learned about designing software well was that coupling is a Bad Thing and should be avoided. It's a shame that some people in Microsoft can't seem to get this through their heads. There are other ways to tie people into using your software without making bad design.

Yes there is but it will take Microsoft to do the work, which is the way around it should be. No-one but Microsoft is responsible for making it difficult to change rendering engines. They have many smart people that could pick apart the mess and write a layer that would allow for different engines to be written while allowing 3rd party apps to continue to function as they have been doing. This would required management to step out of the way though and allow developers to write the code they (probably) wanted to write in the first place.

I find that people are starting to care more. These days it seems that I'm often (pleasantly) surprised by non-technical people I run into when they mention things in conversation that I really wouldn't expect them to know, such as their current favourite browser, or that they just tried out some technology that I'd expect only geeks to be using. Even my mother gave me a start when she asked what I thought about MS SQL Server. She's by no means technical but cares enough about her organisations choice of database server to know that there's more than one option, they're made by different companies, there's such a thing as SQL and that it's used to 'talk' to databases!

People are definitely getting more curious about the technology they're using and the choices that are available to them.

I'd imagine the GPS works just fine if you don't pay the subscription. Access to the information that it relays back would be the part of it that you lose, not the ability of the watch to pick up GPS signals or talk to the satellites.

Yes. The middleman will have the ability to know where your kid is, they just won't tell you without the subscription.

Pfft! Python makes it easy:

import suicide-python

Pfft! You are so wrong!