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Charitable deductions are a hot topic in this year's tax reform debates, but donor-advised funds have been singled out for potential elimination in 2013. Today, donor-advised funds provide a powerful tool to facilitate charitable giving by your upper-middle-class clients and offer a substantial current tax deduction and tax-free growth for contributions.
Donor-advised funds are similar to private foundations but can be used to streamline the giving process for much more modest donations, by allowing for larger deductions and low operating costs. Because of the uncertain future for the tax advantages surrounding charitable giving, your clients should act now to use donor-advised funds to lock in the deduction for tomorrow's charitable gifts today.
Tax Basics of Donor-Advised Funds
The tax benefits afforded to donor-advised funds are substantial—your clients can deduct up to 50% of their adjusted gross income for cash contributions to the fund and up to 30% of adjusted gross income for donating securities. The deduction is allowable for the current year even if the actual charitable gift is not made until well into the future, so your client is protected against potential elimination of the deduction for future years.
Further, if the gift from the established donor-advised fund is not made until the future, contributions to the fund grow tax-free. For example, if your client wants to make a gift using stock that has appreciated in value, he might sell the stock, pay the capital gains tax on the sale, and give the remaining cash to charity.
But if that same client establishes a donor-advised fund and contributes the stock to the fund, the stock can appreciate in value within the fund tax-free. When it is later donated to charity, the client is not liable for the capital gains tax. The charitable gift is therefore maximized while your client minimizes his tax liability.
Donor-Advised Funds Versus Private Foundations
In theory, establishing a private foundation may seem like an appealing way to establish a systematic practice for charitable giving. However, few of your clients are likely find it to be a worthwhile tool because, while a private foundation can offer a donor more control over the assets, the expense of maintaining the foundation likely outweighs this benefit for most clients.
Private foundations generally provide a way for the very wealthy to establish large and ongoing strategies for charitable giving, but both the startup and maintenance costs are high—administrative costs can be as high as 8% of assets each year. Further, a private foundation is required to donate at least 5% of its assets to charity each year, but no similar requirement applies to donor-advised funds.
The allowable deductions for contributions to private foundations are also lower than those allowed with respect to donor-advised funds—a taxpayer is permitted to deduct only up to 30% of adjusted gross income for cash contributions to a private foundation (20% for contributions of securities).
Donor-advised funds provide a way for your clients to take advantage of the currently available tax deductions for charitable giving, but the time to act is now. By this time next year, tax reforms expected to be finalized later in 2012 could have entirely eliminated the strategy.
For additional coverage of this issue and similar ones, we invite you to sign up with AdvisorOne's Summit Business Media partner, National Underwriter Advanced Markets, for a free trial.
You may also be interested in signing up for a free trial with another Summit Business Media partner, Tax Facts Online.


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My opinion of Barry Lyndon is that it is the second best Kubrick film ever made, very near to 2001.
I don't think there have been any 90's period pieces yet, right?
BTW, found this interesting site that offers a lot of in-depth insight into all Kubrick's works...http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/
Yeah, I can't really get into many pre-1920's period pieces a lot of the time myself. I guess it starts to feel too much like school after awhile. Anything about the 20's through the 80's is fucking cool by me though, I love that stuff. I don't think there have been any 90's period pieces yet, right? Anyway, Barry Lyndon was no easier for me to get into than any other 1800's set film I've ever seen. Like I said, it just started to feel like a film I would watch in history class. Don't get me wrong, it was technically AMAZING. The cinematography and the direction was just perfection in every sense of the word...but the story and the characters and all that just didn't click with me I guess. They really bored me. I mean, 2001 is slow...but the urgency is so intriguing...so you want to keep watching. That's why I love that film. Barry Lyndon didn't have that urgency. There did come a point where I didn't give a fuck about it anymore.Oh well...I still love Kubrick.
I've always wanted to actually understand Dr Strangelove.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
I don't get any of the jokes but I still love it.
ahhh to be 16 again...
Quick! Someone post the Special Olympics picture!
"Stop! I'm getting dizzy from spinning in my grave."
From the people in the world that loathe ALL of his movies with a passion or from me not liking ONE of his movies? I'm confused.
Dont drag me into this.


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One of the concerns I have heard pop up lately, both on the messageboards and at shows, is that Pathfinder Society scenarios have become more deadly. I've heard horror stories about TPKs on the rise in various regions of the world. Let's see if we can help combat some of that and help the new player, or the low-level character of a veteran, with some options that may just prove useful.
One of the benefits of being a Venture-Captain before this job was that I met a wide variety of players throughout the southeast. Each and every one has their strong points and weaknesses. One of the strongest rules players I know from my time in Georgia was Jordan James. He survived quite a few tables I GMed, and most of the time, it was because of brilliant use of a piece of equipment I had never heard of or had seen used once at most. He has been discussing equipment that makes survival easier, specifically when it comes to lower-level characters, with the Georgia crowd for the last year through their Pathfinder Society lodge messageboards.
After speaking with Jordan this past week, he proved excited to share his thoughts on a few overlooked items that might just make the difference between your low-level character surviving or going to meet Pharsma earlier than anticipated.
Jordan advised, "Here we have a simple list of items I have found to be ridiculously useful, and sometimes critical, to have around for those situations that, if you aren't prepared, may very well turn into a TPK."
"Please do reply with items I've missed (there will be many) because the sole intention here is to provide a helpful thread for fellow adventurers, and to have a little fun in writing it," he noted.
So, what are some things that are just wonderful to have available in a pinch, and more often than not, are generally not well known?
Elixir of Spirit Sight (1,000 gp): From Pathfinder Adventure Path #38: City of Seven Spears, 1,000 gp for 1 minute of see invisibility and ghost touch for both your weapons and armor! Incorporeal entities got you down with strength drains and random irritating things that ignore your armor and halves your damage? Go to town on them with this wonderful concoction.
Bladeguard (40 gp): Straight out of the Advanced Player's Guide and into your martially inclined character's inventory. This clear resin protects a weapon from harmful attacks from oozes, rust monsters, and similar effects that corrode or melt weapons, rendering the weapon immune for 24 hours. One pot can coat one two-handed weapon, two one-handed or light weapons, or 50 ammunition items. Applying it takes 1 full round. Immersing the weapon in water or similar liquid washes it off. That's pretty useful for its cost.
Potion of Feather Step (50 gp): More Advanced Player's Guide spell goodness, and bottled for your convenience. For 10 minutes, you can ignore difficult terrain, and even take 5-foot steps in such an area, oh HADES YES! Seriously, have you got one of those wizards in your party? You know the type: crazy guy throwing around stone call, sleet storm, and other such "control" spells thinking he's awesome, when all he's really doing is making it impossible for you to move? This bottle is your answer (you can even throw the empty remains at the wizard afterward as a free action!). Smart wizards of the above type also keep a couple of these on hand.
Potion of Invigorate (50 gp): Going into battle with a creature that can sap your endurance, leaving you fatigued or exhausted, this potion will banish that pathetic mortal weakness and allow you to ignore the associated penalties for 10 WHOLE MINUTES. Of course, when it runs out, you get not only the penalties, but also an extra d6 points of nonlethal damage for your arrogance in ignoring your natural limits—but hey, performance enhancements are just an easy way of separating winners from losers! Honestly, though, ignoring those penalties for 10 minutes, that's freaking awesome for 50 gp.
Potion of Delay Poison (300 gp): 300 gp might sound like a lot, but for that handful of gold, you get to tell any and all poisons coursing through your veins for the next HOUR to sit down, shut up, and wait for you to finish beating the stuffing out of the poor fool that thought poisoning you would be its ticket to victory. This is like antitoxin, but sexy.
Smoked Goggles (10 gp): So, medusa, basilisks, and other gaze-type critters suck. You can avert your eyes (50% chance to avoid the gaze, 20% miss chance that round), or close them (immune to the gaze, but then everything gains total concealment from you, which kind of sucks). The answer: These cheap-as-dirt goggles grant you a +8 circumstance bonus on your saving throws vs. gaze, and all you suffer is a 20% miss chance (and a -4 on Perception checks—I know, a real deal breaker there if you're using these for combat). More Advanced Player's Guide goodness.
Smelling Salts (25 gp): Speaking of Advanced Player's Guide goodness, one last entry is the useful smelling salts. These sharply scented gray crystals cause people inhaling them to regain consciousness. Smelling salts grant you a new saving throw to resist any spell or effect that has already rendered you unconscious or staggered. If exposed to smelling salts while dying, you immediately become conscious and staggered, but must still make stabilization checks each round; if you perform any standard action (or any other strenuous action), you take 1 point of damage after completing the act and fall unconscious again. A container of smelling salts has dozens of uses if stoppered after each use, but depletes in a matter of hours if left opened. That's just nifty.
Bracers of Archery, Lesser (5,000 gp): A wrist slot that offers +1 to hit with a bow you're already proficient with is okay, but the hidden gem is that it works like the greater variety in terms of providing you proficiency with ANY bow (excluding crossbows). For characters without any bow proficiency or chaffing under a short bow only restriction, save the feat, drop 5,000 gp, and be happy!
Elixirs (250 gp): These are pretty well known, but just in case, for a paltry 250 gp you can pack potions for a +10 competence bonus on Acrobatics Perception, Stealth, and Swim checks. Handy, but keep in mind the swimming one is sort of overshadowed by the touch of sea potion below.
Golembane Scarab (2,500 gp): It's a neck slot that detects golems within 60 feet and ignores their DR with weapon, unarmed, or natural attacks. This can be a nice little package of helpfulness here!
Pathfinder's Pouch (1,000 gp): This little gem from Seekers of Secrets functions as a small bag of holding, allowing one to store up to 10 pounds of items within its 2-cubic-feet limit. Why is it special? Because detect magic ain't got nothing on this pro—thus, a Pathfinder can keep important or dangerous items safe in its confines with little worry from guards, customs, and random searches. Even if the pouch is opened and turned upside down with a shake, as long as the proper command word remains unspoken, nothing in the extradimensional space will fall out.
Potion of Bestow Grace (400 gp): For good characters only, but this can be a sweet bonus if you happen to have the rare positive Charisma modifier (and aren't already a paladin). For 4 minutes, you get a sacred bonus on all of your saving throws equal to your Charisma score bonus. That's almost good enough to make me consider being good, almost...
Oil of Weapon of Awe (300 gp): For 3 minutes, your weapon not only gains a +2 sacred bonus on damage rolls, but if you score a critical hit, it causes the creature hit to become shaken for 1 round with no save. It can't be used on natural weapons (though it can on unarmed strikes), but the gravy is that when used on ranged weapons, it applies to missiles fired. Loving some of these Advanced Player's Guide spells.
Potion of Touch of Sea (50 gp): For a measly 50 gp, you get a 30-foot swim speed, +8 competence bonus on Swim checks, the ability to take 10 on Swim checks even when distracted or endangered, and even use the run action while swimming. While this is more than enough to leave the poor elixir of swimming curled up in a corner, the one caveat is that it doesn't enable you to breath underwater, but for 1 minute of duration, you are bloody well near a seal.
The following are from the Pathfinder Society Field Guide:
Air Crystals (50 gp): An inexpensive personal bottle of air. Find yourself underwater, in a void, or otherwise bereft of air? Pop some of these beauties in your mouth and you've got 1 minute of breathing space to plan your escape (note that you can't talk while chewing on these crystals).
Comfort (armor special ability) (5,000 gp): Whoa. Okay, for 5,000 gp (doesn't even take up a slot of enhancement bonus on your armor) you get armor that is always clean, doesn't penalize you in hot weather, counts as cold-weather clothing in cold weather, reduces armor check penalties by 1 (minimum 0), AND regardless of what kind of armor it is, it can be slept in as if it were light armor! Note that only applies to being slept in, but my goodness, for anyone concerned about getting caught without their armor in the night, this is a sweet solution!
Dweomer's Essence (500 gp): Casters take note! For 500 gp this one-off pinch of powder may seem insane, until you notice that you can add it as an extra material component to any spell you are casting and receive a +5 bonus to your caster level to overcome spell resistance. It's like an on-demand rod of piercing spell, except it's available whenever you need it, stacks with the Piercing Spell feat if you really need that spell to land, and doesn't cost you an action to get out a rod or an additional level to apply the metamagic. This is the sort of awesome that I'd pay more than 500 gp for, so enjoy and keep some in the component pouch!
Fortunate Charm (3,000 gp): Anything that can help alleviate the terrible pain of lame dice is wonderful, and this neck slot beauty does just that once per day on a failed skill or concentration check. Since failing checks like that can often result in extremely severe consequences, 3,000 gp for that kind of love is just sweet.
Runestone of Power (2,000 gp): Wow, that's a lot of gold! Ever looked longingly at wizards and their fancy pearls of power letting them get free spells? Well, as long as you're a bard, inquisitor, oracle, sorcerer, or summoner you are in luck! For the cost of double an equivalent pearl of power, once per day (per runestone, of course) a spell you cast of its level uses the runestone's power and not one of your limited spells per day.
Potion of Stalwart Resolve (300 gp): New cleric spells to the rescue! For 3 rounds per pop, this little gem lets you ignore ability damage and penalties to any one ability score of your choice (unless it equals your total ability score, in which case you're still screwed). It has a short duration and doesn't protect you from ability drain, but when you really need to shake off some bad ability damage and get back into the fight, this is what you need.
Now for a few from the Adventurer's Armory:
Weapon Cord (1 sp): Cheap as dirt and twice as useful! If you are disarmed or drop your weapon, it never moves farther away from you than an adjacent square and you can recover it as a swift action. The caveat is you cannot wield another weapon with the same hand the cord is tied to, and removing the cord is either a full-round action (untying) or move action (cutting). Great for archers who never want to be separated from their bows.
Spring-Loaded Wrist Sheath (5 gp): Retrieve any dagger, dart, wand, or equivalent-sized object (forearm length or so) as a swift action. Let me provide a simple example of why this is awesome. Your friend is 20 feet away and dying. You move to her, get out your wand, are out of actions, and she dies at your feet. With this wrist sheath, you move to her, produce your wand of cure light wounds with a swift flourish, and save her life.
Antiplague (50 gp): Getting diseased can be really bad. Use this if you know you're moving into an area where such might be likely. For an hour, you receive a +5 alchemical bonus on Fort saves against disease. Even better, if you're already diseased, this will let you make two saves (no +5 bonus though) and use the better result. Good thing to have.
Vermin Repellent (5 gp): Not a perfect defense, but it keeps individual vermin away and swarms of vermin must make a DC 15 Fortitude save to enter your square. Not bad for a 4-hour buff.
Allnight (75 gp): Recommending "herbs" and "black market items"—I love this guide! Allnight eliminates the effects of fatigue for 8 hours, during which time you take a –2 penalty on all skill checks, and when the duration runs out, you're exhausted. The good news: Combine a couple doses with a couple potions of lesser restoration and you are the Energizer Bunny.
And a few other generally useful items to have around:
Potion of Blur (300 gp): Sure, the miss chance may only be 20%, but there are a couple nice bonuses during its 3-minute duration. First, since you gain concealment, most precision-based damage, such as from sneak attacks, won't work on you unless the user has some pretty special feats. Second, if you like to be stealthy, then here is your bottle of "hide in plain sight," since this grants you that necessary concealment you need to hide.
Oil of Align Weapon (300 gp): Your go-to spell when you need a weapon to bypass DR of the evil/good/lawful/chaotic types. Three minutes per use, so it should last long enough to even apply before combat if you know what's around the corner.
Potion of Remove Sickness (50 gp): For 10 minutes, you gain a +4 morale bonus on saves vs. disease and the sickened and nauseated conditions, or suppress effects already being experienced for the duration of the spell. While being sickened is annoying, some diseases, and especially being nauseated, really can make you useless, so this is a lifesaver. Pro tip: When you're nauseated, you can't take standard actions, so either pour this down a nauseated ally's throat on your turn, or hold it out and have one of your comrades do the same for you.
Potion of Negate Aroma (50 gp): For the sneaky types that are sick and tired of being given away by scent, one hit off this potion and you've got 1 hour of scentless scouting as long as you don't get doused in a new, smelly substance.
I know there are more, especially out of Ultimate Equipment, but those are a few I really wanted to throw out! Post other great options and we all might just survive an extra encounter or two!
Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator


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National Aquarium is proud to announce that our circle of partners at Masonville Cove will now include a federal agency: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)! Today, the National Aquarium and its partners joined with government officials and community members to formally announce Masonville Cove as the first Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership in the United States.
Through the Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership program, FWS offices across the nation embarked on a mission to join forces with their local, urban conservation counterparts. Dozens of worthy applications were submitted for official recognition, and eight partnerships were accepted for designation and support. We are thrilled to announce that our own Masonville Cove is one of these eight!
About the Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership Program
While the FWS refuge system encompasses some of our country's most pristine and unique landscapes, a majority of the refuges are in remote locations, making them inaccessible to large portions of the population. With 80 percent of Americans living in urban areas, they identified the need to find innovative ways to share the FWS mission with this expanded audience. Cue the Urban Wildlife Refuge Program!
Ultimately, the goal is to work with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. Through this new program, FWS aims to have a broader and more effective impact through partnering with existing urban conservation organizations.
At National Aquarium, our mission is to inspire conservation of the world's aquatic treasures, and we are proud to take that mission beyond our doors with our amazing group of conservation partners. Today was a special day for National Aquarium at Masonville Cove.
National Aquarium is working to engage students and other local citizens in the process of habitat restoration and we are thrilled to be a part of this unique project – one that highlights the importance of creating and supporting a home for wildlife within an urban center and one that helps bring opportunities to connect with wildlife to urban populations.
– Eric Schwaab, Chief Conservation Officer for National Aquarium.
While this initiative does not make the land at Masonville Cove a National Wildlife Refuge, it does mean that the FWS presence will be felt at the campus. Already, several benefits have been realized including a FWS intern stationed at Masonville Cove, and the creation of a Wildlife Management Plan to maximize habitat use at the site. All of the organizations involved share a common goal of environmental conservation and restoration, and by working together we all increase our chances of making this goal a reality in urban centers.
About Masonville Cove
The Masonville Cove Nature Area was opened in 2012 on a restored site owned by the Maryland Port Administration on the Patapsco River, allowing public access to the cove for the first time in over 70 years. The nature area offers opportunities within the city limits for walking, fishing, bird watching and other recreational activities. Currently 11 acres of the nature area are open to the public and, after further restoration in the next few years, 52 acres will be open to the public. National Aquarium helps lead community-based restoration efforts on the sight, engaging more than 1,000 volunteers in planting more than 45,000 native plants along the shoreline so far, including a wetland restoration event just last week.
If you are interested in visiting the cove, there are many opportunities for recreation and educational programming. Visit www.masonvillecove.org for details. Masonville Cove is also looking for volunteers who love nature and enjoy sharing their passion with others! Friends of Masonville Cove work to improve and manage this urban wilderness area, as well as introduce other community members to the educational and recreational activities Masonville Cove has to offer. If you are interested in a long-term volunteer opportunity involving everything from debris cleanups to gardening to scientific wetland monitoring, please e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com for more information.
The National Aquarium will be hosting another habitat restoration opportunity at the Cove next Spring. Sign up for our e-newsletter to keep up-to-date on these and other volunteer opportunities!


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Bread making recipes for campers
Every summer, thousands of Kiwis go camping – and I am one of them. I love nothing better than a long, hot summer in our caravan and the chance to do some camp cooking. Many years ago, Kiwi nanas were very adept at camp cooking and could rustle up a bit of billy bread to feed hungry mouths. It's quite common to share food at my campground and one thing I love to make is pizza bread, which we throw on the barbecue, then sprinkle with salt. Everyone is so impressed that you can cook with yeast while camping but it really is very easy – just buy granulated, not Surebake, yeast. My friend at the camp, Esther, makes a type of bread we call "doughboys", something many Maori nanas would have made for years. I hope you enjoy these recipes and give them a go if you are camping this summer.
Billy bread
|3 tsp
|Baking powder
|3 cups
|1 Tbsp
|Golden syrup
|1 cup
|Milk, enough milk to mix the dough
Pizza bread
|½ tsp
|1½ cups
|2 tsp
|Active dried yeast
|1 to taste
|Salt & freshly ground pepper
|4 cups
|High grade flour
|4 Tbsp
|Olive oil
|3 tsp
|4½ cups
|Water, warm
|4 tsp
|Active dried yeast
|6 cups
|3 tsp
|2 cm
Billy bread
- Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl, adding enough milk to make a dough.
- Place dough in a greased closed tin or billy. You can then place this in the embers of a beach fire or barbecue, covering the tin with coals for about half an hour (depending on the heat of your coals). Or you can cook it in a conventional oven in a cake tin at 190C for about half an hour.
- Another old cookbook of mine says to roll bits of the dough around sticks and then hold them over the fire, turning so that you get little buns on the end of the sticks. You can then fill the holes left by the sticks with butter, jam or cheese – just delicious.
Pizza bread
- Mix together the water and sugar until dissolved, then sprinkle over the yeast. Leave for 10 minutes in a warm place, until the yeast starts to froth.
- Sprinkle salt and pepper over the flour and stir with a whisk to get some air into it, or sift.
- When the yeast is bubbling, add the olive oil to it, then pour it into the flour mixture. Mix to a soft dough but do not knead. Set aside in a bowl for an hour in a warm place, covered with a tea towel, until the dough doubles.
- Roll out pieces into the size of a pizza and put on the barbecue or grill. When cooked, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.
- Put 2½ cups of warm water in a jug and dissolve the sugar in it. Sprinkle the yeast over the top of the mixture and wait until it starts to bubble and smells strongly like beer.
- Pour the mixture onto the flour and salt, then add the remaining 2 cups of water.
- Knead the mixture, then leave to double in size. Punch down and knead again. Flatten and cut into squares. Leave to rise again for 30 minutes, then fry in hot oil – Esther uses rice bran oil, which has a high smoking point.


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IdeaGuy necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 89 diseños de 29 diseñadores freelance.
Looking for a HIGH END logo/brand that immediately speaks - established business, credible and trustworthy...We deal primarily with Fortune 1000 companies and need a logo that represents that.
Merchant Capital Options
Merchant Capital Options is a merchant solutions provider that offers solutions for merchants (i.e. retailers, hotels, restaurants, small businesses, franchises, professionals, etc., etc.) who need access to capital (money).
Some sites you can see in the business are: FastMerchantAdvance.com, AdvanceMe.com, ProMerchantAdvance.com, and CashPrior.com.
PLEASE NOTE - we are working with a MUCH higher end client than the sites above and our logo needs to represent that.
The logo should be very clean, professional and immediately exude confidence, credibility and trustworthy.
Preffered colors are blue, green, grey (maybe black)...however we are open to suggestions.....
We do not want it to look like a startup (too modern) and we do not want to look like a dinosaur either....(plain block letters)
We are interested in seeing some (NOT all) versions with a play on the MCO (for Merchant Capital Options) - maybe the three initials with the name? There is no tagline at the moment but may be one in the future.
- Very professional and clean logo
- Color scheme should include blues, greens, maybe with some grey or black (not suggesting all 4 colors - just some color families we like).....
- We ARE OPEN to seeing other colors
- Would like to see a few designs (NOT all) with a play on the MCO (three initials of the name) with the name included as well
- Want to look credible, established and trustworthy
- It's ok to present the logos as just the name by itself or the name with some icon/image/symbol
- I don't want someone to think my 7 yr old designed the logo
- Don't want clip art included
- Don't want cash or a wad of cash in logo
- Don't want something that is difficult to read
- Don't want neon colors
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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Appelation of Controlled Origin. A French system initiated in 1935 to safeguard the highest quality producers of various food products, such as cheese, meat and wine, providing a designation that could be used if the producer achieved specific standards and met certain criteria in order to be assigned this designation, also known as AOC.
For cheese producers, four categories were created for the production of the product. If the cheese was made with raw milk from the "home farm" dairy, mountain chalet or hut dairy, and it did not include milk from other sources or farms, the cheese was labeled as a Fermier cheese. The next category is the Artisanal cheese that is produced from milk that may be from either the home farm or farms within the region, but produced into cheese by the home farm dairy. Cooperative cheese is the third category of AOC production designation, which includes all cheese made from only one dairy using the milk of the cooperative members. This designation is also known as the Fruitières. The fourth category is the Industrial (Industriel) designation which includes cheeses made from milk that is purchased from a variety of areas and produced in a commercial environment with larger production facilities.
For wine producers, the designation criteria focuses on such aspects as land, grape varietal, vitacultural practices, amount of yields, alcohol content, winemaking practices, and official tastings. The AOC designation is used to eliminate winemakers and vineyards producing low quality products from using the names of the higher quality vineyards on their labels.
The designation of AOC is the highest classification given to a food product. The other classifications are (from top to bottom): vin délimité de qualité supérierure, vin de pays, and vin de table.
AOC, AC, Appelation d'Origine Contrôlée


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Posts Tagged 'Business Cards'
- 09 / 27 / 2012 by Colin
- 05 / 01 / 2008 by Brian
Business Cards of Bloggers
We recently launched a redesigned website for Jeff Wilson Pool Service in Naples, Florida to continue to expand on their…continue reading
We recently completed a website design and development project for Family Health Centers of Southwest Florida. This National Health Service…continue reading
PLAN is a referral network program of 250 volunteer physicians, community clinics, hospitals and other affiliated health care providers who…continue reading
We're delighted to launch the first ever website for this local irrigation company that has been around since 1989! Automated…continue reading


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Wainwright Gets 8th Win, Cardinals Beat Reds 4-0
CINCINNATI (AP) - Adam Wainwright became the National League's first eight-game winner by dominating Cincinnati again, and the St. Louis Cardinals pulled away to a 4-0 victory Sunday night that completed another successful series against their division rival.
The Cardinals are 6-3 against the Reds this season. They've won 10 of their last 11 series together.
Overall, St. Louis has won nine of its last 11 games and moved to within 1 1-2 games of first-place Milwaukee in the NL Central.
Wainwright (8-2) beat Johnny Cueto and the Reds on opening day in Cincinnati, allowing only three hits during seven innings of a 1-0 victory. On Sunday, the right-hander gave up five hits in eight innings and matched his career high with 12 strikeouts.
Tony Cruz and Kolten Wong each had a pair of singles and drove in a run off Mike Leake (2-4). Wong also stole a pair of bases.


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In our defence, this year was made harder by a large number of departures from the previous headliners. Not least was last year's number one, Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel after his sacking in August. Other notables included GE's Vic Abate, Repower chief technical officer Andreas Schubert and EWEA's chief executive Christian Kjaer, all of whom could have been considered industry stalwarts.
The departure of so many high-profile figures raises the question of where the expertise goes, how long it will take to replace this experience and whether the industry will suffer as a result. Interestingly, two of these high-level departures come from large-scale PLCs and were replaced by company insiders. In Abate's case it was Anne McEntee, while Siemens replaced CEO Felix Ferlemann with Markus Tacke. Both replacements came from their company's oil and gas divisions. A cynical question would be: were they brought in for what they can bring to wind power or because they know the company?
It is also curious that many of the high-level departures leave the industry rather than joining another industry player, which illustrates a curious level of loyalty within the industry.
On the other hand, the experience of people coming in from other sectors should bring fresh ideas. In the case of McEntee and Tacke, it will be interesting to see what they offer from a related sector, albeit a distant one. Meanwhile, Vestas' new CEO Anders Runevad is likely to bring the painful experience of missing out on a new disruptive technology, in this case the rise of smartphones while at Ericsson.
Profit potential
These new hands come into an industry that is still emerging from a difficult period. But our research in this quarter's Windicator (page 53)shows the painful cost-cutting programmes of the last 18 months are starting to pay off for manufacturers, with Vestas and Nordex both set for their first pre-tax profits since 2010. There are still problems, however - most notable this month is German offshore developer Windreich's insolvency - and this year's global installation figure is likely to be less than 2012. But the industry appears to be moving towards making money rather than saving it.
Our interview with another newcomer to the wind industry, GE's head of Europe, reveals the company's plans to be proactive across Europe, particularly in Germany where recent installations have been low, and new markets of Turkey and Russia, where GE has significant business interests.
If it succeeds, it should go a long way to toppling this year's most influential, Enercon's managing director Nicole Fritsch-Nehring, who went straight to the top after taking over from company founder Aloys Wobben this year. It should also help alleviate the withdrawal symptoms from last year's intensive production-tax-credit-led US orders that led it to become the first or second wind turbine manufacturer in the world — depending on which league you look at.
James Quilter is associate editor of Windpower Monthly


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Faded Short Sleeves T-shirt
20,31 €
Com IVA
Faded short sleeves t-shirt with high neckline. Soft and stretchy material for a comfortable fit. Accessorize with a straw hat and you're ready for summer!
Política de segurança (editar com o módulo Garantia do cliente)
Política de entrega (editar com o módulo Garantia do cliente)
Política de devolução (editar com o módulo Garantia do cliente)
Fashion has been creating well-designed collections since 2010. The brand offers feminine designs delivering stylish separates and statement dresses which have since evolved into a full ready-to-wear collection in which every item is a vital part of a woman's wardrobe. The result? Cool, easy, chic looks with youthful elegance and unmistakable signature style. All the beautiful pieces are made in Italy and manufactured with the greatest attention. Now Fashion extends to a range of accessories including shoes, hats, belts and more!


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Backlash Aftermath: King Suddenly Turns Amicable In Trademark Disputes
from the thanks-internet dept
When King, of Candy Crush fame, decided to lose its legal mind over supposed trademark violations by roughly everyone, the backlash on the internet was swift and decisive. Entire platforms developed out of the ether with the seemingly sole purpose of trolling the hell out of King. The most notable dispute, it seemed, was over a game called The Banner Saga, which King insisted represented a grave threat to their business model of allowing people to match up three or more digital representations of candied items. There too, the backlash was relatively severe.
Severe enough, it appears, to get King to suddenly transmogrify itself into an amicable tech beast.
According to both Stoic and Ransom, King has quietly and amicably settled the trademark disputes with both companies.This result provides evidence once again that these David versus Goliath IP disputes can often be resolved with a little sunshine and public shaming. King acted like a bully and once their actions were spotlighted the public sprung into action to make their voices heard.
"Stoic is pleased to have come to an agreement with King regarding Stoic's The Banner Saga trademark, which enables both parties to protect their respective trademarks now and in the future," reads a brief statement on the Stoic website.
Perhaps the more important lesson is one served to King and other companies that might be tempted to behave similarly. It's one thing to protect your brand, but it's quite another to open up a legal salvo, with all of its necessary expenses, only to end up in exactly the same place you began. No names have been changed in response to the disputes. The only real result in all of this is now everyone thinks a little less of King and a bunch of lawyers made a little bit of money. Sort of makes the whole process seem silly, no?
Filed Under: banner saga, candy crush, games, king, saga, trademark
Companies: king, ransom, stoic


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Check out our latest installment of women in science with this interview with Shania Sanders, and learn about her journey from an intern to a computer programmer at NASA Langley Research Center.
Educational Resources - Search Tool
Data scientists work with data captured by scientific instruments or generated by a simulator, as well as data that is processed by software and stored in computer systems. They work with scientists to analyze databases and files using data management techniques and statistics. From changes in sea level, atmospheric composition, or land use, data scientists help make sense of the petabytes of data that NASA collects and stores.
NASA Worldview is a free online visualization tool that is a great launchpad for learners who are new (or veteran) users of satellite data.
This graphic organizer may be used to help students analyze the processes and components of Earth System phenomena.
The My NASA Data visualization tool, Earth System Data Explorer (ESDE), helps learners visualize complex Earth System data sets over space and time. Visit this page to review the datasets we have available to you and their organization by Earth System sphere, science variable, dataset name, and start/end dates.


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Nokia has revamped its X3 sliderphone as... a candybar.
Yet like previous X3 - reviewed here - the new "Touch and Type" version has a touchscreen - the first time the Finnish phone giant has placed touchscreen and keys on the same part of a phone, the company claimed.
"We've designed the Nokia X3 to be a touch and type device because typing is ideal for SMS and social networking where fast and frequent input is needed, while touch is ideal for functions such as setting alarms, smooth browsing and controlling applications like music and games," Nokia's handset head, Mary McDowell, said.
The X3 also packs in 3G, Wi-Fi, a 5Mp camera and comes with a 16GB memory card. It'll set you back no more that €125 (£103) before VAT gets added and any operator subsidy is subtracted. It'll go in sale before the end of September. ®
Sponsored: How to simplify data protection on Amazon Web Services


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Enter your email address to sign up to receive special offers via email.
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Apartment T5 for sale in Lisbon • ref 18885
A'Tower is located in one of the most privileged locations in Lisbon: the Amoreiras neighborhood. Here, it is possible to access the best that the city has to offer, without losing the unique tranquility that characterizes this noble neighborhood. The vast green spots surrounding A'Tower - the Monsanto National Park to the west and the Parque Eduardo VII to the east - allow you to appreciate the contact with nature, without losing sight of the urban lines that define Lisbon: the Esqueda de Baixa, the luminosity reflected in the Tagus River and the unique sensation of being at the top of the city. Only 34 apartments, spread over 15 floors, ensure the individualism and exclusivity of those who choose A'Tower for their home in Lisbon. Offering a variety of typologies - from T1 to T5 - this will always be a cosmopolitan address, sought after by determined professionals, modern families and sophisticated tastes that identify with this posture.


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Yuya Shino / Reuters
Japanese women in kimonos walk during heavy snowfall at Toshimaen amusement park in Tokyo, as they attend a ceremony celebrating Coming of Age Day, Jan. 14, 2013. Youths across Japan are honoured with special coming-of-age ceremonies when they reach the age of 20.
Koji Sasahara / AP
A man crosses a pedestrian bridge in the snow in Tokyo, Jan. 14, 2013.
Franck Robichon / EPA
Pedestrians cross a large avenue as heavy snow falls in Tokyo, Japan, Jan. 14, 2013.
Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuters
People clear snow off a road, next to a car stranded in the snow, in Tokyo, Jan. 14, 2013.
Tokyo had its first snowfall this season today. A blanket of snow made for pretty pictures but difficult commutes. Flights to and from the capital's Haneda airport were cancelled, parts of expressways closed and local train services delayed.
Watch the video report below.
Snow in eastern Japan caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights and led to dozens of road accidents. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.
AFP - Getty Images
Ice and snow changes our environment, as winter engulfs our world.


text: Environment Deadly London smog incident recalled on 60th anniversary The World December 07, 2012 Some 60 years ago, London was enveloped by an extraordinary fog, even by that soupy city's standards. And it wasn't just fog, it was smog, from coal furnaces and factories. It was also deadly, killing as many as 4,000 people over a four-day period.


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There was an article today in the San Diego Union Tribune on mountain goats and Olympic National Park. Blew me away, as it was contrary to everything I believed.
I once saw a herd of mountain goats while hiking in Olympic National Park. One of my favorite wilderness memories, they seemed so natural, so beautiful and majestic, so wild. And so safe.
Turns out they are not native to the Olympic Peninsula, they were imported in the 1920's. They have been a problem for many years, bad for the environment and dangerous for hikers. A mountain goat killed a hiker in 2010. Not by butting him off a cliff, by goring him in the leg. Severed arteries, he bled to death. Seems the mountain goats don't keep their distance, they are attracted by the salt and other minerals that cling to us, our clothing, and our gear.
There have been removal programs, but they aren't very cooperative, and keep reproducing. Now the park service is considering complete elimination from the park, by removal to the North Cascades followed by shooting the ones that escape removal.
You learn something new every day. I wonder if this was well known to our Pacific Northwest friends.


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Welcome to the booking grid!
Click on any of the boxes in the grid above to get started.
You can Click and Drag to select/deselect multiple boxes in one go
Now extend your booking by clicking adjacent boxes.
(we only take bookings of two or more hours)
At the moment your booking is in two different rooms.
If you want to do this, you should add one to the cart, and then go through the booking process again
If this is a mistake, click to deselect on any selected boxes in the wrong room
There's currently a gap in your booking. To be able to add the booking to your basket you'll need to get rid of any gaps.
When you're ready click Add to Cart
Saturday 26th October 2019
To book a room you must be logged in.


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The Ironton Police Department in Ohio found a container of illegal drugs labeled "Not Dope" inside a library.
Police said officers found the container inside the city's library Friday. Police said a loaded syringe and methamphetamine were inside the box.
The owner of the box is unknown at this time.


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It's the backstretch of the year. My endless project will be over, good or ill, at the end of the month. So will Christmas. As for the insanity with which I live, that, I fear, will accompany me into the glad New Year and quite possibly to the end of time, or at least … MY time.
I thought retirement might be dull. I thought it would be … maybe … slower-paced than working was. I was certainly convinced I would have much more time to do stuff, all kinds of stuff, that I didn't get to do when I was working. Hah!
A year ago last August, I was at a retirement party for a friend. Early retirement, I should add. In a rare act of sanity, he hit 60, his pension vested, and he said "Lemme outta here!!!!" and due to actually having at some point done some financial planning, plus a bit of good luck, he could. And did.
So I said, this being a very good friend of many long years standing (and sitting, and falling over, laughing, eating, and whatevering), let's see if we can fit some time to actually visit a bit more often.
He said, and this is a quote: "Now that I'm retiring, I'll have plenty of time." He didn't know yet, but he sure found out fast enough.
I didn't stop laughing for days. He hasn't had a moment to breathe since he quit working. Neither he nor I can figure out how he managed to fit a fulltime job into his life.
Retirement … a misnomer if ever I heard one … is like jumping into a pool of still water. For a brief few moment, you will see the rings spreading out from where your body went under. Then, the surface will again flatten out into a mirror of smoothness. Life, the waters thereof, have taken you in.
Beneath that silken surface is a roiling mass of tasks, catastrophes, obligations, incomplete projects and Lord only knows what else … much of which has been waiting for your arrival for many long years. As you slide under the surface, hands begin to grab at you, voices come in every direction. Your parents need your help. Your children, grandchildren, the house, the cars, volunteer projects all bang you over the head.
When did I volunteer for that? you ask … but you won't remember. Don't bother trying. "You're making that up," you mumble, convinced that everyone has lost their minds, that you have slipped down a rabbit hole or through wormhole into an alternate universe. No, just retirement. It's like that.
You don't have spare time. You don't have any time. You're lucky if you have the time to get a little nap now and then.
Analyze the word and it will make more sense. Re (to repeat); tire (exhaustion and lack of sleep); ment (whatever). You are becoming tired again. Just when you thought you were going to have all that free time, leisure, naps in the warm summer afternoons … hah!
Getting old is definitely not for the faint of heart.


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Kipp Bodnar
I am in agreement with Kipp; sharing is definitely a key factor when it comes to Social Media.
I have taken the main points from Kipp's post:
"When it comes to the social web people often spend too much time talking about the applications and not nearly enough about the content that fuels them. Sharing content and information is the currency of the social web, and without content the platforms are useless. So when we think about B2B social media success we obviously need to focus on content. Though we have written many posts on how to create B2B content for the web, today I want to address how to share content.
Before we get to strategy, I have one rule. "The Rule: Don't only share your content, people don't care about ONLY your content."… let's talk about developing a strategy and tactics for sharing content on social web. This framework should work for sharing content your business creates as well as other relevant information to those in your industry.
"7 Step B2B Social Media Content Sharing Strategy"
1. Understand What Is Interesting To The People You Are Trying To Influence
2. Develop A Process To Gather Relevant Information To Share
3. Preform A Content Distribution Inventory
4. Segment B2B Content By Platform
5. Set Up Cross-Posting
6. Implement Measurement For Each Distribution Method
7. Optimize Distribution TimingSharing content buildings credibility and improves all inbound marketing efforts.
Please continue reading entire post
Do you suggest any other content sharing tips that we could add?
Tags: B2B, Business, Content, Flickr, Marketing, Media, Social Media


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A taste of paradise
Nature is intact and abundant on the island of Fernando de Noronha, Brazil. Islanders and visitors abide by strict rules to keep it that way
Getting to heaven can be a trial. With the only flights to the Brazilian island chain of Fernando de Noronha coming from Recife and Natal, the journey means changing planes in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, and then again in Recife. Once you arrive, all is forgiven – even at 5am, when it's still dark and a cold wind is blasting your face – and at the very latest once you're bumping down the track to Baía dos Golfinhos, dolphin bay, in a buggy. The spectacle begins shortly after sunrise, when hundreds of spinner dolphins swarm into the wide bay from the open sea. The waters churn; time and again, the gray marine mammals shoot skywards, flip and dive back down into the waves. Some of these acrobats, weighing up to 80 kilos, leap three meters into the air, spinning on their own axis as they plummet back into the water. From the cliffs above the bay, two dozen tourists watch the animals through binoculars. The dolphins come in the early morning to relax in the bay after hunting. "This is where they mate, where their young are born," says oceanographer José Martins. "Nowhere else will you find as many spinner dolphins."
The archipelago, 360 kilometers off Brazil's Atlantic coast, is a natural paradise. Thousands upon thousands of migratory and marine birds nest here between the rocks along the bluff. Whales and turtles swim past the island on their yearly migrations. Its bays provide shelter for sharks from ocean predators. Martins came to Fernando de Noronha in 1989, a year after the archipelago and the surrounding ocean was declared a nature reserve. "We do all we can to protect the environment," says the 50-year-old marine scientist, "below the water, the ecosystem is intact."
Ecotourism has its price; everything is much more expensive here than it is on the mainland. "We have to transport all our building materials to the island, and food, too," says Ju Medeiros, co-owner of the Pousada Triboju hotel and a well-known musician whose songs tell of Noronha's beauty. The intact landscape and unique animal and plant kingdoms are the biggest asset of the large main island, which covers 17 square kilometers. The majority of the roughly 5000 islanders earn their living with gentle tourism, which is controlled by strict rules. The government is endeavoring to stem the flow of new people from the mainland as the island population has more than tripled since 1988.
Newcomers are eligible for a residence permit only after ten years. The number of tourists is also strictly regulated, and they pay an environment tax of 51 reais (12 euros) for each day they stay. Although only four daily flights serve the island, some 450 people come to Fernando de Noronha every day and last year, around 80 000 tourists visited this piece of paradise.
The environmental regulations are very strict: no large hotels, no buildings on the beach. There are no jet skis, the number of cars and boats is restricted, and most of the roads are just sandy tracks. "So far, we have been able to preserve this natural paradise with our tourism revenue," says Leonardo Bertrand Veras. "We mustn't let ourselves be swayed by profit and ease the rules, as some people demand."
Veras, a fisheries engineer, came to Noronha in 1990. He hunted with his fishing rod, processed his catch and sold it to the locals, but didn't earn much. So he turned to tourism and built a shark museum on a plateau in the east of the island. "Sharks have incredible abilities. They can detect tiny electrical currents, they have a great sense of smell, and they can see and hear very well," Veras explains. "They are not bloodthirsty killers waiting to devour a human being. No one has ever been attacked by sharks in the waters around Fernando de Noronha. "The food supply beneath the waves is clearly plentiful enough."
We mustn't let ourselves be swayed by profit
In Baía do Sancho, nurse sharks hunt down the shimmering shoals of silver Brazilian sardinellas in shallow waters. As they flee, the fish sometimes lose their sense of direction and end up on the beach, where the locals happily gather them up: "Sardinha" soup is a local delicacy. For years, Sancho has been considered Brazil's most beautiful beach, and the website TripAdvisor voted it the best beach in the world. Surrounded by steep cliffs, it is tucked away in a small bay in the northwest of the island. The sand gleams white-gold, the water a clear turquoise, and there is not a human being to be seen. It's like a Robinson Crusoe movie, almost surreal in its beauty.
The sleepy paradise becomes a hotspot for surfers between January and March, when the waves on Boldró and Cacimba do Padre and the other beaches in the north tower three to five meters high, earning the island its nickname "Brazilian Hawaii." Fernando de Noronha is hailed as Brazil's best place to dive. The Noronha Divers' boat bobs on the waves off the tiny islet of Rata in the northwest, one of roughly 20 dive sites.
The island waters are home to around 250 species of fish. Some are hooped, others striped, dotted or have a single large spot, some resemble balloons, while others are flat as pancakes or as long as snakes. Inside a hole in the rock, an eel waits patiently for prey; beneath a ledge, a young nurse shark enjoys forty winks. And swimming everywhere, turtles gaze at the divers with their big round eyes. "There aren't many places where you can see this many turtles," says Luís Felipe Bortolon, a biologist working for the Tamar turtle protection program launched in Bahia 35 years ago and working very successfully on Fernando de Noronha since 1984. "In the last breeding season, we counted 266 turtle nests. That was an absolute record for Noronha," says the 31-year-old blond giant. On Praia do Porto, he examines two green turtles he caught while diving. He measures their shells and checks out the markings on the front fins. Later, he will use this data to track the exact wanderings and growth of the turtles and update the computer records. After this public examination, he lets several excited children help carry the turtles back to the water.
At sunset, all the beaches in the national park close to leave the animals in peace. During the nesting season, from January to July, some beaches close completely, but visitors can accompany the scientists on their nightly patrols and watch the females laying their eggs. "We let tourists see the tiny turtles hatching and running into the ocean," says Bortolon, a spectacle that never fails to stir a wave of emotion on this island paradise.


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Three miners in China have been rescued after spending two and a half days trapped underground because of flooding in a coal mine that killed three of their colleagues.
Xinhua News Agency says the three were lifted to safety from the mine in Guizhou province's Weng'an county early Monday. They have been hospitalized in stable condition. Three other miners remain missing.
The mine flooded at around 10 p.m. Friday, trapping nine miners. Rescuers on Sunday had been waiting for the water level to recede before entering the shaft.
Xinhua says police have detained eight people in the ongoing investigation.
China's mines have long been the world's deadliest. Safety improvements have reduced deaths in recent years, but regulations are often ignored and accidents are still common.


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Millions of North Americans are expected to dig into turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) feels it has a better idea about what to stick in the roasted bird.
On Friday, the group announced it would be offering free tombstones emblazoned with the words: "Here Lies the Corpse of a Tortured Bird" for kids to place in the Thanksgiving turkey.
PETA, which has a reputation for using sensationalist advertisements and commercials to convey its pro-animal stance, says kids who visit peta2.com/Tombstones and request a tombstone will get them in the mail for free.
All they have to do is tell PETA why they don't eat turkey.
"Kids love animals, and once they realize that turkeys feel pain and fear just as dogs and cats do, they want to switch out those drumsticks for Tofurky," PETA spokeswoman Marta Holmberg says on the organization's site. "This Thanksgiving, families can give turkeys something to be thankful for by choosing delicious vegan meals."
PETA says more than 45 million turkeys are killed in the U.S. for Thanksgiving dinners.
"In nature, turkeys are protective and loving parents as well as spirited explorers who can climb trees and run as fast as 25 miles per hour. But most turkeys slated to be killed for food are crammed into filthy warehouses, where disease, smothering, and heart attacks are common," PETA says.


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Matt York / AP
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaks to supporters during an election night party Tuesday, Nov. 6, in Phoenix. At right is his wife, Eva.
Other results that might have flown under your radar on Election Night:
• Republican Joe Arpaio, 80, nationally famous for his fierce enforcement of laws against illegal immigration, won his sixth straight term as sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Arpaio — who is the defendant in federal and civil lawsuits accusing him of violating the rights of undocumented immigrants — defeated Democrat Paul Penzone, a former Phoenix police officer, Telemundo Arizona reported.
• Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., beat Republican former Gov. Tommy Thompson to become the nation's first openly gay senator, NBC News projected. Thompson — who served as secretary of Health and Human Services in the administration of former President George W. Bush, announced his retirement from politics in his concession speech.
• The latest effort to abolish the death penalty in California was headed for defeat, NBC 4 in Los Angeles reported. Proposition 34 would have applied retroactively to nearly 725 people on California's Death Row and would also have diverted $100 million from the state's general fund to help solve more homicide and rape cases.
• Republican Kerry Bentivolio — a reindeer farmer and Santa Claus impersonator — defeated Democrat Syed Taj, a physician, in Michigan's 11th Congressional District, NBC News projected. The race became wide open after Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a five-term Republican, resigned in July after failing to produce enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.
• "Joe the Plumber" — real name Samuel Wurzelbacher — lost his House race to Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, winning only 24 percent of the vote, NBC station WNWO of Toledo reported. Wurzelbacher, who came to prominence as a politicized symbol of the economy's toll on the middle class in during the 2008 campaign, had said he would advocate for veterans and use his "notoriety" to help others — no matter their party affiliation.
• Republicans lost their 102-member supermajority in the Texas House, opening the door for Democrats to slow or block the majority's conservative agenda, The Associated Press reported. That means Republicans can no longer suspend the rules to push through legislation over the objections of minority Democrats. Last year, Republicans had enough lawmakers to form a quorum without any Democrat showing up for work.
• But Republicans won enough seats in the Tennessee Senate to earn their first supermajority since Reconstruction.
• Voters in Wichita, Kan., defeated a measure to put fluoride in their water, NBC station KSN reported. "I'll be in my office tomorrow morning at 7:30 like most every dentist in Wichita," said Dr. Lucynda Raben of Wichitans for Healthy Teeth.
More election coverage from NBCNews.com:
- Obama wins re-election; Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin prove pivotal
- Democrats retain control of Senate with series of hard-fought wins
- Rape remarks sink two Republican Senate hopefuls
- In costliest-ever Senate race, Warren beats Brown for Mass. seat
- Maine's Harley-riding King vowed to 'shake up' D.C.
- Republicans easily maintain control of House
- Colorado, Washington approve recreational marijuana use
- Pence in as governor of Indiana; Hassan wins in N.H.
- Majority of voters see American on wrong track


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Android: Open systems need responsibility
Edit: The original article (below) was unclear that I'm mainly talking about rooting techniques, custom ROMs, and modifications. This isn't about applications, which are certainly somewhat under control. Even in the ROM world, there's some good stuff happening with, e.g., ROM Manager, and well-known brands like Cyanogen. But at the same time, most people who've rooted their phones or installed custom mods have been told at some point to go download something from mediafire.com or a link from xda-developers, and install it on their phones.
I have a strong suspicion that Google's Android operating system is ripe for a huge catastrophe in the near future. This post is about where it will probably come from, why it will happen, and how we can all manage to avoid being a victim when it happens.
Android: The Open System
Despite all the false debates drummed up by people with financial incentives otherwise, everyone knows that Android is an open system. The source code to the operating system is publicly available, multiple independent teams maintain their own forks of that code, a fair chunk of Android phone users are using custom ROMs. In the application space, Android apps tend to be free, are often written by individuals or small groups, and there are plenty of open source libraries and apps. It's hard not to admit that's an open software ecosystem in action.
Of course, that's great. It means that a lot more options, and often a lot higher quality software, are available to Android users than if they had to rely entirely on a single organization to produce its masterpiece. It's messy, too; certainly there is poor quality software released for Android, and there's more sorting through the options versus a tightly controlled proprietary system; but that's to be expected. Perhaps we can find better ways to sort through and find the best software out there, but that's not the point of this article. Freedom is a good thing.
We have a problem, though.
A Tale of Two Communities
Back outside the smartphone/tablet space, in the 1990s long before such devices were around, there were two very different communities of people sharing code. On the one hand, we had the free software movement (later rebranded "open source" by Raymond). On the other hand, we had the Windows "freeware" community. The two groups both tended to share computer programs, mostly for free. But beyond that, they couldn't have been more different.
The Free Software / Open Source Community:
- The running assumption is that everyone can read code.
- Everything is source code; indeed, sometimes pre-compiled versions are not available.
- Users take care to become acquainted with the technology involved.
- People take trust seriously. People know each other, and work together.
- Software is frequently downloaded from the official web site of that software project.
- Packaging and bundling handled by well-known groups working transparently with documented processes.
The Windows Freeware Community:
- People who understand code are considered an anomaly.
- Compiled executables are shared people who are paranoid about their source code.
- Users often download and install things they don't understand.
- Anyone who can write code is worshiped, regardless of reputation or character.
- Software is often distributed by links in web forums, or file sharing web sites (with lots of popup ads).
- Random people repost software without mention of its source or author.
Predictably, the results were quite different. The open source community exploded, and still today produces high quality software and makes people's lives better. By contrast, "freeware" was responsible for the widespread distribution of viruses, adware, and trojan horses, and likely single-handedly keeps the predatory "anti-virus" industry alive. Reasonable people never install "freeware" on their computers, and even people who want to repeat its mistakes know enough to avoid the word.
A Choice for Android
Which of these communities looks most like today's Android world? It depends on where you look, but it appears depressingly like a huge chunk of the Android community is following the freeware path. Android is fairly new, but it's already been demonstrated that viruses are in the works for the future, and as people rely more and more on smart phones for sensitive information like financial data, this looks likely to grow.
What can we do? Mostly, pay attention. And for goodness sake, quit the worship for "devs". Yes, some people are skilled at software development and make cool things. But they aren't all good people. Indeed, when someone is rude and disrespectful and changes your phone splash screen to a picture of someone peeing just for fun, we are better off as an Android community if that person weren't writing software, or if they are ignored. Just because something is done for free doesn't mean the community should settle for crap. We've sort of figured this out in terms of code quality, but we still need to learn this lesson with regard to someone's relationship with the rest of the community, as well.
We should also start being distrustful of software that's only available at some link from a web forum, or that was posted anonymously to a file sharing site. Someone with pride in their code can find a real official web site to host it from. It's not as if there aren't plenty of free options. Sure, there are good people who are not doing that just because the community norm points the other way… most software posted to XDA is not malware, and does what it claims to do. But it's difficult to build trust when software is posted anonymously to mediafire.com, and pointed from some link on a forum that might disappear tomorrow.
We still have a choice, at this point, whether Android will be a vibrant new platform for open software, or the freeware blight of tomorrow. I hope we make the choice wisely.
5 CommentsLeave a Comment
Jon / Dec 13 2010 3:31 pm
I strongly agree with you. Thank you for writing this.
Josef / Dec 13 2010 4:53 pm
There is one big difference between the Freeware community and Android which I you need to factor in. Android Market. The vast majority of all applications downloaded from Android comes from this one place. With the Freeware community programs came from all over the place, and many of these places where not to be trusted. Furthermore, and this is really crucial, Andoid market is controlled by people who have invested in the Android and want to keep it a healthy place. That means that they will do anything to remove unhealthy programs. And Google have some pretty clever people to work on these problems. I think they will be able to manage it.
I'm not saying that there won't be any problems with Android in the future but I think your analogy is a little off. Freeware-like chaos is not what I'm worrying about.
Nate / Dec 13 2010 6:30 pm
I would just like to make a quick comment about your statement that "Reasonable people never install "freeware"," as it is completely incorrect. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of freeware programs that are absolutely wonderful. Anyone who has used Windows and possessive a modicum of technical knowledge knows this. You clearly have been blinded by the GNU/Linux community's propaganda.
/end rant


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On July 29, a Senior U.S. District Judge for the 7th Circuit Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled that writer Neil Gaiman had the right to a share of the profits from comics and merchandise related to three characters from Todd McFarlane's Spawn franchise. Maggie Thompson reports the ruling here, as part of her exhaustive, in-depth coverage of the case; you can read from the first chapter here.
the "adjectiveless" Spider-Man series, which launched 20 years ago last month, took on criticisms of his writing style by hiring four big-name writers to produce issues of Spawn, with terms favorable to them; Alan Moore, Gaiman, Dave Sim, and Frank Miller wrote issues #8-11 respectively. Gaiman later sued for, and in 2002, won a share of the rights to the characters of Count Cogliostro, Medieval Spawn, and warrior angel Angela, from Spawn #9. The judgment was upheld on appeal in 2004.
The current suit involved the ownership of characters that had appeared later over the years in McFarlane's titles, specifically Dark Ages Spawn and warrior angels Tiffany and Domina. During the months of June and July, Gaiman, McFarlane, and Spawn: The Dark Ages writer Brian Holguin appeared before Judge Barbara Crabb to determine whether those later characters were derivative of Gaiman's work; the judge ruled Thursday that they were.
The ruling, which invokes a previous case involving former Beatle George Harrison and the song "He's So Fine," may be the only occasion in which a judge has ever discussed voluptuous warrior angels wearing "ill-fitting armor bras." The whole court record, taken from the beginning, makes for fascinating reading about comics production behind-the-scenes.
The connection with Spawn #9 also provides a connection to the days of blockbuster sales; several times in the past, including during the current case, I have been contacted for historical background and such sales figures as are in my archives. My records are only partial, but I can share a few things here:
In 1992 and 1993, Capital City Distribution, headquartered in Madison, Wis., the same site as the court case, was the second largest distributor of comics to the comics-shop market. For a publisher like Image, whose newsstand distribution was just beginning, Capital would have provided a larger share than usual of overall sales. Capital's first-month preorders on Spawn issues then — including, for comparison, the issues before and after the "guest author" issues, are as follows:
#7 (McFarlane-written): 143,225 copies at Capital; overall sales, likely 500,000+
• Rank: #8 at Capital, #9 at Diamond
#8 (Moore): 225,675 copies at Capital; overall sales, likely 800,000
• Rank: #2 at Capital, #2 at Diamond
#9 (Gaiman): 204,600 copies at Capital; overall sales, likely 700,000+• Rank: #3 at Capital, #3 at Diamond
#10 (Sim): 210,500 copies at Capital; overall sales, likely 700,000+
• Rank: #2 at Capital,
#11 (Miller): 234,150 copies at Capital; overall sales, likely 800,000+
• Rank: #3 at Capital, #2 at Diamond
#12 (McFarlane): 225,150 copies at Capital; overall sales, likely 800,000
• Rank: #9 at Capital, #8 at Diamond
Capital's initial orders of Spawn #1, in 1992, had been 204,760, a figure Gaiman's issue nearly matched and which all the other titles beat; since Spawn #1, no issue had broken 200,000 at Capital — until Moore's issue. (Note that since Capital's reports were preorders, reorders would have made the total figures higher than those recorded here. Spawn #1 is widely believed to have broken the million-copy mark, overall.)
Interestingly, Gaiman's issue is the lowest-seller of the guest-author series at Capital; Dave Sim's issue had higher orders in a time in which Sandman was outselling Cerebus seven-to-one. A likely contributor was the fact that Gaiman's issue shipped in January, typically a very weak month for comics orders relative to other months.
The actual figures would, of course, have been made available to the parties involved in the 2002 court case. But we can see that just within the run of the Spawn title at the time, the issues the guest authors were on did sell better than those before. Sales continued to be well above earlier levels even after the "guest author" program: orders at Capital would remain above where they were before the program for most of the rest of 1993, until issue #17. (Don't be misled by the drop in rank for #12: that was April 1993, when Superman returned from the dead and Valiant's Turok launched. Sales in the direct market were never higher before or after that month. )
Sales on many titles were buoyed by the peaking market in this period, but the boost Spawn got starting with #8 was larger than the average increase by far. While the litigants have obviously had their own reasons to look back on this time, from the standpoint of circulation history what we see is a picture of a very successful editorial promotion.


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Third Plasma Summit Lifts KDE Desktop To Higher Grounds
Last week, the third Plasma developers meeting was held in the Swiss Alps. 15 developers from 3 continents came to Randa, Canton Wallis to work on Plasma's code, design new ideas and concepts and to strengthen their bonds as a sub-community within KDE. Topics of this third Plasma sprint, which is named after a plasma fusion reactor, included but were not limited to Plasma on mobile devices, network-enabled Plasma widgets and a richer user interface thanks to a new animation framework. Furthermore deeper integration of web services in the Plasma shell, semantic awareness of Plasma components, secure privilege elevation and polishing of the existing functionality, among many other things, were on the agenda. The results of Tokamak III are, with all due modesty, nothing short of mind-blowing and display the health and swift pace of development of the whole KDE community. Plasma lead developer Aaron Seigo wraps up "It's been one of the longest KDE sprints ever, and after a week, we're all quite exhausted. Looking back at the results, however, the we have shown impressive progress all over the KDE desktop shell. We're reaching out to new use cases, new developers, new devices. Meanwhile the social aspects within the Plasma team continue to impress me. The Plasma team has grown into a small community, a group of friends that have set out to revolutionize the desktop. With the previous KDE releases, we mainly focused on providing and improving existing technology, now we're pushing the boundaries of the Free Desktop. Looking at the results that have materialized over the past week, this is the Plasma promise coming true. And we've only just begun..."
Remote Controlling KDE
Dutch Plasma hacker Rob Scheepmaker presented the results of his work on sharing and controlling Plasma applets and KDE applications over the network. He presented how the user can easily share locally installed widgets over the network. As an example, he showed how to share the "Now Playing" Plasmoid with other machines and users on the local network. The "Now Playing" Plasmoid can now be used to control the media player running on another computer, all using KDE's Plasma technology. Under the hood, a number of technologies for communicating, orchestrating and announcing local services is used. For announcing the availability of an applet on the network, the Zeroconf protocol is used. The orchestration and transferring of applets, data and control commands happens using the JOLIE and QtJolie technology. The remote widget support is another long-planned feature for Plasma which will become available in the 4.4 release, as Scheepmakers worked hard to ready the API and polish the user interfaces to meet KDE's standards for inclusion in a main module. "The remote control of a media player on another computer is only the tip of the iceberg of what we make available across the network. Prepare for some completely new and truly innovative collaboration and interaction features coming up using this unique new technology", Scheepmaker lets us know.
Plasmate Development Update
Plasmate is the working name for a new Plasma-addon development application. It provides a workflow-oriented tool to make it easy to create Plasma components such as widgets. By providing this kind of tool on top of scripting languages that can be used to create Plasma components, the plasma team aims to open development of Plasma add-ons to a much wider audience. Plasmate specifically targets programmers and designers that are currently focusing on web technologies. This way, JavaScript (or rather its ISO-standardized version ECMA) becomes a first-class citizen to develop Plasma components that can be shared across the network, for example using the new remote widget support or web services such as Get Hot New Stuff, the application-store functionality integrated into many KDE applications.
New System Tray Standard Matures
Plasma core developer Marco Martin a.k.a. notmart has readied the implementation of the new System Tray standard for inclusion into kdelibs and merged it as part of KDE's core UI framework. The new system tray standard provide a D-Bus based interface, providing a strong separation of system tray needs and their visualisation.
KAuth Provides Secure Privilege Elevation
KDE developer Dario Freddi presented the work of his GSoC student Nicola Gigante during Tokamak III. The project's aim was to provide fine-grained user privilege elevation using the FreeDesktop.org PolicyKit technology. PolicyKit provides a D-Bus interface offering control for actions that can be run in a different user context, for example by running certain commands as root. Freddi readied the KAuth library for inclusion into kdelibs and integrated it with various elements of the user interface, such as the Date and Time configuration module in KDE's System Settings. He also added a specialized version of a KPushButton for application developers that can be attached to a certain action to be run with elevated privileges. This makes it almost trivial to provide direct manipulation of system administration tasks in a secure way, well integrated in the user interface and the set of policies the underlying operating system provides. "KAuth currently works on Linux and Mac systems, support for the Windows platform will be added soon", Freddi explains. More work on integrating KAuth into System Settings and other parts of KDE is needed, but the work up until now surely paves the way to a more secure and at the same time more user-friendly integration of KDE's desktop and applications with the underlying OS.
New Widgets Exporer
Plasma designer Ana Cecília Martins Barbosa presented the work she did within this year's Summer of Code to her fellow Plasma developers. The new widget explorer has been developed using a design-driven development approach. Based on the research results AnnieC gained within the first part of her SoC project, she subsequently implemented a completely new way of adding widgets to the Plasma shell. During Tokamak III, she implemented additional feedback from fellow developers and was able to merge her work into KDE's trunk development tree, meaning that it will be available as part of KDE 4.4 in January. The new widget explorer provides a more beautiful and usable interface for adding Plasma widgets to the desktop or netbook shell and integrates better with other Plasma components such as the Panel controller which is used to manipulate visual and layout aspects of panels in Plasma. While some more polishing is still needed, the whole team is happy to see yet another Summer of Code project come to fruition.
Plasma Netbook Shell to be Released in January
Plasma developers Marco Martin and Artur Souza demonstrated the new Plasma Netbook project, a user interface specialized to be used on netbook devices. The Plasma netbook shell has moved to the kdebase module, making it part of KDE 4.4. The netbook shell is built around constrains on these kinds of devices, in terms of screen space but also optimized for use-cases around the web. The Newspaper page of the Plasma netbook shell provides direct access to information from the web that is important to the user, such as news on interesting websites and weather information. These are only the first step of deep integration of the web into KDE applications and Plasma, more steps towards this direction will become apparent in the next months.
New Anchorlayouts Enhance Canvas-Based Interfaces
INdT and Plasma developer Artur Souza presented a project, his team and the Qt developers in Oslo have been working on over the last months. The new Anchorlayouts provide a way to position user interface elements relative to each other filling a gap Plasma developers have been experiencing when experimenting with new ways of layouting UI elements on the Plasma canvas.
KDE and Plasma on ARM
The Plasma developers worked on running KDE on a so-called "mystery device", a working name for a class of relatively low-performance devices based on the ARM architecture. As a reference device, the developers used a 800 Mhz ARM CPU with 512MB of RAM. During the sprint, KDE 4.2's Plasma was presented running on the device. The overall performance was quite good, although it showed room for improvement. Even without having an accelerated graphics driver available at this point, the developers were quite happy with the performance so far as Souza a.k.a Morpheuz reports on his weblog. Using Qt 4.6 on the device gave another boost in speed. "Even with the short time available to make Plasma run on the device, and without having a proper graphics driver available, we can now be sure that running Plasma on this class of devices is absolutely feasible. I'm sure that, with a bit more integration work, Plasma will offer a premium choice for UI technology on this new class of devices." concludes Souza.
Plasma Team Provides Input and Feedback to Qt Developers
Alexis Menard from the Qt team presented the innovations in the new version of the Qt framework. KDE, and especially Plasma will be able to benefit from vast performance improvements in the QGraphicsView canvas. The addition of Qt Kinetic enables Plasma to easily animate various parts of the UI, using this standard framework. The addition of Qt Kinetic marks a milestone is what can only be described as a successful collaboration between Qt Development Frameworks and Nokia. During the first Tokamak meeting in Milan, Italy, Qt engineer Andreas Aardal Hanssen had presented the plans for a standardized and shared animation framework in Qt, oriented, amongst others, towards the need of rich, canvas-based user interfaces. Subsequently, the Plasma developers have provided use-cases, feedback and API reviews to make sure that Kinetic meets its users' needs and provides the tools necessary to enhance UIs built on top of Qt with smooth and natural animations while being easy to program. During the second Tokamak meeting in February 2009, Qt and Plasma developers Menard presented an example of the Plasma picture frame using kinetic to animate transitions between images in a slidehow. Qt Kinetic will be part of Qt 4.6 which has recently entered feature freeze and will be released in late 2009. The Plasma developers have taken the first steps to be able to use Kinetic in KDE's upcoming release, 4.4 which will be released in January 2010. In the course of the week, a Google Summer of Code project to integrate Kinetic into libplasma has entered review stage, and will probably be merged into KDE's upcoming release branch in the next weeks.
Another new piece of technology the Qt team is working on is QML, the Qt markup language. Menard gave an update of the progress in this field, after Plasma developers had provided an initial round of feedback earlier this year. QML is an implementation of the declarative UI technology that will make it easier for designers to build rich user interfaces on top of Qt. The Plasma developers are looking forward to use QML in order to make it easy to build Plasma components in a visual way, much like Qt designer does for traditional widgets.
Community and Team-building efforts
An important aspect of this kind of developer sprints is the team building and bonding aspect. Getting away from their keyboards every now and then, the team had a daily nature walk. With the terrific surrounding of the Oberwallis, the scenery provided a unique opportunity to re-charge the batteries and talk about various things off-line for a while. Experience with this kind of focused developer meetings has shown that personal interaction is an essential ingredient for good collaboration online. Activities off the keyboards included hiking in the surrounding Swiss Alps, building a dam in a mountain creek and going up onto the "Kleines Matterhorn", one of the mountains surrounding the valley at a height of approximately 3800 meters. The atmosphere in Chalet Nachtigall, (the "Plasmaniac Mansion") was very family-like with the daily lunches and dinners, where everybody sat around a table. In terms of productivity, the results of this meeting are nothing short of impressive.
Other Achievements
The performance of the job viewer in the new Plasma system tray has seen some major performance optimizations. Davide Bettio has overhauled the structure of Plasma's configuration dialogs in an effort to reflect the mental model of the user closer, rather than the technological structure of these components. Sebastian Kügler presented his work on a new, netbook-friendly Plasma network management applet and a work on integrating information from the Akonadi PIM storage framework into Plasma. Chani Armitage has further polished the work on mouse plugins for Plasma she conducted as part of her Summer of Code project. Artur Souza has separated the back- and front-end of the Plasma pastebin widget. This widget now consists of a Plasma applet and a dataengine, making it easier to share this web service between applets. Ivan Cukic has worked on Plasma's context, a service using the Nepomuk semantical framework as provider of context information. In the future, this will be used to adapt applications and the Plasma shell what the user is doing, where he is and other environmental constrains. Cukic, who is the main developer of Lancelot, an innovative application launcher for Plasma and an alternative to the KDE "start menu" Kickoff, integrated KRunner plugins into KDE's default application launcher. While Kickoff is in theory a competitor, or rather a replacement for Lancelot, Cukic showed great team spirit by implementing this substantial improvement into KDE's default setup. KRunner plugins are used to provide matches for the search bar which can be found in Plasma's application launcher, making this technology more accessible to everyday users.
Tokamak III Concludes
The Plasma team thanks the KDE e.V. for providing funding to the team, which made it possible to bring people from all over the world together in one place to collaborate on KDE's primary user interface. Special thanks go out to host Mario Fux, who not only provided the unique premises of Chalet Nachtigall in Randa, but also took care of all the needs of the developers. Fux already showed interest in organizing another sprint in the beautiful Randa, if your team is interested, get in contact with him. Tokamak III was certainly a very unique experience and enabled the developers to fully concentrate on work while gaining new inspiration and ideas. Without the KDE e.V.'s financial support and the friendly support of Mario Fux, this would not have been possible.
Very impressive!
I am really craving a good remote control mechanism that works through routers/firewalls. Teamviewer on Windows/OSX does that really well.
Did you guys work on vertical panels? At the moment they show only tiny tiny icons for tasks.
I would love to get the speed improvements NOW ;), but I just learned that delaying gratification is a really important skill in life. So be it.
By kragil at Tue, 2009/09/08 - 4:21pm
Newspaper layout
I was under the impression that the "newspaper layout" doesn't have anything to do with newspaper-like things (news, weather, etc.) per se, but only refers to the layout of the plasmoids, closely packed in columns similar to a newspaper. Was I wrong?
By Gábor Lehel at Tue, 2009/09/08 - 6:23pm
Newspaper layout
yes, it's primarily a reference to the layout rather than the content. i don't think that long term we'll keep that name visible in the UI.
By Aaron Seigo at Wed, 2009/09/09 - 3:24am
just because most articles i have read -- ok, that's probably a total of two, one at ars and this one here -- seem to get that confused.
By Gábor Lehel at Wed, 2009/09/09 - 9:20am
Who are they ?
Could somebody please put names to the photo, I don't know everybody there ? :-)
By aneundorf at Tue, 2009/09/08 - 6:30pm
from left to right there's: me making a funny face next to a funny carving (i was behind the camera taking the photo of the others, so i guess they decided to find the most bizarre photo of me and throw it in there :P ), Riccardo (artwork, various bits of code), Artur (iNdt, working on Netbook stuff as well), Diego (Plasmate), Sebas (battery, network manager, pim-related plasmoids and various communication tasks), Rob (extenders, remote plasmoids), Dario (KAuth), Annie (new widget explorer), Marco (plasma-netbook, libplasma and tons of work just about everywhere else), Ivan (lancelot, kickoff-krunner integration, misc work elsewhere), Alexis (Qt Dev Frameworks where he works on QGraphicsView, also did the device notifier plasmoid and other bits here and there), Davide (lots of work on config dialogs and various plasmoids).
missing from the photo are Chani (various plasmoids and dataengines inc work on microblogger, containment action plugins, widgets on screensaver, other misc bits here and there), Beat (bug triage, wallpapers, various plasmoids) and our host Mario. Markey and Myriam from Amarok also joined us for a couple days.
By Aaron Seigo at Wed, 2009/09/09 - 3:22am
Of geeks and coding and chocolate & cheese
The foto looks like one of those post-HORDE american jam bands, a Rusted Root, Widespread Panic, String Cheese Incident, etc.. I hope ya'll tried the Swiss cheese while there but also the Emmenthaler, Gruyère, Vacherin Fribourgeois and one of the oldest cheeses in the world, Sbrinz.
>which is named after plasma fusion reactor,
>The goal is to make the system tray more accessible, more >consistent in its interaction model and more flexible
Sweet lion of Zion! I think this could be it!
Ive been waiting for a way to make the system tray icons bigger for quite some time and from what I understood the system tray icons are presently painted by the application so Plasma doesn't have any control over them.
I have a half dozen relatives who are seniors and had me set up their KDE4 desktops with everything big. To hell with elegant lines, designs with 9pt fonts that tie the flow to the motif, they want big icons, big menu, big taskbars and big, big fonts. The zoom is useful but they ALL love the fact that the desktop icons can be any size THEY want. (My uncle asked "Why it wasnt always like that on computers?")
And while every single icons on the taskbar (application launcher, device notifier,etc) can we made bigger, you can do that with the system tray, even when its not on the taskbar, you can expand it as much as you want but the icons always stay small.
I really hope from what Im reading that the system tray functionality and customizability is on track and a priority.
Now be honest,...
By papa chango at Thu, 2009/09/10 - 5:32am
yes :)
"I really hope from what Im reading that the system tray functionality and customizability is on track and a priority."
yes, and making the icons bigger already works today as long as there are only icons of the new variety (otherwise, to keep the layout nice, the old ones keep everything else smaller).
there are so many benefits, this being one of them, when the shell actually has control over the presentation of things.
"how many of you finished a two foot Toblerone all by yourselves when you were there?"
haha.. the chocolate frenzies were actually quite funny. the Swiss are quite serious about their chocolate intake and Mario had a large box of these wonderful chocolate sticks/bars. every so often a handful of them would get tossed into the room and hackers would dive in from all angles. good times.
(and yes, i've tried Sbrinz .. i LOVE Swiss cheeses!)
By Aaron Seigo at Mon, 2009/09/14 - 12:35am
minor typo
"The new system tray standard provide a D-Bus based interface" - probably should be "provides"
By richlv at Thu, 2009/09/10 - 6:32am
Don't forget usability
I am a long time fan of KDE and really am amazed at what was produced from this year's Tokamak meeting. In terms of features KDE had made some great progress. I wish KDE's performance was a bit better, but I am sure this will also improve if from nothing more then performance gains in Qt.
There is one area I think that has lost a bit of focus in KDE and that is Usability. I know there are focus groups within KDE that discus usability, and I hope this group becomes a little more active in the near future. The area that needs the most help when it comes to usability is the System Settings. There are various configuration panels within System Settings which are far from being intuitive to me be let alone a new Linux user.
Does KDE still have an active usability team, and are they providing any input into each release ?
Maybe System Settings panels just need a little time to catch up to all the feature changes going on in KDE.
Congratulations to the Tokomak Team, and thank you for all the great work.
By David Boosalis at Thu, 2009/09/10 - 6:55pm
Not the optimum emphasis
I see a pattern here that is not in the best interest of the project.
The emphasis should not be on thinking up as many new features as possible, but rather on stability and usability of the existing release.
The current release is only marginally stable and several of the small things from KDE-3 are still missing. And, yes DavidB is correct that more attention needs to be given to usability.
By James Tyrer at Fri, 2009/09/25 - 10:00am