… and I’m going to use it as an example of free software projects being capable of marketing crap as a good product.
I’m almost wishing KDE 3.5 gets forked and developed in a sane manner. And I’ve even considered testing out Gnome.
The people who said KDE 4.2 rocks, meant “in comparison to 4.1 or 4.0.” If KDE 4.2 is good in comparison to those, I never want to find out how horrible the earlier versions were.
Now, normally you’d start making bug reports about issues you find, but if the overall quality is sour crud, it’d make more sense to report what works.
And the answer to that is “a lot less than in KDE 3.5.”
rant kde, rant
I earlied ranted about Freshmeat being slow on approving submissions, but based on the Freshmeat Support discussions, it seems the problem lies in their new software that makes some releases pending approval invisible to the admins. And the oddities don’t end there…
No idea whether just releases submitted within a given period are affected. In any case, I hope they patch it up.
rant rant
I just got my second order from Bike24 (from Germany to Finland), and I’ve got to say it was smooth.
- 2009-03-31 Made the order
- 2009-04-03 Bike24 shipped the order (from Dresden, Germany)
- 2009-04-07 Delivery by DHL (in Finland)
- 2009-04-08 Confirmed everything was a perfect fit
Which totals to a week.
Only issue I’ve had so far when ordering from Bike24 is that the local delivery is done via DHL, which was not-so-good experience on the first time. They tried delivering the package when I was not at home (instead of calling me beforehand to ask when it’s okay to deliver – like our postal service Itella does). When I called them back, negotiating a time was, uh, not easy. They couldn’t say exact time that they can deliver (not even within an hour – if I recall right the span was three hours or something like that), and I didn’t manage to get a delivery after working hours, so I had to ask them to bring it to my workplace.
But, apart from that “no good delivery after working hours” issue with DHL, my experiences with Bike24 have been good.
rant cycling
In a somewhat unexpected move (even to me), Encreecia is going be run using “Pay to Play” model in the future. What this means is that the players need to subscribe with a monthly payment – the amount is open at this point.
In the first stage, the aim is to cover costs for a dedicated server hosted by Nebula. If we can’t get enough subscribers to offset the costs, another possibility is selling in-game items and goods for the players. This model has been well-tested in various online games and should prove to be effective.
In the second stage, when the server costs are covered, the plan is to fund the development with the income. This includes graphics artists, background music composers, UI designers, etc. Depending on the amount of money left, I may consider working part-time on the project myself (unlike working on it at evenings on my free time now).
The game will still remain free software in the future. The only change to that is that the Pay to Play server will be always running the newest software, and the free software releases will lag a bit behind that. So you need to subscribe to see all the bells and whistles.
Subscribers will also get priority whenever bugs and in-game issues are being looked into.
More info coming soon…
Update: Note the date 
projects encreecia, projects
