numbers

Ah, numbers.

69.4 cents Canadian (40.3 cents Euro): how much I paid for a liter of gas today. It was nearly twice that price three months ago. Makes one think about deflation and the scary effects that could have on an economy where most people carry too much debt.

100: the number of bug reports filed against plasma in the past week. More and more of them are duplicates, though, which is good. That means people are running out of new problems to find and report. Davide Bettio went on a "find crashes" hunt today though and turned up at least one new one; until Marco fixed it. I had the exact same patch ready to go, but had to step out for half an hour so I could test it. By the time I got back, Marco had gone ahead and committed his patch ... which when I svn up'd merged with my changes character-for-character. Which was pretty cool.

The number of cool things folderview can do keeps growing as well. Frederik H. closed a bug report this evening that noted that folderview kind of sucked when viewing a remote URL on a computer that wasn't always connected to the network: when disconnected, it might time out and show nothing, and when reconnected it wouldn't refresh to see if there were changes made. Thanks to the awesomeness that is Solid, it was a pretty small patch (less than 10 lines of code IIRC) to make the magic happen. One less bug report, one more cool feature.

And one step closer to the user interface I was only dreaming of with my KDE brothers and sisters a few years back: "The computer should just react to its environment!" we'd say, and now it's actually starting to happen. Imagine: a computer that uses all those available cycles to do smart things a human would expect of it.

Two: the number of outrageous videos containing Qt and KDE related singing. I give mad props to Adriaan for this performance live on stag at foss.in; the dude even had dancers, not to mention original material. He makes my karaoke schtick look weak in comparison. I'll have to kick it up a notch. Though, maybe, not in quite the same direction as those jolly Trolls.

Four million: the number of new desktops/laptops sold with KDE on them in Asia, Central and South American markets by just one company in 2007.

Four to one: the return rate MSI suffered of it's Linux offering compared to their Windows offering. Yet ASUS says they are seeing no difference in their return rates. So while some, including MSI, might blame Linux (and granted, MSI chose a different path than ASUS's Qt and KDE heavy offering), I'd blame MSI's poor to-market strategy. ASUS communicated clearly what the device was and wasn't and got it into brick-and-mortar stores where people would put their hands on them.

Two: the number of days before I get to see someone I love in the flesh for the first time probably 4 months. Which is way too long, really.

So, lots of numbers floating around. But really, there's only one numerical answer to everything. Everything else is an approximation. ;)