Plasma

Plasma or plasm may refer to:

Biology

Computing

Media and entertainment

KDE

KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community producing free and libre software like Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and many cross-platform applications designed to run on modern Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems. The Plasma Desktop is a desktop environment provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, Manjaro Linux and also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

The goal of the community is to develop free software solutions and applications for the daily needs of an end-user, as well as providing tools and documentation for developers to write such software. In this regard, the resources provided by KDE make it a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita, digiKam, and many others.

History

Origins

K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.

KDE Plasma 4

KDE Plasma 4, subsequently renamed from KDE Plasma Workspaces, is the umbrella term for the fourth generation graphical environments provided by KDE. It comprehended of three workspaces, each targeting a certain platform: Plasma Desktop for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks, Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and Plasma Active for tablet PCs and similar devices.

KDE Plasma 4 was released as part of KDE Software Compilation 4 and replaced Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba, which formed the Desktop in earlier KDE releases. They are bundled as the default environment with a number of free software operating systems, such as Chakra,Kubuntu,Mageia (DVD version),openSUSE, or PC-BSD.

With the release of KDE SC 4.11 on 14 August 2013 KDE Plasma 4 was put into "feature freeze" and turned into an long-time stable package until August 2015. On 15 July 2014 KDE Plasma 4’s successor, KDE Plasma 5, was released.

Features

Plasma features containments, essentially an applet that contains other applets. Two examples of containments are the desktop background and the taskbar. A containment can be anything the developer wants: an image (either raster graphics or an SVG image), animation, or even OpenGL. Images are most commonly used, but with Plasma the user could set any applet as the desktop background without losing functionality of the applet. This also allows for applets to be dragged between the desktop and the taskbar (two separate containments), and have a separate visualization for the more confined taskbar.

Organic

Organic may refer to:

Chemistry

Farming, certification and products

Organic unit

An organic unit is a military unit that is a permanent part of a larger unit and (usually) provides some specialized capability to that parent unit. For instance, the US Marine Corps incorporates its own aviation units (distinct from the US Air Force and US Navy) that provide it with fire support, electronic warfare, and transport.

At a lower level of organization, infantry units commonly incorporate organic armour or artillery units to improve their combined arms capability. Organic assets are closely integrated into their parent unit's command structure and their personnel are familiar with other personnel in the parent unit, improving coordination and responsiveness and making the parent unit more self-sufficient.

However, over-emphasis of organic assets can create wasteful redundancy. For instance, an infantry unit assigned to urban peacekeeping duties might have little use for its organic artillery, while another unit deployed elsewhere might have less artillery support than it required. The question of how much to emphasise the use of organic assets, as opposed to coordination with separate units ('joint organization') is a subject of debate and heavily dependent on questions of command and control.

Organic wine

Organic wine is wine made from grapes grown in accordance with principles of organic farming, which typically excludes the use of artificial chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.

The consumption of organic wine grew at a rate of 3.7 percent over the year ending September 19, 2009, out-pacing growth in the consumption of non-organic wine which grew 2% during a similar period. There are an estimated 1500-2000 organic wine producers globally, including negociant labels, with more than 885 of these organic domaines in France alone.

The legal definition of organic wine varies from country to country. The primary difference in the way that organic wine is defined relates to the use (or non use) of preservatives during the wine-making process.

Production and preservatives

Wine production comprises two main phases - that which takes place in the vineyard (i.e. grape growing) and that which takes place in the winery (i.e. fermentation of the grapes into wine, bottling etc.). The baseline definition of organic wine as "wine made with grapes farmed organically", deals only with the first phase (grape growing). There are numerous potential inputs which can be made during the second phase of production in order to ferment and preserve the wine. The most universal wine preservative is sulphur dioxide. The issue of wine preservation is central to the discussion of how organic wine is defined.