Slashdot Mirror
No WINE Before Its Time
Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.
This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company.
Yes and no. It is a little simpler than this quote suggests. Wine does not need to implement every API that Microsoft produces. It needs to implement every API that desired Windows applications use. In some ways it is a quality of service problem, the marginal cost between supporting 90% of apps and 100% of apps may be too expensive. Maybe 80% to 90% is too expensive. I don't pretend to know what the optimal percentage is but it is surely not 100% or even mid to high 90%s.
In any case this is a monumental task and the Wine developers deserve an awful lot of credit and thanks.
The idea of running Wine on Intel Macs probably occurred to every WINE enthusiast roughly 300 milliseconds after Apple announced they were abandoning POWER. No doubt many people are working on it, including Codweavers. But forget about financial support from Apple.
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "non-subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
- The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
- The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
- The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
- Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20
arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house
on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
Seastead this.