The people on top of the pile now have every reason to preserve the status quo. Of course they want to discourage class warfare -even if they got to the pile by winning it in the past. The problem with class warfare is it never ends -you just end up replacing one set of overlords with another set. Hence why I said the only way to end it is to change the layout so the overlords have only barely more wealth and power than the underdogs - in that layout, they can't abuse their power because there isn't enough of it. Even then, that state is not inherently stable and must be actively preserved.
Okay, move to the more modern world - pretty much since Greek times onward a key aspect of humanity has been that parents shared resources with their children allowing their children to achieve more than they had. This has been the basis of social mobility for most of recorded history. The only times it didn't happen was when class structures were rigidly enforced by law and upward mobility was effectively prevented by the force. Even that wasn't completely effective - in a very real sense the power of the nobility in Europe was broken when the merchants started making more money than them. They simply could not prevent it forever - and where they kept trying, it led to violent revolutions as people were desperate to uplift themselves and their children.
Our ancestors didn't just pass knowledge along, they passed resources along. As far back as the Mesopotamians they would build cities which their descendants would live in (for thousands of years) without having to rebuild them.
The pattern persists - and when the system makes it hard to ensure your children will have a better life than you - you have a recipe for revolution (the US should watch out - 30 years of Reaganomics is turning the US into a prime condition for such an event - the rise of Trump is in many ways the first stirrings of exactly that).
But in this case - we're not talking about conserving resources, we're just talking about not destroying the long-lived resources (like cities) which we've been inheriting for a very long time so our children won't have to rebuild them. It's a lot easier to expand a city over time than to build a new one.
Most of them never had any guarantees they would be recorded in history - or that anybody would even know.
In 1773 the ship De Jonge Thomas was sunk in a storm outside Table Bay in Cape Town. A elderly farmer by the name of Wolraad Woltemade jumped on his horse and rode it into the sea and rescued two drowning sailors from the wreck, saving their lives. Then he went right back in and pulled out three more. He did this 7 more times - saving 14 stranger's lives. He went in an 8th time - once more risking his life - but as he did so the wreck collapsed and no less than six sailors grabbed onto the horse. The horse, already exhausted, could not carry them all and they drowned along with Woltemade.
By all accounts - including what he told people before he went in - he acted out of pity. He had no way of knowing his actions would be remembered. He knew he was risking his life but he also believed he could succeed. Indeed he did, 7 times he succeeded.
Woltemade had no way of knowing he would go down in history, that in fact South Africa's highest civilian honour for heroism would be named after him - an honour which is only given post-mortem for people who died to save strangers. My own uncle was a recipient. He was working at a gas refinery in the 1970's - in appartheid South Africa when a leak sprung in a gas-line. A number of black workers were trapped inside the pipe. He went and pulled three of them out, then he went in again and pulled out more...and kept going until he himself was overwhelmed by the toxic gas and died. This was a white man - an extremely rightwing one - in appartheid South Africa, who died to save poor black people's lives. Absolutely everything about his culture, upbringing, religion and politics told him that he was the superior human being - yet he died saving them.
To claim that these people - who were overcome with pity at the suffering of strangers and risked their lives fatally to try and save those strangers were acting out of a desire for glory is an insult to their memory.
Perhaps YOU are so big of an asshole that you could never comprehend a truly selfless act - but don't project your mental issues onto the world at last. Almost nobody else on earth is like that. The people who are always claim that everybody else is like that too. The same way rapists tend to think every other guy also does the things they do. Both are simply wrong about that. It's a story told to make themselves feel better about being assholes.
And that is what you call somebody who has no pity for the suffering of any person, even a stranger, an asshole. Not a typical human being. Not a representative sample. An asshole - and luckily, an extremely rare variety of asshole.
Actually our paleolithic ancestors *did* get a leg up from their ancestors - they inherrited knowledge and evolutionary traits from them, each generation since has gotten legs up from the ones before. If that wasn't true we would still be living like our paleolithic ancestors.
Except that history is filled with people who sacrifice their lives to save strangers with literally no possibility of reward.
That alone proves this idiotic claim that libertarians so love to be complete and utter poppycock - or, more accurately, a perfect example of projecting. People with no sense of empathy, sympathy or humanity generally find it impossible to conceive that anybody else may not share that nature. They certainly don't realize that they are a tiny minority and in fact almost nobody thinks like them. The rest of us refer to thinking like you described as anti-social personality disorder (or in the vernacular: being a psychopath).
When the CO2 was that high - the sun was also quite a lot colder than it is now. But don't let inconvenient facts get in the way.
Anyway, past climates are meaningless. Life can survive in any climate - but no particular species may be able to. Life will survive global warming - but that, by no means, guarantee that life will include humans.
Except that it isn't more expensive. There is, at most, a sunk cost fallacy that makes it appear that way. Replacing tech from the 19th century with the best the 21st century has to offer must consistently be cheaper - and indeed, it is.
Are you happy with the amount of refugees flooding Europe and the USA right now ? How happy will you be when there are ten million times as many ?
There may be some positive effects in some areas - but change is disruptive, disruption tends to cause violence and death - lots of it, before we settle into a new normal. History is pretty clear on that point. Plenty of people will be displaced by hunger, thirst and warfare from others equally desperate to control suddenly scarce resources.
Anywhere that has a positive effect will be overwhelmed with refugees desperately fleeing the places that weren't so well off.
In the meantime - we're in for a new age of plagues. Zika is a serious threat to the USA right now - and that's mild, more warmth means greater teritory for plague-carrying insects like mosquitos, that one at least - the rich world won't get to escape.
You're just plain wrong that 'nobody' talks about the positive effects, hell deniers bring them up whenever they run out of ways to deny and everybody else knows about them, but you have to be seriously insane to think they come anywhere close to outweighing the negatives. They don't, not by many orders of magnitude.
You're like the guy drowning in a flood saying "well, at least my roses got watered".
Class Warfare is not a bad thing - and the war is ongoing because it hasn't been won yet.
If you want peace between classes, you have to reduce the differences between them sufficiently to make it impossible for the upper classes to abuse and exploit the lower ones. Only then will the lower ones have nothing to retaliate against.
The term 'prehistory' refers to that part of history that predates human's learning to write. With no written records whatsoever historians have very little capacity to study these times and they belong to archaeologists (for humans) and palaeontologists (for everything else) instead.
Maya had a Linux version more than 16 years ago. Are you saying it doesn't now ? I would be extremely surprised if that's the case since holywood studios are almost all running on Linux.
Anyway - your problem is you point at the names known on windows and don't compare with what is available on Linux or even consider what DOES run via wine. Photoshop is fully supported under wine these days (though I would suggest using the PoL installer). Who needs 3Ds Max or Maya when Blender is free and a very powerful competitor (many professional studios are switching to it) and runs on many platforms ?
The age of the single-platform app is ending rapidly - the market is diversifying (slowly but surely) enough that it's no longer sensible to only support one platform - and once you write portable things using portable libraries, supporting Linux as well is no longer a significant cost.
But why would you WANT to do that on the commandline ? There are several high quality raw converter programs on Linux - UFRaw-gimp if my personal choice but there is nothing wrong with rawstudio or darktable or, in a pinch, even the barebones one built-into digikam. I think even Krita has raw support now.
But this is a completely different goalpost. The discussion was about changing system behaviour, hardware driver operations and system setups. It was not about application space - the vast majority of Linux apps are graphical and for graphics tasks that is basically all of them since it makes so much sense. The only non-GUI graphics app is the small suite of utilities that come with imagemagick, they don't support RAW work but they can be fantastic for doing bulk edits on large batches of images such as rapidly resizing a bunch of jpegs for web-upload.
HURD is technically still under development and have had a few releases. None of them are production quality, the hardware support is dismal compared to Linux and many bugs and missing features remain. If it ever reaches a true stable release it may be interesting to look at - but that could be years away yet, microkernels are simply that hard to do. Of course, for all we know, the time may come when HURD leads a new computing revolution as big as the one Linux is leading now - but the conditions where that may happen is nothing something I am able to imagine.
Unfortunately you are probably right. Small business accounting software has always been a weakness in Linux. There were a couple of attempts over the years but they all whithered and died without ever reaching a level comparable to quickbooks or even pastel. There is a very good reason for that- which is unfortunately very hard to solve. There's plenty of people who would love to write such a program - after all lots of Linux devs are small business owners. But an accounting program - especially a business accounting program - requires more than programmers. You also need accountants and lawyers to make sure the thing is producing results compliant with local laws (tax laws, audit regulations etc. etc) everywhere you want it to work - because nobody wants to run their business on an accounting package that will land them in jail for tax fraud they didn't know they were committing.
This is where the problem comes in. Accountants and lawyers aren't cheap - and getting lots from many countries is even more expensive - and there just aren't many of them willing to volunteer their time. You can get programmers to volunteer to open source projects, but there are very few lawyers and accountaints who would. So now to do this free/open source becomes extremely difficult because of the costs involved, you could try to do it for-profit as a proprietory app but you need to compete with a lot of established brands and your only unique feature is a tiny niche market they don't run on - and now you no longer get volunteer programmers so the cost goes up. To actually be competitive priced as a new product in an established market where by the very nature of the product brand loyalty is pretty much built-in (since changing your accounting software is an expensive and risky process) is extremely hard. About the only way this will change is if one of the established small business accounting packages actually decides it's worth supporting linux - or alternatively brings out a pure web SaaS solution that isn't priced beyond small business owners which you could use in a browser. Of course it sucks to be uploading your confidential business records to some other company's website which may mean that the accounting programs aren't all the interested in trying that anyway as many companies would balk at the suggestion.
I haven't looked into this market in a few years and there may be some developements recently that changed things but the sad reality is as it is.
>Users don't want options and choice, they want consistency.
False dichotomy. It's entirely possible to have both. In fact that's been KDE's driving philosophy for years. Absolute consistency, sane defaults and absolute configurability.
You only need consistency of the starting settings - so people can always find the things they need when they first sit down. You don't need it to remain consistent over time - in fact, letting users change things over time makes their work easier and more productive since no two users have identical brains.
None of your rants are true anyway. Every desktop will run every app from every other desktop. Use whatever API you like best and every major distro will run your code just fine. If you make it open source they will even do the hard work of packaging and integrating it for you - you only have to worry about that if you don't want to play by our rules, in which case, it's only fair that you have to choose which distros you'll support and put in the effort to work on them. If anything, it's a good thing, that proprietory vendors have a cost increase with every additional distro supported while free software developers get pretty much all distros for free.
There is no distro intended for desktop use that won't run a GTK or QT based app - use either of those API sets and everything works just fine. Hell there isn't even one that won't run a KDE app - you can use the entire rich KDE set of APIs and still work on all desktops - just more integrated on KDE based desktops. Now I wouldn't suggest the latter as it's quite a lot of dependencies if your app is not intended specifically for the KDE desktop but QT and GTK are both generic libraries that are almost certainly already installed on every potential user's system and was there when it first shipped.
No my friend, choice and configurability are not bad for users - but it appears they are bad for you because you don't want to do the effort of selecting the best APIs for a job from a set of good candidates - you want there to be only one set so you have to use it and nobody can afterwards complain that you should have used a different one. Basically - you like having your ass covered by a lack of choice for yourself. More skilled and experienced developers have enough confidence in our abilities to prefer to be able to make choices around libraries and apis and choose what suits our needs in this particular instance. We even LIKE that in a future version we could switch to a completely different API if the project grows in a direction where a different library is more suitable than the one we began with - and we code our projects in such a way that doing such a swap-out is a fairly minor process that requires very little rewriting - because we're always aware that this may happen at some time for whatever reason.
On the other hand - this arguably makes the decision making part far better as the evaluation is based on an actual working implementation - no speculation at all.
You are aware that you can run Android itself on PC's right ? That there is an X86 build which runs just fine on commodity PC hardware ? Multisystem even has an automated system to put it on a bootable USB stick for you.
It's not a common use-case, but it's certainly possible.
Quite a lot of people are also running android on things like raspberry PI (though that build is very beta).
On the other side of the coin - Canonical is working very hard to put PC Linux on phones - which can be docked to become a desktop experience.
The line between PC and device isn't as clear-cut as you suggest and that was my point.
>Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again? Nobody has ever said that. No really. Nobody ever said that. No. Not even RMS. Free software has nothing to do with price and a lot of free software does cost money. There is no rule against charging for free software and it doesn't make it any less free.
That said...why would I pay even the price of two beers for something that somebody else is offering me free of charge ? When the gratis one also happens to be free (as in freedom) then it wins on every count and there is no sane reason to want the for-pay one.
Anyway, customizing your desktop is such a fundamental feature that the idea that you need third-party tools to do it is a massive black mark against OSX. If you were trying to sell if by saying that, you failed miserably. I've never yet wanted to make a change to the behaviour of my KDE desktop that I could not do within KDE using tools shipped by the KDE project and included in the original install.
>Pretty racist to assume that all other voting blocks vote in lockstep.
Nobody is assuming that- but we are all (almost certainly correctly) assuming that no voting bloc habitually supports a politician that has declared them "the enemy" or grossly offended them.
How many Jews do you think voted for the NAZIs in 1929 (the only election they ever took part in - and where they actually got trounced winning only about 14% of the vote, not nearly enough to govern but sadly enough to get mainstream rightwing parties to try to appease them by giving Hitler a cabinet post... from which he could manuever his way into absolute power through what was really an armed coup).
For that matter, how many blacks do you think voted for George Wallace or Barry Goldwater ? (To avoid the above being construed as a Godwin - on this occasion those similarities have nothing to do with my argument).
The point is - even the dumbest voters tend not to vote for people whose policies threaten their safety or rights.
That's why we can assume that virtually all voting blocs will be voting in lockstep this election - because bar one all of them have had a target painted on their backs by one of the candidates - and that means voting for the person who is NOT aiming at that target.
Trump isn't in for a landslide, he is in for an avalanche... face it Hillary is an absolutely terrible candidate and she absolutely deserved to get trounced by Obama in 2008. She also deserved to get trounced by Bernie this time round (despite that sadly not happening). But Trump is the one candidate who makes Hillary not just a winner but a winner of absolutely historic proportions. The republicans are in for the biggest electoral loss since Goldwater - and it's not just Trump who is going to lose, he's going to have a massive negative effect on the downballots. Thanks to running Trump the GOP has just handed Hillary the white-house AND a congressional majority in both houses.
The decision was made by a republican - and made on a basis that a LOT of such decisions are made: insufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
The thing about the favour-the-accused legal systems of the free world is they ALSO favour the accused when the accused is rich and powerful. If you can come up with a way to change that without destroying liberty for everybody else who doesn't have those resources I would like to hear it - but for now, it's the worst system in the world except for all the others.
Youtube pays money to the artists if it detects their music in a video. If anything the problem with youtube is that it's too zealous about that- we've had numerous cases where original artists had their works taken down or money from their own music videos redirected to other media companies they had merely licensed the songs too !
Nobody cares about PID1 its all the other tightly coupled pieces which are a bad thing. Multics and VMS were doing great too... and went extinct overnight. Unix survived. DEC went from the biggest computer company in the world to bankrupt and sold for pennies i just 2 years. Unix survived.
Stallman chose unix not because he wanted to (in his own words it would be much more fun to build something new than reimplement what was already an ancient design) but because he understood why unix had outlived everything that came after it. Loosely coupled tools that rely on simple interfaces to connect rather than on code dependency. SystemD is making the same mistake that VMS and Multics and a dozen other OS's made and the only possible outcome is the same: a period of bloom followed by extremely rapid extinction. The only hope we have is that the non SystemD distros can help Linux survive when the next revolution puts every SystemD distro out of business overnight. That will seriously hurt Linux in the market.
Oh and history shows embracing the right way when the ship is sinking does not work. Tru64 did not save DEC.
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The people on top of the pile now have every reason to preserve the status quo. Of course they want to discourage class warfare -even if they got to the pile by winning it in the past. The problem with class warfare is it never ends -you just end up replacing one set of overlords with another set. Hence why I said the only way to end it is to change the layout so the overlords have only barely more wealth and power than the underdogs - in that layout, they can't abuse their power because there isn't enough of it.
Even then, that state is not inherently stable and must be actively preserved.
Okay, move to the more modern world - pretty much since Greek times onward a key aspect of humanity has been that parents shared resources with their children allowing their children to achieve more than they had. This has been the basis of social mobility for most of recorded history. The only times it didn't happen was when class structures were rigidly enforced by law and upward mobility was effectively prevented by the force. Even that wasn't completely effective - in a very real sense the power of the nobility in Europe was broken when the merchants started making more money than them. They simply could not prevent it forever - and where they kept trying, it led to violent revolutions as people were desperate to uplift themselves and their children.
Our ancestors didn't just pass knowledge along, they passed resources along. As far back as the Mesopotamians they would build cities which their descendants would live in (for thousands of years) without having to rebuild them.
The pattern persists - and when the system makes it hard to ensure your children will have a better life than you - you have a recipe for revolution (the US should watch out - 30 years of Reaganomics is turning the US into a prime condition for such an event - the rise of Trump is in many ways the first stirrings of exactly that).
But in this case - we're not talking about conserving resources, we're just talking about not destroying the long-lived resources (like cities) which we've been inheriting for a very long time so our children won't have to rebuild them. It's a lot easier to expand a city over time than to build a new one.
Most of them never had any guarantees they would be recorded in history - or that anybody would even know.
In 1773 the ship De Jonge Thomas was sunk in a storm outside Table Bay in Cape Town. A elderly farmer by the name of Wolraad Woltemade jumped on his horse and rode it into the sea and rescued two drowning sailors from the wreck, saving their lives. Then he went right back in and pulled out three more. He did this 7 more times - saving 14 stranger's lives.
He went in an 8th time - once more risking his life - but as he did so the wreck collapsed and no less than six sailors grabbed onto the horse. The horse, already exhausted, could not carry them all and they drowned along with Woltemade.
By all accounts - including what he told people before he went in - he acted out of pity. He had no way of knowing his actions would be remembered. He knew he was risking his life but he also believed he could succeed. Indeed he did, 7 times he succeeded.
Woltemade had no way of knowing he would go down in history, that in fact South Africa's highest civilian honour for heroism would be named after him - an honour which is only given post-mortem for people who died to save strangers. My own uncle was a recipient. He was working at a gas refinery in the 1970's - in appartheid South Africa when a leak sprung in a gas-line. A number of black workers were trapped inside the pipe. He went and pulled three of them out, then he went in again and pulled out more...and kept going until he himself was overwhelmed by the toxic gas and died.
This was a white man - an extremely rightwing one - in appartheid South Africa, who died to save poor black people's lives. Absolutely everything about his culture, upbringing, religion and politics told him that he was the superior human being - yet he died saving them.
To claim that these people - who were overcome with pity at the suffering of strangers and risked their lives fatally to try and save those strangers were acting out of a desire for glory is an insult to their memory.
Perhaps YOU are so big of an asshole that you could never comprehend a truly selfless act - but don't project your mental issues onto the world at last. Almost nobody else on earth is like that. The people who are always claim that everybody else is like that too. The same way rapists tend to think every other guy also does the things they do. Both are simply wrong about that. It's a story told to make themselves feel better about being assholes.
And that is what you call somebody who has no pity for the suffering of any person, even a stranger, an asshole. Not a typical human being. Not a representative sample. An asshole - and luckily, an extremely rare variety of asshole.
Actually our paleolithic ancestors *did* get a leg up from their ancestors - they inherrited knowledge and evolutionary traits from them, each generation since has gotten legs up from the ones before.
If that wasn't true we would still be living like our paleolithic ancestors.
Except that history is filled with people who sacrifice their lives to save strangers with literally no possibility of reward.
That alone proves this idiotic claim that libertarians so love to be complete and utter poppycock - or, more accurately, a perfect example of projecting. People with no sense of empathy, sympathy or humanity generally find it impossible to conceive that anybody else may not share that nature. They certainly don't realize that they are a tiny minority and in fact almost nobody thinks like them. The rest of us refer to thinking like you described as anti-social personality disorder (or in the vernacular: being a psychopath).
When the CO2 was that high - the sun was also quite a lot colder than it is now. But don't let inconvenient facts get in the way.
Anyway, past climates are meaningless. Life can survive in any climate - but no particular species may be able to. Life will survive global warming - but that, by no means, guarantee that life will include humans.
Except that it isn't more expensive. There is, at most, a sunk cost fallacy that makes it appear that way. Replacing tech from the 19th century with the best the 21st century has to offer must consistently be cheaper - and indeed, it is.
Are you happy with the amount of refugees flooding Europe and the USA right now ?
How happy will you be when there are ten million times as many ?
There may be some positive effects in some areas - but change is disruptive, disruption tends to cause violence and death - lots of it, before we settle into a new normal. History is pretty clear on that point.
Plenty of people will be displaced by hunger, thirst and warfare from others equally desperate to control suddenly scarce resources.
Anywhere that has a positive effect will be overwhelmed with refugees desperately fleeing the places that weren't so well off.
In the meantime - we're in for a new age of plagues. Zika is a serious threat to the USA right now - and that's mild, more warmth means greater teritory for plague-carrying insects like mosquitos, that one at least - the rich world won't get to escape.
You're just plain wrong that 'nobody' talks about the positive effects, hell deniers bring them up whenever they run out of ways to deny and everybody else knows about them, but you have to be seriously insane to think they come anywhere close to outweighing the negatives. They don't, not by many orders of magnitude.
You're like the guy drowning in a flood saying "well, at least my roses got watered".
Class Warfare is not a bad thing - and the war is ongoing because it hasn't been won yet.
If you want peace between classes, you have to reduce the differences between them sufficiently to make it impossible for the upper classes to abuse and exploit the lower ones. Only then will the lower ones have nothing to retaliate against.
Both of which rely on archaeologists for what little physical evidence they can get, but point taken.
The term 'prehistory' refers to that part of history that predates human's learning to write. With no written records whatsoever historians have very little capacity to study these times and they belong to archaeologists (for humans) and palaeontologists (for everything else) instead.
Maya had a Linux version more than 16 years ago. Are you saying it doesn't now ? I would be extremely surprised if that's the case since holywood studios are almost all running on Linux.
Anyway - your problem is you point at the names known on windows and don't compare with what is available on Linux or even consider what DOES run via wine. Photoshop is fully supported under wine these days (though I would suggest using the PoL installer). Who needs 3Ds Max or Maya when Blender is free and a very powerful competitor (many professional studios are switching to it) and runs on many platforms ?
The age of the single-platform app is ending rapidly - the market is diversifying (slowly but surely) enough that it's no longer sensible to only support one platform - and once you write portable things using portable libraries, supporting Linux as well is no longer a significant cost.
But why would you WANT to do that on the commandline ? There are several high quality raw converter programs on Linux - UFRaw-gimp if my personal choice but there is nothing wrong with rawstudio or darktable or, in a pinch, even the barebones one built-into digikam. I think even Krita has raw support now.
But this is a completely different goalpost. The discussion was about changing system behaviour, hardware driver operations and system setups. It was not about application space - the vast majority of Linux apps are graphical and for graphics tasks that is basically all of them since it makes so much sense. The only non-GUI graphics app is the small suite of utilities that come with imagemagick, they don't support RAW work but they can be fantastic for doing bulk edits on large batches of images such as rapidly resizing a bunch of jpegs for web-upload.
HURD is technically still under development and have had a few releases. None of them are production quality, the hardware support is dismal compared to Linux and many bugs and missing features remain.
If it ever reaches a true stable release it may be interesting to look at - but that could be years away yet, microkernels are simply that hard to do. Of course, for all we know, the time may come when HURD leads a new computing revolution as big as the one Linux is leading now - but the conditions where that may happen is nothing something I am able to imagine.
Unfortunately you are probably right. Small business accounting software has always been a weakness in Linux. There were a couple of attempts over the years but they all whithered and died without ever reaching a level comparable to quickbooks or even pastel.
There is a very good reason for that- which is unfortunately very hard to solve. There's plenty of people who would love to write such a program - after all lots of Linux devs are small business owners. But an accounting program - especially a business accounting program - requires more than programmers. You also need accountants and lawyers to make sure the thing is producing results compliant with local laws (tax laws, audit regulations etc. etc) everywhere you want it to work - because nobody wants to run their business on an accounting package that will land them in jail for tax fraud they didn't know they were committing.
This is where the problem comes in. Accountants and lawyers aren't cheap - and getting lots from many countries is even more expensive - and there just aren't many of them willing to volunteer their time. You can get programmers to volunteer to open source projects, but there are very few lawyers and accountaints who would.
So now to do this free/open source becomes extremely difficult because of the costs involved, you could try to do it for-profit as a proprietory app but you need to compete with a lot of established brands and your only unique feature is a tiny niche market they don't run on - and now you no longer get volunteer programmers so the cost goes up.
To actually be competitive priced as a new product in an established market where by the very nature of the product brand loyalty is pretty much built-in (since changing your accounting software is an expensive and risky process) is extremely hard.
About the only way this will change is if one of the established small business accounting packages actually decides it's worth supporting linux - or alternatively brings out a pure web SaaS solution that isn't priced beyond small business owners which you could use in a browser. Of course it sucks to be uploading your confidential business records to some other company's website which may mean that the accounting programs aren't all the interested in trying that anyway as many companies would balk at the suggestion.
I haven't looked into this market in a few years and there may be some developements recently that changed things but the sad reality is as it is.
That said this may be your best compromise right now: https://ubuntuforums.org/showt...
>Users don't want options and choice, they want consistency.
False dichotomy. It's entirely possible to have both. In fact that's been KDE's driving philosophy for years. Absolute consistency, sane defaults and absolute configurability.
You only need consistency of the starting settings - so people can always find the things they need when they first sit down. You don't need it to remain consistent over time - in fact, letting users change things over time makes their work easier and more productive since no two users have identical brains.
None of your rants are true anyway. Every desktop will run every app from every other desktop. Use whatever API you like best and every major distro will run your code just fine. If you make it open source they will even do the hard work of packaging and integrating it for you - you only have to worry about that if you don't want to play by our rules, in which case, it's only fair that you have to choose which distros you'll support and put in the effort to work on them.
If anything, it's a good thing, that proprietory vendors have a cost increase with every additional distro supported while free software developers get pretty much all distros for free.
There is no distro intended for desktop use that won't run a GTK or QT based app - use either of those API sets and everything works just fine. Hell there isn't even one that won't run a KDE app - you can use the entire rich KDE set of APIs and still work on all desktops - just more integrated on KDE based desktops. Now I wouldn't suggest the latter as it's quite a lot of dependencies if your app is not intended specifically for the KDE desktop but QT and GTK are both generic libraries that are almost certainly already installed on every potential user's system and was there when it first shipped.
No my friend, choice and configurability are not bad for users - but it appears they are bad for you because you don't want to do the effort of selecting the best APIs for a job from a set of good candidates - you want there to be only one set so you have to use it and nobody can afterwards complain that you should have used a different one. Basically - you like having your ass covered by a lack of choice for yourself. More skilled and experienced developers have enough confidence in our abilities to prefer to be able to make choices around libraries and apis and choose what suits our needs in this particular instance. We even LIKE that in a future version we could switch to a completely different API if the project grows in a direction where a different library is more suitable than the one we began with - and we code our projects in such a way that doing such a swap-out is a fairly minor process that requires very little rewriting - because we're always aware that this may happen at some time for whatever reason.
On the other hand - this arguably makes the decision making part far better as the evaluation is based on an actual working implementation - no speculation at all.
You are aware that you can run Android itself on PC's right ? That there is an X86 build which runs just fine on commodity PC hardware ? Multisystem even has an automated system to put it on a bootable USB stick for you.
It's not a common use-case, but it's certainly possible.
Quite a lot of people are also running android on things like raspberry PI (though that build is very beta).
On the other side of the coin - Canonical is working very hard to put PC Linux on phones - which can be docked to become a desktop experience.
The line between PC and device isn't as clear-cut as you suggest and that was my point.
>Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again?
Nobody has ever said that. No really. Nobody ever said that. No. Not even RMS. Free software has nothing to do with price and a lot of free software does cost money. There is no rule against charging for free software and it doesn't make it any less free.
That said...why would I pay even the price of two beers for something that somebody else is offering me free of charge ? When the gratis one also happens to be free (as in freedom) then it wins on every count and there is no sane reason to want the for-pay one.
Anyway, customizing your desktop is such a fundamental feature that the idea that you need third-party tools to do it is a massive black mark against OSX. If you were trying to sell if by saying that, you failed miserably. I've never yet wanted to make a change to the behaviour of my KDE desktop that I could not do within KDE using tools shipped by the KDE project and included in the original install.
> But you don't put OS X on phones, and you don't put Android on PC hardware.
Ever heard of chromebooks ?
>Pretty racist to assume that all other voting blocks vote in lockstep.
Nobody is assuming that- but we are all (almost certainly correctly) assuming that no voting bloc habitually supports a politician that has declared them "the enemy" or grossly offended them.
How many Jews do you think voted for the NAZIs in 1929 (the only election they ever took part in - and where they actually got trounced winning only about 14% of the vote, not nearly enough to govern but sadly enough to get mainstream rightwing parties to try to appease them by giving Hitler a cabinet post... from which he could manuever his way into absolute power through what was really an armed coup).
For that matter, how many blacks do you think voted for George Wallace or Barry Goldwater ? (To avoid the above being construed as a Godwin - on this occasion those similarities have nothing to do with my argument).
The point is - even the dumbest voters tend not to vote for people whose policies threaten their safety or rights.
That's why we can assume that virtually all voting blocs will be voting in lockstep this election - because bar one all of them have had a target painted on their backs by one of the candidates - and that means voting for the person who is NOT aiming at that target.
Trump isn't in for a landslide, he is in for an avalanche... face it Hillary is an absolutely terrible candidate and she absolutely deserved to get trounced by Obama in 2008. She also deserved to get trounced by Bernie this time round (despite that sadly not happening). But Trump is the one candidate who makes Hillary not just a winner but a winner of absolutely historic proportions.
The republicans are in for the biggest electoral loss since Goldwater - and it's not just Trump who is going to lose, he's going to have a massive negative effect on the downballots. Thanks to running Trump the GOP has just handed Hillary the white-house AND a congressional majority in both houses.
In this case it would also be nice to know if the persistent (and well supported) rumours of his dealings with the mafia are true.
The decision was made by a republican - and made on a basis that a LOT of such decisions are made: insufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
The thing about the favour-the-accused legal systems of the free world is they ALSO favour the accused when the accused is rich and powerful. If you can come up with a way to change that without destroying liberty for everybody else who doesn't have those resources I would like to hear it - but for now, it's the worst system in the world except for all the others.
Youtube pays money to the artists if it detects their music in a video.
If anything the problem with youtube is that it's too zealous about that- we've had numerous cases where original artists had their works taken down or money from their own music videos redirected to other media companies they had merely licensed the songs too !
Nobody cares about PID1 its all the other tightly coupled pieces which are a bad thing.
Multics and VMS were doing great too... and went extinct overnight. Unix survived. DEC went from the biggest computer company in the world to bankrupt and sold for pennies i just 2 years. Unix survived.
Stallman chose unix not because he wanted to (in his own words it would be much more fun to build something new than reimplement what was already an ancient design) but because he understood why unix had outlived everything that came after it. Loosely coupled tools that rely on simple interfaces to connect rather than on code dependency. SystemD is making the same mistake that VMS and Multics and a dozen other OS's made and the only possible outcome is the same: a period of bloom followed by extremely rapid extinction. The only hope we have is that the non SystemD distros can help Linux survive when the next revolution puts every SystemD distro out of business overnight. That will seriously hurt Linux in the market.
Oh and history shows embracing the right way when the ship is sinking does not work. Tru64 did not save DEC.