Re:We should keep it up as a monument
on
Mir Deathwatch
·
· Score: 1
It's not "my" definition of socialism, it's *the* definition of socialism. If you want to find out about what socialism really is, I recommend you look at this.
The USSR was not socialist. I can say "I don't believe in Jesus, Mary, or God, but I am still a Catholic" and that doesn't make me a Catholic.
Human rights are the foundation of socialism; Gorbachev was a true socialist and in fact considers himself a Leninist. People hate Gorbachev because he did things wrong; rather than bring about socialism in a slow, stable way, he introduced all these reforms all at once which is what made the Soviet Union devolve into capitalism (which was really just its ultimate state anyway; the Russian government today is essentially the same Russian government of the Soviet Union, but without the socialist rhetoric).
People there are much worse off under capitalism than they were under state capitalism. Socialism never entered into the picture, although Gorbachev tried to create it. Socialism is about human rights, it's about making everyone's life better off all the time, it's about freedom, and the end of exploitation. "Anti-socialist" means that which gets rid of human rights, eg capitalism, fascism, despotism, feudalism.
Gorbachev was a socialist. Kruschev was not. End of story.
In my (relatively limited) experience, the best keyboard I've ever used is the keyboard made by SGI that comes with SGI workstations. They use a standard PC-style keyboard cable so you can use them with a PC, but they have a nice, solid, sharp click that is a pleasure to type with. Not to mention they look cool:) One word of advice though: if you get one of these, do NOT remove the space bar for cleaning, because it is impossible to get it back on!
Yes, Macs have always been far more expensive than PCs. But when you're making $1/day and spending it all on the few crumbs of food and clothing you can manage to scrape together, $200 for a PC might as well be $2000 for a Mac, or $2 million. The fact is most people will never see that kind of money; it's like going to the average US citizen and telling them $10 billion is so much cheaper than $30 billion they should be ecstatic.
Let's remember that MacOS X is repackaged NeXT, which was doing "everything just works without being a UNIX guru, but with UNIX under the hood" years ago. I'm actually surprised that the UNIX vendors didn't take this approach a long time ago--eg, power on, and within seconds you're in CDE, hardware autoconfiguration, etc. Makes you wonder.
How many residents of the third world can afford $200 (minimum) for a PC? You do realise most people have never even made a telephone call, don't you? 1 billion people are starving, the next 1 billion people live on under a dollar a day, and it doesn't get much better after that til you reach the smallest 20% or so in the first world. A free operating system doesn't help much when you have to buy hardware as well.
Re:We should keep it up as a monument
on
Mir Deathwatch
·
· Score: 2
I agree with you about the monument thing. But it's important to remember that the Soviet Union was *not* socialist. The economy of the USSR, from roughly Stalin on, was merely state capitalism. After Lenin, the USSR didn't have leaders with socialist aspirations til Gorbachev, and after decades of oppression his truly socialist reforms (glastnost, perestroika) tore apart a fragile state.
While there have always been complaints against X, most of them are due to lack of knowledge about what X can really do. X is a highly capable piece of work, highly extensible, highly portable, and very, very useful. It does the job, and it does it well. Does it do translucent anti-aliased animated menus? No, but with an extension, it easily can (don't ask me why you'd ever *want* those, but some idiots seem to).
Anyway, all technical issues aside, X is an accepted standard that works across every UNIX platform, VMS, Windows, Mac, RiscOS, BeOS, Java, you name it. There is no practical reason to replace it; it does what it's supposed to do, and it does it well, and if there's something you don't like about it, it's extensible. IF for some bizarre reason it was felt that the protocol should be scrapped in favour of a new one, it should be X12, and it should be developed with the expertise and experience in the X crowd, not by random idiots who want alpha channels as a top priority! Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about the X protocol knows that it inherently supports a server supporting multiple versions of X simultaneously. So migration to X12 would be relatively simple, you would start with X servers and libraries supporting both X11 and X12 and move over. Whereas if some dumbasses decided to switch to Berlin we'd end up with fragmented, incompatible stuff and redundant work.
Incentive to work can include many things, for example desire for luxury, or a feeling of civic duty. If people only work when threatened with death, how do you account for open source software?
I've got news for you: Cuba has the highest standard of living of any third world country--a nearly 100% literacy rate, 100% first-world-standards health coverage, free education for everyone, free or cheap housing for everyone, and they have sustained this for a long time, and are still building! This is a country that has been isolated from the rest of the world for a long time, started out as a third world country and essentially a colony of the US, declared its independence from the US and has faced unimaginable adversity, and STILL they have a lower infant mortality rate than the US, and a higher literacy rate! YES, it's a poor third world country--and all the other third world countries look up to it for its excellent standard of living!
As far as the UK, I'd like to know on what basis you make your claim that standard of life and "productivity" there is lower than in the US. I've spent enough time in the UK to observe life there, and I would say standard of living there is at least as good as in the US, with many added benefits like free health care.
The US is not a "hands off country". The US has lots of labour laws thanks to the labour movement, plus it managed to help a lot of poor people with decades of welfare to get them on their feet, and it now purges poor neighbourhoods by arresting massive amounts of people on drug charges. "Prosperity" in the US is due to the fact that it's an imperialistic country that exploits 75% of the world and lives on the back of the average worker and peasant, ruthlessly crushing any attempts at democracy or social development in the many countries it uses as colonies.
I will remind you that in 19th century industrial revolution, it was pretty "hands off"! No labour laws, no welfare, no nothing. And people were fucking miserable, just like 75% of the people alive today. MOST countries are "hands off", particularly in the last 30 years because the US and the other first world nations have done whatever they could to get "free trade" put into place so everything would be cheaper and make them richer. And as a result, poverty around the world, corrected for population growth, has grown by a factor of 2.5 since the 1960s, a time when poverty was actually going DOWN as a result of more social programmes all over the world.
The result of free trade and capitalism is clear, and it doesn't jibe with government/corporate propaganda.
Since when hasn't this been the case for human existence?
It's not the case for those who have enough money they don't have to work. It's not the case in countries like Cuba or (to some extent) the United Kingdom, where the state views survival as a basic human right.
My point was that they have no choice. There is no way out. That's not true for those of us in the exploiting side of society in the US; we have plenty of money, plenty of choice. For them it's not just "Work or die" it's "Work in bad conditions for little pay or die".
You (and many others) say that people choose to work in sweatshops, that the people in 19th century England chose to work in horrible factory conditions, etc.
I will admit that in absolute terms, they do choose it--however, you are forgetting to ask what their alternative is. Their alternative is to die of starvation. This is much like totalitarianism: "Work or die" is the main motivational lever.
There is no way for these people to escape their circumstances within the system; they cannot afford transport, they cannot afford anything but the meagre crumbs they work so hard for every day. It is the same old situation capitalism has always created. There is nothing they can do about the wages; if they strike or attempt to organise, they will be put down by the government, as has happened in Mexico many times; if they in some way succeed, all the factories will just pack up and move to another country. Treaties like FTAA and NAFTA prevent these countries from making labour laws in the first place, so even if the governments suddenly turned benevolent, no such luck.
So you may say "But wait, they have another choice! They can grow their own food!" Well I've got news for you: plenty of people do, they're called peasants, and they live miserably too. Dependent on the climate, they starve when there's a drought, and since most land is owned by rich landowners, they only have tiny plots on which to desperately try to make enough food to survive--why do you think so many peasants leave this for the hellhole of a factory?
So basically these people have three choices: be a starving peasant, be a suffering worker, or die.
The only other choice, of course, is revolution. Or doing something, anything, to hurt the corporations that are causing this intentionally to save money for themselves. One thing we can do, even if it's small, is to boycott them. It's sure as hell better than rewarding them for violating human rights and claiming it was "voluntary" on the part of the workers!
CDE lets you have as many workspaces as you want. Right click on the workspaces in the front panel and a menu will appear allowing you to add more. You can add as many as you want and rename them to whatever you want.
Does anyone else question the reliability of a system where the best way to improve performance is to get posted on Slashdot? ("All of a sudden we're operating at 100% of capacity!")
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you've:
Used CDE extensively and understand how it all fits together
Administered large enterprise networks with network-and-platform-transparent applications working together on one CDE desktop
Programmed using CDE's many libraries, including Motif and the CDE widgets, help system, and printing system, as well as written ToolTalk applications that take advantage of and offer distributed services
Written dtksh scripts and moved them between UNIX systems
Used CDE 2.1
because really, the only way you could make a statement like "CDE sucks" is if you'd done all those things, and formed a rational opinion. So based on that, what exactly are the technical problems you have with CDE?
Netscape works because they staticly compiled in motif.
Wrong. Motif is an open system, and therefore backward compatible. Regardless of whether they statically linked it in, Netscape would have been compatible with future versions of Motif (at least source compatible). That is a fundamental difference between Motif and Gtk/Qt--Motif, like much professional software, is fully documented and guaranteed to be backwards compatible as an Open System.
The real problem is not constant development of things like the kernel--that's fine and to be expected. The real problem is that while Linux is open source, it's not Open Systems. Open Systems means you document all the APIs, interfaces, and protocols and decide on them in an open process generally before coding even begins. You then publish these interfaces and make a guarantee of backwards compatibility in future versions. This means older software always works, and allows for multiple implementations that are all intercompatible. That's what UNIX decided to do a while ago, hence the formation of The Open Group (that's open systems, not open source). Motif and CDE are Open Systems; GNOME/GTK and KDE/Qt are not. UNIX is Open Systems because it complies with the UNIX standard, which is an Open System. Linux does not and is not.
Bottom line: if Linux were to become an Open System by adopting open industry standards and stating compliance, rapid change would be irrelevant to developers because Linux would always be backward compatible. UNIX did this years ago.
More information on open systems is available at the SEI's Open Systems page.
Pirates! by Sid Meier is still the best computer game I've played. Occasionally I go back and play it on the old Apple IIGS and it still amazes me that back in the late 80s a game was produced that was better than any game produced since. It is practically its own genre! What I would really love to see is Pirates! ported to UNIX/X so I could run it on my Linux system. Doing it through dosemu really screws it up.
Around here I think it's mainly a question of trust. Here in California, they recently deregulated the power companies so that independent power companies could exist. Lots of power companies have sprung up, many cheaper than the standard ones, many completely based on environmentally friendly power. Still, lots of people stick with the old big one because they don't trust these littler companies in case something goes wrong.
I think it's the same with phone companies. People don't want the hassle of having to deal with some tiny local company run by a couple of college students that could go out of business in a week and where the maintenance and support are questionable. They know and trust the companies that are already around. The vast majority of people are going to stick with the big, old companies purely out of trust issues, IMO.
I think a good way to do it is with interesting "projects" like for example building a remote-controlled motorboat. It lets you do both electronics and modelling, which is also really fun, and you get a working model that can inspire their imagination afterward. If there are harder parts that are a little too advanced, you can do those yourself and explain them. I definitely think the way to go is integrating electronics into other things--rockets, boats, legos, etc.
You know, if he was going to do this, he should have done it as a server you could telnet into. I've always hated web games, because while you knew someone had to try it some time, they've always been dreadfully slow and awkward. Among other things, when you click on a link and go to a new "screen" you can no longer see what was on the previous one--no scrolling. But the main thing is it's incredibly slow.
I've always wanted an open source TradeWars 2002 clone, written in C and for UNIX and specifically playable by telnet. Now that would be awesome.
In a way, government web site designers have an advantage in usability, because they are not trying to advertise anything and therefore don't have to worry about such things as logo graphics. You can take advantage of that situation to preset information in a more usable way rather than a "flashy" way. I would recommend using almost no graphics and of course, since it's a government web site, it should be designed to be accessible by the disabled and also by people with any browser. Since you've got to include regulatory information, I would make it prominent, and it's also a good idea to be able to browse by section--a really good web site that does this is the California Legislative Counsel which provides a complete up to date database of all California laws.
I also think it's important to offer a lot of government services. Remember, the government is even more flooded with requests, paperwork, etc than any other organisation. So if you can provide services automatically over the web, like making appointments, filing requests, filing forms, obtaining forms, etc, then you as the webmaster have actually saved the taxpayers money! This may be the most important part. If every government organisation did this, it would cut down on their overhead significantly, and save us all some money.
This talks about instant on, presumably by storing files like loader, kernel, etc in what is essentially a different form of NVRAM.
What I don't understand is why this can't be achieved using EEPROMs or just regular old battery-powered NVRAM. I remember the old Macs used to have a great deal of the system on ROMSs... why not take it to its logical conclusion and put all the libraries, kernel, system files, and for that matter OS applications on a ROM or EEPROM?
If the answer is that ROMs are slower than RAMs, can anyone explain why? I would think ROMs would be faster, not having to worry about writes...
Well, it looks like old Artie has finally lost it.
Still, even if it were just a regular old PC, if it had those cool glass bar things that you have to pull out of the walls to shut it down, it would be worth 2000 pounds and more!
One thing I don't understand is the idea that a touchscreen is going to replace a mouse. Touchscreens still have so many technical hurdles to overcome--they are inaccurate, awkward, and worst of all they get covered with fingerprints. Until someone devises a touchscreen that is fingerprint-resistant, and preferably that yields slightly when you touch it, I see them still being relegated to kiosks and curiosities. Furthermore, having to reach from the keyboard to the screen every time you want to do something you would normally do with the mouse sounds like a major pain in the arse.
Re:Dump X for chrissakes.
on
Linux Sin Demo
·
· Score: 1
No.
And I think if you knew much about what this stuff can really do, you'd see why I said what I did. Unfortunately, it's more glamorous for people to invent the wheel than do the reading it takes to see what's already there.
Slashdot Mirror
Real moral of this story: UNION YES!
The USSR was not socialist. I can say "I don't believe in Jesus, Mary, or God, but I am still a Catholic" and that doesn't make me a Catholic.
Human rights are the foundation of socialism; Gorbachev was a true socialist and in fact considers himself a Leninist. People hate Gorbachev because he did things wrong; rather than bring about socialism in a slow, stable way, he introduced all these reforms all at once which is what made the Soviet Union devolve into capitalism (which was really just its ultimate state anyway; the Russian government today is essentially the same Russian government of the Soviet Union, but without the socialist rhetoric).
People there are much worse off under capitalism than they were under state capitalism. Socialism never entered into the picture, although Gorbachev tried to create it. Socialism is about human rights, it's about making everyone's life better off all the time, it's about freedom, and the end of exploitation. "Anti-socialist" means that which gets rid of human rights, eg capitalism, fascism, despotism, feudalism.
Gorbachev was a socialist. Kruschev was not. End of story.
In my (relatively limited) experience, the best keyboard I've ever used is the keyboard made by SGI that comes with SGI workstations. They use a standard PC-style keyboard cable so you can use them with a PC, but they have a nice, solid, sharp click that is a pleasure to type with. Not to mention they look cool :) One word of advice though: if you get one of these, do NOT remove the space bar for cleaning, because it is impossible to get it back on!
Yes, Macs have always been far more expensive than PCs. But when you're making $1/day and spending it all on the few crumbs of food and clothing you can manage to scrape together, $200 for a PC might as well be $2000 for a Mac, or $2 million. The fact is most people will never see that kind of money; it's like going to the average US citizen and telling them $10 billion is so much cheaper than $30 billion they should be ecstatic.
Let's remember that MacOS X is repackaged NeXT, which was doing "everything just works without being a UNIX guru, but with UNIX under the hood" years ago. I'm actually surprised that the UNIX vendors didn't take this approach a long time ago--eg, power on, and within seconds you're in CDE, hardware autoconfiguration, etc. Makes you wonder.
How many residents of the third world can afford $200 (minimum) for a PC? You do realise most people have never even made a telephone call, don't you? 1 billion people are starving, the next 1 billion people live on under a dollar a day, and it doesn't get much better after that til you reach the smallest 20% or so in the first world. A free operating system doesn't help much when you have to buy hardware as well.
I agree with you about the monument thing. But it's important to remember that the Soviet Union was *not* socialist. The economy of the USSR, from roughly Stalin on, was merely state capitalism. After Lenin, the USSR didn't have leaders with socialist aspirations til Gorbachev, and after decades of oppression his truly socialist reforms (glastnost, perestroika) tore apart a fragile state.
Anyway, all technical issues aside, X is an accepted standard that works across every UNIX platform, VMS, Windows, Mac, RiscOS, BeOS, Java, you name it. There is no practical reason to replace it; it does what it's supposed to do, and it does it well, and if there's something you don't like about it, it's extensible. IF for some bizarre reason it was felt that the protocol should be scrapped in favour of a new one, it should be X12, and it should be developed with the expertise and experience in the X crowd, not by random idiots who want alpha channels as a top priority! Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about the X protocol knows that it inherently supports a server supporting multiple versions of X simultaneously. So migration to X12 would be relatively simple, you would start with X servers and libraries supporting both X11 and X12 and move over. Whereas if some dumbasses decided to switch to Berlin we'd end up with fragmented, incompatible stuff and redundant work.
Bah.
I've got news for you: Cuba has the highest standard of living of any third world country--a nearly 100% literacy rate, 100% first-world-standards health coverage, free education for everyone, free or cheap housing for everyone, and they have sustained this for a long time, and are still building! This is a country that has been isolated from the rest of the world for a long time, started out as a third world country and essentially a colony of the US, declared its independence from the US and has faced unimaginable adversity, and STILL they have a lower infant mortality rate than the US, and a higher literacy rate! YES, it's a poor third world country--and all the other third world countries look up to it for its excellent standard of living!
As far as the UK, I'd like to know on what basis you make your claim that standard of life and "productivity" there is lower than in the US. I've spent enough time in the UK to observe life there, and I would say standard of living there is at least as good as in the US, with many added benefits like free health care.
The US is not a "hands off country". The US has lots of labour laws thanks to the labour movement, plus it managed to help a lot of poor people with decades of welfare to get them on their feet, and it now purges poor neighbourhoods by arresting massive amounts of people on drug charges. "Prosperity" in the US is due to the fact that it's an imperialistic country that exploits 75% of the world and lives on the back of the average worker and peasant, ruthlessly crushing any attempts at democracy or social development in the many countries it uses as colonies.
I will remind you that in 19th century industrial revolution, it was pretty "hands off"! No labour laws, no welfare, no nothing. And people were fucking miserable, just like 75% of the people alive today. MOST countries are "hands off", particularly in the last 30 years because the US and the other first world nations have done whatever they could to get "free trade" put into place so everything would be cheaper and make them richer. And as a result, poverty around the world, corrected for population growth, has grown by a factor of 2.5 since the 1960s, a time when poverty was actually going DOWN as a result of more social programmes all over the world.
The result of free trade and capitalism is clear, and it doesn't jibe with government/corporate propaganda.
It's not the case for those who have enough money they don't have to work. It's not the case in countries like Cuba or (to some extent) the United Kingdom, where the state views survival as a basic human right.
My point was that they have no choice. There is no way out. That's not true for those of us in the exploiting side of society in the US; we have plenty of money, plenty of choice. For them it's not just "Work or die" it's "Work in bad conditions for little pay or die".
I will admit that in absolute terms, they do choose it--however, you are forgetting to ask what their alternative is. Their alternative is to die of starvation. This is much like totalitarianism: "Work or die" is the main motivational lever.
There is no way for these people to escape their circumstances within the system; they cannot afford transport, they cannot afford anything but the meagre crumbs they work so hard for every day. It is the same old situation capitalism has always created. There is nothing they can do about the wages; if they strike or attempt to organise, they will be put down by the government, as has happened in Mexico many times; if they in some way succeed, all the factories will just pack up and move to another country. Treaties like FTAA and NAFTA prevent these countries from making labour laws in the first place, so even if the governments suddenly turned benevolent, no such luck.
So you may say "But wait, they have another choice! They can grow their own food!" Well I've got news for you: plenty of people do, they're called peasants, and they live miserably too. Dependent on the climate, they starve when there's a drought, and since most land is owned by rich landowners, they only have tiny plots on which to desperately try to make enough food to survive--why do you think so many peasants leave this for the hellhole of a factory?
So basically these people have three choices: be a starving peasant, be a suffering worker, or die.
The only other choice, of course, is revolution. Or doing something, anything, to hurt the corporations that are causing this intentionally to save money for themselves. One thing we can do, even if it's small, is to boycott them. It's sure as hell better than rewarding them for violating human rights and claiming it was "voluntary" on the part of the workers!
CDE lets you have as many workspaces as you want. Right click on the workspaces in the front panel and a menu will appear allowing you to add more. You can add as many as you want and rename them to whatever you want.
Does anyone else question the reliability of a system where the best way to improve performance is to get posted on Slashdot? ("All of a sudden we're operating at 100% of capacity!")
because really, the only way you could make a statement like "CDE sucks" is if you'd done all those things, and formed a rational opinion. So based on that, what exactly are the technical problems you have with CDE?
Wrong. Motif is an open system, and therefore backward compatible. Regardless of whether they statically linked it in, Netscape would have been compatible with future versions of Motif (at least source compatible). That is a fundamental difference between Motif and Gtk/Qt--Motif, like much professional software, is fully documented and guaranteed to be backwards compatible as an Open System.
Bottom line: if Linux were to become an Open System by adopting open industry standards and stating compliance, rapid change would be irrelevant to developers because Linux would always be backward compatible. UNIX did this years ago.
More information on open systems is available at the SEI's Open Systems page.
Pirates! by Sid Meier is still the best computer game I've played. Occasionally I go back and play it on the old Apple IIGS and it still amazes me that back in the late 80s a game was produced that was better than any game produced since. It is practically its own genre! What I would really love to see is Pirates! ported to UNIX/X so I could run it on my Linux system. Doing it through dosemu really screws it up.
They really should have done a nanoscopic water bong.
I think it's the same with phone companies. People don't want the hassle of having to deal with some tiny local company run by a couple of college students that could go out of business in a week and where the maintenance and support are questionable. They know and trust the companies that are already around. The vast majority of people are going to stick with the big, old companies purely out of trust issues, IMO.
I think a good way to do it is with interesting "projects" like for example building a remote-controlled motorboat. It lets you do both electronics and modelling, which is also really fun, and you get a working model that can inspire their imagination afterward. If there are harder parts that are a little too advanced, you can do those yourself and explain them. I definitely think the way to go is integrating electronics into other things--rockets, boats, legos, etc.
I've always wanted an open source TradeWars 2002 clone, written in C and for UNIX and specifically playable by telnet. Now that would be awesome.
I also think it's important to offer a lot of government services. Remember, the government is even more flooded with requests, paperwork, etc than any other organisation. So if you can provide services automatically over the web, like making appointments, filing requests, filing forms, obtaining forms, etc, then you as the webmaster have actually saved the taxpayers money! This may be the most important part. If every government organisation did this, it would cut down on their overhead significantly, and save us all some money.
What I don't understand is why this can't be achieved using EEPROMs or just regular old battery-powered NVRAM. I remember the old Macs used to have a great deal of the system on ROMSs ... why not take it to its logical conclusion and put all the libraries, kernel, system files, and for that matter OS applications on a ROM or EEPROM?
If the answer is that ROMs are slower than RAMs, can anyone explain why? I would think ROMs would be faster, not having to worry about writes...
Still, even if it were just a regular old PC, if it had those cool glass bar things that you have to pull out of the walls to shut it down, it would be worth 2000 pounds and more!
One thing I don't understand is the idea that a touchscreen is going to replace a mouse. Touchscreens still have so many technical hurdles to overcome--they are inaccurate, awkward, and worst of all they get covered with fingerprints. Until someone devises a touchscreen that is fingerprint-resistant, and preferably that yields slightly when you touch it, I see them still being relegated to kiosks and curiosities. Furthermore, having to reach from the keyboard to the screen every time you want to do something you would normally do with the mouse sounds like a major pain in the arse.
And I think if you knew much about what this stuff can really do, you'd see why I said what I did. Unfortunately, it's more glamorous for people to invent the wheel than do the reading it takes to see what's already there.