Yeah that took "balls". What are they going to do...pass a non-binding resolution to some day send us a strongly worded letter.
Um, they could have threatened nuclear war for violating the UN charter. If you recall, the German invasion of Belgium was enough to get the British into World War I, and likewise, the invasion of Poland started World War II in Europe. W did what few belligerents in recent history have gotten away with. It's doubtful we'll know what happened in our lifetimes but the backdoor diplomacy that allowed that to happen must have been remarkable.
For what its worth, I rebooted from Vista into Ubuntu Linux this morning because hands down Linux does ISO burning better.
Anyway, I resisted autoconf for the longest time, but it turned out to be exceedingly easy to set up
I'll have to try that out. And, environment plays in tools... The one thing that makes Linux work well is that the stdout and stdin ports still work in GUI mode so you can dump a lot of instrumentation out to the console as you debug your app. Also, although PowerShell has so much promise, I still prefer bash.
If you keep reading, you'll notice it all boils down to a huge administration blame game. Reminds me of other discussion boards I've seen.
I'm a conservative and I have to note that those who say Michigan is being screwed by stupid socialism usually fail to point out that for the last thirty years, Michigan has been paying higher taxes to the federal government than it receives in benefits from it. So perhaps if Michigan's taxpayers were not constantly bailing out Republican farmers, they might actually have some money of their own to pay for roads with.
Really, there is a lot of willfull disbelief among my Republican colleagues when it comes to their own protectionism and their own socialism. If red states were as "free trade" and "capitalist" as Michigan was, perhaps we wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars bailing out farmers, or locking out foreign food producers... Conversely, if blue states were as "free trade" and "capitalist" as, say, Alabama is, we wouldn't have gutted our entire manufacturing base in the name of free trade.
IT's a little more complicated than that, really. Modernization requires huge capital expenditures and you can't do that without a steady supply of contracts with which to repay the loans you took out to buy all the fancy new equipment, and, right now, we have too many uneconomic roads and too unsteady a source of funds to make such contracts guaranteed.
No, its not the broken window fallacy. In the case of the broken window fallacy, you are deliberately destroying property in an effort to spur spending. In this case, you are not performing a service that is uneconomic. To be fair, the poster to whom you replied should have more properly said that the drivers who had an interest in the roads should pay for its upkeep.
Letting the market sort things out neglects the fact fact that people who are powerful enough can, will, and even do lie, cheat, and steal.
And how does the government change that? You trade a prince of a corporation for a despot of the government. I could choose to not shop at Acme but I am a US Citizen always.
. Your example is lame in that it excuses (ignores)
Dude, I've stood in supermarket lines and asked people if they care. They don't. Why do you always have to assume that people are stupid when they are not?
American cars is one thing, a proclivity for watching a goat cornhole a dude would probably not reflect well on you if people knew.
Your post was so damned funny that you defeated the purpose of your argument. If someone got a goat to cornhole him, he'd probably be a giant star on youtube for a couple of days. I remember like in the early 1990s there was some girl out there that blew a horse, and that video was definitely popular.
However, the cost to society in the form of radically more serious injuries makes sense for the market to have these rules in the long run.
Does it? The fact of the matter is that all of the safety devices on cars have probably doubled the price of cars, and yet, the greatest thing that has lowered the fatalities has been better driver education, not any of the tech goodies. If you had a car without any safety devices whatsoever, you would have car payments 1/2 of what they are today, allowing for people to save more for college, lower their debt, get themselves out of poverty, but instead, your artificial regulatory price increases just keeps making poverty worse.
The scary communist solution is to demand outside inspections from a third party - the best option being the government.
The problem with your whole point is that you would assume that the government would, in fact, actually do the inspections. What would really happen is that the government would not do the inspections, people would still die of Salmonella, and then the problem would restated as a request for more public funds.
Now, why is the government a good idea? Because people without money can compel it to be transparent. If you had a private party doing the inspections, you could not review their actions. All of the criticism of the FDA is possibly only because as a state entity, it must be transparent.
Government is completely non-transparent and non-accountable, that's the whole point. Why should the FDA be transparent? It's not like there's another FDA. The fact is, its not.
Well...in PA there is really only one DMV - in Harrisburg, PA - for the entire state. They do have satellite centers, but all they do is licenses and license photos. Nothing else.
The irony about PA is that the Republicans control the state legislature and have for decades. If they wanted there to be more DMVs, they could have done it by now.
Would you really want to have to travel like that for health care too?
I do. My HMO eye doctor is in New Jersey. I live in Delaware...
Technically a simple system to set up but seemingly beyond a lot of people
Not really, I mean, the question with VCR times is, why bother doing it. The only reason you needed a VCR to have the right time in it would be if you used the time shifting features it had, but most people bought VCRs to watch movies with, not record them. They only wanted to know that they could record... a fact since born out by knowing that DVD players outsell time shifting things like TIVO by a fairly wide margin.
In fact, the only thing I did was tell them that you bought soup from me. And then they come up and punch you in the head. It's directly because you bought soup from me, but you've no way of knowing without a lot of effort, even if you have a clue on where to start on figuring it out.
Boy uh, that's a stretch.
That's how corporate privacy invasion works. You give data to a few people in some manner, then they give it to someone else, who then uses it in some way to screw you over in some fashion.
What's the punch? Like, if GM knows that I like American cars, and sells it to everyone, than, what's the harm? If anything, I'm getting free advertising for my way of life.
And IMHO, paranoia about employees "stealing" information should not stand in the way of increasing the efficiency of intelligence gathering and analysis.
This is the spy business we're talking about... imagine, if you will, if any of the following had access to the total USA "spy-o-pedia":
Harold Nicholson Robert Philip Hanssen Aldrich Ames David Boone Christopher Boyce Thomas Cavanaugh Lona Cohen George Trofimoff John Walker Jerry Whitworth
The problem with your statement is that markets only work when there is freely available knowledge.
Most people assume that they are being monitored or tracked anyway, just because computerization is so pervasive. I think some opinions to the contrary might be more their projection on people, than any reality. "If they only knew..." has a tinge of fanaticism to it that most people don't have.
If I offered you a service and didn't mention the punch in the head I would also give you, then are you taking up that service because you don't care about being punched in the head?
I would assume that if I went to buy a cup of soup from you, and you punched me in the head, that I probably would not buy soup from you any more. Therefor, if people are getting punched in the head, they don't care.
Why do people who've never seen Star Trek assume that the summary is wrong? Are we REALLY that disillusioned by the editors or is this just classic/. troll behaviour?
You need to check your pattern buffers!
Replicators in Star Trek had absolutely nothing to do with nano technology. Replicated things did not self assemble from molecular machines as much as they were broadcast into existence via a huge energy to matter transmitter.
My real point though, was that everyone is building stuff for the future because Star Trek is so wonderful, but, of all ironies, Stargate actually had the best example of nano-tech going wrong, in its Replicators. The Replicators were nano-beings that were created to fight some other bad guys... anyway, it didn't work out the way the nano-inventors had planned and the Replicators were actually some of the worst, most evil, villians in the universe of sci-fi.
Unlike Galactica's Cylons, the Replicators never sissied out... "Nice Centurions" at the end of Galactica. The Replicators would have NONE of that!
If we are going to be so gayly pedantic about it, I should point out that replicators were an offshoot of an energy to matter conversion via a complex wave generator managed by a pattern buffer!
Replication had nothing to do with nano-technology. There was no self assembly and that is the essence of nano-technology. The only real nano-tech in trek was 7 of 9's "nano probes"... and boy would I'd have liked to have given her a "mano probe.."
But of course Star Trek had replicators. Replicators were alluded to in the first Star Trek TOS and were made explicit in the TNG, although the TOS movies did have a kitchen scene and I think the TOS alluded to a galley every now and then. In any case, by TNG, the replicator as we know it was here to stay and it was more of a plot problem than breathtaking sci-fi...every time they had an episode where the Enterprise needed something, you always were left wondering.... uh, what about the replicators.
For example, the episode where Worf gets paralyzed was just terrible. I mean, yeah they played the Alex heart strings pretty well, but, if you kept your wits about you, you would ask, why couldn't they just replicate a new Worf spine and pop it in? If the replicator is capable of making real food, like something as organically complex as tea, earl grey, then, it ought to be able to crank out some walking for Worf. Or, look at Data... there was always something goofy or unique about Data, but, why couldn't they replicate him? You could just have an away team where Data gets beamed down, killed, and then you make another Data... For that matter, you could do that with people too.
But I digress.
The real point is that Star Trek always espoused a happy view of technology, particularly when it comes to nanotech. When I ripped Star Trek in the original post, the deal was that I was lamenting that so many people want to make the world like Star Trek... I have to admit, I'm caught up in it. But I think that one thing that is cool about Stargate is that it did have a pretty dark vision of evil nanodudes running around. I know that Star Trek's Borg bugged people, but man, the Stargate Replicators just really gave me the heebie jeebies. Self assembling molecular dudes coming to blow up your planet, that's some rough stuff. Let's not build those Replicators, that's what I'm saying.
It's funny that one could look at this and say the markets don't work. The markets ARE working and that most people don't actually care about privacy.
If people -cared- about privacy, they would be willing to pay for the extra care it takes to ensure that their data is private. But, we live in a world where most people really don't care so much if everyone else knows what they are doing, so long as they are not confronted with it, or misuse the information.
Like, if you told someone at a grocery store that, to get their "club card" savings, the store would know exactly what they bought, they would say, they probably didn't care. Now, if they got a letter from the grocery store saying, "hey, since you like strawberries, you might like our sale on blueberries", they might dig that too. And, if they got junk mail from blueberry and strawberry growers, even that might be ok. But, if they got an email saying, "hey, you are killing humanity because you are eating strawberries and your preference for red fruit makes you some kind of a communist", then they would be pissed off.
Bottom line is, people don't care about privacy, but they do care about having their personal information being used to hurt them. It's pretty much the 5th amendment proposition, writ large and writ everywhere. Nothing is really private, but, you can't have your personal information be used to attack you, and that is what the market reflects.
Star Trek has the "cool" sci-fi thing, whereas a lot of people rip Star Gate, but I think the nano-tech future given by the likes of the Replicators are where this nano stuff is headed.
The single greatest shortcoming in human science is its failure to understand outcomes of complex, dynamic systems, and here we are going to make exactly that.
My license had been expired for six months. Renewal, pay a late fee and they hand it over. Easy. It's funny but on that day I heard on the radio some Republican senator saying: "If we have national health insurance, we will have healthcare like the DMV."
Now I'm a right wing kind of guy, but I couldn't help but immediately think:
"I wish my health care was as good as my DMV". I would say Republicans should shy away from DMV arguments, because right now health care is so screwed up that making it like the DMV would be an improvement. Imagine an emergency room where they had different lines for different ailments, actually gave out numbers like the DMV does, had friendly people and a nice building... and only cost $50.
The reason you compartmentalize information is so that it can't all be lost in one well swoop. Now, with intellipedia, someone makes a copy of it, loses it, and boom, all the work product of the CIA would wind up on the internet. I would predict that this is inevitable.
That's ultimately the problem Google has. They might think about becoming a bit of a content company and folding that into their search. They could have a google news page with their own reporting and their own columnists, fold their stuff into the search. They could capture all the meta data so that celebrities, all that stuff, could be put together. They know what their searches are for... why not have their own content? Sure some content providers will be ticked off, but what are they going to do, de-robot themselves so Google can't index them? Why spend hundreds of millions a year on trying to make web based applications when they can spend a fraction of that on good reporters.
I use emacs to code, while emacs is a heavily featured editor, the only real thing I use in comparison to even notepad would be the syntax highlighting
Well, there's a lot of dumb things notepad does... might I recommend textpad, if you are doing the Linux way in Windows? It's roughly comparable to rather good Kate.
I don't want silly bloated tools to get in my way.
Being able to hot track compile errors back to the text, and, debug the source in context, are the two winners for me. The third is having a good project redistributable. I really liked the way KDevelop would roll my solution into a source tarball with all the make install conventions and stuff that are common in Unix. I do not want to learn the ins and outs of autoconf any more than I want to understand the guts of an msi.
Incidentally, I really like the way debugging worked on Linux better with KDevelop than I did Visual C++. KDevelop let you change your code while you were running your project, and Visual C++ decides these days to lock you out. Drives me nuts. But KDevelop completely hit the rocks with the transition to KDE 4 and they still haven't gotten all the holes out of the boat yet. Other C++ environments in Linux aren't quite as good. The Qt one has promise, but it lacks some key polish. I've never been happy with Eclipse and C++, for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah that took "balls". What are they going to do...pass a non-binding resolution to some day send us a strongly worded letter.
Um, they could have threatened nuclear war for violating the UN charter. If you recall, the German invasion of Belgium was enough to get the British into World War I, and likewise, the invasion of Poland started World War II in Europe. W did what few belligerents in recent history have gotten away with. It's doubtful we'll know what happened in our lifetimes but the backdoor diplomacy that allowed that to happen must have been remarkable.
Honestly, will we ever get our national cojones back?
I would think that, having blown off the UN to invade half of the middle east, some might say we have too many cojones...
No wonder our state budget continues to be screwed (massive corruption aside) and we have one of the highest State tax burdens around
Somehow, I think the abundance of traffic circles is to blame.
Wow, we're venturing off-topic!
For what its worth, I rebooted from Vista into Ubuntu Linux this morning because hands down Linux does ISO burning better.
Anyway, I resisted autoconf for the longest time, but it turned out to be exceedingly easy to set up
I'll have to try that out. And, environment plays in tools... The one thing that makes Linux work well is that the stdout and stdin ports still work in GUI mode so you can dump a lot of instrumentation out to the console as you debug your app. Also, although PowerShell has so much promise, I still prefer bash.
If you keep reading, you'll notice it all boils down to a huge administration blame game. Reminds me of other discussion boards I've seen.
I'm a conservative and I have to note that those who say Michigan is being screwed by stupid socialism usually fail to point out that for the last thirty years, Michigan has been paying higher taxes to the federal government than it receives in benefits from it. So perhaps if Michigan's taxpayers were not constantly bailing out Republican farmers, they might actually have some money of their own to pay for roads with.
Really, there is a lot of willfull disbelief among my Republican colleagues when it comes to their own protectionism and their own socialism. If red states were as "free trade" and "capitalist" as Michigan was, perhaps we wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars bailing out farmers, or locking out foreign food producers... Conversely, if blue states were as "free trade" and "capitalist" as, say, Alabama is, we wouldn't have gutted our entire manufacturing base in the name of free trade.
IT's a little more complicated than that, really. Modernization requires huge capital expenditures and you can't do that without a steady supply of contracts with which to repay the loans you took out to buy all the fancy new equipment, and, right now, we have too many uneconomic roads and too unsteady a source of funds to make such contracts guaranteed.
Broken window fallacy.
No, its not the broken window fallacy. In the case of the broken window fallacy, you are deliberately destroying property in an effort to spur spending. In this case, you are not performing a service that is uneconomic. To be fair, the poster to whom you replied should have more properly said that the drivers who had an interest in the roads should pay for its upkeep.
Letting the market sort things out neglects the fact fact that people who are powerful enough can, will, and even do lie, cheat, and steal.
And how does the government change that? You trade a prince of a corporation for a despot of the government. I could choose to not shop at Acme but I am a US Citizen always.
. Your example is lame in that it excuses (ignores)
Dude, I've stood in supermarket lines and asked people if they care. They don't. Why do you always have to assume that people are stupid when they are not?
American cars is one thing, a proclivity for watching a goat cornhole a dude would probably not reflect well on you if people knew.
Your post was so damned funny that you defeated the purpose of your argument. If someone got a goat to cornhole him, he'd probably be a giant star on youtube for a couple of days. I remember like in the early 1990s there was some girl out there that blew a horse, and that video was definitely popular.
However, the cost to society in the form of radically more serious injuries makes sense for the market to have these rules in the long run.
Does it? The fact of the matter is that all of the safety devices on cars have probably doubled the price of cars, and yet, the greatest thing that has lowered the fatalities has been better driver education, not any of the tech goodies. If you had a car without any safety devices whatsoever, you would have car payments 1/2 of what they are today, allowing for people to save more for college, lower their debt, get themselves out of poverty, but instead, your artificial regulatory price increases just keeps making poverty worse.
The scary communist solution is to demand outside inspections from a third party - the best option being the government.
The problem with your whole point is that you would assume that the government would, in fact, actually do the inspections. What would really happen is that the government would not do the inspections, people would still die of Salmonella, and then the problem would restated as a request for more public funds.
Now, why is the government a good idea? Because people without money can compel it to be transparent. If you had a private party doing the inspections, you could not review their actions. All of the criticism of the FDA is possibly only because as a state entity, it must be transparent.
Government is completely non-transparent and non-accountable, that's the whole point. Why should the FDA be transparent? It's not like there's another FDA. The fact is, its not.
Well...in PA there is really only one DMV - in Harrisburg, PA - for the entire state. They do have satellite centers, but all they do is licenses and license photos. Nothing else.
The irony about PA is that the Republicans control the state legislature and have for decades. If they wanted there to be more DMVs, they could have done it by now.
Would you really want to have to travel like that for health care too?
I do. My HMO eye doctor is in New Jersey. I live in Delaware...
Maybe you should move to Delaware?
Technically a simple system to set up but seemingly beyond a lot of people
Not really, I mean, the question with VCR times is, why bother doing it. The only reason you needed a VCR to have the right time in it would be if you used the time shifting features it had, but most people bought VCRs to watch movies with, not record them. They only wanted to know that they could record... a fact since born out by knowing that DVD players outsell time shifting things like TIVO by a fairly wide margin.
In fact, the only thing I did was tell them that you bought soup from me. And then they come up and punch you in the head. It's directly because you bought soup from me, but you've no way of knowing without a lot of effort, even if you have a clue on where to start on figuring it out.
Boy uh, that's a stretch.
That's how corporate privacy invasion works. You give data to a few people in some manner, then they give it to someone else, who then uses it in some way to screw you over in some fashion.
What's the punch? Like, if GM knows that I like American cars, and sells it to everyone, than, what's the harm? If anything, I'm getting free advertising for my way of life.
And IMHO, paranoia about employees "stealing" information should not stand in the way of increasing the efficiency of intelligence gathering and analysis.
This is the spy business we're talking about... imagine, if you will, if any of the following had access to the total USA "spy-o-pedia":
Harold Nicholson
Robert Philip Hanssen
Aldrich Ames
David Boone
Christopher Boyce
Thomas Cavanaugh
Lona Cohen
George Trofimoff
John Walker
Jerry Whitworth
I mean, there's plenty more...
The problem with your statement is that markets only work when there is freely available knowledge.
Most people assume that they are being monitored or tracked anyway, just because computerization is so pervasive. I think some opinions to the contrary might be more their projection on people, than any reality. "If they only knew..." has a tinge of fanaticism to it that most people don't have.
If I offered you a service and didn't mention the punch in the head I would also give you, then are you taking up that service because you don't care about being punched in the head?
I would assume that if I went to buy a cup of soup from you, and you punched me in the head, that I probably would not buy soup from you any more.
Therefor, if people are getting punched in the head, they don't care.
Why do people who've never seen Star Trek assume that the summary is wrong? Are we REALLY that disillusioned by the editors or is this just classic /. troll behaviour?
You need to check your pattern buffers!
Replicators in Star Trek had absolutely nothing to do with nano technology. Replicated things did not self assemble from molecular machines as much as they were broadcast into existence via a huge energy to matter transmitter.
My real point though, was that everyone is building stuff for the future because Star Trek is so wonderful, but, of all ironies, Stargate actually had the best example of nano-tech going wrong, in its Replicators. The Replicators were nano-beings that were created to fight some other bad guys... anyway, it didn't work out the way the nano-inventors had planned and the Replicators were actually some of the worst, most evil, villians in the universe of sci-fi.
Unlike Galactica's Cylons, the Replicators never sissied out... "Nice Centurions" at the end of Galactica. The Replicators would have NONE of that!
If we are going to be so gayly pedantic about it, I should point out that replicators were an offshoot of an energy to matter conversion via a complex wave generator managed by a pattern buffer!
Replication had nothing to do with nano-technology. There was no self assembly and that is the essence of nano-technology. The only real nano-tech in trek was 7 of 9's "nano probes"... and boy would I'd have liked to have given her a "mano probe.."
But of course Star Trek had replicators. Replicators were alluded to in the first Star Trek TOS and were made explicit in the TNG, although the TOS movies did have a kitchen scene and I think the TOS alluded to a galley every now and then. In any case, by TNG, the replicator as we know it was here to stay and it was more of a plot problem than breathtaking sci-fi...every time they had an episode where the Enterprise needed something, you always were left wondering.... uh, what about the replicators.
For example, the episode where Worf gets paralyzed was just terrible. I mean, yeah they played the Alex heart strings pretty well, but, if you kept your wits about you, you would ask, why couldn't they just replicate a new Worf spine and pop it in? If the replicator is capable of making real food, like something as organically complex as tea, earl grey, then, it ought to be able to crank out some walking for Worf. Or, look at Data... there was always something goofy or unique about Data, but, why couldn't they replicate him? You could just have an away team where Data gets beamed down, killed, and then you make another Data... For that matter, you could do that with people too.
But I digress.
The real point is that Star Trek always espoused a happy view of technology, particularly when it comes to nanotech. When I ripped Star Trek in the original post, the deal was that I was lamenting that so many people want to make the world like Star Trek... I have to admit, I'm caught up in it. But I think that one thing that is cool about Stargate is that it did have a pretty dark vision of evil nanodudes running around. I know that Star Trek's Borg bugged people, but man, the Stargate Replicators just really gave me the heebie jeebies. Self assembling molecular dudes coming to blow up your planet, that's some rough stuff. Let's not build those Replicators, that's what I'm saying.
It's funny that one could look at this and say the markets don't work. The markets ARE working and that most people don't actually care about privacy.
If people -cared- about privacy, they would be willing to pay for the extra care it takes to ensure that their data is private. But, we live in a world where most people really don't care so much if everyone else knows what they are doing, so long as they are not confronted with it, or misuse the information.
Like, if you told someone at a grocery store that, to get their "club card" savings, the store would know exactly what they bought, they would say, they probably didn't care. Now, if they got a letter from the grocery store saying, "hey, since you like strawberries, you might like our sale on blueberries", they might dig that too. And, if they got junk mail from blueberry and strawberry growers, even that might be ok. But, if they got an email saying, "hey, you are killing humanity because you are eating strawberries and your preference for red fruit makes you some kind of a communist", then they would be pissed off.
Bottom line is, people don't care about privacy, but they do care about having their personal information being used to hurt them. It's pretty much the 5th amendment proposition, writ large and writ everywhere. Nothing is really private, but, you can't have your personal information be used to attack you, and that is what the market reflects.
Star Trek has the "cool" sci-fi thing, whereas a lot of people rip Star Gate, but I think the nano-tech future given by the likes of the Replicators are where this nano stuff is headed.
The single greatest shortcoming in human science is its failure to understand outcomes of complex, dynamic systems, and here we are going to make exactly that.
Doesn't get any dumber than that!
My license had been expired for six months. Renewal, pay a late fee and they hand it over. Easy. It's funny but on that day I heard on the radio some
Republican senator saying: "If we have national health insurance, we will have healthcare like the DMV."
Now I'm a right wing kind of guy, but I couldn't help but immediately think:
"I wish my health care was as good as my DMV". I would say Republicans should shy away from DMV arguments, because right now health care is so screwed up that
making it like the DMV would be an improvement. Imagine an emergency room where they had different lines for different ailments, actually gave out numbers like the DMV does, had friendly people and a nice building... and only cost $50.
The reason you compartmentalize information is so that it can't all be lost in one well swoop. Now, with intellipedia, someone makes a copy of it, loses it, and boom, all the work product of the CIA would wind up on the internet. I would predict that this is inevitable.
Where did he say he hated Apple
Uh, "Apple I hate you" in the title... :-)
And where will you find that on the Internet?
That's ultimately the problem Google has. They might think about becoming a bit of a content company and folding that into their search. They could have a google news page with their own reporting and their own columnists, fold their stuff into the search. They could capture all the meta data so that celebrities, all that stuff, could be put together. They know what their searches are for... why not have their own content? Sure some content providers will be ticked off, but what are they going to do, de-robot themselves so Google can't index them? Why spend hundreds of millions a year on trying to make web based applications when they can spend a fraction of that on good reporters.
I use emacs to code, while emacs is a heavily featured editor, the only real thing I use in comparison to even notepad would be the syntax highlighting
Well, there's a lot of dumb things notepad does... might I recommend textpad, if you are doing the Linux way in Windows? It's roughly comparable to rather good Kate.
I don't want silly bloated tools to get in my way.
Being able to hot track compile errors back to the text, and, debug the source in context, are the two winners for me. The third is having a good project redistributable. I really liked the way KDevelop would roll my solution into a source tarball with all the make install conventions and stuff that are common in Unix. I do not want to learn the ins and outs of autoconf any more than I want to understand the guts of an msi.
Incidentally, I really like the way debugging worked on Linux better with KDevelop than I did Visual C++. KDevelop let you change your code while you were running your project, and Visual C++ decides these days to lock you out. Drives me nuts. But KDevelop completely hit the rocks with the transition to KDE 4 and they still haven't gotten all the holes out of the boat yet. Other C++ environments in Linux aren't quite as good. The Qt one has promise, but it lacks some key polish. I've never been happy with Eclipse and C++, for sure.