> Yes, and it's been a major factor in Linux never gaining any meaningful traction outside the server market.
Not at all. The major factor is that zero OEMs have offered it as a real choice. The Dell N series doesn't count, almost every time the Windows version sold for the same or less. Never once did a real major OEM offer up a PC preloaded with Linux at a price advantage over Windows. The few times small fry tried it they managed to sell a few but they almost always went so cheep that most Linux folk were not going to buy the junk they were preloading onto.
Nobody even sold a dual boot, even as an option. That wouldn't have even cost them anything. Had Dell offered Canonical a deal where Canonical would provide a preload image and a utility to quickly convert the Linux partition into additional space for Windows or to just collapse it into C: if the customer decided they didn't want it, who doesn't think Canonical wouldn't have jumped at the opportunity to put product in front of a few million potential new users? But Microsoft would have had kittens, Balmer would have thrown a chair, etc.
Remember when Be offered their OS for free and got zero takers? That is the problem, the same one we have had for decades now, the MIcrosoft Monopoly on preloads.
Only us hard core types will load an OS, any OS. Everyone else uses what comes preloaded and that is Windows.
While you are right that Unity (and GNOME3 for that matter) probably make sense on tablets, don't expect to buy one anytime soon. Did ya hear any OEM deals being announced? Hint, if they weren't at CES hyping hardware deals you shouldn't expect any to ship in the next six months to a year. And that is the problem, nobody will ship Ubuntu on a tablet because nobody wants it. Nobody wants it because nobody has ever seen it on a tablet, nobody even knows it exists. And with signed boot being the new hotness there won't even be much aftermarket loading except onto the skeeviest Chinese imports.
But aftermarket loads don't matter anyway, look at Linux. Twenty years on and we are still an asterisk. End users don't load operating systems, they use whatever the factory preloads. And Google and Microsoft will be competing to offer OEMs bennies to pick their offering, what is Canonical planning on offering? It's Free? And so is Android and for all intents and purposes so will Windows 8 be free after the CoOp marketing kickbacks and such, or at least close enough to free that the ability to price the final product higher will make up for it.
That is their claim in the graphs in the article. Graphs that don't mention which competing devices are being compared and which have no numbers. But they are claiming to be middle of the pack in idle power consumption, which has always been the fatal flaw in x86 mobile devices until now. If they have really managed to get an x86 to idle at a couple of milliamps of current then they are probably in the hunt. If not, it is all bogus like an x86 tablet. Who wants a phone you have to charge daily even if you don't call or even light up the display? It is all about idle time with these more mobile devices, not how many HD frames you can push for the hour or so the battery can hold up.
Only if you are doing the task a small number of times. Otherwise you should formalize the procedure and then codify it in the form of a program.
Tex does a better job of formatting a paragraph than 99.9% of humans are likely to do manually, with or without a gui tool. For most cases it probably does a better job of adding an illustration. Seriously. Try banging out a simple document with LaTEX and having it include an illustration in the text. Now have someone bang it out in Word or something. After a one time learning ramp to get the hang of using LaTEX markup you will almost certainly find that the time spent is about the same and the output will be more attractive and much more consistent. While Word can use style sheets and such to get consistancy it is almost never done, because manual placement and formating is what most users see first and never move beyond.
Creating the illustration for insertion is probably a task best left to graphical tools. Everything in it's place.
> And I don't care who you are, either you have every single command memorized (with every > single argument as well) and you have wasted, probably months of your life learning these things > or more likely just know some small subset and have to look up news ones on occasion.
I see it different. If I have to look up the switches on a command it is because it is for something I rarely use; meaning it probably is rare enough I wouldn't be able to do it AT ALL with a graphical tool since they tend toward the lowest common denominator.
Instant example. Do man ls. Note the --author switch on the first display page of the manual (assuming 80x24 xterm) and now tell me how you do that on any of the graphical file system browsing tools? How many provide the option to display size in both decimal and SI units? None I know of, which is also exactly how many offer the functionality of the --block-size option. Do you even know WHY one would want to use the --block-size option? Not something you need every day but when you do you need it enough to read the man page, especially because it isn't all that hard or time consuming since UNIX culture makes it a point to always have the man pages available and they are laid out for fast access.
Again, just sticking to the ls command, all of those options were useful enough for someone to add code for but any gui that tried to expose them all would probably become unusable. But spend a few minutes reading the page and count em. They are all handy for somebody: -a AND -A, -b is certainly obscure enough but -B really clears the clutter from a display, you usually get -C by default but sometimes you need to override in a pipeline and the same can be said for --color, emacs peeps need -D, -f is great in pipes, -F is a bit cluttered for my taste most of the time but others love the additional info, --format is full of useful options, -h is for humans, -i is certainly a special option for the hard things that it makes possible, -n is something you probably can't do with a gui but is info an admin needs sometimes, -N is another one for pipes and scripts along with -q and -Q, and how many graphical tools provide access to all of the SELInux context?
> Pretty wild how a peasant can take a country of mostly peasants and turn it into an industrial superpower in 20 years, with little education no less.
Eh? Even at the max the Soviet Union was a third world country with fusion bombs. Some parts, Russia itself might could have been declared 2nd World if one were being very generous on the grading. These days more third world than second. Lots of propaganda of the time regarding their industrial and military might was eagerly passed on by their fifth column in the Western media but we now know they were a basket case.
No, it is you guys who are doing the buggering. You folks are free riders on our R&D investments paid for by the American public.
Personally I think we should pass a bill putting out a call for Pharma companies to relocate to the US and simply close their foreign branches so your socialized systems can't dictate prices to them. Let your socialized medical systems pay market rates (which would be lower for us with you guys paying more than you currently do) to import your drugs from the US. And announce that at the first threat to just ignore the patents and produce locally it will be a seen as a full declaration of a trade war. Do that for a decade and see if the lesson sinks in.
Whatever ends up working out in the marketplace. UL is paid for by the insurance industry since it turns out they had the most to lose by faulty electrical appliances burning crap to the ground. Consumer Reports and such are paid for by their subscribers. Other logo programs like the Good Housekeeping Seal are more murky as the producers have to pay for the right to display the logo but Good Housekeeping won't just let anyone with a checkbook use it. Remember when a Computer Shopper Magazine Best Buy award was important?
If the heavy hand of the government relaxed we would see a lot more of that sort of thing. Probably best if it happened over a period of time to allow adjustment.
How the government is funded is no problem to libertarian thought. Haven't met many who object to taxes in principle, because we realize the government, like everything else, has to be paid for. We just think there should be a lot less government to have to pay for. We don't approve of income transfers by the government but if we are to have the rule of law we must have police, courts, etc. and those things are not free. We don't like the income tax because of the invasive and progressive nature of it. The country got along just fine without it for a long time, even managed to finance a few wars and such.
> As most people describe it, Libertarianism is anarchism with an expectation that people will cooperate because it serves their "enlightened self interest"...
Yea, I think you have the crux of the problem. Libertarianism is an incomplete philosophy. We know that in general the more individual liberty you have and the less government the better things are, but we lack the details of how to go much beyond the original American Republic in that direction. Sorta the problem in physics, we pretty much know all the forces unify into one Answer but damed if we can figure out how that works.
You can tell we have a big hole left to fill in by asking a dozen hard core Libertarians what their ideal world would look like... then poking at the obvious (to anyone else) holes and watch em start backing and filling details they hadn't thought of. In an hour every one turns into something they themselves will admit is now a nightmare scenario. Most end up with corporations doing most of the things governments are otherwise tasked with and with zero accountability.
Hopefully we get another great thinker who can complete Rand's original work.
You have to dig harder for true prepaid plans but they are out there. You really can just buy a SIM and stick it in a phone and go. I have an Android device with a voice/text only plan. They don't advertise it a lot but T-Mobile will probably sell you a SIM, they won't sell me one in my ZIP code, but if you are in less of a pesthole than I am that is probably your best bet. I am on an AT&T reseller called h2o/Locus and for a light user it doesn't get much cheaper. Toss $10 at it and have three months to use it up at $0.05/text or $014/min for talk. I'm usually around WiFi so it works for me.
You do know that to a useful approximation the entire abolitionist movement was rooted in Christian churches, right? Same for the Civil Rights movement a hundred years later. Meanwhile the godless social experiments from the French Revolution on were all horror after horror, mass grave topped by larger mass graves themselves topped by pyramids of skulls.
Even better food for thought. The underlying theory behind the successful American experiment requires a god, the whole "All men are created equal, endowed by their creator...." business was specifically designed to put fundamental human rights beyond the power of kings AND parliments. And I still haven't seen a god-free replacement that even shows promise as a competing philosophical basis for a free society. Which is kinda annoying as an agnostic, the best I can offer up is that our philisophical understanding is still rather primitive.
Exactly. Both ends are nuts. On the one end we have folks who hear the Monty Python "Every Sperm is Sacred" song and don't realize it is a joke. The other end is in favor of infanticide. One is nuts and one is evil, neither is a sensible position. Problem is that science can't settle this one and the only solution most religions offer is the one that is nuts.
The only solution possible is to recogize the problem, err as much on the side of caution when drawing the legal line as practical and get on with other problems. But the godless progressives made a Holy Sacrement out of hoovering babies out of feminist wombs and refuse to even debate any sort of compromise position even as almost every progressive legal scholar now admits Roe V. Wade was a horrible decision.
> once you realize that religions deal with a problem domains which are important but not susceptible to the scientific method.
Which is my major beef with militant athesists, they almost to a man refuse to believe that part. They insist their God, Science, can indeed answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything. But of course it can't. Science stops at the Big Bang, not a femtosecond beyond that line can it go and still be science.
Which is why as an Agnostic I find all 'believers' suspect. Anybody claims to have The Truth and I just giggle, give us another thousand years and we might.
> Is Angry Birds going to steal the corporation's payroll records?
No, Angry Birds isn't malware. But if you get access to install any app IT has to trust you not to be stupid enough to install some crapware with a spyware payload. They might trust YOU, you read slashdot after all, but what about Ms. Blond Bimbo in HR? Do YOU trust her not to get infested and compromise every file she has access to, including YOUR personnel files? That is the sort of thing that keeps IT folks and the lawyers awake at night. It isn't just because they are assholes who dont want you to have Angry Birds.
Which is why in the end this pendulum will swing back just like it has done before you young iProduct buying punks learned to read. First it was the PC busting up the iron grip of the Lords of the Mainframe. But it was no time before IT brought them under their iron grip again, because leaving critical company info laying around on some mid level manager's PC was not viable. Same thing happened with cell phones. Now the cycle will repeat with tablets. You can't let random employees load up the most vital assets of the company in their personal hardware and carry it out the door, and without long drawn out contract negotiations it won't be staying in the cloud either.
Stop with the $25. That is just marketing, I doubt they actually expect to move the first one of those because they are pointless. You need a keyboard and mouse and the Model A only has one USB port. Good luck finding a hub cheap enough that it doesn't make more sense to just spend the extra $10 for the Model B and get a network port as a bonus. As if network is optional these days.... unless you are going WiFi but price that out... along with a hub. Not to mention that running much of anything modern in 128MB ram is going to be a challenge; and that is before the main processsor (the totally closed GPU) scarfs up a huge ass chunk of that minimal memory load.
So lets break it down. $35 for the Model B plus a power supply for $5. Now you still need a case and I doubt those will be cheap, call it $15. Add in a USB keyboard and mouse for another $10. Yea it is still fairly cheap but now we need to ask WHAT the HELL it can actually do that a surplus P-III can't? Or if you want the I/O ports and are doing robotic/embedded stuff instead of a wierd desktop on a TV what could you do with the existing AVR stuff for really cheep. Or better, buy an Android phone or tablet, root it and thar ya go. You get a screen and perhaps some sensors for under a hundred if ya shop careful, see eBay.
Dunno, I was in the same camp, no way they would actually ship at the stated prices, expect a doubling which would make it too expensive to be interesting. Or at least less interesting than the many other similar project computers and/or microcontroller products actually shipping. But if they are expecting to begin shipping next month and still holding to the original price they are either really going to pull it off or are truly idiots with zero business sense. I'd give em even odds at this point.:)
But why is it front page news every time these guys pass gas? If they ship it, that is news. Heck, when they auction off these guys I'd guess that would be news too. But d we need a story every month even when there isn't any actual news to report?
> Even with the atrocious metro UI, the ability to switch to a full-blown OS with plenty of app selection is enticing for many.
Except of course WE know that is a lie. Tablets with x86 processors are heavy beasts with short battery life and ARM tablets only get Metro instead of the full Windows desktop. I suspect there will be much wailing when end users plump down premium cash for em and then realize they have the smallest app base of any of the tablets while the marketing whispered sweet promises of it being "Windows."
Of course if Intel actually manages to get a CPU that can compete with ARM everything changes. But they have been throwing Sagans of cash at the power problem now for years with little to show for it. A 'low power' netbook or even ultrabook has several times the battery capacity of a large tablet's power source and compared to a phone it isn't even close. Most people's smart phone has a couple (as in way under ten) of Watt/Hours in the battery and that has to run several (2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi, BT, GPS, NFC, FM) radios, four or more processing cores (my cheap ass phone has modem CPU, modem DSP, GPU, CPU, DSP) and keep the DRAM refreshing, run the backlight, etc. And a phone really needs to be able to make it through most days without a recharge during the day. No way Intel plays with what is left over in that power budget anytime soon with a chip powerful enough to run Win8. They might manage the larger tablet form factors but phones are just not in the cards.
> I'm sure it had nothing to do with the almost complete lack of consumer interest in Android tablets.
Let me revise and extend you remark to make it more accurate:
I'm sure it had nothing to do with the almost complete lack of consumer interest in Android tablets at close to iPad prices.
Google has been playing games by withholding the source and access to the Market to all of the no-name products while ensuring all of the brand name ones keep their prices out of 'commodity' territory. Now that 4.0 is available perhaps they will allow the clones into the Market and prices to seek their own level. We shall then see if consumers are interested in Android tablets at half the price of an iProduct.
Personally I have zero interest in them at current pricing. They cost a lot more than a netbook yet have less stuff inside and no MIcrosoft tax to explain the higher price. And while the form factor is interesting, the price they pay is being less generally useful than a netbook or laptop. But get em down under $200 for fully equipped ones (GPS, BT, WiFi-n, camera, 1GHz+ CPU, good display) and I suspect uptake will pick up. But the Android forces have pretty much lost this Xmas selling season because there ain't no way products based on 4.0 will make it to stores in quantity this year.
> There *IS* a loss associated with having too many choices, no matter what some people will tell you.
There is, balanced by benefits that outweigh the costs IMHO. Having multiple desktops and distributions means we can survive one going mad. Compare and contrast what is happening with GNOME3 and Unity with what is going on in the Windows and Mac worlds. When Win8 ships, those people have no choice, they get a tablet interface and it matters not if they like it or not. Eventually the Mac peeps know they get iOS and there ain't nothing they can do. On the other hand we told Fedora and Ubuntu to FOAD and picked something else. Most fedora users seem to be going with XFCE, Ubuntu users appear to be migrating in mass to Mint. Because we had a choice.
Imagine instead developers had listened to the siren song some people have been singing for a decade now, that GNOME and KDE had long since merged into one 'perfect' desktop, the small fry had folded up shop and got on board the One True Desktop. Then that One True Desktop caught tablet fever. Our options? All bad.
Right now we have multiple options in every major category of Free Software. Linus goes mad we adopt one of the BSD kernels. We have multiple web browsers, email clients, desktop environments, plumbing layers. About the only part that isn't redundant is X, no real options for that currently, but Wayland is under development.
> It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
Exactly. I seriously doubt we are soon going to come up with any way to get billions and billions of Watt/Hours of energy without some nasty side effects. They all involve trade offs between instant costs and longterm risk, environmental losses, direct risks to humans, etc. All of them. even 'Green Energy' unless somebody patents direct conversion of unicorn farts... and locates some unicorns. And they probably have some serious downside we wouldn't discover until going into GW scale production.
>"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet.
And won't ever be. "Green Energy' is energy without consequences. As soon as a proposed 'Green' energy source gets beyond research, beyond government subsidized toys for 'I'm Greener Than Thou' prats and goes into real production the side effects (which were there all along) become visible and the Greens turn on it.
Look to history. Remember when Hydro was THE perfect green energy? Most/. readers are too young, but I remember. Then of course people noticed it disrupted fish lifecycles, submerged whole ecosystems, changed flow patterns of rivers and in at least one instance caused an earthquake. OH NOES, CONSEQUENCES! Can't have none of those, start bustin' those damned dams.
Windmills kill birds, environmentalists just won't abide them anywhere THEY have to see the eyesores. A couple of windmills are great, LOOK, I care about saving the earth! A thousand windmills cranking out MWs for the power corp? EVIL!
Solar? So long as the government tosses enough subsidy cash and the toxic manufacturing stays out of sight in China oh yea, plenty of Holier than Thou egoboo for the preening green. Cover the desert in collectors to generate industrial scale power? What! Lizards and shit live in the desert dude!
Tidal? Will kill fish. Just wait, you know it does.
Biofuels? Just toying with it spiked corn prices and is on the brink of causing worldwide hunger. Any attempt to derive a noticable chunk of our current energy needs from there is folly and our energy needs are about to skyrocket as the bulk of the world makes it to the 19th century.
> Give other people what THEY want, not what YOU think would be cool.
Oh bullpoop. The guy is giving out USB sticks. Very handy things for almost anyone to get in their stocking. He just wants to prepopulate em with some helpful stuff. Something you can't do with closed software but you can easily do with Free Software.
And yes, plenty of people give gifts based on their particular passion. Apple folk will tend to give out iProducts. Would they give one to somebody they KNOW isn't going to use it? Hopefully not, but a lot of people on their list would so they do. What is the difference?
Stick OO.o on there of course. And Firefox, Chrome, etc. And why not Gimp, Blender, and friends. All run Windows, why not spread em around. Will everyone use them? Probably not, but a few might and those that don't can just hit delete.
> I'd suggest Ubuntu, with a "readme.txt" written for those who will plug it into their Windows box.
And make sure you give them WUBI instead of expecting someone new to Free Software to be willing to figure out repartitioning. Sure it doesn't perform quite as well, but the benefits balance out for new users.
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> Yes, and it's been a major factor in Linux never gaining any meaningful traction outside the server market.
Not at all. The major factor is that zero OEMs have offered it as a real choice. The Dell N series doesn't count, almost every time the Windows version sold for the same or less. Never once did a real major OEM offer up a PC preloaded with Linux at a price advantage over Windows. The few times small fry tried it they managed to sell a few but they almost always went so cheep that most Linux folk were not going to buy the junk they were preloading onto.
Nobody even sold a dual boot, even as an option. That wouldn't have even cost them anything. Had Dell offered Canonical a deal where Canonical would provide a preload image and a utility to quickly convert the Linux partition into additional space for Windows or to just collapse it into C: if the customer decided they didn't want it, who doesn't think Canonical wouldn't have jumped at the opportunity to put product in front of a few million potential new users? But Microsoft would have had kittens, Balmer would have thrown a chair, etc.
Remember when Be offered their OS for free and got zero takers? That is the problem, the same one we have had for decades now, the MIcrosoft Monopoly on preloads.
Only us hard core types will load an OS, any OS. Everyone else uses what comes preloaded and that is Windows.
While you are right that Unity (and GNOME3 for that matter) probably make sense on tablets, don't expect to buy one anytime soon. Did ya hear any OEM deals being announced? Hint, if they weren't at CES hyping hardware deals you shouldn't expect any to ship in the next six months to a year. And that is the problem, nobody will ship Ubuntu on a tablet because nobody wants it. Nobody wants it because nobody has ever seen it on a tablet, nobody even knows it exists. And with signed boot being the new hotness there won't even be much aftermarket loading except onto the skeeviest Chinese imports.
But aftermarket loads don't matter anyway, look at Linux. Twenty years on and we are still an asterisk. End users don't load operating systems, they use whatever the factory preloads. And Google and Microsoft will be competing to offer OEMs bennies to pick their offering, what is Canonical planning on offering? It's Free? And so is Android and for all intents and purposes so will Windows 8 be free after the CoOp marketing kickbacks and such, or at least close enough to free that the ability to price the final product higher will make up for it.
That is their claim in the graphs in the article. Graphs that don't mention which competing devices are being compared and which have no numbers. But they are claiming to be middle of the pack in idle power consumption, which has always been the fatal flaw in x86 mobile devices until now. If they have really managed to get an x86 to idle at a couple of milliamps of current then they are probably in the hunt. If not, it is all bogus like an x86 tablet. Who wants a phone you have to charge daily even if you don't call or even light up the display? It is all about idle time with these more mobile devices, not how many HD frames you can push for the hour or so the battery can hold up.
Only if you are doing the task a small number of times. Otherwise you should formalize the procedure and then codify it in the form of a program.
Tex does a better job of formatting a paragraph than 99.9% of humans are likely to do manually, with or without a gui tool. For most cases it probably does a better job of adding an illustration. Seriously. Try banging out a simple document with LaTEX and having it include an illustration in the text. Now have someone bang it out in Word or something. After a one time learning ramp to get the hang of using LaTEX markup you will almost certainly find that the time spent is about the same and the output will be more attractive and much more consistent. While Word can use style sheets and such to get consistancy it is almost never done, because manual placement and formating is what most users see first and never move beyond.
Creating the illustration for insertion is probably a task best left to graphical tools. Everything in it's place.
> And I don't care who you are, either you have every single command memorized (with every
> single argument as well) and you have wasted, probably months of your life learning these things
> or more likely just know some small subset and have to look up news ones on occasion.
I see it different. If I have to look up the switches on a command it is because it is for something I rarely use; meaning it probably is rare enough I wouldn't be able to do it AT ALL with a graphical tool since they tend toward the lowest common denominator.
Instant example. Do man ls. Note the --author switch on the first display page of the manual (assuming 80x24 xterm) and now tell me how you do that on any of the graphical file system browsing tools? How many provide the option to display size in both decimal and SI units? None I know of, which is also exactly how many offer the functionality of the --block-size option. Do you even know WHY one would want to use the --block-size option? Not something you need every day but when you do you need it enough to read the man page, especially because it isn't all that hard or time consuming since UNIX culture makes it a point to always have the man pages available and they are laid out for fast access.
Again, just sticking to the ls command, all of those options were useful enough for someone to add code for but any gui that tried to expose them all would probably become unusable. But spend a few minutes reading the page and count em. They are all handy for somebody: -a AND -A, -b is certainly obscure enough but -B really clears the clutter from a display, you usually get -C by default but sometimes you need to override in a pipeline and the same can be said for --color, emacs peeps need -D, -f is great in pipes, -F is a bit cluttered for my taste most of the time but others love the additional info, --format is full of useful options, -h is for humans, -i is certainly a special option for the hard things that it makes possible, -n is something you probably can't do with a gui but is info an admin needs sometimes, -N is another one for pipes and scripts along with -q and -Q, and how many graphical tools provide access to all of the SELInux context?
> Pretty wild how a peasant can take a country of mostly peasants and turn it into an industrial superpower in 20 years, with little education no less.
Eh? Even at the max the Soviet Union was a third world country with fusion bombs. Some parts, Russia itself might could have been declared 2nd World if one were being very generous on the grading. These days more third world than second. Lots of propaganda of the time regarding their industrial and military might was eagerly passed on by their fifth column in the Western media but we now know they were a basket case.
No, it is you guys who are doing the buggering. You folks are free riders on our R&D investments paid for by the American public.
Personally I think we should pass a bill putting out a call for Pharma companies to relocate to the US and simply close their foreign branches so your socialized systems can't dictate prices to them. Let your socialized medical systems pay market rates (which would be lower for us with you guys paying more than you currently do) to import your drugs from the US. And announce that at the first threat to just ignore the patents and produce locally it will be a seen as a full declaration of a trade war. Do that for a decade and see if the lesson sinks in.
> And exactly who pays for the ratings agencies?
Whatever ends up working out in the marketplace. UL is paid for by the insurance industry since it turns out they had the most to lose by faulty electrical appliances burning crap to the ground. Consumer Reports and such are paid for by their subscribers. Other logo programs like the Good Housekeeping Seal are more murky as the producers have to pay for the right to display the logo but Good Housekeeping won't just let anyone with a checkbook use it. Remember when a Computer Shopper Magazine Best Buy award was important?
If the heavy hand of the government relaxed we would see a lot more of that sort of thing. Probably best if it happened over a period of time to allow adjustment.
How the government is funded is no problem to libertarian thought. Haven't met many who object to taxes in principle, because we realize the government, like everything else, has to be paid for. We just think there should be a lot less government to have to pay for. We don't approve of income transfers by the government but if we are to have the rule of law we must have police, courts, etc. and those things are not free. We don't like the income tax because of the invasive and progressive nature of it. The country got along just fine without it for a long time, even managed to finance a few wars and such.
> As most people describe it, Libertarianism is anarchism with an expectation that people will cooperate because it serves their "enlightened self interest" ...
Yea, I think you have the crux of the problem. Libertarianism is an incomplete philosophy. We know that in general the more individual liberty you have and the less government the better things are, but we lack the details of how to go much beyond the original American Republic in that direction. Sorta the problem in physics, we pretty much know all the forces unify into one Answer but damed if we can figure out how that works.
You can tell we have a big hole left to fill in by asking a dozen hard core Libertarians what their ideal world would look like... then poking at the obvious (to anyone else) holes and watch em start backing and filling details they hadn't thought of. In an hour every one turns into something they themselves will admit is now a nightmare scenario. Most end up with corporations doing most of the things governments are otherwise tasked with and with zero accountability.
Hopefully we get another great thinker who can complete Rand's original work.
You have to dig harder for true prepaid plans but they are out there. You really can just buy a SIM and stick it in a phone and go. I have an Android device with a voice/text only plan. They don't advertise it a lot but T-Mobile will probably sell you a SIM, they won't sell me one in my ZIP code, but if you are in less of a pesthole than I am that is probably your best bet. I am on an AT&T reseller called h2o/Locus and for a light user it doesn't get much cheaper. Toss $10 at it and have three months to use it up at $0.05/text or $014/min for talk. I'm usually around WiFi so it works for me.
> Slavery.
You do know that to a useful approximation the entire abolitionist movement was rooted in Christian churches, right? Same for the Civil Rights movement a hundred years later. Meanwhile the godless social experiments from the French Revolution on were all horror after horror, mass grave topped by larger mass graves themselves topped by pyramids of skulls.
Even better food for thought. The underlying theory behind the successful American experiment requires a god, the whole "All men are created equal, endowed by their creator...." business was specifically designed to put fundamental human rights beyond the power of kings AND parliments. And I still haven't seen a god-free replacement that even shows promise as a competing philosophical basis for a free society. Which is kinda annoying as an agnostic, the best I can offer up is that our philisophical understanding is still rather primitive.
Exactly. Both ends are nuts. On the one end we have folks who hear the Monty Python "Every Sperm is Sacred" song and don't realize it is a joke. The other end is in favor of infanticide. One is nuts and one is evil, neither is a sensible position. Problem is that science can't settle this one and the only solution most religions offer is the one that is nuts.
The only solution possible is to recogize the problem, err as much on the side of caution when drawing the legal line as practical and get on with other problems. But the godless progressives made a Holy Sacrement out of hoovering babies out of feminist wombs and refuse to even debate any sort of compromise position even as almost every progressive legal scholar now admits Roe V. Wade was a horrible decision.
> once you realize that religions deal with a problem domains which are important but not susceptible to the scientific method.
Which is my major beef with militant athesists, they almost to a man refuse to believe that part. They insist their God, Science, can indeed answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything. But of course it can't. Science stops at the Big Bang, not a femtosecond beyond that line can it go and still be science.
Which is why as an Agnostic I find all 'believers' suspect. Anybody claims to have The Truth and I just giggle, give us another thousand years and we might.
> Is Angry Birds going to steal the corporation's payroll records?
No, Angry Birds isn't malware. But if you get access to install any app IT has to trust you not to be stupid enough to install some crapware with a spyware payload. They might trust YOU, you read slashdot after all, but what about Ms. Blond Bimbo in HR? Do YOU trust her not to get infested and compromise every file she has access to, including YOUR personnel files? That is the sort of thing that keeps IT folks and the lawyers awake at night. It isn't just because they are assholes who dont want you to have Angry Birds.
Which is why in the end this pendulum will swing back just like it has done before you young iProduct buying punks learned to read. First it was the PC busting up the iron grip of the Lords of the Mainframe. But it was no time before IT brought them under their iron grip again, because leaving critical company info laying around on some mid level manager's PC was not viable. Same thing happened with cell phones. Now the cycle will repeat with tablets. You can't let random employees load up the most vital assets of the company in their personal hardware and carry it out the door, and without long drawn out contract negotiations it won't be staying in the cloud either.
Stop with the $25. That is just marketing, I doubt they actually expect to move the first one of those because they are pointless. You need a keyboard and mouse and the Model A only has one USB port. Good luck finding a hub cheap enough that it doesn't make more sense to just spend the extra $10 for the Model B and get a network port as a bonus. As if network is optional these days.... unless you are going WiFi but price that out... along with a hub. Not to mention that running much of anything modern in 128MB ram is going to be a challenge; and that is before the main processsor (the totally closed GPU) scarfs up a huge ass chunk of that minimal memory load.
So lets break it down. $35 for the Model B plus a power supply for $5. Now you still need a case and I doubt those will be cheap, call it $15. Add in a USB keyboard and mouse for another $10. Yea it is still fairly cheap but now we need to ask WHAT the HELL it can actually do that a surplus P-III can't? Or if you want the I/O ports and are doing robotic/embedded stuff instead of a wierd desktop on a TV what could you do with the existing AVR stuff for really cheep. Or better, buy an Android phone or tablet, root it and thar ya go. You get a screen and perhaps some sensors for under a hundred if ya shop careful, see eBay.
Dunno, I was in the same camp, no way they would actually ship at the stated prices, expect a doubling which would make it too expensive to be interesting. Or at least less interesting than the many other similar project computers and/or microcontroller products actually shipping. But if they are expecting to begin shipping next month and still holding to the original price they are either really going to pull it off or are truly idiots with zero business sense. I'd give em even odds at this point. :)
But why is it front page news every time these guys pass gas? If they ship it, that is news. Heck, when they auction off these guys I'd guess that would be news too. But d we need a story every month even when there isn't any actual news to report?
> Even with the atrocious metro UI, the ability to switch to a full-blown OS with plenty of app selection is enticing for many.
Except of course WE know that is a lie. Tablets with x86 processors are heavy beasts with short battery life and ARM tablets only get Metro instead of the full Windows desktop. I suspect there will be much wailing when end users plump down premium cash for em and then realize they have the smallest app base of any of the tablets while the marketing whispered sweet promises of it being "Windows."
Of course if Intel actually manages to get a CPU that can compete with ARM everything changes. But they have been throwing Sagans of cash at the power problem now for years with little to show for it. A 'low power' netbook or even ultrabook has several times the battery capacity of a large tablet's power source and compared to a phone it isn't even close. Most people's smart phone has a couple (as in way under ten) of Watt/Hours in the battery and that has to run several (2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi, BT, GPS, NFC, FM) radios, four or more processing cores (my cheap ass phone has modem CPU, modem DSP, GPU, CPU, DSP) and keep the DRAM refreshing, run the backlight, etc. And a phone really needs to be able to make it through most days without a recharge during the day. No way Intel plays with what is left over in that power budget anytime soon with a chip powerful enough to run Win8. They might manage the larger tablet form factors but phones are just not in the cards.
> I'm sure it had nothing to do with the almost complete lack of consumer interest in Android tablets.
Let me revise and extend you remark to make it more accurate:
I'm sure it had nothing to do with the almost complete lack of consumer interest in Android tablets at close to iPad prices.
Google has been playing games by withholding the source and access to the Market to all of the no-name products while ensuring all of the brand name ones keep their prices out of 'commodity' territory. Now that 4.0 is available perhaps they will allow the clones into the Market and prices to seek their own level. We shall then see if consumers are interested in Android tablets at half the price of an iProduct.
Personally I have zero interest in them at current pricing. They cost a lot more than a netbook yet have less stuff inside and no MIcrosoft tax to explain the higher price. And while the form factor is interesting, the price they pay is being less generally useful than a netbook or laptop. But get em down under $200 for fully equipped ones (GPS, BT, WiFi-n, camera, 1GHz+ CPU, good display) and I suspect uptake will pick up. But the Android forces have pretty much lost this Xmas selling season because there ain't no way products based on 4.0 will make it to stores in quantity this year.
> Many Gtk2 apps have been ported to Gtk3
Now if gnome-panel and compiz and the old applets in the system trap could be ported everything would be great with GNOME3.
> There *IS* a loss associated with having too many choices, no matter what some people will tell you.
There is, balanced by benefits that outweigh the costs IMHO. Having multiple desktops and distributions means we can survive one going mad. Compare and contrast what is happening with GNOME3 and Unity with what is going on in the Windows and Mac worlds. When Win8 ships, those people have no choice, they get a tablet interface and it matters not if they like it or not. Eventually the Mac peeps know they get iOS and there ain't nothing they can do. On the other hand we told Fedora and Ubuntu to FOAD and picked something else. Most fedora users seem to be going with XFCE, Ubuntu users appear to be migrating in mass to Mint. Because we had a choice.
Imagine instead developers had listened to the siren song some people have been singing for a decade now, that GNOME and KDE had long since merged into one 'perfect' desktop, the small fry had folded up shop and got on board the One True Desktop. Then that One True Desktop caught tablet fever. Our options? All bad.
Right now we have multiple options in every major category of Free Software. Linus goes mad we adopt one of the BSD kernels. We have multiple web browsers, email clients, desktop environments, plumbing layers. About the only part that isn't redundant is X, no real options for that currently, but Wayland is under development.
> It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
Exactly. I seriously doubt we are soon going to come up with any way to get billions and billions of Watt/Hours of energy without some nasty side effects. They all involve trade offs between instant costs and longterm risk, environmental losses, direct risks to humans, etc. All of them. even 'Green Energy' unless somebody patents direct conversion of unicorn farts... and locates some unicorns. And they probably have some serious downside we wouldn't discover until going into GW scale production.
>"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet.
And won't ever be. "Green Energy' is energy without consequences. As soon as a proposed 'Green' energy source gets beyond research, beyond government subsidized toys for 'I'm Greener Than Thou' prats and goes into real production the side effects (which were there all along) become visible and the Greens turn on it.
Look to history. Remember when Hydro was THE perfect green energy? Most /. readers are too young, but I remember. Then of course people noticed it disrupted fish lifecycles, submerged whole ecosystems, changed flow patterns of rivers and in at least one instance caused an earthquake. OH NOES, CONSEQUENCES! Can't have none of those, start bustin' those damned dams.
Windmills kill birds, environmentalists just won't abide them anywhere THEY have to see the eyesores. A couple of windmills are great, LOOK, I care about saving the earth! A thousand windmills cranking out MWs for the power corp? EVIL!
Solar? So long as the government tosses enough subsidy cash and the toxic manufacturing stays out of sight in China oh yea, plenty of Holier than Thou egoboo for the preening green. Cover the desert in collectors to generate industrial scale power? What! Lizards and shit live in the desert dude!
Geothermal? Causes earthquakes. Oops. Sorry bout that.
Tidal? Will kill fish. Just wait, you know it does.
Biofuels? Just toying with it spiked corn prices and is on the brink of causing worldwide hunger. Any attempt to derive a noticable chunk of our current energy needs from there is folly and our energy needs are about to skyrocket as the bulk of the world makes it to the 19th century.
> Give other people what THEY want, not what YOU think would be cool.
Oh bullpoop. The guy is giving out USB sticks. Very handy things for almost anyone to get in their stocking. He just wants to prepopulate em with some helpful stuff. Something you can't do with closed software but you can easily do with Free Software.
And yes, plenty of people give gifts based on their particular passion. Apple folk will tend to give out iProducts. Would they give one to somebody they KNOW isn't going to use it? Hopefully not, but a lot of people on their list would so they do. What is the difference?
Stick OO.o on there of course. And Firefox, Chrome, etc. And why not Gimp, Blender, and friends. All run Windows, why not spread em around. Will everyone use them? Probably not, but a few might and those that don't can just hit delete.
> I'd suggest Ubuntu, with a "readme.txt" written for those who will plug it into their Windows box.
And make sure you give them WUBI instead of expecting someone new to Free Software to be willing to figure out repartitioning. Sure it doesn't perform quite as well, but the benefits balance out for new users.
Exactly. Why do we have to have a post about a press release for a product that may or may not actually come into existence next year?
A year is a very long time in this game, things will be very different, those specs will be obsolete for one thing.
If it ships, then we can discuss it, the usual suspects can troll, folks can point out it is pointless for reasons a, b and c. And so on.