I see this comment get made a lot on slashdot and I think that it shows that most people are missing the point. When I tell people to go out and "buy a mac" I mean go out and buy the Mac OS X system--the complete package of hardware and OS that fits together well. I'm not talking about the hardware only. To buy an Apple computer without the OS is just silly, if not stupid. It's not the "Apple Tax." It's people going out and paying good money for a good product, plain and simple. The reason Windows is called a Microsoft Tax is that if you don't by an Apple Macintosh *system*--say you want to buy a "Linux system"--you have no choice except to plunk down your $300 for Windows regardless of whether you want to use it or not. So people complaining that they can't buy an OS-less Mac is just idiotic. Just go buy a white box. You'll save money anyway. There's no reason to ever buy a Mac without OS X.
Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. If you want to buy a Mac *because* you can also run Windows and Linux as well as OS X for whatever reason, then I say go for it. But if you want to buy a mac to just run Vista or even dual-boot windows and linux, you're wasting your money plain and simple.
The things you are asking for will not be found here. They are mostly in the realm of userspace. Better GUIs, better hardware detection and setup, plug-and-play stuff. All of which depends on kernel support (which is already there) but is actually implemented in the userspace code of the distros. So you're really looking in the wrong place for these things.
Vulnerabilities in OO.org notwithstanding, a few things we must keep in mind: The cost of getting the latest openoffice? Do you need a "genuine" copy of OpenOffice to qualify for patches? Seems like OpenOffice, for all its warts, still comes out ahead in this one area. For home users, this can be a huge point. Of course, the underlying OS (as of windows XP) is still a huge security problem, despite using firefox and oo.org.
Ethanol is a significantly simpler molecule than the various molecules in the cocktail that makes up gasoline. There just aren't as many bonds. Thus it's not going to produce the same amount of energy in your engine. The raw mileage on ethanol is not going to be as good. That may not matter, though, if you run it in a small, efficient car.
Also maybe another reason is because one unit of ethanol requires just slightly more fossil fuel to create than it replaces currently? As we look at any alternate energy or fuel source, we have to take into account the energy costs from end to end. This is something electric car, hybrid car, and hydrogen proponents often conveniently forget. I believe that organic fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, etc can be created some day without consuming more fossil fuel than it replaces. So research in ethanol and the area this company is looking into is a great idea. If we can create an organic molecule with more energy contained in it than ethanol, and run in existing trucks and cars, then it's a clear win. Our biggest problem right now is net carbon increase, which this neatly overcomes.
I notice that many slashdotters are quick to slam any new suggestion without really comprehending it or suggesting workable alternatives. I believe we should research all kinds of technologies to replace our addiction to fossil fuels.
The amount of memory shown as "free" is meaningless in any operating system these days. Any linux distro I've used in recent memory always shows a small fraction of the main memory free. That doesn't mean that your main memory is not available. I would expect a 2 GB system to regularly use as much of that memory for caching as is practical. Given the size of the operating system files these days (and disks), I'd say using a big chunk of this memory for caching that is efficient use of resources. As your game loads and takes over RAM, the caches get flushed out of the way. No big deal. The game gets 1.5 GB of RAM. Seems like you are caught up in the numbers game here.
Seems like the bulk of the UI logic would be easier to develop and more error-free if done in python. python could then tie into the C/C++ backend code where necessary. From my casual search of google, python and (n)curses work very well together.
An RC Glow engine is usually not a diesel, although there are RC diesel engines out there. Diesels in RC have fallen out of favor because of smell of the exhaust, the mixing of the fuel, and the fact that few people make them anymore. Standard glow engines, on the other hand, are common and don't use compression ignition. Rather the glow plug maintains heat from the previous ignition, and also has a wire element that reacts with the fuel to produce an ignition source.
I don't think the RIAA can sue anyone for having bought music from Allofmp3.com. Because buying music from them is not copyright infringement on the part of the person who purchased the music. Rather infringement can only be charged against those who offer copyrighted works for sale or download with the consent of the copyright holder. Or at least several hundred slashdotters hope!
Not a fanboy at all. I dislike OO.org for most of the same reasons I dislike MS Office. As for the rest of your comments, see the replies to your post.
Whatever. I'm not trolling. I merely state facts. If the moderators can't handle that, so be it.
Re:why does linux lag windows in features?
on
VMware Fusion goes Beta
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you're trying to run a small set of applications in Linux, why are you running a desktop environment and doing things the MS Windows way? Don't boot linux up to graphical mode. Just leave it in text mode. Run parallels minimized to the dock. Then a quick script can ssh into the linux machine, run the program, and dump the display out to Apple's wonderful, integrated X11 server, giving you the integration feature you want (clipboard and everything). While there's not yet a shared folder thing for Linux, you can turn on Windows sharing in OS X's System Preference and just have your startup scripts in Linux smbmount the share so you can can transparently access data across the Mac/Linux divide.
Whether you're using OS X and Parallels or VMWare, this is the best solution for almost all situations. That is why no one has great VMWare or Parallels tools for Linux. They simply aren't needed, since you don't need a dedicated window to view the VM desktop. Let's use the God-given features of X11 to our benefit!
My experience with MS Office has not been nice. Two years ago, I used for serious stuff and, boy, did I regret it. This friggin' bug made me loose everything. They told me MS Office was production-ready. So they told me. They lied, they were just a buch of Microsoft fanboys who never wrote more than 20 pages with the thing. So, this is from someone who actually had to used MS Office for more than 20 pages.
Seriously, document corruption and data loss is not restricted to OpenOffice only. If you have to do anything in MS Office over 20 pages (say 100-200 pages), you're asking for trouble. I recommend to my users that they make lots of versions (save a lot), and split their document into smaller files using a master document. For every OpenOffice bug that caused corruption of the file I can think of several occasions where MS Office destroyed everything. I don't trust OpenOffice that much, but I certainly trust MS Office less.
Those who have NDAs on Leopard have said on the Apple mailing lists that Time Machine will not use the file system to accomplish versioning. They will not say how it is done, but it has nothing to do with ZFS. I give it as my opinion that Time Machine is implemented at the OS level, intercepting calls to open and write.
ZFS currently wouldn't work very well for flash storage systems under a certain size because of initial overhead. ZFS requires each device to be at least 64 MB in order to be added to a pool. Also the minimal overhead of ZFS is 32 MB. In other words if you take a 64 MB disk, format it to ZFS, you'll only have 32 MB of space available. As you add devices to the pool, this overhead grows, but at a pretty small rate.
I remember hearing once that Lufthansa co-pilots are trained in this exact fashion. It's very logical. In fact you can train better in a sim than in real life as you can safely simulate more extreme conditions and practice situations that you just can't create on demand in a real airplane. Flying an airplane isn't that difficult under normal circumstances. But each aircraft has its own subtle nuances that can lead to pilots getting into very dangerous circumstances that are hard to prepare for in any other fashion. Plus the cost of simulators has really dropped. For example, even if pilots were required to make several take-offs and landings in the simulator for every airport they fly in and out of, that would familiarize the pilots with the runways and maybe avoid the kind of accident we saw in Kentucky earlier this year. Even though the taxiways had recently changed, just being familiar with the what the horizon looks like, etc, might have clued them in sooner that they were on the wrong runway.
The fedora software updater only alerts me to updates to packages I have installed. I have no idea what you are seeing. Everything it alerts you to are packages you *do* have installed and need updating.
Don't mistake NAS for backup. We plan to implement a NAS and a DVD archive. Here's how it works. Every night the main array is snapshotted. We figure we'll easily have enough storage to maintain about 6 snapshots, given that we change an average of 6 GB of data a day. We'll copy the full snapshot off to backup disk (IE removable disks), about 2 TB worth of data. Then we'll take the snapshot and make ISO images of just the changed data which we'll write to a dvd. If we plan on keeping a year's worth of DVD's, we can track a file back an entire year. This way we back both redundant storage (the RAID), full backup (going back 6 days) and an archive (going back an entire year. This may seem like overkill, but in a scientific institution this is what the doctor ordered.
Good release, but real fun stuff in Java 7
on
Java SE 6 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Java 6 has made great strides in many areas, including speed, Swing LAF, etc. It now uses GTK theme engines (works with all themes) to allow swing apps to look more like GTK apps. The imitation is still very imperfect, but it's much improved over the old, crappy, Metal look. I believe generics have been improved some in 6, and I think, if I recall correctly, 6 marks the beginning of non-backwards compatible changes to the JVM itself to pave the way for a lot of exciting new features in Java 7, the most notable will the inclusion (finally) of delegates, making GUI event programming a lot cleaner. It's possible that with Java 7 finally on feature parity with.NET, someone could write a.NET to JVM translator, such as the reverse of ikvm, to allow C# code to be executed on a clean, GPLd Java stack. I still prefer C# to Java at this point, and it would be nice to have the difference between the two stacks (technologically anyway) be insignificant, hopefully helping developers who would choose.NET choose the now safer Java alternative..NET really did get a jump on Java technologically up until now. It's better in several ways including the generics model, delegates, and being able to support a number of languages including python (jpython for JVM seems to be stalled). Java 7 will start to change all that. Sun's really proved they are listening to the community. Either that or.NET really got them scared.
Give me a break about the cows. I can fix that one anyway. Just add flare stacks to each animal and burn it off harmlessly (it is carbon-neutral). Or collect it and heat your home with it. It's actually such a small amount that neither suggestion is serious.
The truth of the matter is that our landfills are giving off more methane than cows. The first step should be to collect that gas. As for cows farting, I gather there are several orders of magnitude more people on the planet than cows, who have the same problem, so I guess we should take care of them first.
But dumping the SUV? Absolutely. Saying the human affect on the environment is less than we thought should not be an excuse to keep guzzling fossil fuels. Unfortunately, only economics is going to cure us of our oil drug dependency, or massive willpower (unlikely given human nature). And right now the economics of buying a hybrid car don't make sense yet, either in terms of dollar cost or in terms of environmental impact cost.
And it's not pretty either. Even if you ignore global warming or global climate change for a moment, you just have to step outside in any of our urban centers, look at the sky and take a whiff. Of course we're hurting and changing the environment. That's the real shame of it. I happen to work with an environmental scientist and he says the number one bad thing that everyone is ignoring is the short-term, immediate affect on our health. We're slowly killing ourselves in our own pollution.
Whether the long-term effect of what we do is 10 degrees of warming, 5 degrees of warming, or even 5 degrees of cooling, we're still have a pretty drastic affect on the poor earth. Apparently, there is new research coming out all the time (and not from the grand right-wing conspiracy) that global warming isn't happening as fast as some think. But does it really matter that it's slower than we thought? We still have to confront the same issues. Net carbon increase, particulates, and nitrous oxides, all of which damage our health, as well as the environment.
Your implication that Marxism is Communism, or something otherwise bad or evil, is quite false. Marx said a lot of things. Further most people, myself included, don't hardly have the slightest clue what Marx really proposed or believed in. Certainly the Communist Manifesto was *not* Marx. It was the Communist Party's charter for which they paid Marx to draw up according to their own ideals, not Marx's.
Talking to people (in the ivory towers no less) I have learned that Marx wrote many many things that touched on the great and important issues of the day. Many do not realize that Marx predicted what would happen in America. He predicted that cold hard capitalist worker abuses would lead to unions and a reformation of American labor, even within the context of our somewhat free market system. He was exactly accurate in these areas and many others. And it's a good thing we "listened" to Marx or else we'd have never made it through the industrial age intact. Although I would strongly disagree with Marx over globalisation, it seem that the US has listened to him very well when it comes to protectionism of domestic markets. The US is all about free trade and free markets when it is our trade and your markets, not when it's your trade and our markets. Marx does have some flaws.
Now from what I know, the Free Software movement is definitely *not* communism, but rather humanist capitalism at its finest. And yes, it does represent, in my opinion, the true ideals of Marxism too. This is a good thing, in my opinion. It does not take away anything from those who espouse themselves to be libertarian, free-market thinkers ( http://www.politicalcompass.org/ really opened my eyes to where I stand in relationship to our government leaders)
Funny you should talk about character flaws and spiritual emptiness. For Max himself did believe that religion was a bandaid to the this problem, and not a solution. Rather he said we should find and solve the underlying causes of this emptiness, such as the dull, monotonous, slavery of factory worker life, common in his time. I happen to agree with the latter statement, but not with his opiate comment. Programming in a cubicle, notwithstanding a great salary, leads to emptiness and a lack of fulfillment in many circumstances. The Free Software ecosystem, on the other hand helps to offset this monotony and tediousness but encouraging us to exercise tremendous creativity. I believe this can really benefit and complement companies who develop software.
So why is Marxism such a bad thing? It has already brought the US stability and amazing economic development. And honestly if you really listen to what Moglen and the FSF say, they want to bring the same leaps and strides to computers and people, as in the computer industry specifically, we face many of the same issues Marx wrote about. If anyone is truly interested in what Marx had to say, throw away the "Communist Manifesto" and read his real books.
Every year we essentially throw away a lot of vegetable oil after cooking with it at restaurants. Much of this oil gets dumped out or just incinerated. Clearly we need to recycle this oil and burning it as a fuel is a good idea. Except for NO2 and particulates (which we know how to deal with) there is no pollution from using old vegetable oil for fuel in a diesel engine.
However the problem is that there's not enough vegetable oil coming from restaurants to impact even slightly our national oil usage. So it is a cheap fuel source for a few people. That's all. What we really need is a way to create organic oils on a large scale from algae, plants, or some other way using only energy from the sun. If we could immediately replace all our fossil fuels with organic (as it carbon-neutral) oils, we could stop our carbon emissions completely, having an immediate, dramatic, and hopefully non-warming effect on our environment.
In the RC aircraft world, Lithium Polymer batteries are king, due to their fairly high capacity and incredibly high current draw (some packs up to 40 amps). Several folks have tried making packs out of laptop LiIon cells, but they just can't deliver the amps. Is this true that LiIon packs hold more energy but have a lower maximum amp draw? Most laptops draw about 1-3 amps I believe, so this isn't really an issue, but I am curious.
Slashdot Mirror
I see this comment get made a lot on slashdot and I think that it shows that most people are missing the point. When I tell people to go out and "buy a mac" I mean go out and buy the Mac OS X system--the complete package of hardware and OS that fits together well. I'm not talking about the hardware only. To buy an Apple computer without the OS is just silly, if not stupid. It's not the "Apple Tax." It's people going out and paying good money for a good product, plain and simple. The reason Windows is called a Microsoft Tax is that if you don't by an Apple Macintosh *system*--say you want to buy a "Linux system"--you have no choice except to plunk down your $300 for Windows regardless of whether you want to use it or not. So people complaining that they can't buy an OS-less Mac is just idiotic. Just go buy a white box. You'll save money anyway. There's no reason to ever buy a Mac without OS X.
Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. If you want to buy a Mac *because* you can also run Windows and Linux as well as OS X for whatever reason, then I say go for it. But if you want to buy a mac to just run Vista or even dual-boot windows and linux, you're wasting your money plain and simple.
The things you are asking for will not be found here. They are mostly in the realm of userspace. Better GUIs, better hardware detection and setup, plug-and-play stuff. All of which depends on kernel support (which is already there) but is actually implemented in the userspace code of the distros. So you're really looking in the wrong place for these things.
Vulnerabilities in OO.org notwithstanding, a few things we must keep in mind: The cost of getting the latest openoffice? Do you need a "genuine" copy of OpenOffice to qualify for patches? Seems like OpenOffice, for all its warts, still comes out ahead in this one area. For home users, this can be a huge point. Of course, the underlying OS (as of windows XP) is still a huge security problem, despite using firefox and oo.org.
Ethanol is a significantly simpler molecule than the various molecules in the cocktail that makes up gasoline. There just aren't as many bonds. Thus it's not going to produce the same amount of energy in your engine. The raw mileage on ethanol is not going to be as good. That may not matter, though, if you run it in a small, efficient car.
Also maybe another reason is because one unit of ethanol requires just slightly more fossil fuel to create than it replaces currently? As we look at any alternate energy or fuel source, we have to take into account the energy costs from end to end. This is something electric car, hybrid car, and hydrogen proponents often conveniently forget. I believe that organic fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, etc can be created some day without consuming more fossil fuel than it replaces. So research in ethanol and the area this company is looking into is a great idea. If we can create an organic molecule with more energy contained in it than ethanol, and run in existing trucks and cars, then it's a clear win. Our biggest problem right now is net carbon increase, which this neatly overcomes.
I notice that many slashdotters are quick to slam any new suggestion without really comprehending it or suggesting workable alternatives. I believe we should research all kinds of technologies to replace our addiction to fossil fuels.
The amount of memory shown as "free" is meaningless in any operating system these days. Any linux distro I've used in recent memory always shows a small fraction of the main memory free. That doesn't mean that your main memory is not available. I would expect a 2 GB system to regularly use as much of that memory for caching as is practical. Given the size of the operating system files these days (and disks), I'd say using a big chunk of this memory for caching that is efficient use of resources. As your game loads and takes over RAM, the caches get flushed out of the way. No big deal. The game gets 1.5 GB of RAM. Seems like you are caught up in the numbers game here.
Spoken by a true non-zealot who's obviously never tried python.
By the way I am not a python programmer nor do I use it regularly, but for some things it is the right tool for the job.
Seems like the bulk of the UI logic would be easier to develop and more error-free if done in python. python could then tie into the C/C++ backend code where necessary. From my casual search of google, python and (n)curses work very well together.
An RC Glow engine is usually not a diesel, although there are RC diesel engines out there. Diesels in RC have fallen out of favor because of smell of the exhaust, the mixing of the fuel, and the fact that few people make them anymore. Standard glow engines, on the other hand, are common and don't use compression ignition. Rather the glow plug maintains heat from the previous ignition, and also has a wire element that reacts with the fuel to produce an ignition source.
I don't think the RIAA can sue anyone for having bought music from Allofmp3.com. Because buying music from them is not copyright infringement on the part of the person who purchased the music. Rather infringement can only be charged against those who offer copyrighted works for sale or download with the consent of the copyright holder. Or at least several hundred slashdotters hope!
Not a fanboy at all. I dislike OO.org for most of the same reasons I dislike MS Office. As for the rest of your comments, see the replies to your post.
Whatever. I'm not trolling. I merely state facts. If the moderators can't handle that, so be it.
If you're trying to run a small set of applications in Linux, why are you running a desktop environment and doing things the MS Windows way? Don't boot linux up to graphical mode. Just leave it in text mode. Run parallels minimized to the dock. Then a quick script can ssh into the linux machine, run the program, and dump the display out to Apple's wonderful, integrated X11 server, giving you the integration feature you want (clipboard and everything). While there's not yet a shared folder thing for Linux, you can turn on Windows sharing in OS X's System Preference and just have your startup scripts in Linux smbmount the share so you can can transparently access data across the Mac/Linux divide.
Whether you're using OS X and Parallels or VMWare, this is the best solution for almost all situations. That is why no one has great VMWare or Parallels tools for Linux. They simply aren't needed, since you don't need a dedicated window to view the VM desktop. Let's use the God-given features of X11 to our benefit!
My experience with MS Office has not been nice. Two years ago, I used for serious stuff and, boy, did I regret it. This friggin' bug made me loose everything. They told me MS Office was production-ready. So they told me. They lied, they were just a buch of Microsoft fanboys who never wrote more than 20 pages with the thing. So, this is from someone who actually had to used MS Office for more than 20 pages.
Seriously, document corruption and data loss is not restricted to OpenOffice only. If you have to do anything in MS Office over 20 pages (say 100-200 pages), you're asking for trouble. I recommend to my users that they make lots of versions (save a lot), and split their document into smaller files using a master document. For every OpenOffice bug that caused corruption of the file I can think of several occasions where MS Office destroyed everything. I don't trust OpenOffice that much, but I certainly trust MS Office less.
Those who have NDAs on Leopard have said on the Apple mailing lists that Time Machine will not use the file system to accomplish versioning. They will not say how it is done, but it has nothing to do with ZFS. I give it as my opinion that Time Machine is implemented at the OS level, intercepting calls to open and write.
ZFS currently wouldn't work very well for flash storage systems under a certain size because of initial overhead. ZFS requires each device to be at least 64 MB in order to be added to a pool. Also the minimal overhead of ZFS is 32 MB. In other words if you take a 64 MB disk, format it to ZFS, you'll only have 32 MB of space available. As you add devices to the pool, this overhead grows, but at a pretty small rate.
I remember hearing once that Lufthansa co-pilots are trained in this exact fashion. It's very logical. In fact you can train better in a sim than in real life as you can safely simulate more extreme conditions and practice situations that you just can't create on demand in a real airplane. Flying an airplane isn't that difficult under normal circumstances. But each aircraft has its own subtle nuances that can lead to pilots getting into very dangerous circumstances that are hard to prepare for in any other fashion. Plus the cost of simulators has really dropped. For example, even if pilots were required to make several take-offs and landings in the simulator for every airport they fly in and out of, that would familiarize the pilots with the runways and maybe avoid the kind of accident we saw in Kentucky earlier this year. Even though the taxiways had recently changed, just being familiar with the what the horizon looks like, etc, might have clued them in sooner that they were on the wrong runway.
Hmm. Why not just read Marx himself. I think I'd rather do that.
The fedora software updater only alerts me to updates to packages I have installed. I have no idea what you are seeing. Everything it alerts you to are packages you *do* have installed and need updating.
Don't mistake NAS for backup. We plan to implement a NAS and a DVD archive. Here's how it works. Every night the main array is snapshotted. We figure we'll easily have enough storage to maintain about 6 snapshots, given that we change an average of 6 GB of data a day. We'll copy the full snapshot off to backup disk (IE removable disks), about 2 TB worth of data. Then we'll take the snapshot and make ISO images of just the changed data which we'll write to a dvd. If we plan on keeping a year's worth of DVD's, we can track a file back an entire year. This way we back both redundant storage (the RAID), full backup (going back 6 days) and an archive (going back an entire year. This may seem like overkill, but in a scientific institution this is what the doctor ordered.
Java 6 has made great strides in many areas, including speed, Swing LAF, etc. It now uses GTK theme engines (works with all themes) to allow swing apps to look more like GTK apps. The imitation is still very imperfect, but it's much improved over the old, crappy, Metal look. I believe generics have been improved some in 6, and I think, if I recall correctly, 6 marks the beginning of non-backwards compatible changes to the JVM itself to pave the way for a lot of exciting new features in Java 7, the most notable will the inclusion (finally) of delegates, making GUI event programming a lot cleaner. It's possible that with Java 7 finally on feature parity with .NET, someone could write a .NET to JVM translator, such as the reverse of ikvm, to allow C# code to be executed on a clean, GPLd Java stack. I still prefer C# to Java at this point, and it would be nice to have the difference between the two stacks (technologically anyway) be insignificant, hopefully helping developers who would choose .NET choose the now safer Java alternative. .NET really did get a jump on Java technologically up until now. It's better in several ways including the generics model, delegates, and being able to support a number of languages including python (jpython for JVM seems to be stalled). Java 7 will start to change all that. Sun's really proved they are listening to the community. Either that or .NET really got them scared.
Give me a break about the cows. I can fix that one anyway. Just add flare stacks to each animal and burn it off harmlessly (it is carbon-neutral). Or collect it and heat your home with it. It's actually such a small amount that neither suggestion is serious.
The truth of the matter is that our landfills are giving off more methane than cows. The first step should be to collect that gas. As for cows farting, I gather there are several orders of magnitude more people on the planet than cows, who have the same problem, so I guess we should take care of them first.
But dumping the SUV? Absolutely. Saying the human affect on the environment is less than we thought should not be an excuse to keep guzzling fossil fuels. Unfortunately, only economics is going to cure us of our oil drug dependency, or massive willpower (unlikely given human nature). And right now the economics of buying a hybrid car don't make sense yet, either in terms of dollar cost or in terms of environmental impact cost.
And it's not pretty either. Even if you ignore global warming or global climate change for a moment, you just have to step outside in any of our urban centers, look at the sky and take a whiff. Of course we're hurting and changing the environment. That's the real shame of it. I happen to work with an environmental scientist and he says the number one bad thing that everyone is ignoring is the short-term, immediate affect on our health. We're slowly killing ourselves in our own pollution.
Whether the long-term effect of what we do is 10 degrees of warming, 5 degrees of warming, or even 5 degrees of cooling, we're still have a pretty drastic affect on the poor earth. Apparently, there is new research coming out all the time (and not from the grand right-wing conspiracy) that global warming isn't happening as fast as some think. But does it really matter that it's slower than we thought? We still have to confront the same issues. Net carbon increase, particulates, and nitrous oxides, all of which damage our health, as well as the environment.
Your implication that Marxism is Communism, or something otherwise bad or evil, is quite false. Marx said a lot of things. Further most people, myself included, don't hardly have the slightest clue what Marx really proposed or believed in. Certainly the Communist Manifesto was *not* Marx. It was the Communist Party's charter for which they paid Marx to draw up according to their own ideals, not Marx's.
Talking to people (in the ivory towers no less) I have learned that Marx wrote many many things that touched on the great and important issues of the day. Many do not realize that Marx predicted what would happen in America. He predicted that cold hard capitalist worker abuses would lead to unions and a reformation of American labor, even within the context of our somewhat free market system. He was exactly accurate in these areas and many others. And it's a good thing we "listened" to Marx or else we'd have never made it through the industrial age intact. Although I would strongly disagree with Marx over globalisation, it seem that the US has listened to him very well when it comes to protectionism of domestic markets. The US is all about free trade and free markets when it is our trade and your markets, not when it's your trade and our markets. Marx does have some flaws.
Now from what I know, the Free Software movement is definitely *not* communism, but rather humanist capitalism at its finest. And yes, it does represent, in my opinion, the true ideals of Marxism too. This is a good thing, in my opinion. It does not take away anything from those who espouse themselves to be libertarian, free-market thinkers ( http://www.politicalcompass.org/ really opened my eyes to where I stand in relationship to our government leaders)
Funny you should talk about character flaws and spiritual emptiness. For Max himself did believe that religion was a bandaid to the this problem, and not a solution. Rather he said we should find and solve the underlying causes of this emptiness, such as the dull, monotonous, slavery of factory worker life, common in his time. I happen to agree with the latter statement, but not with his opiate comment. Programming in a cubicle, notwithstanding a great salary, leads to emptiness and a lack of fulfillment in many circumstances. The Free Software ecosystem, on the other hand helps to offset this monotony and tediousness but encouraging us to exercise tremendous creativity. I believe this can really benefit and complement companies who develop software.
So why is Marxism such a bad thing? It has already brought the US stability and amazing economic development. And honestly if you really listen to what Moglen and the FSF say, they want to bring the same leaps and strides to computers and people, as in the computer industry specifically, we face many of the same issues Marx wrote about. If anyone is truly interested in what Marx had to say, throw away the "Communist Manifesto" and read his real books.
Every year we essentially throw away a lot of vegetable oil after cooking with it at restaurants. Much of this oil gets dumped out or just incinerated. Clearly we need to recycle this oil and burning it as a fuel is a good idea. Except for NO2 and particulates (which we know how to deal with) there is no pollution from using old vegetable oil for fuel in a diesel engine.
However the problem is that there's not enough vegetable oil coming from restaurants to impact even slightly our national oil usage. So it is a cheap fuel source for a few people. That's all. What we really need is a way to create organic oils on a large scale from algae, plants, or some other way using only energy from the sun. If we could immediately replace all our fossil fuels with organic (as it carbon-neutral) oils, we could stop our carbon emissions completely, having an immediate, dramatic, and hopefully non-warming effect on our environment.
In the RC aircraft world, Lithium Polymer batteries are king, due to their fairly high capacity and incredibly high current draw (some packs up to 40 amps). Several folks have tried making packs out of laptop LiIon cells, but they just can't deliver the amps. Is this true that LiIon packs hold more energy but have a lower maximum amp draw? Most laptops draw about 1-3 amps I believe, so this isn't really an issue, but I am curious.