As sympathetic as I am to efforts to reexamine the school system in America, you have got to admit that the statement about the "unemployment problem" being severe currently is a bit off the chain.
Unemployment in America has not been in the double digits since the 70s and that was becuase of fiscal and monetary mismanagement. Of course America has barely ever had severe unemployment by European or Canadian standards, but that's what a flexible economy gets you I guess.
You've got to do a basic reality check before you swallow this stuff.
This is a good discussion, and a lot of people are making excellent points about the ability of open source software to create a positive tech ecosystem within an economy. It's worth pointing out, though already nicely done elsewhere in this discussion, that Gates' understanding of economics was necessarily compromised prior to his talk.
One of my favorite classic arguments against the oss kills jobs fud was the distinction between sale value of software versus use value and where employment comes from as detailed by esr in his prescient essay the magic cauldron.
First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. In the pre-microcomputer era it used to be a commonplace that 90% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case -- other industries are much more software-intensive now, and the finance industry's share of the total has accordingly dropped -- but we'll see shortly that there is empirical evidence that around 95% of code is still written in-house.
This code includes most of the stuff of MIS, the financial- and database-software customizations every medium and large company needs. It includes technical-specialist code like device drivers (almost nobody makes money selling device drivers, a point we'll return to later on). It includes all kinds of embedded code for our increasingly microchip-driven machines - from machine tools and jet airliners to cars to microwave ovens and toasters.
Most such in-house code is integrated with its environment in ways that make reusing or copying it very difficult. (This is true whether the `environment' is a business office's set of procedures or the fuel-injection system of a combine harvester.) Thus, as the environment changes, there is a lot of work continually needed to keep the software in step.
This is called `maintenance', and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) writing or maintaining in-house code that has no sale value at all -- a fact the reader may readily check by examining the listings of programming jobs in any newspaper with a `Help Wanted' section.
Scanning the employment section of your local newspaper is an enlightening experiment which I urge the reader to perform for him- or herself. Examine the jobs listings under programming, data processing, and software engineering for positions that involve the development of software. Categorize each such job according to whether the software is being developed for use or for sale.
It will quickly become clear that, even given the most inclusive definition of `for sale', at least nineteen in twenty of the salaries offered are being funded strictly by use value (that is, value as an intermediate good). This is our reason for believing that only 5% of the industry is sale-value-driven. Note, however, that the rest of the analysis in this paper is relatively insensitive to this number; if it were 15% or even 20%, the economic consequences would remain essentially the same.
(When I speak at technical conferences, I usually begin my talk by asking two questions: how many in the audience are paid to write software, and for how many do their salaries depend on the sale value of software. I generally get a forest of hands for the first question, few or none for the second, and considerable audience surprise at the proportion.)
The numbers esr quotes are necessarily speculative given the size of the field, however it seems obvious that a young national software industry has a greater opportunity to rapidly develop by taking advantage of the riches of the tech commons available to it rather than allowing scarce capital flow out to a foreign company.
Kalin
I'll second that it's pretty pathetic that the only reason I saw the parent post was due to friend-of-friend modifiers. It's even more pathetic when seeing the dreck that did get modded up in this dicussion. It's been said before, but when discussion of politics on slashdot veers away from IP and privacy law it's a lot easier to just ignore the squabbles. Thanks for putting so much effort into injecting some actual reason into the discussion. I'll also go along with you in encouraging everyone to read Hitchen's viewing notes along with the movie and then really get in front of the issues and make up your own mind after that.
Christopher Hitchens has a strong record for high quality attacks on major government figures, notably producing the article/book/movie "The Trial of Henry Kissinger". He's around twice as smart than Michael Moore, and a hundred times more honest, he's also personally debated Moore in the past.
Meanwhile, leftist enfant terrible Chris Hitchens (no friend of Stalinists either) annihilates Farenheit 9/11 right to its foundations in "Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore." Some choice excerpts:
"There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery."
Come on, Hitch old boy, stop holding back. Tell us how you really feel. But seriously, why should this matter?
"Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft."
Unless your craft is to be the next Leni Riefenstahl. Or Lillian Hellman. But on to some of Hitchens' more substantive beefs:
"It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all--the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002--or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that the
Actually the pre-sharman Kazaa and it's sister product grokster both had a good deal of spyware bundled. Just not nearly as much as post-Sharman. The popular Morpheus version of the Fast Track client was the one with no spyware.
Not to be a complete Gimphead, but if you haven't checked out the recent 2.0 pre-releases you owe it to yourself. A vast improvement over the stable branch in usability. VAST.
I use it all the time (apt-get install gimp1.3 in Debian for ages) here is a screenshot of me using it.
I realize that it doesn't do *everything* that photoshop does, but it *can* edit scans of hundred dollar bills!
My understanding was that Mozilla.org managed to have all or most of it's source tri-lisenced with the MPL, granting Netscape and others the right to include source in proprietary products.
Most of the open source community seems pretty cool with the arrangement.
I was curious about the same thing. The frustrating thing is that the applications I find beachballing are Apple applications. Safari, iTunes, Quicktime and most often the Finder, are the biggest culprits. MS Office X is also horrendous for it's responsiveness and he fact that file name lengths are limited in Carbon apps is a ui nightmare when it comes to sharing files with Windows or Linux users (not Apple's fault necessairly, but still a fly in the ointment of an anointed Mac Zealot).
I will agree that OS X handles things fairly well when you are only doing one thing at a time. But if you have, for instance, 5 finder windows, 8 safari windows, acrobat, mail.app, and 5 terminals you start to have problems, serious ones. This is with 640 MB of RAM on a G4 933 ibook. I routinely have around 3 times this many apps open on a GNOME desktop with 256MB of RAM and an 800Mhz Duron and it simply screams in comparison.
OK, I think I know what you're trying to get at, at first I thought your post was goofy, but it more or less just starts off that way. Mark my words though, capitalism is going to drive Linux into ubiquity by the same forces that drove MS into ubiquity.
Nazi Germany was a fiercely capitalist society (despide the National Socialism moniker). But I will do my best to respond to this.
Nationalizing vast swarthes of industry and implementing a program of full-employment is fiercely capitalist? I must be reading my Hayek upside down or something, or maybe you've got your Marx inside out, or uh, maybe rightside in given some of Marx's bizzare assumptions.
I cant speak for others but for me the point of dislike is that Microsoft is the blatantly obvious result of 100% pure unbashed and uncontrolled capitalist behaviour. 96% market share is just unhealthy for anything in any industry.
No kidding; but what exactly are you referring to with the 96% number? Market share of desktop computers in America. first of all that's a pretty limited market to be looking at in a global economy. Microsoft is arguably losing market share in desktops right now on a world-wide basis and has been for a while. Not only that, but how long has their market-share of business computers really been at monopoly levels? 10 years? It wasn't odd to find many businesses running on insanely proprietary and expensive Unix terminals in the early nineties. Do you really think these levels of saturation can be sustained for another 10 years? Even if they can keep a market lead can MS possibly maintain anything close to the profit margins they have under increased international competition from countless free desktop integrators, not to mention the big pushes from self-interested comptitors to MS who are looking to grab small pieces of a bigger pie? Not without massive government **cough**anti-market**cough** intervention.
And then the same very people tend to moan about evils of competition from the "communist" upstart OSS and how we must regulate against it instead of giving it level playing field and in the case of obvious situations like 3rd world countries, prefer it.
It's pretty disingenuous to try to hold up a one-word Darl McBride quote as a paragon of lassez-faire principles. Darl is nothing close to a capitalist. SCO's entire business model is based on administrative and bureaucratic prospecting. They have practically no customers and practically no product.
Take a look around, there are a lot of very greedy capitalists who are working hard to push MS out of it's monopoly position. I'd hardly call IBM a charity, yet they realize, like any rational player in a relatively free market, that the best shot they have at gaining market share is to provide a better product than the competition. Right now, servicing the shared software infrastructure of Linux and open source is that product.
I can save my clients $650CAD per workstation in simple capital outlay costs by identifying workstations that can do with Open Office and Linux. That's completely discounting the savings in reduced maintainance. I never could have easily put together a fully functional live CD distro for limited-use workstations until recently but now it's trivial to offer a client a way to quickly repurpose a system as needed. It's just completely incredible.
Their greed makes them love the solutions I can offer with Linux. My greed makes me offer it because I want to make more money than some dipshit MCSE and I enjoy ther personal satisfaction of doing things in smart ways and not beating my head against a wall. We're both early adopters so we both laugh our way to the bank as reward for the risk we're taking. My client gets more value out of my services than they could of from almost anyone in IT 5 years ago, and they as investors in their company are rewarded and may even offer better cheaper more productive service to thier customers. Another win for capitalism.
You're of course defining capitalism by assuming the assumptions of those who opposed it. If you frame capitalism through free market assumptions and tests then you would have to come to the conclusion that Linux and the rise of open source are actually a natural and inevitable product of a free market / capitalist system.
Because the point of capitalism is that agents voluntarily act in thier own self interest and the greatest incentives monetary or otherwise present themselves as motivators to use resources more efficiently and make good available at lower and lower prices. That's prosperity baby, and Microsoft provided a huge amount of it to us all over the Wang, Digital, IBM and Sun oligopolies of the eighties when their solutions couldn't satisfy the needs of the market. Now Linux and it's assorted brethern have pushed the envelope once more, delivering way more software bang for the buck than had ever been achieved previously. Microsoft can no longer compete outside of it's core market, and pressure will continue to be applied by... it's well funded competitors.
It is hard to imagine how you could have seen the bazzaar develop in a society which echewed open markets and the free movement of capital, for one thing you would have lacked the innovative precursor of inexpensive decentralised PCs that made Linux possible. Without markets, for capital, code, reputation, or whatever, individuals simply have less incentives and ability to self-organize and create.
What the government is doing by taking a side at all on which software people or organizations choose to use is what goverments do best, subvert capitalism and control production. If you see the word government or UN it probably doesn't have much to do with Capitalism at all. What you're describing in your last paragraph sounds more like an exposition on the moral hazard of private interest regulation--something that is anti-capitalist, not a feature of capitalism.
I completely agree with your observations. OS X is usable, quite a bit more so with quartz extreme, but GNOME absolutely flies on similar hardware. Even just closing applications, or waiting for a dialog box to open is just unbearable on Aqua after a steady dose of GNOME.
I'll add to the fisking (has esr pulled that out of the blogging community into geek jargon yet?) of your response:
- Linux does wake up from sleep in less than a second on my iBook. I'm no expert on power management, but maybe this is more of a hardware issue than a software one.
- Ximian Evolution connects to MS Exchange servers effortlessly with their connector plugin. It's also a much nicer and more stable client than Entourage.
So it looks like you're down to Real-Time video editing and 1394 compatibility, cmyk photo editing (there is a plugin for the Gimp, but I'll agree that it probably won't satisfy the needs of a serious print designer), and high quality page layout software. Basically the same digital art and publishing ghetto the mac has always dominated over any alternate system (the old Amiga video toaster and SGI notwithstanding).
I think that the programmers didn't think about the drop-down bars. That sort of thing is hard to test, though.
Well I don't really see how hard it is to test, we've just managed to reproduce the bug through/. comments. I think you're giving them a bit more credit than they deserve on this. If you look at the system prefs for keyboard and mouse the options says this:
Turn on full keyboard access to use the tab key, arrow key, and other keys to select buttons, lists, and other items on your screen.
It's depressing how poorly MS Office recognizes this setting, but it's even worse when Apple's flag ship products don't pay attention to system-wide preferences. A preference like this really should be built strongly into into the toolkit regardless of what the application developer does. It should "just work"TM
That's interesting. My Mac is faster, better and easier to use than my Linux machine ever was. I spend less time administering it, and more time working with it. And I'd rather use Expose than multiple desktops any day. I've used the multiple desktop thing for almost 10 years now, and I'm happy to have given it up.
Naturally this is a preference thing, the Desktops work better for me the way I think.
Having run a dual-boot system on a few Macs, I'd have to say that the responsiveness of OSX just does not compare. Panther improved the speed a bit, as does a shadow killer, but it's still nowhere close.
Oh, and not only have I never had a problem filling out a web form in Safari, most of the time, the whole thing is filled out for me now automagically, with no errors.
Safari does have good autoform capabilities, probably the best of any browser at the moment, but all too often I will have to fill out something other than my contact info and that is where hitting tab and having the system miss the drop-down box and go to the address bar is unforgivable. Full keyboard access should do what it says.
If you really want to use Gnome, why didn't you just install X under OSX and use that desktop? Then you wouldn't have to go through all the hassle of actually refortmatting your machine and putting Debian on it?
That's precisely what I am doing, as stated in my original post. Though I do praise the fink project, they aren't anywhere near where Debian is for stability and package quality, and frankly can't be expected to be; we shall see how the compile goes.
Your intuition is correct though, on a desktop or portable system I am a GNOME user more than a Linux user. And being able to switch between full screen X and full screen Aqua with a key stroke is a tantalizing prospect, if only for playing the odd Quicktime file.
Oh, and these days, if I ever see the beachball, it means that my application has crashed. I just restart it.
If this happens because of some crappy shareware that's fine. But it shouldn't plague the finder on a fresh factory install of Panther.
I can't RTFA because the site is/.ed at the moment. In my experience Mac OS X provides just enough aggravation for me as a Linux user that I do feel guilty using it. Not guilty because I am betraying Linux or any related ideal, but guilty because I am betraying myself--giving up speed convenience and usability every time I watch the dreaded spinning beach ball of death, or wait for OS X to switch between windows. Expose is a neat hack, but it is no match for multiple desktops and sloppy focus (don't even bother pitching Codetek VirtualDesktop because it is totally inadequate in speed and usability--including the beta code for sloppy focus). Trying to fill out web forms with just the keyboard is impossible (and yes I know about "full keyboard access" a complete misrepresentation since it doesn't work as expected on even Apple applications). The major saving grace of OSX is that Launchbar exists for it.
I own a G4 iBook; the reason I own one is because Apple replaced my G3 iBook after I suffered 3 failed logic boards over the past year. The place where I get my warranty done said that in December they were involved in 5 G3 iBook replacements with Apple. Now, I'm happy that Apple replaced my system with a new model, and I hope that the problems that so many experienced with the last generation of iBooks have been resolved, but going back to OS X is painful after using exclusively GNOME 2.4 for the past month or so. I had consdiered selling the G4 on eBay and getting an x86 system. I didn't because none of them can offer the battery life available on Apple hardware without being Centrino linux-lockout. At least Debian runs well on Apple hardware.
Regardless, I'm in the middle of finking GNOME 2.4 onto Darwin so I can get some work done. I don't fault Apple so much as the rest of the industry for designing ugly, heavy, low-battery-life, windows-centered behemoths.
Stop you're both wrong. Well actually you're a god deal more right than your parent poster was, however all this political quipping has to stop on/., even the right and correct quips. This place is getting as bad as K5, I remember when it used to be a refuge after K5 got so bad... *sigh*
No doubt--the abuse and control of government power by elites is a horrible outcome. Parmalat, right now, is showing us again that more regulation and government involvement in the economy (such as it is) can often make matters even worse. Bush's energy bill was an outright embarrassment.
But invoking the terminology "pure free market capitalism" and following it with a description of the mercantilism pervalent today only obscures the fact that the market isn't free and limits our discussion of alternatives.
Oh the tired argument that socialism has just yet to be properly implemented. Don't the hundreds of failed of attempts to do such, from commune to Soviet level, do as much to indict Marxism as a failed practical ideology as the failed examples of China and USSR do?
And if you are wondering what my criteria is for deciding that the examples have failed, it is that none have sustained net voluntary positive migration for any period of time. Not without force at least.
Or is it just that a socialist society can't function or develop with capitalism all around it?
It seems more true that trading with open market economies, taking price data from capitalist commodoties markets, and relying on technology developed by profit-motivated corporations has been the only way that socialist societies have even managed to last more than a few years.
I'll make the simpler argument: you don't support change but supporting the status quo. Employers in the west never volunteered minimum wage, child labour laws, working hour restrictions, etc, etc, etc.
I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of labour history isn't comprehensive enough to make blanketting statements, but it's been often pointed out that Henry Ford did much to achieve his fortune when he 'unilaterally' doubled wages and shortened the work day. Ford experienced increased productivity, less absenteeism, and ridiculous levels of worker loyalty as a result of the move. The simple version of the story is that a good deal of the increased wages went back into the company as employees purchased Model T's en masse. Several employers in Michigan at the time, by necessity, followed suit.
Michigan was apparently the least regulated economy in the US at the time as there were statutes prohibiting the state government from participating directly in business, as opposed to the government-granted, controlled, or owned monopolies that were the norm in the rest of the west. Of course private-interest regulation hasn't really stopped being a problem which is why so many cringe when Klien hazily refers to the "managed economy" as a solution.
I'm not arguing that Henry Ford is the whole story but it's clearly naive to say that it *never* happened.
This image alone is worth the visit to the site. Interesting background too:
In any event, the original Best of CC had Mr. Spock on the cover. However, a few years later when we needed more books, Paramount was getting nasty about the use of Star Trek characters without a proper license. Initially we were under their radar screen, but we would have had to pay them mucho $$$ for the larger press run of the reprint book, so we needed another cover. The cover illustration I used had been used on an issue of the magazine (can't remember which issue) but the printer had mixed up two of the color negatives (cyan and magenta), so it looked a bit strange. Needless to say, the artist was rather unhappy with the outcome as was I, so I decided to use the same illustration, this time with the correct colors, on the cover of the book.
It's been a long time since computer books were so underground that they could publish with copyrighted images on the front covers. Actually, it's been a long time since underground publications period could get away with this.
Now I'm not usually one to pick on on bad spelling or grammar, but come on, "optomism"?
I suppose this means you're not old enough to remember Transformers, or you'd have a better idea that the root of the word is "opti". Which I suppose also means that you've got a pretty short/young memory for the federal government's despicable acts past and America's weathering of such.
Keep the faith and stay positive, cultural change takes a generation at least.
Slashdot Mirror
As sympathetic as I am to efforts to reexamine the school system in America, you have got to admit that the statement about the "unemployment problem" being severe currently is a bit off the chain.
Unemployment in America has not been in the double digits since the 70s and that was becuase of fiscal and monetary mismanagement. Of course America has barely ever had severe unemployment by European or Canadian standards, but that's what a flexible economy gets you I guess.
You've got to do a basic reality check before you swallow this stuff.
> And this is bad why?
Given the history of the 20th century you'd have to be pretty mind-numbingly biased to assume that communism is any way good, actually.
This is a good discussion, and a lot of people are making excellent points about the ability of open source software to create a positive tech ecosystem within an economy. It's worth pointing out, though already nicely done elsewhere in this discussion, that Gates' understanding of economics was necessarily compromised prior to his talk.
One of my favorite classic arguments against the oss kills jobs fud was the distinction between sale value of software versus use value and where employment comes from as detailed by esr in his prescient essay the magic cauldron .
The numbers esr quotes are necessarily speculative given the size of the field, however it seems obvious that a young national software industry has a greater opportunity to rapidly develop by taking advantage of the riches of the tech commons available to it rather than allowing scarce capital flow out to a foreign company. KalinI'll second that it's pretty pathetic that the only reason I saw the parent post was due to friend-of-friend modifiers. It's even more pathetic when seeing the dreck that did get modded up in this dicussion. It's been said before, but when discussion of politics on slashdot veers away from IP and privacy law it's a lot easier to just ignore the squabbles. Thanks for putting so much effort into injecting some actual reason into the discussion. I'll also go along with you in encouraging everyone to read Hitchen's viewing notes along with the movie and then really get in front of the issues and make up your own mind after that.
I know it's a bit late, but mod parent up please.
Christopher Hitchens has a strong record for high quality attacks on major government figures, notably producing the article/book/movie "The Trial of Henry Kissinger". He's around twice as smart than Michael Moore, and a hundred times more honest, he's also personally debated Moore in the past.
I'm just going to post the excerpts posted by winds of change. But as they say, read the whole thing.
Actually the pre-sharman Kazaa and it's sister product grokster both had a good deal of spyware bundled. Just not nearly as much as post-Sharman. The popular Morpheus version of the Fast Track client was the one with no spyware.
I hate to say it, but mod parent up.
Not to be a complete Gimphead, but if you haven't checked out the recent 2.0 pre-releases you owe it to yourself. A vast improvement over the stable branch in usability. VAST.
I use it all the time (apt-get install gimp1.3 in Debian for ages) here is a screenshot of me using it.
I realize that it doesn't do *everything* that photoshop does, but it *can* edit scans of hundred dollar bills!
My understanding was that Mozilla.org managed to have all or most of it's source tri-lisenced with the MPL, granting Netscape and others the right to include source in proprietary products.
Most of the open source community seems pretty cool with the arrangement.
I was curious about the same thing. The frustrating thing is that the applications I find beachballing are Apple applications. Safari, iTunes, Quicktime and most often the Finder, are the biggest culprits. MS Office X is also horrendous for it's responsiveness and he fact that file name lengths are limited in Carbon apps is a ui nightmare when it comes to sharing files with Windows or Linux users (not Apple's fault necessairly, but still a fly in the ointment of an anointed Mac Zealot).
I will agree that OS X handles things fairly well when you are only doing one thing at a time. But if you have, for instance, 5 finder windows, 8 safari windows, acrobat, mail.app, and 5 terminals you start to have problems, serious ones. This is with 640 MB of RAM on a G4 933 ibook. I routinely have around 3 times this many apps open on a GNOME desktop with 256MB of RAM and an 800Mhz Duron and it simply screams in comparison.
OK, I think I know what you're trying to get at, at first I thought your post was goofy, but it more or less just starts off that way. Mark my words though, capitalism is going to drive Linux into ubiquity by the same forces that drove MS into ubiquity.
Nazi Germany was a fiercely capitalist society (despide the National Socialism moniker). But I will do my best to respond to this.
Nationalizing vast swarthes of industry and implementing a program of full-employment is fiercely capitalist? I must be reading my Hayek upside down or something, or maybe you've got your Marx inside out, or uh, maybe rightside in given some of Marx's bizzare assumptions.
I cant speak for others but for me the point of dislike is that Microsoft is the blatantly obvious result of 100% pure unbashed and uncontrolled capitalist behaviour. 96% market share is just unhealthy for anything in any industry.
No kidding; but what exactly are you referring to with the 96% number? Market share of desktop computers in America. first of all that's a pretty limited market to be looking at in a global economy. Microsoft is arguably losing market share in desktops right now on a world-wide basis and has been for a while. Not only that, but how long has their market-share of business computers really been at monopoly levels? 10 years? It wasn't odd to find many businesses running on insanely proprietary and expensive Unix terminals in the early nineties. Do you really think these levels of saturation can be sustained for another 10 years? Even if they can keep a market lead can MS possibly maintain anything close to the profit margins they have under increased international competition from countless free desktop integrators, not to mention the big pushes from self-interested comptitors to MS who are looking to grab small pieces of a bigger pie? Not without massive government **cough**anti-market**cough** intervention.
And then the same very people tend to moan about evils of competition from the "communist" upstart OSS and how we must regulate against it instead of giving it level playing field and in the case of obvious situations like 3rd world countries, prefer it.
It's pretty disingenuous to try to hold up a one-word Darl McBride quote as a paragon of lassez-faire principles. Darl is nothing close to a capitalist. SCO's entire business model is based on administrative and bureaucratic prospecting. They have practically no customers and practically no product.
Take a look around, there are a lot of very greedy capitalists who are working hard to push MS out of it's monopoly position. I'd hardly call IBM a charity, yet they realize, like any rational player in a relatively free market, that the best shot they have at gaining market share is to provide a better product than the competition. Right now, servicing the shared software infrastructure of Linux and open source is that product.
I can save my clients $650CAD per workstation in simple capital outlay costs by identifying workstations that can do with Open Office and Linux. That's completely discounting the savings in reduced maintainance. I never could have easily put together a fully functional live CD distro for limited-use workstations until recently but now it's trivial to offer a client a way to quickly repurpose a system as needed. It's just completely incredible.
Their greed makes them love the solutions I can offer with Linux. My greed makes me offer it because I want to make more money than some dipshit MCSE and I enjoy ther personal satisfaction of doing things in smart ways and not beating my head against a wall. We're both early adopters so we both laugh our way to the bank as reward for the risk we're taking. My client gets more value out of my services than they could of from almost anyone in IT 5 years ago, and they as investors in their company are rewarded and may even offer better cheaper more productive service to thier customers. Another win for capitalism.
You're of course defining capitalism by assuming the assumptions of those who opposed it. If you frame capitalism through free market assumptions and tests then you would have to come to the conclusion that Linux and the rise of open source are actually a natural and inevitable product of a free market / capitalist system.
Because the point of capitalism is that agents voluntarily act in thier own self interest and the greatest incentives monetary or otherwise present themselves as motivators to use resources more efficiently and make good available at lower and lower prices. That's prosperity baby, and Microsoft provided a huge amount of it to us all over the Wang, Digital, IBM and Sun oligopolies of the eighties when their solutions couldn't satisfy the needs of the market. Now Linux and it's assorted brethern have pushed the envelope once more, delivering way more software bang for the buck than had ever been achieved previously. Microsoft can no longer compete outside of it's core market, and pressure will continue to be applied by... it's well funded competitors.
It is hard to imagine how you could have seen the bazzaar develop in a society which echewed open markets and the free movement of capital, for one thing you would have lacked the innovative precursor of inexpensive decentralised PCs that made Linux possible. Without markets, for capital, code, reputation, or whatever, individuals simply have less incentives and ability to self-organize and create.
What the government is doing by taking a side at all on which software people or organizations choose to use is what goverments do best, subvert capitalism and control production. If you see the word government or UN it probably doesn't have much to do with Capitalism at all. What you're describing in your last paragraph sounds more like an exposition on the moral hazard of private interest regulation--something that is anti-capitalist, not a feature of capitalism.
I completely agree with your observations. OS X is usable, quite a bit more so with quartz extreme, but GNOME absolutely flies on similar hardware. Even just closing applications, or waiting for a dialog box to open is just unbearable on Aqua after a steady dose of GNOME.
Thanks, this is a great program, much better than the commercial offering and previous open source attempts. I look forward to future releases.
I'll also mention that if you haven't tried launchbar you really should. It is the best interface nehancement I have ever used.
I'll add to the fisking (has esr pulled that out of the blogging community into geek jargon yet?) of your response:
- Linux does wake up from sleep in less than a second on my iBook. I'm no expert on power management, but maybe this is more of a hardware issue than a software one.
- Ximian Evolution connects to MS Exchange servers effortlessly with their connector plugin. It's also a much nicer and more stable client than Entourage.
So it looks like you're down to Real-Time video editing and 1394 compatibility, cmyk photo editing (there is a plugin for the Gimp, but I'll agree that it probably won't satisfy the needs of a serious print designer), and high quality page layout software. Basically the same digital art and publishing ghetto the mac has always dominated over any alternate system (the old Amiga video toaster and SGI notwithstanding).
Well I don't really see how hard it is to test, we've just managed to reproduce the bug through
It's depressing how poorly MS Office recognizes this setting, but it's even worse when Apple's flag ship products don't pay attention to system-wide preferences. A preference like this really should be built strongly into into the toolkit regardless of what the application developer does. It should "just work"TM
Kalin
That's interesting. My Mac is faster, better and easier to use than my Linux machine ever was. I spend less time administering it, and more time working with it. And I'd rather use Expose than multiple desktops any day. I've used the multiple desktop thing for almost 10 years now, and I'm happy to have given it up.
Naturally this is a preference thing, the Desktops work better for me the way I think.
Having run a dual-boot system on a few Macs, I'd have to say that the responsiveness of OSX just does not compare. Panther improved the speed a bit, as does a shadow killer, but it's still nowhere close.
Oh, and not only have I never had a problem filling out a web form in Safari, most of the time, the whole thing is filled out for me now automagically, with no errors.
Safari does have good autoform capabilities, probably the best of any browser at the moment, but all too often I will have to fill out something other than my contact info and that is where hitting tab and having the system miss the drop-down box and go to the address bar is unforgivable. Full keyboard access should do what it says.
If you really want to use Gnome, why didn't you just install X under OSX and use that desktop? Then you wouldn't have to go through all the hassle of actually refortmatting your machine and putting Debian on it?
That's precisely what I am doing, as stated in my original post. Though I do praise the fink project, they aren't anywhere near where Debian is for stability and package quality, and frankly can't be expected to be; we shall see how the compile goes.
Your intuition is correct though, on a desktop or portable system I am a GNOME user more than a Linux user. And being able to switch between full screen X and full screen Aqua with a key stroke is a tantalizing prospect, if only for playing the odd Quicktime file.
Oh, and these days, if I ever see the beachball, it means that my application has crashed. I just restart it.
If this happens because of some crappy shareware that's fine. But it shouldn't plague the finder on a fresh factory install of Panther.
I can't RTFA because the site is /.ed at the moment. In my experience Mac OS X provides just enough aggravation for me as a Linux user that I do feel guilty using it. Not guilty because I am betraying Linux or any related ideal, but guilty because I am betraying myself--giving up speed convenience and usability every time I watch the dreaded spinning beach ball of death, or wait for OS X to switch between windows. Expose is a neat hack, but it is no match for multiple desktops and sloppy focus (don't even bother pitching Codetek VirtualDesktop because it is totally inadequate in speed and usability--including the beta code for sloppy focus). Trying to fill out web forms with just the keyboard is impossible (and yes I know about "full keyboard access" a complete misrepresentation since it doesn't work as expected on even Apple applications). The major saving grace of OSX is that Launchbar exists for it.
I own a G4 iBook; the reason I own one is because Apple replaced my G3 iBook after I suffered 3 failed logic boards over the past year. The place where I get my warranty done said that in December they were involved in 5 G3 iBook replacements with Apple. Now, I'm happy that Apple replaced my system with a new model, and I hope that the problems that so many experienced with the last generation of iBooks have been resolved, but going back to OS X is painful after using exclusively GNOME 2.4 for the past month or so. I had consdiered selling the G4 on eBay and getting an x86 system. I didn't because none of them can offer the battery life available on Apple hardware without being Centrino linux-lockout. At least Debian runs well on Apple hardware.
Regardless, I'm in the middle of finking GNOME 2.4 onto Darwin so I can get some work done. I don't fault Apple so much as the rest of the industry for designing ugly, heavy, low-battery-life, windows-centered behemoths.
Stop you're both wrong. Well actually you're a god deal more right than your parent poster was, however all this political quipping has to stop on /., even the right and correct quips. This place is getting as bad as K5, I remember when it used to be a refuge after K5 got so bad... *sigh*
No doubt--the abuse and control of government power by elites is a horrible outcome. Parmalat, right now, is showing us again that more regulation and government involvement in the economy (such as it is) can often make matters even worse. Bush's energy bill was an outright embarrassment.
But invoking the terminology "pure free market capitalism" and following it with a description of the mercantilism pervalent today only obscures the fact that the market isn't free and limits our discussion of alternatives.
Oh the tired argument that socialism has just yet to be properly implemented. Don't the hundreds of failed of attempts to do such, from commune to Soviet level, do as much to indict Marxism as a failed practical ideology as the failed examples of China and USSR do?
And if you are wondering what my criteria is for deciding that the examples have failed, it is that none have sustained net voluntary positive migration for any period of time. Not without force at least.
Or is it just that a socialist society can't function or develop with capitalism all around it?
It seems more true that trading with open market economies, taking price data from capitalist commodoties markets, and relying on technology developed by profit-motivated corporations has been the only way that socialist societies have even managed to last more than a few years.
I'll make the simpler argument: you don't support change but supporting the status quo. Employers in the west never volunteered minimum wage, child labour laws, working hour restrictions, etc, etc, etc.
I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of labour history isn't comprehensive enough to make blanketting statements, but it's been often pointed out that Henry Ford did much to achieve his fortune when he 'unilaterally' doubled wages and shortened the work day. Ford experienced increased productivity, less absenteeism, and ridiculous levels of worker loyalty as a result of the move. The simple version of the story is that a good deal of the increased wages went back into the company as employees purchased Model T's en masse. Several employers in Michigan at the time, by necessity, followed suit.
Michigan was apparently the least regulated economy in the US at the time as there were statutes prohibiting the state government from participating directly in business, as opposed to the government-granted, controlled, or owned monopolies that were the norm in the rest of the west. Of course private-interest regulation hasn't really stopped being a problem which is why so many cringe when Klien hazily refers to the "managed economy" as a solution.
I'm not arguing that Henry Ford is the whole story but it's clearly naive to say that it *never* happened.
Kalin
And don't forget the new star of independent reportage zeyad.
He's the dentist that scooped every major media source with his coverage of the anti-terrorism rallies in Baghdad.
This image alone is worth the visit to the site. Interesting background too:
It's been a long time since computer books were so underground that they could publish with copyrighted images on the front covers. Actually, it's been a long time since underground publications period could get away with this.
Now I'm not usually one to pick on on bad spelling or grammar, but come on, "optomism"?
I suppose this means you're not old enough to remember Transformers, or you'd have a better idea that the root of the word is "opti". Which I suppose also means that you've got a pretty short/young memory for the federal government's despicable acts past and America's weathering of such.
Keep the faith and stay positive, cultural change takes a generation at least.