The guy makes MOVIES. Because you didn't like the latest one (I didn't, either), you think he should be shot? Perspective, anyone?
-jon
Re:CIS is different in a few ways
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
Especially since I've never used anything beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division since I'd left college. All that calculus I took was a waste.
Learning calc was painful (when I went to RPI, they required Calc 1,2,3, and Physics 1,2,3 for CS majors, in addition to three more science classes and two more math classes), but it teaches problem solving. Most calc (and math problems in the sciences) involves ways of reorganizing problems to make them solvable in discrete chunks. Sounds a lot like breaking down a problem to implement a large-scale software project, eh?
In fact, even if you're not doing software, you get a lot out of calc. Learning how to think and solve problems is 9/10 of most jobs.
I'm not a EE or an encryption expert, but wouldn't it be possible for a manufacturer to fake out this stupid system?
All you have to do is implement these new ATA calls, and just return the exact same values for every single hard drive you manufacture. You could get some nice vendor lock-in this way, "unlike everyone else's drives, you can copy ANY files between any of our drives, and they're compatible with all your 'protected' software and data".
There's got to be some reason why this won't work, but I can't see it.
The implosion of dot-coms isn't leading to hungry software engineers and MIS guys in soup kitchen lines, no matter how much some people wish that to be the case. Older, more established companies are now willing to invest in the technologies invented by the dot-coms, and they need those people to help them implement them.
What happened to the dot-coms is what happens in every gold rush; the vast majority of the pioneers get screwed, and the next generation of settlers comes in and makes themselves at home.
This is almost certainly untrue. Grass roots and hobbyists can't afford the servers, network connections, and all sorts of database-y goodness that makes the web a heck of a lot more useful than it was back in the day.
Commericalism on the web is here to stay, and micropayments are the most likely source of income, long term. There will always be free "teaser" content and probably "sponsored" sites (The Coca-Cola Music Site wouldn't surprise me).
Here's a quote from http://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_horn1.html:
"Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. "
(This was written by Bruce Horn, who worked at PARC and Apple at the time)
Granted, my memory was faulty (it was Atkinson, not Hertzfeld), but if you had overlapping windows that didn't redraw, it would be pretty crappy. The Star implementation sounds like a prototype. What Apple did is a finished product.
Then Puff Daddy comes along, samples their work and I don't think the original artists get anything from it (though I could be wrong).
You're very wrong. In the early 90's, Biz Markee had an album recalled from the stores because he didn't get permission for some of the samples on his album. Whether or not removing his albums from the store was a public service is left for the reader to decide.
And, in a case which is far closer in spirit than sampling, take a look at the Led Zepplin/Robert Johnson lawsuit from the 70's. A lot of Zepplin's songs were "inspired" by old blues standards. Well one song, (I forget which) was just too close to one of Robert Johnson's songs, and him (or his estate; my memory of the details of the case is getting fuzzy) sued Led Zepplin AND WON, despite the fact that bluesmen had been "borrowing" each other's songs for forever, tweaking them along the way.
Essentially what they copied was the general idea of the GUI: overlapping windows on a bitmap display.
This is actually untrue. The Xerox Star didn't have overlapping windows; they couldn't figure out how. When Andy Hertzfeld took the tour of PARC, he assumed that they _did_ have overlapping windows, wondered how they did it, and created QuickDraw (and got Apple quite a few patents).
When he told the PARC people that he figured out how to do overlapping windows, they were stunned, since they thought it impossible on the hardware available at the time.
If they are, they aren't doing it for the Mac. The upgrade to version 4 of the DeskJet drivers (which added the ability to save configurations) was free.
Considering the battle between Epson, HP, Cannon, and others for the home printer market, trying to charge for an updated driver is, like I said, nuts.
First of all, relatively few people update the software that came with their computers. They are scared to. The revenue stream from driver upgrades would be negligable; it'd probably cost more to set up the system to process the payments than the payments actually bring in.
Secondly, I can buy an Apollo (really a relabeled HP) inkjet at my local _grocery store_ for $50. They're getting to the point where they are nearly at the disposable price range (for those who can afford computers in the first place). The money is in the ink cartridges, anyway. Nickel and diming people on the printer driver would just generate ill will and virtually no revenue.
Of course, I'm assuming that HP is run by rational people. This assumption isn't always true.
Nice try, but I think you're completely off base on several things on this list.
For example, Apple has completely re-written Display Postscript and created Quartz to be Adobe-free (to avoid paying licencing fees) for Mac OS X. No patent infringement there. Furthermore, there have been third-party GPL'd Postscript interpreters for years; maybe a decade at this point. The other file format examples that you provide are equally impossible.
Sun doesn't have anything to do with JavaScript; you'd think that/.ers could figure that out after 5 years. Nothing in Java is patentable (it's a language and a spec for a class library), so submarine patents are unlikely. There are multiple sources for JVMs (both Sun and IBM make JVMs for Win32 and Linux), so if Sun starts to charge, people will stop using it.
HP charging for it's printer drivers (apart from the cost of the printer) is crazy. What would you do with a printer without a printer driver?
/. charging is, I would bet, quite likely within 5 years. As VC money dries up, companies are going to need to find some other way to pay for providing content (and such).
The internet is a medium which people shouldn't have to pay for. With all these pay here, pay there politics popping up, the internet will no longer be free. It's only a matter of time before you have to insert a quarter to view a web site, or you'd have to pay subscription fees to view Slashdot.org (your daily geek news source).
And how are these sites going to afford their connections to the internet? How are they going to buy computers to create and host the sites? How are they going to pay for electricity for their servers? Heck, how are they going to pay the people to create the content?
TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If you want to give your stuff away, that's fine for you. But it's highly likely that we're going to be paying for quality content on line eventually, unless someone comes up with a business model that works, as ad revenues on line are meager at best.
While I'll admit school is rough, the guy you just flamed is probably busting his ass MORE trying to support a family and better himself. There are those out there who can't for whatever reasons pick up and just go to school for 6 years.
To be fair, he did flame me first, and for no good reason. All I did is point out that the original poster's salary/unemployment formula was foolish, that high-paying jobs are plentiful for me, and that tech support jobs are plentiful in my geographic reason. For this, I was called a dickhead.
Having gone to a relatively expensive college with people who easily qualify as dirt poor, I don't buy most of the excuses people give when they say they can't go to college. There is a LOT of money out there for people who want to go to school, and if you have to take out a loan, so be it. Considering that people go into hock with Visa to buy all sorts of worthless crap, a college education loan is pretty easy to justify.
We all aspire to be something more than we are, just because you took one road don't discount the road others out of necessity take to get to the same place you are.
I don't discount them, but I also am not going to put up with people who blame me because the choices I made were better than the choices they made.
Most of the time, people don't go to college because they just don't want to. Most state universities have amazingly low standards for entrance and most junior colleges have no standards, save a high school diploma. They are also quite cheap to attend, and as I said before educational loans are available, if you can't find a grant. When people pass up these chances and then blame society for not giving them cushy, high-paying jobs, I get annoyed.
It's not like the rules of the game have changed suddenly; people with college degrees (esp. professional degrees like engineering, architecture, medicine, law, and business) have, on average, been out-earning people with high school degrees or less for decades. Skipping college might seem more entertaining at first, but unless you can live off your parents, it's going to be a far more painful route.
I try to be civil, but it's wasted on some of the pigfuckers here.
With your shitty attitude, it's no wonder you can't find a job; pissing and moaning about how hard it is to find a job during the best economy in the history of the planet. I haven't been arrogant. I've pointed out hundreds of jobs for not just engineers, but tech support workers, and you curse at me. Because you didn't bust your ass in school for six years on something useful, you feel morally superior to those of us who pay your welfare checks.
I did read the article, and I was specifically complaining about the stupid assertion that it takes 1 week for every $10,000 of salary. Clearly this is untrue.
Furthermore, jobs for people in tech support in the 707 and 415 area codes (San Francisco and points North in California) are abundant. Try this URL from DICE:
About a year ago, I thought about looking for a job and posted my resume on Dice. Within 24 hours, my answering machine was so full of calls from recruiters, it stopped recording. If I had been willing to do the aforementioned 2 hour commute, I would have been able to earn over $125,000/year. I'm not, so I didn't (according to the orignal poster's math, a job that paid that much would take over 3 months to find).
I ended up changing jobs 6 months ago; a friend mentioned that the company she was working at was looking for Java Software Engineers, and I was looking for a switch. I sent my resume, did two on-site interviews, and had a job offer. With giving my previous employer two week's notice and taking a week vacation, it was about a month from start to finish.
I've heard through the grapevine that one of the companies I spoke with a year ago would hire me in an instant, which is quite a bit shorter than a week. I still get emails and calls from recruiters, even though I've yanked my resume from all of the various resume boards.
I'm not bragging, and I don't think I'm all that unique. I'm just pointing out that I know whereof I speak. The job market in Northern California is tight; my previous employer was offering $8,000 referral bonuses to employees who found Java Software Engineers and QA Engineers. As far as I know, the offer still stands. If you're good engineer and you live between Gilroy and Healdsburg, you can't walk down the street without being offered a job.
The last time I checked the rule of thumb was 1 week for every 10k you earn.
Oh, horsepucky. That's completely untrue for a technical job, even one like tech support. I could quit my job as a software engineer tomorrow and have a new job within a week, not the 2+ months that your silly formula states.
She quit one job and *chose* to find another. 2-3 interviews A DAY and nearly 3 weeks later she found a job with a 2 hour commute time. Was this in some backwater city? No. Los Angeles.
And what did this person do for a living? If they chose a career in something "soft," finding a job could be tough. But they CHOSE it; somehow, my heart doesn't bleed.
And I've driven in LA; a 2 hour commute could be 20-30 miles away.
-jon
Re: Pushing another... - get the OS to non-geeks!
on
BSD to Leapfrog Linux?
·
· Score: 2
I get the impression that MacOS X is being marketed as a serving solution, not a desktop operating environment.
I hate to say it, but are you on drugs?
With all this effort on Aqua and Quartz and other interface nicities, how could anyone in their right mind think that OS X is targeted at servers?
What warrents the excitement? That's all I want to know.:^)
The excitement is that OS X is going to be the first Unix that usable by Grandma.
why doesn't the industry start to concentrate on making energy efficient devices besides the processor, and it would also help out so that we aren't pushing battery technology, because that field seems to be lagging behind badly
There is certainly research and development on low-energy components besides the CPU; check out the energy usage of the mobile Radion, for one thing. However, there are limits on how much you can possibly squeeze out of some components. Hard drives (which probably eat the most energy in a portable system) need to spin, and there's a certain amount of mass which is being kept moving at a certain velocity, along with a certain amount of energy required to read/write data. That puts a limit on how much energy you can save there. CD-ROM drives have similar limitations.
A color LCD of usable brightness (another huge drain on battery life) is going to output a certain amount of energy; you could make the screens dimmer, but then they are harder to see. Wireless connections are going to require a certain amount of power for broadcast; the further the connection, the more juice. Sound output requires a certain amount of power, and so on.
What you're seeing is the design decisions which made the original Palm Pilot: no movable parts for storage, B&W, passive matrix screen, no wireless. And it could run for two months on two AAAs. Adding on just a color screen drops that down significantly and requires rechargable batteries for a reasonable experience. Ditto for wireless. I just don't think there's going to be much of a way around it until we figure out how to store more energy in a light, safe way.
Socialist scenario:
If I were a gardner I would clean your yard for free - if you would help install a new vid card in my PC (whatever).
We both get what we want.
No, this has nothing to do with socialism; what you are describing is a barter system. There's a quid pro quo in barter, which doesn't exist in a Communist (not socialist, as you wrongly stated) system. For Communism, it's from each according to their means to each according to their needs. You would just go yard to yard, fixing up people's gardens if they needed it. I, on the other hand, would go from house to house, installing video cards as desired. If you happened to fix my garden and I your PC, it's just a happy coincidence as we were both self-motivated to do this because we are good Communist folk. Needless to say, trying to find 2 people to do things out of the goodness of their hearts is hard; getting an entire country (much less an entire planet) to do so is impossible. So, Communist countries have tended to resort to force to make those selfish individuals do what's best for everyone, which somehow misses the original point, but it keeps the ruling class happy.
Socialism, as it is usually implemented, has a third party redistributing goods and services. So if enough people thought they deserved nice gardens, the government would decide what a "nice" garden is, hires a bunch of people to work as gardeners as per the spec, and then taxes other people to fund it.
The difference between barter and capitalism is that we both agree to price our goods (your gardening skills, my pc installation knowledge) against a third standard. We call that third standard money. The motivation is the same (greed, improving your personal situation) in barter as in capitalism, just the medium for trade is better, as I am able to get gardening done even if I cannot provide any good or service to the gardener; I give him money.
The bosses control the means to production, we do all the work, and they get rich.
If you want to control the means of production, form your own company. In the US, the vast majority of people are employed by companies with fewer than 25 employees. Relative to most other places on the planet, it's easy to start a company and join the rich ruling class. Of course, your company could suck, and you could end up broke. The greater the risks you take, the greater the rewards and penalites. If you don't like it, stay a peon. But don't bitch about it, because no one is forcing you to be one. If your country's implementation of capitalism sucks, don't blame the US and don't blame capitalism.
So, now that you know something about econ, maybe you can make an intelligent argument. But I doubt you will.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kinda funny, really. They couldn't stand up to the live Nazis, so they ban stuff from dead ones. Go figure.
-jon
Wow! Norton Anti-Virus built into the motherboards! The amazing things Intel is doing these days ;-)
-jon
-jon
And this is why fanboys suck.
The guy makes MOVIES. Because you didn't like the latest one (I didn't, either), you think he should be shot? Perspective, anyone?
-jon
Learning calc was painful (when I went to RPI, they required Calc 1,2,3, and Physics 1,2,3 for CS majors, in addition to three more science classes and two more math classes), but it teaches problem solving. Most calc (and math problems in the sciences) involves ways of reorganizing problems to make them solvable in discrete chunks. Sounds a lot like breaking down a problem to implement a large-scale software project, eh?
In fact, even if you're not doing software, you get a lot out of calc. Learning how to think and solve problems is 9/10 of most jobs.
-jon
All you have to do is implement these new ATA calls, and just return the exact same values for every single hard drive you manufacture. You could get some nice vendor lock-in this way, "unlike everyone else's drives, you can copy ANY files between any of our drives, and they're compatible with all your 'protected' software and data".
There's got to be some reason why this won't work, but I can't see it.
-jon
What happened to the dot-coms is what happens in every gold rush; the vast majority of the pioneers get screwed, and the next generation of settlers comes in and makes themselves at home.
-jon
Commericalism on the web is here to stay, and micropayments are the most likely source of income, long term. There will always be free "teaser" content and probably "sponsored" sites (The Coca-Cola Music Site wouldn't surprise me).
-jon
I'm expecting that the Methuselahs will steal the "New Frontiers" hyperdrive ship and leave Earth...
-jon
"Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. "
(This was written by Bruce Horn, who worked at PARC and Apple at the time)
Granted, my memory was faulty (it was Atkinson, not Hertzfeld), but if you had overlapping windows that didn't redraw, it would be pretty crappy. The Star implementation sounds like a prototype. What Apple did is a finished product.
-jon
You're very wrong. In the early 90's, Biz Markee had an album recalled from the stores because he didn't get permission for some of the samples on his album. Whether or not removing his albums from the store was a public service is left for the reader to decide.
And, in a case which is far closer in spirit than sampling, take a look at the Led Zepplin/Robert Johnson lawsuit from the 70's. A lot of Zepplin's songs were "inspired" by old blues standards. Well one song, (I forget which) was just too close to one of Robert Johnson's songs, and him (or his estate; my memory of the details of the case is getting fuzzy) sued Led Zepplin AND WON, despite the fact that bluesmen had been "borrowing" each other's songs for forever, tweaking them along the way.
-jon
This is actually untrue. The Xerox Star didn't have overlapping windows; they couldn't figure out how. When Andy Hertzfeld took the tour of PARC, he assumed that they _did_ have overlapping windows, wondered how they did it, and created QuickDraw (and got Apple quite a few patents).
When he told the PARC people that he figured out how to do overlapping windows, they were stunned, since they thought it impossible on the hardware available at the time.
-jon
Considering the battle between Epson, HP, Cannon, and others for the home printer market, trying to charge for an updated driver is, like I said, nuts.
First of all, relatively few people update the software that came with their computers. They are scared to. The revenue stream from driver upgrades would be negligable; it'd probably cost more to set up the system to process the payments than the payments actually bring in.
Secondly, I can buy an Apollo (really a relabeled HP) inkjet at my local _grocery store_ for $50. They're getting to the point where they are nearly at the disposable price range (for those who can afford computers in the first place). The money is in the ink cartridges, anyway. Nickel and diming people on the printer driver would just generate ill will and virtually no revenue.
Of course, I'm assuming that HP is run by rational people. This assumption isn't always true.
-jon
For example, Apple has completely re-written Display Postscript and created Quartz to be Adobe-free (to avoid paying licencing fees) for Mac OS X. No patent infringement there. Furthermore, there have been third-party GPL'd Postscript interpreters for years; maybe a decade at this point. The other file format examples that you provide are equally impossible.
Sun doesn't have anything to do with JavaScript; you'd think that /.ers could figure that out after 5 years. Nothing in Java is patentable (it's a language and a spec for a class library), so submarine patents are unlikely. There are multiple sources for JVMs (both Sun and IBM make JVMs for Win32 and Linux), so if Sun starts to charge, people will stop using it.
HP charging for it's printer drivers (apart from the cost of the printer) is crazy. What would you do with a printer without a printer driver?
-jon
And how are these sites going to afford their connections to the internet? How are they going to buy computers to create and host the sites? How are they going to pay for electricity for their servers? Heck, how are they going to pay the people to create the content?
TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If you want to give your stuff away, that's fine for you. But it's highly likely that we're going to be paying for quality content on line eventually, unless someone comes up with a business model that works, as ad revenues on line are meager at best.
-jon
To be fair, he did flame me first, and for no good reason. All I did is point out that the original poster's salary/unemployment formula was foolish, that high-paying jobs are plentiful for me, and that tech support jobs are plentiful in my geographic reason. For this, I was called a dickhead.
Having gone to a relatively expensive college with people who easily qualify as dirt poor, I don't buy most of the excuses people give when they say they can't go to college. There is a LOT of money out there for people who want to go to school, and if you have to take out a loan, so be it. Considering that people go into hock with Visa to buy all sorts of worthless crap, a college education loan is pretty easy to justify.
We all aspire to be something more than we are, just because you took one road don't discount the road others out of necessity take to get to the same place you are.
I don't discount them, but I also am not going to put up with people who blame me because the choices I made were better than the choices they made.
Most of the time, people don't go to college because they just don't want to. Most state universities have amazingly low standards for entrance and most junior colleges have no standards, save a high school diploma. They are also quite cheap to attend, and as I said before educational loans are available, if you can't find a grant. When people pass up these chances and then blame society for not giving them cushy, high-paying jobs, I get annoyed.
It's not like the rules of the game have changed suddenly; people with college degrees (esp. professional degrees like engineering, architecture, medicine, law, and business) have, on average, been out-earning people with high school degrees or less for decades. Skipping college might seem more entertaining at first, but unless you can live off your parents, it's going to be a far more painful route.
-jon
With your shitty attitude, it's no wonder you can't find a job; pissing and moaning about how hard it is to find a job during the best economy in the history of the planet. I haven't been arrogant. I've pointed out hundreds of jobs for not just engineers, but tech support workers, and you curse at me. Because you didn't bust your ass in school for six years on something useful, you feel morally superior to those of us who pay your welfare checks.
Go fuck yourself.
-jon
http://www.dice.com/jobsearch/metro/siliconvalley. html
Type in "tech support" into the search box, and select 707 and 415 for area codes. You'll get over 190 hits.
-jon
Furthermore, jobs for people in tech support in the 707 and 415 area codes (San Francisco and points North in California) are abundant. Try this URL from DICE:
http://jobsearch.dice.com/jobsearch/jobresults.cgi ?sr=1&hp=10&cf=0a.3c117840&brief=0&banner=1
195 hits. One search engine, a few seconds. Enjoy.
-jon
It's not arrogance; it's experience.
About a year ago, I thought about looking for a job and posted my resume on Dice. Within 24 hours, my answering machine was so full of calls from recruiters, it stopped recording. If I had been willing to do the aforementioned 2 hour commute, I would have been able to earn over $125,000/year. I'm not, so I didn't (according to the orignal poster's math, a job that paid that much would take over 3 months to find).
I ended up changing jobs 6 months ago; a friend mentioned that the company she was working at was looking for Java Software Engineers, and I was looking for a switch. I sent my resume, did two on-site interviews, and had a job offer. With giving my previous employer two week's notice and taking a week vacation, it was about a month from start to finish.
I've heard through the grapevine that one of the companies I spoke with a year ago would hire me in an instant, which is quite a bit shorter than a week. I still get emails and calls from recruiters, even though I've yanked my resume from all of the various resume boards.
I'm not bragging, and I don't think I'm all that unique. I'm just pointing out that I know whereof I speak. The job market in Northern California is tight; my previous employer was offering $8,000 referral bonuses to employees who found Java Software Engineers and QA Engineers. As far as I know, the offer still stands. If you're good engineer and you live between Gilroy and Healdsburg, you can't walk down the street without being offered a job.
-jon
Oh, horsepucky. That's completely untrue for a technical job, even one like tech support. I could quit my job as a software engineer tomorrow and have a new job within a week, not the 2+ months that your silly formula states.
She quit one job and *chose* to find another. 2-3 interviews A DAY and nearly 3 weeks later she found a job with a 2 hour commute time. Was this in some backwater city? No. Los Angeles.
And what did this person do for a living? If they chose a career in something "soft," finding a job could be tough. But they CHOSE it; somehow, my heart doesn't bleed.
And I've driven in LA; a 2 hour commute could be 20-30 miles away.
-jon
I hate to say it, but are you on drugs?
With all this effort on Aqua and Quartz and other interface nicities, how could anyone in their right mind think that OS X is targeted at servers?
What warrents the excitement? That's all I want to know. :^)
The excitement is that OS X is going to be the first Unix that usable by Grandma.
-jon
Um, Apple?
Isn't Mac OS X the reason for this discussion?
-jon
There is certainly research and development on low-energy components besides the CPU; check out the energy usage of the mobile Radion, for one thing. However, there are limits on how much you can possibly squeeze out of some components. Hard drives (which probably eat the most energy in a portable system) need to spin, and there's a certain amount of mass which is being kept moving at a certain velocity, along with a certain amount of energy required to read/write data. That puts a limit on how much energy you can save there. CD-ROM drives have similar limitations.
A color LCD of usable brightness (another huge drain on battery life) is going to output a certain amount of energy; you could make the screens dimmer, but then they are harder to see. Wireless connections are going to require a certain amount of power for broadcast; the further the connection, the more juice. Sound output requires a certain amount of power, and so on.
What you're seeing is the design decisions which made the original Palm Pilot: no movable parts for storage, B&W, passive matrix screen, no wireless. And it could run for two months on two AAAs. Adding on just a color screen drops that down significantly and requires rechargable batteries for a reasonable experience. Ditto for wireless. I just don't think there's going to be much of a way around it until we figure out how to store more energy in a light, safe way.
-jon
We both get what we want.
No, this has nothing to do with socialism; what you are describing is a barter system. There's a quid pro quo in barter, which doesn't exist in a Communist (not socialist, as you wrongly stated) system. For Communism, it's from each according to their means to each according to their needs. You would just go yard to yard, fixing up people's gardens if they needed it. I, on the other hand, would go from house to house, installing video cards as desired. If you happened to fix my garden and I your PC, it's just a happy coincidence as we were both self-motivated to do this because we are good Communist folk. Needless to say, trying to find 2 people to do things out of the goodness of their hearts is hard; getting an entire country (much less an entire planet) to do so is impossible. So, Communist countries have tended to resort to force to make those selfish individuals do what's best for everyone, which somehow misses the original point, but it keeps the ruling class happy.
Socialism, as it is usually implemented, has a third party redistributing goods and services. So if enough people thought they deserved nice gardens, the government would decide what a "nice" garden is, hires a bunch of people to work as gardeners as per the spec, and then taxes other people to fund it.
The difference between barter and capitalism is that we both agree to price our goods (your gardening skills, my pc installation knowledge) against a third standard. We call that third standard money. The motivation is the same (greed, improving your personal situation) in barter as in capitalism, just the medium for trade is better, as I am able to get gardening done even if I cannot provide any good or service to the gardener; I give him money.
The bosses control the means to production, we do all the work, and they get rich.
If you want to control the means of production, form your own company. In the US, the vast majority of people are employed by companies with fewer than 25 employees. Relative to most other places on the planet, it's easy to start a company and join the rich ruling class. Of course, your company could suck, and you could end up broke. The greater the risks you take, the greater the rewards and penalites. If you don't like it, stay a peon. But don't bitch about it, because no one is forcing you to be one. If your country's implementation of capitalism sucks, don't blame the US and don't blame capitalism.
So, now that you know something about econ, maybe you can make an intelligent argument. But I doubt you will.
-jon