Why should I care who pays for "artsy" films? Especially since most of the "classic" movies that I can think of were financial successes. Michaelangelo is an excellent example of art that could be appreciated by the masses. Michaelangelo didn't simply coat the Vatican with feces and call it art.
When film producers start talking about "artsy" films they aren't talking about "Gone With The Wind," which was both exceptionally well done and wildly popular, they are talking about something like "The Last Temptation of Christ" whose only artistic merit is the fact that it is both amazingly unpopular and wildly controversial.
If you want to pay for "artsy" films, then go see them twice, but don't expect me to get excited about paying for it.
Personally I thought Episode II was worth the price of admission just to see Yoda in a light saber duel. That is one bad-ass puppet.
Just as an aside, what is an example of a movie that you like. I can see how someone might not like both "Independence Day" and "Episode I." I bet a lot didn't like those movies. In my opinion that's the difference between a good film and a truly great one. The truly great films are so well done that even their detractors admit that the movie had some redeemingly qualities.
WalMart has become the largest retailer on the planet by having the lowest prices, even if they have to sell crap. For a lot of people crap is "good enough," and WalMart knows that many people will sacrifice quality if the price is right. WalMart doesn't get into a market unless they can undercut their competition, and in the computer market it is very difficult to undercut Dell, unless, of course, you don't include the price of Windows.
As for this being a bad business move, I can't see how that could possibly be the case. WalMart isn't selling these at their stores (so they have no inventory problems), and they have outsourced both the construction and the support to Microtel (so they aren't likely to lose money there). So even if these machines don't sell WalMart has wasted little more than some space on their web site.
As for a potential market, I personally have been looking at purchasing a WalMart Linux PC. I could really use a good source of cheap disposable X terminal machines with Linux compatible hardware, currently I use low end Pentiums, so these PCs ought to be more than good enough. It is also important to note is that WalMart doesn't care if their customers pirate Windows. Dell and HP have to care, but WalMart doesn't care what Microsoft says. That's why WalMart also sells OS-less PCs on their web site.
In short, WalMart has very little to lose, and for those consumers that need a low end machine for casual use WalMart's prices can't be beat.
The glass-house is on its way back, and when the thin client pendulum swings the other way X is going to come right back into style. Thin clients really are the wave of the future in large organizations, the problem. They are far easier to maintain than PCs, and they are less expensive to boot. The problem with thin clients (since the PC days anyway) was that the software that people actually wanted to use was only available on a PC.
Linux, however, has finally gotten to the point where it provides an acceptable (but not spectacular) set of applications that are available on X terminals. For most office workers an X terminal running StarOffice, Mozilla, and Evolution would be more than good enough, and the savings, both in software licensing costs, and in maintenance would be far lower.
Secondly, the added weight of X is not nearly as big as you think. With optimized drivers correctly set up the difference in performance between X Windows and Windows is neglible, and as hardware continues to improve it will become even more neglible. Believe me, if artists designing movies can use Linux on their desktops then the rest of us will be fine.
In other words, you might believe that X Windows is holding Linux back, but when Linux does take over the desktop I bet you will find that quite the opposite is true. X Windows is the key to making Linux on the desktop vastly more affordable and easy to support than Windows.
I agree completely. The true answer to security is not "use a Free Software OS and a high level language." If that were true I wouldn't front my Zope application server (written mostly in Python) with Apache. Fact of the matter is that Apache is a lot more battle tested than Zope, and there are plenty of cases where Zope does the wrong thing (which is one of the reasons why the developers generally encourage using either Apache or Squid as a Zope front end).
However, I personally think that "a good design" is only part of the story. Sendmail doesn't have a particularly design, but it's become pretty hardened over time. In short, I think that security comes down to a combination of design, openness, language, and the amount of use the software gets.
Using a high level language is the best kind of software reuse. The reason behind this is simple, chances are good that you are never going to be as talented as Guido van Rossum or Larry Wall. Nor will your data structures get as many eye balls examining them as Python lists or Perl arrays. Borrowing the work of the hackers that created some of these languages only makes sense.
Now, I am not saying that these programs don't have bugs, because they do, but I would bet that they have less bugs than anything you have ever written. So while using high level languages doesn't insure security, it certainly does help.
Yes, MS SQL Server has several isolation levels, but they achieve this with row level locking, not with MVCC. PostgreSQL's MVCC means that reads are never blocked by writes. To illustrate the difference take a large table that's busy in MS SQL server and delete a whole bunch of rows. Chances are good (unless you have an absurd number of locks configured) that your transaction will fail. With PostgreSQL it would work, and reads wouldn't be blocked at all while your delete transaction was happening.
I like MS SQL Server, but PostgreSQL really is an amazing product. If your admins don't mind mixing in a Linux box it really is worth the time to take a look at it.
Karma schmarma. My post was pure ignorance. Hey, it happens.
In my defense, you must admit that Microsoft is calling their use of XML and their new "View-like" folders innovative. And if they are innovative for Microsoft then they must have been more innovative when Free Software hackers wrote them. Besides who is to say that combining Outlook's interface with features from Lotus Notes isn't innovative.
After all, if you set the bar for innovation too high the only folks that were ever innovative were the folks in the MIT AI lab back in the 70s (yes, that is an exaggeration, but you get the point). In fact, almost my entire point is that most innovation in the computer science fields is incremental. As such, Free Software has had more than its fair share of new ideas, and the fact that it is easy to base your new work on an existing Free Software code base means that as Free Software becomes more prevalent that innovation is likely to increase, not decrease.
No, I remember the Newton, I simply refused to actually purchase a $1K toy, so I am not entirely surprised that I got some of the details wrong.
I did know, for example, that the Newton's superior handwriting recognition (inkwell) did not save it from being relegated to the trash bin of history. I didn't know that Graffiti was also available for the Newton. It's somewhat ironic that Grafitti lived on while Inkwell was sidelined. That should tell us a bit about the importance of handwriting recognition.
Both of us would probably agree that price is far more important to the success of a PDA platform than handwriting recognition. That was my main point. The StepUp tablets will probably do better than their name brand cousins despite the fact that the hardware from HP or Dell will use the special table software. For one-fourth the price most people will probably decide that regular Windows XP is good enough (although I would personally prefer Linux).
If Microsoft's table OS only is available on ridiculously expensive gear, then it is doomed. There simply aren't enough people that are interested in a $2500 computer whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn't come with a keyboard.
Exactly, the StepUp machine will be a much more afordable $800, and they will web surf like crazy. Heck, if the Linux version of the StepUp machine is anything like a Zaurus (only bigger) it could actually be very cool.
All I know is that I am done spending $2K for a computer. No matter how cool Microsoft's tablet is I am not interested.
Yes, but the choice between a $2500 monster that is perfect or a $700 machine that is as good (or better) than a Sharp Zaurus is going to go to the $700 machine. As proof of this, if handwriting recognition was the killer feature then the PDA revolution would have starred the Newton instead of the Palm (which required you to learn Graffiti).
If Microsoft lowers their price so that they are competitive then they will squash these machines like a bug. If not, then expect Microsoft's Tablet OS to be a huge flop.
The funny thing about innovation is that it happens everywhere. Take the upcoming version of MS Office which touts two technologies that have debuted in Free Software first. The XML formats for Office are nothing more than a ripoff of OpenOffice's XML formats, and Outlook's new virtual folders are lifted directly from Evolution and it's VFolders.
There is no question that Free Software is doing a lot of mimicking of commercial products, but that is simply because Free Software hackers are building a desktop from scratch. It's pretty tricky to build a word processor that doesn't look like MS Word, or a spreadsheet that doesn't resemble Excel. Especially considering that one of the major goals of these projects is to get people to switch to the Free Software products. Part of convincing people to switch is making the transition as easy as possible.
When you get outside of the desktop, where Free Software has to copy Microsoft to even be considered, then it is clear that Free Software has done quite a bit of innovation. The reason for this is simple, with Free Software you don't have to start from scratch each time you have an idea. Instead you can add a bit on to an already existing product.
The difference between contracts for writers and rock stars doesn't have anything to do with guilds, unions, or associations. Writer's generally are literate, while rock stars are often only semi-literate. Getting a good lawyer is helpful, being able to read the fine print yourself to make sure you aren't getting snowed is even more helpful.
Welcome to the world of software. Many software products that used to command astronomically high prices can now be replaced with commodity Free Software products. In fact, this is what is driving Linux adoption as well. Many companies are finding that they can deploy Linux instead of a commercial operating system and save money, and so that is what they are doing.
People that are using Linux already are an especially hard sell. After all, once you start using Linux and the wide array of Free Software tools you are very likely to experiment Free Software solutions before paying for commercial ones. For example, instead of buying a proprietary instant messaging service they will almost certainly try Jabber first. For one thing, it is probably easier to "apt-get install jabber" than to purchase and test a commercial product.
I lurk on the PostgreSQL mailing lists and we get quite a few Oracle deserters, and the reason for this is simple. PostgreSQL has gotten to the point that for most uses it is good enough.
I know that if I bought a CD and then wrote the "Customer Service" number and got that response, I would be pissed. After all, I clearly had spent my money on their CD. Calling me a pirate when it wouldn't play in my CD player that plays all of my other CDs would not impress me in the slightest.
Ok, so you can somewhat implement the relationship he talked about all in your head, using the filesystem for the underlying representation.
And that's my point. No matter what metaphor we end up using, in the end it's all just a metaphor. Users are going to make the relationships in their head no matter what happens. Now I would certainly agree that adding metadata to the files sometimes can make this easier, and I would also agree that sometimes a computer generated index of text files is very handy, but I have yet to see a more useful metaphor than the filesystem. I certainly haven't seen anything that I would remotely consider a replacement for the filesystem metaphor.
In the end it is simply easier to save my daughter's picture as:/home/jearl/pictures/brooklyn/2002-11-08-watching- television.png
Than to set a whole pile of attributes and hope that I can find the picture again.
Yes, and when I did a search on "me" I would come up with 40,000 attributes dating back to 1987 when I first started using a computer (I still have files from back then). If I was very organized the "me" category would have subcategories like "projects" "clients" "schoolwork."
If you have a problem with slashes then I suppose you could use backslashes instead, but that's hardly innovative.
Not that there aren't ways in which filesystems could be improved. For example, I really like having a TAGS database when programming on larger projects so that I can see where functions are defined and used and move between those files easily. A system utility that made an intelligent database of the information in all of my files would be very cool, but hardly the be-all, end-all of computing.
Yawn... You mean like a project directory with a folder for each account, or/home/jearl/entertainment.
Granted sometimes something like Evolutions VFolders is nice where you can query out messages from different folders, but for the most part all of this sort of stuff is nothing more than the file system warmed over.
Instead of putting files in a directory, you would instead have to manage the file attributes on each file. Miss an attribute and your information would get mis-filed in precisely the same manner as writing your file to the wrong file name. On a real operating system with symbolic links you can even put the same file in multiple directories.
Clearly there has got to be a better way to form a stable mostly-honest government than the route that Chile took. And even if all of the people who were disappeared were guilty of some heinous crime (which I am sure they weren't) then there still is no excuse for not giving these people their day in court. There is no greater corruption than to take someone's life without due process of the law.
On the other hand, I will never forget what my years in Peru taught me. I love that people, they were very kind to me (once they got past the fact that I was a Yanqui), but that country is so screwed up I can't imagine what could possibly fix it. The corruption simply goes too deep. I don't know how to fix Peru's problems, but I do know that without getting a handle on the problems brought on by corruption no amount of foreign aid is likely to do any good.
Perhaps eventually Peruvians will come to understand the importance of electing honest representatives.
Either way, thanks for the discussion. You have reminded me of the all too real consequences of American foreign policy. Unfortunately my travels have made me a bit cynical.
The scary bit about Chile to me, is that I can't help but think that had I been an adult in Chile in 1973 I might easily have become one of the "disaparecidos." I would never choose to live in such a society. Especially considering that Pinochet is unique in being the only dictator that I can think of that was even theoretically good for his country. For the most part dictators have a ruinous track record.
I can see why you reacted so negatively to my prior comments if you think that I would recommend "the Pinochet solution." I was only using Pinochet as an example of how removing the corruption from a society allowed it to attract investors and modernize. Chile was lucky with Pinochet, but they paid a very high price. Clearly the best choice is to elect honest officials, and remove corrupt ones. This is especially true in countries like India that already have a relatively stable democratic government.
I certainly agree that the first world should do our part to help stop corruption in third world countries, and I also agree that westerners are in many cases a huge source of the problem.
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I don't work for RedHat, but I certainly would like to see people switch from Windows to Linux. For one thing it would allow me use OpenOffice for something other than a glorified Word Viewer. It would also increase the value of my Linux skills.
Many people believe that Free Software hackers are not good at "innovating," but if you look closely at Microsoft's new Office suite the two most hyped features are a revamped Outlook (complete with a ripoff of Evolution's VFolders) and XML formats (much like OpenOffice already has). I can't help but think that once Free Software was on people's desks that innovation would happen as a matter of course. After all, we will all be able to build on a an existing codebase instead of starting over from scratch all of the time.
Becoming a mainstream operating system is simply the first milestone in a much larger goal of providing the coolest software ever. Unfortunately, right now we spend way too much time doing useful but not innovative things like reverse engineering SMB. Once we don't have to be compatible with Windows the sky is literally the limit.
Re:Aren't APPS the real issue?
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The reason to clone Windows (to some extent) is that the switching costs from Windows to Linux is far and away the largest cost in a Linux migration.
I agree with you. I use Linux because I like Linux's toolset, but in order to displace Microsoft we are going to need tools that Windows users can use. My grandma isn't going to learn to use vi, and neither are most of the folks that I work with.
Pinochet's political enemies fled the state when he took power (for obvious reasons). Many Americans have very negative things to say about George Bush as well, but that doesn't mean that most Americans hate George Bush. The fact that the majority of Chileans vote along the same party lines as Pinochet should tell you how mainstream his opposition is.
I lived in Chile for two years, with normal Chilean families, in several different cities, and I can guarantee you that the part of the population that was pro-Pinochet is much larger than the very vocal anti-Pinochet contingent. Most people are somewhere in the middle. They are glad for what he did for the country, but they are not happy about the means he used. I would consider myself part of this larger third group. I would even go so far as to say that many of Pinochet's economic policies were bad, but that the removal of corruption from the government outweighed these poor choices in the long run.
And I still contest that corruption is still the root cause of the ills of most developing nations, including Saudi Arabia. But when I talk about corruption I am not simply referring to the crime rate, but to the rule of law. Countries where all of the power is concentrated in just a few people are dangerous for business. That's partially why Chile's economy has grown even faster since Pinochet was forced out. If the ruling family in Saudi Arabia decides they want your business there is little you can do about it. So instead of taking that risk people invest elsewhere.
I have never lived in the Middle East, so I will decline to comment further:).
From your comments it is pretty clear that you don't have any idea what you are talking about, at least when it comes to Pinochet and Chile. I lived in Peru while Pinochet was still in power, and moved to Chile right after nearly 50% of the population of Chile voted to keep him in as dictator. It takes a pretty good dictator to win an unfixed election between continuing the dictatorship and a representative democracy that the dictator supported. I can guarantee you that most Chileans do not feel like Pinochet was bad for their country, and quite a few of the Peruvians that I knew wished that Pinochet would work a similar magic in their country. Yes, Pinochet's tactics were harsh, especially in the first years of his rule, but he had a lot of corruption to remove.
The difference between Peru and Chile after Pinochet's reign was striking. Even the smallest shops in Lima had armed guards, where in Chile not even the policemen carried firearms. During Christmas time in Peru police armed with assault rifles regularly pulled over automobiles to ask for "donations." Such activity would never be permitted in Chile. Under Pinochet not only would such activity cost you your job, it could theoretically cost you your life. Thanks primarily to Pinochet's actions Chile is leading South America in entering the "global economy" and the citizens of Chile love that. As an example the right-leaning parties (who generally are allied with Pinochet) have a majority in the Senate.
So who is the armchair analyst in this case my good friend?
Both you and I agree that reform is the only hope the third world countries have of getting out of their current situations. Unless the corruption is removed there can be no real progress. We just disagree on what the removal of corruption requires. Unfortunately there are very few cases of a nation that has been successful in removing corruption from the government. Chile is the only example that I can think of off-hand, and it certainly is the only example that I have seen with my own eyes. Perhaps you can think of another?
I would agree that the United States has made some policy mistakes. We certainly have backed some despicable folks over the years. However, in many of the cases the U.S. had a very limited number of options. I suppose that we could have simply allowed communism to sweep the world. Would you really have preferred that?
The long and the short of it is that the U.S. is not forcing anyone to take our foreign aid, or our loans, and we aren't even forcing the rest of the world to repay our loans. If a country wants to be cut off from our capital they are welcome to stop paying their debts.
It is possible to clean up the corruption in a country. Pinochet was largely successful in Chile, but it isn't something that the U.S. can do for other countries. More's the pity too. We would love to have more third world countries enter the "global economy." The rule of law is good for everyone.
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Why should I care who pays for "artsy" films? Especially since most of the "classic" movies that I can think of were financial successes. Michaelangelo is an excellent example of art that could be appreciated by the masses. Michaelangelo didn't simply coat the Vatican with feces and call it art.
When film producers start talking about "artsy" films they aren't talking about "Gone With The Wind," which was both exceptionally well done and wildly popular, they are talking about something like "The Last Temptation of Christ" whose only artistic merit is the fact that it is both amazingly unpopular and wildly controversial.
If you want to pay for "artsy" films, then go see them twice, but don't expect me to get excited about paying for it.
Personally I thought Episode II was worth the price of admission just to see Yoda in a light saber duel. That is one bad-ass puppet.
Just as an aside, what is an example of a movie that you like. I can see how someone might not like both "Independence Day" and "Episode I." I bet a lot didn't like those movies. In my opinion that's the difference between a good film and a truly great one. The truly great films are so well done that even their detractors admit that the movie had some redeemingly qualities.
WalMart has become the largest retailer on the planet by having the lowest prices, even if they have to sell crap. For a lot of people crap is "good enough," and WalMart knows that many people will sacrifice quality if the price is right. WalMart doesn't get into a market unless they can undercut their competition, and in the computer market it is very difficult to undercut Dell, unless, of course, you don't include the price of Windows.
As for this being a bad business move, I can't see how that could possibly be the case. WalMart isn't selling these at their stores (so they have no inventory problems), and they have outsourced both the construction and the support to Microtel (so they aren't likely to lose money there). So even if these machines don't sell WalMart has wasted little more than some space on their web site.
As for a potential market, I personally have been looking at purchasing a WalMart Linux PC. I could really use a good source of cheap disposable X terminal machines with Linux compatible hardware, currently I use low end Pentiums, so these PCs ought to be more than good enough. It is also important to note is that WalMart doesn't care if their customers pirate Windows. Dell and HP have to care, but WalMart doesn't care what Microsoft says. That's why WalMart also sells OS-less PCs on their web site.
In short, WalMart has very little to lose, and for those consumers that need a low end machine for casual use WalMart's prices can't be beat.
The glass-house is on its way back, and when the thin client pendulum swings the other way X is going to come right back into style. Thin clients really are the wave of the future in large organizations, the problem. They are far easier to maintain than PCs, and they are less expensive to boot. The problem with thin clients (since the PC days anyway) was that the software that people actually wanted to use was only available on a PC.
Linux, however, has finally gotten to the point where it provides an acceptable (but not spectacular) set of applications that are available on X terminals. For most office workers an X terminal running StarOffice, Mozilla, and Evolution would be more than good enough, and the savings, both in software licensing costs, and in maintenance would be far lower.
Secondly, the added weight of X is not nearly as big as you think. With optimized drivers correctly set up the difference in performance between X Windows and Windows is neglible, and as hardware continues to improve it will become even more neglible. Believe me, if artists designing movies can use Linux on their desktops then the rest of us will be fine.
In other words, you might believe that X Windows is holding Linux back, but when Linux does take over the desktop I bet you will find that quite the opposite is true. X Windows is the key to making Linux on the desktop vastly more affordable and easy to support than Windows.
I agree completely. The true answer to security is not "use a Free Software OS and a high level language." If that were true I wouldn't front my Zope application server (written mostly in Python) with Apache. Fact of the matter is that Apache is a lot more battle tested than Zope, and there are plenty of cases where Zope does the wrong thing (which is one of the reasons why the developers generally encourage using either Apache or Squid as a Zope front end).
However, I personally think that "a good design" is only part of the story. Sendmail doesn't have a particularly design, but it's become pretty hardened over time. In short, I think that security comes down to a combination of design, openness, language, and the amount of use the software gets.
Using a high level language is the best kind of software reuse. The reason behind this is simple, chances are good that you are never going to be as talented as Guido van Rossum or Larry Wall. Nor will your data structures get as many eye balls examining them as Python lists or Perl arrays. Borrowing the work of the hackers that created some of these languages only makes sense.
Now, I am not saying that these programs don't have bugs, because they do, but I would bet that they have less bugs than anything you have ever written. So while using high level languages doesn't insure security, it certainly does help.
Yes, MS SQL Server has several isolation levels, but they achieve this with row level locking, not with MVCC. PostgreSQL's MVCC means that reads are never blocked by writes. To illustrate the difference take a large table that's busy in MS SQL server and delete a whole bunch of rows. Chances are good (unless you have an absurd number of locks configured) that your transaction will fail. With PostgreSQL it would work, and reads wouldn't be blocked at all while your delete transaction was happening.
I like MS SQL Server, but PostgreSQL really is an amazing product. If your admins don't mind mixing in a Linux box it really is worth the time to take a look at it.
Karma schmarma. My post was pure ignorance. Hey, it happens.
In my defense, you must admit that Microsoft is calling their use of XML and their new "View-like" folders innovative. And if they are innovative for Microsoft then they must have been more innovative when Free Software hackers wrote them. Besides who is to say that combining Outlook's interface with features from Lotus Notes isn't innovative.
After all, if you set the bar for innovation too high the only folks that were ever innovative were the folks in the MIT AI lab back in the 70s (yes, that is an exaggeration, but you get the point). In fact, almost my entire point is that most innovation in the computer science fields is incremental. As such, Free Software has had more than its fair share of new ideas, and the fact that it is easy to base your new work on an existing Free Software code base means that as Free Software becomes more prevalent that innovation is likely to increase, not decrease.
No, I remember the Newton, I simply refused to actually purchase a $1K toy, so I am not entirely surprised that I got some of the details wrong.
I did know, for example, that the Newton's superior handwriting recognition (inkwell) did not save it from being relegated to the trash bin of history. I didn't know that Graffiti was also available for the Newton. It's somewhat ironic that Grafitti lived on while Inkwell was sidelined. That should tell us a bit about the importance of handwriting recognition.
Both of us would probably agree that price is far more important to the success of a PDA platform than handwriting recognition. That was my main point. The StepUp tablets will probably do better than their name brand cousins despite the fact that the hardware from HP or Dell will use the special table software. For one-fourth the price most people will probably decide that regular Windows XP is good enough (although I would personally prefer Linux).
If Microsoft's table OS only is available on ridiculously expensive gear, then it is doomed. There simply aren't enough people that are interested in a $2500 computer whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn't come with a keyboard.
"Data, right click on My Network Neighborhood and choose properties..."
Exactly, the StepUp machine will be a much more afordable $800, and they will web surf like crazy. Heck, if the Linux version of the StepUp machine is anything like a Zaurus (only bigger) it could actually be very cool.
All I know is that I am done spending $2K for a computer. No matter how cool Microsoft's tablet is I am not interested.
Yes, but the choice between a $2500 monster that is perfect or a $700 machine that is as good (or better) than a Sharp Zaurus is going to go to the $700 machine. As proof of this, if handwriting recognition was the killer feature then the PDA revolution would have starred the Newton instead of the Palm (which required you to learn Graffiti).
If Microsoft lowers their price so that they are competitive then they will squash these machines like a bug. If not, then expect Microsoft's Tablet OS to be a huge flop.
The funny thing about innovation is that it happens everywhere. Take the upcoming version of MS Office which touts two technologies that have debuted in Free Software first. The XML formats for Office are nothing more than a ripoff of OpenOffice's XML formats, and Outlook's new virtual folders are lifted directly from Evolution and it's VFolders.
There is no question that Free Software is doing a lot of mimicking of commercial products, but that is simply because Free Software hackers are building a desktop from scratch. It's pretty tricky to build a word processor that doesn't look like MS Word, or a spreadsheet that doesn't resemble Excel. Especially considering that one of the major goals of these projects is to get people to switch to the Free Software products. Part of convincing people to switch is making the transition as easy as possible.
When you get outside of the desktop, where Free Software has to copy Microsoft to even be considered, then it is clear that Free Software has done quite a bit of innovation. The reason for this is simple, with Free Software you don't have to start from scratch each time you have an idea. Instead you can add a bit on to an already existing product.
The difference between contracts for writers and rock stars doesn't have anything to do with guilds, unions, or associations. Writer's generally are literate, while rock stars are often only semi-literate. Getting a good lawyer is helpful, being able to read the fine print yourself to make sure you aren't getting snowed is even more helpful.
Welcome to the world of software. Many software products that used to command astronomically high prices can now be replaced with commodity Free Software products. In fact, this is what is driving Linux adoption as well. Many companies are finding that they can deploy Linux instead of a commercial operating system and save money, and so that is what they are doing.
People that are using Linux already are an especially hard sell. After all, once you start using Linux and the wide array of Free Software tools you are very likely to experiment Free Software solutions before paying for commercial ones. For example, instead of buying a proprietary instant messaging service they will almost certainly try Jabber first. For one thing, it is probably easier to "apt-get install jabber" than to purchase and test a commercial product.
I lurk on the PostgreSQL mailing lists and we get quite a few Oracle deserters, and the reason for this is simple. PostgreSQL has gotten to the point that for most uses it is good enough.
I know that if I bought a CD and then wrote the "Customer Service" number and got that response, I would be pissed. After all, I clearly had spent my money on their CD. Calling me a pirate when it wouldn't play in my CD player that plays all of my other CDs would not impress me in the slightest.
And that's my point. No matter what metaphor we end up using, in the end it's all just a metaphor. Users are going to make the relationships in their head no matter what happens. Now I would certainly agree that adding metadata to the files sometimes can make this easier, and I would also agree that sometimes a computer generated index of text files is very handy, but I have yet to see a more useful metaphor than the filesystem. I certainly haven't seen anything that I would remotely consider a replacement for the filesystem metaphor.
In the end it is simply easier to save my daughter's picture as: /home/jearl/pictures/brooklyn/2002-11-08-watching- television.png
Than to set a whole pile of attributes and hope that I can find the picture again.
Yes, and when I did a search on "me" I would come up with 40,000 attributes dating back to 1987 when I first started using a computer (I still have files from back then). If I was very organized the "me" category would have subcategories like "projects" "clients" "schoolwork."
Oh wait, I already have that:
/home/jearl/projects
/home/jearl/schoolwork
/home/jearl/clients
If you have a problem with slashes then I suppose you could use backslashes instead, but that's hardly innovative.
Not that there aren't ways in which filesystems could be improved. For example, I really like having a TAGS database when programming on larger projects so that I can see where functions are defined and used and move between those files easily. A system utility that made an intelligent database of the information in all of my files would be very cool, but hardly the be-all, end-all of computing.
Yawn... You mean like a project directory with a folder for each account, or /home/jearl/entertainment.
Granted sometimes something like Evolutions VFolders is nice where you can query out messages from different folders, but for the most part all of this sort of stuff is nothing more than the file system warmed over.
Instead of putting files in a directory, you would instead have to manage the file attributes on each file. Miss an attribute and your information would get mis-filed in precisely the same manner as writing your file to the wrong file name. On a real operating system with symbolic links you can even put the same file in multiple directories.
Clearly there has got to be a better way to form a stable mostly-honest government than the route that Chile took. And even if all of the people who were disappeared were guilty of some heinous crime (which I am sure they weren't) then there still is no excuse for not giving these people their day in court. There is no greater corruption than to take someone's life without due process of the law.
On the other hand, I will never forget what my years in Peru taught me. I love that people, they were very kind to me (once they got past the fact that I was a Yanqui), but that country is so screwed up I can't imagine what could possibly fix it. The corruption simply goes too deep. I don't know how to fix Peru's problems, but I do know that without getting a handle on the problems brought on by corruption no amount of foreign aid is likely to do any good.
Perhaps eventually Peruvians will come to understand the importance of electing honest representatives.
Either way, thanks for the discussion. You have reminded me of the all too real consequences of American foreign policy. Unfortunately my travels have made me a bit cynical.
The scary bit about Chile to me, is that I can't help but think that had I been an adult in Chile in 1973 I might easily have become one of the "disaparecidos." I would never choose to live in such a society. Especially considering that Pinochet is unique in being the only dictator that I can think of that was even theoretically good for his country. For the most part dictators have a ruinous track record.
I can see why you reacted so negatively to my prior comments if you think that I would recommend "the Pinochet solution." I was only using Pinochet as an example of how removing the corruption from a society allowed it to attract investors and modernize. Chile was lucky with Pinochet, but they paid a very high price. Clearly the best choice is to elect honest officials, and remove corrupt ones. This is especially true in countries like India that already have a relatively stable democratic government.
I certainly agree that the first world should do our part to help stop corruption in third world countries, and I also agree that westerners are in many cases a huge source of the problem.
I don't work for RedHat, but I certainly would like to see people switch from Windows to Linux. For one thing it would allow me use OpenOffice for something other than a glorified Word Viewer. It would also increase the value of my Linux skills.
Many people believe that Free Software hackers are not good at "innovating," but if you look closely at Microsoft's new Office suite the two most hyped features are a revamped Outlook (complete with a ripoff of Evolution's VFolders) and XML formats (much like OpenOffice already has). I can't help but think that once Free Software was on people's desks that innovation would happen as a matter of course. After all, we will all be able to build on a an existing codebase instead of starting over from scratch all of the time.
Becoming a mainstream operating system is simply the first milestone in a much larger goal of providing the coolest software ever. Unfortunately, right now we spend way too much time doing useful but not innovative things like reverse engineering SMB. Once we don't have to be compatible with Windows the sky is literally the limit.
The reason to clone Windows (to some extent) is that the switching costs from Windows to Linux is far and away the largest cost in a Linux migration.
I agree with you. I use Linux because I like Linux's toolset, but in order to displace Microsoft we are going to need tools that Windows users can use. My grandma isn't going to learn to use vi, and neither are most of the folks that I work with.
Pinochet's political enemies fled the state when he took power (for obvious reasons). Many Americans have very negative things to say about George Bush as well, but that doesn't mean that most Americans hate George Bush. The fact that the majority of Chileans vote along the same party lines as Pinochet should tell you how mainstream his opposition is.
I lived in Chile for two years, with normal Chilean families, in several different cities, and I can guarantee you that the part of the population that was pro-Pinochet is much larger than the very vocal anti-Pinochet contingent. Most people are somewhere in the middle. They are glad for what he did for the country, but they are not happy about the means he used. I would consider myself part of this larger third group. I would even go so far as to say that many of Pinochet's economic policies were bad, but that the removal of corruption from the government outweighed these poor choices in the long run.
And I still contest that corruption is still the root cause of the ills of most developing nations, including Saudi Arabia. But when I talk about corruption I am not simply referring to the crime rate, but to the rule of law. Countries where all of the power is concentrated in just a few people are dangerous for business. That's partially why Chile's economy has grown even faster since Pinochet was forced out. If the ruling family in Saudi Arabia decides they want your business there is little you can do about it. So instead of taking that risk people invest elsewhere.
I have never lived in the Middle East, so I will decline to comment further :).
From your comments it is pretty clear that you don't have any idea what you are talking about, at least when it comes to Pinochet and Chile. I lived in Peru while Pinochet was still in power, and moved to Chile right after nearly 50% of the population of Chile voted to keep him in as dictator. It takes a pretty good dictator to win an unfixed election between continuing the dictatorship and a representative democracy that the dictator supported. I can guarantee you that most Chileans do not feel like Pinochet was bad for their country, and quite a few of the Peruvians that I knew wished that Pinochet would work a similar magic in their country. Yes, Pinochet's tactics were harsh, especially in the first years of his rule, but he had a lot of corruption to remove.
The difference between Peru and Chile after Pinochet's reign was striking. Even the smallest shops in Lima had armed guards, where in Chile not even the policemen carried firearms. During Christmas time in Peru police armed with assault rifles regularly pulled over automobiles to ask for "donations." Such activity would never be permitted in Chile. Under Pinochet not only would such activity cost you your job, it could theoretically cost you your life. Thanks primarily to Pinochet's actions Chile is leading South America in entering the "global economy" and the citizens of Chile love that. As an example the right-leaning parties (who generally are allied with Pinochet) have a majority in the Senate.
So who is the armchair analyst in this case my good friend?
Both you and I agree that reform is the only hope the third world countries have of getting out of their current situations. Unless the corruption is removed there can be no real progress. We just disagree on what the removal of corruption requires. Unfortunately there are very few cases of a nation that has been successful in removing corruption from the government. Chile is the only example that I can think of off-hand, and it certainly is the only example that I have seen with my own eyes. Perhaps you can think of another?
I would agree that the United States has made some policy mistakes. We certainly have backed some despicable folks over the years. However, in many of the cases the U.S. had a very limited number of options. I suppose that we could have simply allowed communism to sweep the world. Would you really have preferred that?
The long and the short of it is that the U.S. is not forcing anyone to take our foreign aid, or our loans, and we aren't even forcing the rest of the world to repay our loans. If a country wants to be cut off from our capital they are welcome to stop paying their debts.
It is possible to clean up the corruption in a country. Pinochet was largely successful in Chile, but it isn't something that the U.S. can do for other countries. More's the pity too. We would love to have more third world countries enter the "global economy." The rule of law is good for everyone.