You're missing the comparison of expression to ideal. The idea is to compare real-world capitalism to real-world marxism, but to compare real-world capitalism to ideal capitalism under the idea that the best system to idealize is the one which finds itself most readily expressed by humans, knowing that each one will have its faults. In such a comparison I find capitalism, which is considerably lighter on prescriptive theory than feudalism or communism, seems to come out ahead. Whether the theory itself is best, whether in expression or ideal, is a whole different question. Personally I'll take the free market over the chattel slavery of feudalism or total state control of the economy anyday (especially both of these systems seem to go hand in hand with repressive government).
And if "my" job gets moved to Mexico/India/Mordor, that *is* best. The owner of capital gets to make a product more cheaply, often resulting in less expensive goods for consumers... not only that, some Mexican/Indian/Southron got a job! Good for everyone but me. If the job moves, things improve for three people. If the job stays it simply preserves the status quo.
As to reality TV.... people watch that stuff! Maybe you're too cool for it now that it's no longer limited to MTV (I bet when it was just Real World or whatever you weren't complaining about it). But apparently there are a lot of people who think watching that stuff is a good use of their time. It's their time and their choice to watch it. So much for your elitist BS.
Ultimately, it seems like the true limiting factor on all of these systems is not how well they would work in the ideal, but rather how closely that ideal can be attained in actual practice.
This is an excellent comment. And from just looking around, I'd say that capitalism is easier to maintain than pure Marxism or Feudalism and shows more promise, given the abundance of free societies in places like Europe and America where capitalism is the order of the day, compared against places like Communist Russia, North Korea, or China.
A new Prius costs $20,000. The most expensive bike I've ever seen was $5,000. This is one-fourth the price of the Prius. Clearly a "fraction" of the cost.
Yeah, because we need the FDA to help us not make stupid decisions like getting RFID implants. The people who are getting this sound like hardcore clubgoers and probably have bigger concerns than these implants-- like liver damage.
drafting as much as possible behind other vehicles.
Is that a euphemism for saying you tailgate a lot?
(and now to stay on topic...) I'm a anti-car zealot and I think these hybrid deals are some of the dumbest things ever. They cost what, twice as much as a regular car with no real advantage in terms of fuel efficiency? Even if they got what the claims are they don't look to me like the savings would really pay for the added expense of owning one of these contraptions.
Besides, if you care that much about efficiency get a bike! Bicycles use no fossil fuels for propulsion and are far more efficient in terms of energy expended. With a car you have to move around 2000 pounds just to get your butt to go somewhere... on a bike that becomes 50 pounds, if you've got a really heavy bike. Not only that, even the most expensive bikes cost a fraction of what it costs to own and operate a car.
Considering your post is the first mention of KDE, I think your post itself is flamebait. Petreley never mentions KDE-- all he's doing is whining about Nautilus. For myself, I don't care what some guy who writes for some magazine thinks. Unless maybe it's Verity Stob. She actually makes me laugh.
Personally I love GNOME use it every day and have few, if any, complaints-- that Petreley is even complaining about Nautilus surprises me. I usually forget that's there since I do 99.9% of my file management in gnome-terminal via the BASH shell.
In fact, I think I will upgrade to GNOME 2.6 onto my Gentoo system tonight, just to see what all the fuss is about.
The real problem is finding credible experts. Otherwise I bet there are a lot of unemployed Slashbots who would love the chance to help a guy beat this kind of rap (or would be glad to be the counter-expert, as well).
Obviously our legal system has a real problem if someone can be accused of a crime by groups like the DA and the police department who have enormous investigatory powers and extensive resources, but their only defense is some overworked PD who can't even afford a decent expert in areas that might produce exculpatory evidence.
The U.S., having one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world and still having pretty serious crime issues, really needs to sit down and figure something out. Is it our culture? Is it the form of the legislation? Is it the legal system? Probably it's a combination of all of these... so how do we unravel the knot? Or do we need to cut the knot entirely? Is the great American experiment truly a success? Maybe it's time to dissolve the union?
That's a logical impossibility. That is the first few major items on my todo list.
Or at least it was when I had a girlfriend. Which seemed to be the case a lot more before I started reading Slashdot. Hmmmm. And the house was cleaner too!
Not only that, the only guarantee is that the business logic will change. In my experience the changes will be somewhere between "modest updates" to "complete rewrite". That means you put them where you can get at them easiest, have the easiest time implementing (i.e. more like Perl or SQL and less like assembly language), will be able to understand/verify/explain what you've coded, where it will look the best if you have to show it to someone else (again, SQL over assembly), etc etc.
In some cases it will be easier to maintain in an application than on the database, in other cases vice versa. Also consider which spot gets you the easiest access to version control. The only other guarantee besides change seems to be the reversed decision.
I agree. There could be confounding factors, but the people who came up with the number are all pretty smart and if Linus says the tool helps, then probably the tool helps. Maybe the numbers aren't exact or even all that useful. All I can say is: I wouldn't want to use CVS for this task either, and if you've looked at the other revision control systems out there, it's a pretty sorry landscape. I've never looked at BK myself, because of the license... which to me says: how much do we have to pay McVoy to open source this thing? He's giving so much away for free as-is, we really ought to consider bribing him into making it Free Software.:)
As to #3 I already have the internet on my phone, so I can keep up with news and sports pretty easily with that. I can even send real email and use AIM if I want.
I love the USB idea though-- every device that has digital storage should have USB and a plain HD interface, imho (or a removable card, like SD or CF). I would very much like my phone to store data in XML and allow me to offload and upload via USB (and I suppose for Windows users some software could be downloaded from the maker's web site to help modify the XML or make it work with Outlook, etc).
Gibson invented edgy, hip, and cool science fiction? And you can say this even though you have read Philip K. Dick? *shakes head*
Anyway, I don't think, given the number of brilliant computer minds on the list that any science fiction author should get votes until after people like Vint Cerf or Bill Joy or Ken Thompson get in. Even the guy who wrote the original Tetris ranks higher, in my mind, that Gibson. Or Stephenson. Or even Asimov or Dick, for that matter.
I think it's funny, because if the write-up had pointed out that this is the same company Pamela Jones from Groklaw is working at, everyone would have been drooling to praise it as cool and necessary, but since it's Perens everyone wants to rip on it.
Personally I think in the world of risk, the risks from patent, copyright, and other "intellectual property" infringements are pretty low-- users can't really infringe copyright very easily and patents are just as easy to infringe with proprietary software as with free software. I'd be much more concerned about security, license compliance, and other risk factors that affect companies using or developing Free Software.
Have you used Word lately? I stopped with Word 2000-- it was so broken compared to the previous two decades worth of word processors I'd used I could hardly stand it. It's gotten to where I prefer handcoding HTML in emacs (the HTML gives me formatting and stuff, just view/print from a browser) to going into Word for anything.
why do you want to start from scratch and try to compete with it?
Some might say the same about Linux itself, especially when MS Windows has become much more stable in recent versions. The point, as the other poster was saying, is to promote the use of Free Software.
95% of businesses use word's proprietary 'doc' type file.
You say this like MS Word itself has never had version incompatibility issues. Also, MS Word can import/export a variety of formats, so I don't see this as a huge issue. I've heard you can even trick MS Windows into thinking HTML files are.doc files by simply changing the file extension.
The Commodore 64 with 64k of ram. It didn't have 65536 bytes of ram but 65025 bytes of ram. ALMOST 64ki.
Wha? The C64 had a full 65536 address space #0000 to #FFFF. Of course some of it was ROM and some of it was RAM and some of it was system RAM and some of it was user RAM (and some of it was reserved for cartridge ROM).
Personally I am not going to start using mebibytes for things that have been traditionally measured in megabytes. I'm just used to the fact that hard drives are actually smaller than advertised. As for transmission rates on networks... I don't know. I don't care how the device itself is rated, but we should be measuring transfer rates by how much memory the data would fill (i.e. amounts measured in base 2).
Powers of ten work great for people who are doing math on their fingers, but powers of two work much better for computers.
especially as the purchase was made under duress and under protest
As in "please don't force me to buy this computer?" WTF? Every copy of Windows sold is a copy of Windows sold. While I agree that not one single consumer can be held liable for the supposed "contract" contained in the EULA, don't pretend that you were "forced" to buy Windows. It is fairly easy to parts to build desktop computers without also paying for a Windows license and it is also fairly easy to buy used, off-lease computer equipment that contains no valid copy of Windows (and the lack of which is figured into the depreciation expense of the machine prior to resale). I haven't paid for a copy of Windows since I bought my iMac in like 1998-- but I have built at least one state-of-the-art desktop (at least it was fairly competitive when I built it) and bought several decent laptop systems.
I'm a hardcore free software zealot, but let's not play semantic games and pretend that anyone is being forced to give money to Microsoft, OK?
There is little comparison between unlocked doors and computer worms. If my nieghbor doesn't lock his door and gets robbed, this probably doesn't mean that the robbers will now use my neighbor's house as a place from which to launch a robbery of my house. However, on the net, when someone leaves an unsecured, hacked system running, their computer increases the risks for everyone else because, whether they know it or not, they are helping the virus writers breed their nasty little piece of software.
Whether or not my neighbor is to blame for having been robbed (which I don't believe he is), the point is: if my neighbor's computer is hacked and starts to attack mine, that's when we start to have a heightened sense of his responsibility in the matter.
Thank you. It is important to remember that most of our telecom infrastructure is inextricably linked with liberal doses of public monies or government-mandated monopolies and usually involves usage of a public "right of way" in which cabling is strung and control boxes are located. If the system were truly free market, end to end, then those saying "it's their network" might have a case. As it is, we are more than just customers and deserve to have a bill of rights as customers which is enforced with the same vigor as our responsibilities.
Stealing appropriates the goods and resources of another. Copying involves using one's own resources to make a duplicate of something. Your assertion that "the courts see them as the same" is laughable. There are two distinct sets of laws, one for theft and one for copyright infringement. If they were the same thing they wouldn't even need something called "copyright" and your copyright on a work couldn't just lapse into the public domain at some point (which, barring any future extensions, all copyrighted works will do).
I am sick of people thinking that it is ok to steal movies and music just because it happens to be in digital format.
And I'm sick of people using the word "steal" when what they mean is "make unauthorized copies". There is a significant difference both in the semantics and in the real world effects of these actions.
Yes. I would simply use a disposable credit card number and/or reverse all charges made illegally to my credit card. Just because someone has my card number doesn't mean they are allowed to make unauthorized purchases.
Also, I'd expect that most people would find this very idea somewhat disconcerting. If someone happened to steal a CD-R I'd stored some MP3s on (say for bringing the files to work or use in a portable player), or they stole my laptop, now they also have access to my credit card details?
That day 0 copy of the next StarWars can and should land you in jail plain and simple.
Yeah, because downloading a movie is such an anti-social act that you need to be completely deprived of your liberty at the taxpayers' expense. Geez, get a grip and then get some perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the comparison of expression to ideal. The idea is to compare real-world capitalism to real-world marxism, but to compare real-world capitalism to ideal capitalism under the idea that the best system to idealize is the one which finds itself most readily expressed by humans, knowing that each one will have its faults. In such a comparison I find capitalism, which is considerably lighter on prescriptive theory than feudalism or communism, seems to come out ahead. Whether the theory itself is best, whether in expression or ideal, is a whole different question. Personally I'll take the free market over the chattel slavery of feudalism or total state control of the economy anyday (especially both of these systems seem to go hand in hand with repressive government).
And if "my" job gets moved to Mexico/India/Mordor, that *is* best. The owner of capital gets to make a product more cheaply, often resulting in less expensive goods for consumers... not only that, some Mexican/Indian/Southron got a job! Good for everyone but me. If the job moves, things improve for three people. If the job stays it simply preserves the status quo.
As to reality TV.... people watch that stuff! Maybe you're too cool for it now that it's no longer limited to MTV (I bet when it was just Real World or whatever you weren't complaining about it). But apparently there are a lot of people who think watching that stuff is a good use of their time. It's their time and their choice to watch it. So much for your elitist BS.
Ultimately, it seems like the true limiting factor on all of these systems is not how well they would work in the ideal, but rather how closely that ideal can be attained in actual practice.
This is an excellent comment. And from just looking around, I'd say that capitalism is easier to maintain than pure Marxism or Feudalism and shows more promise, given the abundance of free societies in places like Europe and America where capitalism is the order of the day, compared against places like Communist Russia, North Korea, or China.
And you've apparently never studied fractions. ;)
A new Prius costs $20,000. The most expensive bike I've ever seen was $5,000. This is one-fourth the price of the Prius. Clearly a "fraction" of the cost.
Yeah, because we need the FDA to help us not make stupid decisions like getting RFID implants. The people who are getting this sound like hardcore clubgoers and probably have bigger concerns than these implants-- like liver damage.
drafting as much as possible behind other vehicles.
Is that a euphemism for saying you tailgate a lot?
(and now to stay on topic...) I'm a anti-car zealot and I think these hybrid deals are some of the dumbest things ever. They cost what, twice as much as a regular car with no real advantage in terms of fuel efficiency? Even if they got what the claims are they don't look to me like the savings would really pay for the added expense of owning one of these contraptions.
Besides, if you care that much about efficiency get a bike! Bicycles use no fossil fuels for propulsion and are far more efficient in terms of energy expended. With a car you have to move around 2000 pounds just to get your butt to go somewhere... on a bike that becomes 50 pounds, if you've got a really heavy bike. Not only that, even the most expensive bikes cost a fraction of what it costs to own and operate a car.
Considering your post is the first mention of KDE, I think your post itself is flamebait. Petreley never mentions KDE-- all he's doing is whining about Nautilus. For myself, I don't care what some guy who writes for some magazine thinks. Unless maybe it's Verity Stob. She actually makes me laugh.
Personally I love GNOME use it every day and have few, if any, complaints-- that Petreley is even complaining about Nautilus surprises me. I usually forget that's there since I do 99.9% of my file management in gnome-terminal via the BASH shell.
In fact, I think I will upgrade to GNOME 2.6 onto my Gentoo system tonight, just to see what all the fuss is about.
Expert testimony in particular is very expensive,
The real problem is finding credible experts. Otherwise I bet there are a lot of unemployed Slashbots who would love the chance to help a guy beat this kind of rap (or would be glad to be the counter-expert, as well).
Obviously our legal system has a real problem if someone can be accused of a crime by groups like the DA and the police department who have enormous investigatory powers and extensive resources, but their only defense is some overworked PD who can't even afford a decent expert in areas that might produce exculpatory evidence.
The U.S., having one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world and still having pretty serious crime issues, really needs to sit down and figure something out. Is it our culture? Is it the form of the legislation? Is it the legal system? Probably it's a combination of all of these... so how do we unravel the knot? Or do we need to cut the knot entirely? Is the great American experiment truly a success? Maybe it's time to dissolve the union?
That's a logical impossibility. That is the first few major items on my todo list.
Or at least it was when I had a girlfriend. Which seemed to be the case a lot more before I started reading Slashdot. Hmmmm. And the house was cleaner too!
Not only that, the only guarantee is that the business logic will change. In my experience the changes will be somewhere between "modest updates" to "complete rewrite". That means you put them where you can get at them easiest, have the easiest time implementing (i.e. more like Perl or SQL and less like assembly language), will be able to understand/verify/explain what you've coded, where it will look the best if you have to show it to someone else (again, SQL over assembly), etc etc.
In some cases it will be easier to maintain in an application than on the database, in other cases vice versa. Also consider which spot gets you the easiest access to version control. The only other guarantee besides change seems to be the reversed decision.
I agree. There could be confounding factors, but the people who came up with the number are all pretty smart and if Linus says the tool helps, then probably the tool helps. Maybe the numbers aren't exact or even all that useful. All I can say is: I wouldn't want to use CVS for this task either, and if you've looked at the other revision control systems out there, it's a pretty sorry landscape. I've never looked at BK myself, because of the license... which to me says: how much do we have to pay McVoy to open source this thing? He's giving so much away for free as-is, we really ought to consider bribing him into making it Free Software. :)
As to #3 I already have the internet on my phone, so I can keep up with news and sports pretty easily with that. I can even send real email and use AIM if I want.
I love the USB idea though-- every device that has digital storage should have USB and a plain HD interface, imho (or a removable card, like SD or CF). I would very much like my phone to store data in XML and allow me to offload and upload via USB (and I suppose for Windows users some software could be downloaded from the maker's web site to help modify the XML or make it work with Outlook, etc).
Gibson invented edgy, hip, and cool science fiction? And you can say this even though you have read Philip K. Dick? *shakes head*
Anyway, I don't think, given the number of brilliant computer minds on the list that any science fiction author should get votes until after people like Vint Cerf or Bill Joy or Ken Thompson get in. Even the guy who wrote the original Tetris ranks higher, in my mind, that Gibson. Or Stephenson. Or even Asimov or Dick, for that matter.
I think it's funny, because if the write-up had pointed out that this is the same company Pamela Jones from Groklaw is working at, everyone would have been drooling to praise it as cool and necessary, but since it's Perens everyone wants to rip on it.
Personally I think in the world of risk, the risks from patent, copyright, and other "intellectual property" infringements are pretty low-- users can't really infringe copyright very easily and patents are just as easy to infringe with proprietary software as with free software. I'd be much more concerned about security, license compliance, and other risk factors that affect companies using or developing Free Software.
Well, for one, why fix what isn't broken?
.doc files by simply changing the file extension.
Have you used Word lately? I stopped with Word 2000-- it was so broken compared to the previous two decades worth of word processors I'd used I could hardly stand it. It's gotten to where I prefer handcoding HTML in emacs (the HTML gives me formatting and stuff, just view/print from a browser) to going into Word for anything.
why do you want to start from scratch and try to compete with it?
Some might say the same about Linux itself, especially when MS Windows has become much more stable in recent versions. The point, as the other poster was saying, is to promote the use of Free Software.
95% of businesses use word's proprietary 'doc' type file.
You say this like MS Word itself has never had version incompatibility issues. Also, MS Word can import/export a variety of formats, so I don't see this as a huge issue. I've heard you can even trick MS Windows into thinking HTML files are
burrocrats
;)
Rulers of the underground tunnels?
The Commodore 64 with 64k of ram. It didn't have 65536 bytes of ram but 65025 bytes of ram. ALMOST 64ki.
Wha? The C64 had a full 65536 address space #0000 to #FFFF. Of course some of it was ROM and some of it was RAM and some of it was system RAM and some of it was user RAM (and some of it was reserved for cartridge ROM).
Personally I am not going to start using mebibytes for things that have been traditionally measured in megabytes. I'm just used to the fact that hard drives are actually smaller than advertised. As for transmission rates on networks... I don't know. I don't care how the device itself is rated, but we should be measuring transfer rates by how much memory the data would fill (i.e. amounts measured in base 2).
Powers of ten work great for people who are doing math on their fingers, but powers of two work much better for computers.
especially as the purchase was made under duress and under protest
As in "please don't force me to buy this computer?" WTF? Every copy of Windows sold is a copy of Windows sold. While I agree that not one single consumer can be held liable for the supposed "contract" contained in the EULA, don't pretend that you were "forced" to buy Windows. It is fairly easy to parts to build desktop computers without also paying for a Windows license and it is also fairly easy to buy used, off-lease computer equipment that contains no valid copy of Windows (and the lack of which is figured into the depreciation expense of the machine prior to resale). I haven't paid for a copy of Windows since I bought my iMac in like 1998-- but I have built at least one state-of-the-art desktop (at least it was fairly competitive when I built it) and bought several decent laptop systems.
I'm a hardcore free software zealot, but let's not play semantic games and pretend that anyone is being forced to give money to Microsoft, OK?
Or it could mean people who pay for access to servers, which most many an alt.binaries.* devotee is known to do.
There is little comparison between unlocked doors and computer worms. If my nieghbor doesn't lock his door and gets robbed, this probably doesn't mean that the robbers will now use my neighbor's house as a place from which to launch a robbery of my house. However, on the net, when someone leaves an unsecured, hacked system running, their computer increases the risks for everyone else because, whether they know it or not, they are helping the virus writers breed their nasty little piece of software.
Whether or not my neighbor is to blame for having been robbed (which I don't believe he is), the point is: if my neighbor's computer is hacked and starts to attack mine, that's when we start to have a heightened sense of his responsibility in the matter.
Its hard to sense electricity.
;)
Nonsense! I've never had any trouble telling if 9 volt batteries had a charge by holding them to my tongue. Wouldn't that work in this case as well?
Thank you. It is important to remember that most of our telecom infrastructure is inextricably linked with liberal doses of public monies or government-mandated monopolies and usually involves usage of a public "right of way" in which cabling is strung and control boxes are located. If the system were truly free market, end to end, then those saying "it's their network" might have a case. As it is, we are more than just customers and deserve to have a bill of rights as customers which is enforced with the same vigor as our responsibilities.
Stealing appropriates the goods and resources of another. Copying involves using one's own resources to make a duplicate of something. Your assertion that "the courts see them as the same" is laughable. There are two distinct sets of laws, one for theft and one for copyright infringement. If they were the same thing they wouldn't even need something called "copyright" and your copyright on a work couldn't just lapse into the public domain at some point (which, barring any future extensions, all copyrighted works will do).
I am sick of people thinking that it is ok to steal movies and music just because it happens to be in digital format.
And I'm sick of people using the word "steal" when what they mean is "make unauthorized copies". There is a significant difference both in the semantics and in the real world effects of these actions.
Yes. I would simply use a disposable credit card number and/or reverse all charges made illegally to my credit card. Just because someone has my card number doesn't mean they are allowed to make unauthorized purchases.
Also, I'd expect that most people would find this very idea somewhat disconcerting. If someone happened to steal a CD-R I'd stored some MP3s on (say for bringing the files to work or use in a portable player), or they stole my laptop, now they also have access to my credit card details?
That day 0 copy of the next StarWars can and should land you in jail plain and simple.
Yeah, because downloading a movie is such an anti-social act that you need to be completely deprived of your liberty at the taxpayers' expense. Geez, get a grip and then get some perspective.
Jebus. Learn to spot a joke by the little winky emoticon thingy. Talk about the jerky knee. Methinks perhaps it takes one to know one?