I have been using KDE 4.0 with Fedora 9 for some time now. Functionality has been minimal, but useful and it was relatively stable.
I had one issue: file previews in Konqueror/Dolphin were so slow as to be unusable (on the order of 5-10 seconds per image or file). I was told this was fixed in the 4.1 tree, so today I installed the rawhide 4.1 packages.
Now previews are very fast. Unfortunately, it now appears that you cannot fully disable the compositing desktop, meaning that on my minimal-hardware laptop the desktop is now SLOW AS MOLASSES, including this like scrolling in FireFox. In 4.0 these slowdowns only existed when "desktop effects" were enabled. Now it's like I'm using a 386 with a Trident card even when "desktop effects" are disabled. It has been a long time since I could watch . every . widget . being . redrawn . with . two . second . pauses . between . them .
I am officially giving up and going to GNOME.:-( Not cool, because I can't stand GNOME. Maybe it's time to go back to Windowmaker...
No idea, but Konqueror in 4 also shows the same problem for me. I admit, I haven't tried anything beyond Fedora's most up-to-date packages (still 4.0) but for the moment I am using Nautilus as my primary file manager, which pains me, because I am a longtime Konqueror user and like Dolphin a lot.
Note that the previews for tiny images aren't too bad, but for large files, e.g. 10mb digicam images, they take ages (4-5 seconds each or more) whereas in 3.x and in Nautilus they don't.
But otherwise, I like KDE 4 a lot and can't wait until it's more fully realized.
is the incredibly slow-ass file previews. What happened? I can now open up a folder of digital camera images and have Dolphin or Konqueror preview them, and 45 minutes later it will still be working to get all the thumbnails done.
Compare to the current version of Nautilus (or the KDE 3.x version of Konqueror) that previewed more or less instantly... What gives?
Other than that, I've not had any major stability issues or gripes with KDE 4.x (I'm using Fedora 9 and have switched from the new menu to the old "accordion-style" menu.)
2) Replace a motherboard with a later generation one.
3) Replace a laptop with a later model, installing the old hard drive into the new machine.
In all three cases, reactivation is always required. Which means that my long years of buying Windows licenses to have "alongside" Linux on my desktop and notebook (yes, I have original disks and licenses for each version of windows from Windows 3.0 through Windows XP, even though I'm a Linux user) ended with Windows XP.
Once I realized what a huge PITA it was going to increasingly be to keep a Windows installation intact/licensed, I just gave up on gaming and Windows altogether. In combination with the copy protection in games, it just wasn't worth it anymore. Now I haven't played a game in three years (I used to have a dedicated gaming machine and stacks and stacks of retail box PC games) and Microsoft and the gaming industry have simply lost a customer.
The vast majority of mobile professionals outside of IT ONLY need to use Word and Excel. The Pocket Word and Pocket Excel apps work fine in most cases and for those that done, there a full versions of office apps available for $100 or less from several vendors.
I don't sync mine. It's got a 4GB CF card for data storage and a wireless card and am running Samba on my home PC. I just come home, open my shared folder over the wireless network, and copy documents back and forth.
I'm a writer, so I wanted some form factor to let me touch-type a lot (hours on a single charge) and in very cramped areas, without having to do lots of PC housekeeping tasks or sloooow "boot up" and "shut down" processes. I really wanted a modern equivalent for the Tandy Model 102.
Anyone who needs the same (basically word processing and spreadsheets on a tiny device with a long battery and a touch-typable keyboard) should really consider something more lightweight than a full PC.
Unless there is absolutely some major reason you need Doom and the heavyweight versions of office applications with you at all times, you can do better with an HPC Pro machine.
I picked up a couple of NEC MobilePro machines for $50 on eBay. Windows CE 3, with Pocket Office, Pocket Internet Explorer, etc. I also picked up a Cabletron Roamabout PCMCIA wireless card for $10 with free shipping.
I get:
- Touch-type-able keyboard same as Eee PC - Less weight - Less bulk - Instant on, instant off - MS Pocket Office and a reasonable range of CE apps - Many hours of battery life (at least 6) - If you really need "FULL" Office, you can get SoftMaker office for $100
Just for fun, I tried installing NetBSD on one of these with X using a 4GB CF card and it worked fine, just like any X desktop. But I decided that I just wanted the original functionality so it's back to Windows CE for me, with 4GB of storage and a touch-type-able keyboard and all for $60 cash, and it's small enough to sit on your lap, open, on the subway even in rush hour crowds, which can't be said for the Eee PC.
Only one of the current top three defended the law in this case and tried to hold telecoms responsible for their actions. I'd suggest that if you support this, you
(1) Contact the other campaigns and tell them you won't vote for them and why (2) Donate to this candidate and support them in primary and general election (3) Tell your family and friends about (1) and (2) and the reasoning behind it
On the Democratic side, both are in the middle of an intense campaign, but one of them took time out to turn up and vote against the grain to stop this travesty. The other (read: Clinton) couldn't be bothered.
One thing that matters very much is location. There are universities across the U.S. in places where there's very little call for the graduates they produce. That's the situation I was in when I got out of undergrad—and it was several years before I got smart and headed for the coasts.
I think for undergrads at the top of their class in NYC or DC there is always something to do. For undergrads at the top of their class in New Mexico or Montana or Wyoming or Utah this may not be the case, especially for undergrads in very clearly "academic" fields like the humanities or the social sciences.
It's yet another thing we should probably be warning kids about: "You realize that if you get a college degree and want it to help your career, it basically means moving to one coast or the other for at least a decade or so, right?"
by well-meaning educators, parents, and public figures for most of their youthful lives.
College is your ticket out of the ghetto, means a higher income, better work conditions, more freedom, more control over your career, more respect, blah, blah, blah. It's true in a way, but the way a university education is described is often as the opposite of blue-collar work. That is to say that many kids are told (I know I was, all the way up through the end of undergrad) that I was going to college to avoid certain things:
- Being poor - Having to get paid for what I "do" rather than what I "think" - Being stuck in a "dead-end job" - Having to "flip burgers," "answer phones," "make copies," or other "menial labor" work - Low pay (this is a biggy, and you hear it over and over and over)
Well... all of these things are exactly what you confront when you finish your bachelor's degree. I know it was a tremendous shock to me after having been goaded on for years to get good grades in high school, then to go to college, then to hang in there—goaded using all of these reasons for sticking with it—only to find out that college doesn't provide you with wealth, the ability to get paid for what you think, a way to avoid dead-end jobs, having to start at the absolute entry level, or getting paid nothing for all of the above... The only way up the career ladder is to climb it, from the bottom.
It's the "all kids must go to college" culture that we have—we even direct kids away from the things they're interested in in many cases using these kinds of arguments (which are really veiled threats in a way of what consequences await them if they don't go to college) and then they graduate expecting exactly the benefits that have been used as selling points for all these years.
I can completely empathize. It took me a good five years to come to terms with the fact that I'd essentially been had and would now need to choose between going out and starting up the career ladder as if I'd just graduated high school with essentially no advantage, or going to grad school on the other hand (i.e. school for many more years and at great expense) to gain at least some measurable advantage for myself with all the hard work I'd done.
I chose the latter, but I often reflect on the fact that I could easily have chosen the former as well... there was certainly a point in my life where it could have gone either way.
I don't know if it deserves to be modded down. I'm from Utah and have spent considerable time (living, mostly) in NYC, Chicago, Portland, San Fran, Los Angeles, Austin, Nashville, and a whole smattering of places in between.
Basically, outside of the major coastal and midwestern urban areas the whole damn nation is uneducated white trash, eating, drinking, sleeping, and living the Bible, the small print on Wal-Mart labels, and little else. They're about as different from a New Yorker or a San Franciscan as a microscope lens is from the bottom of a beer bottle.
They probably shouldn't be allowed to vote, much less raise their own children.
My smartphone has MS Office compatible word processor, spreadsheet, and database. It sends email and browses the web. It takes photos and manages my budget. It has an always-on map (Google Maps) that I can use to get my position and/or directions anywhere.
It IS a personal computer.
PCs aren't dying, they're getting integrated more closely into our lives.
I know reservation rewards well! I used to get tons of free food using them through delivery.com (a fast food delivery website). Here's how it would work:
1. Order food online through delivery.com.
2. An "opt-out" cross-sell appears offering you a $10.00 coupon if you don't uncheck enroll box. First 30 days are free.
3. Agree to "free trial" and get $10.00 coupon code. Then call immediately and cancel service you just enrolled for.
4. Use free $10.00 coupon (still good) next time you want to order food through delivery.com.
5. At end of order, an "opt-out" cross sell appears offering you a $10.00 coupon if you don't uncheck the enroll box...
Just over a year ago I probably got $300 in free food delivery that way over a several month stretch before moving to an area where there is no delivery.com service. Too bad.
My card was never charged by these people. All you have to do is be dilligent and pay attention and call the 1-800 number to cancel.
Re:I use photoshop v5 from 2000
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's still better than Gimp. And I keep trying Gimp because I have to use windows if I want to use Photoshop.
Crossover Office has run Photoshop (through PS7, which I routinely use, *alongside* GIMP) in Linux for something like six or seven years now. That people still say "I have to use Windows if I want to run Photoshop" is beyond me.
You will need credit. Not just to buy and sell. To get an apartment. To get a job. To forge other relationships with various institutions that want to evaluate your trustworthiness with something other than your own claims about yourself.
It's regrettable, maybe (certainly I think so), but it's also damn tough to live any other way in the end. A life without credit is a life with many fewer opportunities and many fewer potential relationships. Not just slightly fewer, but fewer to a crippling extent.
But credit is not something that exists here, now, it is something that exists through your own financial history of using it. That is to say it's circular: you get a little, you use that little, then you get a little more, then you use that little more, etc. You only get Credit (big 'C') by using your credit (small 'c') responsibly over time. The later you start, the later you'll actually get there.
If you're over 20 and you haven't started already, you're way behind the game. By the time you're 30 and haven't started, most institutions won't extend you any anymore. They'll just paint you as "different." They don't care whether you're different in a bad or good way for not having credit; they just don't want to do business with people who are "different." Because "different" people might respond to responsibilities in "different" ways from the ways in which members of society typically do.
My advice: go open a bank account and put some money in it. Leave a balance of a few hundred dollars there for a few months, then get a credit card with that bank. Use the damn card. Pay off your balance. Even if you just do $20 a month, i.e. toilet paper and granola bars, on the card. Just to get a credit history going on.
And later on, if you find yourself in this situation again, you'll have a bank account that you can quickly deposit some cash in and use a Visa/Mastercard debit card against.
Goldman Sachs is big capital. Big (capital [B]) Capital. They have people in house to analyze everything, and they are doing very well (Very Well) in the market right now. Almost disgustingly well. Of all industries, Big Capital is probably most informed about the widest variety of things, because their only job is to "know." There is literally not much else that they do.
So while it's okay to doubt, I wouldn't bet too much against the top investment banks right now, because they fund much of the world's industries. (And no, this doesn't mean I'm a cheerleader for them, I rather dislike Big Capital, but their performance over the last few years say that they "know" more often than we do.)
I get endlessly annoyed at the "let the market speak" proponents who really mean simply "let people like me make the decisions," as though this guy, or Linux users, or the people who don't like the "let the market speak" philosophy... aren't a part of the market too.
Be self-consistent. If you want to "let the market speak" then you have to countenance the notion that some of that speech may not be pro-market speech. Not all consumers participate in the market purely to make products better and prices cheaper. I'd venture to say that most of them participate in the market to serve their own idiosyncratic desires... which for this person means writing drivers.
The market is speaking. It's saying that Linux drivers are cooler than better webcams, at least in some cases. So let the market speak.
How long before the individual owns nothing, though everything is owned? How long before it is a legal fact that all "ownership" (even of the very air we breathe) is exercised by corporations rather than individuals or publics?
The way things are going, we will soon see legal battles between all kinds of financial interests:
"We own that story, he wrote it using our software."
"But he was using our hardware."
"Yes, but he was sitting on our chair."
"Ah, but he was sitting inside our building."
"True, but he had eaten our food that morning."
"Yes, and he was working beneath our light bulb."
"Ahhhhh, but he was breathing our air..."
Judge: "Divide the profits from its sale evenly amongst yourselves."
Writer: "But what about me? I don't even want it sold. I wrote it and I should get to control it..."
All: "Bwahahaha, you fool! Do you think you would be anything if it weren't for us? Everything you do is the result of what we have given you!"
This is one of those things that should be obvious but that's very difficult to explain to some less critical radical environmentalists.
Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound
If you switch from fossil fuels to biofuels, all you do is change the problem set, from pollution and peak oil to deforestation and starvation. There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation. I suppose you could say there is a second, getting energy from outside the system (i.e. space) but that still leaves the problem of getting the energy back out of the system (i.e. pushing it cleanly and transparently back into space once used) so that we don't simply heat/pollute the globe beyond control.
I took the original poster to mean property in the colloquial sense (i.e. bourgeois private property) and his or her statement to thus be the common assertion that the communist ideal is the transformation by the state of all things into the private property of the state.
In Marx's conception property as a general abstraction is simply the appropriation of nature by man and has little to do with ownership. Private property (which is what is typically meant when people mention property or ownership) is seen as a specific type of appropriation whose fiction and location is maintained through legal and forcible instruments.
"All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a pre-condition of production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private property. (Which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form, non-property.)" (Grundrisse)
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character." (Manifesto)
You might also want to read some Marx, to problematize your notion that communism supposes property owned by the government. (Hint: communism proposes the abolition of property).
Oh, you're absolutely correct, they're not just the equivalent of Ivy-Leaguers there, they're Ivy-Leaguers here too (I'm in academics and am at a top university finishing my graduate work right now).
But the point is that even at this level, the ex-Soviets absolutely dominate the departments and the social networks within and between institutions because they are simply far and away ahead of their American counterparts (along with the Chinese). The irony or paradox that I was getting at is that their success here proceeds directly from the system within which they were socialized and educated there—a system which they by and large have a great disdain for, but which is also the absolute reason for their success now. By comparison, the American students have had much more exposure to a variety of lifestyles, cultural variety, and different "classes" (if you will) of recreation (i.e. not just opera but also monster truck rallies), but the American students are simply not competitive academically, and usually their English also isn't half as good, nor do they have anywhere near the level of emotional or work discipline.
It's not a value statement that I'm making, more musing out loud about the cost-benefit analysis for some individuals in growing up under various systems and the ways in which the open society/contract society model tends not just to reduce differentiation at the bottom (i.e. by bringing people in the back woods into production) but also at the top (by failing to drive at the policy level the development of an exceptionalist strong intellectual class, beyond mere market demand).
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I have been using KDE 4.0 with Fedora 9 for some time now. Functionality has been minimal, but useful and it was relatively stable.
I had one issue: file previews in Konqueror/Dolphin were so slow as to be unusable (on the order of 5-10 seconds per image or file). I was told this was fixed in the 4.1 tree, so today I installed the rawhide 4.1 packages.
Now previews are very fast. Unfortunately, it now appears that you cannot fully disable the compositing desktop, meaning that on my minimal-hardware laptop the desktop is now SLOW AS MOLASSES, including this like scrolling in FireFox. In 4.0 these slowdowns only existed when "desktop effects" were enabled. Now it's like I'm using a 386 with a Trident card even when "desktop effects" are disabled. It has been a long time since I could watch . every . widget . being . redrawn . with . two . second . pauses . between . them .
I am officially giving up and going to GNOME. :-( Not cool, because I can't stand GNOME. Maybe it's time to go back to Windowmaker...
No idea, but Konqueror in 4 also shows the same problem for me. I admit, I haven't tried anything beyond Fedora's most up-to-date packages (still 4.0) but for the moment I am using Nautilus as my primary file manager, which pains me, because I am a longtime Konqueror user and like Dolphin a lot.
Note that the previews for tiny images aren't too bad, but for large files, e.g. 10mb digicam images, they take ages (4-5 seconds each or more) whereas in 3.x and in Nautilus they don't.
But otherwise, I like KDE 4 a lot and can't wait until it's more fully realized.
is the incredibly slow-ass file previews. What happened? I can now open up a folder of digital camera images and have Dolphin or Konqueror preview them, and 45 minutes later it will still be working to get all the thumbnails done.
Compare to the current version of Nautilus (or the KDE 3.x version of Konqueror) that previewed more or less instantly... What gives?
Other than that, I've not had any major stability issues or gripes with KDE 4.x (I'm using Fedora 9 and have switched from the new menu to the old "accordion-style" menu.)
1) Replace a hard drive with a larger one.
2) Replace a motherboard with a later generation one.
3) Replace a laptop with a later model, installing the old hard drive into the new machine.
In all three cases, reactivation is always required. Which means that my long years of buying Windows licenses to have "alongside" Linux on my desktop and notebook (yes, I have original disks and licenses for each version of windows from Windows 3.0 through Windows XP, even though I'm a Linux user) ended with Windows XP.
Once I realized what a huge PITA it was going to increasingly be to keep a Windows installation intact/licensed, I just gave up on gaming and Windows altogether. In combination with the copy protection in games, it just wasn't worth it anymore. Now I haven't played a game in three years (I used to have a dedicated gaming machine and stacks and stacks of retail box PC games) and Microsoft and the gaming industry have simply lost a customer.
I have better things to do with my time.
That was my point in a way.
The vast majority of mobile professionals outside of IT ONLY need to use Word and Excel. The Pocket Word and Pocket Excel apps work fine in most cases and for those that done, there a full versions of office apps available for $100 or less from several vendors.
I don't sync mine. It's got a 4GB CF card for data storage and a wireless card and am running Samba on my home PC. I just come home, open my shared folder over the wireless network, and copy documents back and forth.
I'm a writer, so I wanted some form factor to let me touch-type a lot (hours on a single charge) and in very cramped areas, without having to do lots of PC housekeeping tasks or sloooow "boot up" and "shut down" processes. I really wanted a modern equivalent for the Tandy Model 102.
Anyone who needs the same (basically word processing and spreadsheets on a tiny device with a long battery and a touch-typable keyboard) should really consider something more lightweight than a full PC.
Unless there is absolutely some major reason you need Doom and the heavyweight versions of office applications with you at all times, you can do better with an HPC Pro machine.
I picked up a couple of NEC MobilePro machines for $50 on eBay. Windows CE 3, with Pocket Office, Pocket Internet Explorer, etc. I also picked up a Cabletron Roamabout PCMCIA wireless card for $10 with free shipping.
I get:
- Touch-type-able keyboard same as Eee PC
- Less weight
- Less bulk
- Instant on, instant off
- MS Pocket Office and a reasonable range of CE apps
- Many hours of battery life (at least 6)
- If you really need "FULL" Office, you can get SoftMaker office for $100
Just for fun, I tried installing NetBSD on one of these with X using a 4GB CF card and it worked fine, just like any X desktop. But I decided that I just wanted the original functionality so it's back to Windows CE for me, with 4GB of storage and a touch-type-able keyboard and all for $60 cash, and it's small enough to sit on your lap, open, on the subway even in rush hour crowds, which can't be said for the Eee PC.
Only one of the current top three defended the law in this case and tried to hold telecoms responsible for their actions. I'd suggest that if you support this, you
(1) Contact the other campaigns and tell them you won't vote for them and why
(2) Donate to this candidate and support them in primary and general election
(3) Tell your family and friends about (1) and (2) and the reasoning behind it
On the Democratic side, both are in the middle of an intense campaign, but one of them took time out to turn up and vote against the grain to stop this travesty. The other (read: Clinton) couldn't be bothered.
One thing that matters very much is location. There are universities across the U.S. in places where there's very little call for the graduates they produce. That's the situation I was in when I got out of undergrad—and it was several years before I got smart and headed for the coasts.
I think for undergrads at the top of their class in NYC or DC there is always something to do. For undergrads at the top of their class in New Mexico or Montana or Wyoming or Utah this may not be the case, especially for undergrads in very clearly "academic" fields like the humanities or the social sciences.
It's yet another thing we should probably be warning kids about: "You realize that if you get a college degree and want it to help your career, it basically means moving to one coast or the other for at least a decade or so, right?"
by well-meaning educators, parents, and public figures for most of their youthful lives.
College is your ticket out of the ghetto, means a higher income, better work conditions, more freedom, more control over your career, more respect, blah, blah, blah. It's true in a way, but the way a university education is described is often as the opposite of blue-collar work. That is to say that many kids are told (I know I was, all the way up through the end of undergrad) that I was going to college to avoid certain things:
- Being poor
- Having to get paid for what I "do" rather than what I "think"
- Being stuck in a "dead-end job"
- Having to "flip burgers," "answer phones," "make copies," or other "menial labor" work
- Low pay (this is a biggy, and you hear it over and over and over)
Well... all of these things are exactly what you confront when you finish your bachelor's degree. I know it was a tremendous shock to me after having been goaded on for years to get good grades in high school, then to go to college, then to hang in there—goaded using all of these reasons for sticking with it—only to find out that college doesn't provide you with wealth, the ability to get paid for what you think, a way to avoid dead-end jobs, having to start at the absolute entry level, or getting paid nothing for all of the above... The only way up the career ladder is to climb it, from the bottom.
It's the "all kids must go to college" culture that we have—we even direct kids away from the things they're interested in in many cases using these kinds of arguments (which are really veiled threats in a way of what consequences await them if they don't go to college) and then they graduate expecting exactly the benefits that have been used as selling points for all these years.
I can completely empathize. It took me a good five years to come to terms with the fact that I'd essentially been had and would now need to choose between going out and starting up the career ladder as if I'd just graduated high school with essentially no advantage, or going to grad school on the other hand (i.e. school for many more years and at great expense) to gain at least some measurable advantage for myself with all the hard work I'd done.
I chose the latter, but I often reflect on the fact that I could easily have chosen the former as well... there was certainly a point in my life where it could have gone either way.
I don't know if it deserves to be modded down. I'm from Utah and have spent considerable time (living, mostly) in NYC, Chicago, Portland, San Fran, Los Angeles, Austin, Nashville, and a whole smattering of places in between.
Basically, outside of the major coastal and midwestern urban areas the whole damn nation is uneducated white trash, eating, drinking, sleeping, and living the Bible, the small print on Wal-Mart labels, and little else. They're about as different from a New Yorker or a San Franciscan as a microscope lens is from the bottom of a beer bottle.
They probably shouldn't be allowed to vote, much less raise their own children.
PC = Personal Computer
My smartphone has MS Office compatible word processor, spreadsheet, and database. It sends email and browses the web. It takes photos and manages my budget. It has an always-on map (Google Maps) that I can use to get my position and/or directions anywhere.
It IS a personal computer.
PCs aren't dying, they're getting integrated more closely into our lives.
I know reservation rewards well! I used to get tons of free food using them through delivery.com (a fast food delivery website). Here's how it would work:
1. Order food online through delivery.com.
2. An "opt-out" cross-sell appears offering you a $10.00 coupon if you don't uncheck enroll box. First 30 days are free.
3. Agree to "free trial" and get $10.00 coupon code. Then call immediately and cancel service you just enrolled for.
4. Use free $10.00 coupon (still good) next time you want to order food through delivery.com.
5. At end of order, an "opt-out" cross sell appears offering you a $10.00 coupon if you don't uncheck the enroll box...
Just over a year ago I probably got $300 in free food delivery that way over a several month stretch before moving to an area where there is no delivery.com service. Too bad.
My card was never charged by these people. All you have to do is be dilligent and pay attention and call the 1-800 number to cancel.
It's still better than Gimp. And I keep trying Gimp because I have to use windows if I want to use Photoshop.
Crossover Office has run Photoshop (through PS7, which I routinely use, *alongside* GIMP) in Linux for something like six or seven years now. That people still say "I have to use Windows if I want to run Photoshop" is beyond me.
with my copy. They can do whatever they want with the codebase.
Certainly not down.
You will need credit. Not just to buy and sell. To get an apartment. To get a job. To forge other relationships with various institutions that want to evaluate your trustworthiness with something other than your own claims about yourself.
It's regrettable, maybe (certainly I think so), but it's also damn tough to live any other way in the end. A life without credit is a life with many fewer opportunities and many fewer potential relationships. Not just slightly fewer, but fewer to a crippling extent.
But credit is not something that exists here, now, it is something that exists through your own financial history of using it. That is to say it's circular: you get a little, you use that little, then you get a little more, then you use that little more, etc. You only get Credit (big 'C') by using your credit (small 'c') responsibly over time. The later you start, the later you'll actually get there.
If you're over 20 and you haven't started already, you're way behind the game. By the time you're 30 and haven't started, most institutions won't extend you any anymore. They'll just paint you as "different." They don't care whether you're different in a bad or good way for not having credit; they just don't want to do business with people who are "different." Because "different" people might respond to responsibilities in "different" ways from the ways in which members of society typically do.
My advice: go open a bank account and put some money in it. Leave a balance of a few hundred dollars there for a few months, then get a credit card with that bank. Use the damn card. Pay off your balance. Even if you just do $20 a month, i.e. toilet paper and granola bars, on the card. Just to get a credit history going on.
And later on, if you find yourself in this situation again, you'll have a bank account that you can quickly deposit some cash in and use a Visa/Mastercard debit card against.
Goldman Sachs is big capital. Big (capital [B]) Capital. They have people in house to analyze everything, and they are doing very well (Very Well) in the market right now. Almost disgustingly well. Of all industries, Big Capital is probably most informed about the widest variety of things, because their only job is to "know." There is literally not much else that they do.
So while it's okay to doubt, I wouldn't bet too much against the top investment banks right now, because they fund much of the world's industries. (And no, this doesn't mean I'm a cheerleader for them, I rather dislike Big Capital, but their performance over the last few years say that they "know" more often than we do.)
I get endlessly annoyed at the "let the market speak" proponents who really mean simply "let people like me make the decisions," as though this guy, or Linux users, or the people who don't like the "let the market speak" philosophy... aren't a part of the market too.
Be self-consistent. If you want to "let the market speak" then you have to countenance the notion that some of that speech may not be pro-market speech. Not all consumers participate in the market purely to make products better and prices cheaper. I'd venture to say that most of them participate in the market to serve their own idiosyncratic desires... which for this person means writing drivers.
The market is speaking. It's saying that Linux drivers are cooler than better webcams, at least in some cases. So let the market speak.
How long before the individual owns nothing, though everything is owned? How long before it is a legal fact that all "ownership" (even of the very air we breathe) is exercised by corporations rather than individuals or publics?
The way things are going, we will soon see legal battles between all kinds of financial interests:
"We own that story, he wrote it using our software."
"But he was using our hardware."
"Yes, but he was sitting on our chair."
"Ah, but he was sitting inside our building."
"True, but he had eaten our food that morning."
"Yes, and he was working beneath our light bulb."
"Ahhhhh, but he was breathing our air..."
Judge: "Divide the profits from its sale evenly amongst yourselves."
Writer: "But what about me? I don't even want it sold. I wrote it and I should get to control it..."
All: "Bwahahaha, you fool! Do you think you would be anything if it weren't for us? Everything you do is the result of what we have given you!"
This is one of those things that should be obvious but that's very difficult to explain to some less critical radical environmentalists.
Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound
If you switch from fossil fuels to biofuels, all you do is change the problem set, from pollution and peak oil to deforestation and starvation. There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation. I suppose you could say there is a second, getting energy from outside the system (i.e. space) but that still leaves the problem of getting the energy back out of the system (i.e. pushing it cleanly and transparently back into space once used) so that we don't simply heat/pollute the globe beyond control.
I took the original poster to mean property in the colloquial sense (i.e. bourgeois private property) and his or her statement to thus be the common assertion that the communist ideal is the transformation by the state of all things into the private property of the state.
In Marx's conception property as a general abstraction is simply the appropriation of nature by man and has little to do with ownership. Private property (which is what is typically meant when people mention property or ownership) is seen as a specific type of appropriation whose fiction and location is maintained through legal and forcible instruments.
"All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a pre-condition of production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private property. (Which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form, non-property.)" (Grundrisse)
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character." (Manifesto)
You might also want to read some Marx, to problematize your notion that communism supposes property owned by the government. (Hint: communism proposes the abolition of property).
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Oh, you're absolutely correct, they're not just the equivalent of Ivy-Leaguers there, they're Ivy-Leaguers here too (I'm in academics and am at a top university finishing my graduate work right now).
But the point is that even at this level, the ex-Soviets absolutely dominate the departments and the social networks within and between institutions because they are simply far and away ahead of their American counterparts (along with the Chinese). The irony or paradox that I was getting at is that their success here proceeds directly from the system within which they were socialized and educated there—a system which they by and large have a great disdain for, but which is also the absolute reason for their success now. By comparison, the American students have had much more exposure to a variety of lifestyles, cultural variety, and different "classes" (if you will) of recreation (i.e. not just opera but also monster truck rallies), but the American students are simply not competitive academically, and usually their English also isn't half as good, nor do they have anywhere near the level of emotional or work discipline.
It's not a value statement that I'm making, more musing out loud about the cost-benefit analysis for some individuals in growing up under various systems and the ways in which the open society/contract society model tends not just to reduce differentiation at the bottom (i.e. by bringing people in the back woods into production) but also at the top (by failing to drive at the policy level the development of an exceptionalist strong intellectual class, beyond mere market demand).