Lots of people have made the analogy between the two as far as the advantages of free software are concerned. However, looking at this little tidbit, it looks like free software has some of the disadvantages as well (but there are differences between the two that make the disadvantages less severe).
The main problem with communism and free software is that, in order to get get to the blissful anarchy that Marx promises, you need a period of totalitarian management to restructure from the existing system to the new one. Unfortunately, absolute power corrupts asolutely, and you're stuck with a totalitarian system that doesn't want to give up.
This really rears its ugly head when the philosophy starts to expand. As both communism and free software started to catch on, the bigger proponents of the philosophy would rather expand the power of their own totalitarian regimes rather than help establish autonomous regimes. In the eyes of Moscow, for example, the Ukraine Socialist Republic was good, but the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic was better (it wasn't until later that they learned of the advantages of puppet states). And the same is true with the GNU: Instead of presenting themselves and their liscencing scheme as one out of a list of alternatives, they'd rather all free software be written under the GPL.
Fortunately, when all is said and done, we're talking about an operating system and not a system of government. No matter how much people like Stallman bitch and moan, dissenting voices never have to worry about the GNU/KGB descending upon them and the Coders' Army won't send in the tanks to prevent code forking. So when all is said and done, short of brainwashing, people are still perfectly capable of making up their own mind about what they want to write or run, Which is good, because I find some GNU tools to be a pain to learn...
At any rate, in the game of Axis & Allies that is the OS war, we'll call Microsoft facist Germany, GNU will be the Soviet Union, and for the role of the political moderates (relatively speaking), we have corporations like IBM and RedHat as the US and the UK. Now all we need is somebody to play Japan...
Oh, yeah, Apple. Duh...
Making sure to shoot both feet...
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 2
Usually, when it comes to Microsoft, their marketing department can do no wrong (unless you're looking at it from a legal standpoint). The marketoids in Redmond are so good at their jobs that Microsoft can put the same old operating system into a new box with a new splash screen and still have people lined up on launch day to buy it.
But this has got to be the stupidest move they've ever done, quite possibly the stupidest thing any marketing deparment has ever done in the history of marketing.
I mean, let's look at this: In the coming three-way console war, there is little if anything to distinguish the systems. Sure, GameCube doesn't allow DVD playback, but I think the ability to play HDTV-resolution games out of the box (something I read in the latest Popular Science) helps make things more even. Beyond that, the three hardware platforms are more or less within spitting distance of each other.
But of the three, the XBox is gearing to be the most expensive of the three options. Even without this new "deal" they got going, PS2 has been in production long enough to justify a price cut around XBox launch time, Nintendo doesn't have to bribe the DVD-CCA, and the XBox price has to cover that hard drive.
Because the three consoles are pretty much neck and neck, the best they can do is win the software war: The winner will be the one that has games only for their system that will make people want to buy that system. Of the three, only Nintendo really has in-house coders that can pull this off, and even they'll need help this time around. Everybody should be scrambling to throw money at third parties to develop exclusively for their system and their system alone.
Instead, the folks at Microsoft now pretty much insist that you buy the system bundled with first- and second-party games. Aside from the fact that this essentially drives up the cost of the system more, customers aren't going to have much money left to buy third-party games. While this tactic might be profitable for Microsoft in the short-term, third-party publishers stand to lose money by having games ready for system release, and that ultimately hurts Microsoft hardware sales in the long term.
What in God's name are they thinking?!? They're setting themselves up to hemorrhage cash at a time when they should be shoring up for a possible XP injunction in the US and/or EU.
Let me try to be impartial for a moment. Even though my violent gut instict is that they have no chance in hell of surviving in the console market longer than Dreamcast, maybe they have a chance. After all, they took over so many other software markets from their competitors. But how could they pull this off?
They could try giving away their new software for free, much like they did with IE. However, that $500 to $1200 price tag doesn't exactly have "free games" written all over it.
They could try using a marketing blitz to get name recognition for their games. Well, I'm a video game junkie, I know upcoming GameCube and PS2 games, but I can't name a single XBox-exclusive game. Sure, there is a marketing blitz in place pushing the console, but if I can't name a game for the system, I'm not sure it's all that effective.
They could try absorbing a good, well-known third-party game company into the Microsoft fold. But the pending console war makes it much more profitable for a third-party publisher to be hardware-agnostic. The more systems they publish for, the more likely they're going to sell.
Finally, they could try writing the best damned games on the planet. But even then, they'd have one heck of an uphill climb simply because they'd have to prove themselves. Everybody knows Nintendo, Konami, Capcom, SNK, Sega, and all those other big names in the industry make good games. Microsoft is more of an unknown than anything else.
And I haven't even touched on things like how the PS2 sold better as a DVD player than a game console on launch, how Microsoft's UltimateTV set-top box still needed to be patched, how Microsoft has neither Zelda or Final Fantasy...
So what the heck were they thinking? Is there some sort of Master Plan that I'm missing here, some sort of Byzantine, Illuminati-ish conspiracy involved that will help them more systems? I mean, they can't be THAT stupid... can they?
At any rate, a few months ago there was something on the Discovery Channel (or some such channel) about the Hindenberg disaster. One guy claimed that the main culprit wasn't the hydrogen in the gas bags, but the material they used to paint/seal the outside (claiming it was the same stuff we use in solid rocket boosters today). Whether this is true or not, the guy did have a point: Hydrogen burns clear, and the exploding zeppelin was anything but.
O: At about this time last year, the Internet freelance marketplace ants.com announced that you'd won a bid to design a mascot for them. Whatever became of that?
BB: I entered as a joke and a bet with my brother-in-law that I could name a price that a dot-com would refuse to pay. The bastards paid.
It wouldn't be very helpful I don't think. If they can't get the individual, they'll go after the medium. Recall what the Scientologists did to Slashdot after someone made an anonymous post they didn't like.
"Just because sales went up does not mean that sales would not have gone up *more* without this "interference.""
I'm not disagreeing that there's a chance this program hurt record sales to some degree. However, I see no reason to believe that sales would have been quintupled without the presence of this program. At the very least, this would likely have been accompanied with a corresponding increase in CD player sales, for instance...
I'd protest for my right to view pr0n, too, if the only way to forcibly remove me from my job is through impeachment. These judges literally have nothing to lose, the best the people in DC can do is bitch and moan.
... except there's talk of MS SQL coming with XP like IE came with 9x. And we know what happened to Netscape when Microsoft shipped their OS with a competing, free application.
""I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file," says Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant in San Francisco. "But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you.""
Jxta seems to be a bit better at being a true P2P network without having to know the address of a node before-hand, but Freenet seems to handle bandwidth better by distributing popular files across multiple nodes as needed.
Sun is apparently trying to keep a "hands-off" posture with IP security on Jxta, while Freenet carries it one step further by making it difficult to find who posted or holds "bad" information at any given time.
So... which will ultimately be the better/prefered choice of users?
I'm sorry, I seem to have wandered into the wrong website. I'm looking for Slashdot. I'm not entirely sure how I wound up at msn.com instead. I guess that'll teach me to use IE...
You see, "popular culture" has the word "popular" in it, which means "involving many people." Big media corporations have figured out what this is and offer it in a neat little box with a pretty pink bow around it, and like hotcakes it does sell because that's the definition of "popular."
"They are all owned, lock and stock, by large IP joints."
You know... I almost wish that were true. That way they'd stop having to try to kiss my ass every November. It would really cut down on the political advertising I have to put up with, maintaining the usual level of idiocy in TV commercials.
In other news, Mozilla has achieved the much-vaunted "five-nines" status. Mozilla 0.99999 was released earlier this February, and most coders on the project still claim that 1.0 will be finished "soon."
Re:Homogeny isn't a bad thing.
on
Windows in 2020
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· Score: 2
Personally, I'd like to see you try to get homogeneity in an operating system with more flavors than Baskin Robins and people can't even agree on which kernel to use. The Linux community is heterogeneous pretty much by definition. Some are using Mandrake, some are using Debian, some are using the old Slackware for the hell of it, hardware companies will make their own branded Linux for their own computers... They'll all run most of the same software and they'll probably all have bash, but that's about where the similarities end. It's like saying a world where everybody uses a Microsoft OS is homogeneous even though some are using XP and some are using DOS 6.
"Had KDE and Gnome merged for the common good, and challenged Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, we would have probably made it..."
You're suggesting that we're trying to beat Microsoft at their own game, and that isn't going to happen. Linux is about choice and about diversity, not trying to impose the One True Desktop upon others.
"OS homogeny is a wonderful thing"
Beyond milk and chemical mixtures, the concept of homogeneity in anything gives me cold chills.
Re:Real Time Strategy - Biases?
on
Kohan for Linux
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· Score: 2
"instead promoting a vision of the American dream gone bad time and time again."
Yeah, only us dirty Americans would team up with the elves and dwarves to persecute the ogres as in WarCraft...
"For example, the Civilisation series of games placed Capitalism at the top of the tree of economic systems, and Democracy at the top of the tree of political systems."
Well, when was the last time a democratic, capitalistic nation-state beat-out one that has neither of those traits? And remember, even Hitler and Stalin got there by elections.
"The aim of the game was to turn your civilisation into another America, replete with global ambitions and terrible ethics (to kill or be killed)."
The US is actually less capitalistic than some other countries. If we had pure capitalism, we wouldn't be talking about such things as the Microsoft anti-trust case, and we'd all go down to the Standard Oil station to gas up our cars.
And as for the democracy bit, we have senators who represent their state (and not necesarily the people of that state... take a look at how they were originally chosen), and an electoral college designed to take the interests of both the people and the state into account.
And as for the "lousy ethics" bit, you need a source of conflict, or else you wouldn't have a game (or even a story). One could shift the conflict from person vs. person to person vs. nature (natural disasters to plan against and such), but then you won't have a multi-player game.
"Why should capitalism be #1 economic system? Why not communism?"
Because command economies have failed over and over in the course of the 20th century. The Soviet Union was essentially in the red (no pun intended) for almost all of it's existance, spending more than they had to keep up with the proverbial Jonses. The GDP of the People's Republic of China has been a joke until both the incorporation of capitalistic Hong Kong and the loosening of governmental controls on industry. North Korea starves while South Korea rivals Japan. Shall I go on?
"If we develop intelligent AI's, then the issue that has meant communism never worked in the past (the planner was crap all planned economies to date) will not be an issue."
The issue isn't lousy planning, the issue is whether to plan to begin with. For more on the issue of planned vs. unplanned complex systems, take a look over at this/. article and the various responses.
"Why don RTS games show some variety of political systems and consequences, instead of putting the American system on an undeserved pedestal?"
I'm still not sure how you're seeing these governments as "American" and not "French" or "Italian" or "Russian" or any of the other capitalistic republics, but going from colony to world power in about a century and superpower in under two makes me question your use of the word "undeserved."
"I would like to see RTS games be more morally responsible, and allow for a more widespread collection of political idealogies and econmic systems, with no value judgements placed on each."
If you want to do that, you're going to need some sort of measuring stick to measure each system by. If you were to use the real world and recorded history as your measuring stick, guess what you end up with...
"The aim of the games should be multiculturalism and postmodern tolerance, not outright destruction. How can our children be expected to understand and tolerate"
You're one of those "Doom turns kids into muderers" people, aren't you?
"The aim of the games should be multiculturalism and postmodern tolerance, not outright destruction. How can our children be expected to understand and tolerate Japanese, Russians and Chinese when at night they plot to destroy them and commit mass murder?"
Funny you mention mass murder and Japan (anthrax on civilians in WWII), Russia (Stalin made Hitler look like a Girl Scout) and China ("cultural revolutions"... need I say more?) in the same sentence.
However, since both Japan and Russia both have capitalistic economies (Japan can be considered more capitalisic than the US on many counts) and democratic governments, and how China is showing marked improvement only after they've losened controls on their economy, it would seem that you're confusing "government" and "economy" with "culture." As for why Western culture is doing so well, I reccomend you start with a glance at this e-mail (and the subsequent responses) about why China won't be becoming a superpower any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem with communism and free software is that, in order to get get to the blissful anarchy that Marx promises, you need a period of totalitarian management to restructure from the existing system to the new one. Unfortunately, absolute power corrupts asolutely, and you're stuck with a totalitarian system that doesn't want to give up.
This really rears its ugly head when the philosophy starts to expand. As both communism and free software started to catch on, the bigger proponents of the philosophy would rather expand the power of their own totalitarian regimes rather than help establish autonomous regimes. In the eyes of Moscow, for example, the Ukraine Socialist Republic was good, but the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic was better (it wasn't until later that they learned of the advantages of puppet states). And the same is true with the GNU: Instead of presenting themselves and their liscencing scheme as one out of a list of alternatives, they'd rather all free software be written under the GPL.
Fortunately, when all is said and done, we're talking about an operating system and not a system of government. No matter how much people like Stallman bitch and moan, dissenting voices never have to worry about the GNU/KGB descending upon them and the Coders' Army won't send in the tanks to prevent code forking. So when all is said and done, short of brainwashing, people are still perfectly capable of making up their own mind about what they want to write or run, Which is good, because I find some GNU tools to be a pain to learn...
At any rate, in the game of Axis & Allies that is the OS war, we'll call Microsoft facist Germany, GNU will be the Soviet Union, and for the role of the political moderates (relatively speaking), we have corporations like IBM and RedHat as the US and the UK. Now all we need is somebody to play Japan...
Oh, yeah, Apple. Duh...
But this has got to be the stupidest move they've ever done, quite possibly the stupidest thing any marketing deparment has ever done in the history of marketing.
I mean, let's look at this: In the coming three-way console war, there is little if anything to distinguish the systems. Sure, GameCube doesn't allow DVD playback, but I think the ability to play HDTV-resolution games out of the box (something I read in the latest Popular Science) helps make things more even. Beyond that, the three hardware platforms are more or less within spitting distance of each other.
But of the three, the XBox is gearing to be the most expensive of the three options. Even without this new "deal" they got going, PS2 has been in production long enough to justify a price cut around XBox launch time, Nintendo doesn't have to bribe the DVD-CCA, and the XBox price has to cover that hard drive.
Because the three consoles are pretty much neck and neck, the best they can do is win the software war: The winner will be the one that has games only for their system that will make people want to buy that system. Of the three, only Nintendo really has in-house coders that can pull this off, and even they'll need help this time around. Everybody should be scrambling to throw money at third parties to develop exclusively for their system and their system alone.
Instead, the folks at Microsoft now pretty much insist that you buy the system bundled with first- and second-party games. Aside from the fact that this essentially drives up the cost of the system more, customers aren't going to have much money left to buy third-party games. While this tactic might be profitable for Microsoft in the short-term, third-party publishers stand to lose money by having games ready for system release, and that ultimately hurts Microsoft hardware sales in the long term.
What in God's name are they thinking?!? They're setting themselves up to hemorrhage cash at a time when they should be shoring up for a possible XP injunction in the US and/or EU.
Let me try to be impartial for a moment. Even though my violent gut instict is that they have no chance in hell of surviving in the console market longer than Dreamcast, maybe they have a chance. After all, they took over so many other software markets from their competitors. But how could they pull this off?
They could try giving away their new software for free, much like they did with IE. However, that $500 to $1200 price tag doesn't exactly have "free games" written all over it.
They could try using a marketing blitz to get name recognition for their games. Well, I'm a video game junkie, I know upcoming GameCube and PS2 games, but I can't name a single XBox-exclusive game. Sure, there is a marketing blitz in place pushing the console, but if I can't name a game for the system, I'm not sure it's all that effective.
They could try absorbing a good, well-known third-party game company into the Microsoft fold. But the pending console war makes it much more profitable for a third-party publisher to be hardware-agnostic. The more systems they publish for, the more likely they're going to sell.
Finally, they could try writing the best damned games on the planet. But even then, they'd have one heck of an uphill climb simply because they'd have to prove themselves. Everybody knows Nintendo, Konami, Capcom, SNK, Sega, and all those other big names in the industry make good games. Microsoft is more of an unknown than anything else.
And I haven't even touched on things like how the PS2 sold better as a DVD player than a game console on launch, how Microsoft's UltimateTV set-top box still needed to be patched, how Microsoft has neither Zelda or Final Fantasy...
So what the heck were they thinking? Is there some sort of Master Plan that I'm missing here, some sort of Byzantine, Illuminati-ish conspiracy involved that will help them more systems? I mean, they can't be THAT stupid... can they?
How are you? I send you this vote to get your advice.
At any rate, a few months ago there was something on the Discovery Channel (or some such channel) about the Hindenberg disaster. One guy claimed that the main culprit wasn't the hydrogen in the gas bags, but the material they used to paint/seal the outside (claiming it was the same stuff we use in solid rocket boosters today). Whether this is true or not, the guy did have a point: Hydrogen burns clear, and the exploding zeppelin was anything but.
BB: I entered as a joke and a bet with my brother-in-law that I could name a price that a dot-com would refuse to pay. The bastards paid.
He's only 53 still.
It wouldn't be very helpful I don't think. If they can't get the individual, they'll go after the medium. Recall what the Scientologists did to Slashdot after someone made an anonymous post they didn't like.
Replace "Dutch" with "Russian," and the same could be said for Sklyarov. But he's in jail just the same.
Man, you didn't even spell it right... What is the world coming to when people don't even know how to properly use profanities?
Including or excluding the "Democratic People's Republic" of Korea?
I'm not disagreeing that there's a chance this program hurt record sales to some degree. However, I see no reason to believe that sales would have been quintupled without the presence of this program. At the very least, this would likely have been accompanied with a corresponding increase in CD player sales, for instance...
I'd protest for my right to view pr0n, too, if the only way to forcibly remove me from my job is through impeachment. These judges literally have nothing to lose, the best the people in DC can do is bitch and moan.
... except there's talk of MS SQL coming with XP like IE came with 9x. And we know what happened to Netscape when Microsoft shipped their OS with a competing, free application.
How about flashable chips?
Only good up to 100 feet without repeaters. And it requires you to be allowed to use the land between BBS 1 and BBS 2.
"a leased line,"
Which means you don't really own it, and the provider can govern what travels over said leased line.
"or a wireless ethernet."
The FCC owns the airwaves.
As it stands now, faxes are legally just as good as the original, including (especially) any signatures you fax. Kinda tricky to do with with e-mail.
Jxta seems to be a bit better at being a true P2P network without having to know the address of a node before-hand, but Freenet seems to handle bandwidth better by distributing popular files across multiple nodes as needed.
Sun is apparently trying to keep a "hands-off" posture with IP security on Jxta, while Freenet carries it one step further by making it difficult to find who posted or holds "bad" information at any given time.
So... which will ultimately be the better/prefered choice of users?
http://www.cnn.com/2001/fyi/teachers.ednews/08/14/ studentrights.ap/index.html
Quoth the court: "Just don't abuse it too much."
So I guess this kinda cancels out that "victory for freedom" you mentioned.
I'm sorry, I seem to have wandered into the wrong website. I'm looking for Slashdot. I'm not entirely sure how I wound up at msn.com instead. I guess that'll teach me to use IE...
You see, "popular culture" has the word "popular" in it, which means "involving many people." Big media corporations have figured out what this is and offer it in a neat little box with a pretty pink bow around it, and like hotcakes it does sell because that's the definition of "popular."
You know... I almost wish that were true. That way they'd stop having to try to kiss my ass every November. It would really cut down on the political advertising I have to put up with, maintaining the usual level of idiocy in TV commercials.
This could very well be the biggest slashdotting in all recorded human history.
Now I have a new ferrous option to coat my depleted uranium slugs with for my rail gun...
In other news, Mozilla has achieved the much-vaunted "five-nines" status. Mozilla 0.99999 was released earlier this February, and most coders on the project still claim that 1.0 will be finished "soon."
"Had KDE and Gnome merged for the common good, and challenged Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, we would have probably made it..."
You're suggesting that we're trying to beat Microsoft at their own game, and that isn't going to happen. Linux is about choice and about diversity, not trying to impose the One True Desktop upon others.
"OS homogeny is a wonderful thing"
Beyond milk and chemical mixtures, the concept of homogeneity in anything gives me cold chills.
Yeah, only us dirty Americans would team up with the elves and dwarves to persecute the ogres as in WarCraft...
"For example, the Civilisation series of games placed Capitalism at the top of the tree of economic systems, and Democracy at the top of the tree of political systems."
Well, when was the last time a democratic, capitalistic nation-state beat-out one that has neither of those traits? And remember, even Hitler and Stalin got there by elections.
"The aim of the game was to turn your civilisation into another America, replete with global ambitions and terrible ethics (to kill or be killed)."
The US is actually less capitalistic than some other countries. If we had pure capitalism, we wouldn't be talking about such things as the Microsoft anti-trust case, and we'd all go down to the Standard Oil station to gas up our cars.
And as for the democracy bit, we have senators who represent their state (and not necesarily the people of that state... take a look at how they were originally chosen), and an electoral college designed to take the interests of both the people and the state into account.
And as for the "lousy ethics" bit, you need a source of conflict, or else you wouldn't have a game (or even a story). One could shift the conflict from person vs. person to person vs. nature (natural disasters to plan against and such), but then you won't have a multi-player game.
"Why should capitalism be #1 economic system? Why not communism?"
Because command economies have failed over and over in the course of the 20th century. The Soviet Union was essentially in the red (no pun intended) for almost all of it's existance, spending more than they had to keep up with the proverbial Jonses. The GDP of the People's Republic of China has been a joke until both the incorporation of capitalistic Hong Kong and the loosening of governmental controls on industry. North Korea starves while South Korea rivals Japan. Shall I go on?
"If we develop intelligent AI's, then the issue that has meant communism never worked in the past (the planner was crap all planned economies to date) will not be an issue."
The issue isn't lousy planning, the issue is whether to plan to begin with. For more on the issue of planned vs. unplanned complex systems, take a look over at this /. article and the various responses.
"Why don RTS games show some variety of political systems and consequences, instead of putting the American system on an undeserved pedestal?"
I'm still not sure how you're seeing these governments as "American" and not "French" or "Italian" or "Russian" or any of the other capitalistic republics, but going from colony to world power in about a century and superpower in under two makes me question your use of the word "undeserved."
"I would like to see RTS games be more morally responsible, and allow for a more widespread collection of political idealogies and econmic systems, with no value judgements placed on each."
If you want to do that, you're going to need some sort of measuring stick to measure each system by. If you were to use the real world and recorded history as your measuring stick, guess what you end up with...
"The aim of the games should be multiculturalism and postmodern tolerance, not outright destruction. How can our children be expected to understand and tolerate"
You're one of those "Doom turns kids into muderers" people, aren't you?
"The aim of the games should be multiculturalism and postmodern tolerance, not outright destruction. How can our children be expected to understand and tolerate Japanese, Russians and Chinese when at night they plot to destroy them and commit mass murder?"
Funny you mention mass murder and Japan (anthrax on civilians in WWII), Russia (Stalin made Hitler look like a Girl Scout) and China ("cultural revolutions"... need I say more?) in the same sentence.
However, since both Japan and Russia both have capitalistic economies (Japan can be considered more capitalisic than the US on many counts) and democratic governments, and how China is showing marked improvement only after they've losened controls on their economy, it would seem that you're confusing "government" and "economy" with "culture." As for why Western culture is doing so well, I reccomend you start with a glance at this e-mail (and the subsequent responses) about why China won't be becoming a superpower any time soon.