Excellent. Now I can put the "Start Applications Menu" on the left of the top mounted menu barn and have an Apple menu, unlike in OS X. I am tempted to build a box for my MacOS bigot developer friend. He hates the OS X interface, although third party widgets ameliorate some of the problems. He did show interest when I told him KDE could display/remove removable file systems at mount/unmount and use proper menus.
The menu being at the top also helps to avoid a major problem with both Windows and most *N*X systems. When you slide the mouse to the top of the screen, you can't overshoot the menu bar and go into the title bar -- the menu bar is topmost. This saves time and keeps you from overshooting then backtracking down to the menu. I know KDE can do this but I haven't played with it much. I'm an OS X and KDE (and formerly enlightenment) user, and have found the menu bar at the top to be a very nice feature, especially with a trackpad (as opposed to a mouse).
Precisely! Fitts's Law in action. The top mounted menu bar makes menus infinitale tall and thus ~five times as fast to access. That is the main reason I use KDE instead of GNOME. The menus in KDE are not well organized, but at least I can put them in a useful place. A long time ago somebody wrote a library which sucked the menus out of GNOME apps and put them in the top panel, but it died on the vine.
If they're so poor as to be living in welfare housing, why do they have a COMPUTER and INTERNET ACCESS? Or are we giving that away with the free food/shelter/check these days, too?
Just last night I saw on the news that the latest numbers say a person must make $27.50 per hour to afford a two bedroom apartment in Boston. That does not account for dependents. It is hardly unfathomable that a woman with two children would need, and qualify for, housing assistance and then be able to afford internet access. Granted, rents aren't quite as bad in New York as they are here, but I don't think they are exactly cheap. Also, I suspect NY has better subsidized housing availability. Not surprisingly, we have a serious crisis up here.
Remember, for the bottom half of wage earners, wages have fallen significantly since the late seventies. For the bottom tenth, real dollar incomes dropped 16% between 1979 and 1989. And they only rose 1.6% in the "boom" nineties. Rents, OTOH, have shot through the roof in recent years. And as I'm sure you have noticed computers and internet access have dropped quite a bit in real dollar price since 1979. Bottom line, there are a lot more people who can't afford an apartment but can afford a computer with internet access.
I suspect that versions of Virtual PC that ran on 604 based Macs will run fine on a G5...just slower than the current Virtual PC release on slower hardware!
Actually, AFAIK all previous PPC CPUs were bi-endian, including the 604 family.
Last time I ran Bochs on OS X (1.5 years ago?) it was unbelievably slow and had no networking.
The hardware implementation is partially proprietary in that it is backed by patents which IBM and Moto enforce. The same is true of P4. However the specs and ISA are published standards.
"Proprietary" and "published" are not mutually exclusive.
Asolutely correct. Proprietary means either held as a trade secret or exclusive by patent or copyright enforcement. I should have been more clear and said published standards not held proprietary via patent and copyright enforcement.
XServe? Are you kidding? For our purposes it is a toy.
So you should be calling up Apple and telling them you'd like to buy a more robust server with OS X. Remember, APPLE IS A HARDWARE COMPANY. They do not make OS X just to make your experience with IBM servers more pleasant. OS X is the hook to get you to buy their hardware.
Last week I told one of their hardware Engineers face to face in front of our sales rep and our technical rep. They have a strict secrecy policy, but he felt it was safe to tell me they have no plans for a blade system, much less one optimized for availability. I told him that if that was the case they should license their OS to IBM or TeraSoft. He thought that was a great idea and recommended I tell my IBM rep. That is a problem since I don't have an IBM rep. We don't let those guys in the door.
Sad really; I was surprised at how close Panther is geting to meeting our needs. But the hardware isn't there. I suspect they will offer a more fault tolerant 2U rack system soon enough. Something to compete with HPq DL380s and the like. That would put them where we are currently in the Wintel space, except with lower cost of ownership (power aside, those CALs kill us). But that isn't compelling enough to overcome MS inertia. Being able to replace all our Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC systems with one power efficient blade system (per data center) might be.
What I said was that there was more to the proprietary/closed nature of the platform than just the processor. This does not mean that the processor is proprietary - though by a strict definition, it is proprietary, to the PowerPC group of IBM, Moto, and Apple, though it may be available as a COTS part - if Intel tried to set up their own PPC fab plant, they'd be sued, no?
The hardware implementation is partially proprietary in that it is backed by patents which IBM and Moto enforce. The same is true of P4. However the specs and ISA are published standards. If you want to build you own PPC chip you are free to, so long as it does not violate their patents. Again, this is like Intel. How this is part of the "proprietary/closed nature of the platform" I don't understand.
What I was saying, though, is that the PLATFORM cannot be replicated using entirely Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) Parts, the way that the Intel platform can. As you said, you'd need to reverse engineer the boot code, and possibly also reserve engineer parts of the OS to get it to run on non-Apple hardware. For the Wintel platform, the reverse engineering work has already been done, and there are already COTS BIOSes.
Precisely. The Intel platform is just as proprietary as the Macintosh. The difference is that the proprietary bits have long been reverse engineered and duplicated. Off the rack availablilty is not relevant to the question of whether the platform is proprietary. That is a market question. CHRP and PREP are fully open and documented, IIRC, but you can't buy enough parts offf the rack to build CHRP and PREP boxes either.
If you want the closest thing to an Apple you can get with COTS parts, you should probably try to get Darwin+OpenStep running on that PPC970 blade system. After all, you hardly need the Aqua GUI for a data center. Or you can always buy an XServe.
Nope. That would have no benefits over GNU/Linux and significant disadvantages. There are plenty of useful proprietary bits in OS X besides the GUI. The incredibly useful command line version of Apple Software Restore springs to mind. The idea is to have a hardware partitionable blade system where we can devote whatever hardware resources we want to a specific server. With ASR we could custom image system drives in five minutes. "Need to replace a server? Give me five minutes. No I don't have to go to the server room. I can allocate the hardware and image the system from here." OS X makes a nice drop in Windows replacement for CIFS etc. The management tools learning curve would be very shallow for our existing Army of Windows admins. My sources at Apple tell me that Panther will ship with a heavily GUIfied Samba 3 implementation too. We could forego Active directory and save a bundle on CALs. Our core business happens to rely on an DBMS which is supported on OS X but not Linux PPC. And certainly not Darwin. If we want to leverage the energy and cooling benefits of PPC, we need to run OS X or find a new DB platform. Likewise, Veritas will already sell you Foundation Suite for OS X, so long as you self validate. We'd need that as we rely heavily on shared storage (Panther multipaths, BTW). They will most likely never support Darwin. There isn't even a commercially supported Darwin distro. This is an enterprise we are talking about here.
XServe? Are you kidding? For our purposes it is a toy.
Apple's Marketing department needs to show television commercials showing how EASY it is to network their computers to existing Windows and Linux corporate networks and continue running in the event of a virus/worm breakout in the Wintel world.
Except that SMB services on Jaguar kinda suck. There are a number of bugs. WINS name resolution, for instance, doesn't work. So if you use NT Domain services (not Active Directory) you can't browse shares on a routed network. Bit of a problem for many corporate users. I submitted a bug report and nagged my Apple rep mercilessly, but they aren't going to fix it. Should be OK in Panther. I haven't used OS X with AD. Supposedly it works OK with just a little tweaking on the AD side.
MOst of the Samba problems in OS X are pretty trivial, but hosed WINS is a deal breaker.
Yes he did say the processor was proprietary, or more precisely that it was part of the '"proprietary"/"closed" nature of the Mac platform,' whatever that means.
That there's more to the "proprietary"/"closed" nature of the Mac platform than just the processor, right?
you can't go out and buy a mac motherboard and build yourself a mac. some people might jump on that and say YES YOU CAN but that is still using apple's proprietary (meaning that you can't get them from a 3rd party company) parts salvaged from older machines, or reserved for repairs.
Proprietary doesn't mean impossible to buy from third parties either. It means used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker, or held as a business secret. In other words, it means illegal to buy from third party vendors, or impossible to buy from them because they don't know how to make it. To my knowledge, very little of the Mac fits that bill. I think even the bridge chips are fully documented and not held proprietary. The only part thing I know to be proprietary on Apple motherboards is the boot code in OpenFirmware. You'd have to write your own replacement for that. But aren't Dell and HPq's BIOS code proprietary as well?
Apple has no compelling reason to keep the hardware proprietary because they hold the OS proprietary (well OK, large chunks are dual licensed). You can't legally use their OS without their hardware, and the OS is the big selling point. Too bad, because OS X Server and SuSe on a hardware partitioned PPC970 blade system from IBM would be pretty compelling in my data center.
I hear you and agree. OTOH, I'm not so sure trademarking is going to help prevent frivolous suits either.
One way to convince a judge, if you had to, would be with a demonstration. Set up a quickie sendmail server on a laptop and telnet to port 25 from another. Type in a simple RFC 821 conversation with incorrect from: and to: info and then show him how it looks in the receiving client. Also give him a copy of RFC 821.
I am just trying to figure out how to strike a balance between limiting my exposure to liability in this networked world (because everyone is happy to sue these days) and still participating in society in normal ways.
I don't see what you have to worry about. The from and to fields you see on an e-mail are totally arbitrary and have no relationship to sender and recipient. E-mail is like a business letter. It has a header, which contains identifying information of interest to the reader but does not effect delivery, and an envelope, which has the actual delivery information. The from field on the message you receive comes from the header. Anyone who sues you over it has a very bad lawyer.
As someone who runs both MacOS X and various Unix variants, I can honestly say that I can install and configure FreeBSD on a PC faster than MacOS X can get through the basic installation...
Using an iPod I can install a two gigabyte image, including Classic, MS Office and all our other standard applications, on a G4 400 in five minutes. The necessary command line utilities are part of the standard 10.2 install, but Mike Bombich's NetRestore Cocoa/AppleScript front end makes it fast and easy. Likewise his Carbon Copy Cloner makes creating compressed images a breeze.
Just yesterday I had to make six clones of a Slackware box. The fastest way to do it was to take them all off the network, put them on a hub, boot each from a floppy, manually fdisk, mk2fs and build a rudimentary root directory structure, then rsync the original box to them. It was downright comical and took two of us hours. Even accounting for Murphy's law it wouldn't have taken more than half an hour with Macs. Simply boot a target machine off the build machine in Firewire target disk mode, Clone it with Carbon Copy Cloner, hook both of those up to two more target machines etc. until done. Each clone is a one or two click affair.
Granted, things would have been a bit easier had we been allowed to use RedHat and do kickstart builds then rsync, but nothing approaching the ease OS X affords. G4U would have been easy but it was way too slow.
Here's a TCO issue... suppose I want to manage my new computers? SMS from Microsoft lists at $1,779 with 25 client licenses. For each additional 25 client license I have to pay another $899. And the whole thing won't run without SQL server, so I need to buy a license for that at $1500-$10,000. I couldn't find any information about educational discounts. Apple Remote Desktop for unlimited clients is $499 list, $299 for educational customers.
I took the MS numbers and info off MS's web site and the Yahoo store (SQL Server).
That is our educational discount on Superdrive equipped eMacs (1Ghz/256/80). I just bought an iBook 12"/900/128/40 for $1099 with an Airport card and got an iPod for $69 more ($200 rebate). Our price on the 867Mhz TiBook is $1799 with Airport and an extended warranty. That is a $629 discount.
Actually the V-1 wasn't a rocket. It was a pulse jet powered cruise missile. A pulsejet is sort of like a ramjet with venetian blinds on the air intake, It fires in pulses rather than a continuous stream. Unlike a ramjets, pulsejets can be started while standing still.
AFAIK, the sourcey bits in RPM have no GUI though. But so long as you are dealing with src.rpms the command set is simple. Even when building.src.rpms from tarballs it ain't exactly rocket science.
and we could base such an installer on the standard./configure && make && sudo make install procedure. Such a program could find out what options./configure takes and present them in a nice gui.
And we could call it RPM;-)
Seriously, this is how source.rpms work. Although they are toolset agnostic and can run any build commands you put in their spec file.
Problem here is, of course, that all of your packages need to be maintained and distributed for your packaging system. You cannot simply download this cool program from the developer's website and install it, unless he's made packages for your distro-- which, let's face it, is a little confusing for your average luser who just wants to download a file, browse to it using his nice graphical explorer-like interface and click it to install. Linux might benefit from a step-based, easy, per-application, graphical, STANDARD InstallShield-like thingie.
You mean a GUI for rpmbuild? This is how RPM works. So long as you have it on your system, you simply download the src.rpm, install it and do an rpmbuild. It will compile it for your system and build a.rpm binary package with all your dependencies. The developer doesn't have to package for your distro, just for RPM. That covers a lot of distros. Currently, you do have to type two commands.
These are certainly the popular definitions, but they are not the ones my economics professors, primarily Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, taught me. I wouldn't rely on general dictionary to define economic terms. Furthermore, their socialism definition fully jibes with what I said. They say nothing about planning or market model, only ownership and administration. Similarly the Fascism definition does not contradict my statement. As for a real world example of a market socialist economy, that was certainly the direction Chile was heading quite rapidly until 1973. Soviet Russia under the NEP (New Economic Program) was more slowly moving to a Market Socialist system, with some limited private ownership mixed in, until Lenin's death. Likewise, in the eighties China undertook a partial marketization of their agricultural system. Farms were all collectively owned, but peasants were granted individual plots. They were under contract to seel a certain amount of their crop on the governement market. Any remainder they could sell on private markets. Furthermore, collectively and state owned enterprises compete all the time in mixed free market economies. Look at the European auto industry. Until the eighties' rash of sell-offs, Volvo, Renault (IIRC) and Fiat all had some state ownership.
Among the more influential Market Socialist theorists in this country was the Individualist Anarchist icon Benjamin Tucker who, contrary to Libertarian mythology, proposed the complete elimination of private property.
The Nazis used the word Socialist, but they were nothing of the sort. Was the German Democratic Republic democratic? For that matter, is the Democratic party in the US primarily composed of Democrats? It was pure propaganda. The Nazi economy most certainly was Capitalist. The means of production was entirely privately owned. And Fascism was much more than a political philosophy. There was a religious restoration element for one thing (one of the differences between Fascism and Nazism). Fascism was very clear about it's economic agenda: state planning under private owhership. As Mussolini said, it was at its core the merger of state and corporate power. BTW, there is also non-Fascist state capitalism. Arguably postwar Japan was such a system as well as the Republic of Korea for many years (some would say the ROK was actually Fascist).
If you are interested in Market Socialist economics I highly recommend you read (or write) Bowles and Gintis, since they are well known current Market Socialist economists. They are most famous for their paper arguing that rational corporations maximize market share, not profit (except under specific conditions). The first state (non-anarchist) Market Socialist was probably Oscar Lange, if you want to start ar the begining. John Roemer at Berkely is a Market Socialist well known for his critique of the Labor Theory of Value from a Game Theory perspective. IIRC, Michael Piore at MIT is very good, although he may be more of a Structuralist. It has been a long time and my memory fades.
Ever the iconoclast, Joe Stiglitz once wrote a very interesting critique of Market Socialism based on the hypthesis that markets aren't really that efficient as resource allocation mechanisms. I think it was called Wither Socialism.
Capitalism is a "laisse faire" economic system. (I might've butchered the spelling, sorry) So a company that is supported by laws which protect it's monopoly status, is not a capitalist company. The US is not a pure capitalist system, and it is this lack of pure capitalism which allows Microsoft to be protected from competition. Just because something exists in the US does not make it capitalist and just because Microsoft says they're capitalists doesn't make it so. Microsoft says they're innovators too, do you believe that?
Capitalism is an ownership model, not a market model. State Capitalism (i.e. Fascism), with government granted and planned but privately held Monopolies, is still Capitalism. Likewise you can have Market Socialism, with multiple collectively owned enerprises competing against each other in free markets.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
Apple is currently offering a $200 discount on iPods for educational users who buy a Powerbook or iBook ($300 if you get a qualifying printer). Through my edu vendor that meant a $1099 900MHZ/CD-RW iBook for my wife and a $69 iPod for me. Your pricing may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent. Now I can put the "Start Applications Menu" on the left of the top mounted menu barn and have an Apple menu, unlike in OS X. I am tempted to build a box for my MacOS bigot developer friend. He hates the OS X interface, although third party widgets ameliorate some of the problems. He did show interest when I told him KDE could display/remove removable file systems at mount/unmount and use proper menus.
Precisely! Fitts's Law in action. The top mounted menu bar makes menus infinitale tall and thus ~five times as fast to access. That is the main reason I use KDE instead of GNOME. The menus in KDE are not well organized, but at least I can put them in a useful place. A long time ago somebody wrote a library which sucked the menus out of GNOME apps and put them in the top panel, but it died on the vine.
Asolutely correct. Proprietary means either held as a trade secret or exclusive by patent or copyright enforcement. I should have been more clear and said published standards not held proprietary via patent and copyright enforcement.
Last week I told one of their hardware Engineers face to face in front of our sales rep and our technical rep. They have a strict secrecy policy, but he felt it was safe to tell me they have no plans for a blade system, much less one optimized for availability. I told him that if that was the case they should license their OS to IBM or TeraSoft. He thought that was a great idea and recommended I tell my IBM rep. That is a problem since I don't have an IBM rep. We don't let those guys in the door.
Sad really; I was surprised at how close Panther is geting to meeting our needs. But the hardware isn't there. I suspect they will offer a more fault tolerant 2U rack system soon enough. Something to compete with HPq DL380s and the like. That would put them where we are currently in the Wintel space, except with lower cost of ownership (power aside, those CALs kill us). But that isn't compelling enough to overcome MS inertia. Being able to replace all our Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC systems with one power efficient blade system (per data center) might be.
The hardware implementation is partially proprietary in that it is backed by patents which IBM and Moto enforce. The same is true of P4. However the specs and ISA are published standards. If you want to build you own PPC chip you are free to, so long as it does not violate their patents. Again, this is like Intel. How this is part of the "proprietary/closed nature of the platform" I don't understand.
Precisely. The Intel platform is just as proprietary as the Macintosh. The difference is that the proprietary bits have long been reverse engineered and duplicated. Off the rack availablilty is not relevant to the question of whether the platform is proprietary. That is a market question. CHRP and PREP are fully open and documented, IIRC, but you can't buy enough parts offf the rack to build CHRP and PREP boxes either.
Nope. That would have no benefits over GNU/Linux and significant disadvantages. There are plenty of useful proprietary bits in OS X besides the GUI. The incredibly useful command line version of Apple Software Restore springs to mind. The idea is to have a hardware partitionable blade system where we can devote whatever hardware resources we want to a specific server. With ASR we could custom image system drives in five minutes. "Need to replace a server? Give me five minutes. No I don't have to go to the server room. I can allocate the hardware and image the system from here." OS X makes a nice drop in Windows replacement for CIFS etc. The management tools learning curve would be very shallow for our existing Army of Windows admins. My sources at Apple tell me that Panther will ship with a heavily GUIfied Samba 3 implementation too. We could forego Active directory and save a bundle on CALs. Our core business happens to rely on an DBMS which is supported on OS X but not Linux PPC. And certainly not Darwin. If we want to leverage the energy and cooling benefits of PPC, we need to run OS X or find a new DB platform. Likewise, Veritas will already sell you Foundation Suite for OS X, so long as you self validate. We'd need that as we rely heavily on shared storage (Panther multipaths, BTW). They will most likely never support Darwin. There isn't even a commercially supported Darwin distro. This is an enterprise we are talking about here.
XServe? Are you kidding? For our purposes it is a toy.
Except that SMB services on Jaguar kinda suck. There are a number of bugs. WINS name resolution, for instance, doesn't work. So if you use NT Domain services (not Active Directory) you can't browse shares on a routed network. Bit of a problem for many corporate users. I submitted a bug report and nagged my Apple rep mercilessly, but they aren't going to fix it. Should be OK in Panther. I haven't used OS X with AD. Supposedly it works OK with just a little tweaking on the AD side.
MOst of the Samba problems in OS X are pretty trivial, but hosed WINS is a deal breaker.
And their vast array of jackbooted variables.
What is proprietary/closed about PowerPC? Compared to x86?
Proprietary does not mean less common.
I hear you and agree. OTOH, I'm not so sure trademarking is going to help prevent frivolous suits either.
One way to convince a judge, if you had to, would be with a demonstration. Set up a quickie sendmail server on a laptop and telnet to port 25 from another. Type in a simple RFC 821 conversation with incorrect from: and to: info and then show him how it looks in the receiving client. Also give him a copy of RFC 821.
I don't see what you have to worry about. The from and to fields you see on an e-mail are totally arbitrary and have no relationship to sender and recipient. E-mail is like a business letter. It has a header, which contains identifying information of interest to the reader but does not effect delivery, and an envelope, which has the actual delivery information. The from field on the message you receive comes from the header. Anyone who sues you over it has a very bad lawyer.
Using an iPod I can install a two gigabyte image, including Classic, MS Office and all our other standard applications, on a G4 400 in five minutes. The necessary command line utilities are part of the standard 10.2 install, but Mike Bombich's NetRestore Cocoa/AppleScript front end makes it fast and easy. Likewise his Carbon Copy Cloner makes creating compressed images a breeze.
Just yesterday I had to make six clones of a Slackware box. The fastest way to do it was to take them all off the network, put them on a hub, boot each from a floppy, manually fdisk, mk2fs and build a rudimentary root directory structure, then rsync the original box to them. It was downright comical and took two of us hours. Even accounting for Murphy's law it wouldn't have taken more than half an hour with Macs. Simply boot a target machine off the build machine in Firewire target disk mode, Clone it with Carbon Copy Cloner, hook both of those up to two more target machines etc. until done. Each clone is a one or two click affair.
Granted, things would have been a bit easier had we been allowed to use RedHat and do kickstart builds then rsync, but nothing approaching the ease OS X affords. G4U would have been easy but it was way too slow.
Here's a TCO issue... suppose I want to manage my new computers? SMS from Microsoft lists at $1,779 with 25 client licenses. For each additional 25 client license I have to pay another $899. And the whole thing won't run without SQL server, so I need to buy a license for that at $1500-$10,000. I couldn't find any information about educational discounts. Apple Remote Desktop for unlimited clients is $499 list, $299 for educational customers.
I took the MS numbers and info off MS's web site and the Yahoo store (SQL Server).
That is our educational discount on Superdrive equipped eMacs (1Ghz/256/80). I just bought an iBook 12"/900/128/40 for $1099 with an Airport card and got an iPod for $69 more ($200 rebate). Our price on the 867Mhz TiBook is $1799 with Airport and an extended warranty. That is a $629 discount.
Or like the United States?
Actually the V-1 wasn't a rocket. It was a pulse jet powered cruise missile. A pulsejet is sort of like a ramjet with venetian blinds on the air intake, It fires in pulses rather than a continuous stream. Unlike a ramjets, pulsejets can be started while standing still.
AFAIK, the sourcey bits in RPM have no GUI though. But so long as you are dealing with src.rpms the command set is simple. Even when building .src.rpms from tarballs it ain't exactly rocket science.
And we could call it RPM
Seriously, this is how source
You mean a GUI for rpmbuild? This is how RPM works. So long as you have it on your system, you simply download the src.rpm, install it and do an rpmbuild. It will compile it for your system and build a
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them release a PP970 based blade system. There are two vendors already doing this.
Before Darwin was even released. He ported XFree86 to Rhapsody DR1 (IIRC, it might have been DR2).
These are certainly the popular definitions, but they are not the ones my economics professors, primarily Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, taught me. I wouldn't rely on general dictionary to define economic terms. Furthermore, their socialism definition fully jibes with what I said. They say nothing about planning or market model, only ownership and administration. Similarly the Fascism definition does not contradict my statement. As for a real world example of a market socialist economy, that was certainly the direction Chile was heading quite rapidly until 1973. Soviet Russia under the NEP (New Economic Program) was more slowly moving to a Market Socialist system, with some limited private ownership mixed in, until Lenin's death. Likewise, in the eighties China undertook a partial marketization of their agricultural system. Farms were all collectively owned, but peasants were granted individual plots. They were under contract to seel a certain amount of their crop on the governement market. Any remainder they could sell on private markets. Furthermore, collectively and state owned enterprises compete all the time in mixed free market economies. Look at the European auto industry. Until the eighties' rash of sell-offs, Volvo, Renault (IIRC) and Fiat all had some state ownership.
Among the more influential Market Socialist theorists in this country was the Individualist Anarchist icon Benjamin Tucker who, contrary to Libertarian mythology, proposed the complete elimination of private property.
The Nazis used the word Socialist, but they were nothing of the sort. Was the German Democratic Republic democratic? For that matter, is the Democratic party in the US primarily composed of Democrats? It was pure propaganda. The Nazi economy most certainly was Capitalist. The means of production was entirely privately owned. And Fascism was much more than a political philosophy. There was a religious restoration element for one thing (one of the differences between Fascism and Nazism). Fascism was very clear about it's economic agenda: state planning under private owhership. As Mussolini said, it was at its core the merger of state and corporate power. BTW, there is also non-Fascist state capitalism. Arguably postwar Japan was such a system as well as the Republic of Korea for many years (some would say the ROK was actually Fascist).
If you are interested in Market Socialist economics I highly recommend you read (or write) Bowles and Gintis, since they are well known current Market Socialist economists. They are most famous for their paper arguing that rational corporations maximize market share, not profit (except under specific conditions). The first state (non-anarchist) Market Socialist was probably Oscar Lange, if you want to start ar the begining. John Roemer at Berkely is a Market Socialist well known for his critique of the Labor Theory of Value from a Game Theory perspective. IIRC, Michael Piore at MIT is very good, although he may be more of a Structuralist. It has been a long time and my memory fades.
Ever the iconoclast, Joe Stiglitz once wrote a very interesting critique of Market Socialism based on the hypthesis that markets aren't really that efficient as resource allocation mechanisms. I think it was called Wither Socialism.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
Apple is currently offering a $200 discount on iPods for educational users who buy a Powerbook or iBook ($300 if you get a qualifying printer). Through my edu vendor that meant a $1099 900MHZ/CD-RW iBook for my wife and a $69 iPod for me. Your pricing may vary.