Keeping in mind that this is an early beta of LindowsOS, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, who is Michael Robertson targeting? Once the Windows user gets LindowOS installed, he's looking at an interface that is, while similar to Windows, a foreign one.
Ask this question again and again. Ask it to yourself everytime somebody says "Linux on the desktop".
Linux can make it on the desktop, as long as they don't try to be a "me-too" Windowsalike.
Free top-of-the-head ideas for a Linux-based focus:
A disk-image distribution for a web/email computer
GameOS--an OS with built-in APIs/libraries for network 3D games (that are downloadable from the Internet
Home server: install-and-forget firewall, family server, mail/web server with an arrangement with DynDNS for a family-based domain name resolving to their cable modem.
Linux needs to find its niche (small/medium servers is a good start) and excel there. I can predict that Lindows will soon join Loki on the bench.
As we've seen with actions taken by OPEC, if there is the ability for one supplier, or one group of suppliers, to make artifical changes to the supply, then they can directly change the price.
WRT oil prices, petroleum prices have been dropping since 1900 (when the average farmer had no use for the stuff and wasn't about to put it in his horse). I don't remember where I read that, but I'm pretty confident I could back it up.
Price fluctuates. No argument there. But prices have consistantly fallen overall, and the average lifestyle of people has consistantly improved.
Capitalism isn't the problem, it's the solution.
Re:electrocution? I don't think so.
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 1
True enough. But since 120V house current is likely on a 15 or 20 amp breaker, you're still unlikely to die. You can get burned pretty nicely, but not likely a pine box.
Without intellectual property protection of any
kind, the chip race would simply be: who can fab
the most cheaply? And, I guess, who can protect
their secrets?
And your preference would be... what? Whoever thinks up a microprocessor gets sole possesion of the product until the end of time?
Re:electrocution? I don't think so.
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 2
Plus, a 120V house-current is unlikely to electrocute most people. It's not fun, but not usually fatal.
Neither you, nor any other fuzzy-eyed environmental socialist know what you're talking about.
Professional alarmist Paul Ehrlich (he of _Population Bomb_) has been predicting the downfall of the world for some 40 years. Economist Julian Simon bet Ehrlich that between 1980 and 1990 the market price of metals (Ehrlich could pick the metals, even) would fall: Ehrlich believed that they would rise (i.e. become more scarce). In 1990, whoever was wrong would send the other the difference.
Ehrlich picked copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten. In 1990, Ehrlich had to send Simon a check for some $560.
You're just flat out wrong. However, I don't expect you to believe or accept it.
That is a confusion between Capitalism, and commerce. Capitalism depend on two things: capital, and free labor.
That is a warped view. Capitalism, at it's heart, is free commerce. I'll grant you that the economic system we have today is called "capitalism", but it's really capitalism's dowdy cousin, "sort-of capitalism".
The first condition of Capitalism is availability of people who lack the tools to produce on their own and thus must sell their labor. The second is a government that sanctions and enforces contracts and property rights, without which capital can neither accumulate nor contract with labor.
This is not correct. The first condition of capitalism is supply, the second is demand. You are stuck on the idea that capitalism needs government intervention in order to function.
Even a stable currency isn't *neccessary* for capitalism (not that our government is providing us with one): barter and trade work interchangably with dollars and cents. The convenience of a single currency, and the standardization (and enforcement) of rules of commerce (i.e. the SEC) are just that: conveniences. They are not, repeat NOT neccessary for capitalism to exist.
Milton and Rose Friedeman described money in this way:
There are four ways for money to move
1. You spend your money on yourself. You get exactly what you want at the best price.
2. You spend your money on other people. You get the best price, but you don't care as much about pleasing the recipient. This is why you got underwear for Christmas.
3. You spend other people's money on yourself. You get exactly what you want, but at any old price. This is why 20-year-old second wives of 55-year-old men drive convertible BMWs.
4. You spend other people's money on other people. Nobody gives two shakes about price, quality, or suitability of purpose.
Capitalism works in the first area. Government works in the fourth. They mix poorly, and whereas #1 can begat #4, the reverse is almost never true.
There isn't any historical reference to capitalism absent these two conditions. Buying and selling isn't capitalism, it's commerce. Capitalism is buying and selling other people's work.
Sure there is: look at the origins and beginning of America. People living out West did well enough without the benefit of the SEC, the dollar, or even Alan Greenspan. If you grew corn, you traded that corn for a cow when you wanted milk or meat. If you wanted a new plow, you bought it with gold you got from selling your corn to hungry miners. If people didn't trust their gold assayer, he got shot.
Modern capitalism is a dog's breakfast of free market, socialism, and political chicanery. Pure capitalism is based in the free market.
Or, as I've had it explained to me: if you wake up in the morning, you can fall in the bathtub and hurt yourself. This can lead to conditions by which you are unable to work. Since you can't work, you can't buy food, and therefore you die.
Our best hope is that the President's advisors listen to intelligent conservative commentators like George Will, who wrote an excellent column in the Washington Post about Enron, in which he made the following point:
Capitalist economies don't spring up automatically, like crabgrass. They are dependent upon a complex set of laws. Capitalism is a government program.
George Will is wrong. Or, if you prefer, he's wrong, but in an interesting way.
Capitalist economies do spring up automatically. It is in our nature to get what we want at the best price. The interworking of this with more than a single person will be inherently capitalist. Look at kids trading baseball cards: each gets what they want for what they want to pay.
Government does not bring forth capitalism: government's nature is to grow more government. Government's place in a capitalist society is to inhibit the strong from unfairly overpowering the weak. Remember those baseball card trading kids? Government is the teacher on the playground keeping the big kid from knocking the other kids down and simply taking their baseball cards.
The means by which, and the extent to which the government does this is where we get today's political parties. However, after some 60 years of steadily increasing government involvement, it seems that the more government gets involved, the less good it does. Indeed, it seems, at least to some people, to be doing more harm than good.
George Will, in saying that government promotes capitalism, is wrong. Government does have a role, but that role (if you are to have pure capitalism) is very, very limited. Capitalism is intuitive and inherent in our nature.
Yes and no. You are right--he was not an "appointee", implying that he was appointed and confirmed. He was appointed, but rejected. More accurate would be "Bork, Reagan's Supreme Court nominee"
However, "Borking" does not mean rejected for idealogical reasons, per se. Those that opposed Bork's nomination didn't like his ideology, we presume, but "Borking" is a process whereby you spike a nomination through a series of procedural delays, character smearing, mud-slinging, and/or the calling in of political favors or threatening of political retribution. It's the casting of a nominee in the worst possible light and using parlimentary schemes to discourage passage of the nomination.
It's a shameful way of doing the "People's Business", and has probably been in constant use since ancient Rome.
Not a red herring, I think. As you say, the impact on a larger corporation (Enron-sized) can be amortized over a large customer base.
However, as most people do, you leave out the smaller corporations, which make up the majority of corporations extant today. I don't mean the 2-person LLCs (although they are significant), but the 300-500 employee corporations. Increasing the cost of doing business to these is a problem. They may not have millions of customers, they may only have dozens (albeit rich ones). It is a significant problem.
I'm trying to argue against a backlash on corporations (which, just like regular people, are mostly decent companies just trying to do business) because of one glaring example acted dishonestly or wrongly.
One thing is always true with legislation: while the legislation may or may not work (i.e. punish bad companies), it is guaranteed to cause unforseen problems (i.e. put decent companies out of business).
You're being overly exact: I don't equate Enron with a person. I'm using an analogy. Because one kid stabs another in a cyber-cafe, does that mean we should punish all kids by instigating a curfew?
It shouldn't be any different in the case of Enron: the board and executives should be held accountable by their shareholders. Unfortunately, the end that I see has Democrats giving the major players in this scandal a free ride (immunity) in the hopes of sticking it to George Bush and the Republicans. It will become a political game, rather than a legal matter between the top-brass and the truly injured: the employees and shareholders of Enron.
That's an interesting idea... on the surface it sounds good.
The only problem I can imagine with it right off hand is that it creates an "unfunded mandate". It costs $$$ to store stuff. I dunno what the statute of limitation on fraud is, but let's say 7 years. With a large corporation, that can add up quickly to massive costs. Corps will pass this cost down to consumers, or appeal to legislators for some kind of funding or tax break to fulfill this requirement.
That's not including the personnel overhead to manage and maintain this requirement.
The problem isn't that simple, normally. In any organization of some size, there will be embarrassing documents floating around: created on demand from the CEO, or by a rogue employee, these things will happen. Multiply this by years and years, and you end up with the potential for massive problems if they are discovered.
Go look up some of your old Usenet posts on Google Groups... you'll see some and say, "wow, I was a real idiot then." It's the same principle, different scale when you're dealing with a company with 50K employees.
Not all corporations are Enron. Most of them aren't even all that big. Don't paint with such a wide brush.
Are you saying that corporations should disclose everything? Research, development, patents in developent? Everything?
It's like engineering: there will be tradeoffs. For the 100s of decent corporations, there will be a big Enron blight that mucks it up. Should we punish everybody because of one asshole?
Nice try, but I think you'll find your words wasted.
I could write an essay on the topic of culture choice and how it affects a community, but I'll boil it down to this: Linux devotees chose the "elite techie" culture whereas Apple zealots chose the "enthusiast" culture, and it shows.
Where there are Mac admin mailing lists frequented by hundreds of helpful Mac managers who will patiently (if not exactly happily) answer the same question over and over again, for Linux users there is IRC and Usenet--which is quite funny, considering how difficult it sometimes is to get your Linux box online.
Linux users tend towards elitism, whereas Mac users tend towards snobbery. They sound similar, but in reality are quite different. It's the difference between wealth and royalty: make enough money (or buy a Mac), and you're in the club. But unless you're born of royal blood (or have the hacker-nature), you just can't join the clique.
I'm afraid your words will fall on many deaf ears, as very few people are intellectually honest enough with themselves to admit that they might be wrong, and need to change.
I like how you swing the argument away from your own snide remark about our "corporate republic" to stake some claim to a moral high ground, where polite discourse on my part must meet some restricted form of formalized debate, whereas you are allowed to simply provide quips (speaking of shooting your mouth off...)
Indeed, your own comments, vis. "screwing anyone over for a buck or two more" relies on a particularly pernicious debate tactic of begging the question. Perhaps you care to provide proof that more than half of the corporations out there exist primarily to screw other people over?
Finally, as a small (very small) business owner myself, I have as much acerage on Mount Moral as you do, neighbor. I'll ask politely this time: either keep your barking dog quiet, or chain him up. He's keeping me awake at night.
Perhaps, "Corporate Republic" is getting more a realistic description, rather than the classic "Republic"?
I'm starting to get quite sick of this.
If you have such a blind hatred of corporatism, then remove the power of the government to facilitate corporate-coddling! Make the government do nothing more than protect the borders from invasion!
But that's not what you want... you want government to have *lots* of power, but you want that power to be used in ways that *you* think is "healthy" or "beneficial".
In other words, you want exactly what the corporations are getting. I suggest you start a corporation and make a lot of money, rather than kick your little feet and beat your little fists on the floor, whining about how unfair it is.
Eric Raymond supports this idea saying that this will bring Linux to a wider market
After all, God knows how many times my mom asks me, "Should I up my ODDDEFNAME to 256?"
That this question is even being asked shows that Linux is not ready for the desktop. Or, more to the point, Linux zealots aren't ready to even develop a desktop OS.
For lightweight server duties (single, maybe dual processor), Linux or one of the BSDs will do you.
For anything greater, I would move to a Sun SPARC with Solaris. The price difference is negligible when you hold it up to the light of experience: Solaris props up some of the biggest and baddest sites in the world. Linux doesn't have that distiction, at least not yet. Solaris admins tend to be of a more "professional" cut than Linux admins.
Not a slam on Linux: it just doesn't have that kind of history or reputation yet. Given time, Linux may be keeping Scott McNealy up at night, rather than Bill Gates.
Bottom line, a 1U single x86 rackmount couldn't be happier than with Linux or a BSD (my personal choice would be a BSD). For that 8-headed monster with a 300GB RAID-5, I'd put my faith in Sun and Solaris, and write Scott the check...
Go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread with your satisfaction of doing a damned good job.
Would you be satisfied with Lucent giving you a hearty handshake and a pat on the back for doing a good job? Or would you wrap that middle-manager's necktie around a ceiling fan until he forked over a check?
Please--spare me the working-class-blues routine. You wouldn't expect anything other than a bottom-line-oriented paycheck from your employer; why hold them to a different standard?
If we've learned anything recently, all you have to do is kill a few thousand civilians with little to no warning. That's a pretty hefty weapon, and all it cost is a handful of brainwashings and $1.99 at Home Depot for a box cutter.
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Ask this question again and again. Ask it to yourself everytime somebody says "Linux on the desktop".
Linux can make it on the desktop, as long as they don't try to be a "me-too" Windowsalike.
Free top-of-the-head ideas for a Linux-based focus:
Linux needs to find its niche (small/medium servers is a good start) and excel there. I can predict that Lindows will soon join Loki on the bench.
Nah, it's more like quitting smoking by hiding cigarettes from yourself.
WRT oil prices, petroleum prices have been dropping since 1900 (when the average farmer had no use for the stuff and wasn't about to put it in his horse). I don't remember where I read that, but I'm pretty confident I could back it up.
Price fluctuates. No argument there. But prices have consistantly fallen overall, and the average lifestyle of people has consistantly improved.
Capitalism isn't the problem, it's the solution.
True enough. But since 120V house current is likely on a 15 or 20 amp breaker, you're still unlikely to die. You can get burned pretty nicely, but not likely a pine box.
And your preference would be... what? Whoever thinks up a microprocessor gets sole possesion of the product until the end of time?
Plus, a 120V house-current is unlikely to electrocute most people. It's not fun, but not usually fatal.
I shouldn't have replied to you above. Now I know that I've just been trolled... yay me...
Neither you, nor any other fuzzy-eyed environmental socialist know what you're talking about.
Professional alarmist Paul Ehrlich (he of _Population Bomb_) has been predicting the downfall of the world for some 40 years. Economist Julian Simon bet Ehrlich that between 1980 and 1990 the market price of metals (Ehrlich could pick the metals, even) would fall: Ehrlich believed that they would rise (i.e. become more scarce). In 1990, whoever was wrong would send the other the difference.
Ehrlich picked copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten. In 1990, Ehrlich had to send Simon a check for some $560.
You're just flat out wrong. However, I don't expect you to believe or accept it.
That is a warped view. Capitalism, at it's heart, is free commerce. I'll grant you that the economic system we have today is called "capitalism", but it's really capitalism's dowdy cousin, "sort-of capitalism".
The first condition of Capitalism is availability of people who lack the tools to produce on their own and thus must sell their labor. The second is a government that sanctions and enforces contracts and property rights, without which capital can neither accumulate nor contract with labor.
This is not correct. The first condition of capitalism is supply, the second is demand. You are stuck on the idea that capitalism needs government intervention in order to function.
Even a stable currency isn't *neccessary* for capitalism (not that our government is providing us with one): barter and trade work interchangably with dollars and cents. The convenience of a single currency, and the standardization (and enforcement) of rules of commerce (i.e. the SEC) are just that: conveniences. They are not, repeat NOT neccessary for capitalism to exist.
Milton and Rose Friedeman described money in this way:
There are four ways for money to move
1. You spend your money on yourself. You get exactly what you want at the best price.
2. You spend your money on other people. You get the best price, but you don't care as much about pleasing the recipient. This is why you got underwear for Christmas.
3. You spend other people's money on yourself. You get exactly what you want, but at any old price. This is why 20-year-old second wives of 55-year-old men drive convertible BMWs.
4. You spend other people's money on other people. Nobody gives two shakes about price, quality, or suitability of purpose.
Capitalism works in the first area. Government works in the fourth. They mix poorly, and whereas #1 can begat #4, the reverse is almost never true.
There isn't any historical reference to capitalism absent these two conditions. Buying and selling isn't capitalism, it's commerce. Capitalism is buying and selling other people's work.
Sure there is: look at the origins and beginning of America. People living out West did well enough without the benefit of the SEC, the dollar, or even Alan Greenspan. If you grew corn, you traded that corn for a cow when you wanted milk or meat. If you wanted a new plow, you bought it with gold you got from selling your corn to hungry miners. If people didn't trust their gold assayer, he got shot.
Modern capitalism is a dog's breakfast of free market, socialism, and political chicanery. Pure capitalism is based in the free market.
Or, as I've had it explained to me: if you wake up in the morning, you can fall in the bathtub and hurt yourself. This can lead to conditions by which you are unable to work. Since you can't work, you can't buy food, and therefore you die.
So stay in bed, or you'll die.
George Will is wrong. Or, if you prefer, he's wrong, but in an interesting way.
Capitalist economies do spring up automatically. It is in our nature to get what we want at the best price. The interworking of this with more than a single person will be inherently capitalist. Look at kids trading baseball cards: each gets what they want for what they want to pay.
Government does not bring forth capitalism: government's nature is to grow more government. Government's place in a capitalist society is to inhibit the strong from unfairly overpowering the weak. Remember those baseball card trading kids? Government is the teacher on the playground keeping the big kid from knocking the other kids down and simply taking their baseball cards.
The means by which, and the extent to which the government does this is where we get today's political parties. However, after some 60 years of steadily increasing government involvement, it seems that the more government gets involved, the less good it does. Indeed, it seems, at least to some people, to be doing more harm than good.
George Will, in saying that government promotes capitalism, is wrong. Government does have a role, but that role (if you are to have pure capitalism) is very, very limited. Capitalism is intuitive and inherent in our nature.
Yes and no. You are right--he was not an "appointee", implying that he was appointed and confirmed. He was appointed, but rejected. More accurate would be "Bork, Reagan's Supreme Court nominee"
However, "Borking" does not mean rejected for idealogical reasons, per se. Those that opposed Bork's nomination didn't like his ideology, we presume, but "Borking" is a process whereby you spike a nomination through a series of procedural delays, character smearing, mud-slinging, and/or the calling in of political favors or threatening of political retribution. It's the casting of a nominee in the worst possible light and using parlimentary schemes to discourage passage of the nomination.
It's a shameful way of doing the "People's Business", and has probably been in constant use since ancient Rome.
Not a red herring, I think. As you say, the impact on a larger corporation (Enron-sized) can be amortized over a large customer base.
However, as most people do, you leave out the smaller corporations, which make up the majority of corporations extant today. I don't mean the 2-person LLCs (although they are significant), but the 300-500 employee corporations. Increasing the cost of doing business to these is a problem. They may not have millions of customers, they may only have dozens (albeit rich ones). It is a significant problem.
I'm trying to argue against a backlash on corporations (which, just like regular people, are mostly decent companies just trying to do business) because of one glaring example acted dishonestly or wrongly.
One thing is always true with legislation: while the legislation may or may not work (i.e. punish bad companies), it is guaranteed to cause unforseen problems (i.e. put decent companies out of business).
You're being overly exact: I don't equate Enron with a person. I'm using an analogy. Because one kid stabs another in a cyber-cafe, does that mean we should punish all kids by instigating a curfew?
It shouldn't be any different in the case of Enron: the board and executives should be held accountable by their shareholders. Unfortunately, the end that I see has Democrats giving the major players in this scandal a free ride (immunity) in the hopes of sticking it to George Bush and the Republicans. It will become a political game, rather than a legal matter between the top-brass and the truly injured: the employees and shareholders of Enron.
That's an interesting idea... on the surface it sounds good.
The only problem I can imagine with it right off hand is that it creates an "unfunded mandate". It costs $$$ to store stuff. I dunno what the statute of limitation on fraud is, but let's say 7 years. With a large corporation, that can add up quickly to massive costs. Corps will pass this cost down to consumers, or appeal to legislators for some kind of funding or tax break to fulfill this requirement.
That's not including the personnel overhead to manage and maintain this requirement.
The problem isn't that simple, normally. In any organization of some size, there will be embarrassing documents floating around: created on demand from the CEO, or by a rogue employee, these things will happen. Multiply this by years and years, and you end up with the potential for massive problems if they are discovered.
Go look up some of your old Usenet posts on Google Groups... you'll see some and say, "wow, I was a real idiot then." It's the same principle, different scale when you're dealing with a company with 50K employees.
Not all corporations are Enron. Most of them aren't even all that big. Don't paint with such a wide brush.
Are you saying that corporations should disclose everything? Research, development, patents in developent? Everything?
It's like engineering: there will be tradeoffs. For the 100s of decent corporations, there will be a big Enron blight that mucks it up. Should we punish everybody because of one asshole?
Useless in a legal situation. The court will subpoena key to unlock the files.
Nice try, but I think you'll find your words wasted.
I could write an essay on the topic of culture choice and how it affects a community, but I'll boil it down to this: Linux devotees chose the "elite techie" culture whereas Apple zealots chose the "enthusiast" culture, and it shows.
Where there are Mac admin mailing lists frequented by hundreds of helpful Mac managers who will patiently (if not exactly happily) answer the same question over and over again, for Linux users there is IRC and Usenet--which is quite funny, considering how difficult it sometimes is to get your Linux box online.
Linux users tend towards elitism, whereas Mac users tend towards snobbery. They sound similar, but in reality are quite different. It's the difference between wealth and royalty: make enough money (or buy a Mac), and you're in the club. But unless you're born of royal blood (or have the hacker-nature), you just can't join the clique.
I'm afraid your words will fall on many deaf ears, as very few people are intellectually honest enough with themselves to admit that they might be wrong, and need to change.
I like how you swing the argument away from your own snide remark about our "corporate republic" to stake some claim to a moral high ground, where polite discourse on my part must meet some restricted form of formalized debate, whereas you are allowed to simply provide quips (speaking of shooting your mouth off...)
Indeed, your own comments, vis. "screwing anyone over for a buck or two more" relies on a particularly pernicious debate tactic of begging the question. Perhaps you care to provide proof that more than half of the corporations out there exist primarily to screw other people over?
Finally, as a small (very small) business owner myself, I have as much acerage on Mount Moral as you do, neighbor. I'll ask politely this time: either keep your barking dog quiet, or chain him up. He's keeping me awake at night.
I'm starting to get quite sick of this.
If you have such a blind hatred of corporatism, then remove the power of the government to facilitate corporate-coddling! Make the government do nothing more than protect the borders from invasion!
But that's not what you want... you want government to have *lots* of power, but you want that power to be used in ways that *you* think is "healthy" or "beneficial".
In other words, you want exactly what the corporations are getting. I suggest you start a corporation and make a lot of money, rather than kick your little feet and beat your little fists on the floor, whining about how unfair it is.
After all, God knows how many times my mom asks me, "Should I up my ODDDEFNAME to 256?"
That this question is even being asked shows that Linux is not ready for the desktop. Or, more to the point, Linux zealots aren't ready to even develop a desktop OS.
For lightweight server duties (single, maybe dual processor), Linux or one of the BSDs will do you.
For anything greater, I would move to a Sun SPARC with Solaris. The price difference is negligible when you hold it up to the light of experience: Solaris props up some of the biggest and baddest sites in the world. Linux doesn't have that distiction, at least not yet. Solaris admins tend to be of a more "professional" cut than Linux admins.
Not a slam on Linux: it just doesn't have that kind of history or reputation yet. Given time, Linux may be keeping Scott McNealy up at night, rather than Bill Gates.
Bottom line, a 1U single x86 rackmount couldn't be happier than with Linux or a BSD (my personal choice would be a BSD). For that 8-headed monster with a 300GB RAID-5, I'd put my faith in Sun and Solaris, and write Scott the check...
Go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread with your satisfaction of doing a damned good job.
Would you be satisfied with Lucent giving you a hearty handshake and a pat on the back for doing a good job? Or would you wrap that middle-manager's necktie around a ceiling fan until he forked over a check?
Please--spare me the working-class-blues routine. You wouldn't expect anything other than a bottom-line-oriented paycheck from your employer; why hold them to a different standard?
Nah...
If we've learned anything recently, all you have to do is kill a few thousand civilians with little to no warning. That's a pretty hefty weapon, and all it cost is a handful of brainwashings and $1.99 at Home Depot for a box cutter.