'you can't get people to do what I think is good for them.' --- No. Investing in the future is good for you. Capitalism says so. The ability to invest heavily in the future was why Hong Kong went from having 1/3 of the US per-capita GDP to having 4/5 of the US per-capita GDP in only a few decades. However, experience has repeatedly shown that people are wary of investing in the future. They would rather maintain security in the near term than be better off long term. Why do you think the majority of Americans have no savings? Why do you think we continue to mortgage our environment, leaving our children to clean up the mess? Why do we continue to avoid investing in alternative fuel research, and avoid limiting our current consumption, despite the looming potential consequences of running out?
That's why I said that military spending is one of the few ways to get people to use their money how they should use it, not why they are using it. By using their fear, you can persuade them to pay up for military programs, and use that money (however inefficiently, because for every $ spent on research, many are spent on things that explode after use!) to invest in the future.
And therein lies the fundemental weakness of democracy. You can't get people to do whats good for them. The fact that military spending is a big boon for technology is for the precise reason that peoples' irrational fears make it easy to control them. By controlling them, you take the "mob rule" factor out of the equation, and can spend money how you want. Military spending, while a very inefficient way to invest in the future, is one of the few ways to do that within the confines of a democratic framework.
But my point is that the target market is *not* necessarily home-user desktop computing! Linux is certainly mainstream at my campus, where all engineers have at least a basic intro to UNIX, and where many of the CS classes are taught on Linux. Linux is certainly mainstream (if not dominant) in the graphics workstation market where major movie studios like ILM use it for their artists. Linux is certainly mainstream in the embedded market, where many embedded products use Linux. And Linux is on the verge of becoming mainstream in the corporate desktop market.
What the hell are you talking about? What did you think I said, and what was your point???
I mentioned Matlab because the question of whether Matlab is mainstream is similar to the question of whether Linux is mainstream. It all depends on what market you are talking about. A scientist or engineer definately considers Matlab to be mainstream, but a gamer probably does not. Like Linux, it all depends on what market you are talking about.
the problem has been and continues to be peripheral manufacturers who refuse to write drivers for their equipment.
Again, its all a matter of what market you are talking about. Linux's support for server peripheral's is excellent, which is why it has "gone mainstream" in the server market. Its also not a problem on the business desktop, where IT purchases are planned ahead of time, and are generally conservative about hardware. The fact that Linux doesn't support Sony Minidisc players is utterly irrelevent on a corporate desktop. As long as it supports the integrated graphics and sound chips on the motherboard (and Linux almost always does) hardware support is not an issue.
This is why the predictions have so far failed to bear fruit.
If somebody predicated in 1998 that Linux was about to go mainstream in the home user market, they were full of shit. But the home user market is only a part of the overall computing landscape, and Linux has managed to become mainstream in many markets without making any inroads in the home market.
Just pick RedHat. That's what the commercial market generally does. If you support RedHat and SuSE (both very similar from a software standpoint) you'll hit 90% of the Linux desktop market.
That's a very good point. When people say "we heard about this in 1998!" they are usually referring to a different market. "Mainstream" is a very vague word. Is Matlab "mainstream?" You'll find very few copies on a home user's desktop, but pretty much every engineer or scientist has a copy on theirs. In its market, Matlab is definately mainstream!
Linux has been becoming "mainstream" in a number of different markets over time. First it was low-end servers. Then mid-range servers. Then scientific computing (supercomputers, etc). Then workstations (ILM, etc). Then it was the embedded market. Now, its the corporate desktop. Come 2006, you'll hear again that "Linux is going mainstream" but it'll be a different market (maybe educational or public terminals?) Linux is becoming more suitable for more and more markets, and that's what the repeated articles about it "going mainstream" reflect.
To a business, its not just a matter of the fact that they have to pay, but how much. Qt's license is relatively cheap compared to the productivity it buys you. Commercial developers seem to have no problem paying thousands of dollars for Visual Studio, or even more for products like Rational Rose, and from the number of companies that have bought Qt licenses shows they seem to have no problem with paying for Qt either.
Um, you're completely wrong. What significant apps really use FLTK, Motif, XAW, etc? You can even avoid XUL if you use a program like Epiphany. For most practical purposes, GTK+ and Qt are the only toolkits that matter, especially now that OpenOffice is being ported to native toolkits.
Oh, and note, the situation isn't any worse than on Windows. Its almost impossible to stick with a single toolkit in Windows, because the major Microsoft apps (Internet Explorer, MS Office, Visual Studio) all use different toolkits!
The key to fixing things is not to standardize on a single toolkit, but to have a central configuration repository for stuff like fonts, window, etc.
You make an excellent point. The middle and uppler classes in India are pretty well off, there is just (relatively) fewer of them than in the United States. For those with money, life is quite comfortable, if different from how it is in the US.
Last I heard India is still a developing country in many aspects. --- *Many* respects.
How may are prepared to share the road with not only automobiles and pedestrians but elephants, sacred bovines, and pack animals which all produce fair shares of manure? --- Okay, that's just horse-shit. There aren't elephants roaming the streets of the major cities. Perhaps the worse drivers in the world (hm, maybe not as bad as those in Bangkok...) but no elephants. Or pack animals. Lots of carts, bicyles, and other people-powered devices, though.
Bah. If they used a real language (read: not Java), they wouldn't need to cast! Java takes the dubious honor of being one of the few statically-typed languages that are highly prone to runtime-type errors. Congratulations Java: you suck!
The code is mostly 4.4BSD-Lite2. There is a good thread on OSNews about OS X that goes into comparing the source code, and it supports the idea that, while there are many changes, most parts of the BSD subsystem is still plain 4.4BSD-Lite2 code.
The phrase is pretty much universally used in this sense. Most think the phrase originated from some writer in France, and the terms parallel the French First, Second, and Third estates.
Applications will generally run at the same speed, but lots of things should be visibly faster. I've noticed the following things on my machine (2.0GHz P4 640MB of RAM, KDE 3.2):
- Better interactivity and elimination of the "nice -10" hack for XFree. - Much nicer behavior while running compiles or apt-get upgrade. I can run a compile in the background and not even notice it in the foreground. Its nearly impossible to get audio to skip. - Better I/O performance. Doing a large disk write doesn't make things stutter. With the CFQ scheduler, heavy disk activity doesn't adversely impact startup time of newly launched apps.
A kernel is much more complex than a single program. A program usually does one thing, and once you've optimized that, that's all there really is. In contrast, a kernel does all sorts of things. 2.2 was good for small-scale servers. 2.4 was good for mid-range servers. 2.6 is good for larger servers and desktop machines. 2.8 is supposed to get improvements to make it better on desktops and on huge NUMA machines. Linux has always been a fast kernel for what it did, its just that its doing a lot more today than it did a few years ago.
India is part of the Soviet Union? That's new to me! Try and understand what the term means, dumb-fuck. In any case, since there is no longer a Soviet Union, the term "3rd world" is antiquated --- the term "developing nation" is more accurate.
You apply for a Visa with Indian Embassy in Washington, DC. The letter is one of the supporting documents (photo ID, etc) required for the application.
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You've obviously never seen the Southern Baptist on TV who claimed that Ghandi was definately going to hell.
'you can't get people to do what I think is good for them.'
---
No. Investing in the future is good for you. Capitalism says so. The ability to invest heavily in the future was why Hong Kong went from having 1/3 of the US per-capita GDP to having 4/5 of the US per-capita GDP in only a few decades. However, experience has repeatedly shown that people are wary of investing in the future. They would rather maintain security in the near term than be better off long term. Why do you think the majority of Americans have no savings? Why do you think we continue to mortgage our environment, leaving our children to clean up the mess? Why do we continue to avoid investing in alternative fuel research, and avoid limiting our current consumption, despite the looming potential consequences of running out?
That's why I said that military spending is one of the few ways to get people to use their money how they should use it, not why they are using it. By using their fear, you can persuade them to pay up for military programs, and use that money (however inefficiently, because for every $ spent on research, many are spent on things that explode after use!) to invest in the future.
And therein lies the fundemental weakness of democracy. You can't get people to do whats good for them. The fact that military spending is a big boon for technology is for the precise reason that peoples' irrational fears make it easy to control them. By controlling them, you take the "mob rule" factor out of the equation, and can spend money how you want. Military spending, while a very inefficient way to invest in the future, is one of the few ways to do that within the confines of a democratic framework.
But my point is that the target market is *not* necessarily home-user desktop computing! Linux is certainly mainstream at my campus, where all engineers have at least a basic intro to UNIX, and where many of the CS classes are taught on Linux. Linux is certainly mainstream (if not dominant) in the graphics workstation market where major movie studios like ILM use it for their artists. Linux is certainly mainstream in the embedded market, where many embedded products use Linux. And Linux is on the verge of becoming mainstream in the corporate desktop market.
What the hell are you talking about? What did you think I said, and what was your point???
I mentioned Matlab because the question of whether Matlab is mainstream is similar to the question of whether Linux is mainstream. It all depends on what market you are talking about. A scientist or engineer definately considers Matlab to be mainstream, but a gamer probably does not. Like Linux, it all depends on what market you are talking about.
the problem has been and continues to be peripheral manufacturers who refuse to write drivers for their equipment.
Again, its all a matter of what market you are talking about. Linux's support for server peripheral's is excellent, which is why it has "gone mainstream" in the server market. Its also not a problem on the business desktop, where IT purchases are planned ahead of time, and are generally conservative about hardware. The fact that Linux doesn't support Sony Minidisc players is utterly irrelevent on a corporate desktop. As long as it supports the integrated graphics and sound chips on the motherboard (and Linux almost always does) hardware support is not an issue.
This is why the predictions have so far failed to bear fruit.
If somebody predicated in 1998 that Linux was about to go mainstream in the home user market, they were full of shit. But the home user market is only a part of the overall computing landscape, and Linux has managed to become mainstream in many markets without making any inroads in the home market.
Just pick RedHat. That's what the commercial market generally does. If you support RedHat and SuSE (both very similar from a software standpoint) you'll hit 90% of the Linux desktop market.
That's a very good point. When people say "we heard about this in 1998!" they are usually referring to a different market. "Mainstream" is a very vague word. Is Matlab "mainstream?" You'll find very few copies on a home user's desktop, but pretty much every engineer or scientist has a copy on theirs. In its market, Matlab is definately mainstream!
Linux has been becoming "mainstream" in a number of different markets over time. First it was low-end servers. Then mid-range servers. Then scientific computing (supercomputers, etc). Then workstations (ILM, etc). Then it was the embedded market. Now, its the corporate desktop. Come 2006, you'll hear again that "Linux is going mainstream" but it'll be a different market (maybe educational or public terminals?) Linux is becoming more suitable for more and more markets, and that's what the repeated articles about it "going mainstream" reflect.
To a business, its not just a matter of the fact that they have to pay, but how much. Qt's license is relatively cheap compared to the productivity it buys you. Commercial developers seem to have no problem paying thousands of dollars for Visual Studio, or even more for products like Rational Rose, and from the number of companies that have bought Qt licenses shows they seem to have no problem with paying for Qt either.
Those distros all offer GNOME libs. UserLinux will not offer kdelibs and Qt at all, and that's the problem!
Um, you're completely wrong. What significant apps really use FLTK, Motif, XAW, etc? You can even avoid XUL if you use a program like Epiphany. For most practical purposes, GTK+ and Qt are the only toolkits that matter, especially now that OpenOffice is being ported to native toolkits.
Oh, and note, the situation isn't any worse than on Windows. Its almost impossible to stick with a single toolkit in Windows, because the major Microsoft apps (Internet Explorer, MS Office, Visual Studio) all use different toolkits!
The key to fixing things is not to standardize on a single toolkit, but to have a central configuration repository for stuff like fonts, window, etc.
Very well said :)
Democracy is about freedom. Capitalism is also about freedom. The two go hand in hand. The basic issue here is this:
You want government to take away the freedom of managers to choose who to hire.
Its really as simple as that.
You make an excellent point. The middle and uppler classes in India are pretty well off, there is just (relatively) fewer of them than in the United States. For those with money, life is quite comfortable, if different from how it is in the US.
Last I heard India is still a developing country in many aspects.
---
*Many* respects.
How may are prepared to share the road with not only automobiles and pedestrians but elephants, sacred bovines, and pack animals which all produce fair shares of manure?
---
Okay, that's just horse-shit. There aren't elephants roaming the streets of the major cities. Perhaps the worse drivers in the world (hm, maybe not as bad as those in Bangkok...) but no elephants. Or pack animals. Lots of carts, bicyles, and other people-powered devices, though.
Congratulations! You sound like an SCO Press Release!
Bah. If they used a real language (read: not Java), they wouldn't need to cast! Java takes the dubious honor of being one of the few statically-typed languages that are highly prone to runtime-type errors. Congratulations Java: you suck!
Read the OpenDarwin FAQ: here.
The code is mostly 4.4BSD-Lite2. There is a good thread on OSNews about OS X that goes into comparing the source code, and it supports the idea that, while there are many changes, most parts of the BSD subsystem is still plain 4.4BSD-Lite2 code.
That's so depressing. I'm going to go jump in a lake now...
According to my sources your definition is not correct.
The phrase is pretty much universally used in this sense. Most think the phrase originated from some writer in France, and the terms parallel the French First, Second, and Third estates.
Applications will generally run at the same speed, but lots of things should be visibly faster. I've noticed the following things on my machine (2.0GHz P4 640MB of RAM, KDE 3.2):
- Better interactivity and elimination of the "nice -10" hack for XFree.
- Much nicer behavior while running compiles or apt-get upgrade. I can run a compile in the background and not even notice it in the foreground. Its nearly impossible to get audio to skip.
- Better I/O performance. Doing a large disk write doesn't make things stutter. With the CFQ scheduler, heavy disk activity doesn't adversely impact startup time of newly launched apps.
A kernel is much more complex than a single program. A program usually does one thing, and once you've optimized that, that's all there really is. In contrast, a kernel does all sorts of things. 2.2 was good for small-scale servers. 2.4 was good for mid-range servers. 2.6 is good for larger servers and desktop machines. 2.8 is supposed to get improvements to make it better on desktops and on huge NUMA machines. Linux has always been a fast kernel for what it did, its just that its doing a lot more today than it did a few years ago.
India is part of the Soviet Union? That's new to me! Try and understand what the term means, dumb-fuck. In any case, since there is no longer a Soviet Union, the term "3rd world" is antiquated --- the term "developing nation" is more accurate.
You apply for a Visa with Indian Embassy in Washington, DC. The letter is one of the supporting documents (photo ID, etc) required for the application.
More details can be found at their website.
Geez. For people so obsessed with Microsoft/SCO FUD, Slashdot seems to have no problem generating FUD of its own!
Yes there is, if you've got a letter from an Indian company.