The GPL? or the LGPL? Or the BSD? Because those where the licenses KDE 1.x was under. The libraries have always been LGPL, the apps GPL, with a few pieces here and there under BSD.
Of course, Qt wasn't under Free Software license, but KDE itself was fine.
Ah yes, the year 2000. That was when Redhat wrested the World Troll Cup from Debian by publicly declared KDE to be a criminal desktop.
There are two ways to store persistent objects, as files or in a database. But the boundaries between the two are starting to blur. Bragging that your OS doesn't have files just doesn't make sense. I bet recovery is a bitch on Phantom OS.
"It's not what I'm used to!" strikes at the very heart of usability. Something that is good for newbies but bad for experts has POOR USABILITY! This isn't Fisher-Price, this is the desktop many of us have been using daily for an entire decade. It's the desktop we use for productive work. I'm not hostile to change, but I am hostile to that subset of change that interfers with my work and gets in my way.
KDE 4.2 hung my system FOUR times yesterday. I spent much of this morning tweaking drivers and xorg.confs so it wouldn't happen again. That isn't productive work, that's wasted time.
It's a driver issue. I get it using the radeon driver, but not with the fglrx driver. (I get other problems with fglrx and not with radeon, so no one driver is better than the other). But since this only happens on one desktop, is it really the driver's fault? One of these days all the drivers will have caught up to KDE 4.2... but by then KDE 5.0 will be shipping.
Engineers make lousy politicians. Why? Because they think they can fix anything. They have a deep seated hubris in believing they know how everything works and how to make everything run better. They are used to be in absolute control over their environment. But people are not devices, and society is not a network.
The last two engineer presidents we have had: Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Both were noted for economic crises. They thought they could engineer the economy, and ended up making things worse.
I want someone in office who is fully aware that the imperfections in the world are NOT failures, but natural order of things.
Huge multinational corporations are not the problem, they are the symptom! The core problem is government. NOT the current Finnish government, per se, but the system of government itself. It is a system that tries to organize society through centralized planning and direction. Our modern societies are far too complex to effectively manage in this way, and it leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. One such consequence is big business. Free markets do not create huge corporate behemoths, because markets loath inefficiencies. These busineses have become so large that they must create internal autonomous divisions, or they would cease to operate. So why do some businesses become so large? Because modern tax and regulatory structures favor size.
In a nutshell, when only companies large enough to have legions of lawyers are able to navigate the bureaucratic swamps, only companies large enough to have legions of lawyers will thrive. It may seem sensible to impose regulations on these monsters, but those same regulations affect SMALL businesses as well! They erect barriers to entries, creating monopolies. It can be more profitable for big businesses to lobby government than to engage in productive market activities. In fact, many regulations are lobbied for by the business community itself!
I am not arguing to get rid of all regulations. But we do need to be cognizant of the fact that every regulation has negative consequences. Pretending that we can wave a legislative wand and fix all of our problems is naive.
There is no single silver bullet to this problem. Nokia has grown too big for its britches. But we can start to repair the damage by loosening the restrictions we place on small businesses. Let's change directions and start growing government and business smaller.
When I say "the user doesn't care", I mean that the user doesn't care who is at fault. There's one KDE bug that drives me nuts, but it was closed as INVALID within minutes of my logging it. Why? Because "it's an X.org bug". That doesn't make the bug go away, nor does it make it any less annoying. I'm not demanding that KDE fix it, because they can't. But since the bug only exists on KDE 4, it deserves a bit more than a kneejerk response.
p.s. I have submitted bug reports and contributed to testing. And I contribute code.
Correction: I tries to do it, and often succeeds. But sometimes it fails. Is it KDE's fault or the video driver's fault? When the user has a locked system he doesn't care!
The reason it works in Windows and OSX, is because the manufacturers write complete drivers. But in X11 the drivers are hit and miss. Either you have undermanned open source drivers working with incomplete specs, or proprietary drivers that just don't care. It's starting to change, but not fast enough.
Let's hope he's got equally impressive breakthroughs planned for his encore as US Secretary of Energy
There is a world of difference between physics and the Department of Energy. One deals with particles and waves and mathematics, the other deals with human beings, tangled networks of regulations, and discordant policy objectives. Mr. Chu's qualifications as a scientist will have no bearing in his new role.
I would define as fundamentalist, someone who starts ranting against markets in the middle of a thread about keyboards. Really now, dig that burr out of your butt and get on with life.
1. Not all markets are healthy. Oligopoly and misregulation commonly screw things up.
No one ever claimed markets were healthy. Only that they were more efficient relative to the alternatives.
This is known as the King's Singer Fallacy. A king is auditioning court singers and is down to the final two. He has them sing for him. The first sings and the king says "that was the worst singer I've ever heard - I hereby declare the other singer my new Court Singer."
2. Getting the best results from a market require that all participants have perfect information (which implies they've spent the time to do a full analysis of all their options). This never happens.
The world is not perfect (duh) and any theory that is premised on perfection is silly. Unfortunately, there is a school of economics that is indeed premised on this impossibility - neoclassicism. Doubly unfortunate, this school is currently in vogue. That doesn't make it true.
You cannot claim that markets are a failure just because one guy sells peanuts for 30 cents a pound and another for 32 cents a pount. Since they are not selling at the same price, then obviously they do not have perfect information. But this is hardly an excuse to dump the peanut market! Perfect information is impossible, as our preferences are constantly changing. No computer, no matter how powerful, could ever calculate "perfect" prices.
But again, the King's Singer Fallacy. Prices are imperfect, but what guarantee do you have the the alternative is better?
3. Network effects really can result in entrenching technically inferior solutions. The barrier to entry can be so high that the market can't overcome it in a reasonable amount of time.
It is only your opinion tha that a particular solution is inferior. It may indeed be inferior, for you, but not for everyone. A decision is not automatically wrong just because it's different from the one you made.
Certain solutions become more popular because more people choose them. More people chose VHS over BetaMax, and that's why the BetaMax format lost. They're decisions aren't wrong, they're just different from yours. Maybe they weren't interested in the finer technical specifications (those the technical superiority of BetaMax has yet to be demonstrated objectively), maybe they place greater weight on non-technical factors. In any case, a Video Format Czar is a stupid idea.
In summary, a market is the worse possible way to allocate scarce resources... except for the alternatives!
Where's the money coming from? We're spending so much money even drunk sailors are embarassed. Moreover, we're spending money we don't have. Niether party is showing any hint of restraint, and the incoming president is worried we aren't unrestrained enough.
Subsizing new cars is the LAST thing we need at this point! Instead of taking the bottle away from the drunk, we're giving him a Stoli IV drip!
Actually, it's called a "natural monopoly". The argument with Comcast is that it's impossible for more than one cable company to exist, therefore Comcast is a natural monopoly. This ignores the fact that the local government gave a monopoly to Comcast in the first place.
Why can't there be more than one set of cables under our streets? There's no reason local governments have to pick and choose which ones get to lay cable, because more than one line can be laid in the same pipe. The problem of dug up streets won't exist if you make the companies pay for the work (duh) and limit such diggings to only once a year (or longer).
But even with government created monopolies, I find in my town I still have a choice of two broadband providers: DSL and Cable. (Actually I have a choice in DSL as well, because a couple other providers are leasing lines from the DSL monopolist, and making up for the higher price with better service).
As in, no Internet at all It doesn't seem likely that this will always be an option.
There is always an alternative. If cable was your only broadband option, and the monopolist decided to charge you $1000 a month, would you still be on cable? Hell no! You will find an alternative! Maybe it's sharing a connection with your block through wifi, splitting the cost ten ways. Maybe you'll get DS3 for the same price, and share it with your neighbors (in effect competing with the monopolist). There are always alternatives, and if the government does not forbid it, competitors will move in to provide them when the monopolist forgets that he is still at the mercy of the market.
But there are no alternatives when the government is in charge of your access. You pays your internet taxes or you don't get internet. That's why I still prefer a corrupt business operating in a free market than the most wise and beneficent government.
Unnhh... you are arguing about Operating Systems, not access controllers.
I used operating systems (lower case) as an example. I could have used automobiles, frozen dinners or toasters instead. Or service providers. Regardless of market seector used, the philosophical principles remain the same.
Where I live the choice is between DSL, Cable, and dial-up. DSL and Cable each have one provider.
I notice that you still have three choices. They may be "natural" monopolies, but they still provide you 300% more choices than with the centralized local government monopoly you desire. Even discounting the dialup, the DSL and cable companies are still competing with each other for your business.
I notice that you used the qualification that the oligopolies were not in a free market. That is a false dichotomy! You're asking us to choose between dysfunctional government with unspecified business firms versus dysfunctional government with corrupt oligarchies.
In terms of a relatively free market, I would prefer the corrupt oligopolies more than functional and efficient governments.
You say I have a hand in electing government, but I do not. In terms of the Federal government, I only have a hand in electing the president, two senators and congressman. There are tens of thousands of Federal government members remaining. Also my vote was only one among over a hundred million. My vote does not count. I've got a better chance of winning the lottery than having my vote make a difference.
No matter what I do, whether my four candidates win or lose, the Federal Government still has direct power over me.
Now let's look at the oligarchy. If I don't like Microsoft I can go with Apple. Or use Linux or FreeBSD or OpenOffice or Firefox or any number of alternatives. Even with Microsoft at 90% of the market, nothing stops me from using the alternative. Ditto for Sprint versus Verizon versus Horizon etc, etc. Even if there is a true monopoly or oligarchy with no competitors, I still have the option of foregoing. If I don't like any of the auto-manufacturers, I can choose a bicycle instead. Or choose to walk. Our "votes" in the marketplace *DO* count! Our influence on the companies may be negligable, but it's still far more than in elections. Prices themselves come about through consumer preferences. If a price is too high, consumers will buy less. Even in the case of monopolies.
No, markets are not perfect, and none ever will be. I'm still not going to get everything I want. Duh! But unlike the political system, at least I have choices.
The US Government is on a spending orgy of bailouts, stimuli and old fashioned pork. All pretenses of fiscal conservativism, from either political party, have vanished. We're into several trillion in promised payouts. The spending is accelerating, even as revenues are falling due to the crisis. There is simply no financial restraint left in government anymore. It wouldn't be so bad if the incoming president said he was going to pull back, but from all indications he thinks we aren't spending fast enough.
But geeks don't care, they're getting their net neutrality pony, and the rest of the world could burn for all they care.
How about getting rid of patents altogether? Not just on software, but on everything. They ain't natural, but are purely government created monopoly privileges.
Still not understanding the "republicans" tag attached to this article. Is there another architecture that's better suited to democrats? What should libertarians and greens use?
QThingy *thingy = new QThingy(); You can safely assume that anyone who writes that today doesn't know C++.
Then I guess not very many people know C++!!! I'm a contractor who has worked with dozens of companies in a wide range of fields, including medical, space and security. I have seen new statements wrapped in try blocks exactly once in that time.
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The GPL? or the LGPL? Or the BSD? Because those where the licenses KDE 1.x was under. The libraries have always been LGPL, the apps GPL, with a few pieces here and there under BSD.
Of course, Qt wasn't under Free Software license, but KDE itself was fine.
Ah yes, the year 2000. That was when Redhat wrested the World Troll Cup from Debian by publicly declared KDE to be a criminal desktop.
There are two ways to store persistent objects, as files or in a database. But the boundaries between the two are starting to blur. Bragging that your OS doesn't have files just doesn't make sense. I bet recovery is a bitch on Phantom OS.
"It's not what I'm used to!" strikes at the very heart of usability. Something that is good for newbies but bad for experts has POOR USABILITY! This isn't Fisher-Price, this is the desktop many of us have been using daily for an entire decade. It's the desktop we use for productive work. I'm not hostile to change, but I am hostile to that subset of change that interfers with my work and gets in my way.
KDE 4.2 hung my system FOUR times yesterday. I spent much of this morning tweaking drivers and xorg.confs so it wouldn't happen again. That isn't productive work, that's wasted time.
It's a driver issue. I get it using the radeon driver, but not with the fglrx driver. (I get other problems with fglrx and not with radeon, so no one driver is better than the other). But since this only happens on one desktop, is it really the driver's fault? One of these days all the drivers will have caught up to KDE 4.2... but by then KDE 5.0 will be shipping.
Engineers make lousy politicians. Why? Because they think they can fix anything. They have a deep seated hubris in believing they know how everything works and how to make everything run better. They are used to be in absolute control over their environment. But people are not devices, and society is not a network.
The last two engineer presidents we have had: Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Both were noted for economic crises. They thought they could engineer the economy, and ended up making things worse.
I want someone in office who is fully aware that the imperfections in the world are NOT failures, but natural order of things.
Huge multinational corporations are not the problem, they are the symptom! The core problem is government. NOT the current Finnish government, per se, but the system of government itself. It is a system that tries to organize society through centralized planning and direction. Our modern societies are far too complex to effectively manage in this way, and it leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. One such consequence is big business. Free markets do not create huge corporate behemoths, because markets loath inefficiencies. These busineses have become so large that they must create internal autonomous divisions, or they would cease to operate. So why do some businesses become so large? Because modern tax and regulatory structures favor size.
In a nutshell, when only companies large enough to have legions of lawyers are able to navigate the bureaucratic swamps, only companies large enough to have legions of lawyers will thrive. It may seem sensible to impose regulations on these monsters, but those same regulations affect SMALL businesses as well! They erect barriers to entries, creating monopolies. It can be more profitable for big businesses to lobby government than to engage in productive market activities. In fact, many regulations are lobbied for by the business community itself!
I am not arguing to get rid of all regulations. But we do need to be cognizant of the fact that every regulation has negative consequences. Pretending that we can wave a legislative wand and fix all of our problems is naive.
There is no single silver bullet to this problem. Nokia has grown too big for its britches. But we can start to repair the damage by loosening the restrictions we place on small businesses. Let's change directions and start growing government and business smaller.
The BSD daemon, "Beastie", is not the FreeBSD logo. It is the BSD mascot, suitable for all BSDs. Even some official NetBSD flyers use it.
When I say "the user doesn't care", I mean that the user doesn't care who is at fault. There's one KDE bug that drives me nuts, but it was closed as INVALID within minutes of my logging it. Why? Because "it's an X.org bug". That doesn't make the bug go away, nor does it make it any less annoying. I'm not demanding that KDE fix it, because they can't. But since the bug only exists on KDE 4, it deserves a bit more than a kneejerk response.
p.s. I have submitted bug reports and contributed to testing. And I contribute code.
The longer I live the more I see people reinventing the wheel, usually to huge media fanfares. This time Google reinvents the POP3 email client.
Correction: I tries to do it, and often succeeds. But sometimes it fails. Is it KDE's fault or the video driver's fault? When the user has a locked system he doesn't care!
The reason it works in Windows and OSX, is because the manufacturers write complete drivers. But in X11 the drivers are hit and miss. Either you have undermanned open source drivers working with incomplete specs, or proprietary drivers that just don't care. It's starting to change, but not fast enough.
Here's my prediction: After several billion dollars, three studies, and a thirty day comment period, Obama will decide to use Firefox.
This is news? How is this news? Scripting applications with Javascript has been a feature of Qt for quite a while now.
Some of the biggest idiots I have met in my life have also had the most IQ and education.
There is a world of difference between physics and the Department of Energy. One deals with particles and waves and mathematics, the other deals with human beings, tangled networks of regulations, and discordant policy objectives. Mr. Chu's qualifications as a scientist will have no bearing in his new role.
I would define as fundamentalist, someone who starts ranting against markets in the middle of a thread about keyboards. Really now, dig that burr out of your butt and get on with life.
No one ever claimed markets were healthy. Only that they were more efficient relative to the alternatives.
This is known as the King's Singer Fallacy. A king is auditioning court singers and is down to the final two. He has them sing for him. The first sings and the king says "that was the worst singer I've ever heard - I hereby declare the other singer my new Court Singer."
The world is not perfect (duh) and any theory that is premised on perfection is silly. Unfortunately, there is a school of economics that is indeed premised on this impossibility - neoclassicism. Doubly unfortunate, this school is currently in vogue. That doesn't make it true.
You cannot claim that markets are a failure just because one guy sells peanuts for 30 cents a pound and another for 32 cents a pount. Since they are not selling at the same price, then obviously they do not have perfect information. But this is hardly an excuse to dump the peanut market! Perfect information is impossible, as our preferences are constantly changing. No computer, no matter how powerful, could ever calculate "perfect" prices.
But again, the King's Singer Fallacy. Prices are imperfect, but what guarantee do you have the the alternative is better?
It is only your opinion tha that a particular solution is inferior. It may indeed be inferior, for you, but not for everyone. A decision is not automatically wrong just because it's different from the one you made.
Certain solutions become more popular because more people choose them. More people chose VHS over BetaMax, and that's why the BetaMax format lost. They're decisions aren't wrong, they're just different from yours. Maybe they weren't interested in the finer technical specifications (those the technical superiority of BetaMax has yet to be demonstrated objectively), maybe they place greater weight on non-technical factors. In any case, a Video Format Czar is a stupid idea.
In summary, a market is the worse possible way to allocate scarce resources... except for the alternatives!
Of course, the World's Fastest Typist anecdote is proof, proof I tell you, that ordinary computer geeks are better off with dvorak.
Dvorak: The homeopathy of the keyboard...
Where's the money coming from? We're spending so much money even drunk sailors are embarassed. Moreover, we're spending money we don't have. Niether party is showing any hint of restraint, and the incoming president is worried we aren't unrestrained enough.
Subsizing new cars is the LAST thing we need at this point! Instead of taking the bottle away from the drunk, we're giving him a Stoli IV drip!
Here's to four years of hoping for change...
Actually, it's called a "natural monopoly". The argument with Comcast is that it's impossible for more than one cable company to exist, therefore Comcast is a natural monopoly. This ignores the fact that the local government gave a monopoly to Comcast in the first place.
Why can't there be more than one set of cables under our streets? There's no reason local governments have to pick and choose which ones get to lay cable, because more than one line can be laid in the same pipe. The problem of dug up streets won't exist if you make the companies pay for the work (duh) and limit such diggings to only once a year (or longer).
But even with government created monopolies, I find in my town I still have a choice of two broadband providers: DSL and Cable. (Actually I have a choice in DSL as well, because a couple other providers are leasing lines from the DSL monopolist, and making up for the higher price with better service).
There is always an alternative. If cable was your only broadband option, and the monopolist decided to charge you $1000 a month, would you still be on cable? Hell no! You will find an alternative! Maybe it's sharing a connection with your block through wifi, splitting the cost ten ways. Maybe you'll get DS3 for the same price, and share it with your neighbors (in effect competing with the monopolist). There are always alternatives, and if the government does not forbid it, competitors will move in to provide them when the monopolist forgets that he is still at the mercy of the market.
But there are no alternatives when the government is in charge of your access. You pays your internet taxes or you don't get internet. That's why I still prefer a corrupt business operating in a free market than the most wise and beneficent government.
I used operating systems (lower case) as an example. I could have used automobiles, frozen dinners or toasters instead. Or service providers. Regardless of market seector used, the philosophical principles remain the same.
I notice that you still have three choices. They may be "natural" monopolies, but they still provide you 300% more choices than with the centralized local government monopoly you desire. Even discounting the dialup, the DSL and cable companies are still competing with each other for your business.
I notice that you used the qualification that the oligopolies were not in a free market. That is a false dichotomy! You're asking us to choose between dysfunctional government with unspecified business firms versus dysfunctional government with corrupt oligarchies.
In terms of a relatively free market, I would prefer the corrupt oligopolies more than functional and efficient governments.
You say I have a hand in electing government, but I do not. In terms of the Federal government, I only have a hand in electing the president, two senators and congressman. There are tens of thousands of Federal government members remaining. Also my vote was only one among over a hundred million. My vote does not count. I've got a better chance of winning the lottery than having my vote make a difference.
No matter what I do, whether my four candidates win or lose, the Federal Government still has direct power over me.
Now let's look at the oligarchy. If I don't like Microsoft I can go with Apple. Or use Linux or FreeBSD or OpenOffice or Firefox or any number of alternatives. Even with Microsoft at 90% of the market, nothing stops me from using the alternative. Ditto for Sprint versus Verizon versus Horizon etc, etc. Even if there is a true monopoly or oligarchy with no competitors, I still have the option of foregoing. If I don't like any of the auto-manufacturers, I can choose a bicycle instead. Or choose to walk. Our "votes" in the marketplace *DO* count! Our influence on the companies may be negligable, but it's still far more than in elections. Prices themselves come about through consumer preferences. If a price is too high, consumers will buy less. Even in the case of monopolies.
No, markets are not perfect, and none ever will be. I'm still not going to get everything I want. Duh! But unlike the political system, at least I have choices.
The US Government is on a spending orgy of bailouts, stimuli and old fashioned pork. All pretenses of fiscal conservativism, from either political party, have vanished. We're into several trillion in promised payouts. The spending is accelerating, even as revenues are falling due to the crisis. There is simply no financial restraint left in government anymore. It wouldn't be so bad if the incoming president said he was going to pull back, but from all indications he thinks we aren't spending fast enough.
But geeks don't care, they're getting their net neutrality pony, and the rest of the world could burn for all they care.
How about getting rid of patents altogether? Not just on software, but on everything. They ain't natural, but are purely government created monopoly privileges.
History seems to hint that rather than foster innovation, patents retard it. Here's an article summary that suggests Watt's patent slowed down steam engine innovation.
Still not understanding the "republicans" tag attached to this article. Is there another architecture that's better suited to democrats? What should libertarians and greens use?
Then I guess not very many people know C++!!! I'm a contractor who has worked with dozens of companies in a wide range of fields, including medical, space and security. I have seen new statements wrapped in try blocks exactly once in that time.