The developers of the new KDE desktop disdain the traditional desktop, and as near as I can tell, disdain the people who like the traditional. To them it's obsolete, archaic, your "grandpa's desktop", etc. If you criticize the new direction, you are asked to leave.
I gotta agree too. Plasmoids on the panel are great. Plasmoids on the desktop suck. If they were like OSX and instantly available, I would be happy. There are supposed to be "workspaces" that you can switch between, but it's slow and painful. And the entirety of the user documentation consists of a FAQ.
I'm still waiting for open source drivers that work. Until then there's no way you can call it a victory.
I'm building a new computer this month, but I have no idea what video card to use. I need something that works with new KDE4 desktop, but still has stable Open Source drivers. I suspect such a thing does not actually exist.
Yeah, and 2.2 is still available on the repos, but so what? The odds that your distro will be supporting 3.5.x in their next release is slim. Many major distros have already dropped support for it.
It's unthinkable because the IT industry as a whole seems incapable of comprehending the possibility of such an attack. Cities are installing muni-wifis without encryption, military branches are standardizing on Windows, commercial broadband routers/modems continue to be shipped with security off by default, etc.
Friedrich Hayek won a Nobel Prize demonstrating the impossibility of central planning to obtain necessary market information, yet we still haven't learned. The market process is far from perfect, but it's nothing compared to the ineptitude of central economic planning. Sure the government can pay people to dig ditches, but dig them to where? And how much to pay them? Should we recruit diggers from technology fields or manufacturing? What level of education should diggers have? How much is a ditch worth? A market can offer useful answers to these questions, but a government cannot. A government can only make arbitrary pronouncements, and damn anyone who gets in the way.
Central economic planning got us into the predicament, with its manipulation of credit and nationalization of risks, so why would anyone look to the same government to get us out? The question is not what government can do to help us, but rather what government can undo.
What's my take? Only that I be aware of which media has DRM and which does not. After that the choice to buy is up to me. I prefer a society where interactions are voluntary, rather than compelled or banned.
If you don't like iTunes, then don't by music from iTunes! I continue to be amazed by how many folks here on Slashdot cannot understand this simple idea.
But why should businesses be different? Sure you get a paycheck, but it's still a voluntary association. Nobody forced you to go work for your current employer.
What? You live in a country that wrongfully imprisoned you on trumped up charges? Don't like prison? Just slit your throat. And stop being such a whiner.
Your employer cannot imprison you. No really, they can't. The only power your employer has over you, the ONLY power, is terminating your voluntary association. Yeah, it sucks getting fired. But it sucks breaking up too, but I don't see too many people lobbying to pass laws requiring girlfriends to give thirty days notice before dumping their asses.
A firm is nothing more than a group of individual people associating together. Those individuals have the right of association (and non-association). While certain forms of association may be immoral, should they also be illegal? It's a very slippery slope when we let government have the power to choose who you may or may not associate with.
The best solution when you are confronted with a firm that discriminates, is to simply not associate with them. If they piss you off enough, then go ahead and organize a boycott and picket. But getting the government involved will always lead to unintended consequences.
Here's my novel legal theory: if you don't like it, quit. If you're a longstanding employee who suddenly was told he had to start taking religious classes, then you might have a case, because that wasn't part of your employment agreement. But if you're a new employee, then quit. Just quit. You lost a couple of days in your job search over this red herring, but that's all.
Employers cannot layout off everyone, because then they would have no employees! Duh! You can lay off a few, and replace them. But there's no freaking way a large company can lay everyone off and hire replacements. I don't know if you've ever tried to hire someone, but it's not a quick process. Even in a small company of 50, if you fire everyone, you'll be out of commission for months trying to hire replacements in a specialized trade. You think you can hire them from your competitors? Then you'll have to pay them better wages! Think you can hire from the unemployment lines? Then you'll get unskilled workers you have to train!
Unions are a cartel of labor, and can extert economic pressures on a company without having to use government and police.
Just make it voluntary. Don't make me join a union, and don't make me still pay dues if I don't. Also allow firms to fire employees "for cause" when they repeatedly fail to show up for work because of a strike. As long I I retain my right to associate or not associate with people on a purely voluntary manner, I don't have the slightest problem with unions.
The great thing is, you can switch the station! No, really, switch the station! Don't like your kids watching boobies, change the channel. Don't like commercials, change the channel.
Or get a DVR. Or only watch stuff from netflix. Or stop watching television altogether. You'll probably gain three IQ points off that last one.
You let the government handle your television broadcasting, you end up with government quality television broadcasting. No surprise at all. Letting the government provide your television is like hiring the mafia to babysit your kids: it's not what they're best at.
I'm not sure about netbeans, but the other stuff is spot on. Learn C++ (you'll learn C for free along the way). Then learn Python as a second language. Add in Qt (and PyQt) and you're set.
There's far too much code out there to reuse it all. So we need some way to separate out the good reusable code from the the bad code. And one way is to let individual voluntary actions of developers and users operate to create an emergent order that will rank the code by desirability. In other words, a free market of ideas. Some good code will slip into obscurity and some bad code will get more promotion than it warrants, but overall the code that does get reused will be the good code.
It's like that other emergent order called evolution. Does anyone care what happens to failed mutations? The good genes get reused and improved, the bad genes die out. It's not perfect, but nothing in life is.
Apparently it always takes a raving ego maniac to do it, however.
It takes someone willing to take the risk, somone who can herd all the right cats, someone willing to endure scorn that comes with success, someone who loves their dreams more than their social life. That such people tend to be egotists and jerks is not at all surprising. Look at the people running free software projects: Linus, Richard, Theo, etc. They tend to be egotists and jerks too, for exactly the same reasons.
This had little to do with government intervention.
It had a lot to do with copyrights, which monopoly grants by government. I know it's unrealistic to imagine a world without copyright, but that doesn't mean we must ignore the unintended consequences of this government intervention.
Right now Microsoft is ready to take a huge chunk out of the antivirus business when they start including their AV software with Windows. They aren't going to take a chunk out of the AV business by being a superior product but simply by bundling it with their monopoly operating system.
From where I sit there is still a lot of competition in this area. I see McAfee, AVG, Norton, Trend Micro, ZoneAlarm, and dozens more. But keeping on topic with this article, AV is rapidly becoming a a commodity, and the price will continue to plummet, with or without Microosoft.
But that's all beside the point. Without the crapfest that is Windows, the demand for anti-virus software would be a fraction of what it is now. It's not at all surprising that Microsoft would seek to bundle up a tool that is nearly essential for the proper functioning of Windows.
This seems antithetical to the goals of the free market to me.
Do not anthropomorphize markets (I know it's hard to do). Markets do not have goals, individuals have goals. A market is just a collection of people interacting with each other. There are as many goals in a market as their are individuals. It is an emergent order arising from all of these individual goals. (Read up on Hayek for more on emergent market orders).
Trying to decide what the goals should be is what is truly antithetical to a free market.
Slashdot Mirror
The developers of the new KDE desktop disdain the traditional desktop, and as near as I can tell, disdain the people who like the traditional. To them it's obsolete, archaic, your "grandpa's desktop", etc. If you criticize the new direction, you are asked to leave.
I gotta agree too. Plasmoids on the panel are great. Plasmoids on the desktop suck. If they were like OSX and instantly available, I would be happy. There are supposed to be "workspaces" that you can switch between, but it's slow and painful. And the entirety of the user documentation consists of a FAQ.
uh... with a CD?
I'm still waiting for open source drivers that work. Until then there's no way you can call it a victory.
I'm building a new computer this month, but I have no idea what video card to use. I need something that works with new KDE4 desktop, but still has stable Open Source drivers. I suspect such a thing does not actually exist.
Whining on Slashdot fixes nothing, but a wrongful arrest lawsuit will make some folks sit up and take notice.
Yeah, and 2.2 is still available on the repos, but so what? The odds that your distro will be supporting 3.5.x in their next release is slim. Many major distros have already dropped support for it.
It's not just GNU, it's all of FOSS. Only software that comes from the GNU project should be called "GNU".
It's unthinkable because the IT industry as a whole seems incapable of comprehending the possibility of such an attack. Cities are installing muni-wifis without encryption, military branches are standardizing on Windows, commercial broadband routers/modems continue to be shipped with security off by default, etc.
Friedrich Hayek won a Nobel Prize demonstrating the impossibility of central planning to obtain necessary market information, yet we still haven't learned. The market process is far from perfect, but it's nothing compared to the ineptitude of central economic planning. Sure the government can pay people to dig ditches, but dig them to where? And how much to pay them? Should we recruit diggers from technology fields or manufacturing? What level of education should diggers have? How much is a ditch worth? A market can offer useful answers to these questions, but a government cannot. A government can only make arbitrary pronouncements, and damn anyone who gets in the way.
Central economic planning got us into the predicament, with its manipulation of credit and nationalization of risks, so why would anyone look to the same government to get us out? The question is not what government can do to help us, but rather what government can undo.
What's my take? Only that I be aware of which media has DRM and which does not. After that the choice to buy is up to me. I prefer a society where interactions are voluntary, rather than compelled or banned.
If you don't like iTunes, then don't by music from iTunes! I continue to be amazed by how many folks here on Slashdot cannot understand this simple idea.
But why should businesses be different? Sure you get a paycheck, but it's still a voluntary association. Nobody forced you to go work for your current employer.
Your employer cannot imprison you. No really, they can't. The only power your employer has over you, the ONLY power, is terminating your voluntary association. Yeah, it sucks getting fired. But it sucks breaking up too, but I don't see too many people lobbying to pass laws requiring girlfriends to give thirty days notice before dumping their asses.
A firm is nothing more than a group of individual people associating together. Those individuals have the right of association (and non-association). While certain forms of association may be immoral, should they also be illegal? It's a very slippery slope when we let government have the power to choose who you may or may not associate with.
The best solution when you are confronted with a firm that discriminates, is to simply not associate with them. If they piss you off enough, then go ahead and organize a boycott and picket. But getting the government involved will always lead to unintended consequences.
Here's my novel legal theory: if you don't like it, quit. If you're a longstanding employee who suddenly was told he had to start taking religious classes, then you might have a case, because that wasn't part of your employment agreement. But if you're a new employee, then quit. Just quit. You lost a couple of days in your job search over this red herring, but that's all.
I live in Silicon Valley, and there have NOT been hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.
Hardware is cheaper than programmers! Fire all programmers and when client bitches about bugs, just add more ram! :-)
Employers cannot layout off everyone, because then they would have no employees! Duh! You can lay off a few, and replace them. But there's no freaking way a large company can lay everyone off and hire replacements. I don't know if you've ever tried to hire someone, but it's not a quick process. Even in a small company of 50, if you fire everyone, you'll be out of commission for months trying to hire replacements in a specialized trade. You think you can hire them from your competitors? Then you'll have to pay them better wages! Think you can hire from the unemployment lines? Then you'll get unskilled workers you have to train!
Unions are a cartel of labor, and can extert economic pressures on a company without having to use government and police.
Just make it voluntary. Don't make me join a union, and don't make me still pay dues if I don't. Also allow firms to fire employees "for cause" when they repeatedly fail to show up for work because of a strike. As long I I retain my right to associate or not associate with people on a purely voluntary manner, I don't have the slightest problem with unions.
The great thing is, you can switch the station! No, really, switch the station! Don't like your kids watching boobies, change the channel. Don't like commercials, change the channel.
Or get a DVR. Or only watch stuff from netflix. Or stop watching television altogether. You'll probably gain three IQ points off that last one.
You let the government handle your television broadcasting, you end up with government quality television broadcasting. No surprise at all. Letting the government provide your television is like hiring the mafia to babysit your kids: it's not what they're best at.
The vast majority of people using mini-notebooks aren't going to be concerned about math formulas. Really, they aren't.
I'm not sure about netbeans, but the other stuff is spot on. Learn C++ (you'll learn C for free along the way). Then learn Python as a second language. Add in Qt (and PyQt) and you're set.
There's far too much code out there to reuse it all. So we need some way to separate out the good reusable code from the the bad code. And one way is to let individual voluntary actions of developers and users operate to create an emergent order that will rank the code by desirability. In other words, a free market of ideas. Some good code will slip into obscurity and some bad code will get more promotion than it warrants, but overall the code that does get reused will be the good code.
It's like that other emergent order called evolution. Does anyone care what happens to failed mutations? The good genes get reused and improved, the bad genes die out. It's not perfect, but nothing in life is.
It takes someone willing to take the risk, somone who can herd all the right cats, someone willing to endure scorn that comes with success, someone who loves their dreams more than their social life. That such people tend to be egotists and jerks is not at all surprising. Look at the people running free software projects: Linus, Richard, Theo, etc. They tend to be egotists and jerks too, for exactly the same reasons.
It had a lot to do with copyrights, which monopoly grants by government. I know it's unrealistic to imagine a world without copyright, but that doesn't mean we must ignore the unintended consequences of this government intervention.
From where I sit there is still a lot of competition in this area. I see McAfee, AVG, Norton, Trend Micro, ZoneAlarm, and dozens more. But keeping on topic with this article, AV is rapidly becoming a a commodity, and the price will continue to plummet, with or without Microosoft.
But that's all beside the point. Without the crapfest that is Windows, the demand for anti-virus software would be a fraction of what it is now. It's not at all surprising that Microsoft would seek to bundle up a tool that is nearly essential for the proper functioning of Windows.
Do not anthropomorphize markets (I know it's hard to do). Markets do not have goals, individuals have goals. A market is just a collection of people interacting with each other. There are as many goals in a market as their are individuals. It is an emergent order arising from all of these individual goals. (Read up on Hayek for more on emergent market orders).
Trying to decide what the goals should be is what is truly antithetical to a free market.