Indeed it does. To put a human face on that... minimum wage laws cause poverty, unemployment, welfare dependence and some measure of inflation - by creating an artificial barrier to entry into the workforce for those with the least skills.
To put it another way, minimum wage laws make the truly poor even poorer.
This boils down to the fact that this was a agreement made with AOL *of your own free will*, and as a consenting adult.
So you made a bad choice, and it wasn't quite what you thought it would be. In exercising your option to end the arrangement, you made a second decision *of your own free will*.
Now your class action lawsuit threatens to establish precedent which will effectively take away the ability of all current and future online volunteers (AOL or otherwise) to *make their own decisions for themselves*.
It really burns me up when a small group appoints themselves saviors and decides to make decisions on behalf of other people - as if the other people were 'too stupid' to know what's best for themselves.
it's quite apparent that AOL was exploiting people who would do anything for free hours.
It was a voluntary agreement between AOL and consenting adults. Participants were free to terminate the arrangement at any time. Many of them did.
Are you saying that the minimum wage should be done away with?
Absolutely! Minimum wage laws cause unemployment, poverty and welfare dependence among the least-skilled workers.
If the minimum wage is set at, say, $5/hr, only those who have skills worth that much can get jobs. The rest - the ones at the very bottom - are left SOL, with no chance whatsoever of getting a job so they can learn some skills and better their situation.
Proponents of minimum wage laws like to talk as if they are helping people, but in reality they hurt the poorest in our society the most.
In fact, labor unions have been the driving force behind minimum wage increases in the U.S. Don't you find this a little suspicious? When was the last time you heard of a union member making anywhere near minimum wage?
Cool. I guess it would probably be fast on my K6-2/350 as well, huh? Maybe I'd buy it... but I think It'd be weird paying money for software. That's so early 90's.
I have to say, Mozilla is starting to feel more solid these days. I download a nightly build at least once a week just to see how things are going. If the last few I've downloaded are any indication, the final product is going to rock when it finally ships... I just hope its not too much longer.
In addition to my Linux box, I have an NT 4 machine with IE 5.5, and I can say that it provides a 10x better browsing experience than NS4.7 on Linux. Faster rendering, quicker page load times, decent features, and almost rock solid stability, with a huge footprint. This is what I compare the Mozilla builds to, and I would say that they are catching up, and that they are definitely going to give IE some competition sooner or later. They will also go a long way to making Linux a viable desktop platform.
That's for wussies. The coffee they serve at the cafe down the street must be at least 300F. It's so hot that I have to buy it 24 hours in advance so it can cool to a drinkable temperature.
Do you think Soros or any speculator isn't motived by greed ? Do you think that stock-ups and Internet golden rush isn't motivated by greed, especially for the investors?
Those are businesspeople, not capitalists. Common misconception.
A capitalist is someone who believes that the means of production, e.g. capital, should be privately owned, and that resources should be allocated according to supply and demand instead of central planning. This is in stark contrast to the communists (who outlawed private ownership of much of anything) and the socialists (who try to create an equal society through involuntary redistribution of wealth).
First, America has not had a capitalist economy since at least the early 1900's. It's now a mixed economy - part capitalist, part socialist.
Second, the countries that have the freest economies also have the highest life expectancies. This includes the U.S., which has the 4th freest economy in the world. Conversely, the countries with the least free economies have the lowest life expectancies. Coincidence? Nope. You see, free people live long and prosper. People in chains die.
some industries almost require an oligopolistic market to be profitable, because there are substantial startup costs that small firms can't handle.
Taxation and over-regulation also serve as barriers to market entry. Some industries have so many byzantine rules and regulations that it's impossible for any company to enter the market unless they are enormous, heavily capitalized, and have several hundred lawyers.
Another complication is economies of scale, where only large oligopolies or monopolies have the capacities necessary to realize low per-unit costs.
A large company can easily be outdone in the marketplace by a decentralized network of independent firms, in a manner similar to distributed supercomputing. Examples include Linux, which gets contributions from hundreds of companies worldwide, and Mom & Pop ISPs, which rose up out of nowhere in 1995 and totally walked over the big telcos.
I agree that think-tank economists are not always in touch with what is going on in the trenches in the computer industry.
Anyway, I wasn't really talking about globalization in my post. My point was that the market for computer operating systems is one that is rapidly and dramatically expanding. That's true whether you look at it nationally or globally.
I have to leave to go work now, but I'll leave you with this wrt the other issues you bring up:
If these multinational corporations are so oppressive and exploitative of workers in developing nations, why do these workers line up in droves to apply for jobs, with more applicants than there are positions? Could it be that even though they're not quite up to Western standards, the working conditions they offer an improvement over their other options? No one is forcing people to work at these companies - it's entirely voluntary.
IMHO, market economies and global free trade are the best ways to pull Third World countries out of poverty. Most of them are currently run by socialist dictators who steal the workers' output, murder political opponents, and get fat off of Western aid.
You're resorting to that tired old statement that capitalists are motivated by greed. It wasn't true when the Communist Party said it in the former Soviet Union, and it isn't true now.
You might be surprised to know that capitalists (those who believe in private ownership of the means of production) want lower profit margins too. Razor-thin profit margins are a sign of healthy competition.
Adam Smith, one of the fathers of capitalism, denounced profit as evil, saying it was an indicator of inefficiencies in the marketplace (which are often due to over-regulation and political corruption).
Sorry about the sarcasm in the previous post. I have been very sarcastic today for some reason.
Point Four: Market-share does not define a monopoly in the "new economy"
This actually is a good point... I think I saw something on the Helix Code web site that says something like "Only 5 percent of the world's population has chosen a desktop computing environment. That leaves a lot of room for GNOME."
The point is that this is a marketplace that is expanding quickly and dramatically, and that Microsoft's current 90% of the desktop marketplace could easily amount to only a 12% share by the year 2004.
Also, I found it ironic that a Slashdot story a day or two ago questioned whether Linux had eclipsed Macintosh as the number one competitor to MS. I thought monopolies didn't have competitors?! Slashdotters are so two-faced. One second we are railing about how there's no way anyone can compete against the monopoly in Redmond, the next we're railing about how Linux is kicking Windows' ass. Makes no sense to me.
Nevermind the fact that their networks never could have been built without the government's permission and help (both financial and legislative).
Cable companies are legally protected monopolies.
Your argument is that because of this, their competitors should be allowed access to their network.
Instead of this, how about opening the cable market up to competition, and allowing more than one cable provider in a given region? In other words, why don't we get rid of the laws that create these monopolies?
I hear a lot of arguments saying something to the effect of 'Well, they're given special treatment by the government, so we have to also give special treatment to their competitors.'
This invariably results in layer upon layer of special treatment, and a convoluted legal code base.
Libertarians want to *eliminate* the special treatment across the board. What's so bad about that?
I know corporation bashing is popular on/., I guess that's why your computer was hand crafted by a tribe of indigenous people from the amazon, right?
That's a no-no also, as it implies trade between countries, i.e. Global Capitalism. Shudder to think that those durned fur'ners might have made your floppy drive.
The truly 'socially responsible' computer is one built at cost by a local peoples' cooperative using indigenous materials.
Disclaimer: I am a smoker. I don't like the fact that I smoke, but all my quitting attempts have so far been unsuccessful. This is the reason why I don't think tobacco products should be sold. A government-enforced ban on smoking would probably be the best thing to happen to me in my life.
I bet a government-enforced ban on smoking would be real successful, just like alcohol Prohibition and the War on Drugs.
Just what we need, more violence in our streets, adulterated tobacco, people stealing to support their nicotine habit, and no discernible reduction in smoking.
Disclaimer: I'm a smoker too. I've quit twice for 6 months each time, and am determined to quit once and for all. They say that most smokers quit 3 times before quitting for good. It's painfully difficult to quit, but where there's a will there's a way.
I still think that I am the person who is best equipped to make decisions for myself. Not Dubya, Gore, Nader or any other person with a tie and a thirst for power over others. It's my body, my life, and my choice for better or for worse. Whatever happened to the concept of personal responsibility?
Well man its like this... sometimes it takes resources to run shit. Like bigass beer-cooled Sun servers, redundant T3's, administrative/technical/customer service personnel (who incidentally need to eat and drink beer too), climate controlled buildings, generators, big UPS's, fire supression systems, Cisco routers w/support contracts, and toilet paper for the bathroom. Triple all that if you want a fault-tolerant operation with redundant, geographically isolated data centers.
I don't think that's at all an exaggeration of what's involved in running a decent-sized TLD.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone, somewhere has to foot the bill for shit. Why shouldn't it be the people who are benefitting from it? Seems pretty fair to me.
I tried to register a 'lastname.city.md.us' domain about 4 or 5 years ago. The registrar for my area was/is Nametamer.
I had a terrible experience with them. Took me months to get them to set my domain record to point to my nameservers properly. All the while they were sending me 'you must pay now' emails. I wasn't gonna pay for jack if it they weren't gonna make it work.
Eventually they got it fixed, but by that time I had gotten frustrated and already registered a domain elsewhere.
Keep in mind that this was a long time ago... they could have changed a lot since 1995/1996.
The.us TLD does have cool possibilities but it seems like a couple unresponsive registrars have monopolies over big regions.
I just discovered that the netatalk (Appletalk for Linux, including file and print services) project is now being hosted on SourceForge... at http://sourceforge.net/projects/netatalk .
I have been struggling with netatalk for several years in connecting several MacOS 9 clients to a Linux webserver. I had given up the netatalk project for dead, since a new release hadn't come out during those years. I have netatalk working, but it is pretty flaky and cantankerous.
So, there are 15 developers listed on SourceForge, and the project seems to be fairly active now.
What a happy day in the neighborhood. I hope netatalk ends up being as fast, solid and robust as $3500 Helios Ethershare. I am going to go file bug reports now.
The only Cocoa I know of is a kid's Internet multimedia authoring package. I've been trying to use it to teach fundamental programming concepts to my 8 y.o. son on his Power Mac 6100. Unfortunately it's clunky and backwards in some respects. He rather quickly gets frustrated with it and goes back to playing Nethack for hours.
I don't think this is the Cocoa you're talking about:)
Man, I hear you. I like NPR, but sometimes it is just too damn classical music listenin', literature appreciatin', minutiae dwellin', corn farmer in Iowa interviewin', monotone talkin' whitebread boring for me to listen to.
What I need is an NPR with a blunted hip-hop/acid jazz soundtrack, and street sensibilities to match. Like, Ice-T interviewing Kevin Mitnick or something.
Maybe I should just cut down on the coffee.
--
Re:GNOME vs KDE Episode 18: Pointlessness
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
That's cool to know, thanks.
I have an NT4 Workstation box here, which is what I was comparing against. I have yet to even see W2K running.
I still prefer to work in front of the Linux box though - I start to freak out if I don't have 23 shell windows open:)
Linux is the backbone of Africa's emerging IT infrastructure, which is one of the keys to more freedom, education and prosperity in that region.
Contributing to Linux helps Third World countries and the former Soviet Union develop economic stability... and nurtures the free speech movement in China... There are countless 'ripple effects' that are positive side effects of free software.
--
Re:GNOME vs KDE Episode 18: Pointlessness
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2
There are several things I like about KDE that make it a better desktop environment than Windows, IMHO:
- double-clicking a taskbar icon will iconify that application. great for getting stuff out of your way.
- right-clicking a taskbar icon gives you a menu which includes 'iconify other windows', which is really handy since I usually have like 14 Konsoles, 11 Netscapes, GAIM, XMMS, Quanta+ and StarOffice open simultaneously.
- Alt-F2 brings up a little input field which I can use to start an app quicker than using the menus. It keeps a history too, so I can cycle through previous commands.
- Rotating desktop wallpapers. I have a directory of about 450 hi-color psychedelic 1024x768 wallpapers, and I have KDE set to switch to a random one every 30 seconds. Keeps things interesting.
- Right click on desktop gives you a menu which includes 'Logout'. I find that much easier to deal with than windows, which requires you to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del or click on the Start button.
So, I guess it's subtle things like that, that make me like KDE so much.
I like GNOME in concept, but it just doesn't feel right to me. I installed Helix GNOME the other day... It has a very slick, professional installer, but the underlying GNOME still seems cumbersome and sort of clunky.
I'll keep an eye on GNOME, and I will definitely check out Nautilus at some point, but for now I'm sticking with KDE.
Slashdot Mirror
As said before, MW creates economic inefficiency.
Indeed it does. To put a human face on that... minimum wage laws cause poverty, unemployment, welfare dependence and some measure of inflation - by creating an artificial barrier to entry into the workforce for those with the least skills.
To put it another way, minimum wage laws make the truly poor even poorer.
--
This boils down to the fact that this was a agreement made with AOL *of your own free will*, and as a consenting adult.
So you made a bad choice, and it wasn't quite what you thought it would be. In exercising your option to end the arrangement, you made a second decision *of your own free will*.
Now your class action lawsuit threatens to establish precedent which will effectively take away the ability of all current and future online volunteers (AOL or otherwise) to *make their own decisions for themselves*.
It really burns me up when a small group appoints themselves saviors and decides to make decisions on behalf of other people - as if the other people were 'too stupid' to know what's best for themselves.
--
it's quite apparent that AOL was exploiting people who would do anything for free hours.
It was a voluntary agreement between AOL and consenting adults. Participants were free to terminate the arrangement at any time. Many of them did.
Are you saying that the minimum wage should be done away with?
Absolutely! Minimum wage laws cause unemployment, poverty and welfare dependence among the least-skilled workers.
If the minimum wage is set at, say, $5/hr, only those who have skills worth that much can get jobs. The rest - the ones at the very bottom - are left SOL, with no chance whatsoever of getting a job so they can learn some skills and better their situation.
Proponents of minimum wage laws like to talk as if they are helping people, but in reality they hurt the poorest in our society the most.
In fact, labor unions have been the driving force behind minimum wage increases in the U.S. Don't you find this a little suspicious? When was the last time you heard of a union member making anywhere near minimum wage?
--
Cool. I guess it would probably be fast on my K6-2/350 as well, huh? Maybe I'd buy it... but I think It'd be weird paying money for software. That's so early 90's.
I have to say, Mozilla is starting to feel more solid these days. I download a nightly build at least once a week just to see how things are going. If the last few I've downloaded are any indication, the final product is going to rock when it finally ships... I just hope its not too much longer.
In addition to my Linux box, I have an NT 4 machine with IE 5.5, and I can say that it provides a 10x better browsing experience than NS4.7 on Linux. Faster rendering, quicker page load times, decent features, and almost rock solid stability, with a huge footprint. This is what I compare the Mozilla builds to, and I would say that they are catching up, and that they are definitely going to give IE some competition sooner or later. They will also go a long way to making Linux a viable desktop platform.
I really should be sleeping right now.
--
That's for wussies. The coffee they serve at the cafe down the street must be at least 300F. It's so hot that I have to buy it 24 hours in advance so it can cool to a drinkable temperature.
--
Do you think Soros or any speculator isn't motived by greed ? Do you think that stock-ups and Internet golden rush isn't motivated by greed, especially for the investors?
Those are businesspeople, not capitalists. Common misconception.
A capitalist is someone who believes that the means of production, e.g. capital, should be privately owned, and that resources should be allocated according to supply and demand instead of central planning. This is in stark contrast to the communists (who outlawed private ownership of much of anything) and the socialists (who try to create an equal society through involuntary redistribution of wealth).
--
First, America has not had a capitalist economy since at least the early 1900's. It's now a mixed economy - part capitalist, part socialist.
Second, the countries that have the freest economies also have the highest life expectancies. This includes the U.S., which has the 4th freest economy in the world. Conversely, the countries with the least free economies have the lowest life expectancies. Coincidence? Nope. You see, free people live long and prosper. People in chains die.
--
some industries almost require an oligopolistic market to be profitable, because there are substantial startup costs that small firms can't handle.
Taxation and over-regulation also serve as barriers to market entry. Some industries have so many byzantine rules and regulations that it's impossible for any company to enter the market unless they are enormous, heavily capitalized, and have several hundred lawyers.
Another complication is economies of scale, where only large oligopolies or monopolies have the capacities necessary to realize low per-unit costs.
A large company can easily be outdone in the marketplace by a decentralized network of independent firms, in a manner similar to distributed supercomputing. Examples include Linux, which gets contributions from hundreds of companies worldwide, and Mom & Pop ISPs, which rose up out of nowhere in 1995 and totally walked over the big telcos.
Good post.
--
I agree that think-tank economists are not always in touch with what is going on in the trenches in the computer industry.
Anyway, I wasn't really talking about globalization in my post. My point was that the market for computer operating systems is one that is rapidly and dramatically expanding. That's true whether you look at it nationally or globally.
I have to leave to go work now, but I'll leave you with this wrt the other issues you bring up:
If these multinational corporations are so oppressive and exploitative of workers in developing nations, why do these workers line up in droves to apply for jobs, with more applicants than there are positions? Could it be that even though they're not quite up to Western standards, the working conditions they offer an improvement over their other options? No one is forcing people to work at these companies - it's entirely voluntary.
IMHO, market economies and global free trade are the best ways to pull Third World countries out of poverty. Most of them are currently run by socialist dictators who steal the workers' output, murder political opponents, and get fat off of Western aid.
--
You're resorting to that tired old statement that capitalists are motivated by greed. It wasn't true when the Communist Party said it in the former Soviet Union, and it isn't true now.
You might be surprised to know that capitalists (those who believe in private ownership of the means of production) want lower profit margins too. Razor-thin profit margins are a sign of healthy competition.
Adam Smith, one of the fathers of capitalism, denounced profit as evil, saying it was an indicator of inefficiencies in the marketplace (which are often due to over-regulation and political corruption).
Sorry about the sarcasm in the previous post. I have been very sarcastic today for some reason.
--
Point Four: Market-share does not define a monopoly in the "new economy"
This actually is a good point... I think I saw something on the Helix Code web site that says something like "Only 5 percent of the world's population has chosen a desktop computing environment. That leaves a lot of room for GNOME."
The point is that this is a marketplace that is expanding quickly and dramatically, and that Microsoft's current 90% of the desktop marketplace could easily amount to only a 12% share by the year 2004.
Also, I found it ironic that a Slashdot story a day or two ago questioned whether Linux had eclipsed Macintosh as the number one competitor to MS. I thought monopolies didn't have competitors?! Slashdotters are so two-faced. One second we are railing about how there's no way anyone can compete against the monopoly in Redmond, the next we're railing about how Linux is kicking Windows' ass. Makes no sense to me.
--
Nevermind the fact that their networks never could have been built without the government's permission and help (both financial and legislative).
Cable companies are legally protected monopolies.
Your argument is that because of this, their competitors should be allowed access to their network.
Instead of this, how about opening the cable market up to competition, and allowing more than one cable provider in a given region? In other words, why don't we get rid of the laws that create these monopolies?
I hear a lot of arguments saying something to the effect of 'Well, they're given special treatment by the government, so we have to also give special treatment to their competitors.'
This invariably results in layer upon layer of special treatment, and a convoluted legal code base.
Libertarians want to *eliminate* the special treatment across the board. What's so bad about that?
--
I know corporation bashing is popular on /., I guess that's why your computer was hand crafted by a tribe of indigenous people from the amazon, right?
That's a no-no also, as it implies trade between countries, i.e. Global Capitalism. Shudder to think that those durned fur'ners might have made your floppy drive.
The truly 'socially responsible' computer is one built at cost by a local peoples' cooperative using indigenous materials.
--
Disclaimer: I am a smoker. I don't like the fact that I smoke, but all my quitting attempts have so far been unsuccessful. This is the reason why I don't think tobacco products should be sold. A government-enforced ban on smoking would probably be the best thing to happen to me in my life.
I bet a government-enforced ban on smoking would be real successful, just like alcohol Prohibition and the War on Drugs.
Just what we need, more violence in our streets, adulterated tobacco, people stealing to support their nicotine habit, and no discernible reduction in smoking.
Disclaimer: I'm a smoker too. I've quit twice for 6 months each time, and am determined to quit once and for all. They say that most smokers quit 3 times before quitting for good. It's painfully difficult to quit, but where there's a will there's a way.
I still think that I am the person who is best equipped to make decisions for myself. Not Dubya, Gore, Nader or any other person with a tie and a thirst for power over others. It's my body, my life, and my choice for better or for worse. Whatever happened to the concept of personal responsibility?
--
How does one tell the difference between a virus infection and a normal Windows installation?
--
Well man its like this... sometimes it takes resources to run shit. Like bigass beer-cooled Sun servers, redundant T3's, administrative/technical/customer service personnel (who incidentally need to eat and drink beer too), climate controlled buildings, generators, big UPS's, fire supression systems, Cisco routers w/support contracts, and toilet paper for the bathroom. Triple all that if you want a fault-tolerant operation with redundant, geographically isolated data centers.
I don't think that's at all an exaggeration of what's involved in running a decent-sized TLD.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone, somewhere has to foot the bill for shit. Why shouldn't it be the people who are benefitting from it? Seems pretty fair to me.
--
I tried to register a 'lastname.city.md.us' domain about 4 or 5 years ago. The registrar for my area was/is Nametamer.
.us TLD does have cool possibilities but it seems like a couple unresponsive registrars have monopolies over big regions.
I had a terrible experience with them. Took me months to get them to set my domain record to point to my nameservers properly. All the while they were sending me 'you must pay now' emails. I wasn't gonna pay for jack if it they weren't gonna make it work.
Eventually they got it fixed, but by that time I had gotten frustrated and already registered a domain elsewhere.
Keep in mind that this was a long time ago... they could have changed a lot since 1995/1996.
The
--
I just discovered that the netatalk (Appletalk for Linux, including file and print services) project is now being hosted on SourceForge... at http://sourceforge.net/projects/netatalk .
I have been struggling with netatalk for several years in connecting several MacOS 9 clients to a Linux webserver. I had given up the netatalk project for dead, since a new release hadn't come out during those years. I have netatalk working, but it is pretty flaky and cantankerous.
So, there are 15 developers listed on SourceForge, and the project seems to be fairly active now.
What a happy day in the neighborhood. I hope netatalk ends up being as fast, solid and robust as $3500 Helios Ethershare. I am going to go file bug reports now.
--
Don't you mean Carbon?
:)
The only Cocoa I know of is a kid's Internet multimedia authoring package. I've been trying to use it to teach fundamental programming concepts to my 8 y.o. son on his Power Mac 6100. Unfortunately it's clunky and backwards in some respects. He rather quickly gets frustrated with it and goes back to playing Nethack for hours.
I don't think this is the Cocoa you're talking about
--
I always thought that WIMPS stood for "Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer? Sheesh!"
--
Apache was indeed based on NCSA httpd, but was NCSA's server based on CERN code? I thought the CERN server was first...
--
Man, I hear you. I like NPR, but sometimes it is just too damn classical music listenin', literature appreciatin', minutiae dwellin', corn farmer in Iowa interviewin', monotone talkin' whitebread boring for me to listen to.
What I need is an NPR with a blunted hip-hop/acid jazz soundtrack, and street sensibilities to match. Like, Ice-T interviewing Kevin Mitnick or something.
Maybe I should just cut down on the coffee.
--
That's cool to know, thanks.
:)
I have an NT4 Workstation box here, which is what I was comparing against. I have yet to even see W2K running.
I still prefer to work in front of the Linux box though - I start to freak out if I don't have 23 shell windows open
--
Gotta disagree with you on the last part.
Linux is the backbone of Africa's emerging IT infrastructure, which is one of the keys to more freedom, education and prosperity in that region.
Contributing to Linux helps Third World countries and the former Soviet Union develop economic stability... and nurtures the free speech movement in China... There are countless 'ripple effects' that are positive side effects of free software.
--
There are several things I like about KDE that make it a better desktop environment than Windows, IMHO:
- double-clicking a taskbar icon will iconify that application. great for getting stuff out of your way.
- right-clicking a taskbar icon gives you a menu which includes 'iconify other windows', which is really handy since I usually have like 14 Konsoles, 11 Netscapes, GAIM, XMMS, Quanta+ and StarOffice open simultaneously.
- Alt-F2 brings up a little input field which I can use to start an app quicker than using the menus. It keeps a history too, so I can cycle through previous commands.
- Rotating desktop wallpapers. I have a directory of about 450 hi-color psychedelic 1024x768 wallpapers, and I have KDE set to switch to a random one every 30 seconds. Keeps things interesting.
- Right click on desktop gives you a menu which includes 'Logout'. I find that much easier to deal with than windows, which requires you to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del or click on the Start button.
So, I guess it's subtle things like that, that make me like KDE so much.
I like GNOME in concept, but it just doesn't feel right to me. I installed Helix GNOME the other day... It has a very slick, professional installer, but the underlying GNOME still seems cumbersome and sort of clunky.
I'll keep an eye on GNOME, and I will definitely check out Nautilus at some point, but for now I'm sticking with KDE.
--