At least for the prior Zaurus versions, X11 would've been worthless for the uses you describe. With a 240x320 screen, you can't even view a single Save File box from a popular desktop program.
Editing the software to function sanely on a smaller screen is technically possible, but it requires not only programming skills, but also a level of artistry few have reached.
FLTK and Gtk+ have been used for years for writing handheld applications; they have special small-screen versions and there are numerous small-screen optimized applciations out there. More X11 toolkits would get small-screen versions if there were more small screens to run them on. Unfortunately, the one small screen Linux PDA that there is makes every effort to exclude competitors (free or commercial) from its GUI.
Qtopia is like KDE vs. everything else all over again, it's just that this time, Troll Tech likes to stack the deck by precluding any competition from even appearing on the same screen.
In short, ease of porting desktop apps can actually be a liability, because rewriting the GUI will force the developer to create it entirely PDA-focused.
I fail to see the "liability". I much rather have an application with an iffy UI quickly than nothing at all; if the application becomes popular, people will fork it and/or improve the GUI for the small screen. But, as I was saying, there are already plenty of X11-based small screen applications available.
The important point is that not only should there be an X server running on the PDA, but also on the desktop. A Win32 Xserver should automatically be installed along with whatever "Qtopia Desktop" sync software comes with the Zaurus. When the Zaurus is plugged in, the desktop software should present a list of every X11 application on the PDA, which the user can click to view on her desktop. This has many cool possibilities.
I agree. That's another huge advantage. And the Zaurus VNC just doesn't cut it there IMO.
Technically you can write commercial Zaurus software without payment, as long as you don't use Qt/emb.
By "commercial Zaurus software", I meant Qt/Embedded: that's the Zaurus's native GUI, its only native GUI. The Zaurus happens to run some subset of Java and a terminal emulator, but I wouldn't consider Java and text-mode applications "Zaurus" applications.
lor access the screen device directly, or use libSDL or such
It's not clear that you can do that without linking to the Qtopia libraries, in which case Qtopia's library would presumably apply.
The silly thing about Raymond's rant, of course, is that OS X is using, of all things, CUPS as its printer system. Both on Linux and on OS X, there are GUIs for configuring it, and when they work, configuration is pretty straightforward on either system. When they don't work (which happens with some regularity), regular users are stuck on either system, and power-users have a better chance of fixing things on Linux because CUPS is still better documented on Linux.
I like having someone else worry about my security updates for me.
Well, too bad that Apple doesn't do that. Apple only gives you security updates for their own software. So, you won't get automatic updates for Office or any other third party software you install on your Mac.
If you want comprehensive automatic updates, security and otherwise, for all your software on your machine, your best bet is Debian. But companies like SuSE also offer seamless and complete on-line security fixes.
I'm willing to pay for someone else to do maintance and assure that my OS is completely compatible with my hardware.
OS X has its share of driver bugs and problems as well. Furthermore, as soon as you buy any third party piece of hardware, you run into the same issue with OS X as with Linux: not everything is supported. In fact, OS X probably supports less third party hardware than Linux.
But to the degree that anybody can achieve that with any OS, there are plenty of companies that will sell you Linux on hardware that they guarantee works with it. However, installers for Linux systems like SuSE have gotten so good that most people just don't bother anymore buying special Linux-compatible hardware--it simply isn't necessary anymore.
'Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves'!
Yes, Apple has managed to create that image for themselves. Unfortunately, I didn't find it to be true: I didn't find Mac OS X usability to be singificantly better than Gnome, KDE, or Windows. Nor, for that matter, have I found that non-computer experts have an easier time using Mac OS X than using a recent Gnome or KDE installation.
And what UNIX nerds will also discover is that package management and system management on Mac OS X can be a lot more work than on Linux (Netinfo, Fink, inconsistent installers, integrating OS X into a networked environment, etc.), and that a lot of UNIX software requires significant effort to port.
In terms of numbers, I haven't seen any evidence for any significant move towards Mac OS X compared to Linux.
Copyright is one concern, but people do have certain rights to their own images. Generally, photographers have people sign releases when they want to user their images in commerce. That may be necessary even if only the body is used.
I think that amounts to about 5 gallons of liquid. Regardless of whether the caffeine kills you, I suspect drinking that much liquid in 24h may be dangerous in and of itself.
No FLTK, no Gnome, no Gtk+, no Tcl/Tk, no wxWindows, no Mono/Gtk#, no X11, no Firefox, no R, etc. The thing doesn't run any software that I use or develop for. Sorry, Sharp, until the thing ships with X11, it's no more than a PDA, and as a PDA, Palms are more usable and mature. Not to mention that I can develop commercial and free software for Palm without paying anybody.
I'm a die-hard LInux user, but my PDA is a Palm--Palms even work better with Linux than Zaurus. My Zaurus is gathering dust--it's useful neither as a PDA nor as a Linux handheld.
Sharp could easily fix this without changing their product much: replace Qt/embedded with Qt/X11. That won't make it a better PDA and it won't make Qt less of a resource hog (Qt/X11 is worse than Qt/embedded), but it would make the Zaurus a better Linux handheld.
Because I'm perfectly happy allowing adults to work out their own interactions for themselves,
Well, and I am not happy with that. The reason is that we know that people are not perfectly rational economic agents: they have limited information and they have limited resources to reason things through. So, people make suboptimal choices. Now, some of their suboptimal choices I don't care about, but other suboptimal choices also hurt me personally. So, it makes sense to help other people get more information and to help them reason things through.
In fact, your own behavior is not rational: if you let your fellow man engage in arbitrary irrational behavior, you end up hurting yourself. The ability to share information and to share reasoning in order to benefit each other is a fundamental aspect of human societies and human economic behavior (non zero-sum game). It's a good bet that that's why we developed language and communication in the first place.
without feeling the need to inject my own values into someone else's transactions.
It has nothing to do with "injecting my values". I'm merely connecting values I presume most people to have with their actions. That is, I'm saying, if you don't like big mining cartels, don't buy diamonds. I'm not telling you to dislike big mining cartels, I'm simply assuming you don't. If my assumption about your values doesn't apply to you (maybe you own part of DeBeers), I think you can figure that out for yourself.
"Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea."
LOL. And that statement is a matter of objective, universal, no-two-ways-about-it truth, right?
Actually, it is. More precisely, it is again a shorthand for an implication: "If you demonstrate that you have lots of money, you will attract people who are after your money, by legal or illegal means. I find attracting those kinds of people unpleasant, and if you think about it, you probably would, too." A second part of the argument is that "If you truly have lots of money, people will know it even if you don't show it off; therefore, ostentatious displays of wealth generally indicate people who have achieved only modest wealth in comparison and are eager to show it off." Same deal: if you want to attract frauds and thieves and if you want your image to be that of someone who has recently come into modest amounts of money, go ahead, show off; but you should be aware of what you are doing and what the consequences are.
It's quite interesting to discover, from the inside, how the french justice system works. I'm back from Paris. I've just been indicted and charged of distributing programs that violated Intellectual Property rights (literally translated, it's "counterfeiting and concealment of counterfeiting"). Maximum punishment for these charges are two years in jail and a fine of 150.000 euros. I'm not yet judged guilty or innocent, but I already had to pay around two or three thousands dollars for two trips to Paris (I live in Boston, MA, USA), plane tickets, and lawyer fees. I already talked about my story here (in french).
That's the way justice systems work in general: if someone accuses you of a crime and makes what looks like a reasonable case to the police, it ends up costing you money. Welcome to the real world. Life sucks sometimes.
If it's a civil complaint, in some countries, the people sueing you may have to pay your expenses if they lose, but that's also not exactly a blessing--it also means that if you have a complaint against someone else, you may end up paying them a lot of money if you lose--a strong disincentive to enforcing your rights when you have been wronged.
In Europe, many people have private legal insurance, which will pay for legal fees and lawyers when you get sued; something like that might cover this case. Many people who work professionally in some field also get professional insurance, which also often covers them against lawsuits. So, the short answer is: in order to avoid getting bankrupted by frivolous legal claims, people insure themselves.
If you have been falsely accused, your accuser may have committed a criminal offense themselves and you may also be able to recover damages in civil court. However, in a case like this, that may be too hard to prove even if it is obvious to you and me.
If independant researchers cannot analyse security softwares and publish their discoveries, final users will just have marketing press releases from editors to assess the quality of a sofware. Unfortunately, it seems that we are heading to this kind of world in France and maybe in Europe.
No, it just means you have to go about exposing their product differently. Publish an article in a respected publication. Then, they'd have to take on the publisher.
Or file a complaint against them for false advertising. That could be either a complaint to an organization like the Better Business Bureau (or the French equivalent), or an legal complaint.
It may still be worth filing a counter-complaint at this point. You need to talk to a lawyer about that.
Given that you seemed to be starting off with economic interactions, you really do have only two options - buy or don't buy
Well, if that is your view, why don't you tell DeBeers and Jaguar not to advertise? By your reasoning, they also have only two options: to offer something for sale or not to offer it for sale. By your reasoning, there should be no marketing, advertising, or anything else. By your reasoning, buyers and sellers just bump into each other randomly, I suppose.
Of course, you can probably expect someone to exercise their freedom to point out that you're simply arguing that people should substitute your subjective values for their own currently held values, for no particular reason other than because you think they ought to.
I gave a much more specific argument than that. If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by buying a diamond, you are lining the pockets of the DeBeers cartel and contributing to unnecessary and destructive mining operations. If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by contribution to a charity, cultural or artistic cause, or to medical or scientific research, you may achieve some additional good.
Now, maybe you don't care about any of those things. But I bet a lot of other people do.
And that's, not surprisingly, why charitable giving "in lieu of gifts/flowers" is actually becoming more and more socially acceptable.
You should definitely buy a diamond. And a Jaguar. You are failing to consider the social benefits of owning premium goods, and therefore your values are incorrect.
I know the value of owning premium goods: products for which you pay a premium because they are created using better craftsmanship, better designs, and better materials.
That is entirely different from goods whose primary purpose is to demonstrate that you have lots of money. Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea. In fact, most people who feel compelled to demonstrate that they have lots of money probably don't actually have a lot of money. The compulsion to show off one's wealth diminishes as the actual wealth increases. Trust me on that one. But understatement is perhaps a concept the nouveau riche don't understand... You can read all about it here.
Jaguar = $X. Toyota = $Y. $X - $Y = something, I guess. Would you prefer that cars, gems, computers, et cetera, were all identical, all coming in plain white boxes marked "CAR", "GEM", "COMPUTER", and so forth?
How does that follow? If I could wave a magic wand, I would not eliminate Jaguars, I'd simply bring their pricing in line with functionally equivalent cars from other manufacturers.
Really, you're coming perilously close to suggesting that less choice is better than more choice, and I have to admit that's a new one on me.;)
I suggested no such thing.
(However, I fail to see the peril in that suggestion. Modern psychologists and economists are saying exactly that: choice not only has an economic cost associated with it, it also often makes people unhappy.)
For better or for worse, societies and economies are not built around your personal preferences. You have the same choice everyone else has - to buy or not to buy.
Contrary to the very limited view you seem to have of humans and their social and economic interactions, I and everybody else has a lot more choices than whether to buy or not to buy. For example, people can tell each other about their experiences with products (e.g., "brand X may be expensive, but its quality is low"). And they can tell each other about their own views of brands ("I think buying brand X is not cool"). That's as much a legitimate and integral part of our free market economy as purchasing decisions and corporate marketing. And it is particularly relevant to brands and products whose value is highly dependent on perceptions and associations.
In different words, DeBeers has the right to construct a brand "diamond" and people like me have the right to deconstruct it again.
Why? Because you disapprove of how other people are spending their money?
Yes. Just like each of us has every right to spend our money any way we like, each of us also has every right to disapprove of, and publicly criticize, each other's spending decisions. It's a free country, and that applies to both spending and speech.
DeBeers has done the same thing that innumerable other manufacturers have done, from Jaguar to Apple Computers to Miller beer - they've found a way to appeal to consumers by creating psychological responses attendant to their product.
Yes, and like innumerable other manufacturers, we can ask how much the brand contributes to the price consumers are willing to pay. That is, how much more are people willing to pay for an Apple rather than a non-name box, for a Dell rather than a non-name box, for a Jaguar rather than for an equally powerful Toyota, etc.
And like innumerable other manufacturers that sell their products for far more than equivalent no-name products, consumers should be aware what they are paying for: the brand name and the appearances. You spend money on it to demonstrate your ability to dispose of large quantities of money. And there is nothing wrong with that, you should just do it consciously, rather than fooling yourself into thinking that you get "value" for your money from any other aspect of the product.
Many people, when they actually think about why diamonds cost as much as they do, will end up valuing them less. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. You are, of course, free to disagree.
Which leads one to wonder exactly what the point of marketing by meat producers is, if you're right.
The point is that they make "normal" returns on their marketing dollar for a product people would otherwise perhaps buy a little less of. In contrast, DeBeers would make a tiny fraction of what they are making if they didn't market the way they do.
A claim not borne out by the historical record, unfortunately. People have been spending obscene amounts of money for gems for thousands of years, despite the fact that "marketing" in the modern sense hardly existed. Gems have been highly prized throughout history,
Gems actually used to be scarce. Now, the scarcity in something like diamonds is (largely) purposely created, both because we have much more efficient mining operations and because there are good artificial substitutes. In fact, even the creation of undetectable, flawless artificial diamonds won't change the scarcity because DeBeers will just shift marketing slightly and sell "certified 'real' diamonds". If they have to, they'll mark or register the "real" diamonds in a central database. Should a 1 million ton diamond asteroid soft-land in the Sahara desert, they'll start marketing "certified 'real' terrestrial diamonds". And on and on. They really are just selling a brand.
All DeBeers has done is bring that same cachet to the masses, along with the ability to actually realize it. Want a really nice diamond? You don't have to be the Duc d'Waffles or whatever any more, unlike in 1600 or so, thanks to the efforts of DeBeers, et al...
No. DeBeers has created a cartel that keeps prices artificially high. And they have made "diamonds" a brand like Apple, Jaguar, and others, as opposed to no-name functional brands. The branding bit is standard corporate fare and people like me think the image should be deconstructed. The cartel bit is arguably illegal and certainly contrary to free market principles.
All DeBeers has done is bring that same cachet to the masses, along with the ability to actually realize it.
I'd prefer if people expressed their "cachet" through charitable giving: it disposes of the money just as effectively as buying useless baubles, but it serves a better purpose than to line the pockets of DeBeers. And if the charitable giving is chosen well, it can have a much more positive impact on the economy than DeBeers (giving to non-profit research labs, contributing to private space exploration, etc.). In my opinion, DeBeers's activities are economically and socially worthless or even harmful.
At $2000 with a 3h battery life and 6 pounds of weight, TabletPC is a loser. At $650 with a 6h battery life and 3 pounds of weight, it could be a winner (this device has a 2h battery life and weighs 2 pounds; they should increase the battery capacity--they have the spare weight to do it).
Basically, we thought the Linux Tablet/PDA Hybrid was totally overrated and would recommend against it at this time.
Well, that depends on what your needs are. At $650, this Linux "Tablet/PDA hybrid" would be great for our needs, and none of the current Palm, PocketPC, or TabletPC offerings satisfy our needs: their operating systems are too limited, they are too expensive, and/or their screens and hardware are too limited. A Linux tablet with a 640x480 screen and a CD-ROM would be great for our needs.
If you are just looking for a replacement for your Palm Zire, then you are right: a Linux Tablet isn't for you. But if those are your needs, just about anything will work for you.
Fine, but this is trivially true of just about everything - people assign the values that they do to things for purely psychological reasons, no matter which thing it is we're discussing in particular.
But in the case of diamonds, we aren't talking about arbitrary psychological reasons, we are talking about the effects of the DeBeers's marketing strategy. That is, we are asking: how much return on investment has DeBeers gotten out of their marketing? That is probably one of the most standard microeconomic questions you can ask. There is nothing "trivial" about that question, nor is it in any way esotheric.
Asking how much people would pay for diamonds if diamonds weren't seen as a token of esteem is somewhat like asking how much people would pay for steak if it wasn't tasty. [...] They apparently like the taste of steak, arguments about what would happen if they didn't notwithstanding.
We can ask how much people would be paying for steak if it weren't for the Meat Producers of America marketing campaigns. The answer is: probably about the same as they are paying now--as you say, people just like the taste of meat. In fact, decades of vegetarian activism and health warnings haven't made much of a difference.
We can ask how much people would be paying for diamonds if it weren't for DeBeers marketing. The answer is: probably much less than they are paying now (there are models for quantifying "much less", but that's not the point here). There are no physical qualities of diamonds that make them in any way more appealing than lots of other shiny, glittery gemstones or artificially created substances that cost much less.
So, the demand for meat is almost certainly much less dependent on marketing and advertising than the demand for diamonds. And, again, there is nothing obscure or "un"-economic about that kind of analysis--it's an analysis good-ol', down-to-earth US companies do every day for just about every product: what's our return on each marketing dollar?
Packages in a distribution like Debian update and uninstall cleanly, you can build every one from source if you want to, and someone else has worried about (1) testing the binary and (2) getting all the dependencies right.
Build from source if you need the software and no package exists, or if you really, really need a processor-specific version. But for most applications, go with the pre-packaged version: as a system manager, there are a lot more useful things you can do than recompile "ls" on a dozen machines.
So I guess you're saying, in essence, that because of those two additional icons in KDE, XFCE is "much less clutered".
No, that's not what I'm saying. To me, KDE is "cluttered" in many ways; here are some examples:
"Did you know..." dialog boxes at startup.
Tray icons and lots of tray icon functionality.
Deeply nested menus with applications I neither know nor care about.
Lots of extra processes that get started up when KDE starts up.
Complicated configuration dialogs.
Yet another help system.
Basically, KDE gives me lots of functionality that I don't want, that doesn't help me, and that I just find distracting.
KDE also duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists in Linux, and it duplicates it just for the purpose of having a Qt-based implementation of something that otherwise already works perfectly well. That is also clutter, and clutter that XFCE mostly avoids.
I'm curious, as an economist, about the magic formula that you're using that determines value absent from a market...
Who said anything about "absent from a market"? We are comparing two different markets in diamonds: one actual, in which DeBeers has created artificial scarcity and has created a mystique surrounding diamonds, and one hypothetical, in which those two factors are missing. We can ask: what price would people be willing to pay for diamonds in the second case?
Real, working economists face those kinds of comparisons between actual and hypothetical markets all the time. For example, they have to predict what price people would be willing to pay if a product includes a new feature, is marketed a certain way, or if a competitor enters the market. In a sense, that sort of thing is the bread-and-butter of large areas of real-world economics.
So, what's the "real value" of an opera house? In what way is the intrinsic value of listening to music greater than the intrinsic value of looking at a sparkling stone?
My comparison was intended to be between spending lots of money on animated GIFs vs. donations to a charity or non-profit.
But it seems that, cartel or not, a lot of people think diamonds have a higher value than opera houses.
I suspect, in part, it's less committal: they can always sell the diamond again. However, personally, I would view diamonds as a rather risky investment in the long run.
The "real value" of any good or service is whatever you can get in exchange for it - any notion of intrinsic worth is a specious concept, as is any valuation other than exchange value if people didn't value diamonds as highly as DeBeers does, they simply wouldn't buy them.
Yes, and my point is that they "value them as highly" for psychological reasons. It's the same reason people pay a lot of money for some brand name leather handbag.
And it is perfectly valid to ask the question of what diamonds would be valued at by the market if they lacked this psychological factor and if DeBeers didn't distort the market. That's not a question about any kind of "intrinsic value", it's a perfectly sensible free market question. Companies face that question constantly when pricing products: how much would consumers pay (in the free market) if we left out feature "X" or if competitor "Y" didn't exist? Likewise, it is perfectly valid to ask how much consumers would pay for diamonds if they weren't perceived as a "token of love" and if DeBeers didn't create an artificial scarcity in them. The answer is that people would probably not pay a whole lot, since diamonds would be very scarce and since there are many substitutes of similar appearance.
The real value of diamonds is a small fraction of what they cost in the market. The reason they are expensive is because a smart cartell has established them as expensive, if valueless, tokens of affection. And there is ample precedent in biology: males are supposed to demonstrate their wealth and prowess by not having to care about expending costly resources on useless pursuits.
However, if you are going to do this, why not dispose of your resources in some socially valuable way? Demonstrate your boundless resources by making a "platinum circle" donation to your local opera house, either in your own name or in your sweetheart's name.
Gates is wrong. Hardware prices don't depend as much on technology but on what people are willing to pay. A PC costs $1000 because that's what people are willing to pay for it, and they happen to get as much hardware and software for that as they can.
I'm sure Gates would like the entire $1000 to go to Microsoft, but that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because Microsoft isn't going to produce $900 worth of software that is capable of running on whatever $100 buys you in hardware. That's not a problem with hardware design, it's a problem with the kind of software that Microsoft develops: big and resource intensive.
On the other hand, you will probably be able to get a really cheap computer that runs Linux and runs it well. We are already beginning to see this with Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX systems: they run Linux so much better than Windows. For $200, you get a full desktop system capable of pretty much everything that a home user needs.
What really helps Linux is that it doesn't have to push an agenda or "innovate" constantly. If a 1995 word processor written in C runs fine on $1000 1995 hardware, it will run really well on a $100 2005 Mini-ITX system, with a few `bug fixes and feature enhancements. Microsoft's new.NET-based office suite using COM, DCOM, SOAP, DHTML, and whatnot, on the other hand, won't. But Microsoft has to keep changing things in order to get people to buy and pay them more money.
I haven't used XFCE, but last time I looked at it, it was a CDE clone. To me that says "clutter". A busy control panel and icons that minimize to the desktop is visual clutter.
It looks a little like CDE, but it behaves differently. Minimization to the desktop can be turned off. You can also turn off either or both of the launcher and/or the task list and use menus. Whatever it is, it is much less clutered and complex than KDE.
Tell ya what man. Why don't you do a console log in, then type "XFree86". Biiiingo:)
Actually, I usually log in on the console and then type "xinit". And that usually brings up either icewm or xfce, both of which are excellent and responsive desktop environments.
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At least for the prior Zaurus versions, X11 would've been worthless for the uses you describe. With a 240x320 screen, you can't even view a single Save File box from a popular desktop program.
Editing the software to function sanely on a smaller screen is technically possible, but it requires not only programming skills, but also a level of artistry few have reached.
FLTK and Gtk+ have been used for years for writing handheld applications; they have special small-screen versions and there are numerous small-screen optimized applciations out there. More X11 toolkits would get small-screen versions if there were more small screens to run them on. Unfortunately, the one small screen Linux PDA that there is makes every effort to exclude competitors (free or commercial) from its GUI.
Qtopia is like KDE vs. everything else all over again, it's just that this time, Troll Tech likes to stack the deck by precluding any competition from even appearing on the same screen.
In short, ease of porting desktop apps can actually be a liability, because rewriting the GUI will force the developer to create it entirely PDA-focused.
I fail to see the "liability". I much rather have an application with an iffy UI quickly than nothing at all; if the application becomes popular, people will fork it and/or improve the GUI for the small screen. But, as I was saying, there are already plenty of X11-based small screen applications available.
The important point is that not only should there be an X server running on the PDA, but also on the desktop. A Win32 Xserver should automatically be installed along with whatever "Qtopia Desktop" sync software comes with the Zaurus. When the Zaurus is plugged in, the desktop software should present a list of every X11 application on the PDA, which the user can click to view on her desktop. This has many cool possibilities.
I agree. That's another huge advantage. And the Zaurus VNC just doesn't cut it there IMO.
Technically you can write commercial Zaurus software without payment, as long as you don't use Qt/emb.
By "commercial Zaurus software", I meant Qt/Embedded: that's the Zaurus's native GUI, its only native GUI. The Zaurus happens to run some subset of Java and a terminal emulator, but I wouldn't consider Java and text-mode applications "Zaurus" applications.
lor access the screen device directly, or use libSDL or such
It's not clear that you can do that without linking to the Qtopia libraries, in which case Qtopia's library would presumably apply.
The silly thing about Raymond's rant, of course, is that OS X is using, of all things, CUPS as its printer system. Both on Linux and on OS X, there are GUIs for configuring it, and when they work, configuration is pretty straightforward on either system. When they don't work (which happens with some regularity), regular users are stuck on either system, and power-users have a better chance of fixing things on Linux because CUPS is still better documented on Linux.
I like having someone else worry about my security updates for me.
Well, too bad that Apple doesn't do that. Apple only gives you security updates for their own software. So, you won't get automatic updates for Office or any other third party software you install on your Mac.
If you want comprehensive automatic updates, security and otherwise, for all your software on your machine, your best bet is Debian. But companies like SuSE also offer seamless and complete on-line security fixes.
I'm willing to pay for someone else to do maintance and assure that my OS is completely compatible with my hardware.
OS X has its share of driver bugs and problems as well. Furthermore, as soon as you buy any third party piece of hardware, you run into the same issue with OS X as with Linux: not everything is supported. In fact, OS X probably supports less third party hardware than Linux.
But to the degree that anybody can achieve that with any OS, there are plenty of companies that will sell you Linux on hardware that they guarantee works with it. However, installers for Linux systems like SuSE have gotten so good that most people just don't bother anymore buying special Linux-compatible hardware--it simply isn't necessary anymore.
'Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves'!
Yes, Apple has managed to create that image for themselves. Unfortunately, I didn't find it to be true: I didn't find Mac OS X usability to be singificantly better than Gnome, KDE, or Windows. Nor, for that matter, have I found that non-computer experts have an easier time using Mac OS X than using a recent Gnome or KDE installation.
And what UNIX nerds will also discover is that package management and system management on Mac OS X can be a lot more work than on Linux (Netinfo, Fink, inconsistent installers, integrating OS X into a networked environment, etc.), and that a lot of UNIX software requires significant effort to port.
In terms of numbers, I haven't seen any evidence for any significant move towards Mac OS X compared to Linux.
Copyright is one concern, but people do have certain rights to their own images. Generally, photographers have people sign releases when they want to user their images in commerce. That may be necessary even if only the body is used.
I think that amounts to about 5 gallons of liquid. Regardless of whether the caffeine kills you, I suspect drinking that much liquid in 24h may be dangerous in and of itself.
No FLTK, no Gnome, no Gtk+, no Tcl/Tk, no wxWindows, no Mono/Gtk#, no X11, no Firefox, no R, etc. The thing doesn't run any software that I use or develop for. Sorry, Sharp, until the thing ships with X11, it's no more than a PDA, and as a PDA, Palms are more usable and mature. Not to mention that I can develop commercial and free software for Palm without paying anybody.
I'm a die-hard LInux user, but my PDA is a Palm--Palms even work better with Linux than Zaurus. My Zaurus is gathering dust--it's useful neither as a PDA nor as a Linux handheld.
Sharp could easily fix this without changing their product much: replace Qt/embedded with Qt/X11. That won't make it a better PDA and it won't make Qt less of a resource hog (Qt/X11 is worse than Qt/embedded), but it would make the Zaurus a better Linux handheld.
Because I'm perfectly happy allowing adults to work out their own interactions for themselves,
Well, and I am not happy with that. The reason is that we know that people are not perfectly rational economic agents: they have limited information and they have limited resources to reason things through. So, people make suboptimal choices. Now, some of their suboptimal choices I don't care about, but other suboptimal choices also hurt me personally. So, it makes sense to help other people get more information and to help them reason things through.
In fact, your own behavior is not rational: if you let your fellow man engage in arbitrary irrational behavior, you end up hurting yourself. The ability to share information and to share reasoning in order to benefit each other is a fundamental aspect of human societies and human economic behavior (non zero-sum game). It's a good bet that that's why we developed language and communication in the first place.
without feeling the need to inject my own values into someone else's transactions.
It has nothing to do with "injecting my values". I'm merely connecting values I presume most people to have with their actions. That is, I'm saying, if you don't like big mining cartels, don't buy diamonds. I'm not telling you to dislike big mining cartels, I'm simply assuming you don't. If my assumption about your values doesn't apply to you (maybe you own part of DeBeers), I think you can figure that out for yourself.
"Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea."
LOL. And that statement is a matter of objective, universal, no-two-ways-about-it truth, right?
Actually, it is. More precisely, it is again a shorthand for an implication: "If you demonstrate that you have lots of money, you will attract people who are after your money, by legal or illegal means. I find attracting those kinds of people unpleasant, and if you think about it, you probably would, too." A second part of the argument is that "If you truly have lots of money, people will know it even if you don't show it off; therefore, ostentatious displays of wealth generally indicate people who have achieved only modest wealth in comparison and are eager to show it off." Same deal: if you want to attract frauds and thieves and if you want your image to be that of someone who has recently come into modest amounts of money, go ahead, show off; but you should be aware of what you are doing and what the consequences are.
It's quite interesting to discover, from the inside, how the french justice system works. I'm back from Paris. I've just been indicted and charged of distributing programs that violated Intellectual Property rights (literally translated, it's "counterfeiting and concealment of counterfeiting"). Maximum punishment for these charges are two years in jail and a fine of 150.000 euros. I'm not yet judged guilty or innocent, but I already had to pay around two or three thousands dollars for two trips to Paris (I live in Boston, MA, USA), plane tickets, and lawyer fees. I already talked about my story here (in french).
That's the way justice systems work in general: if someone accuses you of a crime and makes what looks like a reasonable case to the police, it ends up costing you money. Welcome to the real world. Life sucks sometimes.
If it's a civil complaint, in some countries, the people sueing you may have to pay your expenses if they lose, but that's also not exactly a blessing--it also means that if you have a complaint against someone else, you may end up paying them a lot of money if you lose--a strong disincentive to enforcing your rights when you have been wronged.
In Europe, many people have private legal insurance, which will pay for legal fees and lawyers when you get sued; something like that might cover this case. Many people who work professionally in some field also get professional insurance, which also often covers them against lawsuits. So, the short answer is: in order to avoid getting bankrupted by frivolous legal claims, people insure themselves.
If you have been falsely accused, your accuser may have committed a criminal offense themselves and you may also be able to recover damages in civil court. However, in a case like this, that may be too hard to prove even if it is obvious to you and me.
If independant researchers cannot analyse security softwares and publish their discoveries, final users will just have marketing press releases from editors to assess the quality of a sofware. Unfortunately, it seems that we are heading to this kind of world in France and maybe in Europe.
No, it just means you have to go about exposing their product differently. Publish an article in a respected publication. Then, they'd have to take on the publisher.
Or file a complaint against them for false advertising. That could be either a complaint to an organization like the Better Business Bureau (or the French equivalent), or an legal complaint.
It may still be worth filing a counter-complaint at this point. You need to talk to a lawyer about that.
Given that you seemed to be starting off with economic interactions, you really do have only two options - buy or don't buy
Well, if that is your view, why don't you tell DeBeers and Jaguar not to advertise? By your reasoning, they also have only two options: to offer something for sale or not to offer it for sale. By your reasoning, there should be no marketing, advertising, or anything else. By your reasoning, buyers and sellers just bump into each other randomly, I suppose.
Of course, you can probably expect someone to exercise their freedom to point out that you're simply arguing that people should substitute your subjective values for their own currently held values, for no particular reason other than because you think they ought to.
I gave a much more specific argument than that. If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by buying a diamond, you are lining the pockets of the DeBeers cartel and contributing to unnecessary and destructive mining operations. If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by contribution to a charity, cultural or artistic cause, or to medical or scientific research, you may achieve some additional good.
Now, maybe you don't care about any of those things. But I bet a lot of other people do.
And that's, not surprisingly, why charitable giving "in lieu of gifts/flowers" is actually becoming more and more socially acceptable.
You should definitely buy a diamond. And a Jaguar. You are failing to consider the social benefits of owning premium goods, and therefore your values are incorrect.
I know the value of owning premium goods: products for which you pay a premium because they are created using better craftsmanship, better designs, and better materials.
That is entirely different from goods whose primary purpose is to demonstrate that you have lots of money. Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea. In fact, most people who feel compelled to demonstrate that they have lots of money probably don't actually have a lot of money. The compulsion to show off one's wealth diminishes as the actual wealth increases. Trust me on that one. But understatement is perhaps a concept the nouveau riche don't understand... You can read all about it here.
Jaguar = $X. Toyota = $Y. $X - $Y = something, I guess. Would you prefer that cars, gems, computers, et cetera, were all identical, all coming in plain white boxes marked "CAR", "GEM", "COMPUTER", and so forth?
;)
How does that follow? If I could wave a magic wand, I would not eliminate Jaguars, I'd simply bring their pricing in line with functionally equivalent cars from other manufacturers.
Really, you're coming perilously close to suggesting that less choice is better than more choice, and I have to admit that's a new one on me.
I suggested no such thing.
(However, I fail to see the peril in that suggestion. Modern psychologists and economists are saying exactly that: choice not only has an economic cost associated with it, it also often makes people unhappy.)
For better or for worse, societies and economies are not built around your personal preferences. You have the same choice everyone else has - to buy or not to buy.
Contrary to the very limited view you seem to have of humans and their social and economic interactions, I and everybody else has a lot more choices than whether to buy or not to buy. For example, people can tell each other about their experiences with products (e.g., "brand X may be expensive, but its quality is low"). And they can tell each other about their own views of brands ("I think buying brand X is not cool"). That's as much a legitimate and integral part of our free market economy as purchasing decisions and corporate marketing. And it is particularly relevant to brands and products whose value is highly dependent on perceptions and associations.
In different words, DeBeers has the right to construct a brand "diamond" and people like me have the right to deconstruct it again.
Why? Because you disapprove of how other people are spending their money?
Yes. Just like each of us has every right to spend our money any way we like, each of us also has every right to disapprove of, and publicly criticize, each other's spending decisions. It's a free country, and that applies to both spending and speech.
DeBeers has done the same thing that innumerable other manufacturers have done, from Jaguar to Apple Computers to Miller beer - they've found a way to appeal to consumers by creating psychological responses attendant to their product.
Yes, and like innumerable other manufacturers, we can ask how much the brand contributes to the price consumers are willing to pay. That is, how much more are people willing to pay for an Apple rather than a non-name box, for a Dell rather than a non-name box, for a Jaguar rather than for an equally powerful Toyota, etc.
And like innumerable other manufacturers that sell their products for far more than equivalent no-name products, consumers should be aware what they are paying for: the brand name and the appearances. You spend money on it to demonstrate your ability to dispose of large quantities of money. And there is nothing wrong with that, you should just do it consciously, rather than fooling yourself into thinking that you get "value" for your money from any other aspect of the product.
Many people, when they actually think about why diamonds cost as much as they do, will end up valuing them less. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. You are, of course, free to disagree.
Which leads one to wonder exactly what the point of marketing by meat producers is, if you're right.
The point is that they make "normal" returns on their marketing dollar for a product people would otherwise perhaps buy a little less of. In contrast, DeBeers would make a tiny fraction of what they are making if they didn't market the way they do.
A claim not borne out by the historical record, unfortunately. People have been spending obscene amounts of money for gems for thousands of years, despite the fact that "marketing" in the modern sense hardly existed. Gems have been highly prized throughout history,
Gems actually used to be scarce. Now, the scarcity in something like diamonds is (largely) purposely created, both because we have much more efficient mining operations and because there are good artificial substitutes. In fact, even the creation of undetectable, flawless artificial diamonds won't change the scarcity because DeBeers will just shift marketing slightly and sell "certified 'real' diamonds". If they have to, they'll mark or register the "real" diamonds in a central database. Should a 1 million ton diamond asteroid soft-land in the Sahara desert, they'll start marketing "certified 'real' terrestrial diamonds". And on and on. They really are just selling a brand.
All DeBeers has done is bring that same cachet to the masses, along with the ability to actually realize it. Want a really nice diamond? You don't have to be the Duc d'Waffles or whatever any more, unlike in 1600 or so, thanks to the efforts of DeBeers, et al...
No. DeBeers has created a cartel that keeps prices artificially high. And they have made "diamonds" a brand like Apple, Jaguar, and others, as opposed to no-name functional brands. The branding bit is standard corporate fare and people like me think the image should be deconstructed. The cartel bit is arguably illegal and certainly contrary to free market principles.
All DeBeers has done is bring that same cachet to the masses, along with the ability to actually realize it.
I'd prefer if people expressed their "cachet" through charitable giving: it disposes of the money just as effectively as buying useless baubles, but it serves a better purpose than to line the pockets of DeBeers. And if the charitable giving is chosen well, it can have a much more positive impact on the economy than DeBeers (giving to non-profit research labs, contributing to private space exploration, etc.). In my opinion, DeBeers's activities are economically and socially worthless or even harmful.
At $2000 with a 3h battery life and 6 pounds of weight, TabletPC is a loser. At $650 with a 6h battery life and 3 pounds of weight, it could be a winner (this device has a 2h battery life and weighs 2 pounds; they should increase the battery capacity--they have the spare weight to do it).
Basically, we thought the Linux Tablet/PDA Hybrid was totally overrated and would recommend against it at this time.
Well, that depends on what your needs are. At $650, this Linux "Tablet/PDA hybrid" would be great for our needs, and none of the current Palm, PocketPC, or TabletPC offerings satisfy our needs: their operating systems are too limited, they are too expensive, and/or their screens and hardware are too limited. A Linux tablet with a 640x480 screen and a CD-ROM would be great for our needs.
If you are just looking for a replacement for your Palm Zire, then you are right: a Linux Tablet isn't for you. But if those are your needs, just about anything will work for you.
Fine, but this is trivially true of just about everything - people assign the values that they do to things for purely psychological reasons, no matter which thing it is we're discussing in particular.
But in the case of diamonds, we aren't talking about arbitrary psychological reasons, we are talking about the effects of the DeBeers's marketing strategy. That is, we are asking: how much return on investment has DeBeers gotten out of their marketing? That is probably one of the most standard microeconomic questions you can ask. There is nothing "trivial" about that question, nor is it in any way esotheric.
Asking how much people would pay for diamonds if diamonds weren't seen as a token of esteem is somewhat like asking how much people would pay for steak if it wasn't tasty. [...] They apparently like the taste of steak, arguments about what would happen if they didn't notwithstanding.
We can ask how much people would be paying for steak if it weren't for the Meat Producers of America marketing campaigns. The answer is: probably about the same as they are paying now--as you say, people just like the taste of meat. In fact, decades of vegetarian activism and health warnings haven't made much of a difference.
We can ask how much people would be paying for diamonds if it weren't for DeBeers marketing. The answer is: probably much less than they are paying now (there are models for quantifying "much less", but that's not the point here). There are no physical qualities of diamonds that make them in any way more appealing than lots of other shiny, glittery gemstones or artificially created substances that cost much less.
So, the demand for meat is almost certainly much less dependent on marketing and advertising than the demand for diamonds. And, again, there is nothing obscure or "un"-economic about that kind of analysis--it's an analysis good-ol', down-to-earth US companies do every day for just about every product: what's our return on each marketing dollar?
Packages in a distribution like Debian update and uninstall cleanly, you can build every one from source if you want to, and someone else has worried about (1) testing the binary and (2) getting all the dependencies right.
Build from source if you need the software and no package exists, or if you really, really need a processor-specific version. But for most applications, go with the pre-packaged version: as a system manager, there are a lot more useful things you can do than recompile "ls" on a dozen machines.
No, that's not what I'm saying. To me, KDE is "cluttered" in many ways; here are some examples:
Basically, KDE gives me lots of functionality that I don't want, that doesn't help me, and that I just find distracting.
KDE also duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists in Linux, and it duplicates it just for the purpose of having a Qt-based implementation of something that otherwise already works perfectly well. That is also clutter, and clutter that XFCE mostly avoids.
I'm curious, as an economist, about the magic formula that you're using that determines value absent from a market...
Who said anything about "absent from a market"? We are comparing two different markets in diamonds: one actual, in which DeBeers has created artificial scarcity and has created a mystique surrounding diamonds, and one hypothetical, in which those two factors are missing. We can ask: what price would people be willing to pay for diamonds in the second case?
Real, working economists face those kinds of comparisons between actual and hypothetical markets all the time. For example, they have to predict what price people would be willing to pay if a product includes a new feature, is marketed a certain way, or if a competitor enters the market. In a sense, that sort of thing is the bread-and-butter of large areas of real-world economics.
So, what's the "real value" of an opera house? In what way is the intrinsic value of listening to music greater than the intrinsic value of looking at a sparkling stone?
My comparison was intended to be between spending lots of money on animated GIFs vs. donations to a charity or non-profit.
But it seems that, cartel or not, a lot of people think diamonds have a higher value than opera houses.
I suspect, in part, it's less committal: they can always sell the diamond again. However, personally, I would view diamonds as a rather risky investment in the long run.
The "real value" of any good or service is whatever you can get in exchange for it - any notion of intrinsic worth is a specious concept, as is any valuation other than exchange value if people didn't value diamonds as highly as DeBeers does, they simply wouldn't buy them.
Yes, and my point is that they "value them as highly" for psychological reasons. It's the same reason people pay a lot of money for some brand name leather handbag.
And it is perfectly valid to ask the question of what diamonds would be valued at by the market if they lacked this psychological factor and if DeBeers didn't distort the market. That's not a question about any kind of "intrinsic value", it's a perfectly sensible free market question. Companies face that question constantly when pricing products: how much would consumers pay (in the free market) if we left out feature "X" or if competitor "Y" didn't exist? Likewise, it is perfectly valid to ask how much consumers would pay for diamonds if they weren't perceived as a "token of love" and if DeBeers didn't create an artificial scarcity in them. The answer is that people would probably not pay a whole lot, since diamonds would be very scarce and since there are many substitutes of similar appearance.
The real value of diamonds is a small fraction of what they cost in the market. The reason they are expensive is because a smart cartell has established them as expensive, if valueless, tokens of affection. And there is ample precedent in biology: males are supposed to demonstrate their wealth and prowess by not having to care about expending costly resources on useless pursuits.
However, if you are going to do this, why not dispose of your resources in some socially valuable way? Demonstrate your boundless resources by making a "platinum circle" donation to your local opera house, either in your own name or in your sweetheart's name.
Gates is wrong. Hardware prices don't depend as much on technology but on what people are willing to pay. A PC costs $1000 because that's what people are willing to pay for it, and they happen to get as much hardware and software for that as they can.
.NET-based office suite using COM, DCOM, SOAP, DHTML, and whatnot, on the other hand, won't. But Microsoft has to keep changing things in order to get people to buy and pay them more money.
I'm sure Gates would like the entire $1000 to go to Microsoft, but that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because Microsoft isn't going to produce $900 worth of software that is capable of running on whatever $100 buys you in hardware. That's not a problem with hardware design, it's a problem with the kind of software that Microsoft develops: big and resource intensive.
On the other hand, you will probably be able to get a really cheap computer that runs Linux and runs it well. We are already beginning to see this with Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX systems: they run Linux so much better than Windows. For $200, you get a full desktop system capable of pretty much everything that a home user needs.
What really helps Linux is that it doesn't have to push an agenda or "innovate" constantly. If a 1995 word processor written in C runs fine on $1000 1995 hardware, it will run really well on a $100 2005 Mini-ITX system, with a few `bug fixes and feature enhancements. Microsoft's new
I haven't used XFCE, but last time I looked at it, it was a CDE clone. To me that says "clutter". A busy control panel and icons that minimize to the desktop is visual clutter.
It looks a little like CDE, but it behaves differently. Minimization to the desktop can be turned off. You can also turn off either or both of the launcher and/or the task list and use menus. Whatever it is, it is much less clutered and complex than KDE.
Tell ya what man. Why don't you do a console log in, then type "XFree86". Biiiingo :)
Actually, I usually log in on the console and then type "xinit". And that usually brings up either icewm or xfce, both of which are excellent and responsive desktop environments.