Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! It is amazing how leftists want to use taxation to enforce egalitarian ideologies. Let's tax those cold, greedy, evil, heartless, selfish, Paris Hilton-loving rich and middle-class exploiters to the poorhouse, and reward all of that money to the poor. That'll show those evil capitalists a thing or two about poverty. It's all about the great "class struggle," after all. It starts there, and then soon breeds into communism unless somebody saves the day.
Redistribution of wealth is not what taxes are for. Taxes are used to pay for essential government services, such as military, Interstate highways, and other essential federal services. States and communities may add more things to the mix, such as schools, health care, parks, state- and locally-owned roads, and other community services. Taxation is not supposed to be an engine for egalitarian redistribution. It can work, but this form of equality does eventually end up destroying liberty.
If people want to donate money to help poor people, then they should do that voluntarily. Compassion is when you do things from your heart. Compassion and empathy is needed in a society in order to survive. But it should never be enforced by law. It's not compassion when the government is telling you what to do with your money. It's not compassion when your community's tax dollars for their schools are being siphoned off to another community's, and your schools are left to rot because you're not in a low enough income bracket. It's not compassion; it's theft.
It doesn't have to be GPS. You know the stickers that you put on your license plate every year that you buy from the DMV? They can just raise the prices on those stickers for hybrid and electric cars to fund the roads.
I am against the idea of forcing people to put tracking devices in their cars. If the government can't pay for its services without trampling over people's rights to privacy and property, then it should privatize those services. I'd rather pay a toll each time I go on a freeway than to install government tracking devices in my car.
If the state and federal governments are going to put tracking devices in our cars in order to have us pay up for our roads, we might as well privatize them. That would save the state and federal governments a lot of money, since they don't have to deal with the funding of roads at all. I, for one, would rather pay a toll to use a road and pay a private corporation for upkeep of the road than to have the government forcibly install tracking devices in my car. Tracking devices installed by governments installed on your property are evil (who gave the government the right to track your car?), and whoever thought of this horrible idea should read Nineteen Eighty-Four and see what this can lead to.
I'm not a strong advocate of road privatization (even with my libertarian views on most issues, I believe that good, interstate roads are essential to a federal government, and the states should maintain their own network of roads; cities and counties, too, not to mention road networks fall under natural monopolies). However, if the government wants to invade our privacy for the name of maintaining roads, then I feel that the roads should be taken away from the government and be sold to private corporations. If they can't even ethically fund the roads, why should they be able to maintain them?
Let's just hope that they don't through with this tracking crap, though.
Re:Good job kids. Way to be elitist.
on
Build a Program Now
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, as a former VB user (don't flame me Slashdotters, I have redeemed myself by learning C, C++, and Java), VB itself isn't half bad. Need a GUI for an application? With Visual Basic, you are done in just ten minutes or so. Need to access a database? Just drag the control, change some variables, type some minimal code, and you're done. Visual Basic allows you to make simple programs very quickly. Now, Visual Basic becomes impractical for larger, more complex projects (such as high-end video games, office suites, real web browsers, and other more complex applications), but Visual Basic is very efficient for small, business applications (e.g., keeping payrolls, databases, etc.). It is so easy to use, a 10-year old can learn it within a few days (I learned VB when I was 10, after learning QBasic for a year, and I know of other programmers who done the same when they were 10. Note that my Visual Basic knowledge is limited to VB 6.0; I don't know anything about VB.NET, so things might have changed).
So, why do people criticize VB? Well, Unix people don't like it because it is Windows-only and proprietary. Computer scientists and "real programmers" don't like it it breaks their style of programming; while CS majors and "real programmers" think of projects in terms of algorithms and data structures and our languages support that way of thinking, VB users think of programs as GUIs and controls, and their language supports that. VB users are criticized because, on average, they tend to not know as much about computer science topics (such as algorithms, data structures, etc.) than their counterparts, and they tend to only know VB (as compared to many computer scientists and other programmers, who know multiple languages and multiple ways of doing things). There is a culture clash between VB coders and other programmers. Finally, there is some hostility from Unix users who had some experience with badly-made $29.99 shareware Windows applications written in Visual Basic, and now resent VB and VB coders.
VB is perfectly fine for the projects that it was designed for: GUI wrappers, database accessors, business applications, and other small GUI applications. VB is quickly outgrown, however, when dealing with much larger problems, and if you want portability, forget it. Just use the right tool for the job.
I don't think that a self-proclaimed anarchocapitalist would steal. (Perhaps some rebelious, unruly, anti-corporation high school or college "anarchist" punk would do so, but not an anarchocapitalist). I'm a libertarian, and since we're vigorous defenders of free-market capitalism and property rights, stealing goes against our ideas of private property.
Anyways, back on topic, there is a way to stop bar-scanning scamming. Each barcode on each item on the shelf has a code and a price. The barcode also corresponds to a code in a database that holds all of the prices. Every time the cashier rings up the item, the cash register checks the price on the item against the price stored in the database. If the prices are equal, then everything is clear. If the prices are different, then there is a problem. By the prices being checked through a central database, it will be much harder for these barcode scammers to work.
Now, if they had access to the central database, then the plan would backfire, but then most theft cases will be limited to employee theft.
The Great Depression was a product of the free market.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That's the normal socialist response to the Great Depression. The Great Depression wasn't a failure of the free market, it started as a normal recession being made worse by the Federal Reserve's irresponsible monetary policies made during those first few years. The Federal Reserve contracted the monetary supply instead of expanded it, which led to mass deflation. The worldwide fall of the gold standard also played a role in the creation of the Great Depression.
Getting back on topic, capitalism hasn't saved the day with oil because capitalism was never allowed to become Superman here. The true price of oil is masked with government subsidies to oil companies. We don't know what the true cost of oil is, which is undoubtly higher. If the government stopped fueling the oil companies and consumers will see the true price of gas (which may be about $3-$4 per gallon, and I'm being conservative with my figures), then it will drive corporations to develop cheaper (and possibly more environmentally-friendly) alternatives, such as biodiesel, hydrogen cells, ethanol, etc.
There is nothing wrong with having a business that relies on the government as long as you provide society with products and services that it needs.
Yes, there is something wrong with businesses that need the government in order to make profit. It's wrong because it goes against the nature of free markets. Have you heard of corporate welfare? If a business cannot make the profits necessary, then it should either change its business plan or die, and not have taxpayers pay to keep it alive. There is a huge difference between governments contracting corporations in order for them to build infrastructure and schools, and governments subsidizing businesses (e.g., corporate welfare). He's talking mainly about subsidies.
Also watch out for some chair-throwing action whenever it gets mad.
Re:So why is Tamiflu withdrawn from customers?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
When it comes to supplying everyone with PlayStations, I am willing to let free market do the job. But when we are talking about a rare vital medicine, I'd rather have the government do it.
Did you see what happened when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Where was the government then? How effective was the government response?
That only proves the parent poster's point. Free markets are far less bureaucratic than governments are.
The Democrats ARE better. They may not be the ideal but the worst of them could do better than this bunch of corrupt losers.
Ha! I'm rolling on the floor laughing.
Ha! The Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans now. Who do you think voted for the DMCA? The DMCA was passed unanimously by the Senate and was signed into law by...Bill Clinton. Last time I checked, Democrats were in the Senate that year, and Bill Clinton is a Democrat. And what about the War on Drugs? There are many Democrats who support that. And don't get me started on Hillary Clinton and her policies....
It doesn't matter whether Congress people are Democrats or Republicans; they are still corrupt. They are ignorant about technical issues and can be bought and sold by corporations. Republicans and Democrats typically don't give a flying hoot about your personal freedoms. They both advocate big, all-encompassing government that controls many parts of your life.
Don't let the Democrats fool you, just because they aren't on the front stage. They have supported evil legislation, and they are no less immune to corruption and corporatism as the Republicans are.
Note: I'm not a Republican, so don't think that I'm a Republican apologizer.
This isn't representative of capitalism. This is corporatism.
As an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, please make it very clear that capitalism != rule by corporations. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production is privately owned, and when prices are determined by the market, not the state. Never mix corporatism with capitalism.
OpenOffice does take a minute to load...on my 266MHz Pentium II with 64MB RAM (that's how long it takes OpenOffice 1.1.4 to load on my laptop). However, once it is open, it is very responsive. I think I might upgrade the laptop to OpenOffice 2.0.
However, OpenOffice 2.0 loads in about 10-15 seconds on my 950MHz Duron box with 384MB RAM. Even though it takes longer to open OpenOffice than it is to open an individual program in MS Office, OpenOffice doesn't seem excruciatingly slow as long as you don't have an excruciatingly slow machine.
Disclaimer: I'm not a socialist. I want to make that clear.
Err, there is nothing socialistic about open-source software. Socialism is an economic policy in which the state owns a great deal of the means of production; not to the extent as communism (in which they own everything), but the government has much more control over industry than a free market would. Socialism also involves the notion of positive rights, rights that are provided by other people. These "rights" include a free education, universal health care, guaranteed minimum income, low-cost Internet access, etc. How are these positive rights paid for? You guessed it, progressive taxes.
Open-source software is much like a community in which everybody organizes to build a software project and give it back to the community without the intellectual property bull that proprietary software manufacturers give you. With OSS, we don't have to worry about DRM, abusive copyrights, and all of that other nonsense. OSS is a community and is somewhat collectivist, but communities can exist even in the purest capitalist societies. So, no, open source software isn't socialist.
Japan? Communist? The Japanese have a collectivist culture, but they definately aren't communist, or even leftist for that matter. Japan's economics are quite right-wing now of days, and in fact, the current administration of Koizumithere is trying to privatize Japan's post office and to significantly reduce business subsidies, which are both against the beliefs of leftism.
Japan's people are collectivist, but Japan's government doesn't impose collectivism on its people. There is a big difference between the two.
Err, Rhapsody was based off of OPENSTEP, which is based off NEXTSTEP, which is based off 4.2BSD (based off AT&T Unix 32V) and Mach from CMU. Mac OS X is based off of Rhapsody. Rhapsody was never released to the public, and the only reason why Rhapsody "failed" (i.e., Apple decided to abandon it and do a different approach with transforming OPENSTEP to OS X) is because Rhapsody would have forced developers to develop all of their applications for OPENSTEP APIs (now known as Cocoa). Developers didn't feel like re-writing all of their old Mac OS applications, so Apple had to spend the next few years developing Carbon (which contains much of the old Classic APIs, just updated for OS X).
Plan 9 is a new operating system, but much of it is based off the concepts of Unix. Plan 9 improves from Unix in many ways. It "failed" in the sense of doesn't have any market share, but Plan 9 wasn't about taking over the world. It is just a research project, and many of the concepts invented there (such as UTF-8 support and/proc) has been used in many other OSes and applications. Plan 9 has a very neat design and environment.
In a sense, all of the modern OSes that we use now are based off of a predecessor OS, either by sharing code or sharing concepts/functionality.
Yeah, that's the sad thing with computers now. We have no more diversity in platforms. Everything is an x86 (except for high end IBM POWER and Sun SPARC workstations, which may be dying too; embedded machines don't count). The days of choosing from a wide range of platforms are dead. Everything, from 2007 onward, will be an el-cheapo x86 box. Operating systems and environments are still improving (OS X is still adding nice features, and development with GNUstep still shows just how ahead NEXTSTEP was back in the day), but nothing's happening to the core of the operating system. Where is my exokernel OS? Heck, we don't really have a pure microkernel OS in wide usage now, and that's 80's research.
There needs to be a company that pushes computer science research forward, with new ideas for operating systems, architectures, languages, and other areas of computer science. We need that excitement to come back to computing.
Another architecture bites the dust. Looks like we're down to POWER on IBM workstations and servers, SPARC for high-end Sun workstations, and x86 or x86-64 for everything else. (And no, embedded machines don't count).
I wonder if there will ever be another non-x86 architecture? The x86 is like the Windows of the architecture world; it may not be technologically the best, but since everybody needs it for "compatability"....
GNUstep looks like a very nice desktop environment for those who miss the NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP look, feel, and functionality. (WindowMaker and AfterStep gives you the look and feel, but not the functionality). Now that the development tools are completed, now they can start getting to work on the applications.
Some applications that they do need are:
Web Browser
Word Processor
Spreadsheet
Multimedia Tools
Full-Featured Text Editor (kind of like KDE's Kate. Ports of Emacs and vi would also be nice)
Graphics Tools (like GIMP)
Some command line-applications (like mplayer and emacs/vi) written in C just need graphical wrappers, so porting them would be quite easy. Some of the GTK applications are written in pure C, so they can be ported to Objective-C by removing the GTK dependencies and replacing the code with GNUstep classes. (OS X users will also be pleased, as porting from GNUstep to OS X is just a compile away). Once we get the Objective-C++ sources from Apple (where you can mix Objective-C and C++), then we can get applications such as Camino and AbiWord, which have already been ported to OS X (using Cocoa), and porting them to GNUstep isn't too difficult from there.
Well if folks stopping voting republican for all levels of government because of the illusion of safety from terrorists we would not be in this mess.
And do you honestly think that the Democrats would do better? Over the past 40 years they have expanded federal control to eduaction. Their intentions were good (try to educate all of the public). Heck, even your favorite president, George W. Bush, got his No Child Left Behind Act passed, which further increased federal control over schools. Yet, the quality of our schools have been slipping for the last 40 years. It is too bureaucratic and too centralized. People who sit on school boards tend to care about keeping power and sometimes pushing their own adgendas rather than doing their job; help come up with solutions that best educate the public. Bad teachers cannot be fired easily because they're involved in teacher's unions (even though I believe that good teachers are underpaid, I also believe that bad teachers are overpaid.). The community has very little say in what goes on in their schools because of federal issues. Poor people end up shafted because they have little say (and little tax payer's dollars, too), and they're forced to go to the monopolized, ill-equipped, poorly staffed and funded neighborhood government schools.
Sorry, but as long as the two powers remain in power and retain their big government approaches, we aren't getting anywhere. It needs to be decentralized. I'm not a Republican symphasizer, but I'm sceptical of the Democrats, too.
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Redistribution of wealth is not what taxes are for. Taxes are used to pay for essential government services, such as military, Interstate highways, and other essential federal services. States and communities may add more things to the mix, such as schools, health care, parks, state- and locally-owned roads, and other community services. Taxation is not supposed to be an engine for egalitarian redistribution. It can work, but this form of equality does eventually end up destroying liberty.
If people want to donate money to help poor people, then they should do that voluntarily. Compassion is when you do things from your heart. Compassion and empathy is needed in a society in order to survive. But it should never be enforced by law. It's not compassion when the government is telling you what to do with your money. It's not compassion when your community's tax dollars for their schools are being siphoned off to another community's, and your schools are left to rot because you're not in a low enough income bracket. It's not compassion; it's theft.
It doesn't have to be GPS. You know the stickers that you put on your license plate every year that you buy from the DMV? They can just raise the prices on those stickers for hybrid and electric cars to fund the roads.
I am against the idea of forcing people to put tracking devices in their cars. If the government can't pay for its services without trampling over people's rights to privacy and property, then it should privatize those services. I'd rather pay a toll each time I go on a freeway than to install government tracking devices in my car.
If the state and federal governments are going to put tracking devices in our cars in order to have us pay up for our roads, we might as well privatize them. That would save the state and federal governments a lot of money, since they don't have to deal with the funding of roads at all. I, for one, would rather pay a toll to use a road and pay a private corporation for upkeep of the road than to have the government forcibly install tracking devices in my car. Tracking devices installed by governments installed on your property are evil (who gave the government the right to track your car?), and whoever thought of this horrible idea should read Nineteen Eighty-Four and see what this can lead to.
I'm not a strong advocate of road privatization (even with my libertarian views on most issues, I believe that good, interstate roads are essential to a federal government, and the states should maintain their own network of roads; cities and counties, too, not to mention road networks fall under natural monopolies). However, if the government wants to invade our privacy for the name of maintaining roads, then I feel that the roads should be taken away from the government and be sold to private corporations. If they can't even ethically fund the roads, why should they be able to maintain them?
Let's just hope that they don't through with this tracking crap, though.
Well, as a former VB user (don't flame me Slashdotters, I have redeemed myself by learning C, C++, and Java), VB itself isn't half bad. Need a GUI for an application? With Visual Basic, you are done in just ten minutes or so. Need to access a database? Just drag the control, change some variables, type some minimal code, and you're done. Visual Basic allows you to make simple programs very quickly. Now, Visual Basic becomes impractical for larger, more complex projects (such as high-end video games, office suites, real web browsers, and other more complex applications), but Visual Basic is very efficient for small, business applications (e.g., keeping payrolls, databases, etc.). It is so easy to use, a 10-year old can learn it within a few days (I learned VB when I was 10, after learning QBasic for a year, and I know of other programmers who done the same when they were 10. Note that my Visual Basic knowledge is limited to VB 6.0; I don't know anything about VB.NET, so things might have changed).
So, why do people criticize VB? Well, Unix people don't like it because it is Windows-only and proprietary. Computer scientists and "real programmers" don't like it it breaks their style of programming; while CS majors and "real programmers" think of projects in terms of algorithms and data structures and our languages support that way of thinking, VB users think of programs as GUIs and controls, and their language supports that. VB users are criticized because, on average, they tend to not know as much about computer science topics (such as algorithms, data structures, etc.) than their counterparts, and they tend to only know VB (as compared to many computer scientists and other programmers, who know multiple languages and multiple ways of doing things). There is a culture clash between VB coders and other programmers. Finally, there is some hostility from Unix users who had some experience with badly-made $29.99 shareware Windows applications written in Visual Basic, and now resent VB and VB coders.
VB is perfectly fine for the projects that it was designed for: GUI wrappers, database accessors, business applications, and other small GUI applications. VB is quickly outgrown, however, when dealing with much larger problems, and if you want portability, forget it. Just use the right tool for the job.
For a minute, I thought that comment was a joke, until I actually RTFA'd....
Wow. I'd expect this comment from a five year old, but not a 19 year old. Should he know the difference between right and wrong by now?
Oh well, for him. Have fun with Bubba!
I don't think that a self-proclaimed anarchocapitalist would steal. (Perhaps some rebelious, unruly, anti-corporation high school or college "anarchist" punk would do so, but not an anarchocapitalist). I'm a libertarian, and since we're vigorous defenders of free-market capitalism and property rights, stealing goes against our ideas of private property.
Anyways, back on topic, there is a way to stop bar-scanning scamming. Each barcode on each item on the shelf has a code and a price. The barcode also corresponds to a code in a database that holds all of the prices. Every time the cashier rings up the item, the cash register checks the price on the item against the price stored in the database. If the prices are equal, then everything is clear. If the prices are different, then there is a problem. By the prices being checked through a central database, it will be much harder for these barcode scammers to work.
Now, if they had access to the central database, then the plan would backfire, but then most theft cases will be limited to employee theft.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That's the normal socialist response to the Great Depression. The Great Depression wasn't a failure of the free market, it started as a normal recession being made worse by the Federal Reserve's irresponsible monetary policies made during those first few years. The Federal Reserve contracted the monetary supply instead of expanded it, which led to mass deflation. The worldwide fall of the gold standard also played a role in the creation of the Great Depression.
Getting back on topic, capitalism hasn't saved the day with oil because capitalism was never allowed to become Superman here. The true price of oil is masked with government subsidies to oil companies. We don't know what the true cost of oil is, which is undoubtly higher. If the government stopped fueling the oil companies and consumers will see the true price of gas (which may be about $3-$4 per gallon, and I'm being conservative with my figures), then it will drive corporations to develop cheaper (and possibly more environmentally-friendly) alternatives, such as biodiesel, hydrogen cells, ethanol, etc.
Didn't Dijkstra ever tell you that goto was considered harmful?
Yes, there is something wrong with businesses that need the government in order to make profit. It's wrong because it goes against the nature of free markets. Have you heard of corporate welfare? If a business cannot make the profits necessary, then it should either change its business plan or die, and not have taxpayers pay to keep it alive. There is a huge difference between governments contracting corporations in order for them to build infrastructure and schools, and governments subsidizing businesses (e.g., corporate welfare). He's talking mainly about subsidies.
Also watch out for some chair-throwing action whenever it gets mad.
Did you see what happened when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Where was the government then? How effective was the government response?
That only proves the parent poster's point. Free markets are far less bureaucratic than governments are.
Ha! I'm rolling on the floor laughing.
Ha! The Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans now. Who do you think voted for the DMCA? The DMCA was passed unanimously by the Senate and was signed into law by...Bill Clinton. Last time I checked, Democrats were in the Senate that year, and Bill Clinton is a Democrat. And what about the War on Drugs? There are many Democrats who support that. And don't get me started on Hillary Clinton and her policies....
It doesn't matter whether Congress people are Democrats or Republicans; they are still corrupt. They are ignorant about technical issues and can be bought and sold by corporations. Republicans and Democrats typically don't give a flying hoot about your personal freedoms. They both advocate big, all-encompassing government that controls many parts of your life.
Don't let the Democrats fool you, just because they aren't on the front stage. They have supported evil legislation, and they are no less immune to corruption and corporatism as the Republicans are.
Note: I'm not a Republican, so don't think that I'm a Republican apologizer.
This isn't representative of capitalism. This is corporatism.
As an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, please make it very clear that capitalism != rule by corporations. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production is privately owned, and when prices are determined by the market, not the state. Never mix corporatism with capitalism.
C doesn't have a boolean type.
OpenOffice does take a minute to load...on my 266MHz Pentium II with 64MB RAM (that's how long it takes OpenOffice 1.1.4 to load on my laptop). However, once it is open, it is very responsive. I think I might upgrade the laptop to OpenOffice 2.0.
However, OpenOffice 2.0 loads in about 10-15 seconds on my 950MHz Duron box with 384MB RAM. Even though it takes longer to open OpenOffice than it is to open an individual program in MS Office, OpenOffice doesn't seem excruciatingly slow as long as you don't have an excruciatingly slow machine.
Disclaimer: I'm not a socialist. I want to make that clear.
Err, there is nothing socialistic about open-source software. Socialism is an economic policy in which the state owns a great deal of the means of production; not to the extent as communism (in which they own everything), but the government has much more control over industry than a free market would. Socialism also involves the notion of positive rights, rights that are provided by other people. These "rights" include a free education, universal health care, guaranteed minimum income, low-cost Internet access, etc. How are these positive rights paid for? You guessed it, progressive taxes.
Open-source software is much like a community in which everybody organizes to build a software project and give it back to the community without the intellectual property bull that proprietary software manufacturers give you. With OSS, we don't have to worry about DRM, abusive copyrights, and all of that other nonsense. OSS is a community and is somewhat collectivist, but communities can exist even in the purest capitalist societies. So, no, open source software isn't socialist.
Not until 2080, unless the MPAA/RIAA^W Congress extends copyright again.
Hmmm, I just thought of a profit motive, hehehe
I can even code this:
for(;;) {
firefoxInstalled = installfirefox();
if(firefoxInstalled == true) {
firefoxUninstalled = uninstallfirefox();
firefoxInstalled = false;
}
if(firefoxUninstalled == true)
money += 2;
}
Now, on the road to millions!
Japan? Communist? The Japanese have a collectivist culture, but they definately aren't communist, or even leftist for that matter. Japan's economics are quite right-wing now of days, and in fact, the current administration of Koizumithere is trying to privatize Japan's post office and to significantly reduce business subsidies, which are both against the beliefs of leftism.
Japan's people are collectivist, but Japan's government doesn't impose collectivism on its people. There is a big difference between the two.
Err, Rhapsody was based off of OPENSTEP, which is based off NEXTSTEP, which is based off 4.2BSD (based off AT&T Unix 32V) and Mach from CMU. Mac OS X is based off of Rhapsody. Rhapsody was never released to the public, and the only reason why Rhapsody "failed" (i.e., Apple decided to abandon it and do a different approach with transforming OPENSTEP to OS X) is because Rhapsody would have forced developers to develop all of their applications for OPENSTEP APIs (now known as Cocoa). Developers didn't feel like re-writing all of their old Mac OS applications, so Apple had to spend the next few years developing Carbon (which contains much of the old Classic APIs, just updated for OS X).
Plan 9 is a new operating system, but much of it is based off the concepts of Unix. Plan 9 improves from Unix in many ways. It "failed" in the sense of doesn't have any market share, but Plan 9 wasn't about taking over the world. It is just a research project, and many of the concepts invented there (such as UTF-8 support and /proc) has been used in many other OSes and applications. Plan 9 has a very neat design and environment.
In a sense, all of the modern OSes that we use now are based off of a predecessor OS, either by sharing code or sharing concepts/functionality.
Yeah, that's the sad thing with computers now. We have no more diversity in platforms. Everything is an x86 (except for high end IBM POWER and Sun SPARC workstations, which may be dying too; embedded machines don't count). The days of choosing from a wide range of platforms are dead. Everything, from 2007 onward, will be an el-cheapo x86 box. Operating systems and environments are still improving (OS X is still adding nice features, and development with GNUstep still shows just how ahead NEXTSTEP was back in the day), but nothing's happening to the core of the operating system. Where is my exokernel OS? Heck, we don't really have a pure microkernel OS in wide usage now, and that's 80's research.
There needs to be a company that pushes computer science research forward, with new ideas for operating systems, architectures, languages, and other areas of computer science. We need that excitement to come back to computing.
Another architecture bites the dust. Looks like we're down to POWER on IBM workstations and servers, SPARC for high-end Sun workstations, and x86 or x86-64 for everything else. (And no, embedded machines don't count).
I wonder if there will ever be another non-x86 architecture? The x86 is like the Windows of the architecture world; it may not be technologically the best, but since everybody needs it for "compatability"....
GNUstep looks like a very nice desktop environment for those who miss the NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP look, feel, and functionality. (WindowMaker and AfterStep gives you the look and feel, but not the functionality). Now that the development tools are completed, now they can start getting to work on the applications.
Some applications that they do need are:
Some command line-applications (like mplayer and emacs/vi) written in C just need graphical wrappers, so porting them would be quite easy. Some of the GTK applications are written in pure C, so they can be ported to Objective-C by removing the GTK dependencies and replacing the code with GNUstep classes. (OS X users will also be pleased, as porting from GNUstep to OS X is just a compile away). Once we get the Objective-C++ sources from Apple (where you can mix Objective-C and C++), then we can get applications such as Camino and AbiWord, which have already been ported to OS X (using Cocoa), and porting them to GNUstep isn't too difficult from there.
Dennis Thompson? I didn't know that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson fused and merged together back in the 60s to become ... Dennis Thompson.
And do you honestly think that the Democrats would do better? Over the past 40 years they have expanded federal control to eduaction. Their intentions were good (try to educate all of the public). Heck, even your favorite president, George W. Bush, got his No Child Left Behind Act passed, which further increased federal control over schools. Yet, the quality of our schools have been slipping for the last 40 years. It is too bureaucratic and too centralized. People who sit on school boards tend to care about keeping power and sometimes pushing their own adgendas rather than doing their job; help come up with solutions that best educate the public. Bad teachers cannot be fired easily because they're involved in teacher's unions (even though I believe that good teachers are underpaid, I also believe that bad teachers are overpaid.). The community has very little say in what goes on in their schools because of federal issues. Poor people end up shafted because they have little say (and little tax payer's dollars, too), and they're forced to go to the monopolized, ill-equipped, poorly staffed and funded neighborhood government schools.
Sorry, but as long as the two powers remain in power and retain their big government approaches, we aren't getting anywhere. It needs to be decentralized. I'm not a Republican symphasizer, but I'm sceptical of the Democrats, too.