Well, AbiWord and GNUmeric are part of a collection of applications known as GNOME Office. They use GTK2, and are very lightweight (even though they don't have all of the features and capabilities of OpenOffice; AbiWord needs some work on its Word import/export functions). A GTK2 presentation application would be a nice thing.
On KDE, you have KOffice, which is pretty lightweight (compared to OpenOffice) and has a decent mix of features.
Now if somebody made an FOSS office suite for GNUstep and OS X....
I agree. About three weeks ago I bought a 3-year old 950MHz Duron box with an 60GB hard drive, Voodoo3 graphics card, and 384MB RAM for $100 (I'm a poor college student, so I can't afford anything brand new). It is much better than the 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64MB RAM that I was stuck with, and also better than the 475MHz K6-2 with 64MB RAM that I had at home.
The Duron machine runs FreeBSD and KDE like a charm. I wouldn't recommend a similar purchase to people such as graphic artists and gamers who really do need a top-of-the-line Athlon 64 or Pentium 4, but a computer in the 800MHz-1.5GHz range from about 2-4 years ago can be a very nice deal for most people (provided that there is at least 256MB RAM in the box). This computer would get me through at least a few years before I buy another computer.
In the meanwhile, I'm looking forward to those new Intel Macs coming out next year. Then the prices of the G4 and G5 Macintoshes would surely drop quite a bit. Then I could afford a PowerMac G5;)
Let me reiterate something that I said in another post earlier today. Left-right is an economic scale that ranges from communism/socialism (far left) to pure laissez-faire capitalism (far right). Right wing has nothing to do with "intelligent design," knowing factiods of every war, and other similar issues.
Political correctness and the push for "intelligent design" in schools and knowledge of every little factoid of war history (slanted, of course) is a symptom of authoritarianism (even though the left authoritarians and right authoritarians exhibit it in different ways, as the grandparent and parent posters showed). Authoritarianism cannot be measured on the left-right scale; rather, you'll need to create a new scale. There is another scale ranging from authoritarian (where authority/tradition/society > individual freedoms) vs. libertarian (where individual freedoms > authority/tradition/society).
That's the problem with the UN and democracy. People care so much about "tolerance" and "fairness" and "the principles of democracy" that they forget the most important thing for people: freedom.
Democracy doesn't do any good when you can't say what you want or read what you want on the Internet because China and Cuba are controlling the thing, just because "we have to tolerate diversity of ideas." No!
I want a private corporation or private organization to control the Internet, and not any governmental organization. Not the US (even though their control has been great), not the EU, and definately not the UN or China/Iraq/N. Korea/{insert other communist/totalitarian country here}. The Interet is about freedom of expression, freedom of ideas, and freedom of speech. I will not give that up in the name of "tolerance," "democracy," and other political buzzwords that democracy-lovers throw at me.
Remember, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for lunch. Do you really want the wolves guarding the sheep pen? Or do you want the sheep to be able to be free? We need freedom, not evil totalitarian countries deciding what free people should do.
Oh please, anti-American socialist troll. What does war, "racism," and the US not giving money to a country that isn't even in their control have to do with the US and the Internet?
I'm really getting sick and tired of all of these anti-American trolls coming out of the woodwork saying that the US is the most evil thing since Satan.
Both you and the grandparent post don't understand what left and right really mean. Left-right is an economic scale that ranges from communism/socialism (far left) to pure laissez-faire capitalism (far right), with a mixed economy (e.g., United States's economy) somewhere in the middle.
Even though left-wingers do seem more sympathetic toward environmental issues, environmentalism isn't exclusively left-wing only; there are right wing environmentalists (the only difference between the two is that left-wingers prefer governmental involvement in environmental issues, whereas right-wingers prefer free-market solutions to solving environmental issues).
Being a right winger doesn't make you intolerant and anti-democratic (even though right-wingers tend to be more sympathetic to republics than democracies), and being a left-winger doesn't make one unpatriotic and extreme. Libertarianism, for example, is a right wing philosophy that supports tolerance and democracy/republicanism (as long as it doesn't trample over the liberties of its people). The left has philosophiles such as progressivism and American liberalism (who tend to be patriotic and not too extreme to the left).
No. Less restrictive licenses (like the BSD and MIT licenses) and more restrictive licenses (like the one OpenSolaris has) are needed for different purposes. I, for one, like my BSD-licensed operating system, and many other corporations do, too.
Because doing so improves the society at large, making your life safer and more fulfilling. I'm sorry if you're incapable of putting a dollar figure on that, but that's your problem not ours.
How? How does broadband internet make my life "safer" and "more fulfilling"? Why should I justify being forced to pay for a service that I might not want or need just because some government said that it would "make my life safer, more fulfilling, and help the society at large"? If I decide to get broadband Internet access, I'll pay a private corporation to do so. I don't want some government telling me what I want and what I need, just because "it's for the greater good of society." The entire leftist belief of "government providing for the common good" is flawed, because it implies paternalism and state-mandated collectivism. A paternalistic government takes away from the freedoms of the individual. I don't oppose collectivism, but I do oppose it whenever it is state mandated. I don't like the idea of being told by Big Daddy Government(TM) to give away 70% of my income because it's "for the common good." Socialism implies that the people are children to the government, and that their only existence is to live up to and obey their parents.
I am an individual. I, therefore, should have the right to make my own decisions and choose what I want to buy or what services I want, as long as I don't infringe on the rights of other people. Once again, I'm not the government's child as the paternalistic socialist/communist-style governments want me to be. We're all adults, here. We should be free to choose.
Still, though, why should the federal government subsidize broadband Internet access for everybody? The job of the government isn't to hand out free-for-all Internet access. Besides, that just gives government more power to try to control certain aspects of the Internet. Instead, let the free market take care of that; governments are the wrong institutions to do this type of thing, as they are very bureaucratic and like throwing their power around. We also don't need a government monopoly on Internet access. Government functions should strictly stick to courts, military, police (locally and state only), roads, environmental protection, and school funding.
Taboo to say round these parts, I know, but socialism works pretty well. Taxes are the cost we pay for a civilized society.
Socialism may provide all of these welfare services and "extras" like free high-speed broadband internet access, but it comes at a cost (and much more than paying heavy taxes): your freedom. Your tax dollars go to various special interest groups and some other services that you may not want (or need), just because some representatives or the majority of the people decided to approve them. What if you don't want (or need) broadband Internet access? In a socialist economy, too bad, the majority wanted broadband access, so it looks like your taxes will be raised another 3% to pay for a service you don't want or need. In a free market, however, you have a choice whether or not to have broadband Internet access. Nobody is subsizing it; the only people paying for it are those who want the service.
Call me another person who read too much Milton Friedman, but I believe that the free market just works better for things such as broadband Internet. It is not a right, it is not a necessary service needed for commerce and transport (unlike roads, for instance), and giving the government more rope may backfire (e.g., censorship laws, laws restricting free speech, etc.). I also don't approve of government monopolies. I'm sorry, but I don't and won't accept socialism of any form. No matter how much socialist governments try to implement all of these services for "the common good", even though they have good intentions and starry eyes, the government normally ends up doing more harm than good in the long run. Socialism to me just leads to a slippery slope leading to totalitarianism and communism.
I think that most/.ers wouldn't be here if they hadn't been introduced to computers at some point; most people are introduced to computing through Windows.
I don't know if I'd say that, though. Many people's first experience of computers were with DOS (still Microsoft, I know, but not Windows), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, and probably a plethora of other platforms from the late 70s and 1980s that I forgot to mention. And then we have some old-timers here who were introduced to vacuum tubes, punch cards, IBM mainframes, PDP-11s, and some other ancient stuff.
Computers have been around for about 60 years now, and they have been in Joe Average's workplace for about 25. I'm pretty sure that except for the youngest generation, most people have been exposed to computing prior to Windows dominating the market.
What meaning does this statement have at the end of the day ? Why do I care about an operating system's pedigree ? Either it does what I want, or it does not. In fact, it seems pretty silly to market something solely on the basis that it still has ten year old bits of code floating around in it.
Solaris could do anything and everything that Linux could do. Why would Sun switch from Solaris to Linux if Solaris can do everything that Linux can do?
"unique and different" are two words which describe Microsoft. I wonder why their way of doing things appeal to you ? It may have escaped you that people want things that are standard and interoperable. I want to choose between vendors or open source products that just work. I don't want to see the wheel re-invented each go-round.
You should read more about Plan 9. Plan 9 isn't a reinvention of the wheel; it is something completely different. And, yes, interoperatability is quite possible with Plan 9 (even though I must admit that Plan 9 is currently a research OS, so the applications are a bit lacking). I was just using Plan 9 as an example; if I were a corporation dropping my Unix product, I would rather go one step above the competition (Plan 9) rather than a sell a complete clone of something that I have already sold (Linux).
The term "better designed" means nothing. Will it allow me to do my job better, or not ? Sure, x86 is a heap of shit. But if it performs better, why should I care ?
Using a chip that is better designed for your purposes may get you more "miles per gallon" for your job. The SPARC may fit your needs if you want a very powerful workstation, the x86 may fit your needs if you want a PC. That's up to the customer to decide.
There is no such thing as too much competition. Sun's hardware is among the best there is.
You're right, there is no such thing as too much competition. However, I still believe that Sun is better off selling SPARC machines with Solaris than x86 machines with Linux. I have a feeling that Dell would just kill Sun if Sun made that move.
They need to reinvent themselves as an end-to-end solutions provider for Linux and dump (or at least really heavily de-emphasize) the rest. Forget about OpenSolaris - salvage what little is still worth anything in Solaris, GPL it and help integrate it into Linux. Stop designing, making and selling new SPARC hardware - give the platform to Fujitsu or Toshiba or whoever is stupid enough to want it. Focus entirely on making the best AMD64-based servers money can buy. Become the new high end of the Linux server market. Be the vendor that can sell you the complete package. Have support techs that know more about Red Hat than Red Hat.
Great, we'll just lose some more operating system and (especially) platform diversity. OpenSolaris is the best thing that can happen to Solaris, and I would like to see more competition between Solaris, Linux, and BSD (because competition leads to more innovation between the three OSes). There are many nice things and advantages to the Solaris platform that Linux could learn from. Besides, Solaris is a real Unix (based off AT&T Unix System V), whereas Linux is just a clone. Why would Sun drop something based on the real thing for an imitation? If Sun were to drop anything, I'd rather Sun adopt Plan 9 rather than Linux. At least Plan 9 is unique and different.
And with the SPARC platform, why would Sun drop that elegant platform for the inferior x86-64 architecture? (Don't get me wrong, I like the AMD64 a lot, but it is still based on that hideous x86 architecture, and the SPARC is much better designed). Over the past few years, we have lost a few well-designed platforms (Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC) to the x86, and the SPARC is the last holdout. I do not want to see an x86 monopoly on computing, but it looks like were heading for that. And when we're stuck with the x86 as our only platform, then innovation will slow down, and we might not see better platforms again.
Sun should continue what it has been doing; be a Unix company selling a Unix variant and workstations, and promoting Java (let's not forget that important part of Sun). We don't need another Linux PC manufacturer. If Sun degenerated to just selling Linux PCs, then Sun would die faster than you can say a BSD or Apple troll.
Sounds like a 'vim' user, shunning usable interfaces for hardcore elitism.
Hey, watch that flamebait. If vi[m] were unusable, then nobody would use it. Heck, I use vi all the time. Oh wait, silly me, I forgot. An interface can't be "usable" unless it has a shinee, gooee, clickee Mickey Mouse interface with all of the icons and translucency and so on....
It's just amazing how GUI people call us people who love command-line interfaces "elitists", and call anything that doesn't have an icon "unusable." Once again, if command lines were unusable, then nobody (as in zero people) would be using them. Give me a break!
I'm sorry if I have offended you. I don't have anything against liberal arts; in fact, I think that the subject matter is quite interesting and I really do enjoy learning history and philosophy as a hobby (I'm a freshman computer science major). I also feel that liberal arts is very important for all university graduates to learn. However, I was trying to prove the point that the business world is filled with people like Carly Fiorina who don't know anything about science and engineering, yet is expected to run businesses almost entirely based on them. And what has she done to them? AT&T became just a phone company with no research (and ended up dying), Bell Labs isn't doing too much these days, and HP went from a true engineering corporation to a Dell-wannabe (even though Fiorina was smart enough to spin off the engineering components to Aglient; they're still going strong).
Once again, sorry if you were offended. I was trying to make a specific reference to Carly Fironia, but it must not have worked.
Or, why don't we get rid of the dogfood in the first place? Imagine if all K-12 schools were private, and the government completely paid for the education for the poor and gave middle-class students vouchers that paid for it partially. This will finally give all parents access to "free-market education," where they get to choose the schools that best meet their child's needs, rather than be forced to go to a certin public school because it is in your neighborhood (which hinders poor children a lot, because the schools in their neighborhoods are generally pretty poor in quality). The parents would also be "stockholders" of their child(ren)'s school. There will be much less federal and state government bureaucracy, and the parents would have a greater say about what is happening with the school, since the parents vote with their dollars. Schools will also benefit a bit, becuase they can fine-tune their curricula to match their school's purpose. They don't have to deal with state- and federal-mandated standardized tests (which makes the schools more focused on having their students pass tests rather than learning the material, which means two different things). Finally, the salaries of teachers will be much more competitive, since the schools now have to compete for students and excellent teachers. Good schools and good teachers will be rewarded in the marketplace, and bad schools and bad teachers will not.
The liberals and socialists reading this are probably just shaking their heads right now, but I have a feeling that this idea is what this country (the United States) needs to improve its education system. The state and federal governments have done a horrible job with educating its children, especially those of poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. I believe that the free market and vouchers for those who need help paying for it can work much better than any government department could.
...if our corporations were ran by people with science and engineering backgrounds who cared about long-term research and development rather than ran by MBAs with BAs in Medieval History and Philosophy who can't differentiate a simple function or write a line of code, and who care more about short-term profits and $$$, then perhaps we'll see some more scientific and engineering progress in this country. Witness the downfall of Bell Labs, for example. Bell Labs was very innovative and many of its research projects led to things that we take for granted today (the very operating system that I'm typing this message on now, is FreeBSD, which is a direct descendant of Bell Labs' Unix [if you ignore the fact that the code was completely rewritten]). Then, some person who knows nothing about science and engineering took control and cut its funding to its knees. Now Bell Labs is very small, and that same dummy went on to destroy HP in a similar fashion....
The education system isn't looking that great, either. Our secondary schools are also failing to teach the basic science and mathematics needed to produce students capable of succeeding in an science or engineering field. College students looking at future career prospects might end up switching to law or business, because the future looks brighter for them. After all, we're outsourcing a great deal of the engineering jobs.
This country is fast on its way of becoming a country full of rich lawyers and managers, and poor McDonalds employees and janitors. But who will be exploring science and developing new technologies? The Indians and Chinese, of course. Their corporate culture seems to care much more about the future, and besides, many of our corporations are using them to do our non-law/managerial work.
If we want to turn back the tide, the corporate culture needs to change, and we need more CEOs who have science and engineering backgrounds who care about science and engineering. The school system in this country also needs to be radically improved.
Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background.
There are some gems on that site, and in its parent folder as well (more Unix jokes).
I noticed on Apple's page that the eMac is gone. It is no longer on Apple's hardware website (except under "eMac for Education"), and it is no longer sold at the Apple store.
I guess the Mac Mini must have made the eMac a bit redundant, so sales of the eMac must have dropped tremendously.
This is just more of the left wing nannie state bullshit. The gov't needs to stay out of our business.
I fail to see how left wing policies have to do with the state playing the role of parents. Left-right is an economic scale representing communism/socialism vs. pure laissez-faire capitalism. You must mean authoritarian. The Democrats have taken an authoritarian turn over the past few years, especially with Hillary Clinton and the like.
The Democrats have evolved from the party where "the government will take care of economic problems" (Franklin Roosevelt) to "the government will take care of social problems" (Kennedy and LBJ), to now "the government will take care of moral problems" (Hillary Clinton). As a libertarian, I am not too supportive of the first two philosophies, but I'm adamantly opposed to the third philosophy that the Democrats seem to be moving to. The third one is very scary, as that cannot be achieved without becoming more authoritarian and less free. Individualism will be tossed to the garbage. After all, Hillary Clinton is the one who said that "we're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." You might want to read this page that further describes her approaches.
I am leery of both the Democrats and Republicans, but the Democrats' new philosophy scares me even more than anything Bush and Co. seems to be cooking up these days.
In California and many other western states, you are right. California decided to dispose of most of its US highways once the Interstate system was in full swing in the 60s. The reasoning for this is because what happened in the 1950s was that freeways were built before the Interstate system was started, so those freeways started with US highway numbers and signs. Freeways also tended to be built parallel to the former US highway routing; in California, freeways are usually built to replace other roads. When the Interstate system made its way to California in 1960, the Interstate numbers were somewhat grafted on to those freeways. However, certain routes in the past were assigned two (or sometimes even three) US routes numbers, and adding an Interstate and State highway signage to the same road led to a lot of motorist confusion. For example, this page has a picture of a typical freeway sign in the LA area before 1964.
In 1964, California decided to renumber much of its roads by getting rid of duplicate numbers and by replacing most of its US highways with Interstate (and sometimes State) highways. For example, US 99 was replaced largely with Interstate 5 and California State Route 99, US 91 was replaced with Interstate 15, US 66 was replaced with Interstate 40, etc. Only a few US routes in California remain, but some of those remaining routes got truncated. (For example, US 101 south of Los Angeles has been replaced by Interstate 5.)
On the East Coast, on the other hand, the Interstate and US Highway system tend to coexist. Interstates are relegated to freeways, whereas US highways are relegated mostly to surface streets and non-freeway highways. The Interstates and US highways don't seem to cancel each other out, unlike what has happened in California.
Well, it is possible to use Windows securely. I have a Windows XP partition, for example, and I don't get viruses or malware because I take proper precautions (use firewall, use anti-virus/anti-malware, use Windows Update, and don't use IE except for doing Windows Update). However, there are some fundamental flaws built into the software. Internet Explorer has some sort of new flaw discovered every week, because of insecure code. Windows doesn't enforce the distinction between user and administrator accounts in XP Home (which many users use). These effects can be mitigated by staying careful, but let's not lose sight of Windows's main deficiency -- security.
Gee, sounds like a mind-numbingly simple idea. I guess it has many names, but they all end in "nix." (BSD excepted, but you get the point.)
I love *nix (and BSD, too), but there are ways that Microsoft can make a secure operating system without switching its kernel to a BSD kernel. (Note I left Linux out; there is no way Microsoft is ever going to base their flagship product on GPL'd software). Here are some ways that they can do that:
Decouple the Internet Explorer/ActiveX connection. Internet Explorer would be much like Konqueror on KDE if it didn't have that insecure ActiveX giving malware access to the machine.
Microsoft should do what OpenBSD did to much of their software; check to see if there are any potential buffer overflows and other security issues created from bad code and replace them with safer functions. OpenBSD created strlcat() and strlcpy() to replace the insecure strcat() and strcpy() functions in C, for example. Removing all of these insecure stuff from their software will help a lot.
Windows should also better handle user accounts, in an almost Unix-like manner. Granted, Windows has gotten much better over the years with the "Run As..." command and more applications are aware of adminstrator and limited user account, but there are still some minor flaws that need to be fixed.
I don't think Windows needs a new kernel. I just think that all of its APIs, programs, and functionality should be secured, and very insecure things (like ActiveX) should be removed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, AbiWord and GNUmeric are part of a collection of applications known as GNOME Office. They use GTK2, and are very lightweight (even though they don't have all of the features and capabilities of OpenOffice; AbiWord needs some work on its Word import/export functions). A GTK2 presentation application would be a nice thing.
On KDE, you have KOffice, which is pretty lightweight (compared to OpenOffice) and has a decent mix of features.
Now if somebody made an FOSS office suite for GNUstep and OS X....
I agree. About three weeks ago I bought a 3-year old 950MHz Duron box with an 60GB hard drive, Voodoo3 graphics card, and 384MB RAM for $100 (I'm a poor college student, so I can't afford anything brand new). It is much better than the 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64MB RAM that I was stuck with, and also better than the 475MHz K6-2 with 64MB RAM that I had at home.
The Duron machine runs FreeBSD and KDE like a charm. I wouldn't recommend a similar purchase to people such as graphic artists and gamers who really do need a top-of-the-line Athlon 64 or Pentium 4, but a computer in the 800MHz-1.5GHz range from about 2-4 years ago can be a very nice deal for most people (provided that there is at least 256MB RAM in the box). This computer would get me through at least a few years before I buy another computer.
In the meanwhile, I'm looking forward to those new Intel Macs coming out next year. Then the prices of the G4 and G5 Macintoshes would surely drop quite a bit. Then I could afford a PowerMac G5 ;)
Let me reiterate something that I said in another post earlier today. Left-right is an economic scale that ranges from communism/socialism (far left) to pure laissez-faire capitalism (far right). Right wing has nothing to do with "intelligent design," knowing factiods of every war, and other similar issues.
Political correctness and the push for "intelligent design" in schools and knowledge of every little factoid of war history (slanted, of course) is a symptom of authoritarianism (even though the left authoritarians and right authoritarians exhibit it in different ways, as the grandparent and parent posters showed). Authoritarianism cannot be measured on the left-right scale; rather, you'll need to create a new scale. There is another scale ranging from authoritarian (where authority/tradition/society > individual freedoms) vs. libertarian (where individual freedoms > authority/tradition/society).
You might want to check this out.
That's the problem with the UN and democracy. People care so much about "tolerance" and "fairness" and "the principles of democracy" that they forget the most important thing for people: freedom.
Democracy doesn't do any good when you can't say what you want or read what you want on the Internet because China and Cuba are controlling the thing, just because "we have to tolerate diversity of ideas." No!
I want a private corporation or private organization to control the Internet, and not any governmental organization. Not the US (even though their control has been great), not the EU, and definately not the UN or China/Iraq/N. Korea/{insert other communist/totalitarian country here}. The Interet is about freedom of expression, freedom of ideas, and freedom of speech. I will not give that up in the name of "tolerance," "democracy," and other political buzzwords that democracy-lovers throw at me.
Remember, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for lunch. Do you really want the wolves guarding the sheep pen? Or do you want the sheep to be able to be free? We need freedom, not evil totalitarian countries deciding what free people should do.
Oh please, anti-American socialist troll. What does war, "racism," and the US not giving money to a country that isn't even in their control have to do with the US and the Internet?
I'm really getting sick and tired of all of these anti-American trolls coming out of the woodwork saying that the US is the most evil thing since Satan.
Both you and the grandparent post don't understand what left and right really mean. Left-right is an economic scale that ranges from communism/socialism (far left) to pure laissez-faire capitalism (far right), with a mixed economy (e.g., United States's economy) somewhere in the middle.
Even though left-wingers do seem more sympathetic toward environmental issues, environmentalism isn't exclusively left-wing only; there are right wing environmentalists (the only difference between the two is that left-wingers prefer governmental involvement in environmental issues, whereas right-wingers prefer free-market solutions to solving environmental issues).
Being a right winger doesn't make you intolerant and anti-democratic (even though right-wingers tend to be more sympathetic to republics than democracies), and being a left-winger doesn't make one unpatriotic and extreme. Libertarianism, for example, is a right wing philosophy that supports tolerance and democracy/republicanism (as long as it doesn't trample over the liberties of its people). The left has philosophiles such as progressivism and American liberalism (who tend to be patriotic and not too extreme to the left).
No. Less restrictive licenses (like the BSD and MIT licenses) and more restrictive licenses (like the one OpenSolaris has) are needed for different purposes. I, for one, like my BSD-licensed operating system, and many other corporations do, too.
How? How does broadband internet make my life "safer" and "more fulfilling"? Why should I justify being forced to pay for a service that I might not want or need just because some government said that it would "make my life safer, more fulfilling, and help the society at large"? If I decide to get broadband Internet access, I'll pay a private corporation to do so. I don't want some government telling me what I want and what I need, just because "it's for the greater good of society." The entire leftist belief of "government providing for the common good" is flawed, because it implies paternalism and state-mandated collectivism. A paternalistic government takes away from the freedoms of the individual. I don't oppose collectivism, but I do oppose it whenever it is state mandated. I don't like the idea of being told by Big Daddy Government(TM) to give away 70% of my income because it's "for the common good." Socialism implies that the people are children to the government, and that their only existence is to live up to and obey their parents.
I am an individual. I, therefore, should have the right to make my own decisions and choose what I want to buy or what services I want, as long as I don't infringe on the rights of other people. Once again, I'm not the government's child as the paternalistic socialist/communist-style governments want me to be. We're all adults, here. We should be free to choose.
Still, though, why should the federal government subsidize broadband Internet access for everybody? The job of the government isn't to hand out free-for-all Internet access. Besides, that just gives government more power to try to control certain aspects of the Internet. Instead, let the free market take care of that; governments are the wrong institutions to do this type of thing, as they are very bureaucratic and like throwing their power around. We also don't need a government monopoly on Internet access. Government functions should strictly stick to courts, military, police (locally and state only), roads, environmental protection, and school funding.
Socialism may provide all of these welfare services and "extras" like free high-speed broadband internet access, but it comes at a cost (and much more than paying heavy taxes): your freedom. Your tax dollars go to various special interest groups and some other services that you may not want (or need), just because some representatives or the majority of the people decided to approve them. What if you don't want (or need) broadband Internet access? In a socialist economy, too bad, the majority wanted broadband access, so it looks like your taxes will be raised another 3% to pay for a service you don't want or need. In a free market, however, you have a choice whether or not to have broadband Internet access. Nobody is subsizing it; the only people paying for it are those who want the service.
Call me another person who read too much Milton Friedman, but I believe that the free market just works better for things such as broadband Internet. It is not a right, it is not a necessary service needed for commerce and transport (unlike roads, for instance), and giving the government more rope may backfire (e.g., censorship laws, laws restricting free speech, etc.). I also don't approve of government monopolies. I'm sorry, but I don't and won't accept socialism of any form. No matter how much socialist governments try to implement all of these services for "the common good", even though they have good intentions and starry eyes, the government normally ends up doing more harm than good in the long run. Socialism to me just leads to a slippery slope leading to totalitarianism and communism.
I don't know if I'd say that, though. Many people's first experience of computers were with DOS (still Microsoft, I know, but not Windows), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, and probably a plethora of other platforms from the late 70s and 1980s that I forgot to mention. And then we have some old-timers here who were introduced to vacuum tubes, punch cards, IBM mainframes, PDP-11s, and some other ancient stuff.
Computers have been around for about 60 years now, and they have been in Joe Average's workplace for about 25. I'm pretty sure that except for the youngest generation, most people have been exposed to computing prior to Windows dominating the market.
Solaris could do anything and everything that Linux could do. Why would Sun switch from Solaris to Linux if Solaris can do everything that Linux can do?
You should read more about Plan 9. Plan 9 isn't a reinvention of the wheel; it is something completely different. And, yes, interoperatability is quite possible with Plan 9 (even though I must admit that Plan 9 is currently a research OS, so the applications are a bit lacking). I was just using Plan 9 as an example; if I were a corporation dropping my Unix product, I would rather go one step above the competition (Plan 9) rather than a sell a complete clone of something that I have already sold (Linux).
Using a chip that is better designed for your purposes may get you more "miles per gallon" for your job. The SPARC may fit your needs if you want a very powerful workstation, the x86 may fit your needs if you want a PC. That's up to the customer to decide.
You're right, there is no such thing as too much competition. However, I still believe that Sun is better off selling SPARC machines with Solaris than x86 machines with Linux. I have a feeling that Dell would just kill Sun if Sun made that move.
The x86 may be cheaper, but it doesn't mean that it is better.
Unfortunately for the SPARC, PowerPC, Alpha, and the rest of them, people don't want a great architecture; they'll settle for "good enough."
Great, we'll just lose some more operating system and (especially) platform diversity. OpenSolaris is the best thing that can happen to Solaris, and I would like to see more competition between Solaris, Linux, and BSD (because competition leads to more innovation between the three OSes). There are many nice things and advantages to the Solaris platform that Linux could learn from. Besides, Solaris is a real Unix (based off AT&T Unix System V), whereas Linux is just a clone. Why would Sun drop something based on the real thing for an imitation? If Sun were to drop anything, I'd rather Sun adopt Plan 9 rather than Linux. At least Plan 9 is unique and different.
And with the SPARC platform, why would Sun drop that elegant platform for the inferior x86-64 architecture? (Don't get me wrong, I like the AMD64 a lot, but it is still based on that hideous x86 architecture, and the SPARC is much better designed). Over the past few years, we have lost a few well-designed platforms (Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC) to the x86, and the SPARC is the last holdout. I do not want to see an x86 monopoly on computing, but it looks like were heading for that. And when we're stuck with the x86 as our only platform, then innovation will slow down, and we might not see better platforms again.
Sun should continue what it has been doing; be a Unix company selling a Unix variant and workstations, and promoting Java (let's not forget that important part of Sun). We don't need another Linux PC manufacturer. If Sun degenerated to just selling Linux PCs, then Sun would die faster than you can say a BSD or Apple troll.
Hey, watch that flamebait. If vi[m] were unusable, then nobody would use it. Heck, I use vi all the time. Oh wait, silly me, I forgot. An interface can't be "usable" unless it has a shinee, gooee, clickee Mickey Mouse interface with all of the icons and translucency and so on....
It's just amazing how GUI people call us people who love command-line interfaces "elitists", and call anything that doesn't have an icon "unusable." Once again, if command lines were unusable, then nobody (as in zero people) would be using them. Give me a break!
I'm sorry if I have offended you. I don't have anything against liberal arts; in fact, I think that the subject matter is quite interesting and I really do enjoy learning history and philosophy as a hobby (I'm a freshman computer science major). I also feel that liberal arts is very important for all university graduates to learn. However, I was trying to prove the point that the business world is filled with people like Carly Fiorina who don't know anything about science and engineering, yet is expected to run businesses almost entirely based on them. And what has she done to them? AT&T became just a phone company with no research (and ended up dying), Bell Labs isn't doing too much these days, and HP went from a true engineering corporation to a Dell-wannabe (even though Fiorina was smart enough to spin off the engineering components to Aglient; they're still going strong).
Once again, sorry if you were offended. I was trying to make a specific reference to Carly Fironia, but it must not have worked.
Or, why don't we get rid of the dogfood in the first place? Imagine if all K-12 schools were private, and the government completely paid for the education for the poor and gave middle-class students vouchers that paid for it partially. This will finally give all parents access to "free-market education," where they get to choose the schools that best meet their child's needs, rather than be forced to go to a certin public school because it is in your neighborhood (which hinders poor children a lot, because the schools in their neighborhoods are generally pretty poor in quality). The parents would also be "stockholders" of their child(ren)'s school. There will be much less federal and state government bureaucracy, and the parents would have a greater say about what is happening with the school, since the parents vote with their dollars. Schools will also benefit a bit, becuase they can fine-tune their curricula to match their school's purpose. They don't have to deal with state- and federal-mandated standardized tests (which makes the schools more focused on having their students pass tests rather than learning the material, which means two different things). Finally, the salaries of teachers will be much more competitive, since the schools now have to compete for students and excellent teachers. Good schools and good teachers will be rewarded in the marketplace, and bad schools and bad teachers will not.
The liberals and socialists reading this are probably just shaking their heads right now, but I have a feeling that this idea is what this country (the United States) needs to improve its education system. The state and federal governments have done a horrible job with educating its children, especially those of poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. I believe that the free market and vouchers for those who need help paying for it can work much better than any government department could.
...if our corporations were ran by people with science and engineering backgrounds who cared about long-term research and development rather than ran by MBAs with BAs in Medieval History and Philosophy who can't differentiate a simple function or write a line of code, and who care more about short-term profits and $$$, then perhaps we'll see some more scientific and engineering progress in this country. Witness the downfall of Bell Labs, for example. Bell Labs was very innovative and many of its research projects led to things that we take for granted today (the very operating system that I'm typing this message on now, is FreeBSD, which is a direct descendant of Bell Labs' Unix [if you ignore the fact that the code was completely rewritten]). Then, some person who knows nothing about science and engineering took control and cut its funding to its knees. Now Bell Labs is very small, and that same dummy went on to destroy HP in a similar fashion....
The education system isn't looking that great, either. Our secondary schools are also failing to teach the basic science and mathematics needed to produce students capable of succeeding in an science or engineering field. College students looking at future career prospects might end up switching to law or business, because the future looks brighter for them. After all, we're outsourcing a great deal of the engineering jobs.
This country is fast on its way of becoming a country full of rich lawyers and managers, and poor McDonalds employees and janitors. But who will be exploring science and developing new technologies? The Indians and Chinese, of course. Their corporate culture seems to care much more about the future, and besides, many of our corporations are using them to do our non-law/managerial work.
If we want to turn back the tide, the corporate culture needs to change, and we need more CEOs who have science and engineering backgrounds who care about science and engineering. The school system in this country also needs to be radically improved.
You have just reminded me of some old Unix jokes: Politically Correct Unix. Here is one:
There are some gems on that site, and in its parent folder as well (more Unix jokes).
I noticed on Apple's page that the eMac is gone. It is no longer on Apple's hardware website (except under "eMac for Education"), and it is no longer sold at the Apple store.
I guess the Mac Mini must have made the eMac a bit redundant, so sales of the eMac must have dropped tremendously.
I fail to see how left wing policies have to do with the state playing the role of parents. Left-right is an economic scale representing communism/socialism vs. pure laissez-faire capitalism. You must mean authoritarian. The Democrats have taken an authoritarian turn over the past few years, especially with Hillary Clinton and the like.
The Democrats have evolved from the party where "the government will take care of economic problems" (Franklin Roosevelt) to "the government will take care of social problems" (Kennedy and LBJ), to now "the government will take care of moral problems" (Hillary Clinton). As a libertarian, I am not too supportive of the first two philosophies, but I'm adamantly opposed to the third philosophy that the Democrats seem to be moving to. The third one is very scary, as that cannot be achieved without becoming more authoritarian and less free. Individualism will be tossed to the garbage. After all, Hillary Clinton is the one who said that "we're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." You might want to read this page that further describes her approaches.
I am leery of both the Democrats and Republicans, but the Democrats' new philosophy scares me even more than anything Bush and Co. seems to be cooking up these days.
Well, I know of a computer company that sells virgin computers, in nice, elegant, white boxes.
In California and many other western states, you are right. California decided to dispose of most of its US highways once the Interstate system was in full swing in the 60s. The reasoning for this is because what happened in the 1950s was that freeways were built before the Interstate system was started, so those freeways started with US highway numbers and signs. Freeways also tended to be built parallel to the former US highway routing; in California, freeways are usually built to replace other roads. When the Interstate system made its way to California in 1960, the Interstate numbers were somewhat grafted on to those freeways. However, certain routes in the past were assigned two (or sometimes even three) US routes numbers, and adding an Interstate and State highway signage to the same road led to a lot of motorist confusion. For example, this page has a picture of a typical freeway sign in the LA area before 1964.
In 1964, California decided to renumber much of its roads by getting rid of duplicate numbers and by replacing most of its US highways with Interstate (and sometimes State) highways. For example, US 99 was replaced largely with Interstate 5 and California State Route 99, US 91 was replaced with Interstate 15, US 66 was replaced with Interstate 40, etc. Only a few US routes in California remain, but some of those remaining routes got truncated. (For example, US 101 south of Los Angeles has been replaced by Interstate 5.)
On the East Coast, on the other hand, the Interstate and US Highway system tend to coexist. Interstates are relegated to freeways, whereas US highways are relegated mostly to surface streets and non-freeway highways. The Interstates and US highways don't seem to cancel each other out, unlike what has happened in California.
Well, it is possible to use Windows securely. I have a Windows XP partition, for example, and I don't get viruses or malware because I take proper precautions (use firewall, use anti-virus/anti-malware, use Windows Update, and don't use IE except for doing Windows Update). However, there are some fundamental flaws built into the software. Internet Explorer has some sort of new flaw discovered every week, because of insecure code. Windows doesn't enforce the distinction between user and administrator accounts in XP Home (which many users use). These effects can be mitigated by staying careful, but let's not lose sight of Windows's main deficiency -- security.
I love *nix (and BSD, too), but there are ways that Microsoft can make a secure operating system without switching its kernel to a BSD kernel. (Note I left Linux out; there is no way Microsoft is ever going to base their flagship product on GPL'd software). Here are some ways that they can do that:
I don't think Windows needs a new kernel. I just think that all of its APIs, programs, and functionality should be secured, and very insecure things (like ActiveX) should be removed.
This message was brought to you by the RIAA. RIAA: Helping Capture Pirates(TM).