The R Cubed Linux laptops have Intel integrated graphics cards for which Intel has released 2D and 3D-accelerated open source graphics drivers that are capable of transparent windows and drop shadows with EXA as well as rotating cubes and wobbly windows with XGL and Compiz! Way to go Intel!
This is the most positive post that I've ever read about Intel Integrated Graphics in all of my 2.25 years of viewing Slashdot. I'm serious here.
Too many responses to the question of how to help our public schools revolve on personal stories such as yours. Yes, you got out and got a great education. I would argue that by doing so your local public school was made that much worse.
Yeah, the public school would have been made worse with high achieving students leaving. However, I would also argue that high achieving students should go to a school that is conducive to their needs.
Finally I just have to say something about the current fetishization of "the marketplace" as the way to fix public schooling. It's bullshit, an artifact of electing business leaders to government. Our system of government is not an economic marketplace. It is a structured social agreement. It has accountability pre-baked-in, through elections and lobbying. Creating more types of schools does not actually improve accountability one tiny bit, all it does is splinter the existing accountability, allowing greater stratification between the social and economic classes. It simply makes it easier and more convenient to identify the "least desirable" elements and marginalize them.
There are fundamental differences between a democratic government and the marketplace. In the government system, you needs are always at the election poll. If you have a complaint or want something changed, you must go through the bureaucracy. Lobbying is slow and occassionally corrupt. When it is voting time, if you don't get the majority of the vote, then it's just tough for you; you must wait until the next election. In a free market, sellers would do whatever it takes in order for you to buy their product/service/etc. There is a lot of variety on the market. You have a choice. You have freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding who is for lunch (but it works better than all other forms of government).
The marketplace isn't perfect and it shouldn't be applied to everything (I'm not a fan of road privatization, for example), but it is still better than government bureaucracy. However, I still believe that local and state governments should fund education for all school-aged children. I don't care if it is private, public, a private-public partnership, homeschool, whatever. I just want all children to get a quality education. Let the state and local government pay the way (but don't expect them to fully fund a rich private boarding school tuition), and let children attend schools that fit their needs. This is even more important on the middle- and high-school level, where there should be a combination of vocational high schools and rigorous college-prep high schools, and options in between.
There are so many other problems with education these days that I'll have to write a full-fledged book to describe them all, but public school choice and competition for students between public schools will help improve the quality of all public schools. (If failing public schools had to compete for tax dollars, they would definately improve their programs or face being shut down. I've seen some failing schools nationwide become transformed into top magnet schools that attract everybody.) There are no easy answers to this problem, but the answer isn't more bureaucracy and more control.
Want to make public schools better? Get rid of charter schools, get rid of computer teachers, make it hard to home-school kids, tax the hell out of private schools. Force the community to care about the public schools, rather than try to find new ways for the best students and families to pull out of them.
Poppycock! So we "improve" failing public schools by forcing the best and brightest to attend failing schools? That reeks of the evils of socialism and communism, where you have no choice. You must have taken that from the Marxist phrasebook. Imagine if the government dictated which grocery store you go to, which department store you go to, which malls you go to, just because you want to "force the community to care about their businesses, rather than try to find new ways for customers to go outside of their neighborhood." If you don't like this analogy, then let me tell you a story about my life.
Throughout my childhood, I always lived in the ghetto. My parents worked hard to give us a good education. They used the addresses of family friends and relatives who lived in better neighborhoods so that way we can attend those schools. Throught elementary school, I attended very high quality, suburban public schools. I did very well throught school, got straight As, and was in gifted programs. However, the rules changed once I reached middle school. We weren't allowed to use an address for day care purposes; you were pretty much restricted to the public school in your neighborhood. Intra- and inter-district transfers are very hard to get where I am from, and the good schools were always overcrowded. My parents continuously fought the public school system, but continued to lose. My parents were also unable to afford private school tuition.
Luckily, we found out about a local charter school. It was an independent-study charter school and was of very high quality. I attended that school and stayed there until I graduated from high school. I also simultaneously attended community college courses. After finishing high school, I was admitted to 5 universities and I am currently a student at a highly ranked public university in California (I won't disclose the exact one so I won't unclose my identity).
Charter schools saved my parents from sending their children to failing public schools. But you want to get rid of the only viable option that low-income families like my parents have. Well, my parents attended failing public schools a generation ago, and they also keep up with the latest documentaries and news on the public school system. They know, with experience, that the teachers at those schools frankly have low expectations for their students. They come to work unenthusiastic about their jobs, and just want to get through the day. The other students come in with boatloads of problems, and some of them want to take it out on other students. The quality of education is very low. Gifted programs and accelerated programs (such as AP courses and the International Baccalaureate program) are limited to non-existant in poorer schools. It isn't a conducive environment to learning.
What is the solution? I am still struggling between public school choice, school vouchers, and full privatization (but with some mechanism of funding for the poor and middle class, so that way nobody is "left behind"). I would like to see a market place solution to schools (using the grocery store analogy again). But closing down all charter and magnet schools, and forcing all people in private schools to return to their neighborhood public school is NOT the answer. It is the antithesis to freedom, and it also reinforces the public school monopoly, which has been failing more kids than it has helped. I would rather see the public school system die than to continue doing a poor job at educating our kids. Do you honestly think that more money is going to solve the problem? Since the federal government got involved in education and transfe
It can be a little frustrating when you extoll the virtues of the PPC in the mac compared to intels 'crap', then Apple switches and you're left with your foot in your mouth.
I'm a fan of the PowerPC (and still am to this day; I still dream of a G5 laptop), but even a hardcore PowerPC fan must admit that the Intel Core Duo is quite a wonderful chip. Even the non-dual core Pentium M knocks the socks off the old G4s that the PowerBook and iBook used, and Apple really needed to upgrade those G4s, which were really getting old. The Core Duo chips builds on the same technology as the Pentium M, which were designed for heat efficiency. And they are very great performers, too. x86 assembly may suck, but Intel knows how to build a processor.
My only worry about the Intel switch is the future of OS X. But that's something I'll save for another post.
Why didn't you state that already? I wouldn't have responded if you said something to that effect. You sounded like another one of those "Ohhh, I can get some HP/Dell/EMachines computer less than a Mac that doesn't have comparable stats" trolls, but with that point, you're not one of them.
Sure, if you're going to spend your own money, get all sorts of fancy stuff. Maybe it's even worthwhile. But when you're spending the taxpayers' money, stick to the essentials. A $650 laptop will provide >99% of the educational value of a $949 or $1199 laptop.
While we're at at, I wonder how those $100 laptops are doing? A $100 laptop will provide about 90% of the educational value of a $649 laptop, wouldn't it?
Are you using iBook ($949 for 12", $1199 for 14"; those are education prices) prices or MacBook prices? If you were using iBook prices, then I would definitely agree with your argument. If you were using MacBook prices, then that would be unfair. Your Pavillion isn't dual core and doesn't have the features that the MacBook has. (Now, if that Pavillion had a dual core processor of that speed for that price, then I'll make a special trip to Fry's one of these weekends....).
No, they are really getting iBooks. (The online Apple Store for Education at my school is still selling iBook G4s, even today). An end-of-the-line iBook would give you better performance at running PowerPC applications than a MacBook would (PPC emulation on a x86 results in a performance hit, although Rosetta seems to be handling the task well; and most big software packages won't have Universal Binaries until 2007). Remember that many education users still use Classic applications; you can't run Classic on an Intel Mac.
Buying a PowerPC Mac today isn't a crazy idea, especially if you want something proven to be reliable (have you heard about the problems plauging the MacBook and MacBook Pro lately?) and works flawlessly with existing (and old) software.
A great deal of educational software hasn't been made into Universal Binaries yet (and translating PPC code to x86 is a performance hit, although Rosetta is doing very well).
Speaking of software, some people in the education market haven't even moved off of Classic yet. (For example, at my university, the physics department still used a Classic application for physics motion diagrams. I saw Framemaker a few years ago at a graphics lab a year ago at a community college; to my knowledge, there is no OS X version of Framemaker. The physics department has invested in the Mac since the 80s; I once saw a stack of Macintosh SEs, SE/30s, Classics, and an old Power Mac 9600 around).
A G4 Mac with Classic support would fit the education market's needs better, for now. Once OS X-ported software gets Universal Binary support, and once people finally let go of Classic, then we'll see the education market adopt the Intel Macs in much larger numbers. (With all PowerPC Macs except for the Power Mac G5 discontinued, Classic users better find or code alternatives to their programs if they intend on upgrading.)
...Vista will be successful, no matter how angry us geeks get. Solely because it will come preinstalled on all non-Apple machines beginning this January. (Ditto for Office 2007, but to a lesser extent). Schools would upgrade to Vista and Office 2007, just to keep up with the latest in Microsoft's offerings. Businesses might upgrade. Regular users who don't read the news and don't know anything about Vista's lost features, delays, and OS X would think that Vista was the best thing since sliced bread. And, we're all going to have to use it, whether we like Vista's and Office's new interface or not. Short of telling people not to buy non-Apple computers after January, there isn't much that can stop Vista's success.
The operating system market sucks now of days. Windows still has its security issues, Mac OS X is locked to Apple machines (if only Apple had more variety with their hardware), and Linux still has some kinks to work out in terms of drivers and the UI (although it is getting better every 6 months). There is no OS/2, BeOS, or NEXTSTEP to escape to like there was 10 years ago or so. Hopefully things will get better in the next few years. But for now, get prepared for Vista; it's coming, no matter how much we don't care for it.
Perhaps I'm just another unrealistic young idealist, but I digress....
Lesson 3. Stronger resistance against right-wing intrusiveness is warranted.
As a right winger of the small government, economically liberal (or conservative in US parlance), and civil libertarian type, I take offense to that statement. A right winger is somebody who believes in free market economics. Right wingers stand opposed to left wing economics. In my views, the difference between left wing and right wing are only economic. We have an entirely different scale for groups that strongly protect civil liberties versus those who are strongly opposed to civil liberties. What does support for free markets have to do with the PATRIOT Act, invasion of piracy, the war on terror, and other similar actions?
Now, there are some right-wingers who do believe in those actions. Use terms like neoconservative or fascist then, if you wish. But don't conflate neoconservatives and fascists with the entire right wing. You're falling into the same trap that some of us right wingers make when we conflate Castro and Mao with the entire left wing.
Ideally, I would pick the first two. However, all new and successful OSes has a compatibility layer. Windows NT-based OSes have compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows apps. Mac OS X (on PPC) has Classic for older Mac OS applications. Linux is source compatible with any Unix program written in the past 35 years.
I was just dreaming with my original post. The probability of an OS like this coming out is very slim because there is just too much work to do to build it, as well as the required work involved in compatibility, hardware support, and other similar issues.
I'm not an Apple shill; I just used Apple's history as an example. The original Windows NT architecture also fits the bill, and I can name a few more OSes that I can use as examples (BeOS and Plan 9 comes to mind).
I hope you realize that actually writing software takes TIME, with an exponential relationship with complexity. An OS takes a LOT of time to write because it has a LOT of hardware to support, a lot of usage scenarios to take into account.
Agreed. Now that I thought about it for a few minutes, the only OS that was a radical change from its previous OS yet still supported most PC hardware was Windows NT. The transition from DOS and Windows 9x to Windows NT and its derivatives took a while, but it gone by smoothly. I don't know of any other companies creating a general purpose OS; the companies either control the hardware (Apple, Be, Amiga, NeXT [for the first so many years]) or have a very restricted subset of hardware (NeXTSTEP for Intel comes to mind). Linux and BSD are exceptions, but they aren't companies, and nearly all of their driver support comes from the FOSS community.
Cobble together that's "new and cutting edge" like NeXT STEP would only yield yet another spectacular business failure, because there would be no time to build, test, and secure such a large chunk of code.
Taligent and Copland comes to mind. NeXTSTEP didn't fail because it was cobbled together (in fact, its technologies were quite coherent), it was because the PC and the Mac were already well established at the time, and the window to introduce a new platform was closing quickly in 1989. (NeXT also took a few early missteps that might have cost them, such as releasing very expensive ($10,000) machines and the whole magneto-optical drive fiascal; had their initial offerings been their NeXTSTATION instead of the Cube, then they might have done much better).
You bring up some good points which help explain why we don't have radical changes in OSes. There is a lot of backwards compatibility and hardware support to worry about. All of these new OS features doesn't mean a hill of beans if it doesn't support their hardware. It would be even more difficult for a start-up company, since they don't already have a stockpile of hardware driver source code.
I would love to see an OS released for the market that combines all of the research done within the past 10-15 years in kernels, file systems, HCI, application development, programming languages and APIs, virtual machines and virtualization, etc. However, look where we are at now. We're still using (for the most part) monolithic kernels, old file systems, old development tools, etc. There hasn't been any radical improvements in commerical OSes for quite some time. (One could say that OS X is a dramatic improvement, but much of OS X is based off NeXTSTEP, which had existed for quite some time before Apple bought them out).
I would like to see a new NeXTSTEP (technologically, not in terms of business success). NeXT was able to look at all of the current CS research of the time and integrate that into their operating system. NeXTSTEP was far ahead of its competition and, if it weren't for hardware support and the need for modern software, I'd probably run it as an everyday OS. Mac OS X is still ahead of its competition because of its NeXTSTEP roots, as well as Apple's improvements to the OS since 1997. Imagine if there was a new OS that took advantage of all of today's CS research, was very easy to use, and was compatible with existing software. I'd be the first person in line to buy it.
Until then, I can dream about my ultra-secure, exokernel OS with a database file system, flexible yet safe programming language, very easy to use UI, "boxes" to run Windows and *nix software....
Huh? The price of Apple hardware is now at par with the price of other PCs. Now, Apple doesn't give out $300 mail in rebates like Dell does, nor does Apple sell cheap Celeron and Sempron boxes in the $200-500 range. So, yes, the entry level Mac Mini is triple the price of a $200 Celeron box, but upgrade the stats to something comparable to the Mac Mini, and the prices wouldn't differ by much.
I don't know what you mean by vendor lock-in. There is a lot of software choice available for Macs. Now, if you mean you want to install Mac OS X on your dual dual-core Opteron box, then I understand what you mean....
Apple isn't going to sue you, unless you do something like I mentioned above....
Huh? In my experience, the BSDs have performed quite well compared to Linux boxes, and BSD hardware support is very good in my experience (I never had a device not work under BSD). Now, if you're talking about OS X's performance, then blame the Mach kernel, not BSD. (It is a commonly accepted fact that Mach is slower than a traditional monolithic kernel such as BSD and Linux)
Come on, give me better reasons to choose Linux over OS X.
This isn't 1995 anymore. Mac OS X has changed Apple's demographics quite substantially. Most computer geeks wouldn't touch the classic Mac OS with a 10 foot pole. Now half of the CS professors and students that I know own a Mac, solely because of OS X.
(Spoken by a soon-to-be MacBook user currently using FreeBSD)
Liberal Party of Australia is the conservative Australian party
The term liberal outside the United States means somebody who is more or less a economic conservative who also upholds civil liberties. Outside of the United States, the term liberal is more or less like our term libertarian (although liberals of that type aren't as anarchic as our libertarians here).
I don't know the policies of the Liberal Party of Australia, but they should fit closer to our Republican Party or Libertarian Party than the Democratic Party. The American term liberal is known outside of the US as a social democrat or sometimes outright socialist.
Actually, no they were not, although there seem to be many poorly educated people in the US who think they were.
I understand your point, although the ad hominem was gratitious. Whether or not the Nazis were socialists depends on the definition of socialism used. (I just finished reading something like this). The problem with the term socialism is that it can mean a multitude of different things, depending on who you are talking to. It can range from the original definition of "workers own the means of production," (a very narrow definition) to any economic system in which the government intervenes (a very broad definition). Socialism is also used as an umbrella term that includes almost all leftist ideologies (except communism, but it is sometimes hard to distinguish communism from socialism).
The Nazis weren't socialist if you use the defintion of "the workers owning the means of production"; however, one would argue that since "the workers" is sometimes codename for "the state" (there are state socialists who replace the terms "society" and "the workers" with "the state), they are socialists. To continue, the Nazis were strong opponents of social democracy (a form of socialism) and communists; in fact, they were another group of people who were rounded up and sent them to concentration camps. However, the Nazis did implement socialistic policies. Here are somearticles from the Mises Institute, which looks at things with a libertarian/anarchocapitalist bent. Under their definition of socialism, they fit the bill.
It all depends on your definition of the word "socialism." I believe that you are using the original workers definition, or the definition that involves social democracy. However, socialism means other things, too. I, personally, would label the Nazis fascist, not socialist, but many of their economic policies were indeed socialistic.
It's my, and only my, responsibility to raise my kids. Not that of government, not that of special interest groups, not that of any political party. Mine!
Sorry, but that's not what Hillary Clinton thinks. After all, "it takes a village to raise a child.". And what is that village? The good-old United States Federal Government, that's it. In order for that to happen, she's "going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." You, as an individual and a parent, don't matter to her. Don't believe me? Google those quotes.
Hillary Clinton isn't a liberal (in neither the classical nor modern senses of the word); far from it. Look at her political views and actions. Her views are more socialistic and authoritarian than modern liberal.
Authoritarians of any type shouldn't be in any political position at all.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the most positive post that I've ever read about Intel Integrated Graphics in all of my 2.25 years of viewing Slashdot. I'm serious here.
I thought the golden rule was those who has the gold makes the rules. There is a difference in meaning.
Yeah, the public school would have been made worse with high achieving students leaving. However, I would also argue that high achieving students should go to a school that is conducive to their needs.
There are fundamental differences between a democratic government and the marketplace. In the government system, you needs are always at the election poll. If you have a complaint or want something changed, you must go through the bureaucracy. Lobbying is slow and occassionally corrupt. When it is voting time, if you don't get the majority of the vote, then it's just tough for you; you must wait until the next election. In a free market, sellers would do whatever it takes in order for you to buy their product/service/etc. There is a lot of variety on the market. You have a choice. You have freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding who is for lunch (but it works better than all other forms of government).
The marketplace isn't perfect and it shouldn't be applied to everything (I'm not a fan of road privatization, for example), but it is still better than government bureaucracy. However, I still believe that local and state governments should fund education for all school-aged children. I don't care if it is private, public, a private-public partnership, homeschool, whatever. I just want all children to get a quality education. Let the state and local government pay the way (but don't expect them to fully fund a rich private boarding school tuition), and let children attend schools that fit their needs. This is even more important on the middle- and high-school level, where there should be a combination of vocational high schools and rigorous college-prep high schools, and options in between.
There are so many other problems with education these days that I'll have to write a full-fledged book to describe them all, but public school choice and competition for students between public schools will help improve the quality of all public schools. (If failing public schools had to compete for tax dollars, they would definately improve their programs or face being shut down. I've seen some failing schools nationwide become transformed into top magnet schools that attract everybody.) There are no easy answers to this problem, but the answer isn't more bureaucracy and more control.
Poppycock! So we "improve" failing public schools by forcing the best and brightest to attend failing schools? That reeks of the evils of socialism and communism, where you have no choice. You must have taken that from the Marxist phrasebook. Imagine if the government dictated which grocery store you go to, which department store you go to, which malls you go to, just because you want to "force the community to care about their businesses, rather than try to find new ways for customers to go outside of their neighborhood." If you don't like this analogy, then let me tell you a story about my life.
Throughout my childhood, I always lived in the ghetto. My parents worked hard to give us a good education. They used the addresses of family friends and relatives who lived in better neighborhoods so that way we can attend those schools. Throught elementary school, I attended very high quality, suburban public schools. I did very well throught school, got straight As, and was in gifted programs. However, the rules changed once I reached middle school. We weren't allowed to use an address for day care purposes; you were pretty much restricted to the public school in your neighborhood. Intra- and inter-district transfers are very hard to get where I am from, and the good schools were always overcrowded. My parents continuously fought the public school system, but continued to lose. My parents were also unable to afford private school tuition.
Luckily, we found out about a local charter school. It was an independent-study charter school and was of very high quality. I attended that school and stayed there until I graduated from high school. I also simultaneously attended community college courses. After finishing high school, I was admitted to 5 universities and I am currently a student at a highly ranked public university in California (I won't disclose the exact one so I won't unclose my identity).
Charter schools saved my parents from sending their children to failing public schools. But you want to get rid of the only viable option that low-income families like my parents have. Well, my parents attended failing public schools a generation ago, and they also keep up with the latest documentaries and news on the public school system. They know, with experience, that the teachers at those schools frankly have low expectations for their students. They come to work unenthusiastic about their jobs, and just want to get through the day. The other students come in with boatloads of problems, and some of them want to take it out on other students. The quality of education is very low. Gifted programs and accelerated programs (such as AP courses and the International Baccalaureate program) are limited to non-existant in poorer schools. It isn't a conducive environment to learning.
What is the solution? I am still struggling between public school choice, school vouchers, and full privatization (but with some mechanism of funding for the poor and middle class, so that way nobody is "left behind"). I would like to see a market place solution to schools (using the grocery store analogy again). But closing down all charter and magnet schools, and forcing all people in private schools to return to their neighborhood public school is NOT the answer. It is the antithesis to freedom, and it also reinforces the public school monopoly, which has been failing more kids than it has helped. I would rather see the public school system die than to continue doing a poor job at educating our kids. Do you honestly think that more money is going to solve the problem? Since the federal government got involved in education and transfe
She must have taught you how to use Unix or OS X for the first time, since that is the only believeable answer. (This is Slashdot, after all).
I'm a fan of the PowerPC (and still am to this day; I still dream of a G5 laptop), but even a hardcore PowerPC fan must admit that the Intel Core Duo is quite a wonderful chip. Even the non-dual core Pentium M knocks the socks off the old G4s that the PowerBook and iBook used, and Apple really needed to upgrade those G4s, which were really getting old. The Core Duo chips builds on the same technology as the Pentium M, which were designed for heat efficiency. And they are very great performers, too. x86 assembly may suck, but Intel knows how to build a processor.
My only worry about the Intel switch is the future of OS X. But that's something I'll save for another post.
Why didn't you state that already? I wouldn't have responded if you said something to that effect. You sounded like another one of those "Ohhh, I can get some HP/Dell/EMachines computer less than a Mac that doesn't have comparable stats" trolls, but with that point, you're not one of them.
While we're at at, I wonder how those $100 laptops are doing? A $100 laptop will provide about 90% of the educational value of a $649 laptop, wouldn't it?
Are you using iBook ($949 for 12", $1199 for 14"; those are education prices) prices or MacBook prices? If you were using iBook prices, then I would definitely agree with your argument. If you were using MacBook prices, then that would be unfair. Your Pavillion isn't dual core and doesn't have the features that the MacBook has. (Now, if that Pavillion had a dual core processor of that speed for that price, then I'll make a special trip to Fry's one of these weekends....).
No, they are really getting iBooks. (The online Apple Store for Education at my school is still selling iBook G4s, even today). An end-of-the-line iBook would give you better performance at running PowerPC applications than a MacBook would (PPC emulation on a x86 results in a performance hit, although Rosetta seems to be handling the task well; and most big software packages won't have Universal Binaries until 2007). Remember that many education users still use Classic applications; you can't run Classic on an Intel Mac.
Buying a PowerPC Mac today isn't a crazy idea, especially if you want something proven to be reliable (have you heard about the problems plauging the MacBook and MacBook Pro lately?) and works flawlessly with existing (and old) software.
Remember:
A G4 Mac with Classic support would fit the education market's needs better, for now. Once OS X-ported software gets Universal Binary support, and once people finally let go of Classic, then we'll see the education market adopt the Intel Macs in much larger numbers. (With all PowerPC Macs except for the Power Mac G5 discontinued, Classic users better find or code alternatives to their programs if they intend on upgrading.)
...Vista will be successful, no matter how angry us geeks get. Solely because it will come preinstalled on all non-Apple machines beginning this January. (Ditto for Office 2007, but to a lesser extent). Schools would upgrade to Vista and Office 2007, just to keep up with the latest in Microsoft's offerings. Businesses might upgrade. Regular users who don't read the news and don't know anything about Vista's lost features, delays, and OS X would think that Vista was the best thing since sliced bread. And, we're all going to have to use it, whether we like Vista's and Office's new interface or not. Short of telling people not to buy non-Apple computers after January, there isn't much that can stop Vista's success.
The operating system market sucks now of days. Windows still has its security issues, Mac OS X is locked to Apple machines (if only Apple had more variety with their hardware), and Linux still has some kinks to work out in terms of drivers and the UI (although it is getting better every 6 months). There is no OS/2, BeOS, or NEXTSTEP to escape to like there was 10 years ago or so. Hopefully things will get better in the next few years. But for now, get prepared for Vista; it's coming, no matter how much we don't care for it.
Perhaps I'm just another unrealistic young idealist, but I digress....
As a right winger of the small government, economically liberal (or conservative in US parlance), and civil libertarian type, I take offense to that statement. A right winger is somebody who believes in free market economics. Right wingers stand opposed to left wing economics. In my views, the difference between left wing and right wing are only economic. We have an entirely different scale for groups that strongly protect civil liberties versus those who are strongly opposed to civil liberties. What does support for free markets have to do with the PATRIOT Act, invasion of piracy, the war on terror, and other similar actions?
Now, there are some right-wingers who do believe in those actions. Use terms like neoconservative or fascist then, if you wish. But don't conflate neoconservatives and fascists with the entire right wing. You're falling into the same trap that some of us right wingers make when we conflate Castro and Mao with the entire left wing.
I think in this context, AA == affirmative action, not alcoholics anonymous.
Ideally, I would pick the first two. However, all new and successful OSes has a compatibility layer. Windows NT-based OSes have compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows apps. Mac OS X (on PPC) has Classic for older Mac OS applications. Linux is source compatible with any Unix program written in the past 35 years.
I was just dreaming with my original post. The probability of an OS like this coming out is very slim because there is just too much work to do to build it, as well as the required work involved in compatibility, hardware support, and other similar issues.
I'm not an Apple shill; I just used Apple's history as an example. The original Windows NT architecture also fits the bill, and I can name a few more OSes that I can use as examples (BeOS and Plan 9 comes to mind).
Agreed. Now that I thought about it for a few minutes, the only OS that was a radical change from its previous OS yet still supported most PC hardware was Windows NT. The transition from DOS and Windows 9x to Windows NT and its derivatives took a while, but it gone by smoothly. I don't know of any other companies creating a general purpose OS; the companies either control the hardware (Apple, Be, Amiga, NeXT [for the first so many years]) or have a very restricted subset of hardware (NeXTSTEP for Intel comes to mind). Linux and BSD are exceptions, but they aren't companies, and nearly all of their driver support comes from the FOSS community.
Taligent and Copland comes to mind. NeXTSTEP didn't fail because it was cobbled together (in fact, its technologies were quite coherent), it was because the PC and the Mac were already well established at the time, and the window to introduce a new platform was closing quickly in 1989. (NeXT also took a few early missteps that might have cost them, such as releasing very expensive ($10,000) machines and the whole magneto-optical drive fiascal; had their initial offerings been their NeXTSTATION instead of the Cube, then they might have done much better).
You bring up some good points which help explain why we don't have radical changes in OSes. There is a lot of backwards compatibility and hardware support to worry about. All of these new OS features doesn't mean a hill of beans if it doesn't support their hardware. It would be even more difficult for a start-up company, since they don't already have a stockpile of hardware driver source code.
I would love to see an OS released for the market that combines all of the research done within the past 10-15 years in kernels, file systems, HCI, application development, programming languages and APIs, virtual machines and virtualization, etc. However, look where we are at now. We're still using (for the most part) monolithic kernels, old file systems, old development tools, etc. There hasn't been any radical improvements in commerical OSes for quite some time. (One could say that OS X is a dramatic improvement, but much of OS X is based off NeXTSTEP, which had existed for quite some time before Apple bought them out).
I would like to see a new NeXTSTEP (technologically, not in terms of business success). NeXT was able to look at all of the current CS research of the time and integrate that into their operating system. NeXTSTEP was far ahead of its competition and, if it weren't for hardware support and the need for modern software, I'd probably run it as an everyday OS. Mac OS X is still ahead of its competition because of its NeXTSTEP roots, as well as Apple's improvements to the OS since 1997. Imagine if there was a new OS that took advantage of all of today's CS research, was very easy to use, and was compatible with existing software. I'd be the first person in line to buy it.
Until then, I can dream about my ultra-secure, exokernel OS with a database file system, flexible yet safe programming language, very easy to use UI, "boxes" to run Windows and *nix software....
Come on, give me better reasons to choose Linux over OS X.
This isn't 1995 anymore. Mac OS X has changed Apple's demographics quite substantially. Most computer geeks wouldn't touch the classic Mac OS with a 10 foot pole. Now half of the CS professors and students that I know own a Mac, solely because of OS X.
(Spoken by a soon-to-be MacBook user currently using FreeBSD)
Since 1933 and since the FDR era's broad interpretation of the commerce clause, you might as well pretend that the 10th Amendment doesn't exist.
What ever happened to the small government that Democrats and Republicans once supported back in the founding days? Oh, wait....
The original poster meant elementary algebra, not university-level algebra such as linear algebra, abstract algebra, and the like.
You can create VMWare images using QEMU. It's a nice, free way to do so.
The term liberal outside the United States means somebody who is more or less a economic conservative who also upholds civil liberties. Outside of the United States, the term liberal is more or less like our term libertarian (although liberals of that type aren't as anarchic as our libertarians here).
I don't know the policies of the Liberal Party of Australia, but they should fit closer to our Republican Party or Libertarian Party than the Democratic Party. The American term liberal is known outside of the US as a social democrat or sometimes outright socialist.
I understand your point, although the ad hominem was gratitious. Whether or not the Nazis were socialists depends on the definition of socialism used. (I just finished reading something like this). The problem with the term socialism is that it can mean a multitude of different things, depending on who you are talking to. It can range from the original definition of "workers own the means of production," (a very narrow definition) to any economic system in which the government intervenes (a very broad definition). Socialism is also used as an umbrella term that includes almost all leftist ideologies (except communism, but it is sometimes hard to distinguish communism from socialism).
The Nazis weren't socialist if you use the defintion of "the workers owning the means of production"; however, one would argue that since "the workers" is sometimes codename for "the state" (there are state socialists who replace the terms "society" and "the workers" with "the state), they are socialists. To continue, the Nazis were strong opponents of social democracy (a form of socialism) and communists; in fact, they were another group of people who were rounded up and sent them to concentration camps. However, the Nazis did implement socialistic policies. Here are some articles from the Mises Institute, which looks at things with a libertarian/anarchocapitalist bent. Under their definition of socialism, they fit the bill.
It all depends on your definition of the word "socialism." I believe that you are using the original workers definition, or the definition that involves social democracy. However, socialism means other things, too. I, personally, would label the Nazis fascist, not socialist, but many of their economic policies were indeed socialistic.
Sorry, but that's not what Hillary Clinton thinks. After all, "it takes a village to raise a child.". And what is that village? The good-old United States Federal Government, that's it. In order for that to happen, she's "going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." You, as an individual and a parent, don't matter to her. Don't believe me? Google those quotes.
Hillary Clinton isn't a liberal (in neither the classical nor modern senses of the word); far from it. Look at her political views and actions. Her views are more socialistic and authoritarian than modern liberal.
Authoritarians of any type shouldn't be in any political position at all.