Performance is a big reason. You basically need new hardware to run it. Even then it is slower than XP on the same hardware. Consistency is another reason. Admins don't really want to support more OS's than they have to, and they don't have the budget to upgrade all of them, so XP on all makes sense. Then there are issues getting old hardware peripherals to work with it. There are issues with older applications that won't run or won't run stably on Vista. Some you can upgrade (another cost) others you cannot so it is a hard block. Finally, there are migration costs and user training (many of whom obstinately don't want Vista for whatever reason).
From an enterprise perspective, looking at a Vista migration means considering alternatives, like Linux which is a real possibility in many ways and a long term cost saver. A lot of companies are just holding off and waiting for it to stabilize and most of the problems I listed to go away. Others see holding off as a necessary step now, since Vista includes even more data and protocol lock-ins that will make migrating away from it even more expensive than migrating away from WinXP. I have nothing against Vista and recognize some of the real improvements, but I would not recommend a large scale migration to anyone for a while yet. A year ago I said, at least wait a year and see how it goes. It's been a year, and I'd still wait a while.
Find the evidence that shows that the over all average ocean temperatures have risen appreciably, since scientists were first able to measure them.
Why? Ocean temperatures are more stable than overall temperature because of their mass, evaporation, and ice melt. Why look at a less reactive measure for change, when their are more reactive trends easily visible? There are a few pilot projects to measure the overall ocean temperature, but not enough sensors to measure more than a fraction of the surface in use today.
A little more ice melting in the polar regions and high mountains doesn't make for global warming.
No, rapidly increasing atmospheric temperatures over the last 40 years does.
It is you that has to provide data that shows the climate IS changing.
Me? I read two peer reviewed journals on science and technology, Scientific American and New Scientist. They have regular, peer reviewed studies on climate change and ongoing science. Care to show me any peer reviewed journals that have a consensus against global climate change or even that cast it in doubt? Sure there are plenty of non-peer reviewed, "soft science" opinion pieces in the media (guess who funds them). But the scientific consensus is quite clear and has been for a long time.
You and your GW friends are asserting that the whole earth is getting hotter, so you have the burden of showing evidence for that.
Show me any respectable scientist who denies it. Even the oil company paid shills have given up trying to argue that and are working on the "there is nothing we can do" and "it must be caused by something other than people" speaking points.
If the oceans are not getting significantly warmer, then the earth as a whole isn't either.
The oceans won't get significantly warmer until after all the significant expanses of ice are gone. Of course at that point we'll have had such a large and rapid change in environmental factors we'll almost certainly be too late to maintain current climate.
The measurements don't support GW.
Yes they do.
An even if it were getting warmer, that doesn't mean that human activity is to blame....
True, but the drastic correlation between greenhouse gas levels and atmospheric temperatures is a very good indicator of a potential causation, better than any other phenomenon proposed or examined in any formal study to date. If you have an alternative causation to forward, do so.
...nor that warming would necessarily be bad. Would you object to a lower heating bill each winter? Probably not.
I think you're missing the point of the problem. The climate is a system we don't fully understand. We do know that rapid changes have cascaded into drastic overall changes in the past. Right now there are rapid changes taking place and the most likely reason is certain human activities.
If we do nothing, the polar ice will probably go away. There will probably be a lot of flooding and storms for years that will cost a lot more to deal with that stopping said human activities in the first place. Beyond that, there is the potential for huge climate change in either direction. With the balance upset, we might go into a cycle of increasing temperatures. We almost certainly will see water moving to different locations, making much habitable land uninhabitable and vice versus. There is the potential that the gulf stream will redirect as it has in the past, leading to lowering temperatures in Europe. There is also the potential of salinity issues leading to rapid climate change snowballing in the other direction, including a new mini ice age.
An analogy is, you found a way to make money. You poke a bear in the face with a stick and people throw coins at you. So far he's been ignoring you, but the last two times he growled. Do you:
Exactly! What makes you think that todays scientists are so much better and/or more honest than their forefathers? Are today's scientists any less prone to being wrong just because they have a little better technology and fancy computer models?
Your entire post is trying to compare the accuracy of given scientists in the past with the consensus of scientists today. That is not even relevant. The relevant question is, who is more likely to be right, scientists who have performed formal studies... or you who have no evidence, but just don't want them to be right?
If you don't think the climate is changing, fine where is the data and reason to back up your hypothesis? All your posturing aside, you haven't answered that basic question and until you do, you have offered no rational person a reason to believe you.
In terms of both economics and law, a commodity has to refer to something physical, specifically something used as a raw material. I think the term has ben generalized in common parlance to mean "stuff" but that is not a valuable definition in a discussion such as ours.
How does restricting the availability of property restrict free trade?
It doesn't, but that is not what IP laws do. Copyright law in particular restricts you from making a copy. It doesn't restrict access to copies directly. This is no different than restricting access to chairs by passing laws stopping people from being able to make them... an obvious infringement of free trade.
That's like saying you are restricting the free market if you don't agree to sell me your house. It's perfectly within your rights not to have your house on the free market.
No, it's like restricting free trade by making it illegal for a builder to build another house like yours in the same area, thus artificially boosting the value of yours.
As for "capitalist free market", no such thing exists.
The capitalist free market is a type of market that is not perfectly implemented anywhere, nor would I argue it should be. It is, however, the definition of capitalism and so anything that moves further away from it is anti-capitalist.
How does that make anything abstract? Sure, I can sing a pop song, but that is not the same thing as a professionally-produced CD, is it? I can quote Family Guy, but that doesn't mean I own Family Guy.
But the free market does not decide which is better or more valuable. More to the point, purchasers cannot comparison shop between your singing and that of the pop star. That is anti-capitalist.
Why can't it exist as property? It is property. It's not speech.
Property is not being restricted. Speech is. My singing is not property. It is a service if I'm paid for it. By making it illegal for me to sing it, my actions are being restricted and I can't compete in the free market in that way. That is anti-capitalist because it is a government imposed restriction on the free market.
Why not?
Because it does not physically exist. It is n idea that can be held in the mind or on any other media. The media exists, but if I already own a blank DVD, I'm not making anything by copying data on to it, I'm just changing its state.
You appear to have a very unusual idea of what capitalism is. I haven't seen any "traditional" definitions that exclude intellectual property.
Umm, the traditional definition of capitalism is that private companies, not the state, control free trade. IP is a law, passed by the government to try to manage the market. The constitution, in fact, only allows the government to grant copyrights and IP restrictions for the specific purpose of advancing the science and arts... not for enriching private companies. Very specific definitions such as you'll find in an economics textbook are even more easily seen to be in agreement with my statements. You don't have to buy a textbook, just look in the dictionary.
Closed source benefits *some* developers and harms others. If Apache were to vanish, developers selling web servers would benefit, but web application developers would suffer.
I don't think we're in disagreement, but rather we're using terms differently. When I write "user" and "developer" I mean in relation to the project (OSS or closed) being discussed. When you write "developer" you're referring to a person in the profession of developing software. In your example above, Web application developers are users of Apache. Those same people can also be developers of Apache, but Apache being open source benefits them in their role as user.
You're lucky you slipped that word "extreme" in there. I assume by "extreme socialism" you mean a centrally-planned economy, and those are generally known to be less effective than distributed economies.
I view every economy to be a hybrid composed of some capitalist free trade and markets (even if they are just barter), some socialist programs controlled by a centralized government, and communist cells of given sizes sharing some portion of resources. By "extreme socialism" I mean an economy where the balance has slipped significantly toward a large number of centrally run markets or programs.
OTOH, "non-extreme" socialism has done some pretty remarkable things in certain domains.
I think any reasonable economist looking at the economies of the world would have to admit that socialist programs are very beneficial in both curbing wealth condensation and managing markets where information or need is not balanced enough for traditional capitalism.
If you're going to compare with extreme communism, compare with extreme capitalism.
I said "extreme socialism" not communism. And the major alternatives to extreme socialism are:
- balanced socialism and capitalism (usually thought of by Americans as just capitalism)
- extreme capitalism
The only advantage of either over extreme socialism, is their ability to harness greed, so it doesn't really matter which I compare it to in this case.
Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein[sic]?
Tolkien's works are literature and I think calling them second rate is understandable, but somewhat misguided. Tolkien had a vision and he translated it to paper very well. He wanted to write new mythology, which would inspire the same way the mythology of old did and in which he could include parables and morality tales. In this, he succeeded admirably. Generations of people now recognize he mythological races and figures he created and have copied his vision. That is both impressive and interesting.
What Tolkien did not do was much in the way of character development. He was creating icons more than characters and it shows. All the orcs are evil, all the elves are good. Moral decisions are always clear cut and the main characters were created to epitomize innocence and good. Basically, it was pretty good when I was twelve. In conflict with this is that his works are dated and use language that can be a bit dense and difficult to parse for a modern reader.
Tolkien's work is fascinating because it was innovative and epic. More pertinent to this discussion, it is easily translatable to film; a special effects bonanza with a long story, but not much character development needed. From the movie studio's perspective it is perfect except for the lack of "hot chicks" but they can fudge that and aim it more at kids (who benefit from the simplicity).
I certainly would not put Tolkien's work in the same class as Camus, but I do want to see what Guillermo del Toro can do with the material.
Supply and demand do not apply to abstract property. The cost of duplicating IP is basically zero, hence in traditional capitalism its cost also moves to zero. Sure it does. You can restrict the supply of abstract property, and you can increase demand for it. For example - it costs nothing to give somebody a blowjob, but you can make a lot of money by restricting the giving of blowjobs to those who pay.
You should have finished reading my paragraph. Like where I wrote, "Creation of IP, on the other hand fits just fine in traditional capitalism... as a service." Blowjobs, like the creation of IP are a service, not a commodity.
Likewise, look at the most popular IP - TV shows. You restrict a popular TV show to a certain network, and that network makes more money in advertising because they have a popular show that there is a lot of demand for.
Yes, if you artificially restrict the duplication of IP (as our laws do) you can try to make it more like property, but that is by restricting free trade and hence, the capitalist free market.
There' also the fact that this property isn't really abstract. Are you claiming that a TV show, or a piece of software is simply an abstract, intangible notion?
It is abstract in terms of property because what is being restricted is not physical property, but speech. Natural human rights to free expression mean if you sing a song and I hear you, I also can sing the song. IP laws are about restricting free speech in an attempt to make creation artificially profitable, theoretically for the benefit of society.
That software code actually exists.
Sure it does, but as speech, not property.
The tapes/film/animation cells of a TV show actually exist.
They are contained on media, which exists, but it is not duplication of the media that is restricted, but the data. The data is not property in the traditional, capitalist sense. That is not to say IP laws are "bad" just that they are anti-capitalist. So are public roads, that doesn't mean they are a bad idea.
And since when has the vast majority of scientists or even people in general been right?
It's called the scientific method... it works.
Truth is an independent variable. It has no relationship to how many believe or disbelieve a given theory.
You're right, but that's irrelevant. There is a method for determining what the most likely thing to be the truth is. This is called the scientific method. It is what rational people use to determine facts.
Need evidence? Take a look at the relatively recent history of the "science" of climate change and the media hype surrounding it:
I don't think you understand the articles you mention. We are undergoing climate change. It is getting warmer, rapidly. This may well lead to rapid climate change in the opposite direction. Take the time to actually understand the articles and their ramifications if you're planning on commenting.
Scientists today have fancier computer models and a little better data gathering capability than back in 1895, but are likely just as wrong as their ancestor scientists were over time.
So your idea is that scientists might be wrong based upon their research... so you'll ignore the data and the best models and make a random decision and hope what you want to be right is. That is called "being irrational."
So if you believe them, get out of your SUV now and WALK!
Individual action helps very little. We need global policy changes. We need a commitment to stop giving oil and coal companies tax subsidies and start giving them to clean energy sources. We need to start charging companies the real cost of their business, including the cost to clean up any pollution they release into the environment. What we don't need is people buying into the huge media campaign run by those companies and what we don't need are people like you who are willfully ignorant, but feel the need to express their ignorant opinions anyway.
What if even though we are the source, we can't stop it? What if it turns out there's just no way now to turn things around, we are too far down the road? What then?
That is certainly a possibility, but not the only one. The vast majority of scientists agree that it can be reversed, if we take action soon enough. That means not delaying or giving up while there is still a window of opportunity.
Assuming historical extrapolations are right, the world has been much hotter and colder than it is now. Thus it is likely that will happen again. Thus no matter what we do, we are probably in for a big temperature change at some point.
True.
So then if we assume it is true that a temperature shift of a few degrees will really screw us over, then we need to be preparing for it and figuring out how to deal with it.
We know how to deal with it, the problem is it will cost trillions and result in enormous loss of life.
Either way, the most sensible thing would seem to be to figure out what we need to do to be able to survive a temperature shift, not concern ourselves with what the cause is because unless we are extremely incorrect about past temperature
Your logic is a bit flawed. Sure the temperature will change, but without human intervention that is likely to be tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future. It's like saying that the sun will go out in a few million years so worrying about problems on the earth is pointless so we should concentrate on moving out of the solar system.
How about if we concentrate on stopping the extremely rapid global warming from known, human causes before it escalates into unpredictable climate change disasters, and put off worrying about major climate changes in the future for five thousand years or so at which point our technology will probably have advanced enough to take care of it.
Hurting competition in and of itself hurts consumers.
"Hurting" the competition is a part of Capitalism, which is by definition competitive. There is always a winner and a loser in Capitalism.
You're failing to distinguish "competition" and "the competition." The former is the process of multiple entrants competing to make the best and most profitable product. The latter is specific entrant, not the process itself.
Capitalism is about beating competitors and thus "hurting" them. It is not about hurting the ability of others to compete, it is just being better than it.
An analogy might be a boxing match. Your goal is to beat "the competition" and win. Your goal is not supposed to be to beat "competition" by drugging your opponent before the match so they don't have a level playing field.
Gardening isn't really free. It's just grown the way you want it. That's the benifit[sic]. If you equated the time it requires to garden, plus seeds/plants, fertilizer and pesticides (if you choose). You'll find that gardening does cost you, even though you don't have to pull out your wallet at harvest time.
You can claim anything costs you in terms of opportunity cost, if nothing else. Still if we're going to continue this analogy, maybe something like Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming is a better model than backyard gardening. Basically it is planting a sustainable system of plants that do the work themselves (or that is one part of it anyway). Think of it as a one time investment and then little or no maintenance and you go pick food when you want it.
For most businesses, this is closer to the investment in OSS. Py someone to develop and release it, then use it as long as you want with little or no maintenance cost
I've considered that perspective, but the problem with alledging that intellectual property doesn't exist because it's abstract is flawed.
Supply and demand do not apply to abstract property. The cost of duplicating IP is basically zero, hence in traditional capitalism its cost also moves to zero. Creation of IP, on the other hand fits just fine in traditional capitalism... as a service.
You have a chair. I move it to my house and start sitting in it. Only abstract rules implemented by a sensible society say that that chair is yours.
Ahh, but there are real costs to replacing a chair, in both labor and materials. What happens when someone invents a device to instantly duplicate other objects? Arbitrary societal rules may determine if a chair is mine or yours, but if we can make as many chairs just like it for free, does it matter any longer? That is where we are with IP these days.
That is not to say IP laws are not potentially useful or beneficial to society. It is just that beneficial and useful to society are not synonymous with capitalism. While IP laws may be the former, they are not the latter.
A "true free market" is an impossible ideal due to a massive number of real world flaws...
Of course it is and neither is it always desirable.
I get where your opinion comes from, but free market is a powerful simplified model, not a holy grail of human capacity.
I was responding to comments that MS's view was strictly capitalist, not speaking to what is ideal for society. In fact, MS's position is anti-capitalist. That doesn't make it inherently wrong, it just means that people need to reconsider their incomplete understanding such that they can realize not everything advocated by a big company is pro-capitalist (and often is not, in fact).
I think Sun underestimated the importance of casual users. A lot of times the people choosing an OS for a project (be it enterprise deployment, inclusion with hardware, or just use within IT) go with what they are familiar with and also what their current interests are. When Sun open sourced Solaris, there was a lot of interest from the Linux and BSD communities. A lot of those people decided to download a copy and give it a try. The difficulty these casual users had in grabbing an installable copy and getting it running easily were significant. A lot of people just said, "meh" and moved on. The last time I grabbed a developer preview I still had to fill out a bunch of forms with my personal data then deal with Sun's "download manager" and then spend significant time getting it to install, even within a VM customized to run OpenSolaris in particular. That is still better than it used to be. I only have a success rate of about 50% in getting Solaris to install to date.
For most people I think it is just too much of a hassle and all the developer momentum is on Linux. I guess when Sun thinks about open sourcing Solaris, they see it as a way to try to stop their hardware customers from moving away from Sun, which is fine, but does little to leverage the real benefits of an OSS community such as Linux has been doing for a long time.
First, I dont think that copyrights in general are all bad, but rather the perversion of them.
I wasn't meaning to imply otherwise. I'm a moderate when it comes to economics. Extreme capitalism is a dead end. There are markets where information, timeliness, or imbalance make capitalism a poor solution. Strict capitalism itself is unsustainable, collapsing into monopolies and trusts when unregulated.
I think patents, trademarks, and copyrights can be of great benefit to society when properly implemented. Like you, I believe our current copyright laws are very broken including durations. The ability to distribute work quickly and widely is improved immensely since the 1700's. Most works are not profitable to start with and profitable ones are usually only on the primary market for a few years making money. Despite this copyright lengths have grown instead of shrunk. That is very bad for society as a whole.
Also, I think a better phrase probably is that "OSS tips the balance of power to users" rather than just benefits users.
The reason I wrote that OSS benefits users instead of developers is because OSS, as a feature of a program, provides benefit to users as opposed to developers (as any feature does). As a developer closed source brings higher margins, the ability to lock-in users. I suppose you could argue OSS allows you to leverage the work of others, which is true, but it is preexisting condition, not a choice for a developer.
Successful OSS business models are ones where the developer is also a user, and hence gains the benefits as a user. IBM is a user of Linux. They use it to sell services and hardware and that is why they develop it. Very few OSS developers are not doing so because they are a user of that software.
Also, I do not see anything inherently wrong with closed source models as they create jobs, attract investments, and build revenues considerably faster than any OSS business model could.
Nor do I. I've certainly profited working on them. I see the problems with closed source mostly as problems with our broken IP laws. Copyright in the US and most of the world is very broken and this allows many abuses including undermining basic principals of copyright using DRM. Fix IP laws and the majority of closed source software problems are gone as well.
What? Closed source benefits developers and users with fair trade of service/product for profit, not the one-sided exchange like OSS.
Does it benefit a developer to add a feature to a product, even if it won't get them any new sales? Does it benefit a developer to add a feature that, for example, makes it easy to move your data into any other program, including competitors? Why would a developer add such a feature? The only reason is because users want it and a competitor is offering it. That's why features are added in general. OSS basically ensures you won't be locked in and you can take competitive bids from multiple vendors for improvements. It is just a feature and one that actually increases competition.
OSS software is not one sided. I've helped develop it and I was paid. How is that one sided? In other cases I've helped develop it and was paid not in cash, but I did get any improvements other people made later on. That is also a form of payment, just a smaller payment than most commercial companies would like... of course commercial companies want as high of margins as they can get, but they charge based upon the competition.
The closed source model has worked for thousands of years.
So has the open source model. It's called a co-op these days in many other markets, but the interesting thing is applying it to IP.
OSS is just hippie, socialist crap for slave labour.
OSS is the antithesis of socialism. It is applying some of the same techniques as socialism, but to an artificially restricted monopoly. Intellectual property laws are restrictions on capitalism designed to benefit society as a whole. OSS is undermining IP laws by creating a lower margin product that cannot be monopolized because of those very same laws. If I want a new feature in Windows, I can talk to Microsoft or slag off. If I want a new feature in InDesign I can talk to Adobe or go slag off. If I want a new feature added to InkScape (OSS) I can do it myself, or hire anyone I want to and make them bid against one another for the lowest price. That last example is the height of capitalism baby.
As for slave labor, if I choose to work on OSS or if a company pays me to do it I have a choice and I'm getting paid. Either users have to abide by my license or the company has to cut me a check. That still is capitalism chum.
Their argument is based off a strictly capitalist view.
I think you mean an anti-capitalist view. Copyrights are restrictions on the free market to start with. MS is an antitrust abuser, repeatedly convicted of undermining the capitalist free market. OSS is capitalism trying to route around the worst of the damage. Capitalism is so broken in the software industry that users forming co-ops to create their own solutions are not only succeeding, but the norm in many segments.
In a truly free, capitalist market, OSS would be a very late stage market innovation. As it is, the market is so broken it is a necessity. It is sort of like antibiotic resistant bacteria. You keep poisoning the ecosystem long enough and this stuff has to evolve.
'I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,' he said And remember, the first one is always free.
Actually this is very close to the truth. MS is concerned that other people are giving away drugs for free or at least more cheaply. He's upset that what is basically a co-op is making better products more cheaply. But just like a pusher, one of his biggest concerns is that as part of his business model all the drugs he makes are addictive and very hard to stop taking. Users don't like that, but what can they do? Well now they can try the competing drugs, some of which are formulated to specifically ease the pain of coming off of MS's crack.
OSS typically goes after mature late life cycle applications, such as OS's, Office suites, etc.
I'd elaborate upon this. OSS business models have the greatest advantage in markets where there are already strong, entrenched players. If I were to come up with something truly innovative, closed source will allow me to make better profit margins. If I'm trying to compete in an already existing market, OSS will allow me to undercut people using closed source business models and leverage shared development to make things less expensively.
Basically closed source benefits developers. OSS benefits users. It is a feature and no developer wants to add a feature they don't have to because it costs them money.
Meaning, people can say what they like, but in my opinion OSS is capitalism's way of preventing companies from profiting on a product the developed indefinitely...
Technically speaking, capitalism inherently already does that. Copyright law is what allows companies to profit from an artificial monopoly on creating some product. Copyright is not free market capitalism, but a restriction on capitalism designed, originally, to benefit society as a whole. OSS is capitalism trying to route around the damage of our current, absurdly anti-capitalist copyright laws.
Nothing wrong with greedy. Ok, then show one example in which greed actually helps anything beyond the short-term gain of the individual.
Greed is the reason capitalism results in better products than extreme socialism. People desire personal gain. They work hard or smart or both to make money. Many different people all do this and the market rewards the "best" with the most money. As a result a lot of people work long and hard to create things people want. Innovation in a market and the creation of new technology is often the indirect result of greed.
Now there is a caveat. You can look at the success of capitalism in two ways. Capitalism works because it leverages human greed for the benefit of society. If humans were not greedy, a system that leverages other motivations could potentially create the same or superior results. If the average person suddenly did not care about personal gain and profit would they work just as hard to benefit society? Probably not, but it is something to consider. Many scientific advances in academia are innovative and benefit society and (psychologically speaking) are largely motivated by a desire to impress members of the opposite sex. That's a pretty powerful human drive as well and I'm sure a social construct that rewarded innovation with sex would be effective as well.
You're right that his "improve" on OSS argument is empty, because I think what he was trying to say by "nobody can improve on it" is "no business can improve on it."
Businesses improve on GPL products all the time; IBM, Sun, even Apple. They do it for profit too.
Bill's point was that businesses can't take GPL software and improve upon it or link proprietary software to it without the viral nature of the GPL taking over.
Yeah, that sure is a problem for him. Also, I can't take Stephen king's novels, improve on them and resell them without the viral nature of copyright laws taking over. Gates is just being two-faced. He wants to make a profit selling copyrighted software, but he doesn't want to pay the people developing copyrighted GPL software their required fee (any code added and distributed in future).
The proof is in the pudding, they made use of a BSD based TCP/IP stack and TCP tools for many years before they rewrote them. Obviously they don't have a problem with BSD licensed software, only GPL licensed software.
Microsoft's business model and entire culture is based upon locking in users and making it hard to switch to competing products. Pretty much everything they make includes such a component. They don't like GPL software because it makes this sort of lock in impossible and forces companies using it to constantly offer the best product all the time or lose out to competitors. Actually keeping their products competitive based upon real features and merits is not as profitable.
What is Brasero, like a less featured crappy version of K3b?
They're both pretty full featured. K3b is clean but not as user friendly. They both have features the other lacks. K3b is also a audio/video ripping applications, whereas Brasero has more options for burning stuff and integrates better with the OS and other applications. I'd say it comes down to your use cases, but I'd lean towards Brasero for novices.
There were rumors posted at one point that Apple had offered to donate a core OS, but were turned down for not being completely open-source. Perhaps if those rumors had any truth, they could be fulfilled now.
I hope not. Look I'm as big of an OS X fan as anyone, but it is not really suited to the OLPC project in a number of ways. Also, the all OSS stack makes sense with regard to their mission, to bootstrap an intellectual property creation industry in these nations. Being able to edit and modify all the code provides a starting place for this project to sustain itself via the user base.
I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.
The OLPC software is very well designed for its core tasks of educating children, which is quite different from general purpose computing. As a kid, I'd much rather have had an OLPC that allows me to learn with all the other kids in my school, than even a modern OS X system. Swapping it out for OS X makes little more sense than doing the same with WinXP.
Slashdot Mirror
Performance is a big reason. You basically need new hardware to run it. Even then it is slower than XP on the same hardware. Consistency is another reason. Admins don't really want to support more OS's than they have to, and they don't have the budget to upgrade all of them, so XP on all makes sense. Then there are issues getting old hardware peripherals to work with it. There are issues with older applications that won't run or won't run stably on Vista. Some you can upgrade (another cost) others you cannot so it is a hard block. Finally, there are migration costs and user training (many of whom obstinately don't want Vista for whatever reason).
From an enterprise perspective, looking at a Vista migration means considering alternatives, like Linux which is a real possibility in many ways and a long term cost saver. A lot of companies are just holding off and waiting for it to stabilize and most of the problems I listed to go away. Others see holding off as a necessary step now, since Vista includes even more data and protocol lock-ins that will make migrating away from it even more expensive than migrating away from WinXP. I have nothing against Vista and recognize some of the real improvements, but I would not recommend a large scale migration to anyone for a while yet. A year ago I said, at least wait a year and see how it goes. It's been a year, and I'd still wait a while.
Find the evidence that shows that the over all average ocean temperatures have risen appreciably, since scientists were first able to measure them.
Why? Ocean temperatures are more stable than overall temperature because of their mass, evaporation, and ice melt. Why look at a less reactive measure for change, when their are more reactive trends easily visible? There are a few pilot projects to measure the overall ocean temperature, but not enough sensors to measure more than a fraction of the surface in use today.
A little more ice melting in the polar regions and high mountains doesn't make for global warming.
No, rapidly increasing atmospheric temperatures over the last 40 years does.
It is you that has to provide data that shows the climate IS changing.
Me? I read two peer reviewed journals on science and technology, Scientific American and New Scientist. They have regular, peer reviewed studies on climate change and ongoing science. Care to show me any peer reviewed journals that have a consensus against global climate change or even that cast it in doubt? Sure there are plenty of non-peer reviewed, "soft science" opinion pieces in the media (guess who funds them). But the scientific consensus is quite clear and has been for a long time.
You and your GW friends are asserting that the whole earth is getting hotter, so you have the burden of showing evidence for that.
Show me any respectable scientist who denies it. Even the oil company paid shills have given up trying to argue that and are working on the "there is nothing we can do" and "it must be caused by something other than people" speaking points.
If the oceans are not getting significantly warmer, then the earth as a whole isn't either.
The oceans won't get significantly warmer until after all the significant expanses of ice are gone. Of course at that point we'll have had such a large and rapid change in environmental factors we'll almost certainly be too late to maintain current climate.
The measurements don't support GW.
Yes they do.
An even if it were getting warmer, that doesn't mean that human activity is to blame....
True, but the drastic correlation between greenhouse gas levels and atmospheric temperatures is a very good indicator of a potential causation, better than any other phenomenon proposed or examined in any formal study to date. If you have an alternative causation to forward, do so.
...nor that warming would necessarily be bad. Would you object to a lower heating bill each winter? Probably not.
I think you're missing the point of the problem. The climate is a system we don't fully understand. We do know that rapid changes have cascaded into drastic overall changes in the past. Right now there are rapid changes taking place and the most likely reason is certain human activities.
If we do nothing, the polar ice will probably go away. There will probably be a lot of flooding and storms for years that will cost a lot more to deal with that stopping said human activities in the first place. Beyond that, there is the potential for huge climate change in either direction. With the balance upset, we might go into a cycle of increasing temperatures. We almost certainly will see water moving to different locations, making much habitable land uninhabitable and vice versus. There is the potential that the gulf stream will redirect as it has in the past, leading to lowering temperatures in Europe. There is also the potential of salinity issues leading to rapid climate change snowballing in the other direction, including a new mini ice age.
An analogy is, you found a way to make money. You poke a bear in the face with a stick and people throw coins at you. So far he's been ignoring you, but the last two times he growled. Do you:
Your entire post is trying to compare the accuracy of given scientists in the past with the consensus of scientists today. That is not even relevant. The relevant question is, who is more likely to be right, scientists who have performed formal studies... or you who have no evidence, but just don't want them to be right?
If you don't think the climate is changing, fine where is the data and reason to back up your hypothesis? All your posturing aside, you haven't answered that basic question and until you do, you have offered no rational person a reason to believe you.
In terms of both economics and law, a commodity has to refer to something physical, specifically something used as a raw material. I think the term has ben generalized in common parlance to mean "stuff" but that is not a valuable definition in a discussion such as ours.
How does restricting the availability of property restrict free trade?It doesn't, but that is not what IP laws do. Copyright law in particular restricts you from making a copy. It doesn't restrict access to copies directly. This is no different than restricting access to chairs by passing laws stopping people from being able to make them... an obvious infringement of free trade.
That's like saying you are restricting the free market if you don't agree to sell me your house. It's perfectly within your rights not to have your house on the free market.No, it's like restricting free trade by making it illegal for a builder to build another house like yours in the same area, thus artificially boosting the value of yours.
As for "capitalist free market", no such thing exists.The capitalist free market is a type of market that is not perfectly implemented anywhere, nor would I argue it should be. It is, however, the definition of capitalism and so anything that moves further away from it is anti-capitalist.
How does that make anything abstract? Sure, I can sing a pop song, but that is not the same thing as a professionally-produced CD, is it? I can quote Family Guy, but that doesn't mean I own Family Guy.But the free market does not decide which is better or more valuable. More to the point, purchasers cannot comparison shop between your singing and that of the pop star. That is anti-capitalist.
Why can't it exist as property? It is property. It's not speech.Property is not being restricted. Speech is. My singing is not property. It is a service if I'm paid for it. By making it illegal for me to sing it, my actions are being restricted and I can't compete in the free market in that way. That is anti-capitalist because it is a government imposed restriction on the free market.
Why not?Because it does not physically exist. It is n idea that can be held in the mind or on any other media. The media exists, but if I already own a blank DVD, I'm not making anything by copying data on to it, I'm just changing its state.
You appear to have a very unusual idea of what capitalism is. I haven't seen any "traditional" definitions that exclude intellectual property.Umm, the traditional definition of capitalism is that private companies, not the state, control free trade. IP is a law, passed by the government to try to manage the market. The constitution, in fact, only allows the government to grant copyrights and IP restrictions for the specific purpose of advancing the science and arts... not for enriching private companies. Very specific definitions such as you'll find in an economics textbook are even more easily seen to be in agreement with my statements. You don't have to buy a textbook, just look in the dictionary.
I don't think we're in disagreement, but rather we're using terms differently. When I write "user" and "developer" I mean in relation to the project (OSS or closed) being discussed. When you write "developer" you're referring to a person in the profession of developing software. In your example above, Web application developers are users of Apache. Those same people can also be developers of Apache, but Apache being open source benefits them in their role as user.
I view every economy to be a hybrid composed of some capitalist free trade and markets (even if they are just barter), some socialist programs controlled by a centralized government, and communist cells of given sizes sharing some portion of resources. By "extreme socialism" I mean an economy where the balance has slipped significantly toward a large number of centrally run markets or programs.
OTOH, "non-extreme" socialism has done some pretty remarkable things in certain domains.I think any reasonable economist looking at the economies of the world would have to admit that socialist programs are very beneficial in both curbing wealth condensation and managing markets where information or need is not balanced enough for traditional capitalism.
I said "extreme socialism" not communism. And the major alternatives to extreme socialism are:
The only advantage of either over extreme socialism, is their ability to harness greed, so it doesn't really matter which I compare it to in this case.
Extreme capitalism leads to a feudal system.No argument there.
Tolkien's works are literature and I think calling them second rate is understandable, but somewhat misguided. Tolkien had a vision and he translated it to paper very well. He wanted to write new mythology, which would inspire the same way the mythology of old did and in which he could include parables and morality tales. In this, he succeeded admirably. Generations of people now recognize he mythological races and figures he created and have copied his vision. That is both impressive and interesting.
What Tolkien did not do was much in the way of character development. He was creating icons more than characters and it shows. All the orcs are evil, all the elves are good. Moral decisions are always clear cut and the main characters were created to epitomize innocence and good. Basically, it was pretty good when I was twelve. In conflict with this is that his works are dated and use language that can be a bit dense and difficult to parse for a modern reader.
Tolkien's work is fascinating because it was innovative and epic. More pertinent to this discussion, it is easily translatable to film; a special effects bonanza with a long story, but not much character development needed. From the movie studio's perspective it is perfect except for the lack of "hot chicks" but they can fudge that and aim it more at kids (who benefit from the simplicity).
I certainly would not put Tolkien's work in the same class as Camus, but I do want to see what Guillermo del Toro can do with the material.
You should have finished reading my paragraph. Like where I wrote, "Creation of IP, on the other hand fits just fine in traditional capitalism... as a service." Blowjobs, like the creation of IP are a service, not a commodity.
Likewise, look at the most popular IP - TV shows. You restrict a popular TV show to a certain network, and that network makes more money in advertising because they have a popular show that there is a lot of demand for.Yes, if you artificially restrict the duplication of IP (as our laws do) you can try to make it more like property, but that is by restricting free trade and hence, the capitalist free market.
There' also the fact that this property isn't really abstract. Are you claiming that a TV show, or a piece of software is simply an abstract, intangible notion?It is abstract in terms of property because what is being restricted is not physical property, but speech. Natural human rights to free expression mean if you sing a song and I hear you, I also can sing the song. IP laws are about restricting free speech in an attempt to make creation artificially profitable, theoretically for the benefit of society.
That software code actually exists.Sure it does, but as speech, not property.
The tapes/film/animation cells of a TV show actually exist.They are contained on media, which exists, but it is not duplication of the media that is restricted, but the data. The data is not property in the traditional, capitalist sense. That is not to say IP laws are "bad" just that they are anti-capitalist. So are public roads, that doesn't mean they are a bad idea.
It's called the scientific method... it works.
Truth is an independent variable. It has no relationship to how many believe or disbelieve a given theory.You're right, but that's irrelevant. There is a method for determining what the most likely thing to be the truth is. This is called the scientific method. It is what rational people use to determine facts.
Need evidence? Take a look at the relatively recent history of the "science" of climate change and the media hype surrounding it:I don't think you understand the articles you mention. We are undergoing climate change. It is getting warmer, rapidly. This may well lead to rapid climate change in the opposite direction. Take the time to actually understand the articles and their ramifications if you're planning on commenting.
Scientists today have fancier computer models and a little better data gathering capability than back in 1895, but are likely just as wrong as their ancestor scientists were over time.So your idea is that scientists might be wrong based upon their research... so you'll ignore the data and the best models and make a random decision and hope what you want to be right is. That is called "being irrational."
So if you believe them, get out of your SUV now and WALK!Individual action helps very little. We need global policy changes. We need a commitment to stop giving oil and coal companies tax subsidies and start giving them to clean energy sources. We need to start charging companies the real cost of their business, including the cost to clean up any pollution they release into the environment. What we don't need is people buying into the huge media campaign run by those companies and what we don't need are people like you who are willfully ignorant, but feel the need to express their ignorant opinions anyway.
That is certainly a possibility, but not the only one. The vast majority of scientists agree that it can be reversed, if we take action soon enough. That means not delaying or giving up while there is still a window of opportunity.
Assuming historical extrapolations are right, the world has been much hotter and colder than it is now. Thus it is likely that will happen again. Thus no matter what we do, we are probably in for a big temperature change at some point.True.
So then if we assume it is true that a temperature shift of a few degrees will really screw us over, then we need to be preparing for it and figuring out how to deal with it.We know how to deal with it, the problem is it will cost trillions and result in enormous loss of life.
Either way, the most sensible thing would seem to be to figure out what we need to do to be able to survive a temperature shift, not concern ourselves with what the cause is because unless we are extremely incorrect about past temperatureYour logic is a bit flawed. Sure the temperature will change, but without human intervention that is likely to be tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future. It's like saying that the sun will go out in a few million years so worrying about problems on the earth is pointless so we should concentrate on moving out of the solar system.
How about if we concentrate on stopping the extremely rapid global warming from known, human causes before it escalates into unpredictable climate change disasters, and put off worrying about major climate changes in the future for five thousand years or so at which point our technology will probably have advanced enough to take care of it.
You're failing to distinguish "competition" and "the competition." The former is the process of multiple entrants competing to make the best and most profitable product. The latter is specific entrant, not the process itself.
Capitalism is about beating competitors and thus "hurting" them. It is not about hurting the ability of others to compete, it is just being better than it.
An analogy might be a boxing match. Your goal is to beat "the competition" and win. Your goal is not supposed to be to beat "competition" by drugging your opponent before the match so they don't have a level playing field.
You can claim anything costs you in terms of opportunity cost, if nothing else. Still if we're going to continue this analogy, maybe something like Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming is a better model than backyard gardening. Basically it is planting a sustainable system of plants that do the work themselves (or that is one part of it anyway). Think of it as a one time investment and then little or no maintenance and you go pick food when you want it.
For most businesses, this is closer to the investment in OSS. Py someone to develop and release it, then use it as long as you want with little or no maintenance cost
Supply and demand do not apply to abstract property. The cost of duplicating IP is basically zero, hence in traditional capitalism its cost also moves to zero. Creation of IP, on the other hand fits just fine in traditional capitalism... as a service.
You have a chair. I move it to my house and start sitting in it. Only abstract rules implemented by a sensible society say that that chair is yours.Ahh, but there are real costs to replacing a chair, in both labor and materials. What happens when someone invents a device to instantly duplicate other objects? Arbitrary societal rules may determine if a chair is mine or yours, but if we can make as many chairs just like it for free, does it matter any longer? That is where we are with IP these days.
That is not to say IP laws are not potentially useful or beneficial to society. It is just that beneficial and useful to society are not synonymous with capitalism. While IP laws may be the former, they are not the latter.
A "true free market" is an impossible ideal due to a massive number of real world flaws...Of course it is and neither is it always desirable.
I get where your opinion comes from, but free market is a powerful simplified model, not a holy grail of human capacity.I was responding to comments that MS's view was strictly capitalist, not speaking to what is ideal for society. In fact, MS's position is anti-capitalist. That doesn't make it inherently wrong, it just means that people need to reconsider their incomplete understanding such that they can realize not everything advocated by a big company is pro-capitalist (and often is not, in fact).
I think Sun underestimated the importance of casual users. A lot of times the people choosing an OS for a project (be it enterprise deployment, inclusion with hardware, or just use within IT) go with what they are familiar with and also what their current interests are. When Sun open sourced Solaris, there was a lot of interest from the Linux and BSD communities. A lot of those people decided to download a copy and give it a try. The difficulty these casual users had in grabbing an installable copy and getting it running easily were significant. A lot of people just said, "meh" and moved on. The last time I grabbed a developer preview I still had to fill out a bunch of forms with my personal data then deal with Sun's "download manager" and then spend significant time getting it to install, even within a VM customized to run OpenSolaris in particular. That is still better than it used to be. I only have a success rate of about 50% in getting Solaris to install to date.
For most people I think it is just too much of a hassle and all the developer momentum is on Linux. I guess when Sun thinks about open sourcing Solaris, they see it as a way to try to stop their hardware customers from moving away from Sun, which is fine, but does little to leverage the real benefits of an OSS community such as Linux has been doing for a long time.
I wasn't meaning to imply otherwise. I'm a moderate when it comes to economics. Extreme capitalism is a dead end. There are markets where information, timeliness, or imbalance make capitalism a poor solution. Strict capitalism itself is unsustainable, collapsing into monopolies and trusts when unregulated.
I think patents, trademarks, and copyrights can be of great benefit to society when properly implemented. Like you, I believe our current copyright laws are very broken including durations. The ability to distribute work quickly and widely is improved immensely since the 1700's. Most works are not profitable to start with and profitable ones are usually only on the primary market for a few years making money. Despite this copyright lengths have grown instead of shrunk. That is very bad for society as a whole.
Also, I think a better phrase probably is that "OSS tips the balance of power to users" rather than just benefits users.The reason I wrote that OSS benefits users instead of developers is because OSS, as a feature of a program, provides benefit to users as opposed to developers (as any feature does). As a developer closed source brings higher margins, the ability to lock-in users. I suppose you could argue OSS allows you to leverage the work of others, which is true, but it is preexisting condition, not a choice for a developer.
Successful OSS business models are ones where the developer is also a user, and hence gains the benefits as a user. IBM is a user of Linux. They use it to sell services and hardware and that is why they develop it. Very few OSS developers are not doing so because they are a user of that software.
Also, I do not see anything inherently wrong with closed source models as they create jobs, attract investments, and build revenues considerably faster than any OSS business model could.Nor do I. I've certainly profited working on them. I see the problems with closed source mostly as problems with our broken IP laws. Copyright in the US and most of the world is very broken and this allows many abuses including undermining basic principals of copyright using DRM. Fix IP laws and the majority of closed source software problems are gone as well.
Does it benefit a developer to add a feature to a product, even if it won't get them any new sales? Does it benefit a developer to add a feature that, for example, makes it easy to move your data into any other program, including competitors? Why would a developer add such a feature? The only reason is because users want it and a competitor is offering it. That's why features are added in general. OSS basically ensures you won't be locked in and you can take competitive bids from multiple vendors for improvements. It is just a feature and one that actually increases competition.
OSS software is not one sided. I've helped develop it and I was paid. How is that one sided? In other cases I've helped develop it and was paid not in cash, but I did get any improvements other people made later on. That is also a form of payment, just a smaller payment than most commercial companies would like... of course commercial companies want as high of margins as they can get, but they charge based upon the competition.
The closed source model has worked for thousands of years.So has the open source model. It's called a co-op these days in many other markets, but the interesting thing is applying it to IP.
OSS is just hippie, socialist crap for slave labour.OSS is the antithesis of socialism. It is applying some of the same techniques as socialism, but to an artificially restricted monopoly. Intellectual property laws are restrictions on capitalism designed to benefit society as a whole. OSS is undermining IP laws by creating a lower margin product that cannot be monopolized because of those very same laws. If I want a new feature in Windows, I can talk to Microsoft or slag off. If I want a new feature in InDesign I can talk to Adobe or go slag off. If I want a new feature added to InkScape (OSS) I can do it myself, or hire anyone I want to and make them bid against one another for the lowest price. That last example is the height of capitalism baby.
As for slave labor, if I choose to work on OSS or if a company pays me to do it I have a choice and I'm getting paid. Either users have to abide by my license or the company has to cut me a check. That still is capitalism chum.
I think you mean an anti-capitalist view. Copyrights are restrictions on the free market to start with. MS is an antitrust abuser, repeatedly convicted of undermining the capitalist free market. OSS is capitalism trying to route around the worst of the damage. Capitalism is so broken in the software industry that users forming co-ops to create their own solutions are not only succeeding, but the norm in many segments.
In a truly free, capitalist market, OSS would be a very late stage market innovation. As it is, the market is so broken it is a necessity. It is sort of like antibiotic resistant bacteria. You keep poisoning the ecosystem long enough and this stuff has to evolve.
Actually this is very close to the truth. MS is concerned that other people are giving away drugs for free or at least more cheaply. He's upset that what is basically a co-op is making better products more cheaply. But just like a pusher, one of his biggest concerns is that as part of his business model all the drugs he makes are addictive and very hard to stop taking. Users don't like that, but what can they do? Well now they can try the competing drugs, some of which are formulated to specifically ease the pain of coming off of MS's crack.
I'd elaborate upon this. OSS business models have the greatest advantage in markets where there are already strong, entrenched players. If I were to come up with something truly innovative, closed source will allow me to make better profit margins. If I'm trying to compete in an already existing market, OSS will allow me to undercut people using closed source business models and leverage shared development to make things less expensively.
Basically closed source benefits developers. OSS benefits users. It is a feature and no developer wants to add a feature they don't have to because it costs them money.
Meaning, people can say what they like, but in my opinion OSS is capitalism's way of preventing companies from profiting on a product the developed indefinitely...Technically speaking, capitalism inherently already does that. Copyright law is what allows companies to profit from an artificial monopoly on creating some product. Copyright is not free market capitalism, but a restriction on capitalism designed, originally, to benefit society as a whole. OSS is capitalism trying to route around the damage of our current, absurdly anti-capitalist copyright laws.
Greed is the reason capitalism results in better products than extreme socialism. People desire personal gain. They work hard or smart or both to make money. Many different people all do this and the market rewards the "best" with the most money. As a result a lot of people work long and hard to create things people want. Innovation in a market and the creation of new technology is often the indirect result of greed.
Now there is a caveat. You can look at the success of capitalism in two ways. Capitalism works because it leverages human greed for the benefit of society. If humans were not greedy, a system that leverages other motivations could potentially create the same or superior results. If the average person suddenly did not care about personal gain and profit would they work just as hard to benefit society? Probably not, but it is something to consider. Many scientific advances in academia are innovative and benefit society and (psychologically speaking) are largely motivated by a desire to impress members of the opposite sex. That's a pretty powerful human drive as well and I'm sure a social construct that rewarded innovation with sex would be effective as well.
Businesses improve on GPL products all the time; IBM, Sun, even Apple. They do it for profit too.
Bill's point was that businesses can't take GPL software and improve upon it or link proprietary software to it without the viral nature of the GPL taking over.Yeah, that sure is a problem for him. Also, I can't take Stephen king's novels, improve on them and resell them without the viral nature of copyright laws taking over. Gates is just being two-faced. He wants to make a profit selling copyrighted software, but he doesn't want to pay the people developing copyrighted GPL software their required fee (any code added and distributed in future).
The proof is in the pudding, they made use of a BSD based TCP/IP stack and TCP tools for many years before they rewrote them. Obviously they don't have a problem with BSD licensed software, only GPL licensed software.Microsoft's business model and entire culture is based upon locking in users and making it hard to switch to competing products. Pretty much everything they make includes such a component. They don't like GPL software because it makes this sort of lock in impossible and forces companies using it to constantly offer the best product all the time or lose out to competitors. Actually keeping their products competitive based upon real features and merits is not as profitable.
They're both pretty full featured. K3b is clean but not as user friendly. They both have features the other lacks. K3b is also a audio/video ripping applications, whereas Brasero has more options for burning stuff and integrates better with the OS and other applications. I'd say it comes down to your use cases, but I'd lean towards Brasero for novices.
So from the review there are several new features here that might be of use:
So it sounds like a couple of useful new features and probably more the review did not cover. opefully I'll give it a test run tonight.
I hope not. Look I'm as big of an OS X fan as anyone, but it is not really suited to the OLPC project in a number of ways. Also, the all OSS stack makes sense with regard to their mission, to bootstrap an intellectual property creation industry in these nations. Being able to edit and modify all the code provides a starting place for this project to sustain itself via the user base.
I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.The OLPC software is very well designed for its core tasks of educating children, which is quite different from general purpose computing. As a kid, I'd much rather have had an OLPC that allows me to learn with all the other kids in my school, than even a modern OS X system. Swapping it out for OS X makes little more sense than doing the same with WinXP.