I think Negroponte is just making this move to coax a better deal out of Linux Corp. -- the same way govt. agencies threaten to use Linux in order to get MS to offer them cheaper windows.
I suspect if Linux lowers its price from $0 to -$50, you'll hear no more about OLPC running Windows.
I didn't much like the suggestion that Ubuntu's email client (evolution) was inferior 'cause it couldn't perfectly import yr Outlook data (whose fault is that?).
Then he got to "Word Processing" and apparently decided to compare OOo to OOo (gave Ubuntu the win for being preinstalled).
There was an old misunderstanding, i.e. "Windows hardware support is better..."
And a weird conclusion: "The very best thing about Ubuntu, in my opinion, is the fact that you can boot the CD and try it out in a totally non-destructive way"
Sorry, the very best thing about Ubuntu is not that you can use it without actually having to use it. The best thing is that you own it and control it. And, as a sidenote to that, you likely won't ever have to buy any new software (or hardware) ever again in your life.
"50-50 -- Vista for its Picture Gallery [> F-spot]; Ubuntu for having a better native image editor than Paint."
Now, maybe the Picture Gallery does edge out Fspot (I've never used it, but author says for example bulk import is backgrounded, and tagging scores of pics at once is easier) but is this comparable to how far Paint falls behind the gimp?
You have NO IDEA what the costs of running a broadband network are! You left out
-My $1.4 million salary
-$2 - $7 million/yr in campaign contributions
-Dozens of attorneys to sue Vonage out of existence
...and a bunch of things I'm not allowed to talk about
Mateo LeFou, CEO, Verizon/AT&T
I'm neither a very capable nor very willing advocate for communism. I posit certain things as a corrective to the idyllic vision of capitalist that prevails in this thread -- and in America -- that says, in essence.
Capitalism is where you get paid to work, and communism is where you get paid whether or not you work.
In reality, the difference lies in the control of the means of production. Private ownserhip of these is very efficient, because the owners respond to market sigals to maximize their profit. But this isn't a perfect system.
In a nutshell I think it's imperfect because established capitalistic powers *shape the market as well as respond to it. In certain cases -- two examples might be American mass media and automobile industries -- it is easier (read "more profitable") to tell people what they want rather than listen to them. Same old TV, same old inefficient cars. I could go into more detail, but you can probably infer what I'm implying about the public opportunity cost of letting private entities decide what kinds of cars are available and what is broadcast on the airwaves.
The foregoing does *not mean I think communism is "the answer". It's quite imperfect, for reasons you suggest. It is very difficult to calculate "top-down" what the best way to allocate productive capacity is. So many factors are involved that the distributed intelligence of a freely-developing market system works much better in many cases.
A single example, though: where the item in question is "information" the ability of a private "producer" to capture all the benefit in the form of compensation is severely hampered. Public goods are, briefly, just *not provided most efficiently by private production in response to market signals. This is why most economies are mixed.
"I don't know of a legal position where licensing a tool gives the tool's vendor rights in perpetuity to the work produced therewith" My straw man was little more than a hasty synopsis of the theory of surplus labor, which I assume you're familiar with. If the employee gets paid an amount corresponding to the value heshe produces, there is no possibility of profit for the employer.
>> If you reduce government to its most basic level (that of the family), would you still argue that interference by the decision-makers cannot solve problems?
>This is a fallacious argument, because government did not develop from the family unit.
The origins of government notwithstanding, GP's point is that cooperative *governance -- as a concept -- is a perfectly legitimate way of solving problems. As human institutions, they have the potential for corruption and that's why civilization is an ongoing project.
As for your contentions that e.g., "Communism, by definition, is based on government intervention" you're just incorrect. Communism by definition is based on public ownership of the means of production, and democratic processes about how to best utilize those.
Picture yourself at an auction. You have no money, that's okay because at this auction it's not a *given that your only role is "consumer". You've got talent, and could create a great deal of value for yourself and others if you only had a paintbrush and canvas. Alas, these items have been monopolized through a cooperative pact between the wealthy and the auction house. They will allow you to use them but you have to give them a share (or the bulk) of the eventual sale price, forever.
Modern communism is not about how terriblehorrible this situation is, but about the fact that it is long-term untenable and does not allocate the means of production in an efficient manner. I think this is true w/r/t some sectors of industry, though not all.
I don't think I'm a commie troll, but I think that at least part of your objection applies to capitalist systems as well.
If I were playing devil's advocate I might say "capitalism cannot possibly work the way its designers envisioned because they didn't take corporate nature into account." For example, there is a tendency in corporocracy to treat *everything as a transaction and *everything as property (see for example "intellectual property", the privatization of drinking water, etc).
I think the fact that corporations have co-opted our ostensibly democratic government so thoroughly is almost as serious an indictment of capitalism as the corrupted Party's betrayal of basic democratic principles in the Reddish parts of the world.
These guys seem cool and all, but dude, get a proofreader "distributing Data, Information and Intelligence. A development that should not be dependent upon the whimp of a few very affluant and powerfull entities." http://www.gravityzoo.com/developers/openSource.py
At least according to US copyright law, raw data does not contain the expressive component necessary for copyrights.
From the complaint: "Alexa seeks to force Mr. Hornbaker to stop infringing Alexa's trademarks and to stop pirating Alexa proprietary data."
I don't know exactly what Alexa does, but the only thing protectable in a database is its *design and *structure -- and that only if those attributes exhibit creativity (rather than the ordinary constraints of the relational model).
Not that I hold out hope that this will be the salvation of the world, but combine this stuff with e.g. fora.tv and you're halfway to a genuine "pull" technology mass media infrastructure
Could someone build at least one world in which you purchase "land" based on the power/CPU requirements of the land, rather than its (virtual) area.
The "necessity" of getting a return on your per-square-meter fees causes SL to be overtaken by casinos and brothels. Make the fee dependent on something of actual economic value.
Just thinking aloud, don't have time to do it myself
I was afraid it might be a philanthropic effort, which BG and friends are moderately-good at. Thankfully it's a business, which they suck at.*
*footnote: that is to say, businesses in which they cannot leverage a pre-existing monopoly on the desktop. Like e.g. new PC deployments in third world countries.
"Why does the music industry feel it should tamper with the education of our minors just to placate some facile legal action?"
Dude, get a clue: these are *pirates, they don't care about education. All they care about is stealing, stealing, stealing other people's intellectual property.
If anything is tampering with their education, it's the alien viruses in their brains, which impel them to download our songs for *nothing, thereby descrating our intellectual property. The same intellectual property provided for in the Constitution, section IV, which says
"Intellectual property rocks. We should have lots of it."
The "nobody's getting fired for going MS" mentality overlooks something important:
Most of the world doesn't agree. When your bosses discover that the global market is five times bigger than the American one (I've adjusted population ratio to account for the much wider availability of the net in the US), and that those durn foreigners won't just play ball and buy Office, a lot of execs are going to have to make tough decisions.
Export to ODF. I suspect one of the billion or so people who don't think Office is God's Gift to Whomever will figure out how to go ODF->pdf, or ->flash, or ->DHTML, or something even better.
Sorry, I can't resist a dig at that stupid concept.
If your OS is *disgustingly, *alarmingly inefficient with resources, you can stick a thumbdrive in it and cross your fingers that the email you just spent half an hour typing on will go through.
In other news if your car gets 1.4 miles per gallon, you can drive around with a few 50-gallon drums of gasoline to get you through out of those tight spots.
"Have you every tried to submit a resume in.txt format? Most everyone wants a Word file (.doc). Some will take a PDF, but Word is the preferred format"
What rubbish. If they think you're good for the job, all they want is the *information in the resume. I've sent plain text, often inlined in an email. I've also sent HTML versions when I wanted to control the layout a bit more.
Naturally if they kick and scream ("how the hell do I open an HTML file?") I'll export a.doc to humor them. But that hasn't happened yet.
"Either conform or forget about getting a job."
Thanks, I'm actually doing fine in that department.
"This is a situation that validates the failure in our constitution and the degradation of political system. Lobbyists should not be allowed in government for a company that has a monopoly on a market. If Microsoft wants to have the governments use Microsoft products, they should donate them to the government and get a tax writeoff for it. I should not have to pay taxes so government employees can use substandard expensive software."
I forget... what was the hilarious position of Citizens Against Government Waste (*against open formats in Massachussets)?
I send.txt files through email whenever I can't just inline the stuff. No one's complained yet; I assume people who use windows are easily opening these in Word or WordPad or lol Works
Slashdot Mirror
I think Negroponte is just making this move to coax a better deal out of Linux Corp. -- the same way govt. agencies threaten to use Linux in order to get MS to offer them cheaper windows.
I suspect if Linux lowers its price from $0 to -$50, you'll hear no more about OLPC running Windows.
I didn't much like the suggestion that Ubuntu's email client (evolution) was inferior 'cause it couldn't perfectly import yr Outlook data (whose fault is that?).
Then he got to "Word Processing" and apparently decided to compare OOo to OOo (gave Ubuntu the win for being preinstalled).
There was an old misunderstanding, i.e. "Windows hardware support is better..."
And a weird conclusion: "The very best thing about Ubuntu, in my opinion, is the fact that you can boot the CD and try it out in a totally non-destructive way"
Sorry, the very best thing about Ubuntu is not that you can use it without actually having to use it. The best thing is that you own it and control it. And, as a sidenote to that, you likely won't ever have to buy any new software (or hardware) ever again in your life.
On photo editing
"50-50 -- Vista for its Picture Gallery [> F-spot]; Ubuntu for having a better native image editor than Paint."
Now, maybe the Picture Gallery does edge out Fspot (I've never used it, but author says for example bulk import is backgrounded, and tagging scores of pics at once is easier) but is this comparable to how far Paint falls behind the gimp?
You have NO IDEA what the costs of running a broadband network are! You left out
...and a bunch of things I'm not allowed to talk about
-My $1.4 million salary
-$2 - $7 million/yr in campaign contributions
-Dozens of attorneys to sue Vonage out of existence
Mateo LeFou, CEO, Verizon/AT&T
"is now seen as mostly fighting to make people refer to a free system as GNU/Linux..."
If he's seen that way it's inaccurate. rms is as cogent as he's ever been, and still tackles large, complicated issues.
Someone said Moglen is the Thomas Jefferson of the information age, and I'm inclined to agree.
I'm neither a very capable nor very willing advocate for communism. I posit certain things as a corrective to the idyllic vision of capitalist that prevails in this thread -- and in America -- that says, in essence.
Capitalism is where you get paid to work, and communism is where you get paid whether or not you work.
In reality, the difference lies in the control of the means of production. Private ownserhip of these is very
efficient, because the owners respond to market sigals to maximize their profit. But this isn't a perfect system.
In a nutshell I think it's imperfect because established capitalistic powers *shape the market as well as respond to it. In certain cases -- two examples might be American mass media and automobile industries -- it is easier (read "more profitable") to tell people what they want rather than listen to them. Same old TV, same old inefficient cars. I could go into more detail, but you can probably infer what I'm implying about the public opportunity cost of letting private entities decide what kinds of cars are available and what is broadcast on the airwaves.
The foregoing does *not mean I think communism is "the answer". It's quite imperfect, for reasons you suggest. It is very difficult to calculate "top-down" what the best way to allocate productive capacity is. So many factors are involved that the distributed intelligence of a freely-developing market system works much better in many cases.
A single example, though: where the item in question is "information" the ability of a private "producer" to capture all the benefit in the form of compensation is severely hampered. Public goods are, briefly, just *not provided most efficiently by private production in response to market signals. This is why most economies are mixed.
"I don't know of a legal position where licensing a tool gives the tool's vendor rights in perpetuity to the work produced therewith"
My straw man was little more than a hasty synopsis of the theory of surplus labor, which I assume you're familiar with. If the employee gets paid an amount corresponding to the value heshe produces, there is no possibility of profit for the employer.
>> If you reduce government to its most basic level (that of the family), would you still argue that interference by the decision-makers cannot solve problems?
>This is a fallacious argument, because government did not develop from the family unit.
The origins of government notwithstanding, GP's point is that cooperative *governance -- as a concept -- is a perfectly legitimate way of solving problems. As human institutions, they have the potential for corruption and that's why civilization is an ongoing project.
As for your contentions that e.g., "Communism, by definition, is based on government intervention" you're just incorrect. Communism by definition is based on public ownership of the means of production, and democratic processes about how to best utilize those.
Picture yourself at an auction. You have no money, that's okay because at this auction it's not a *given that your only role is "consumer". You've got talent, and could create a great deal of value for yourself and others if you only had a paintbrush and canvas. Alas, these items have been monopolized through a cooperative pact between the wealthy and the auction house. They will allow you to use them but you have to give them a share (or the bulk) of the eventual sale price, forever.
Modern communism is not about how terriblehorrible this situation is, but about the fact that it is long-term untenable and does not allocate the means of production in an efficient manner. I think this is true w/r/t some sectors of industry, though not all.
I don't think I'm a commie troll, but I think that at least part of your objection applies to capitalist systems as well.
If I were playing devil's advocate I might say "capitalism cannot possibly work the way its designers envisioned because they didn't take corporate nature into account." For example, there is a tendency in corporocracy to treat *everything as a transaction and *everything as property (see for example "intellectual property", the privatization of drinking water, etc).
I think the fact that corporations have co-opted our ostensibly democratic government so thoroughly is almost as serious an indictment of capitalism as the corrupted Party's betrayal of basic democratic principles in the Reddish parts of the world.
Just thinking aloud, really.
"It's going to reach the point where no software company in america will be able to create anything original at all"
I agree. This will almost certainly happen by 1998, and definitely by 2001
These guys seem cool and all, but dude, get a proofreadery
"distributing Data, Information and Intelligence. A development that should not be dependent upon the whimp of a few very affluant and powerfull entities."
http://www.gravityzoo.com/developers/openSource.p
...for clinching the decision on whether I need to boycott Samsung. I've had one of their DVD players for a couple years now and it's a bunch of ass.
At least according to US copyright law, raw data does not contain the expressive component necessary for copyrights.
From the complaint:
"Alexa seeks to force Mr. Hornbaker to stop infringing Alexa's trademarks and to stop pirating Alexa proprietary data."
I don't know exactly what Alexa does, but the only thing protectable in a database is its *design and *structure -- and that only if those attributes exhibit creativity (rather than the ordinary constraints of the relational model).
Not that I hold out hope that this will be the salvation of the world, but combine this stuff with e.g. fora.tv and you're halfway to a genuine "pull" technology mass media infrastructure
Could someone build at least one world in which you purchase "land" based on the power/CPU requirements of the land, rather than its (virtual) area.
The "necessity" of getting a return on your per-square-meter fees causes SL to be overtaken by casinos and brothels. Make the fee dependent on something of actual economic value.
Just thinking aloud, don't have time to do it myself
I was afraid it might be a philanthropic effort, which BG and friends are moderately-good at. Thankfully it's a business, which they suck at.*
*footnote: that is to say, businesses in which they cannot leverage a pre-existing monopoly on the desktop. Like e.g. new PC deployments in third world countries.
"Don't worry, here in Europe the Micro$oft brainwash is even stronger."
It might be more aggressive, but signs (even those old signs) indicate it's not as effective. I think the reason's pretty obvious.
You could conceivably be talked into believing that "what's good for Microsoft is good for America" but Spain?
Also: check out India, China, and Brazil. Fascinating places...
"Why does the music industry feel it should tamper with the education of our minors just to placate some facile legal action?"
Dude, get a clue: these are *pirates, they don't care about education. All they care about is stealing, stealing, stealing other people's intellectual property.
If anything is tampering with their education, it's the alien viruses in their brains, which impel them to download our songs for *nothing, thereby descrating our intellectual property. The same intellectual property provided for in the Constitution, section IV, which says
"Intellectual property rocks. We should have lots of it."
The "nobody's getting fired for going MS" mentality overlooks something important:
Most of the world doesn't agree. When your bosses discover that the global market is five times bigger than the American one (I've adjusted population ratio to account for the much wider availability of the net in the US), and that those durn foreigners won't just play ball and buy Office, a lot of execs are going to have to make tough decisions.
I forget where, but I believe it described devs who build to the standards, then go through the "fsck it up in the ways that IE likes" process.
Class action, anyone?
Export to ODF. I suspect one of the billion or so people who don't think Office is God's Gift to Whomever will figure out how to go ODF->pdf, or ->flash, or ->DHTML, or something even better.
Sorry, I can't resist a dig at that stupid concept.
If your OS is *disgustingly, *alarmingly inefficient with resources, you can stick a thumbdrive in it and cross your fingers that the email you just spent half an hour typing on will go through.
In other news if your car gets 1.4 miles per gallon, you can drive around with a few 50-gallon drums of gasoline to get you through out of those tight spots.
"Have you every tried to submit a resume in .txt format? Most everyone wants a Word file (.doc). Some will take a PDF, but Word is the preferred format"
.doc to humor them. But that hasn't happened yet.
What rubbish. If they think you're good for the job, all they want is the *information in the resume. I've sent plain text, often inlined in an email. I've also sent HTML versions when I wanted to control the layout a bit more.
Naturally if they kick and scream ("how the hell do I open an HTML file?") I'll export a
"Either conform or forget about getting a job."
Thanks, I'm actually doing fine in that department.
"This is a situation that validates the failure in our constitution and the degradation of political system. Lobbyists should not be allowed in government for a company that has a monopoly on a market. If Microsoft wants to have the governments use Microsoft products, they should donate them to the government and get a tax writeoff for it. I should not have to pay taxes so government employees can use substandard expensive software."
... what was the hilarious position of Citizens Against Government Waste (*against open formats in Massachussets)?
I forget
I send .txt files through email whenever I can't just inline the stuff. No one's complained yet; I assume people who use windows are easily opening these in Word or WordPad or lol Works