Socialism isn't Commnunism, and Communism isn't marxism. Furthermore, socialism isn't marxism. ESR's view on socialism, marxism, etc. is WAY too extreme. The terms "marxist" and "socialist" are used regularly in the academic world to describe things that have NOTHING to do with Communist governments.
If I understand correctly, socialism is much like the Norwegian system. People view themselves as members of a community, and they make policy accordingly. And from what I understand, it seems to be reasonably effective. If any.no folks want to comment on this, I'd enjoy reading their posts.
So, is the Norwegian government as evil as the Nazi Germany? ESR seems to think so. And if he denies it, then his original statement suffers from the same pretentious and simplistic flaws that infest "The Cathedral and the Bazzar".
Libertarianism is, in my view, just as dangerous as communism is. There was a time when America was free of "big government" and stupid regulations. it was the late 19th century, when American cities were extremely corrupt and machine rule was commonplace. Businesses essentially compelled children to work to work for peanuts. Grown men worked for slightly more. And the term "peanuts" is actually far too generous here. The average American lived in squalid poverty while greedy businesses and crooked politicians exploited their misfortune.
Big Government restricts what we can do, but it also protects us from our own apathy, greed, and ignorance. Would we even have computers and the Internet without a federally funded university system? How many of you attend/attended college on federal Stafford loans?
The libertarians want to have their cake and eat it too. They grew up and live in a time of unprecidented prosperity, but they can't leave well enough alone. They want the benefits and security that government provides, but they don't want taxes and restrictions.
Government should not be trusted. We should always scrutinize what the government does, and we should not delude ourselves into ignoring it's faults. But we must look before we leap, and we must balance social responsibility with the preservation of personal autonomy. ESR's libertarianism is just plain irresponsible.
Sorry for spelling poorly. And I'm sorry for writing such a long post and for inevitably irritating some people. Some things just piss you off and you've gotta tell someone about it.
"what i'd like to see is someone tackling a truely significant problem. like programming a computer to be able to vaccume your house."
They already have made robots that sweep/mop/vaccum/whatever floors as well as people can. The problem is that it's still cheaper to pay a person to do it.
Having a robo-slave would be cool, though. You could have it do yardwork, cook dinner, clean the house, all sorts of stuff. But I think that the advent of robots that can do "people work" will raise all sorts of ethical issues -- for instance, robots do manual labor as well as people can for longer hours and for less money, then think about all the people that could be put out of work.
We won't have to worry about that for a while, though.
If Windows NT is as good as Microsoft says it is then it seems to me they'd want to use it on their Hotmail service. The last time I checked, www.hotmail.com was running Apache and FreeBSD.
Seriously, I'm too cynical to believe that the Congress will do much of anything for computer geeks. Technology changes very quickly, and Congress and the court system are both INCREDIBLY slow. In order to write relevant polciy governing computers, the computer industry, and such, you have to have a degree of foresight. This is where Congress REALLY fails. There is an election every two years and the parties are both trying to get/keep their guys in office. So all they really care about is the nearest election. Obviously, we can't really count on them to do anything. Any we can't count on industry to look out for us either, because all industry leaders care about is making money for their shareholders.
That's why I think Free Software is so cool -- it empowers people to take care of themselves. Of course, it won't help us fight spam, but eventually high quality free software might provide all users with an alternative to crappy software.
I saw that on a Jackie Chan movie. I think it was Operation Condor. He used it to escape from some ancient tribe who tried to make him marry a really ugly woman. Take care, Steve
I wish Netscape would allow you to automatically enable and disable certain features depending on what domain you are visiting.
For instance, JavaScript could always be enabled EXCEPT when visiting a Geocities site. And cookies could always be refused except when visiting a webmail site that requires them, or something.
My first linux installation was maybe a year ago. I created a root and a swap partition on my second HD and installed RedHat 5.0 in 30 minutes with the help of a Sams Learn Linux in 24 Hours book I got for $15.
I'm not a pimped-out software developer like a lot of people who post, but I still got it to work. In fact, for about a month, whenever I had a problem it was always faster and easier to reinstall the OS than to try to fix the problem (yes I was a real dumbass). Maybe he should have tried OpenLinux 2.3, Red Hat, or Mandrake.
KDE has something that I think is similar to what you describe. You right-click on the desktop, and then you can select an option called "Execute Command" or something like that. This will give you a little text-entry field where you type in whatever command you want to use. Unfortunately, I can't get it to display the output in a window, so if I type a command like "ps -A |grep wine" I can't read the output. There may be a way to do this, but I haven't fooled with it enough to figure it out.
In the old days, people had to physically send printed (or written) documents to people. This is inherently inconvenient, so they didn't send stuff out unless it was pretty important. When in doubt, don't send it. Now that it's so easy just to e-mail a word processor file to someone or post a PDF on the Internet, people post and send stuff much more often, simply because it's easier. So now it's when in doubt, send it, post it, whatever.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't like reading off of computer monitors. Some people complain that it's harder on the eyes. Personally, I think it's easier to proofread a printed copy of a document than to proofread what's on the screen. In the old days, when everything was paper, they had less to read. But now that people are swamped with web pages, PDFs e-mail messages, and so on, the people who'd rather read it on paper have a lot to print out and use a lot of paper to do so. And computers were supposed to bring us a paper-free office, too.
"Well if you dont like using linux/unix then dont use it." I do like Linux and I do use it.
You assume that making Linux easier to use hurts advanced users. That simply isn't true. Sure, you can have GNOME or KDE, and a lot of cute desktop themes installed on your system, but you can also strip that away if you want and just work from twm or even the console. Making linux a point-and-click, drag-and-drop OS doesn't involve crippling what's already there -- you'd just need to add something like GNOME or KDE (but a more mature version of GNOME or KDE that what we've currently got).
Ease of use depends on developers' willingness to adopt standards. RPM files are great, but not everyone distributes them. KDE provides a drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste desktop environment, but not all developers make their software KDE (or GNOME) compliant.
X Windows is a good example of what I'm trying to say. Software makers know that just about everyone using a Linux GUI has X installed, so software is X compliant. If KDE (or GNOME) and RPM become as standard as X, then software will begin to support those features. And if you don't like it, you can always run from the console.
"We are giving up speed and relibilaty for eye candy."
Eye Candy is the stupid talking paper clip in Office 97. Drag-and-drop environments enable busy people to get small jobs done quickly. To many users, that is worth the loss of speed. Besides, in Linux you can disable the stuff you don't like, so NO ONE IS GIVING UP ANYTHING.
"But for some dumb reson alot of linux people feel we need to make Linux a one size fits all OS."
No one wants Linux to be a one-size-fits-all OS. That implies that you have an operating system that is rigid and impossible to customize which is trying to do a little bit of everything. But this is certainly not the case. Linux users get to choose what they want and what they don't. Giving users more choice DOESN'T HURT ANYBODY because if you don't like something, you don't have to install it.
Making linux easier certainly makes it more marketable, but it also makes its users more productive people. People should have the option of installing features that make Linux easier to use. If you're an advanced user, you should get to disable the stuff that gets in your way.
In defense of the Microsoft guy (let the flames begin), installing Linux software is pretty messy if you are used to Mac and Windows software. To install a Windows app, all you do is click setup.exe and agree to the EULA. Everything else is done for you. Nobody reads manuals because they consist of crap like "Now let's learn how to use the mouse."
Linux users, of course, don't have it so easily. You have to deal with downloading libraries, extracting stuff from tarballs, fooling with gcc, and so on. Reading documentation is a necessary part of the Linux culture, and Linux users have accepted the complications as part of the package.
Unfortunately, we live in a point-and-click, plug-and-play world, and most people have different expectations of what computers should be like. Most computer users are not programmers, and they don't want to learn how to do anything complicated. The doctors and lawyers and teachers and car mechanics and whoever else demand SIMPLICITY, so they can continue to go about their daily lives.
You can't even expect programmers to part with this "I don't wanna fool it" mentality. I got my first exposure to UNIX in a CS course, and I got my first Linux CD from a CS professor. However, it's possible to go through college, major in CS, and graduate without having touched UNIX at all. I've taken courses at three colleges, and only one of them used UNIX in CS courses.
I guess my point is that the guy calling tech support represents most of the computer using public and that Windows 95 and the Mac OS set the standard for ease of use. People are beginning to demand that from Linux, and if it can't deliver, it's the fault of the OS, and not the user.
Take care,
Steve
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a supporter of Microsoft and am writing this from my Linux workstation.
I think that, at some point, giving in to these people will legitimize malicious cracking in the eyes of many. This will only lead to more cracking attempts, and the more people there are trying to crack systems, the more likely a given system is to fall.
Furthermore, this is bad because banks depend heavily on the trust of regular people. Since they take the money you deposit into your savings account and loan it out, making money on the interest the borrowers must pay, it isn't good for the bank if too many people lose faith at once and come for their savings.
I wouldn't feel good about having my money in a bank that gives in to the demands of script kiddies.:-)
I don't know much about IRC and big-time servers, so I won't comment on that. I do think that his conclusion that Linux will shine in the low-end desktop market is a bit far-fetched. Here's my thinking.
In order to have a good desktop system that my mother and grandmother can use, you're gonna need a GUI that allows drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, standardized widgets and stuff ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE. I think the only way to do this is to have these features built into the X Windows. GNOME and KDE just won't cut it. Furthermore, there should be some way to force software makers into supporting this native desktop environment.
You're also going to have to do something with fonts and printing. There should be one centralized place to dump your fonts, and any font that X can display should work with your printer too. Of course, TrueType fonts should be natively supported.
Device support is still a major concern. Something should be done to provide a standard software interface for printers, modems, scanners, digital cameras, and the like. Scanners are pretty cheap these days, and digital cameras are coming down in price too, so it's possible that a low-end computer would need to support them in the near future. Even cheap-o devices (in fact, especially the cheap-o devices) should work reliably with Linux.
These are just some of the problems that need to be worked out before Dvorak's predicition of Linux on the desktop can be taken seriously.
For what it is worth, below is a link to a webcam showing footage of Myrtle Beach. The storm hasn't hit us (yep, I'm in SC) yet, and y'all see the same weather reports as I do, so I can't really say much else. Take care,
What do you need to do to move to the Netherlands?:-)
I am from South Carolina, one of the States who sold DL photos to this company, so might be able to say something. The US Congress passed a law that banned states from selling DL info to companies. Then our State Attorney General, Charlie Condon (Republican, for what it's worth), claiming that Congress had no authority to pass such a law. You see, we have no Constitutional right to privacy and Congress has limited power over the State governments.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Condon: we have no right to privacy and Congress can't do anything about it without passing a Constitutional Amendment. Needless to say, the law was thrown out. Shortly afterwards, the SC government sold millions of DL photos to this company for something like $2000 or $5000. It's totally legal and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
I would LOVE to run Linux on Apple Hardware. A G3 or G4 dual boot machine would do just about anything and look good too. Here's something I don't get. The Macs I've used all had one-button mice, but X Windows seems to require 2 buttons (with a third being really useful.) How do Apple+Linux users get around this? Do you have to reconfigure X or is there some sort of emulation via keyboard commands? Furthermore if you get a two or three button mouse does this solve problems or create them? Later, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Socialism isn't Commnunism, and Communism isn't marxism. Furthermore, socialism isn't marxism. ESR's view on socialism, marxism, etc. is WAY too extreme. The terms "marxist" and "socialist" are used regularly in the academic world to describe things that have NOTHING to do with Communist governments.
.no folks want to comment on this, I'd enjoy reading their posts.
If I understand correctly, socialism is much like the Norwegian system. People view themselves as members of a community, and they make policy accordingly. And from what I understand, it seems to be reasonably effective. If any
So, is the Norwegian government as evil as the Nazi Germany? ESR seems to think so. And if he denies it, then his original statement suffers from the same pretentious and simplistic flaws that infest "The Cathedral and the Bazzar".
Libertarianism is, in my view, just as dangerous as communism is. There was a time when America was free of "big government" and stupid regulations. it was the late 19th century, when American cities were extremely corrupt and machine rule was commonplace. Businesses essentially compelled children to work to work for peanuts. Grown men worked for slightly more. And the term "peanuts" is actually far too generous here. The average American lived in squalid poverty while greedy businesses and crooked politicians exploited their misfortune.
Big Government restricts what we can do, but it also protects us from our own apathy, greed, and ignorance. Would we even have computers and the Internet without a federally funded university system? How many of you attend/attended college on federal Stafford loans?
The libertarians want to have their cake and eat it too. They grew up and live in a time of unprecidented prosperity, but they can't leave well enough alone. They want the benefits and security that government provides, but they don't want taxes and restrictions.
Government should not be trusted. We should always scrutinize what the government does, and we should not delude ourselves into ignoring it's faults. But we must look before we leap, and we must balance social responsibility with the preservation of personal autonomy. ESR's libertarianism is just plain irresponsible.
Sorry for spelling poorly. And I'm sorry for writing such a long post and for inevitably irritating some people. Some things just piss you off and you've gotta tell someone about it.
Take care,
Steve
"what i'd like to see is someone tackling a truely significant problem. like programming a computer to be able to vaccume your house."
They already have made robots that sweep/mop/vaccum/whatever floors as well as people can. The problem is that it's still cheaper to pay a person to do it.
Having a robo-slave would be cool, though. You could have it do yardwork, cook dinner, clean the house, all sorts of stuff. But I think that the advent of robots that can do "people work" will raise all sorts of ethical issues -- for instance, robots do manual labor as well as people can for longer hours and for less money, then think about all the people that could be put out of work.
We won't have to worry about that for a while, though.
Take care,
Steve
If Windows NT is as good as Microsoft says it is then it seems to me they'd want to use it on their Hotmail service. The last time I checked, www.hotmail.com was running Apache and FreeBSD.
You can see for yourself at http://www.netcraft.com/whats/
Take care,
Steve
Seriously, I'm too cynical to believe that the Congress will do much of anything for computer geeks. Technology changes very quickly, and Congress and the court system are both INCREDIBLY slow. In order to write relevant polciy governing computers, the computer industry, and such, you have to have a degree of foresight. This is where Congress REALLY fails. There is an election every two years and the parties are both trying to get/keep their guys in office. So all they really care about is the nearest election. Obviously, we can't really count on them to do anything. Any we can't count on industry to look out for us either, because all industry leaders care about is making money for their shareholders.
That's why I think Free Software is so cool -- it empowers people to take care of themselves. Of course, it won't help us fight spam, but eventually high quality free software might provide all users with an alternative to crappy software.
Take care,
Steve
"Any insiders out there reading /.?"
If Washington insiders read Slashdot, we'd be a lot better off right now. No software patents, looser encryption laws, who knows what else.
take care,
Steve
I saw that on a Jackie Chan movie. I think it was Operation Condor. He used it to escape from some ancient tribe who tried to make him marry a really ugly woman. Take care, Steve
I wish Netscape would allow you to automatically enable and disable certain features depending on what domain you are visiting.
For instance, JavaScript could always be enabled EXCEPT when visiting a Geocities site. And cookies could always be refused except when visiting a webmail site that requires them, or something.
And I agree about the autoload image button.
Take care,
Steve
My first linux installation was maybe a year ago. I created a root and a swap partition on my second HD and installed RedHat 5.0 in 30 minutes with the help of a Sams Learn Linux in 24 Hours book I got for $15.
I'm not a pimped-out software developer like a lot of people who post, but I still got it to work. In fact, for about a month, whenever I had a problem it was always faster and easier to reinstall the OS than to try to fix the problem (yes I was a real dumbass). Maybe he should have tried OpenLinux 2.3, Red Hat, or Mandrake.
Take care,
Steve
KDE has something that I think is similar to what you describe. You right-click on the desktop, and then you can select an option called "Execute Command" or something like that. This will give you a little text-entry field where you type in whatever command you want to use. Unfortunately, I can't get it to display the output in a window, so if I type a command like "ps -A |grep wine" I can't read the output. There may be a way to do this, but I haven't fooled with it enough to figure it out.
Take care,
Steve
In the old days, people had to physically send printed (or written) documents to people. This is inherently inconvenient, so they didn't send stuff out unless it was pretty important. When in doubt, don't send it. Now that it's so easy just to e-mail a word processor file to someone or post a PDF on the Internet, people post and send stuff much more often, simply because it's easier. So now it's when in doubt, send it, post it, whatever.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't like reading off of computer monitors. Some people complain that it's harder on the eyes. Personally, I think it's easier to proofread a printed copy of a document than to proofread what's on the screen. In the old days, when everything was paper, they had less to read. But now that people are swamped with web pages, PDFs e-mail messages, and so on, the people who'd rather read it on paper have a lot to print out and use a lot of paper to do so.
And computers were supposed to bring us a paper-free office, too.
Take care,
Steve
"Well if you dont like using linux/unix then dont use it." I do like Linux and I do use it.
You assume that making Linux easier to use hurts advanced users. That simply isn't true. Sure, you can have GNOME or KDE, and a lot of cute desktop themes installed on your system, but you can also strip that away if you want and just work from twm or even the console. Making linux a point-and-click, drag-and-drop OS doesn't involve crippling what's already there -- you'd just need to add something like GNOME or KDE (but a more mature version of GNOME or KDE that what we've currently got).
Ease of use depends on developers' willingness to adopt standards. RPM files are great, but not everyone distributes them. KDE provides a drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste desktop environment, but not all developers make their software KDE (or GNOME) compliant.
X Windows is a good example of what I'm trying to say. Software makers know that just about everyone using a Linux GUI has X installed, so software is X compliant. If KDE (or GNOME) and RPM become as standard as X, then software will begin to support those features. And if you don't like it, you can always run from the console.
"We are giving up speed and relibilaty for eye candy."
Eye Candy is the stupid talking paper clip in Office 97. Drag-and-drop environments enable busy people to get small jobs done quickly. To many users, that is worth the loss of speed. Besides, in Linux you can disable the stuff you don't like, so NO ONE IS GIVING UP ANYTHING.
"But for some dumb reson alot of linux people feel we need to make Linux a one size fits all OS."
No one wants Linux to be a one-size-fits-all OS. That implies that you have an operating system that is rigid and impossible to customize which is trying to do a little bit of everything. But this is certainly not the case. Linux users get to choose what they want and what they don't. Giving users more choice DOESN'T HURT ANYBODY because if you don't like something, you don't have to install it.
Making linux easier certainly makes it more marketable, but it also makes its users more productive people. People should have the option of installing features that make Linux easier to use. If you're an advanced user, you should get to disable the stuff that gets in your way.
Gotta go,
Steve
In defense of the Microsoft guy (let the flames begin), installing Linux software is pretty messy if you are used to Mac and Windows software. To install a Windows app, all you do is click setup.exe and agree to the EULA. Everything else is done for you. Nobody reads manuals because they consist of crap like "Now let's learn how to use the mouse."
Linux users, of course, don't have it so easily. You have to deal with downloading libraries, extracting stuff from tarballs, fooling with gcc, and so on. Reading documentation is a necessary part of the Linux culture, and Linux users have accepted the complications as part of the package.
Unfortunately, we live in a point-and-click, plug-and-play world, and most people have different expectations of what computers should be like. Most computer users are not programmers, and they don't want to learn how to do anything complicated. The doctors and lawyers and teachers and car mechanics and whoever else demand SIMPLICITY, so they can continue to go about their daily lives.
You can't even expect programmers to part with this "I don't wanna fool it" mentality. I got my first exposure to UNIX in a CS course, and I got my first Linux CD from a CS professor. However, it's possible to go through college, major in CS, and graduate without having touched UNIX at all. I've taken courses at three colleges, and only one of them used UNIX in CS courses.
I guess my point is that the guy calling tech support represents most of the computer using public and that Windows 95 and the Mac OS set the standard for ease of use. People are beginning to demand that from Linux, and if it can't deliver, it's the fault of the OS, and not the user.
Take care,
Steve
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a supporter of Microsoft and am writing this from my Linux workstation.
I think that, at some point, giving in to these people will legitimize malicious cracking in the eyes of many. This will only lead to more cracking attempts, and the more people there are trying to crack systems, the more likely a given system is to fall.
:-)
Furthermore, this is bad because banks depend heavily on the trust of regular people. Since they take the money you deposit into your savings account and loan it out, making money on the interest the borrowers must pay, it isn't good for the bank if too many people lose faith at once and come for their savings.
I wouldn't feel good about having my money in a bank that gives in to the demands of script kiddies.
Take care,
Steve
I don't know much about IRC and big-time servers, so I won't comment on that. I do think that his conclusion that Linux will shine in the low-end desktop market is a bit far-fetched. Here's my thinking.
In order to have a good desktop system that my mother and grandmother can use, you're gonna need a GUI that allows drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, standardized widgets and stuff ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE. I think the only way to do this is to have these features built into the X Windows. GNOME and KDE just won't cut it. Furthermore, there should be some way to force software makers into supporting this native desktop environment.
You're also going to have to do something with fonts and printing. There should be one centralized place to dump your fonts, and any font that X can display should work with your printer too. Of course, TrueType fonts should be natively supported.
Device support is still a major concern. Something should be done to provide a standard software interface for printers, modems, scanners, digital cameras, and the like. Scanners are pretty cheap these days, and digital cameras are coming down in price too, so it's possible that a low-end computer would need to support them in the near future. Even cheap-o devices (in fact, especially the cheap-o devices) should work reliably with Linux.
These are just some of the problems that need to be worked out before Dvorak's predicition of Linux on the desktop can be taken seriously.
Gotta go eat dinner now. Take care,
Steve
For what it is worth, below is a link to a webcam showing footage of Myrtle Beach. The storm hasn't hit us (yep, I'm in SC) yet, and y'all see the same weather reports as I do, so I can't really say much else. Take care,
m s/pavilion/
Steve
http://www.gocarolinas.com/travel/beach/beachca
What do you need to do to move to the Netherlands? :-)
I am from South Carolina, one of the States who sold DL photos to this company, so might be able to say something. The US Congress passed a law that banned states from selling DL info to companies. Then our State Attorney General, Charlie Condon (Republican, for what it's worth), claiming that Congress had no authority to pass such a law. You see, we have no Constitutional right to privacy and Congress has limited power over the State governments.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Condon: we have no right to privacy and Congress can't do anything about it without passing a Constitutional Amendment. Needless to say, the law was thrown out. Shortly afterwards, the SC government sold millions of DL photos to this company for something like $2000 or $5000. It's totally legal and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Take care,
Steve
I would LOVE to run Linux on Apple Hardware. A G3 or G4 dual boot machine would do just about anything and look good too. Here's something I don't get. The Macs I've used all had one-button mice, but X Windows seems to require 2 buttons (with a third being really useful.) How do Apple+Linux users get around this? Do you have to reconfigure X or is there some sort of emulation via keyboard commands? Furthermore if you get a two or three button mouse does this solve problems or create them? Later, Steve