Capitalism vs Corporatism
Saturday 29 May 2010, 07:52 WST —
I’ve come across a tweet recently from PoisonTheMonkey, about the current BP abomination:
This is what capitalism looks like: http://tumblr.com/xevam3dx2
It’s a disturbing image, and I agree with what she is trying to say, except for her usage of the word “capitalism”. From wikipedia:
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned; supply, demand and price are mostly set by market forces rather than economic planning; and profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses. Capitalism also refers to the process of capital accumulation.
It continues with “There is however no consensus on the definition of capitalism, nor how it should be used as an analytical category.”
So pretty much it seems to be a very general word that actually covers a few things, and that’s the problem. Capitalism shouldn’t be a dirty word, there’s nothing inherit in capitalism that means companies should get away with killing flora and fauna. It just means that people and buy and sell stuff they own.
The problem is that we are under a system of corporatism, now I will fully admit corporatism is a capitalist system, but it’s not the capitalism of the system that is causing the problem, it’s the fact the governments of the world give favour to companies/corporations. So I feel PoisonTheMonkey’s statement is actually blaming the wrong thing.
She’s not being malicious at all, she knows the governments attitudes are the problem. What she is describing is what I understand as corporatism, so I would think that is a much better word to use to describe the problem.
As far as the BP situation goes, the American government should be stepping in, and making BP pay for a 100% clean up, until it’s fixed, or BP have no more money left. Corporations are all about profit, so if you make disasters like this cost them, they will make sure it’s fixed quickly and never happens again.
Moving from Windows to OSX
Monday 17 May 2010, 20:54 WST —
I’ve always liked developing software on a *nix based system, generally this means Linux, but I’ve recently been using OpenSolaris because, well, it’s better than Linux. Anyway, there has always been OSX, and I did used to own an iMac, which was nice.
However, it’s very hard to upgrade the video hardware in any Mac, besides the lovely, but very expensive MacPros. And as I do like gaming on my PC as well, it’s kinda something that is a bit important to me at times.
Anyway, I’ve managed to get OSX running on my PC hardware, there’s plenty of websites on how to go about it, so I’m not going to repeat them here, Google is your friend. So now I’m running OSX Snow Leopard, the only problem I seem to have is that I can’t enable my full 8GB of RAM, and I have to run at only 4GB. Besides that however, everything else seems to work just fine. Even my Geforce 295.
The only other problem is finding software that does certain tasks in a way that I’m used to on Windows, so I thought I would just mention a few in case it can help anyone else out.
Games
Steam has just come to the Mac, so I think that pretty much solves the problem for me. For the last few years, I have only ever used Steam to buy my PC games, and Valve’s recent support for Mac now means that I can do the same under OSX. With the added advantage that when I buy a copy for my PC, I get the Mac version for free. With the support of Steam, I’m hoping that the Mac will get some more support from game developers.
Music
This is a pretty important one for me, I pretty much always have music playing when I’m at my computer, so it’s important that I can at least have a music player that I can live with. On Windows, I always used Foobar as my music player of choice. It supports pretty much all music formats under the sun you could think of, it’s pretty customisable, and supports ReplayGain.
When it comes to OSX however, seriously, iTunes is probably the best option, all other music players just don’t seem as nice, which now gives me some problems.
No FLAC support
iTunes doesn’t (and probably never will, support FLAC properly. This actually isn’t much of a problem now. iTunes has always supported Apple Lossless, which, seems to me, produces a smaller file size than FLAC did. So basically I can recode all my FLAC files to Apple Lossless.
Now this has always been an option, so why wasn’t I using iTunes on the PC then? Well, because I also have an iPhone. If I did have my entire music collection in iTunes, I would need to keep two copies of tracks about. The lossless ones for playing on the desktop, and the lossy ones for syncing with my iPhone. However, the new version of iTunes (at least on OSX) now supports encoding of lossless to lossy when syncing. So now all I have to do is manually manage tracks to sync on my iPhone, but don’t have to keep two copies, and re-encode tracks I want to sync.
No replaygain support
This one is kinda important for me, ReplayGain addresses the issue of having a mixture of CDs that have been normalised to different levels, basically this is a problem when you have your music player set to random. You will some find some tracks are really quiet, so you’ll turn up the volume, and then it will switch to a much louder track, and you’ll be deafened.
iTunes does have support for pre-calculated volume adjustment, it’s called Soundcheck. However, the problem with Soundcheck, is that it does per-track normalisation, this is bad. On an album, say for example Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, you will find that with Soundcheck results in the volume of the tracks jumping all over the place. The volume should be normalised based over the whole album. iTunes does not support this…
However, with a bit of searching, I found iVolume. This program when set correctly, will calculate and set the Soundcheck setting so each track in an album is set to the same level. This means no jumping up and down in volume, and also that the normalisation will work across albums as well.
Well, that’s it for now.
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