apt-get is not recommended as versions of debians packages could conflict with identical versions of the rpms that are already installed or will be installed.
apt-get is available for SuSE, complete with corresponding (RPM) repositories. Although not officially supported, apt-get is even available on your CD. For more info (including repositories), e.g. look here. So the packages listed by the parent posters probably are indeed packages for SuSE 10.
You don't like the way things are handeled and you:
Option A: just do it your own way, without talking to the others involved, risking to break a lot of things. "Who cares, I do what I want to do..."
Option B: Start a discussion about what you don't like, trying to convince as many of the others involved as possible that the current system needs in your opinion to be reformed.
What you are essentially saying that one should go with option A, because B just shows how much you hate the others? Strange thinking...
Please bear in mind that Germany, France, et al. are the same countries that are trying, through the UN, to forcibly take control of the internet's root servers.
To forcibly take control? They are questioning the status quo and are trying to persuade the world that it should be handled differently. It is their right to do this, and there is no force involved.
Also, please note that the article has nothing to do with the states of France and Germany. It mentions two cell phone companies, SFR and Vodafone, which apparently decided to block VoIP on their respective networks.
The U.N. is comprised of many of these repressive anti-freedom regimes.
Well, at least as far as Germany and France are concerned, the "regimes" mentionend in the article are Vodafone and SFR, both cell phone providers. I can asure you that neither of them is member of the UN.
I work for a German company. The differences between me and my coworkers in Germany are striking. I don't get the vacations they do and I'm always the first to get laid off. They've had US employees for fifty years, but the "20 Year Employee" list consists solely of German names.
I don't doubt that. But still your German coworkers don't have a garanteed live time employment, which the original poster seemed to claim.
The German society values social security very high. That is why Germany has a very extensive social network and e.g. protects the workers from being fired very easily. Until not too long ago, it was deemed perfectly normal to start working at a company when you are young and stay with this company until you retire. But there never was a guarantee, and of course there were always companies laying off people. Germany was doing very well with this approach until the 80s, but in the last years one could also see the downside, namely that the system is probably too inflexible to adjust to growing international competition due to the globalised world. The fact that we have a bunch of countries with low labour costs right on our door step (Eastern Europe) also doesn't help. So, the society is changing, although somewhat reluctantly.
Or in an EU country like France or Germany, where workers get to enjoy lifetime employment (if they're able to get a job; given their high rate of unemployment, that's no sure thing) in exchange for a stagnant economy and a crushing tax burden.
Lifetime employment in German companies? I hope, this was ment to be another cliche, but this was is not apparent from your wording. It probably is more difficult to lay off workers in Germany (and companies say it is too difficult), but it is of course possible and happens frequently. You probably got confused by the fact that certain jobs offered by the state are indeed life time positions. But no company will grant you something like this.
europes insesant NEED to block out that they allowed millions of people to be killed right under their nose
You know, it's OK that you disagree that the use of Nazi symbols etc. is regulated in places like Germany. But please stop this bullshit that this is to suppress the knowledge that the Nazi era happened. Books, films, TV reports etc. about the Nazi times are abundant in Germany. You can get into problems if you publish articles DENYING that the holocaust ever happenend, or use Nazi symbols otherwise than in a historical, educational,... context (films, books, theater plays... about Nazi times). As I said, one can argue whether this is the right approach, but claiming this is done to prevent knowledge that the Nazi era is a historical fact just makes you look very uninformed.
The EU is so hot and fired up to wrench control of the intarweb from the US, so let THEM deal with it. If we can't be trusted with the DNS system, seems logical to me that the EU would be much better off orchestrating and paying for the upgrade to IPV6.
I can tell you who will pay for the upgrade to IPv6: the various organisations who run the network(s) - internet service providers, the various national scientific networks,... - and ultimately their customers. You somehow still seem to have this idea that the US built and paid for the internet as it is today and lets everybody else in the world just use it out of generosity.
While I might to some extent agree with the design part (although some unimportant protocols like http were designed elsewhere), my agreement stops when it comes to "we build it". I'm quite sure that the networks forming the internet were not build entirely by the US. For example the various national research/university networks in Europe were planned by the respective government agencies, and paid for by the respective tax payers. Still, everybody so far accepted some kind of supreme authority of the US when it came to handling the address space and the root servers. But just as much as the Europeans can not demand to gain control over the US part of the network(s), the US can not expect that everybody else on the planet forever accepts US supremacy when it comes to running their own networks. If the world outside the US decided to use an independent address space under the control of some international body, there is nothing taken away from the US that belongs to them, the Internet is a truly international conglomerate of networks.
Well, many countries that have special 'area codes' for mobiles also have number portability, but only for switching between different mobile providers. On the other hand, if you use standard area codes for your mobile phones, doesn't that mean you have to change your cell phone number when you are moving out of the area? If you have a separate numbering scheme for mobile phones, there is no need for that, because there is nothing that ties the number to a special region...
You guys in other countries may not know that here one can transfer a cell phone number to a land line and a land line to a cell phone.
Obviously you can't do that, but with some providers in Germany you can get an additional fixed line phone number for your mobile (or transfer your old land line number), and then people can call you on your mobile for land line prices. And you have the choice if you only want to be reachable with this number when you are at home (=1-2 km around the address you provided) or wherever you are. In the latter case you have to pay some fees for forwarding if you are outside your 'home zone'.
It's much more complicated and liberated than your closed systems.
It's neither, it's just different, and what is the better system depends on your preferences...
Maybe, but who makes that determination. My understanding is that Hitler believed he was really loved by the people and judging from the video recordings of his speeches many people did, or at least pretended to.
I did not mean to say that nobody really liked him. The Nazis surely had many followers (and he initially did get a lot of votes in a democratic election, despite being openly antidemocratic and antisemitic). Nevertheless, when somebody says that Hitler was a democratically elected leader, I feel the urge to point out that his rule in Germany was largly a dictatorship, with all the necessary ingredients: no other political parties, complete control of the press, political oponents prosecuted at will, a system of intimidation to stifle the desire for resistance... Of course you need a lot of devoted people to keep the system going.
Wasn't trying to defend Hitler at all, just wanted to point out that everything isn't always cut and dried. If you look on the other side of the coin, Stalin was as evil a dictator as Hitler. Should we not have included him in the Allies during WWII. Was it right to ally with him considering the tragedies that were occuring in his country?
Well, I think one can not blame anybody for the alliance with Stalin in that situation. And surely it does not really matter whether Hitler was democratically elected or not. The war against Nazi Germany was justified for the actions of their leadership alone, there was no other option (Hitler being elected or not).
Thanks for the link though, very interesting article.
I believe Adolph Hitler was a democratically elected leader.
Well, initially yes. But I think you lose the status of a 'democratic leader' once you start throwing your oponents into jail. You might want to read up a bit on it here.
Considering the follow-up sentence ("I would say that if anyone in the Linux market had the wherewithal to polish the Desktop, it would be Novell/SuSE."), I think my parsing was the correct one.
In GSM, it is theoretically impossible to have cell sizes larger than a few kilometers (I believe 16). There are working CDMA cells that provide commercial service and are 64 kilometers in radius. Boomer cells are planned now that are only limited by the curvature of the earth.
Normal GSM cells can have a radius of 35 km. It is also possible to extend the range of GSM cells to 70 km and more.
And this is different for GSM operators exactly how? In the US, the GSM deployments work this way too! There are no SIM cards in the US for any technology. This is a deliberate decision made by the operators.
As somebody else pointed out, this is not true. The GSM networks in the US also use SIM cards, and you can use any unlocked GSM phone that supports the US frequencies by simply slipping in your SIM card (and change as often as you like).
GSM started as a project by France Telecom's mobile phone subdivision and was created independently of the EU's directive. It was one of the standards considered by the various standards groups, and in the end was their choice.
Not quite. GSM was a group by CEPT (the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations). It was indeed independent of the EU's directive to reserve the 900 MHz band, because it was founded before (actually it seems that the directive was passed to allow this group finish its work). I just found a nice article about this here (PDF). (There are also some other articles about the creation of GSM.
The only geographic area where CDMA does not have a foothold is Western Europe (big surprise), where the various governments have passed rules to ban non-GSM technologies! Various operators who would otherwise have gladly chosen CDMA have been FORCED to adopt GSM.
In western Europe, many network operators started before the first CDMA standard existed. Nevertheless, it's true that the European states specifically handed out GSM licenses, which makes sense if you want to ensure interoperability between the networks in different countries. After all, one problem the (at that time) new generation of networks was supposed to solve was that many countries used incompatible standards.
The UN does not collect taxes on phone service, that I'm aware of, and I've looked a little bit during this discussion.
The fundamental discussion is about whether such essential things like the allocation of address space or the creation of TLDs in an international network should be the responsibility of an international organisation or if it should be controlled by one country alone. I personally would prefer the former. I see that the linked article also mentions the possibility of impossing an 'internet tax', which in my book is something completely unnecessary. But it's not like you can't have the former without the later. One should not take the most stupid suggestion made in relation with an international internet organisation as an argument to reject the whole thing in general. Of course the international organisation should have as few responsibilities as possible, but enough to make the decissions necessary to prevent the fragmentation of the network. That includes the assignment of address space and decissions about TLDs, but surely not any taxation powers or any decision about how the individual countries handle their TLDs.
Your analogy (and that of others) is flawed. It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines. Germans may have invented the concept but the engines used in American cars are built for those cars.
Just as well you can say that the US has developed the concept of the internet by developing most of the protocolls (although one of the main protocolls used by many people - http - was developed at CERN, if I'm not mistaken). People worldwide are not using the "American internet" (physically build by the US), but networks build by their own companies (or paid for by their own governments) which use the concept developed in the US. And because so far everybody agrees in accepting some US servers as authority when it comes to assigning addresses, it appears to be a world wide uniform network. But I surely hope you do not believe that the network connecting European universities, or the network bringing internet connections into European homes was build by the US, do you? To paraphrase you: The internet used in Europe was build by the Europeans.
If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes.
Since the hardware is already international, "building their own internet" essentially means to not accept the US root servers any more. If all countries other than the US decide to use an independent address system, they have their "own internet". Of course, that would be a major inconvinience for almost everybody, including many US companies.
Apples to oranges... The UN does not regulate phone service, mobile or otherwise. Why should it regulate the use of the Internet. It's a bad idea plain and simple.
Well, international phone service is in fact regulated by the International Telecommunication Union, which is "an international organization within the United Nations System" (quoted from their web site). To quote further:
"The Union was established last century as an impartial, international organization within which governments and the private sector could work together to coordinate the operation of telecommunication networks and services and advance the development of communications technology."
It sounds a lot like the telephone equivalent of what is suggested for the internet.
While not supporting it in the first place may be a different matter, withdrawing support now only supports the terrorists.
A large majority of the Spanish population never supported the war, not before, not during the war, not afterwards. They threw the government out of office on the first occasion they had. That sounds reasonable. Should they let terrorists influence their opinion and their vote?
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's a problem for KDE, but does Apple not have the right to do what they want with their patches?
Yes, and nobody is denying that, but this is not the point. The story is about the fact that KDE's KHTML and Apple's WebCore are nowadays pretty much separate in their development effort. So there is some disappointment in the KDE community. Sure it's their problem, and you could call them naive to hope that a big cooperation like Apple would collaborate with them, instead of just minding their own business. Again, nobody is claiming that Apple is doing something illegal, it's just that people hoped for more.
Europe could have used IS-54. But they didn't, they created an incompatible standard instead. This is why we didn't have much GSM in the US for a long time. Because the Europeans had made a standard with no backward compabitility. That didn't matter to them much because there were few analog phones in Europe. The US, on the other hand, had a fairly large installation of analog phones (I personally had a handheld analog phone before GSM even existed), in cars, contractor phones (dynaTACs) and bag phones.
The problem with backward compatibility in Europe would also have been, that - as I already said - there was not a single standard to which it one could try to be backwards compatible.
McCaw had TDMA up and running in the US in 1993 or 1994.
And GSM was going live (after one year delay) in 1992. The licenses were of course issued even earlier. And of course it is understandable that the European telecommunications industry did not just sit on their back and waited until some American company had something up and running (for which they probably would have had to pay licensing costs). I don't know the technical features of IS-54 and IS-95, their advantages and disadvantages with respect to GSM. But GSM was not just mandated by the governments, it was developed collaboratively by all involved parties (network manufacturers and network operators) with their needs in mind, specifically (for Europe) the importance of international roaming.
Anyway, like in all other cases, the government mandating certain standards has caused inefficiencies and restricted advances.
Actually, it caused a big market and low prices, causing Europe (at least for a long time) to have the most advanced mobile phone market in the world. If that is "restrictive and inefficient" for you, fine. I think the introduction of GSM was a huge success story.
No one had to mandate compatibility in the US, it came naturally. It would have in Europe also.
I don't know how the US market evolved. But if 15 states in Europe each issued 1 or 2 national licenses without specifying the technology, I somehow doubt that compatibility across Europe would have evolved naturally. If there really were other standards available in 1990 which would have been as good as GSM, you would have ended up with some countries using GSM and some countries using the other option - and you could not just go from one to the other and take your phone with you...
Slashdot Mirror
apt-get is not recommended as versions of debians packages could conflict with identical versions of the rpms that are already installed or will be installed.
apt-get is available for SuSE, complete with corresponding (RPM) repositories. Although not officially supported, apt-get is even available on your CD. For more info (including repositories), e.g. look here. So the packages listed by the parent posters probably are indeed packages for SuSE 10.
Sooo...
You don't like the way things are handeled and you:
Option A: just do it your own way, without talking to the others involved, risking to break a lot of things. "Who cares, I do what I want to do..."
Option B: Start a discussion about what you don't like, trying to convince as many of the others involved as possible that the current system needs in your opinion to be reformed.
What you are essentially saying that one should go with option A, because B just shows how much you hate the others? Strange thinking...
Please bear in mind that Germany, France, et al. are the same countries that are trying, through the UN, to forcibly take control of the internet's root servers.
To forcibly take control? They are questioning the status quo and are trying to persuade the world that it should be handled differently. It is their right to do this, and there is no force involved.
Also, please note that the article has nothing to do with the states of France and Germany. It mentions two cell phone companies, SFR and Vodafone, which apparently decided to block VoIP on their respective networks.
The U.N. is comprised of many of these repressive anti-freedom regimes.
Well, at least as far as Germany and France are concerned, the "regimes" mentionend in the article are Vodafone and SFR, both cell phone providers. I can asure you that neither of them is member of the UN.
I work for a German company. The differences between me and my coworkers in Germany are striking. I don't get the vacations they do and I'm always the first to get laid off. They've had US employees for fifty years, but the "20 Year Employee" list consists solely of German names.
I don't doubt that. But still your German coworkers don't have a garanteed live time employment, which the original poster seemed to claim.
The German society values social security very high. That is why Germany has a very extensive social network and e.g. protects the workers from being fired very easily. Until not too long ago, it was deemed perfectly normal to start working at a company when you are young and stay with this company until you retire. But there never was a guarantee, and of course there were always companies laying off people. Germany was doing very well with this approach until the 80s, but in the last years one could also see the downside, namely that the system is probably too inflexible to adjust to growing international competition due to the globalised world. The fact that we have a bunch of countries with low labour costs right on our door step (Eastern Europe) also doesn't help. So, the society is changing, although somewhat reluctantly.
Or in an EU country like France or Germany, where workers get to enjoy lifetime employment (if they're able to get a job; given their high rate of unemployment, that's no sure thing) in exchange for a stagnant economy and a crushing tax burden.
Lifetime employment in German companies? I hope, this was ment to be another cliche, but this was is not apparent from your wording. It probably is more difficult to lay off workers in Germany (and companies say it is too difficult), but it is of course possible and happens frequently. You probably got confused by the fact that certain jobs offered by the state are indeed life time positions. But no company will grant you something like this.
europes insesant NEED to block out that they allowed millions of people to be killed right under their nose
You know, it's OK that you disagree that the use of Nazi symbols etc. is regulated in places like Germany. But please stop this bullshit that this is to suppress the knowledge that the Nazi era happened. Books, films, TV reports etc. about the Nazi times are abundant in Germany. You can get into problems if you publish articles DENYING that the holocaust ever happenend, or use Nazi symbols otherwise than in a historical, educational,... context (films, books, theater plays... about Nazi times). As I said, one can argue whether this is the right approach, but claiming this is done to prevent knowledge that the Nazi era is a historical fact just makes you look very uninformed.
The EU is so hot and fired up to wrench control of the intarweb from the US, so let THEM deal with it. If we can't be trusted with the DNS system, seems logical to me that the EU would be much better off orchestrating and paying for the upgrade to IPV6.
... - and ultimately their customers. You somehow still seem to have this idea that the US built and paid for the internet as it is today and lets everybody else in the world just use it out of generosity.
I can tell you who will pay for the upgrade to IPv6: the various organisations who run the network(s) - internet service providers, the various national scientific networks,
We designed it, we built it, we control it.
While I might to some extent agree with the design part (although some unimportant protocols like http were designed elsewhere), my agreement stops when it comes to "we build it". I'm quite sure that the networks forming the internet were not build entirely by the US. For example the various national research/university networks in Europe were planned by the respective government agencies, and paid for by the respective tax payers. Still, everybody so far accepted some kind of supreme authority of the US when it came to handling the address space and the root servers. But just as much as the Europeans can not demand to gain control over the US part of the network(s), the US can not expect that everybody else on the planet forever accepts US supremacy when it comes to running their own networks. If the world outside the US decided to use an independent address space under the control of some international body, there is nothing taken away from the US that belongs to them, the Internet is a truly international conglomerate of networks.
Well, many countries that have special 'area codes' for mobiles also have number portability, but only for switching between different mobile providers. On the other hand, if you use standard area codes for your mobile phones, doesn't that mean you have to change your cell phone number when you are moving out of the area? If you have a separate numbering scheme for mobile phones, there is no need for that, because there is nothing that ties the number to a special region...
You guys in other countries may not know that here one can transfer a cell phone number to a land line and a land line to a cell phone.
Obviously you can't do that, but with some providers in Germany you can get an additional fixed line phone number for your mobile (or transfer your old land line number), and then people can call you on your mobile for land line prices. And you have the choice if you only want to be reachable with this number when you are at home (=1-2 km around the address you provided) or wherever you are. In the latter case you have to pay some fees for forwarding if you are outside your 'home zone'.
It's much more complicated and liberated than your closed systems.
It's neither, it's just different, and what is the better system depends on your preferences...
Maybe, but who makes that determination. My understanding is that Hitler believed he was really loved by the people and judging from the video recordings of his speeches many people did, or at least pretended to.
:)
I did not mean to say that nobody really liked him. The Nazis surely had many followers (and he initially did get a lot of votes in a democratic election, despite being openly antidemocratic and antisemitic). Nevertheless, when somebody says that Hitler was a democratically elected leader, I feel the urge to point out that his rule in Germany was largly a dictatorship, with all the necessary ingredients: no other political parties, complete control of the press, political oponents prosecuted at will, a system of intimidation to stifle the desire for resistance... Of course you need a lot of devoted people to keep the system going.
Wasn't trying to defend Hitler at all, just wanted to point out that everything isn't always cut and dried. If you look on the other side of the coin, Stalin was as evil a dictator as Hitler. Should we not have included him in the Allies during WWII. Was it right to ally with him considering the tragedies that were occuring in his country?
Well, I think one can not blame anybody for the alliance with Stalin in that situation. And surely it does not really matter whether Hitler was democratically elected or not. The war against Nazi Germany was justified for the actions of their leadership alone, there was no other option (Hitler being elected or not).
Thanks for the link though, very interesting article.
You're welcome.
I believe Adolph Hitler was a democratically elected leader.
Well, initially yes. But I think you lose the status of a 'democratic leader' once you start throwing your oponents into jail. You might want to read up a bit on it here.
You and I parsed this statement differently.
;)
[...]
Considering the follow-up sentence ("I would say that if anyone in the Linux market had the wherewithal to polish the Desktop, it would be Novell/SuSE."), I think my parsing was the correct one.
I guess you are right. Sorry Karzz1.
As I understood it, SuSE employed several KDE developers. I assume this talent went with the sale to Novell.
Why? SuSE still is a strong supporter of KDE. They even still look for KDE developers (sorry, link in German).
In GSM, it is theoretically impossible to have cell sizes larger than a few kilometers (I believe 16). There are working CDMA cells that provide commercial service and are 64 kilometers in radius. Boomer cells are planned now that are only limited by the curvature of the earth.
Normal GSM cells can have a radius of 35 km. It is also possible to extend the range of GSM cells to 70 km and more.
And this is different for GSM operators exactly how? In the US, the GSM deployments work this way too! There are no SIM cards in the US for any technology. This is a deliberate decision made by the operators.
As somebody else pointed out, this is not true. The GSM networks in the US also use SIM cards, and you can use any unlocked GSM phone that supports the US frequencies by simply slipping in your SIM card (and change as often as you like).
GSM started as a project by France Telecom's mobile phone subdivision and was created independently of the EU's directive. It was one of the standards considered by the various standards groups, and in the end was their choice.
Not quite. GSM was a group by CEPT (the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations). It was indeed independent of the EU's directive to reserve the 900 MHz band, because it was founded before (actually it seems that the directive was passed to allow this group finish its work).
I just found a nice article about this here (PDF).
(There are also some other articles about the creation of GSM.
The only geographic area where CDMA does not have a foothold is Western Europe (big surprise), where the various governments have passed rules to ban non-GSM technologies! Various operators who would otherwise have gladly chosen CDMA have been FORCED to adopt GSM.
In western Europe, many network operators started before the first CDMA standard existed. Nevertheless, it's true that the European states specifically handed out GSM licenses, which makes sense if you want to ensure interoperability between the networks in different countries. After all, one problem the (at that time) new generation of networks was supposed to solve was that many countries used incompatible standards.
that "weird" format is mpeg 4 (with drm).
No, it's mpeg 4 (or AAC) without DRM. If you rip CDs with iTunes, you get regular AAC files which should work with every AAC capable player.
The UN does not collect taxes on phone service, that I'm aware of, and I've looked a little bit during this discussion.
The fundamental discussion is about whether such essential things like the allocation of address space or the creation of TLDs in an international network should be the responsibility of an international organisation or if it should be controlled by one country alone. I personally would prefer the former. I see that the linked article also mentions the possibility of impossing an 'internet tax', which in my book is something completely unnecessary. But it's not like you can't have the former without the later. One should not take the most stupid suggestion made in relation with an international internet organisation as an argument to reject the whole thing in general.
Of course the international organisation should have as few responsibilities as possible, but enough to make the decissions necessary to prevent the fragmentation of the network. That includes the assignment of address space and decissions about TLDs, but surely not any taxation powers or any decision about how the individual countries handle their TLDs.
Your analogy (and that of others) is flawed. It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines. Germans may have invented the concept but the engines used in American cars are built for those cars.
Just as well you can say that the US has developed the concept of the internet by developing most of the protocolls (although one of the main protocolls used by many people - http - was developed at CERN, if I'm not mistaken).
People worldwide are not using the "American internet" (physically build by the US), but networks build by their own companies (or paid for by their own governments) which use the concept developed in the US. And because so far everybody agrees in accepting some US servers as authority when it comes to assigning addresses, it appears to be a world wide uniform network. But I surely hope you do not believe that the network connecting European universities, or the network bringing internet connections into European homes was build by the US, do you? To paraphrase you: The internet used in Europe was build by the Europeans.
If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes.
Since the hardware is already international, "building their own internet" essentially means to not accept the US root servers any more. If all countries other than the US decide to use an independent address system, they have their "own internet". Of course, that would be a major inconvinience for almost everybody, including many US companies.
Apples to oranges... The UN does not regulate phone service, mobile or otherwise. Why should it regulate the use of the Internet. It's a bad idea plain and simple.
Well, international phone service is in fact regulated by the International Telecommunication Union, which is "an international organization within the United Nations System" (quoted from their web site). To quote further:
"The Union was established last century as an impartial, international organization within which governments and the private sector could work together to coordinate the operation of telecommunication networks and services and advance the development of communications technology."
It sounds a lot like the telephone equivalent of what is suggested for the internet.
While not supporting it in the first place may be a different matter, withdrawing support now only supports the terrorists.
A large majority of the Spanish population never supported the war, not before, not during the war, not afterwards. They threw the government out of office on the first occasion they had. That sounds reasonable. Should they let terrorists influence their opinion and their vote?
No, Central European Summer Time
That's a problem for KDE, but does Apple not have the right to do what they want with their patches?
Yes, and nobody is denying that, but this is not the point. The story is about the fact that KDE's KHTML and Apple's WebCore are nowadays pretty much separate in their development effort. So there is some disappointment in the KDE community. Sure it's their problem, and you could call them naive to hope that a big cooperation like Apple would collaborate with them, instead of just minding their own business. Again, nobody is claiming that Apple is doing something illegal, it's just that people hoped for more.
Europe could have used IS-54. But they didn't, they created an incompatible standard instead. This is why we didn't have much GSM in the US for a long time. Because the Europeans had made a standard with no backward compabitility. That didn't matter to them much because there were few analog phones in Europe. The US, on the other hand, had a fairly large installation of analog phones (I personally had a handheld analog phone before GSM even existed), in cars, contractor phones (dynaTACs) and bag phones.
The problem with backward compatibility in Europe would also have been, that - as I already said - there was not a single standard to which it one could try to be backwards compatible.
McCaw had TDMA up and running in the US in 1993 or 1994.
And GSM was going live (after one year delay) in 1992. The licenses were of course issued even earlier. And of course it is understandable that the European telecommunications industry did not just sit on their back and waited until some American company had something up and running (for which they probably would have had to pay licensing costs).
I don't know the technical features of IS-54 and IS-95, their advantages and disadvantages with respect to GSM. But GSM was not just mandated by the governments, it was developed collaboratively by all involved parties (network manufacturers and network operators) with their needs in mind, specifically (for Europe) the importance of international roaming.
Anyway, like in all other cases, the government mandating certain standards has caused inefficiencies and restricted advances.
Actually, it caused a big market and low prices, causing Europe (at least for a long time) to have the most advanced mobile phone market in the world. If that is "restrictive and inefficient" for you, fine. I think the introduction of GSM was a huge success story.
No one had to mandate compatibility in the US, it came naturally. It would have in Europe also.
I don't know how the US market evolved. But if 15 states in Europe each issued 1 or 2 national licenses without specifying the technology, I somehow doubt that compatibility across Europe would have evolved naturally. If there really were other standards available in 1990 which would have been as good as GSM, you would have ended up with some countries using GSM and some countries using the other option - and you could not just go from one to the other and take your phone with you...