Windows is also for tech savvy people, you require a significant level of knowledge to configure and manage a windows network in a secure and stable way. Someone with minimal knowledge can get things limping along, but there will always be problems. The same is somewhat true of linux, but people with minimal knowledge tend to be afraid to try linux at all.
In a corporate network this extends to having an IT department which configures everything, so the users don't have to worry about it. An IT department could just as easily provide linux, solaris, mainframe access etc as the users will only be touching a tiny subset of functionality thats provided to them and don't need to know anything about the underlying system.
For users however, both windows and linux are extremely unsuitable, and hence why you see the rise of chromeos, android and ios as well as various single-purpose appliances. Most of these are linux anyway, but they are preconfigured by the manufacturer to only provide a limited set of functions - in the same way that a corporate IT department should.
Primarily, there are a lot of people that need an app or utility that is only available for Windows.
There are some, but not the "typical user desktop", the average user doesn't need anything windows-specific and in many developing countries its very much mobile-first with a large number of users doing everything they need on mobile/tablet devices.
You are right about network effect however, microsoft have usually designed their products to be non standard as a way of locking people into their way of doing things. When those products are dominant it makes it difficult to switch away, but it also goes against them in areas which they don't dominate, such as their repeated failures in the mobile market.
The single biggest reason for people running windows on desktops/laptops is thats what they come with, mac laptops also sell quite well, users generally regard them as superior to windows laptops and are willing to pay a premium for them (or want them but cant afford them).
The purchasing power of people within any market will vary, and any pricing will inherently discriminate against those who can't afford it... Not everyone can afford a ferrari for instance.. The difference with digital content is that the pricing is totally arbitrary, and has no relation to the cost of actually providing the content.
Or having a license anywhere in the EU automatically grants an EU-wide license since the EU doesn't allow something to be licensed in only one member state as that's an artificial restriction of trade.
Yes things have definitely gotten worse, network transparency has largely been abandoned by the developers of X11 and the various gui toolkits running on top of it. Most modern distros even ship with tcp support in X11 turned off by default. A few years ago the situation was reversed, rdp was slow and inflexible and before that there was no rdp at all, it's quite sad that one of the biggest benefits x11 had is being discarded.
Being unable to plug in USB devices is generally beneficial in a typical corporate environment... You don't want users plugging in usb sticks that might contain malware, nor do you want them copying corporate data onto devices that you don't control. It's actually much better from a security perspective to use a device that doesn't support USB at all than take a device designed to fully support USB and then jump through extra hoops trying to neuter that support.
X11 is capable of everything you describe and has been for many years, for instance opengl support in x11 offloads the rendering to the client device in the same way directx does and has been doing so for much longer.
The problem is that these features of X11 get ignored and neglected. Modern applications and ui frameworks are doing things which either break network transparency or make it extremely slow, and features like remote glx got ignored for so long that the code broke and got removed.
I used to use an SGI workstation as a local display, and several linux boxes exported apps to it (ie things which don't run well on irix), it was a great setup. I was even able to run quake on linux and have it display on the sgi, using the sgi opengl implementation (the linux host had only a basic embedded gpu with no opengl capability).
Such systems already exist, they are called "servers" and "thin clients", and many businesses do exactly what you describe. The idea of a cloud desktop is exactly the same, only the server sits in someone else's datacenter and you rent access to it instead of having your own in the basement - the thin clients are the same.
The fact is general purpose computers were always geek toys, they only became widespread because they were the only way (but not a very good way) to do certain things that consumers wanted to do. Once better options became available, general purpose computers move back to the niches.
Or likely limited by the form factor... These things are pretty small, barely bigger than the wired earbuds which don't contain batteries, charging circuits, bluetooth or audio decoding hardware.
Then why did the remain campaign not expose the lies of the leave campaign before the vote? If all the evidence is in favour of remain, then why did the remain campaign do such a poor job of informing the voters?
If you're supplying your passport number to a uk government site, then surely the government has the capability to check if the passport number you supplied has right of abode or not.
Well the petition threshold is 100,000 so even assuming just the people who marched (250,000) filled out the petition - and why wouldn't they, if they were willing to go to the effort of a physical protest then taking a couple of minutes to fill out a petition is nothing, then you're already well over the threshold which requires the petition to be debated.
And if your doing so in an area where it's illegal you'll also be paying enough attention to your surroundings to notice if any cops are nearby so you'll never get caught...
The problem is that many people don't pay attention, so they ruin it for everyone else. Many people are bad drivers even when not texting...
If a car crash only injured the occupants of the car that caused it you'd have a point... But a car crash can injure pedestrians, bus riders or occupants of other cars who have done nothing stupid themselves.
And many people hate dubbing, even if they can understand the language into which it has been dubbed. If you can understand the original language it's almost always preferable to watch a movie with its original language track. I did find that a lot of content in France was available with the original language as an option tho, you just have to switch the language track used by the player - most digital tv broadcasts, as well as dvds allow this etc.
DRM also makes the playback devices more complicated, which increases the unit costs and also increases the support costs when problems are caused for paying customers by the DRM.
In order to get to the page you cite, you've explicitly followed the "social networks" page link, which you'd expect to have information about social networks given the title. This is a bit different from having trackers on totally unrelated pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is also for tech savvy people, you require a significant level of knowledge to configure and manage a windows network in a secure and stable way. Someone with minimal knowledge can get things limping along, but there will always be problems.
The same is somewhat true of linux, but people with minimal knowledge tend to be afraid to try linux at all.
In a corporate network this extends to having an IT department which configures everything, so the users don't have to worry about it. An IT department could just as easily provide linux, solaris, mainframe access etc as the users will only be touching a tiny subset of functionality thats provided to them and don't need to know anything about the underlying system.
For users however, both windows and linux are extremely unsuitable, and hence why you see the rise of chromeos, android and ios as well as various single-purpose appliances. Most of these are linux anyway, but they are preconfigured by the manufacturer to only provide a limited set of functions - in the same way that a corporate IT department should.
Primarily, there are a lot of people that need an app or utility that is only available for Windows.
There are some, but not the "typical user desktop", the average user doesn't need anything windows-specific and in many developing countries its very much mobile-first with a large number of users doing everything they need on mobile/tablet devices.
You are right about network effect however, microsoft have usually designed their products to be non standard as a way of locking people into their way of doing things. When those products are dominant it makes it difficult to switch away, but it also goes against them in areas which they don't dominate, such as their repeated failures in the mobile market.
The single biggest reason for people running windows on desktops/laptops is thats what they come with, mac laptops also sell quite well, users generally regard them as superior to windows laptops and are willing to pay a premium for them (or want them but cant afford them).
AmigaOS had this feature, if you ejected a floppy that was in use it would tell you to put it back in and wait for you to do so...
Exactly, if a few people start letting the companies exploit them like that then the companies will start to perceive it as normal and expected.
The purchasing power of people within any market will vary, and any pricing will inherently discriminate against those who can't afford it... Not everyone can afford a ferrari for instance..
The difference with digital content is that the pricing is totally arbitrary, and has no relation to the cost of actually providing the content.
Or having a license anywhere in the EU automatically grants an EU-wide license since the EU doesn't allow something to be licensed in only one member state as that's an artificial restriction of trade.
Yes things have definitely gotten worse, network transparency has largely been abandoned by the developers of X11 and the various gui toolkits running on top of it. Most modern distros even ship with tcp support in X11 turned off by default.
A few years ago the situation was reversed, rdp was slow and inflexible and before that there was no rdp at all, it's quite sad that one of the biggest benefits x11 had is being discarded.
Being unable to plug in USB devices is generally beneficial in a typical corporate environment... You don't want users plugging in usb sticks that might contain malware, nor do you want them copying corporate data onto devices that you don't control.
It's actually much better from a security perspective to use a device that doesn't support USB at all than take a device designed to fully support USB and then jump through extra hoops trying to neuter that support.
X11 is capable of everything you describe and has been for many years, for instance opengl support in x11 offloads the rendering to the client device in the same way directx does and has been doing so for much longer.
The problem is that these features of X11 get ignored and neglected. Modern applications and ui frameworks are doing things which either break network transparency or make it extremely slow, and features like remote glx got ignored for so long that the code broke and got removed.
I used to use an SGI workstation as a local display, and several linux boxes exported apps to it (ie things which don't run well on irix), it was a great setup. I was even able to run quake on linux and have it display on the sgi, using the sgi opengl implementation (the linux host had only a basic embedded gpu with no opengl capability).
Such systems already exist, they are called "servers" and "thin clients", and many businesses do exactly what you describe.
The idea of a cloud desktop is exactly the same, only the server sits in someone else's datacenter and you rent access to it instead of having your own in the basement - the thin clients are the same.
The fact is general purpose computers were always geek toys, they only became widespread because they were the only way (but not a very good way) to do certain things that consumers wanted to do. Once better options became available, general purpose computers move back to the niches.
Or likely limited by the form factor... These things are pretty small, barely bigger than the wired earbuds which don't contain batteries, charging circuits, bluetooth or audio decoding hardware.
Then why did the remain campaign not expose the lies of the leave campaign before the vote? If all the evidence is in favour of remain, then why did the remain campaign do such a poor job of informing the voters?
The government will still have records of you, there will be records of your parents, records of you attending school, medical records etc.
If you're supplying your passport number to a uk government site, then surely the government has the capability to check if the passport number you supplied has right of abode or not.
Well the petition threshold is 100,000 so even assuming just the people who marched (250,000) filled out the petition - and why wouldn't they, if they were willing to go to the effort of a physical protest then taking a couple of minutes to fill out a petition is nothing, then you're already well over the threshold which requires the petition to be debated.
And if your doing so in an area where it's illegal you'll also be paying enough attention to your surroundings to notice if any cops are nearby so you'll never get caught...
The problem is that many people don't pay attention, so they ruin it for everyone else. Many people are bad drivers even when not texting...
If a car crash only injured the occupants of the car that caused it you'd have a point...
But a car crash can injure pedestrians, bus riders or occupants of other cars who have done nothing stupid themselves.
Well mobile phones started as "car phones" because they were too heavy to practically carry around.
And many people hate dubbing, even if they can understand the language into which it has been dubbed. If you can understand the original language it's almost always preferable to watch a movie with its original language track.
I did find that a lot of content in France was available with the original language as an option tho, you just have to switch the language track used by the player - most digital tv broadcasts, as well as dvds allow this etc.
If there's DRM then you've no guarantee that your copy will still be playable once they pull it from their catalog.
DRM also makes the playback devices more complicated, which increases the unit costs and also increases the support costs when problems are caused for paying customers by the DRM.
Why would they need to perform the encoding in realtime? They can use a buffer and pause playback once the buffer fills.
In order to get to the page you cite, you've explicitly followed the "social networks" page link, which you'd expect to have information about social networks given the title. This is a bit different from having trackers on totally unrelated pages.
The worst software tends to be the most successful...