You have to realise that what Microsoft marketing says has little to no relevance to what the company actually does.
The concept of the monopoly that invented Licensing 6 and came up with "DOS aint done 'till Lotus won't run" being customer friendly isn't just silly, it's plain old doublespeak.
The marketing guys at Microsoft (and there are over a thousand of them) say things like, the key to being liked is to be customer focussed. Such a statement is meaningless, because they have no control over what the company does. The best they can do is touch up the afteraffects of bad decisions to try and make them looked good. The very concept of "customer focussed" is deliberately vague anyway.
1) It means you can be impressed (and impress others, if they are that way inclined) with the pace and volume of open source development.
2) There are 100 people in the channel from all kinds of projects, ranging from GNOME to bzFlag, all chilling out (there will soon be a #commits-only for those who for whatever reason don't like the chatter).
3) It's a neat hack that took about 2 hours to do, and took off in a big way.
For all you people saying "that's so pointless" you don't get it, it's not meant to be an informational resource. It's not even meant to be useful. It's just meant to be cool:)
I suspect they embed IE. We do that at work for one of our Java apps, it's very easy if you have the right tools (we use neva coroutine, see nevaobject.com).
It does reduce your portability somewhat of course:) I've been getting our app to run using Wine. Internet Explorer in a JVM in Wine on Linux is a bit bizarre, but we haven't seen any major speed problems with it so far.....
Done properly, this kind of move by Apple could eventually kill the big record labels by removing their need to exist.
What, and replacing them with big computer corps instead? That's a top idea.
Bands could get their product to market without the absurd overhead imposed upon them by the big labels. You all know the scam -- the big label "advances" the band a seductively huge blob of cash, then leeches it all back in fees and charges, to where the band become their indentured servants.
What makes you think bands won't want advertising, support, a salary and all the other things that record labels provide them? Apples place in this only replaces the overhead of your local music store with the overhead of subsidising Apples platform-world-domination fantasies. It's good for convenience, but don't kid yourself that this means a change of the system.
Re:Ximian Connector ?
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, DCOM is based on MSRPC, a forked derivative of DCE-RPC. The wire protocol is different for instance. Read up on the history of it.
As I Wine developer myself (grep the changelogs for my real name) I can assure you that making Wine work on MacOS is while possible, ridiculously hard. There was one guy a while back who just about managed to get it to compile, but AFAIK it never ran. MacOS is very different to Linux regardless of what you might think, for instance the MachO shlib model has had some serious crack smoking put into it.
CPU emulation, next to simply getting the low level details of threading etc sorted out, looks comparatively easy, especially now we have QEMU. And anyway, I thought people bought Macs because they wanted consistancy and "all my commercial software". Wine on MacOS doesn't give you anything Wine on Linux doesn't.
We've certainly been here before. As has been pointed out on/. a number of times, ActiveX, CORBA, DCE etc. have all made claims like this and have met with limited success.
Actually I would claim that ActiveX (which is built on (D)COM->RPC->DCE RPC) has been a huge success. COM objects and ActiveX controls are widely deployed throughout the Windows platform. CORBA has also been successful but more in the server room, rather than on the desktop.
First there is the inefficiency introduced by constantly translating data (where equivalents exist at all), second the impedance mismatch of languages with quite different call models.
.NET has no marshalling penality for language crosscalls as the ABIs are standardised in the CIL/MSIL documents. The downside is that you sometimes have to extend or alter the languages a bit (but I'd note that this can be done in a backwards compatible manner). You aren't necessarily restricted either - you are free to use lots of C++ specific features in Managed C++ as long as that object doesn't need to be exposed to other languages.
Note that this isn't the same argument that says that bytecode level interworking is doomed - one is still limited to a rather C#-like subset of features, just as one is to a Java-like subset in a JVM.
Not really. Yes if you want to do interop with other languages, but this has been true of every semi-automatic language binding method, including COM, even including simple things like UNIX pipes.
Hardly a ringing endorsement of Mono here. Perhaps the last reference will be the proposition that we can't refuse?
You've misunderstood a crucial point. That software lets you use.NET objects in standard shipping Python - not Python.NET. If you wanted 2 way objects, then you'd want to compile Python down to CIL. As it is, this means you can write an object in a.NET language then plug it into an existing base of Python code without changing an interpreter for a compiler, without hosting your app on Mono etc - ie with minimal disruption.
Doesn't the Java world have one of those too? Yes, in fact, it's had one for five years.
Again your understanding is flawed. Rhino does not compile JavaScript to java opcodes as a Mono-based JavaScript engine would, so it cannot take advantage of lots of VM features. The two are completely different under the hood.
So, draw your own conclusions about what real new capabilities Mono will bring to the OSS world.
How about a language for developing GUIs that doesn't suck? Yes, I like Python too, but horror stories of large apps getting extra-buggy when written using Python due to its heritage of being a scripting language haunt me. Java is dead on the desktop basically, it had its chance (for years!) and blew it. Now it's the turn of.NET
Don't forget that Miguel and co. have never been particularly clear about why they are doing this
Yes, they have:
.NET is a nice platform to work in, for large projects better than Python/Perl/Ruby/C++/C/Java/whatever
It's necessary for compatability
Those reasons seem pretty clear to me.
and what precisely was wrong with established OSS efforts such as Parrot, Guile, Kaffe etc.
Miguels opinion on Parrot isn't exactly a secret - how many opcodes does it have by now? I've suggested that he publish an FAQ on these things, but he hasn't got around to it yet. Basically he believes the design of Parrot is pretty flawed and it'd be too hard to optimise the bytecode. Guile is an embedded scripting language, based on Lisp of all things - it's not even in the same ballpark as.NET. Kaffe is cool, but they are way behind the latest from Sun, in fact I don't think they ever intend to implement Java 2.
"Doing" Java would seem an attractive option, but Java was never really designed for multiple languages and to be frank, the developer momentum simply isn't there..NET is being used to write desktop apps (the majority of apps out there I'd guess), whereas Java is not. The Mono community is easily over 100 developers, compared to that of GNU Classpath/GCJ which is more like 4 or 5.
The one line about the desktop theme thats "also a Nautilus theme, a Galeon theme, an XMMS theme, an OpenOffice.org theme, a Metacity theme, and an Icon theme" made me chuckle.
Nautilus themes no longer exist, so I dunno why he said that. I'm not sure where the theming is in Galeon, I don't remember it. XMMS, OpenOffice are outside the control of Ximian, and the OO theme was an icon theme anyway, which is a duplicate of the last item and "Metacity theme" just refers to the window borders which are part of the style of the desktop.
So I don't see what your problem is.
The stuff about Mono is crack. You think cloning.NET is optional? I can tell you from my work on Wine, that it is not. MS lockin is going to get worse before it gets better, and down the road when an app you don't just want, but NEED runs only on a.NET implementation, you won't be so quick to blow them off.
It was so annoying doing all of thw software updates all the time (new GLibc, new libpng, new qt aaagh!)... The consitency of the interface, commercial softweare support (Office, explorer etc) and the ability to use X and all my favorite linux apps
I just had the BEST idea! It works like this:
1) You send me $129 via PayPal. In return, I'll send you a Linux distro made only of GNOME HIG compliant apps, so everything is very consistant, and I'll throw in a copy of CrossOver and WineX so you can run ALL the commercial software, including Office, IE and games, that your heart desires. I'll call it MinusLinuxOS X 10. It will be locked down so you can't change anything, for reasons explained below.
2) You send me $129 every year, and in return you get a CD with 129 new features, one for every dollar you send! Just stick in the CD and it'll update itself for you, complete with all the new software.
3) Profit!
See how easy this is? All you have to do is send me money, and I'll give you an OS that you can't ugprade yourself so you'll never have dependancy hell (we only upgrade it for you when we feel like it), a bunch of apps chosen for consistancy (sure, there won't be as many as if you used all the software out there, but hey, MacOS doesn't have many apps either) and a shiny box with the CD in.
You don't have to worry about things being getting out of date quickly, because you'll always be about a year behind the cutting edge - but hey, just for you, I'll keep it all under NDAs and threaten people who leak info about what's new with lawsuits so you need never know! Just ignore the rumour sites, they know nothing.
You know, you and me, we'd make a great partnership. My email address is mike@theoretic.com, so off you go, send me the cash and you'll be a happy man;)
I would buy it, I would actually drop Windows and become a OS-X user overnight
No you wouldn't, as the chances of all your hardware working would be miniscule.
You would have to repurchase all your software as well, unless you're going to dual boot every five minutes. How much value is in the software you have? I'm assuming you didn't just warez it all of course. MS Office alone is several hundred dollars.
There would be few games. Dual boot for them too? Use a console? Dunno.
Not to mention that it would cost way, way more than what Windows does - Apple can't lose the money from hardware sales, so the only option for a separate release would be high prices and to hope people would buy it.
sure, you can get most any peripheral you want (as long as it comes with a Mac driver), but the basic computer is always consistent.
Well no - there is relatively little hardware available for the Mac. If people start upgrading the boxes themselves (which they do rarely due to aforementioned small market) things start going wrong also - I've seen this happen to my local Mac user several times now....
Re:Ximian Connector ?
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 2, Informative
MAPI is, as far as reimplementations are concerned, a horrendous protocol. It's based on DCOM, which is itself very complex, badly documented and so on. In Wine there is a very rough DCOM implementation, and I think Samba have one too, but supporting MAPI would be a lot of work. There are probably only about 3 or 4 people in the world who fully understand the details of it, and they all work for Microsoft.
So now you know.
My review
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 3, Informative
This is just from looking at the screenshots. Let's see if I can do any better.
Firstly, it's clear that the visual style is a clean and stylish one. It's a GTK2 theme that doesn't suck, so congratulations to them for that.
The OpenOffice screenshots are nice, but simply having a good icon theme and making everything white (it follows the colours of the theme) didn't make as much of an improvement as I thought it would. Still, nice to see it better integrated. I think OO can use Gnome VFS now also.
The rest just smells of polish - what else did you expect from Ximian though?
OK. So reading the FAQ, I'm left wondering:
1) Is it really worth basically $100? Well, that would depend A LOT for me on how good Red Carpet Express it. I tried RC a few days ago, it's OK, but it has very little software available on it. Apt is good. They would have to work hard to beat even FreshRPMs, but if they did then yes, I think I'd pay for it, especially if they continue to improve the desktop to keep pace with GNOME, their own addons/extras etc as the year progressed.
2) Who are they selling this to? Corporate desktop users will probably want to have it all from one place, the distro and the desktop tied together. Are companies going to pay once for a distro, then again for a desktop? OTOH I'm not sure there's a big market for XD Pro in the home user market either. Extra commerical addons are nice, but... not that nice.
Fascinating though. And out in only a week! I can't wait.
Re:Let's hope they improved Nautilus
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 1
The more I use GNOME, the more I hate the "less (features) = more (work)" philosophy. It would be good progress if they would focus on letting users perform certain actions in a more efficient (less time consuming, less handling) manner.
Those problems have nothing to do with usability philosophy, and everything to do with simple bugs. There aren't many people hacking on Nautilus, why don't you help them out?
Well you can use EvilWM with Gnome. Just killall metacity then start EvilWM. Voila, your favourite WM but with a proper desktop, panel and other assorted goodies.
Re:Necessary?
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, it's just a piss poor review. XD2 adds stuff like real printing support, themed/better integrated OpenOffice, some kind of "Dashboard" app and a whole load of other goodies. It clearly has its own theme for both GTK2 and GTK1.2 as well. Unfortunately the first thing Mr Barr did was set everything to some random settings before taking any screenshots, and then proceeded to write about the menu layout.
Basically, I suggest we wait for some real reviews.
I'll read the article in a moment. Until then, what do you mean Desktop Linux is dead in the developed world? What I see is people desperate to use it, but held back by lack of ease-of-use, compatability and too much inertia. I don't see people saying "oh, who cares, getting done over by Redmond isn't so bad".
That actually was a response by MS to programmers who felt like using a specific API in a specific DLL, of felt they could just over-run Microsoft's designs willy-nilly. Remember, the most pervasive Windows out there is still the 9x series, not NT and it's modern kin. Most users are root whether they like it or not.
It was a ridiculous and disgusting hack around the brokenness of some windows installers, and the lack of proper DLL versioning control. It has little to do with what APIs are used.
Quite why it wasn't implemented in the FS layer is beyond me, presumably internal MS politics are to blame, it's the only rational explanation.
As Dante pointed out to me, they can't stop you simply copying mshtml.dll across, which is really the only part I actually care about. So it's not such a big deal after all.
Before it was as easy as loading up said site into IE 6 or IE 5 or what have you and seeing if the layout was as it should be. What now?
Hmm, I never figured out how to easily make IE6 and IE5 work on the same machine.
As a web designer, this worries me. How am I supposed to test my sites from here on out?
The way I do it is to use Wine on Linux. You can just have multiple fake windows directories, and switching between different installed versions of IE becomes a matter of switching a symlink.
Of course, if in future IE is not available as a separate upgrade, that approach won't work terribly well.
I have seen demos of technology that performs image stabilisation around the area of a license plate, which operates in the standard light ranges. In other words, if you light up the road so a human could read it, so can the camera, no matter how fast the car is going or how unstable it (or the camera) is.
Why should he be? Way too many people are killed on the roads.
Why stop with a system that automatically records your "bad behavior" and reports it? Why not take the next logical step and integrate controls that PREVENT the bad behavior in the first place?
Sounds cool to me. I've driven with enough people who quite frankly are dangerous drivers and who don't even realise to think that this would probably be a good idea. Would be hard to get accepted though.
If they're going to go to that length, why not take the next few steps and go with the fully automated vehicles of Minority Report?
That would be sweet! On the sides of the buildings and stuff. Oh, what, you don't like the idea of having your car controlled from outside? Well, it already is, the police have had guns which can shut down engine computers remotely for a while now. Dunno how widely they are deployed. There are cruder techniques - road blocks and such.
And of course the whole "innocent man on the run from the state" story is cool, but pretty rare in the real world.
As for this English system, it's a mixed blessing. A step in the right direction for tracking vehicles and dealing with some of the MANY problems surrounding personal transportation. But it's a step in the wrong direction in the way of personal freedom and privacy.
Arresting people and detaining them in prisons is hardly great in terms of personal freedom and privacy. We do it anyway though, because the alternative (anarchy) is worse. It boils down to cost/benefit analysis.
Remember that Britain has no Bill of Rights or anything else to prevent abuse.
It does however have a Data Protection Act which actually has teeth and has been used to slam people abusing personal data.
I think people are overreacting. They're assuming that the major purpose will be abuse. I can already be tracked in about a gazillion ways simply through the paper trail, phone records, security cameras etc. I'm sure that can be, and is abused, but not at a level that causes me undue concern.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of the monopoly that invented Licensing 6 and came up with "DOS aint done 'till Lotus won't run" being customer friendly isn't just silly, it's plain old doublespeak.
The marketing guys at Microsoft (and there are over a thousand of them) say things like, the key to being liked is to be customer focussed. Such a statement is meaningless, because they have no control over what the company does. The best they can do is touch up the afteraffects of bad decisions to try and make them looked good. The very concept of "customer focussed" is deliberately vague anyway.
1) It means you can be impressed (and impress others, if they are that way inclined) with the pace and volume of open source development.
2) There are 100 people in the channel from all kinds of projects, ranging from GNOME to bzFlag, all chilling out (there will soon be a #commits-only for those who for whatever reason don't like the chatter).
3) It's a neat hack that took about 2 hours to do, and took off in a big way.
For all you people saying "that's so pointless" you don't get it, it's not meant to be an informational resource. It's not even meant to be useful. It's just meant to be cool :)
(i helped set it up though so i would say that)
It does reduce your portability somewhat of course :) I've been getting our app to run using Wine. Internet Explorer in a JVM in Wine on Linux is a bit bizarre, but we haven't seen any major speed problems with it so far.....
What, and replacing them with big computer corps instead? That's a top idea.
Bands could get their product to market without the absurd overhead imposed upon them by the big labels. You all know the scam -- the big label "advances" the band a seductively huge blob of cash, then leeches it all back in fees and charges, to where the band become their indentured servants.
What makes you think bands won't want advertising, support, a salary and all the other things that record labels provide them? Apples place in this only replaces the overhead of your local music store with the overhead of subsidising Apples platform-world-domination fantasies. It's good for convenience, but don't kid yourself that this means a change of the system.
No, DCOM is based on MSRPC, a forked derivative of DCE-RPC. The wire protocol is different for instance. Read up on the history of it.
CPU emulation, next to simply getting the low level details of threading etc sorted out, looks comparatively easy, especially now we have QEMU. And anyway, I thought people bought Macs because they wanted consistancy and "all my commercial software". Wine on MacOS doesn't give you anything Wine on Linux doesn't.
Actually I would claim that ActiveX (which is built on (D)COM->RPC->DCE RPC) has been a huge success. COM objects and ActiveX controls are widely deployed throughout the Windows platform. CORBA has also been successful but more in the server room, rather than on the desktop.
First there is the inefficiency introduced by constantly translating data (where equivalents exist at all), second the impedance mismatch of languages with quite different call models.
Note that this isn't the same argument that says that bytecode level interworking is doomed - one is still limited to a rather C#-like subset of features, just as one is to a Java-like subset in a JVM.
Not really. Yes if you want to do interop with other languages, but this has been true of every semi-automatic language binding method, including COM, even including simple things like UNIX pipes.
Hardly a ringing endorsement of Mono here. Perhaps the last reference will be the proposition that we can't refuse?
You've misunderstood a crucial point. That software lets you use .NET objects in standard shipping Python - not Python.NET. If you wanted 2 way objects, then you'd want to compile Python down to CIL. As it is, this means you can write an object in a .NET language then plug it into an existing base of Python code without changing an interpreter for a compiler, without hosting your app on Mono etc - ie with minimal disruption.
Doesn't the Java world have one of those too? Yes, in fact, it's had one for five years.
Again your understanding is flawed. Rhino does not compile JavaScript to java opcodes as a Mono-based JavaScript engine would, so it cannot take advantage of lots of VM features. The two are completely different under the hood.
So, draw your own conclusions about what real new capabilities Mono will bring to the OSS world.
How about a language for developing GUIs that doesn't suck? Yes, I like Python too, but horror stories of large apps getting extra-buggy when written using Python due to its heritage of being a scripting language haunt me. Java is dead on the desktop basically, it had its chance (for years!) and blew it. Now it's the turn of .NET
Yes, they have:
Those reasons seem pretty clear to me.
and what precisely was wrong with established OSS efforts such as Parrot, Guile, Kaffe etc.
Miguels opinion on Parrot isn't exactly a secret - how many opcodes does it have by now? I've suggested that he publish an FAQ on these things, but he hasn't got around to it yet. Basically he believes the design of Parrot is pretty flawed and it'd be too hard to optimise the bytecode. Guile is an embedded scripting language, based on Lisp of all things - it's not even in the same ballpark as .NET. Kaffe is cool, but they are way behind the latest from Sun, in fact I don't think they ever intend to implement Java 2.
"Doing" Java would seem an attractive option, but Java was never really designed for multiple languages and to be frank, the developer momentum simply isn't there. .NET is being used to write desktop apps (the majority of apps out there I'd guess), whereas Java is not. The Mono community is easily over 100 developers, compared to that of GNU Classpath/GCJ which is more like 4 or 5.
Nautilus themes no longer exist, so I dunno why he said that. I'm not sure where the theming is in Galeon, I don't remember it. XMMS, OpenOffice are outside the control of Ximian, and the OO theme was an icon theme anyway, which is a duplicate of the last item and "Metacity theme" just refers to the window borders which are part of the style of the desktop.
So I don't see what your problem is.
The stuff about Mono is crack. You think cloning .NET is optional? I can tell you from my work on Wine, that it is not. MS lockin is going to get worse before it gets better, and down the road when an app you don't just want, but NEED runs only on a .NET implementation, you won't be so quick to blow them off.
I just had the BEST idea! It works like this:
1) You send me $129 via PayPal. In return, I'll send you a Linux distro made only of GNOME HIG compliant apps, so everything is very consistant, and I'll throw in a copy of CrossOver and WineX so you can run ALL the commercial software, including Office, IE and games, that your heart desires. I'll call it MinusLinuxOS X 10. It will be locked down so you can't change anything, for reasons explained below.
2) You send me $129 every year, and in return you get a CD with 129 new features, one for every dollar you send! Just stick in the CD and it'll update itself for you, complete with all the new software.
3) Profit!
See how easy this is? All you have to do is send me money, and I'll give you an OS that you can't ugprade yourself so you'll never have dependancy hell (we only upgrade it for you when we feel like it), a bunch of apps chosen for consistancy (sure, there won't be as many as if you used all the software out there, but hey, MacOS doesn't have many apps either) and a shiny box with the CD in.
You don't have to worry about things being getting out of date quickly, because you'll always be about a year behind the cutting edge - but hey, just for you, I'll keep it all under NDAs and threaten people who leak info about what's new with lawsuits so you need never know! Just ignore the rumour sites, they know nothing.
You know, you and me, we'd make a great partnership. My email address is mike@theoretic.com, so off you go, send me the cash and you'll be a happy man ;)
No you wouldn't, as the chances of all your hardware working would be miniscule.
You would have to repurchase all your software as well, unless you're going to dual boot every five minutes. How much value is in the software you have? I'm assuming you didn't just warez it all of course. MS Office alone is several hundred dollars.
There would be few games. Dual boot for them too? Use a console? Dunno.
Not to mention that it would cost way, way more than what Windows does - Apple can't lose the money from hardware sales, so the only option for a separate release would be high prices and to hope people would buy it.
Well no - there is relatively little hardware available for the Mac. If people start upgrading the boxes themselves (which they do rarely due to aforementioned small market) things start going wrong also - I've seen this happen to my local Mac user several times now....
So now you know.
Firstly, it's clear that the visual style is a clean and stylish one. It's a GTK2 theme that doesn't suck, so congratulations to them for that.
The OpenOffice screenshots are nice, but simply having a good icon theme and making everything white (it follows the colours of the theme) didn't make as much of an improvement as I thought it would. Still, nice to see it better integrated. I think OO can use Gnome VFS now also.
The rest just smells of polish - what else did you expect from Ximian though?
OK. So reading the FAQ, I'm left wondering:
1) Is it really worth basically $100? Well, that would depend A LOT for me on how good Red Carpet Express it. I tried RC a few days ago, it's OK, but it has very little software available on it. Apt is good. They would have to work hard to beat even FreshRPMs, but if they did then yes, I think I'd pay for it, especially if they continue to improve the desktop to keep pace with GNOME, their own addons/extras etc as the year progressed.
2) Who are they selling this to? Corporate desktop users will probably want to have it all from one place, the distro and the desktop tied together. Are companies going to pay once for a distro, then again for a desktop? OTOH I'm not sure there's a big market for XD Pro in the home user market either. Extra commerical addons are nice, but ... not that nice.
Fascinating though. And out in only a week! I can't wait.
Those problems have nothing to do with usability philosophy, and everything to do with simple bugs. There aren't many people hacking on Nautilus, why don't you help them out?
Well you can use EvilWM with Gnome. Just killall metacity then start EvilWM. Voila, your favourite WM but with a proper desktop, panel and other assorted goodies.
Basically, I suggest we wait for some real reviews.
Hmph.
It was a ridiculous and disgusting hack around the brokenness of some windows installers, and the lack of proper DLL versioning control. It has little to do with what APIs are used.
Quite why it wasn't implemented in the FS layer is beyond me, presumably internal MS politics are to blame, it's the only rational explanation.
As Dante pointed out to me, they can't stop you simply copying mshtml.dll across, which is really the only part I actually care about. So it's not such a big deal after all.
Hmm, I never figured out how to easily make IE6 and IE5 work on the same machine.
As a web designer, this worries me. How am I supposed to test my sites from here on out?
The way I do it is to use Wine on Linux. You can just have multiple fake windows directories, and switching between different installed versions of IE becomes a matter of switching a symlink.
Of course, if in future IE is not available as a separate upgrade, that approach won't work terribly well.
Arguably such a road is whatever the majority agrees it is, but in the real world of course the majority opinion does not always rule.
I need to watch the Matrix again :)
I have seen demos of technology that performs image stabilisation around the area of a license plate, which operates in the standard light ranges. In other words, if you light up the road so a human could read it, so can the camera, no matter how fast the car is going or how unstable it (or the camera) is.
Why should he be? Way too many people are killed on the roads.
Why stop with a system that automatically records your "bad behavior" and reports it? Why not take the next logical step and integrate controls that PREVENT the bad behavior in the first place?
Sounds cool to me. I've driven with enough people who quite frankly are dangerous drivers and who don't even realise to think that this would probably be a good idea. Would be hard to get accepted though.
If they're going to go to that length, why not take the next few steps and go with the fully automated vehicles of Minority Report?
That would be sweet! On the sides of the buildings and stuff. Oh, what, you don't like the idea of having your car controlled from outside? Well, it already is, the police have had guns which can shut down engine computers remotely for a while now. Dunno how widely they are deployed. There are cruder techniques - road blocks and such.
And of course the whole "innocent man on the run from the state" story is cool, but pretty rare in the real world.
As for this English system, it's a mixed blessing. A step in the right direction for tracking vehicles and dealing with some of the MANY problems surrounding personal transportation. But it's a step in the wrong direction in the way of personal freedom and privacy.
Arresting people and detaining them in prisons is hardly great in terms of personal freedom and privacy. We do it anyway though, because the alternative (anarchy) is worse. It boils down to cost/benefit analysis.
It does however have a Data Protection Act which actually has teeth and has been used to slam people abusing personal data.
I think people are overreacting. They're assuming that the major purpose will be abuse. I can already be tracked in about a gazillion ways simply through the paper trail, phone records, security cameras etc. I'm sure that can be, and is abused, but not at a level that causes me undue concern.