hoax: something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a scientifical theory that has yet to be clearly disproven. Even if it has since been recycled by politicians to fill their own personal agenda, it is originally an hypothesis that was formulated on the sole base of observable facts, outside of any manipulation intend.
Now, get an English dictionary, and find the differences between meaning of the words "hoax" and "hypothesis". Using your own personal definition, Ptolemy's Almagest was also an hoax, since it was ultimately disproven yet used by the Church authorities to fill a political agenda.
Summary: an hoax implies conscious fraud; an hypothesis doesn't.
Are you kidding? The only reason Nintendo can't be said to have an ulterior motive is because they have no leverage with which to accomplish any ulterior goal.
I don't think (s)he was kidding. Nintendo had no ulterior motive than making profit, by trying to monopolize as much of the gaming market for itself. Why did Nintendo experiment so many "unusual" gaming devices ? Simple: to attract as many customers as possible, grabbing them before less inovative competitors. Somtimes, it was a huge success (Gameboy, NES), sometimes it wasn't (VirtualBoy, NES64). But their core strategy stayed constant during the last 30 years: focus on the gaming business, and try to cut the grass before their opponent's feet by "being the first" in the innovation field.
So, how is that different from Microsoft and Sony ? Well, the goal of those two doesn't seem to make a lot of direct profit with their gaming devices, but rather use them as 'front-ends' to technologies they promote. They play a game of technological reputation: the one with the best-looking gaming device will won the label of "cool brand", and the key technologies associated with their machines will get a boost (PS3 is using Blu-Ray + PS3 is cool = Blu-Ray is cool; PS3 is a Sony product + PS3 is cool = Sony is cool). I think that Sony and MS don't care if XBoxes and PS3s are sold without any direct profit: they are seeking about indirect returns.
And Nintendo ? Well, their strategy seems to be very different. They are still focusing on gaming - and only gaming. They underline the 'social' trait of gaming. They push forward new input devices technologies to provide a new experience to players. Why ? I think that's because they're trying to make profit out of the gaming market itself, instead of using it as a display case for their technological skills.
In that respect, I think saying that Nintendo "has no utter motive" is quite accurate: Nintendo produces games and gaming devices to sell games and gaming devices, while MS and Sony produce those as advertisements for themselves and their other technologies.
Java development in Windows is "standard", in linux is good and in Mac it is great.
Except for a small point: Java Mustang Betas were available on Windows/Linux for more than one year. What about the OSX version ? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they had to wait until the B77 version in May to get it. Oh, and how long was it to get a working Java 5 on OSX ?
Sure, the coding tools are nice - but there's more to take into consideration.
And the difference between Linux and Mac is performance. *Usually*, a Java application runs faster on Mac than on Linux, because the Java VM in Mac is done by Apple, meaning that its built by the ones who knows the OS.
Wrong; benchmarks never displayed such a performance edge of Java/OSX over the Linux version.
In Linux, as you certainly know, is a certain pain to install Java (you need to follow one or another howto to get things working),
Ah, well, it was indeed a pain to be able to unpack an auto-extract archive and link the java executables in your/usr/bin, was it ?
Moreover, don't forget that it was for the Java SDK. The JRE, the only one that interests the non-coder user, was packaged by lots of distributions for some time already.
I'd also point out that with the recent changes of the JDK licence, it is now easier for distributions to package the Java SDK directly - that's what Debian did, for example; so there is no "manual" handling of the install required.
If you had to follow an howto to install the Java SDK on a Linux box during the last three years, well, your knowledge of Linux and computers is probably so thin that it is understandable that you prefer the Mac. But you definitely don't examplify the "geeks" out there.
and the performance is *usually* worse than in a Mac, because the VM is done by Sun, which is concerned mainly in getting things working. Yes, they care about performance, but not that much
The performance point is grossly wrong. Grab a Mustang JDK and benchmark them both on OSX and Linux on a MacBook, and come back when you got numbers. You may also want to get a couple informations about the relative performance of Java on OSX - for example http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.t ss?l=JavaMac.
I'll not comment on the Ruby part of your experience, because I don't have enough knowledge of that language - but given the amount of rather biaised information you presented here, I think people interested in Ruby should take your opinion with caution.
You may not agree with Stallman's tactics, but the message this sends is clear: The people passing today's draconian intellectual property laws they are NOT representing the general public -- they are representing coporate interests.
Except that now, the French Prime Minister will have a much easier time to dismiss Stallman in the eyes of the public. "See, that guy dressed like a hippie tried to short-circuit the procedure, as if this country was his own property". If that was intentional from Stallman, then I'd say it is a very bad attempt that shows little understanding of the French political customs.
Bill Gates is a citizen of the US, just like Stallman. Gates and Stallman take opposing viewpoints on the particular issue, and both are well known and intelligent individuals with strong arguments. However, only Gates was allowed to talk to the PM.
Because Gates prepared his meeting months in advance, and was clever enough to use skilled representatives that had an in-depth knowledge on how things work in France to prepare the meeting. Do you really think that he just passed by, waved his hand and was magically given entrance ? Of course not.
Stallman tried to get an audience with the PM, but was refused.
Yes - yet we don't know exactly how the demand was formulated, so it is hard to draw any conclusion about this point.
It was only after the refusal that he tried to just "barge in", and there is *nothing wrong with this*.
Of course, there is. You may not like the decisions taken by the French government, but that's still the emanation of an organized, democratic system, in which there are rather strict rules telling you how to act in each case.
Sure, it was his right to try to force entrance - but so was it the right of the PM to refuse it. There is nothing wrong on either side, as the security guard reacted the normal way to the coming of something that isn't on the "guests list".
This kind of thing has happened throughout history -- a corrupt goverment has favored a certain group of people, and the unfavored group resorts to any tactics necessary to get themesleves heard.
Let's be clear on this - the event isn't about an opposition between the philosophies of RMS and corporations. It basically describes somebody attempting to see the Prime Minister of France without invitation. What has this to do with corruption and tactics ? Do you really think this would be any different in another country ?
Those of you who are criticizing Stallman, saying thing like "duh, I could have told you this would fail"... You're totally missing the point. Stallman also knew it would fail. Why else would he have a cameraman on hand ready to document the event. He's making a point, and it seems like a lot of people are missing it.
I don't miss it - it was for him a good way of showing how evil the French PM is. Yet this is not going to earn him a lot of support in Europe: blatantly ignoring the local customs and rules will not make you welcome for sure. A lot of French people already see the US as overly intrusive - and now, they'll see images of an US citizen behaving as if he was in conquerred territory. *We* know that it isn't the case, but *they* would read the event quite differently.
In a very real sense, Stallman represents the little guy, and Gates represents the corporate interests.
Again, that's not the point here. Gates followed the local rules, while RMS didn't.
In a very real sense, the goverments are NOT listening to the people. When the governments are only hearing one side of the story on DRM/copyright, it should be obvious that the laws are going to be heavily biased.
You know what ? French people interested by the debate already know, for the most part, that the government is heavily biased. The rest of the citizens really don't care at all. So what did this action change ? Nothing. Zero. Nada. It actually only strengthened the DRM/copyright side by offerin
certainly they want to take a few weeks to analyze their patch and make sure it doesn't break a bunch of things.
Wonderful. I'm sure that system administrators will be more than happy to hear that known security breaches take "a few weeks" to be closed.
I hardly see a delay for security fixes measured in weeks as compatible with the claim of being the OS that "delivers the highest level of security through the adoption of industry standards, open software development and wise architectural decisions".
Or maybe we're supposed to believe that hackers will wait "a few weeks" to give Apple enough time to get a fair chance against them ?
- Pronounced as in Japanese, "Wii" sounds like the English word "We"; Nintendo is splitting the world between "Them" with their PlayBox or X-Station 630 and their outdated gaming concepts, and "We", who are part of the Revolution. It also plays on a "more humane view" of the gaming concept - "We" is a word that subconsciously associates with concepts like family, friends, partnership and cooperation;
- Pronounced as in English "Wii" is similar to "Why"; there are strong marketing opportunities behind such a word. I wouldn't be surprized to see at some point ads like "Wii ? Because of its controller"; "Wii ? Because Mario likes it", and so on. And that it opens itself to a lot of easy jokes can actually be a very positive point, as it will quickly make the name very popular;
- In a lot of languages, something as simple as "Wii" can be read and used in a way or another. Take French for example: "Wii" sounds exactly like "Oui" ("Yes"), which is definitely a pretty starting point for an advertisement campaign;
- The whole logo echoes to the trend of the i(insert-mac-related-word-here). Same kind of color scheme, same importance of the "i" in the logo presentation. I don't think the success of the "iPod" name is completely unrelated to the design of the "Wii" logo. Maybe I'm wrong - but "looks like an Apple ad" is one of the first things I thought after seeing the Flash introduction, and I definitely think that a lot of people will react the same;
To summarize, I think it is a very good choice because not only it is easy to remember and pronounce (whatever the language), but it is also a completely abstract term. I think that alone should make it popular, whatever the marketing campaign used to support it.
What Linux needs right now is a platform that will accomplish everything that joe sixpack wants to do right out of the box.
This is exactly what distributions like (K)ubuntu aim to achieve - by default, they provide what's needed to surf the web, type a letter, watch videos or read emails. Now, it is true that the default programs chosen for each task sometimes is a poor choice - but that's not a problem of platform definition, but rather one of "selecting the best-suited software for a given task".
I think that a script like automatix for ubuntu is a pretty nice feature in that it does take a lot of the guesswork out of installing the most common software needed. However, all the functionality in this script should be included in Ubuntu by default.
The problem is that "different people have different needs". (K)ubuntu aims at providing a "working basis" that can be fine-tuned by the user. This is not very different from what happens under Windows: the first thing one does after (re)installing Windows is downloading and installing those optional-yet-unescapable tools like Adobe Reader, Flash/Shockwave, or an antivirus software. It is hard to blame (K)ubuntu for not doing something Windows itself doesn't do.
Also, what Linux needs the most is to have a media player that is well integrated inside firefox and that plays wma and wmv files.
It already exists. In Debian and (K)ubuntu, this is contained in the mozilla-mplayer package. You may also need the Windows codecs (package w32codecs).
Either that, or make it possible to integrate windows media player inside firefox using wine.
Again, this already exists, although as a commercial product, which is called CrossOver Office. I cannot say how well it works with Windows Media Player 10, though, as I never tried that.
The second most important thing to do for linux is to pour more resources into developing Wine. We need a windows emulator (I know it's not an emulator) that works flawlessly right now at least for games.
The problem of Wine (or its games-focused spinoff Cedega) is not about the lack of development resources. It is mostly about the obfuscated Windows API/behavior. And each time a new version of a popular Win32 API comes out, a lot work has to be done by the Wine developers to (1)spot the changes, (2)understand how they impact the API and (3)implement them. Also note that games are actually the hardest apps to provide the 'emulation' for. Don't expect flawless support "at least" for games through Wine - if anything, perfect games support is what will occur last.
[i]The French support we enjoyed during the revolution was critical. It was not, however, in any way comparable to the support they enjoyed during WW2.[/i]
Well, did you ever wondered where the Insurgents got most of their military equipment from ? Who provided the maritime support required ? Who provided the basical military instruction needed that lacked to the army of Washington ? That's much more than the "moral support" you were talking about. Actually, most of the guns used by the Insurgents were provided by the French (One of the most active being the famous writer Beaumarchais).
In both wars, the support was actually comparable, and had the same critical impact on the result. The only difference is its absolute scale - but let's not forget that the US Independence War was lead nearly two centuries before WW2, and on a much more limited area, hence the difference in raw numbers.
Um. No. Have you seen it? I mean actually looked at it? Looks like crap. There's this wonderful new technology that you guys might be interested in. It's called "electronic kerning." It's brand new; it was only invented about... um...forty years ago. You should totally check it out.
Kerning is supported in X font renderers. Stop spreading false informations. Go read the docs, please.
Damaging one of the/etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.
Try it sometime. You'll be unpleasantly surprised.
That's what I did. I did even more - I removed the/etc/rcX directories completely. Guess what ? I still got console access. You are loosing credibility each time, you should stop speaking about what you don't know.
Every couple of weeks there's a story in the technology trades about another company getting accused of some heinous crime by the Gnu people.
That's quite different from "being harrassed by lawyers".
I'm not talking about keyboard input or character sets. I'm talking about localization. You know, the ability to have your program switch from an English user interface to an Arabic or a Hebrew or a Farsi or a Chinese user interface based on the user's system-wide language preference. Linux has no facility for doing that, which is kind of okay, because if it did, there would be no facility for Linux applications to actually have localization built into them.
Go make some research about terms like the environment variables LANG, LC_LOCAL, i18n and i10n. I am also sure you'll find websites like http://i18n.kde.org/ worth reading.
Beg pardon? Are you saying that because Linux users are totally happy to live in a world where every computer and peripheral has to be configured by hand (an assertion which I totally dispute), that Bonjour was no big deal?
Network autoconfiguration tools existed for a long time before Rendezvous. You didn't need to "manually configure everything" on the client machine. The goal of ZeroConf was to provide a way to do it (for network services) without the need of a server.
But cron is no more. It doesn't run.
Quoting the same article again: When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.
I could continue by taking your list point by point. I could also talk about virtualization (Xen), data security (Encrypted mounts, distributed fs, software raid), remote management (webmin), portability, high-level portable development APIs (SDL, GTK), networked installation, dependency-aware software installation (apt), on-site optimization (gentoo), support for handheld devices (uCLinux), free and native Java compilation (gcj), abstract data management (kio), mass storage virtualization (LVM)... But you wouldn't probably listen anyway.
Come back after you have informed yourself better about both the various operating systems available today. You'll understand that not only Linux and BSDs aren't as late as you'd like to see it, but also that their existence contributed to improve the overall quality of software in general. And in the meantime, let the Linux and OSX fans debate on sane grounds and exchange ideas on what computing would mean in the future - this proved much more productive than blindly uninformed bashing.
Linux is, for all intents and purposes, dead as anything other than a server operating system.
Facts currently seem to go against that proposal. Maybe you should have a look at their current market shares on the fields outside servers. Definitely, they'll not be the leading system on the desktop market any time soon - but neither is OSX.
Nobody can actually use Linux code for anything unless they're willing to give up commercial control of their project. Nobody is willing to do that.
IBM, Novell, Oracle or HP are thus probably suddenly getting mad and are sinking themselves at investing money for both free and commercial projects around the Linux platform... Not to be rude, but I frankly think that you should get a little more informed on how the software business is now running - we aren't in 1980 anymore.
We can surge ahead because we're not constantly getting harassed by lawyers from the FSF.
Court action of the FSF against commercial products are pretty rare and only involve cases where licence was unilaterally broken (which is illegal). May I remind you how many patents and NDA issues Apple or Microsoft already conducted in the past ? Check your facts before spreading unfounded rumors, please.
But it's not sane to ask those questions to the exclusion of other areas of advancement. Oh, sure, those guys are tweaking the background color of the file browser, but they're overlooking the completely fucked up font rendering architecture, or the essential inability to localize the system. That kind of thing.
Font rendering works perfectly under X for quite some time already, thanks, with network-aware font management as an extra. As for the system localization, it is also perfectly working, both with local codepages or Unicode formats. Of course, there are applications that are not localized - but the base system and all the common desktop tools are. Again, I urge you to check your facts before arguing.
Sure it is. All the run-time programs are basically file-by-file copies of Unix programs: init, inetd, the various networking daemons, all the command-line tools. Over the years people have sat down and copied Unix --Unix from the 1970s, remember -- file by file like the monks of old, dutifully reproducing everything even if it's just obviously stupid, like the init/inetd/cron/init.d/rc disaster.
*sigh*... inetd appeared with BSD 4.3 at the end of the eighties. Cron was written in 1987 by Paul Vixie. I see no 1970s in that.
May I also remind you that launchd does not replace cron ? Quoting OSNews on this:
Traditionally the cron daemon is always running, whether or not there are any jobs to run. Now, launchd watches/var/cron/tabs. If there aren't any files in that directory (i.e. there are no user cronjobs configured) then cron isn't running. When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.
Maybe you don't understand what launchd is.
I am happy to notice that the people of OSNews are apparently as ignorant as I am.
There's no such problem with launchd.
Destroy launchd configuration for critical services, and you'll get the same result. Note that it is not an attack against launchd - just the fact that without the valid configuration of the boot-critical systems, you'll never get the thing to start up, being Windows, OSX or Linux.
If inittab or/etc/rc are damaged, a Linux system can't boot at all.
Damaging one of the/etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.
we've rolled out massive innovation in Tiger.
I never denied that OSX made great progresses in various fields. But so did Linux or the BSDs.
Hell, even Bonjour (née Rendezvous). That's a world-changer. We took an idea that was frankly languishing, turned it into an actual specification and used it to change
I don't see a single innovation in Linux. It's all taken from Windows, Mac OS X, Unix and others.
Unix ? Which Unix ? Most of them already tend to use more and more of the software initially developed on Linux/BSDs. And most ideas implemented by either Windows or OSX aren't particularly new. At most, they were the first ones to implement them.
I know that it's free, but I'm not in business so that's not a selling point to me.
Neither am I. For *you*, money could not be an issue. But you see, the 120$ an OSX would cost me, I prefer spending them on a better screen. Or a better printer. See the (economical) point ?
What is in Linux that I can't get anywhere else?
Example: Show me how I can set up a software RAID5 with automated backup procedures under OSX or Windows without third-party tools.
Of course, you'll probably tell me that no domestic user requires such entreprise features. Well, given the stability problems lots of domestic users encounter for various reasons, don't you think it would be a good selling point to tell them that their "my document" folder can be made much more robust and recoverable without them ever having to bother about it ? Would you dismiss it on the sole idea that this is a technology traditionally labeled as "entreprise feature" ?
That's just one example of course - there are plenty others.
It's not really their fault - they do it as a hobby, generally. But no-one is driving innovation in Linux. It's *stagnating*
See, when I do something as a hobby, I tend to put much more into it than if I have to make it "because my boss said so". And most of those people working on the various Linux-related projects are like that. A lot are also professional graphists, designers, coders or administrators. Do not underestimate their technical and humane skills on the sole purpose that they are "doing it for fun". It really, really is unsulting for them.
Yes, that explains why companies like Apple, and even Microsoft in their own, glacial way, are innovating on a fundamental level while Linux is...you know. Not.
"Linux" (and the whole trend behind it, but also other systems and projects like FreeBSD) has at last been innovative in two ways:
- It showed that a cooperative development based on free will and open standards could lead to complex software projects that were able to stand up the comparaison against products built on the previous logic of closed, in-house, nearly reclusive development. And not only it is working, but for some it is also an economically viable model;
- On the specific point of technological innovation, Linux contributed to bring several technologies that were only available on costly enterprise systems to the masses, or only experiments. Think about the logical volume manager, software raid, efficient system virtualization or journalled filesystems. It is Linux and Free/Net/OpenBSD that pushed things to the points they are today, not Apple.
I'm being totally serious now: Linux is easily twenty years behind Apple. Seriously. Think about where all the attention is going: Human-user interface design. That was Apple in 1985. Today, Apple is doing no-shit innovation.
What you seem to forget is that Human Interface Design studies are currently the focal point because it is a way to get what your users want. I find pretty sane to see developers asking themselves "How can we make that software easier to use ?" all the time. Ease of use is a keypoint in today's software strategies and human-friendly designs is what's going to make a difference. And if you think that Apple isn't deeply investing on Human Interface Design anymore, then you'd better get more informed.
Even little things make a huge difference. Linux, being almost a file-by-file clone of Unix, is crippled by a vast and interdependent web of system watchdog services. There's init, there's inetd, there's watchdogd, there's cron, all separate and overlapping services whose job it is to start services. All complex, all in need of configuration. What did we do? We scrapped it all, replacing the whole mess with launchd. A single service with XML (meaning self-checking) configuration files.
Several points to address here:
- Linux isn't a "file-by-file" clone of Unix; a unified Unix doesn't exist anymore for more than 20 years. It uses a similar base organisation - just like OSX does.
- There is no such crippled interdependent web of services. Neither are they overlapped - to each daemon, its task. And launchd didn't scrap all of them - it is just a system to unify daemons configuration and launching. Note that similar tools exist under Linux and the BSDs and that every major distribution features standardized configuration files. True, XML isn't used - but when working on a console environment, XML is not necessarily the most readable format out there.
Do you know what happens on a Unix machine if your inittab file contains garbage data? The system refuses to boot! With XML configuration files, a config file that fails to validate will simply be ignored. The system will run in a degraded state until the file is corrected.
And what if a critical service fails to start because of its malformed XML configuration file ? Excuse me, but your comparaison sounds rather biaised. The equivalent of "garbaging" one of the XML configuration files of launchd would be corrupting one of the/etc/init.d/ configuration scripts under Linux. This doesn't prevent the machine to boot at all - it simply means that the damaged service will not work.
It's stuff like that. Yes, we're doing big-time flashy innovation with things like Core Data and Spotlight. Those are no-shit world-changing things. But we're not just glomming new services onto old infrastructure. We're evolving the operating syst
I would love to see the sales numbers for the next OS X release. We could see some increase in sales due to Microsoft owners realizing that there is another OS in the market that works at least as well, if not better, than XP.
Don't you forget one small, little detail ? Something to do with hardware compatibility ? Or maybe I missed the announce for an x86-compatible OSX ?
Whatever the qualities of OSX, it has indeed one significant drawback: it runs on Apple's hardware only. Do not forget that "Microsoft owners" are not only Microsoft owners: they also are x86-compatible-hardware owners. They are x86-compatible-software owners.
To switch to OSX, the common "Joe Desktop User" running Windows will have to (1) buy OSX, (2) buy a new hardware configuration and (3) buy OSX versions of the software he so far used under Windows. Not everybody has the economical strength to renew all this just because "the OS is better".
The translation isn't correct for the first paragraph. That's quite a problem, since it changes the meaning significantly.
Le président serait-il prêt à s'entretenir avec le concurrent de Google, Microsoft, puisqu'il a tant de convergences de vues avec son président, Bill Gates, qu'il a longuement reçu à l'Elysée? "Pourquoi pas?", répondent les conseillers de M. Chirac.
The initial translator wrote "Would the president be ready to make a deal with Google's competitor, Microsoft" which is incorrect.
A correct translation would be:
Would the president be ready to talk with
Google's competitor, Microsoft, since he has so many views in common with its president, Bill Gates, whom he has long welcomed to the Elysée?
The thing is that places do acquire reputations for a reason.
The problem is that too often, the reputation is founded on false rumors and very limited experience. That's what - both in French and English - leads to Clichés: caricatural descriptions.
I have a few friends who have travelled to France (including outlying regions beyond paris) and the only one who enjoyed the experience is someone whose wife spoke fluent French.
First, it is harder to enjoy a trip in a foreign country when you don't speak its language. It may sound weird to you, but the vast majority of humans do not speak or even understand English. The French popular culture relies heavily on spoken language, so it is hard to enjoy it if you don't understand it.
Moreover, there has been a strong Anti-Americanism sentiment in France (and more generally in Western Europe) since the start of the war in Iraq, mirroring the Anti-French sentiment in the US. It could have played a role in the bad experience as well.
Finally, even French citizens recognize that some Parisians are maybe a little too proud of themselves - but that's not a problem specific to Paris or France and certainly cannot be generalized to all the Frenchs.
This effect is aggravated by the "seemingly rude" point - there are some things people do in other cultures that strike Americans as rude. Part of that for my friends was some sort of service issue at restaurants, I forget the detail but some seemingly inconsequential thing they wanted was looked on in outrage by the waiter. Perhaps he also viewed the request as rude, but the response basically discolored my friends opinion of restaurants in France.
When travelling to a foreign country, you have to accept its customs and habits. If you step on them, you'll definitely turn people angry or annoyed. If you make a mistake and offend somebody, apologizing solves it in most cases. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I didn't see a lot of american tourists caring much about the local behavior in restaurants, hotels or museums.
(...) While it did not make me think of all Spaniards as lunatics, it certainly made me think a little bit inside that shopkeepers there were on something of a power trip with little respect for customers.
Never *ever* touch the window display in a shop in Western Europe. That's a *major* mistake. For the shop keeper, it is about as offensive as taking a item exposed in a museum "to better see it" or to touch a XIVth century painting with your fingers "to check what kind of pigment it is". For him, that would be about the same if you threw a stone on his shop's display window.
Your experience is definitely one of "cultural gap", not a "those people are unfriendly" one. Don't expect the shop keeper to have any respect for a customer who obviously had none for him !
So reputations of other countries being difficult may stem from the degree of cultural differences between two countries. And to some extent, I have to say that given that the reputation is correct as far as the average person goes. Even though the behavior there might not really be rude, to the traveller it might seem that way and really that's the same thing as far as the traveller is concerned!
I definitely disagree with your conclusion. *Everybody* in *every* foreign culture will be annoyed, offended or angry when you stomp on their customs. The vast majority of people (at least in Spain and France, which I know pretty well) are very friendly and will be open and helpful - as long as you don't behave as some kind of barbarian from their point of view.
Before taking conclusions about the friendliness in foreign countries, always think about your own behavior first: did the inhabitants find it offensive ? Did you ask them first when you were uncertain on what was the proper thing to do ? Did you present apologises in the formal way used by the inhabitants ? In most cases, you'll find it very instructive and it will help you to enjoy your future trips much more than any "Those guys are unfriendly" kind of Cliché.
It is quite understandable why XOrg will not get into Sarge - requirements of portability and stability aren't met and will require lots of work. Yet I cannot restrain myself of thinking: I always hear about Sarge, but what about the unstable branch of Debian ? I still don't get why Sarge would require unstable to be frozen like that - and in fact, it isn't the case for most of the other packages.
Sarge is indeed a good excuse for the Debian XSF to be late, but it is starting to become a little overused. Initially, the position was something in the lines of "Debian will not start working on integrating XOrg before Sarge is out". And at that time, it made sense.
The problem is that the expected date release of Sarge was pushed back over and over. The Debian X Strike Force was IMHO quite slow at reacting to the upcoming of XOrg. The draft of the consensus reached is dated 15th August. Fine - but when checking the subversion repository of the XSF, you see that it was initiated at the end of September. Little also seem to have changed since the end of October.
Now, I understand that the top priority of the Debian XSF is to iron out bugs for Sarge - but I don't think it should mean such a long-terme freeze for the unstable branch which is - by definition - unstable. Why keeping the XOrg work aside ? By doing so, it means that another long delay will be required after Sarge is out for it to become available on unstable - and then, people will be *right* when claiming that "Debian is outdated".
Backporting pieces of code from XOrg to XFree 4.3 as it is currently done only partially solves the fundamental issue - as XOrg matures and evolves, backporting will become more and more difficult to handle. In some case, backporting may even proove impossible. And the development time spent on backports is time that doesn't get into working on XOrg stuff. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is somewhat lacking of future perspective.
I quite appreciate the efforts made by Debian to maintain such a massive amount of packages - but I more and more get the impression that the Debian X Strike Force lost contact with some of their users and isn't efficient enough to handle the current situation by itself and is a little overusing Sarge as an excuse for some lateness.
"There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873."
Wrong, grossly wrong.
There's only one true standard regarding keyboards, defined by the ISO/CEI 9995 norm ("Keyboard Layouts for Text and Office Systems, in Parts").
Now, inside that norm, there are several standards in use all around the world: QWERTY in anglo-saxon countries. AZERTY in Europe. QWERTZ and DVORAK also found limited use. And that's not even counting the numerous regional variants. Even if you restrain the definition to the layout of the standard alphanumeric keys, you can already find AZERTY, QWERTY, DVORAK both with unshifted and shifted access to numbers, all in widespread use - that's already six layouts that you can call standards (as they're used in more than one country).
Don't believe that because QWERTY-US is in use in your country that it is the case in the rest of the world !
You got very good points there. But there are some things to clear out:
- DVD playback under Linux is only a problem in a few countries (Jon Johansen, deCSS author, has been declared innocent in January by the Norwegian Court);
- DVD authoring is perfectly legal in all cases. Not easy ? Projects like QDVD-Author now allow the same level of control and ease-of-use than the average Windows DVD-Authoring software. As with firewire digicams, I don't encounter any problem with those. Want advanced video editing from DV sources ? Things like MainActor 5 are now available. I'll not pretend you will find it easy - I'll just say that I don't find it hard.
- Again, iTunes DRM'd songs can be played legally in most countries; don't want those ugly WINE kludges ? Get CrossOver Office, which will allow you to install iTunes (and others) within a friendly GUI and without having to manually edit cryptic configuration files.
I perfectly understood "desktop" in the way you meant it - "home computing". And I certainly don't say Linux is perfect - that's very far from it. Nor do I depreciate Windows or MacOS - both are good desktop OSes as well. It is just that the "very poor desktop OS" sounds for me somewhat injustified.
It's a poor platform for a desktop OS, plain and simple
I'd be interested to hear in which way. If you put the gaming market aside, it is a very competitive desktop OS (and a significant number of administrations, offices and other organisms selected it as their main work desktop platform). Applications ? It has. Stability and efficience at managing resources ? It has. Connectivity ? It has.
and the efforts to turn it into a good desktop OS are too splintered and half-assed.
I suspect that you think so because there's no unique initiative towards a friendly Linux desktop environment - you have a several distributions, toolkits, or desktop environments to choose from, which can be quite intimidating at first. But there are Linux distributions specifically aiming at providing an out-of-the-box, easy-to-use desktop environment smoothly integrating everything you may want. Knoppix or Ubuntu are just two popular examples of that trend - trying to provide something coherent without too many compromises.
Each little distro can then focus on the hardware it's designed for, and the task it's meant to do, rather than trying to cram every OSS project under the sun onto 6 DVD's and calling it a "Windows Killer".
The goal of the distributions isn't to cram "every OSS project" on its CDs. Generalist distributions like Debian, SuSE or Fedora try to encompass most of what you can expect to do with a computer in the easiest way possible. And that's why things like package managers or networked installer CDs were invented: to make your life easier. Linux isn't a "geek-only" system anymore.
Finally, when speaking about "Joe Sixpack's exposure" to Linux and his possible reactions to it, you may want to give a try at this article (English version here ), where the author compared the ease of installation and use of Linux Mandrake 9.2 and Windows 2000 by letting his unexperimented wife handle it by herself. The result demonstrates that (at least for her) Linux was easier to install and use for her daily tasks.
A common mistake is to point at the case of people used to Windows attempting to use Linux and being "lost" in an alien environment. The only valuable point to take into account is how people who never used a computer before can find their marks under Linux. That's two pretty different things to consider, I'd say.
Re:!Windows Emulator, Wine Is Not an Emulator.
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Strictly speaking, WINE is an emulator - "Emulating" applies to any system providing a compatible environment different from its native one.
Now, it should also be made clear that WINE is not similar to a console emulator in the sense that it is not a hardware emulator, but rather belongs to the family of software compatibility layers.
If the WINE staff insists so much on the "it isn't an emulator", it is probably simply because of a semantic shift of the term: for a lot of people, emulation is associated with "on-the-fly translation of hardware instructions" and thus with the idea of a significant degradation of performances.
But since WINE is just an API compatibility layer without any translation of the machine code, it doesn't suffer of such performance drops. Its behavior is in fact closer to what 32-bit versions of Windows do when running older, 16-bit apps than what softwares like VMWare or BOCHS do - this probably explains why the WINE staff insists so much on the "not an emulator" (read: "not a hardware emulator") message.
Meanwhile, at the bearded terminal hacker's lab...
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"What's that, Snibs ?
- Err... That's what they call a 'mouse' in the outside world, Sir. I thought it would be an interesting device for you to see, Sir.
- A mouse ? What is it made for ? Hunt cheese bits between the coke cans ?
- No, Sir. Actually, they use it to interact with the GUI and...
- What ?! GUI ?! You bloody traitor ! GUARDS ! Take Mr. Snibs and his... rodent to the PDP-11 mental reconditioning room !"
An interesting point, which underlines a few common misconceptions regarding today's global strategy.
The first point regards a short to mid-term massive military engagement, at a scale comparable to World War II. The eventuality of such a conflict is indeed pretty unlikely, as very few nations would have the economical power to sustain such a large-scale engagement against the 'Occident' in general, or the USA in particular. Countries like China would have a military potential sufficient to attempt such a challenge - but that would be economically highly inefficient, and would go against the ideology followed by China during the past 20 years.
The second misconception is that "danger comes from the skies". Missiles are seen as the most important threat to US security on the military level. This is basically a truncated view coming back from the Cold War Era. Recent experience obviously proved that it was much more cost-efficient for a potential aggressor trying to destabilize a country to use infiltration and terrorist schemes.
Third questionable point: the attack of the US territory itself. Why would a foreign country try to bomb the US territory with missiles ? The US territory is not the most important strategical target in the hypothesis of a large-scale conflict: the economical and political resources outside the country are, because thay are more difficult to protect and more accessible. That's quite the strategy followed since 1945: fearing a major nuclear war where no one would ultimately win, conflicts were solved around satellite countries in an attempt to change the balance of power a little in a direction or another.
The question of the "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction" is also quite questionable. India and Pakistan indeed developed such weapons - but they're short-range ones only, their main purpose being to target their immediate neighbours in a scheme quite similar to the Cold War one. China also has an important destruction potential, but has everything to loose in the hypothesis of a direct conflict with another major power due to its current economical situation. The arsenal of the former USSR countries is mostly an heritage of the Sovietic era; no massive developments on that side. Countries of the Middle-East and Africa do not have either the economical or technological support required to develop such mass-destruction weapons on a large-scale. So where is that proliferation some US politicians warned about ?
Finally, it is indeed true that one of the primary respoonsabilities of governments is protection of people. Would anti-missile measures be more effective given the current sociological and economical context than anti-terrorist protection programs ? I am quite doubtful about it. But I'd rather prefer pay taxes for education or medical research than for what I mostly see as High-Tech Military Toys.
The fact is, and this is hard to deny, europe today is extremely dependent on the US for its security.
Believe it or not, I'll attempt just that.
Your point is interesting, because I think it gives a good insight of common geopolitical "easy ways".
First, I'd like to underline that we see "Europe" and "EU" described as a block, as homogenous geopolitically as the US. This is a fundamental error: the EU is basically a group of very divergent political entities. Of course, some european countries share "common roots" (being economically, strategically or politically). But even considering that, it is impossible to take the Europe - or even its reduced EU view - as a whole. Opposed opinions about terrorism in the EU alone is a good example of such strong local nuances. This is something which is unfortunately too often put aside, leading to oversimplification of the problems.
Now, keeping my previous point in mind, about the question of "defense".
It is indeed true that the current average line of politics in Europe goes more towards pacifist solutions. There are good historical reasons for that: Europe was the focal point of the two World Wars; Europe initiated colonial wars about 300 years ago; Europe ruled the world from the end of the XVth Century to the middle of the XXth. Past events showed that although war gave by itself impressive short and middle-term results, it wasn't very efficient to establish long-term objectives. All major conflicts of the XXth century confirmed this trend, being lead by Europe or other countries. Western European countries have a long colonialist past behind them, and that definitely plays a role on the way they perceive the current situation: military domination proved rather inefficient compared to economical control. This emphasis on the economical side rather than on the military side is definitely obvious in today's European diplomacy.
I'm rather curious to see what kind of massive military attacks Europe could expect from the outside. I see only a couple of options there:
- From the Middle-East or from the Northern Africa ? But those are economically dependent from Europe. They're also made of a puzzle of contradictory interests - there is no unity to expect on short or middle-term timeframe. Besides that, their military power is questionable (Israel being an exception);
- From Central Asia ? Caucasian republics are busy with their own anarchy. The two most important military forces there are Pakistan and India - but they are watching at each other, not at Europe, which is perceived as a neutral supplier, just like the USA;
- From the Far East ? But what would be the interest of China to attack and damage what is one of their most important trading partners ?
- From "the South" ? None of the countries of Central/Southern Africa or Southern America can oppose a realistic military answer to the EU;
This leaves only one possibility: Europe being endangered by Europe itself. There are very few possibilities there: most of the former "Eastern Block" is in the process of being integrated into the EU. The former Jugoslavia never attempted anything outside its borders - and doesn't present a threat to the rest of the continent. So where is that military threat above the head of Europe ? The question needs to be asked, and so far received no clear answer. Just as a side note, although the military power of Europe is inferior to the US one, it is very far from outdated or inexistent; and Europe has the financial capability to sustain large-scale, long-duration operations, something the USA cannot really afford anymore.
About the WWI, WWII and Yugoslavia: It is a common thought that "USA saved Europe". Some things to remember, though:
- The intervention of the USA during WWI was marginal and never decisive for the course of the war. If you study your history manuals, you'll see that Germans capitulated mostly because political and economical troubles starting to suffoca
Slashdot Mirror
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a scientifical theory that has yet to be clearly disproven. Even if it has since been recycled by politicians to fill their own personal agenda, it is originally an hypothesis that was formulated on the sole base of observable facts, outside of any manipulation intend.
Now, get an English dictionary, and find the differences between meaning of the words "hoax" and "hypothesis". Using your own personal definition, Ptolemy's Almagest was also an hoax, since it was ultimately disproven yet used by the Church authorities to fill a political agenda.
Summary: an hoax implies conscious fraud; an hypothesis doesn't.
Are you kidding? The only reason Nintendo can't be said to have an ulterior motive is because they have no leverage with which to accomplish any ulterior goal.
I don't think (s)he was kidding. Nintendo had no ulterior motive than making profit, by trying to monopolize as much of the gaming market for itself. Why did Nintendo experiment so many "unusual" gaming devices ? Simple: to attract as many customers as possible, grabbing them before less inovative competitors. Somtimes, it was a huge success (Gameboy, NES), sometimes it wasn't (VirtualBoy, NES64). But their core strategy stayed constant during the last 30 years: focus on the gaming business, and try to cut the grass before their opponent's feet by "being the first" in the innovation field.
So, how is that different from Microsoft and Sony ? Well, the goal of those two doesn't seem to make a lot of direct profit with their gaming devices, but rather use them as 'front-ends' to technologies they promote. They play a game of technological reputation: the one with the best-looking gaming device will won the label of "cool brand", and the key technologies associated with their machines will get a boost (PS3 is using Blu-Ray + PS3 is cool = Blu-Ray is cool; PS3 is a Sony product + PS3 is cool = Sony is cool). I think that Sony and MS don't care if XBoxes and PS3s are sold without any direct profit: they are seeking about indirect returns.
And Nintendo ? Well, their strategy seems to be very different. They are still focusing on gaming - and only gaming. They underline the 'social' trait of gaming. They push forward new input devices technologies to provide a new experience to players. Why ? I think that's because they're trying to make profit out of the gaming market itself, instead of using it as a display case for their technological skills.
In that respect, I think saying that Nintendo "has no utter motive" is quite accurate: Nintendo produces games and gaming devices to sell games and gaming devices, while MS and Sony produce those as advertisements for themselves and their other technologies.
"Guts" ? Mmm... Maybe I should get better informed with the evolution of the English slang. I knew "brass", "bread", "greens", "motsa" and "wad".
Thanks to you, I know I can add "Guts" to the list of terms used to designate money in my own personal lexicon.
Java development in Windows is "standard", in linux is good and in Mac it is great.
/usr/bin, was it ?
t ss?l=JavaMac .
Except for a small point: Java Mustang Betas were available on Windows/Linux for more than one year. What about the OSX version ? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they had to wait until the B77 version in May to get it. Oh, and how long was it to get a working Java 5 on OSX ?
Sure, the coding tools are nice - but there's more to take into consideration.
And the difference between Linux and Mac is performance. *Usually*, a Java application runs faster on Mac than on Linux, because the Java VM in Mac is done by Apple, meaning that its built by the ones who knows the OS.
Wrong; benchmarks never displayed such a performance edge of Java/OSX over the Linux version.
In Linux, as you certainly know, is a certain pain to install Java (you need to follow one or another howto to get things working),
Ah, well, it was indeed a pain to be able to unpack an auto-extract archive and link the java executables in your
Moreover, don't forget that it was for the Java SDK. The JRE, the only one that interests the non-coder user, was packaged by lots of distributions for some time already.
I'd also point out that with the recent changes of the JDK licence, it is now easier for distributions to package the Java SDK directly - that's what Debian did, for example; so there is no "manual" handling of the install required.
If you had to follow an howto to install the Java SDK on a Linux box during the last three years, well, your knowledge of Linux and computers is probably so thin that it is understandable that you prefer the Mac. But you definitely don't examplify the "geeks" out there.
and the performance is *usually* worse than in a Mac, because the VM is done by Sun, which is concerned mainly in getting things working. Yes, they care about performance, but not that much
The performance point is grossly wrong. Grab a Mustang JDK and benchmark them both on OSX and Linux on a MacBook, and come back when you got numbers. You may also want to get a couple informations about the relative performance of Java on OSX - for example http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.
I'll not comment on the Ruby part of your experience, because I don't have enough knowledge of that language - but given the amount of rather biaised information you presented here, I think people interested in Ruby should take your opinion with caution.
You may not agree with Stallman's tactics, but the message this sends is clear: The people passing today's draconian intellectual property laws they are NOT representing the general public -- they are representing coporate interests.
Except that now, the French Prime Minister will have a much easier time to dismiss Stallman in the eyes of the public. "See, that guy dressed like a hippie tried to short-circuit the procedure, as if this country was his own property". If that was intentional from Stallman, then I'd say it is a very bad attempt that shows little understanding of the French political customs.
Bill Gates is a citizen of the US, just like Stallman. Gates and Stallman take opposing viewpoints on the particular issue, and both are well known and intelligent individuals with strong arguments. However, only Gates was allowed to talk to the PM.
Because Gates prepared his meeting months in advance, and was clever enough to use skilled representatives that had an in-depth knowledge on how things work in France to prepare the meeting. Do you really think that he just passed by, waved his hand and was magically given entrance ? Of course not.
Stallman tried to get an audience with the PM, but was refused.
Yes - yet we don't know exactly how the demand was formulated, so it is hard to draw any conclusion about this point.
It was only after the refusal that he tried to just "barge in", and there is *nothing wrong with this*.
Of course, there is. You may not like the decisions taken by the French government, but that's still the emanation of an organized, democratic system, in which there are rather strict rules telling you how to act in each case.
Sure, it was his right to try to force entrance - but so was it the right of the PM to refuse it. There is nothing wrong on either side, as the security guard reacted the normal way to the coming of something that isn't on the "guests list".
This kind of thing has happened throughout history -- a corrupt goverment has favored a certain group of people, and the unfavored group resorts to any tactics necessary to get themesleves heard.
Let's be clear on this - the event isn't about an opposition between the philosophies of RMS and corporations. It basically describes somebody attempting to see the Prime Minister of France without invitation. What has this to do with corruption and tactics ? Do you really think this would be any different in another country ?
Those of you who are criticizing Stallman, saying thing like "duh, I could have told you this would fail"... You're totally missing the point. Stallman also knew it would fail. Why else would he have a cameraman on hand ready to document the event. He's making a point, and it seems like a lot of people are missing it.
I don't miss it - it was for him a good way of showing how evil the French PM is. Yet this is not going to earn him a lot of support in Europe: blatantly ignoring the local customs and rules will not make you welcome for sure. A lot of French people already see the US as overly intrusive - and now, they'll see images of an US citizen behaving as if he was in conquerred territory. *We* know that it isn't the case, but *they* would read the event quite differently.
In a very real sense, Stallman represents the little guy, and Gates represents the corporate interests.
Again, that's not the point here. Gates followed the local rules, while RMS didn't.
In a very real sense, the goverments are NOT listening to the people. When the governments are only hearing one side of the story on DRM/copyright, it should be obvious that the laws are going to be heavily biased.
You know what ? French people interested by the debate already know, for the most part, that the government is heavily biased. The rest of the citizens really don't care at all. So what did this action change ? Nothing. Zero. Nada. It actually only strengthened the DRM/copyright side by offerin
certainly they want to take a few weeks to analyze their patch and make sure it doesn't break a bunch of things.
Wonderful. I'm sure that system administrators will be more than happy to hear that known security breaches take "a few weeks" to be closed.
I hardly see a delay for security fixes measured in weeks as compatible with the claim of being the OS that "delivers the highest level of security through the adoption of industry standards, open software development and wise architectural decisions".
Or maybe we're supposed to believe that hackers will wait "a few weeks" to give Apple enough time to get a fair chance against them ?
I think it is a pretty clever choice actually.
- Pronounced as in Japanese, "Wii" sounds like the English word "We"; Nintendo is splitting the world between "Them" with their PlayBox or X-Station 630 and their outdated gaming concepts, and "We", who are part of the Revolution. It also plays on a "more humane view" of the gaming concept - "We" is a word that subconsciously associates with concepts like family, friends, partnership and cooperation;
- Pronounced as in English "Wii" is similar to "Why"; there are strong marketing opportunities behind such a word. I wouldn't be surprized to see at some point ads like "Wii ? Because of its controller"; "Wii ? Because Mario likes it", and so on. And that it opens itself to a lot of easy jokes can actually be a very positive point, as it will quickly make the name very popular;
- In a lot of languages, something as simple as "Wii" can be read and used in a way or another. Take French for example: "Wii" sounds exactly like "Oui" ("Yes"), which is definitely a pretty starting point for an advertisement campaign;
- The whole logo echoes to the trend of the i(insert-mac-related-word-here). Same kind of color scheme, same importance of the "i" in the logo presentation. I don't think the success of the "iPod" name is completely unrelated to the design of the "Wii" logo. Maybe I'm wrong - but "looks like an Apple ad" is one of the first things I thought after seeing the Flash introduction, and I definitely think that a lot of people will react the same;
To summarize, I think it is a very good choice because not only it is easy to remember and pronounce (whatever the language), but it is also a completely abstract term. I think that alone should make it popular, whatever the marketing campaign used to support it.
What Linux needs right now is a platform that will accomplish everything that joe sixpack wants to do right out of the box.
This is exactly what distributions like (K)ubuntu aim to achieve - by default, they provide what's needed to surf the web, type a letter, watch videos or read emails. Now, it is true that the default programs chosen for each task sometimes is a poor choice - but that's not a problem of platform definition, but rather one of "selecting the best-suited software for a given task".
I think that a script like automatix for ubuntu is a pretty nice feature in that it does take a lot of the guesswork out of installing the most common software needed. However, all the functionality in this script should be included in Ubuntu by default.
The problem is that "different people have different needs". (K)ubuntu aims at providing a "working basis" that can be fine-tuned by the user. This is not very different from what happens under Windows: the first thing one does after (re)installing Windows is downloading and installing those optional-yet-unescapable tools like Adobe Reader, Flash/Shockwave, or an antivirus software. It is hard to blame (K)ubuntu for not doing something Windows itself doesn't do.
Also, what Linux needs the most is to have a media player that is well integrated inside firefox and that plays wma and wmv files.
It already exists. In Debian and (K)ubuntu, this is contained in the mozilla-mplayer package. You may also need the Windows codecs (package w32codecs).
Either that, or make it possible to integrate windows media player inside firefox using wine.
Again, this already exists, although as a commercial product, which is called CrossOver Office. I cannot say how well it works with Windows Media Player 10, though, as I never tried that.
The second most important thing to do for linux is to pour more resources into developing Wine. We need a windows emulator (I know it's not an emulator) that works flawlessly right now at least for games.
The problem of Wine (or its games-focused spinoff Cedega) is not about the lack of development resources. It is mostly about the obfuscated Windows API/behavior. And each time a new version of a popular Win32 API comes out, a lot work has to be done by the Wine developers to (1)spot the changes, (2)understand how they impact the API and (3)implement them. Also note that games are actually the hardest apps to provide the 'emulation' for. Don't expect flawless support "at least" for games through Wine - if anything, perfect games support is what will occur last.
[i]The French support we enjoyed during the revolution was critical. It was not, however, in any way comparable to the support they enjoyed during WW2.[/i] Well, did you ever wondered where the Insurgents got most of their military equipment from ? Who provided the maritime support required ? Who provided the basical military instruction needed that lacked to the army of Washington ? That's much more than the "moral support" you were talking about. Actually, most of the guns used by the Insurgents were provided by the French (One of the most active being the famous writer Beaumarchais). In both wars, the support was actually comparable, and had the same critical impact on the result. The only difference is its absolute scale - but let's not forget that the US Independence War was lead nearly two centuries before WW2, and on a much more limited area, hence the difference in raw numbers.
Um. No. Have you seen it? I mean actually looked at it? Looks like crap. There's this wonderful new technology that you guys might be interested in. It's called "electronic kerning." It's brand new; it was only invented about ... um ...forty years ago. You should totally check it out.
/etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.
/etc/rcX directories completely. Guess what ? I still got console access. You are loosing credibility each time, you should stop speaking about what you don't know.
Kerning is supported in X font renderers. Stop spreading false informations. Go read the docs, please.
Damaging one of the
Try it sometime. You'll be unpleasantly surprised.
That's what I did. I did even more - I removed the
Every couple of weeks there's a story in the technology trades about another company getting accused of some heinous crime by the Gnu people.
That's quite different from "being harrassed by lawyers".
I'm not talking about keyboard input or character sets. I'm talking about localization. You know, the ability to have your program switch from an English user interface to an Arabic or a Hebrew or a Farsi or a Chinese user interface based on the user's system-wide language preference. Linux has no facility for doing that, which is kind of okay, because if it did, there would be no facility for Linux applications to actually have localization built into them.
Go make some research about terms like the environment variables LANG, LC_LOCAL, i18n and i10n. I am also sure you'll find websites like http://i18n.kde.org/ worth reading.
Beg pardon? Are you saying that because Linux users are totally happy to live in a world where every computer and peripheral has to be configured by hand (an assertion which I totally dispute), that Bonjour was no big deal?
Network autoconfiguration tools existed for a long time before Rendezvous. You didn't need to "manually configure everything" on the client machine. The goal of ZeroConf was to provide a way to do it (for network services) without the need of a server.
But cron is no more. It doesn't run.
Quoting the same article again: When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.
Accessibility
See for example http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-HOWTO/
Cocoa
See for example GNUStep.
I could continue by taking your list point by point. I could also talk about virtualization (Xen), data security (Encrypted mounts, distributed fs, software raid), remote management (webmin), portability, high-level portable development APIs (SDL, GTK), networked installation, dependency-aware software installation (apt), on-site optimization (gentoo), support for handheld devices (uCLinux), free and native Java compilation (gcj), abstract data management (kio), mass storage virtualization (LVM)... But you wouldn't probably listen anyway.
Come back after you have informed yourself better about both the various operating systems available today. You'll understand that not only Linux and BSDs aren't as late as you'd like to see it, but also that their existence contributed to improve the overall quality of software in general. And in the meantime, let the Linux and OSX fans debate on sane grounds and exchange ideas on what computing would mean in the future - this proved much more productive than blindly uninformed bashing.
Linux is, for all intents and purposes, dead as anything other than a server operating system.
/var/cron/tabs. If there aren't any files in that directory (i.e. there are no user cronjobs configured) then cron isn't running. When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.
/etc/rc are damaged, a Linux system can't boot at all.
/etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.
Facts currently seem to go against that proposal. Maybe you should have a look at their current market shares on the fields outside servers. Definitely, they'll not be the leading system on the desktop market any time soon - but neither is OSX.
Nobody can actually use Linux code for anything unless they're willing to give up commercial control of their project. Nobody is willing to do that.
IBM, Novell, Oracle or HP are thus probably suddenly getting mad and are sinking themselves at investing money for both free and commercial projects around the Linux platform... Not to be rude, but I frankly think that you should get a little more informed on how the software business is now running - we aren't in 1980 anymore.
We can surge ahead because we're not constantly getting harassed by lawyers from the FSF.
Court action of the FSF against commercial products are pretty rare and only involve cases where licence was unilaterally broken (which is illegal). May I remind you how many patents and NDA issues Apple or Microsoft already conducted in the past ? Check your facts before spreading unfounded rumors, please.
But it's not sane to ask those questions to the exclusion of other areas of advancement. Oh, sure, those guys are tweaking the background color of the file browser, but they're overlooking the completely fucked up font rendering architecture, or the essential inability to localize the system. That kind of thing.
Font rendering works perfectly under X for quite some time already, thanks, with network-aware font management as an extra. As for the system localization, it is also perfectly working, both with local codepages or Unicode formats. Of course, there are applications that are not localized - but the base system and all the common desktop tools are. Again, I urge you to check your facts before arguing.
Sure it is. All the run-time programs are basically file-by-file copies of Unix programs: init, inetd, the various networking daemons, all the command-line tools. Over the years people have sat down and copied Unix --Unix from the 1970s, remember -- file by file like the monks of old, dutifully reproducing everything even if it's just obviously stupid, like the init/inetd/cron/init.d/rc disaster.
*sigh*... inetd appeared with BSD 4.3 at the end of the eighties. Cron was written in 1987 by Paul Vixie. I see no 1970s in that.
May I also remind you that launchd does not replace cron ? Quoting OSNews on this:
Traditionally the cron daemon is always running, whether or not there are any jobs to run. Now, launchd watches
Maybe you don't understand what launchd is.
I am happy to notice that the people of OSNews are apparently as ignorant as I am.
There's no such problem with launchd.
Destroy launchd configuration for critical services, and you'll get the same result. Note that it is not an attack against launchd - just the fact that without the valid configuration of the boot-critical systems, you'll never get the thing to start up, being Windows, OSX or Linux.
If inittab or
Damaging one of the
we've rolled out massive innovation in Tiger.
I never denied that OSX made great progresses in various fields. But so did Linux or the BSDs.
Hell, even Bonjour (née Rendezvous). That's a world-changer. We took an idea that was frankly languishing, turned it into an actual specification and used it to change
I don't see a single innovation in Linux. It's all taken from Windows, Mac OS X, Unix and others.
Unix ? Which Unix ? Most of them already tend to use more and more of the software initially developed on Linux/BSDs. And most ideas implemented by either Windows or OSX aren't particularly new. At most, they were the first ones to implement them.
I know that it's free, but I'm not in business so that's not a selling point to me.
Neither am I. For *you*, money could not be an issue. But you see, the 120$ an OSX would cost me, I prefer spending them on a better screen. Or a better printer. See the (economical) point ?
What is in Linux that I can't get anywhere else?
Example: Show me how I can set up a software RAID5 with automated backup procedures under OSX or Windows without third-party tools.
Of course, you'll probably tell me that no domestic user requires such entreprise features. Well, given the stability problems lots of domestic users encounter for various reasons, don't you think it would be a good selling point to tell them that their "my document" folder can be made much more robust and recoverable without them ever having to bother about it ? Would you dismiss it on the sole idea that this is a technology traditionally labeled as "entreprise feature" ? That's just one example of course - there are plenty others.
It's not really their fault - they do it as a hobby, generally. But no-one is driving innovation in Linux. It's *stagnating*
See, when I do something as a hobby, I tend to put much more into it than if I have to make it "because my boss said so". And most of those people working on the various Linux-related projects are like that. A lot are also professional graphists, designers, coders or administrators. Do not underestimate their technical and humane skills on the sole purpose that they are "doing it for fun". It really, really is unsulting for them.
Some thoughts about this.
...you know. Not.
/etc/init.d/ configuration scripts under Linux. This doesn't prevent the machine to boot at all - it simply means that the damaged service will not work.
Yes, that explains why companies like Apple, and even Microsoft in their own, glacial way, are innovating on a fundamental level while Linux is
"Linux" (and the whole trend behind it, but also other systems and projects like FreeBSD) has at last been innovative in two ways:
- It showed that a cooperative development based on free will and open standards could lead to complex software projects that were able to stand up the comparaison against products built on the previous logic of closed, in-house, nearly reclusive development. And not only it is working, but for some it is also an economically viable model;
- On the specific point of technological innovation, Linux contributed to bring several technologies that were only available on costly enterprise systems to the masses, or only experiments. Think about the logical volume manager, software raid, efficient system virtualization or journalled filesystems. It is Linux and Free/Net/OpenBSD that pushed things to the points they are today, not Apple.
I'm being totally serious now: Linux is easily twenty years behind Apple. Seriously. Think about where all the attention is going: Human-user interface design. That was Apple in 1985. Today, Apple is doing no-shit innovation.
What you seem to forget is that Human Interface Design studies are currently the focal point because it is a way to get what your users want. I find pretty sane to see developers asking themselves "How can we make that software easier to use ?" all the time. Ease of use is a keypoint in today's software strategies and human-friendly designs is what's going to make a difference. And if you think that Apple isn't deeply investing on Human Interface Design anymore, then you'd better get more informed.
Even little things make a huge difference. Linux, being almost a file-by-file clone of Unix, is crippled by a vast and interdependent web of system watchdog services. There's init, there's inetd, there's watchdogd, there's cron, all separate and overlapping services whose job it is to start services. All complex, all in need of configuration. What did we do? We scrapped it all, replacing the whole mess with launchd. A single service with XML (meaning self-checking) configuration files.
Several points to address here:
- Linux isn't a "file-by-file" clone of Unix; a unified Unix doesn't exist anymore for more than 20 years. It uses a similar base organisation - just like OSX does.
- There is no such crippled interdependent web of services. Neither are they overlapped - to each daemon, its task. And launchd didn't scrap all of them - it is just a system to unify daemons configuration and launching. Note that similar tools exist under Linux and the BSDs and that every major distribution features standardized configuration files. True, XML isn't used - but when working on a console environment, XML is not necessarily the most readable format out there.
Do you know what happens on a Unix machine if your inittab file contains garbage data? The system refuses to boot! With XML configuration files, a config file that fails to validate will simply be ignored. The system will run in a degraded state until the file is corrected.
And what if a critical service fails to start because of its malformed XML configuration file ? Excuse me, but your comparaison sounds rather biaised. The equivalent of "garbaging" one of the XML configuration files of launchd would be corrupting one of the
It's stuff like that. Yes, we're doing big-time flashy innovation with things like Core Data and Spotlight. Those are no-shit world-changing things. But we're not just glomming new services onto old infrastructure. We're evolving the operating syst
I would love to see the sales numbers for the next OS X release. We could see some increase in sales due to Microsoft owners realizing that there is another OS in the market that works at least as well, if not better, than XP.
Don't you forget one small, little detail ? Something to do with hardware compatibility ? Or maybe I missed the announce for an x86-compatible OSX ?
Whatever the qualities of OSX, it has indeed one significant drawback: it runs on Apple's hardware only. Do not forget that "Microsoft owners" are not only Microsoft owners: they also are x86-compatible-hardware owners. They are x86-compatible-software owners.
To switch to OSX, the common "Joe Desktop User" running Windows will have to (1) buy OSX, (2) buy a new hardware configuration and (3) buy OSX versions of the software he so far used under Windows. Not everybody has the economical strength to renew all this just because "the OS is better".
The translation isn't correct for the first paragraph. That's quite a problem, since it changes the meaning significantly.
Le président serait-il prêt à s'entretenir avec le concurrent de Google, Microsoft, puisqu'il a tant de convergences de vues avec son président, Bill Gates, qu'il a longuement reçu à l'Elysée? "Pourquoi pas?", répondent les conseillers de M. Chirac.
The initial translator wrote "Would the president be ready to make a deal with Google's competitor, Microsoft" which is incorrect.
A correct translation would be:
Would the president be ready to talk with Google's competitor, Microsoft, since he has so many views in common with its president, Bill Gates, whom he has long welcomed to the Elysée?
Quite a different meaning, don't you think ?
The thing is that places do acquire reputations for a reason.
The problem is that too often, the reputation is founded on false rumors and very limited experience. That's what - both in French and English - leads to Clichés: caricatural descriptions.
I have a few friends who have travelled to France (including outlying regions beyond paris) and the only one who enjoyed the experience is someone whose wife spoke fluent French.
First, it is harder to enjoy a trip in a foreign country when you don't speak its language. It may sound weird to you, but the vast majority of humans do not speak or even understand English. The French popular culture relies heavily on spoken language, so it is hard to enjoy it if you don't understand it.
Moreover, there has been a strong Anti-Americanism sentiment in France (and more generally in Western Europe) since the start of the war in Iraq, mirroring the Anti-French sentiment in the US. It could have played a role in the bad experience as well.
Finally, even French citizens recognize that some Parisians are maybe a little too proud of themselves - but that's not a problem specific to Paris or France and certainly cannot be generalized to all the Frenchs.
This effect is aggravated by the "seemingly rude" point - there are some things people do in other cultures that strike Americans as rude. Part of that for my friends was some sort of service issue at restaurants, I forget the detail but some seemingly inconsequential thing they wanted was looked on in outrage by the waiter. Perhaps he also viewed the request as rude, but the response basically discolored my friends opinion of restaurants in France.
When travelling to a foreign country, you have to accept its customs and habits. If you step on them, you'll definitely turn people angry or annoyed. If you make a mistake and offend somebody, apologizing solves it in most cases. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I didn't see a lot of american tourists caring much about the local behavior in restaurants, hotels or museums.
(...)
While it did not make me think of all Spaniards as lunatics, it certainly made me think a little bit inside that shopkeepers there were on something of a power trip with little respect for customers.
Never *ever* touch the window display in a shop in Western Europe. That's a *major* mistake. For the shop keeper, it is about as offensive as taking a item exposed in a museum "to better see it" or to touch a XIVth century painting with your fingers "to check what kind of pigment it is". For him, that would be about the same if you threw a stone on his shop's display window.
Your experience is definitely one of "cultural gap", not a "those people are unfriendly" one. Don't expect the shop keeper to have any respect for a customer who obviously had none for him !
So reputations of other countries being difficult may stem from the degree of cultural differences between two countries. And to some extent, I have to say that given that the reputation is correct as far as the average person goes. Even though the behavior there might not really be rude, to the traveller it might seem that way and really that's the same thing as far as the traveller is concerned!
I definitely disagree with your conclusion. *Everybody* in *every* foreign culture will be annoyed, offended or angry when you stomp on their customs. The vast majority of people (at least in Spain and France, which I know pretty well) are very friendly and will be open and helpful - as long as you don't behave as some kind of barbarian from their point of view.
Before taking conclusions about the friendliness in foreign countries, always think about your own behavior first: did the inhabitants find it offensive ? Did you ask them first when you were uncertain on what was the proper thing to do ? Did you present apologises in the formal way used by the inhabitants ? In most cases, you'll find it very instructive and it will help you to enjoy your future trips much more than any "Those guys are unfriendly" kind of Cliché.
It is quite understandable why XOrg will not get into Sarge - requirements of portability and stability aren't met and will require lots of work. Yet I cannot restrain myself of thinking: I always hear about Sarge, but what about the unstable branch of Debian ? I still don't get why Sarge would require unstable to be frozen like that - and in fact, it isn't the case for most of the other packages.
Sarge is indeed a good excuse for the Debian XSF to be late, but it is starting to become a little overused. Initially, the position was something in the lines of "Debian will not start working on integrating XOrg before Sarge is out". And at that time, it made sense.
The problem is that the expected date release of Sarge was pushed back over and over. The Debian X Strike Force was IMHO quite slow at reacting to the upcoming of XOrg. The draft of the consensus reached is dated 15th August. Fine - but when checking the subversion repository of the XSF, you see that it was initiated at the end of September. Little also seem to have changed since the end of October.
Now, I understand that the top priority of the Debian XSF is to iron out bugs for Sarge - but I don't think it should mean such a long-terme freeze for the unstable branch which is - by definition - unstable. Why keeping the XOrg work aside ? By doing so, it means that another long delay will be required after Sarge is out for it to become available on unstable - and then, people will be *right* when claiming that "Debian is outdated".
Backporting pieces of code from XOrg to XFree 4.3 as it is currently done only partially solves the fundamental issue - as XOrg matures and evolves, backporting will become more and more difficult to handle. In some case, backporting may even proove impossible. And the development time spent on backports is time that doesn't get into working on XOrg stuff. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is somewhat lacking of future perspective.
I quite appreciate the efforts made by Debian to maintain such a massive amount of packages - but I more and more get the impression that the Debian X Strike Force lost contact with some of their users and isn't efficient enough to handle the current situation by itself and is a little overusing Sarge as an excuse for some lateness.
This is indeed a good news regarding the portability of GPL, QT-based applications; this decision brings QT on par with GTK in that respect.
Now, I just hope they'll not make us wait for too long for QT 4 !
"There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873."
Wrong, grossly wrong.
There's only one true standard regarding keyboards, defined by the ISO/CEI 9995 norm ("Keyboard Layouts for Text and Office Systems, in Parts").
Now, inside that norm, there are several standards in use all around the world: QWERTY in anglo-saxon countries. AZERTY in Europe. QWERTZ and DVORAK also found limited use. And that's not even counting the numerous regional variants. Even if you restrain the definition to the layout of the standard alphanumeric keys, you can already find AZERTY, QWERTY, DVORAK both with unshifted and shifted access to numbers, all in widespread use - that's already six layouts that you can call standards (as they're used in more than one country).
Don't believe that because QWERTY-US is in use in your country that it is the case in the rest of the world !
You got very good points there. But there are some things to clear out:
- DVD playback under Linux is only a problem in a few countries (Jon Johansen, deCSS author, has been declared innocent in January by the Norwegian Court);
- DVD authoring is perfectly legal in all cases. Not easy ? Projects like QDVD-Author now allow the same level of control and ease-of-use than the average Windows DVD-Authoring software. As with firewire digicams, I don't encounter any problem with those. Want advanced video editing from DV sources ? Things like MainActor 5 are now available. I'll not pretend you will find it easy - I'll just say that I don't find it hard.
- Again, iTunes DRM'd songs can be played legally in most countries; don't want those ugly WINE kludges ? Get CrossOver Office, which will allow you to install iTunes (and others) within a friendly GUI and without having to manually edit cryptic configuration files.
I perfectly understood "desktop" in the way you meant it - "home computing". And I certainly don't say Linux is perfect - that's very far from it. Nor do I depreciate Windows or MacOS - both are good desktop OSes as well. It is just that the "very poor desktop OS" sounds for me somewhat injustified.
It's a poor platform for a desktop OS, plain and simple
I'd be interested to hear in which way. If you put the gaming market aside, it is a very competitive desktop OS (and a significant number of administrations, offices and other organisms selected it as their main work desktop platform). Applications ? It has. Stability and efficience at managing resources ? It has. Connectivity ? It has.
and the efforts to turn it into a good desktop OS are too splintered and half-assed.
I suspect that you think so because there's no unique initiative towards a friendly Linux desktop environment - you have a several distributions, toolkits, or desktop environments to choose from, which can be quite intimidating at first. But there are Linux distributions specifically aiming at providing an out-of-the-box, easy-to-use desktop environment smoothly integrating everything you may want. Knoppix or Ubuntu are just two popular examples of that trend - trying to provide something coherent without too many compromises.
Each little distro can then focus on the hardware it's designed for, and the task it's meant to do, rather than trying to cram every OSS project under the sun onto 6 DVD's and calling it a "Windows Killer".
The goal of the distributions isn't to cram "every OSS project" on its CDs. Generalist distributions like Debian, SuSE or Fedora try to encompass most of what you can expect to do with a computer in the easiest way possible. And that's why things like package managers or networked installer CDs were invented: to make your life easier. Linux isn't a "geek-only" system anymore.
Finally, when speaking about "Joe Sixpack's exposure" to Linux and his possible reactions to it, you may want to give a try at this article (English version here ), where the author compared the ease of installation and use of Linux Mandrake 9.2 and Windows 2000 by letting his unexperimented wife handle it by herself. The result demonstrates that (at least for her) Linux was easier to install and use for her daily tasks.
A common mistake is to point at the case of people used to Windows attempting to use Linux and being "lost" in an alien environment. The only valuable point to take into account is how people who never used a computer before can find their marks under Linux. That's two pretty different things to consider, I'd say.
Strictly speaking, WINE is an emulator - "Emulating" applies to any system providing a compatible environment different from its native one.
Now, it should also be made clear that WINE is not similar to a console emulator in the sense that it is not a hardware emulator, but rather belongs to the family of software compatibility layers.
If the WINE staff insists so much on the "it isn't an emulator", it is probably simply because of a semantic shift of the term: for a lot of people, emulation is associated with "on-the-fly translation of hardware instructions" and thus with the idea of a significant degradation of performances.
But since WINE is just an API compatibility layer without any translation of the machine code, it doesn't suffer of such performance drops. Its behavior is in fact closer to what 32-bit versions of Windows do when running older, 16-bit apps than what softwares like VMWare or BOCHS do - this probably explains why the WINE staff insists so much on the "not an emulator" (read: "not a hardware emulator") message.
"What's that, Snibs ?
- Err... That's what they call a 'mouse' in the outside world, Sir. I thought it would be an interesting device for you to see, Sir.
- A mouse ? What is it made for ? Hunt cheese bits between the coke cans ?
- No, Sir. Actually, they use it to interact with the GUI and...
- What ?! GUI ?! You bloody traitor ! GUARDS ! Take Mr. Snibs and his... rodent to the PDP-11 mental reconditioning room !"
An interesting point, which underlines a few common misconceptions regarding today's global strategy. The first point regards a short to mid-term massive military engagement, at a scale comparable to World War II. The eventuality of such a conflict is indeed pretty unlikely, as very few nations would have the economical power to sustain such a large-scale engagement against the 'Occident' in general, or the USA in particular. Countries like China would have a military potential sufficient to attempt such a challenge - but that would be economically highly inefficient, and would go against the ideology followed by China during the past 20 years. The second misconception is that "danger comes from the skies". Missiles are seen as the most important threat to US security on the military level. This is basically a truncated view coming back from the Cold War Era. Recent experience obviously proved that it was much more cost-efficient for a potential aggressor trying to destabilize a country to use infiltration and terrorist schemes. Third questionable point: the attack of the US territory itself. Why would a foreign country try to bomb the US territory with missiles ? The US territory is not the most important strategical target in the hypothesis of a large-scale conflict: the economical and political resources outside the country are, because thay are more difficult to protect and more accessible. That's quite the strategy followed since 1945: fearing a major nuclear war where no one would ultimately win, conflicts were solved around satellite countries in an attempt to change the balance of power a little in a direction or another. The question of the "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction" is also quite questionable. India and Pakistan indeed developed such weapons - but they're short-range ones only, their main purpose being to target their immediate neighbours in a scheme quite similar to the Cold War one. China also has an important destruction potential, but has everything to loose in the hypothesis of a direct conflict with another major power due to its current economical situation. The arsenal of the former USSR countries is mostly an heritage of the Sovietic era; no massive developments on that side. Countries of the Middle-East and Africa do not have either the economical or technological support required to develop such mass-destruction weapons on a large-scale. So where is that proliferation some US politicians warned about ? Finally, it is indeed true that one of the primary respoonsabilities of governments is protection of people. Would anti-missile measures be more effective given the current sociological and economical context than anti-terrorist protection programs ? I am quite doubtful about it. But I'd rather prefer pay taxes for education or medical research than for what I mostly see as High-Tech Military Toys.
The fact is, and this is hard to deny, europe today is extremely dependent on the US for its security.
Believe it or not, I'll attempt just that.
Your point is interesting, because I think it gives a good insight of common geopolitical "easy ways".
First, I'd like to underline that we see "Europe" and "EU" described as a block, as homogenous geopolitically as the US. This is a fundamental error: the EU is basically a group of very divergent political entities. Of course, some european countries share "common roots" (being economically, strategically or politically). But even considering that, it is impossible to take the Europe - or even its reduced EU view - as a whole. Opposed opinions about terrorism in the EU alone is a good example of such strong local nuances. This is something which is unfortunately too often put aside, leading to oversimplification of the problems.
Now, keeping my previous point in mind, about the question of "defense".
It is indeed true that the current average line of politics in Europe goes more towards pacifist solutions. There are good historical reasons for that: Europe was the focal point of the two World Wars; Europe initiated colonial wars about 300 years ago; Europe ruled the world from the end of the XVth Century to the middle of the XXth. Past events showed that although war gave by itself impressive short and middle-term results, it wasn't very efficient to establish long-term objectives. All major conflicts of the XXth century confirmed this trend, being lead by Europe or other countries. Western European countries have a long colonialist past behind them, and that definitely plays a role on the way they perceive the current situation: military domination proved rather inefficient compared to economical control. This emphasis on the economical side rather than on the military side is definitely obvious in today's European diplomacy.
I'm rather curious to see what kind of massive military attacks Europe could expect from the outside. I see only a couple of options there:
- From the Middle-East or from the Northern Africa ? But those are economically dependent from Europe. They're also made of a puzzle of contradictory interests - there is no unity to expect on short or middle-term timeframe. Besides that, their military power is questionable (Israel being an exception);
- From Central Asia ? Caucasian republics are busy with their own anarchy. The two most important military forces there are Pakistan and India - but they are watching at each other, not at Europe, which is perceived as a neutral supplier, just like the USA;
- From the Far East ? But what would be the interest of China to attack and damage what is one of their most important trading partners ?
- From "the South" ? None of the countries of Central/Southern Africa or Southern America can oppose a realistic military answer to the EU;
This leaves only one possibility: Europe being endangered by Europe itself. There are very few possibilities there: most of the former "Eastern Block" is in the process of being integrated into the EU. The former Jugoslavia never attempted anything outside its borders - and doesn't present a threat to the rest of the continent. So where is that military threat above the head of Europe ? The question needs to be asked, and so far received no clear answer. Just as a side note, although the military power of Europe is inferior to the US one, it is very far from outdated or inexistent; and Europe has the financial capability to sustain large-scale, long-duration operations, something the USA cannot really afford anymore.
About the WWI, WWII and Yugoslavia: It is a common thought that "USA saved Europe". Some things to remember, though:
- The intervention of the USA during WWI was marginal and never decisive for the course of the war. If you study your history manuals, you'll see that Germans capitulated mostly because political and economical troubles starting to suffoca