OS X gives you basically just one theme (well, there are third party hacks, but I have found them to be pretty unpredictable), plus the option of enabling a few gimmicks in the GUI. And architecturally, a lot of that stuff happens by special-purpose functionality.
The combination of Gnome, KDE, and X11 in (K)Ubuntu already gives you a choice of dozens of well-designed themes each, in addition to having implemented nearly all the special effects that OS X has.
But that's just the beginning, because the Xgl architecture makes it much easier to implement new visual GUI technologies. People have already demonstrated far more sophisticated and complex GUI techniques and visual styles than anything shown by Apple.
there's plenty of Linux vendors
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For servers and workstations, you can go with companies like Penguin Computing (there are many more of them) that put together machines out of Linux-compatible components, integrate it, preinstall everything, and ship it.
For laptops, there are actually plenty of Linux compatible laptops, but there is no single recognizable brand that is consistently Linux compatible, making the problem one of selection, not availability. Fortunately, a number of companies like Emperor Linux do the legwork for you.
With hardware virtualization on the new Intel mobile chips, using Windows or OS X as a "bootstrap loader and device driver" for Linux is another reasonable choice. That way, you get all the goodness of a Linux desktop environment on your hardware, but installation is trivial and you can strip down the host OS to its bare minimum.
The reason I don't run a Linux machine is BECAUSE no vendor (known to me) sells hardware that will be guaranteed to run Linux with 100% hardware working.
You really have to look around a bit more: there are thousands of vendors that sell Linux pre-installed and guarantee that it's working, including same-day hardware and software support.
The lack of Linux adoption is really first and foremost a hardware issue
There is no "lack of Linux adoption"; at this point, Linux is the most common OS after Windows, with OS X trailing a distant third on servers and a closer third on desktops. Linux supports far more hardware than OS X, and far more hardware out of the box than Windows.
The only area where there is any practically significant difficulty with Linux and hardware these days is on laptops and with 3D cards--both of those are real problems, but they don't matter that much to Linux's core market, and they will get fixed sooner or later. It's a shame Lenovo didn't take this opportunity to help address these issues, but it's ultimately their loss.
First of all, Lenovo is not IBM; IBM was shipping Linux.
However small Linux sales were, if they stop Linux sales, they will lose business.
Well, that's not always the case. Shipping or tolerating Linux costs them some money: marketing, support calls, more difficult deals with proprietary hardware vendors. Still, I think all things being equal, Linux is already popular enough so that those costs would have more than been compensated by the sales.
So, I agree that Microsoft probably pushed them with both a carrot (lower Windows licensing costs) and a stick (Microsoft has lots of sticks).
And, yes, Microsoft is clearly scared (as they should be).
They have missed a big opportunity. They could have used this juncture to become a leading Linux supplier for the corporate desktop and server market. Instead, they're just handing more and more control over their business to Microsoft.
And if they think they can always do that later, they're kidding themselves. People already don't trust their brand name and their ability to innovate, and shipping beige boxes to Microsoft specs is going to damage their brand even more.
While only a small fraction of violent criminals are even familiar with video games, nearly all of them have been exposed to the Bible, a book containing and glorifying torture, genocide, incest, and many other despicable acts. Furthermore, many murderers have explicitly stated that they were motivated by the Bible.
(I'm only semi-kidding; I think the Bible cannot be banned, and most criminals would be criminal with or without it. But the Bible really is a horrific document and it really has been used to justify more killing that any other single document. And while the Bible contains some parts that promote moral behavior, large parts of it can only be described as abhorrent and reprehensible.)
The problem with trademarking the term "Web 2.0" is that people have started using it as a generic term for a technology, but now a company wants to claim it for a product. That's clearly tempting, because having a term establish itself as a generic term and then getting a trademark on it is a lot cheaper than creating and marketing a proprietary brand name from scratch.
That is not the same as what happened with Linux or Wikipedia, which all referred specific products. It's like trademarking the term "software engineering" and telling people that they can't hold a conference with the name "software engineering" in the title.
If the trademark on the "Web 2.0 Conference" is narrow, then there is no problem--you could still hold the "Web 2.0 World Congress" and the "Joint Conferences on Web 2.0 Technologies". But if CMP wants to assert control over any and all uses of "Web 2.0" in conference titles, then we should regard the term "Web 2.0" as proprietary and stop using it to refer generically to the next generation of web technologies.
So, the best thing is probably to drop "Web 2.0" from our language (it's pretty silly anyway) and refer to these technologies as something else: NextGenWeb or WebTech 2 whatever. If it helps, just think "CMP Web 2.0" everytime you are tempted to use the term "Web 2.0".
For better or for worse, iPod is probably so enormously popular because of iTunes, in particular playlist synchronization, smart playlists, the iTunes store, and podcasts. Furthermore, people get all that functionality bundled in a single app (which is kind of necessary in order to make synchronization work smoothly).
What's the desktop integration story with RockBox? Does RockBox emulate USB storage when plugged in? What support is there for playlist synchronization? I think without a good desktop tool, RockBox may be a threat to other MP3 players, but not iPod.
The phrase "Apple shouldn't complain" has nothing to do with Apple actually complaining; it's a colloquialism.
As for whether Apple will actually publicly "whine" about it, I expect not. That's not because Apple is a nice company, it's because SanDisk isn't big enough and doesn't have enough brand recognition to bother with.
What I do expect is that if they ever started feeling that RockBox affects them in any way, Apple would try to shut it down with threats of legal action for anything they can find--after all, it wouldn't be the first time.
Apple has made a career out and a fortune out of portraying their competitors as evil and dominating, and people who buy their competitors' products as boring and conforming. It is only fair that when Apple dominates a market, others do the same thing to them.
What I wanted to say is that the FSF efforts are really good, but it would be better to try to focus more on educating the consumers (show them why DRM is bad in the same way the corporations are trying to paint it as a good thing),
That's what the FSF is doing, in the best way they can: by creating and disseminating memes like "DRM = Digital Restrictions Management". Those messages aren't directed at the advertisers, they are directed at the population.
Granted, it doesn't match the slick advertising that highly paid advertising agencies for big media companies come up with, but, I'm sorry, it's the best that the FSF knows how to do.
I don't think an article on Ubuntu for everyday desktop usage should include fiddling with gdm.conf to enable Xgl. That kind of eye candy really is not essential to desktop usage, and that kind of hacking only scares people away.
VB and VB.NET are effective, productive programming languages; on technical grounds, you have very little grounds to argue against them. In fact, for most applications, they are probably better languages to use than C++.
Performance used to be an issue with VB, but is not with VB.NET anymore; even in VB, a good strategy was to write performance critical code in C (as little as possible) and the rest of the application in VB. And the VB language (but not VB.NET) had grown organically, so that, as a language, it was a bit crufty, but I don't think that mattered much.
Of course, VB code frequently has problems, but that has causes outside the language, foremost that the IDE enables people with little experience to write applications, and the way the IDE handles GUI design (also a problem with VC++). Another big problem with VB is that it's proprietary, so you are stuck on the Windows platform; however, there is a VB.NET implementation being created for Linux.
So, overall, I don't think you have much of an argument, in particular if the discussion is about VB.NET
McAllister is apparently some anti-copyright hippie, because otherwise he'd understand that it's the FSF's code and they can choose whatever license they damned well please. If he doesn't like it, he doesn't have to use it. He's welcome to try and use Microsoft's or Apple's or Oracle's code contrary to their licenses or even try to argue with their legal staff about their licenses and see how far he gets.
He also thinks that free software has to prove itself to him or anybody else; here's a piece of news: it doesn't have to prove anything to anybody. In practice, enough people find it useful for free software to be a force in the market. If McAllister can't figure out why, that's his loss and his problem.
As for "neo-political activism", that's what the FSF is about (that's actually why the FSF and the GNU project are separate, but, hey, if you're an Infoworld journalist, why bother with facts). Personally, I consider the FSF's methods a whole lot better than the campaign contributions and other influence peddling that the big commercial software companies engage in. Regardless of whether you agree with their goals (and I don't always myself), politics is supposed to work like the FSF does it, not like corporate America does it.
If McAllister wants to participate in any meaningful debate on free software and free software licenses, he first needs to get rid of some of his assumptions, foremost his assumption that free software owes him anything.
That's not the way it works. It's those that want to deviate from the norm/corporate standard that must demonstrate the benefits/cost of an alternative, and in many cases it must VASTLY outweigh the standard for it to even be considered.
You are describing how many irrational organizations work. I'm stating how rational organizations need to behave.
The fact is that linux is NOT ready for the desktop.
The fact is that you're full of shit. Linux is technically superior as a desktop OS to both Windows and Macintosh: it's more consistent, less prone to security problems, more advanced technically, easier to install, and easier to maintain.
One can argue that there are non-technical reasons why a Windows or Mac purchase still makes sense. For example, I'm using a Macintosh laptop right now simply because OS X is preinstalled on it. And I have a Windows partition for the occasional Windows-only software. But none of those are intrinsic advantages of Windows or Macintosh.
IT shops then have to decide whether it is worth having a single OS throughout the company (Windows) for all desktops, laptops, servers, and even some PDAs, or would it be more cost beneficient to have some machines linux and some machines windows.
First of all, the idea that Microsoft ships a single Windows OS is a myth; Microsoft ships half a dozen different operating systems, some of them wildly incompatible. If you go with all-Microsoft systems, you are already running a multi-platform shop.
Second, in my experience, almost any Windows system you replace with a UNIX or Linux system in an organization, desktop or server, greatly reduces support costs.
Usually, it does right at the point you say it's FREE (But we have to hire another $40,000-$80,000 IT guy to support it). At $30-$50 a license for Windows that most mid/large companies pay for a copy of Windows,
No, usually, at this point, I point out that, in all the organizations I have ever worked, each Windows desktop machine has required about 10x the amount of IT support hours as UNIX or Linux desktop machines.
Windows systems are enormously labor, support, and training intensive. That is one big reason for getting rid of them.
There is a lot more than just what is technologically "better" when deciding on what platform(s) a company uses.
Indeed. But except for compatibility with some proprietary software and corporate inertia, Windows loses in just about every category: TCO, support costs, training costs, security, licensing costs, reliability, usability, consistency, interoperability, technology, business risk, upgrade costs, etc.
All that will happen is that US Immigration will ask you for the same 34 pieces of information, and refuse you entry if you don't supply them.
Well, that is progress already because (1) you know the kind of information that is being collected and (2) you yourself supply it so that you yourself are responsible for any mistakes.
While everyone wants to see China improving its enforcement of IP rights, is this a step too far?"
China is under no intrinsic legal or ethical obligation to respect our copyright laws. The fact that they are making efforts to do so is the result of their trade relationships: basically, we tell them that in order to trade with us, they must implement copyright and patent laws similar to our own, and they comply because they want to trade with us.
That's different from, say, human rights. Whether China trades with us or not, human rights in China are our business, and China is under international legal and ethical obligations to respect them. (Of course, what constitutes human rights, and what constitutes acceptable cultural differences, is something one can debate endlessly; but there is a core of human rights that every nation on this planet must adhere to.)
First of all, just like Americans, Europeans trust their own government more than foreign governments.
Second, do you seriously believe that in the US, there won't be widespread tracking of license plates? It will likely be carried out by some company, who will then sell the data to almost anybody who asks. In fact, in the US, companies can operate with near impunity, and the US government apparently circumvents restrictions on itself by outsourcing.
The real difference in terms of privacy between the US and Europe is that Europeans generally place stronger limits on corporate use of private data and that governmental use is more transparent. That makes it appear as if European governments are more intrusive, but in the end, it probably means that in absolute terms, your personal life is still a little more protected in Europe than in the US.
The US doesn't give "financial aid" to Europe. Instead, Europe and Asia are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the US to keep the US economy afloat (it's not called "financial aid", but "loans and investments", but the end result is not that different). They are doing this because the US is an important export market for Europe and Asia and the world economy would collapse if they didn't do this.
So, the US has some credible economic threats against Europe, but withdrawal of "financial aid" isn't it. The US threat is more like "we can commit economic suicide and take you with us"; it's a threat better exercised with great care.
These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer
Those rights are also there to prevent the government from abusing your data. Just look at Italy over the last few years to see what kind of potential for abuse there exists.
It was also available under license to anyone that wanted to use it, and partly for that reason many variants grew up and lost interoperability - and the Unix wars began
That's a nice, often-repeated story, but it doesn't correspond to reality. In reality, UNIX variants were no worse than the different versions of Windows or MacOS we have had to live with. In fact, once the ABIs were decided upon, arguably, things were somewhat better. And today, at least on x86, the Linux ABI is a de-facto standard that's supported by several UNIX systems. For a brief time, Windows and MacOS had their act together a little bit better in terms of software packaging and installation (driven by necessit), but UNIX and Linux are now lightyears ahead of both Windows and OS X in that area, too.
The primary source of binary incompatibility between machines was, in the end, simply the use of different processors by different vendors; as long as that existed, software vendors had to recompile and ship different binaries anyway. Note that Microsoft briefly tried to handle multiple processors with Windows NT and the effort flopped completely.
First of all, few scientists have the luxury of having dedicated programmers anymore. Second, the team of scientists can generally find other things to do with no problems (grant applications, etc.).
Since everything you can compare Bluray to is proprietary as well it makes no sense to point that out as a reason for its higher price.
The article does not say that it's expensive because it's proprietary.
The article states that Sony chose an expensive format because they have a financial stake in the commercial success of that format. And that is entirely correct.
It's not a question of "zealotry", the word "proprietary" simply means that some entity legally owns and controls it, and that's clearly the case for BlueRay and DVDs. (I believe the patents on CDs and MPEG may be expiring, so they may become non-proprietary fairly soon).
In particular, contrary to what you imagine, standards licensed under RAND licensing terms are, of course, still proprietary.
Yes, which brings us back to only a "tiny fraction" of all scientific programmers dealing with optimizations. In fact, supercomputers are disappearing from all but a few niches.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X gives you basically just one theme (well, there are third party hacks, but I have found them to be pretty unpredictable), plus the option of enabling a few gimmicks in the GUI. And architecturally, a lot of that stuff happens by special-purpose functionality.
The combination of Gnome, KDE, and X11 in (K)Ubuntu already gives you a choice of dozens of well-designed themes each, in addition to having implemented nearly all the special effects that OS X has.
But that's just the beginning, because the Xgl architecture makes it much easier to implement new visual GUI technologies. People have already demonstrated far more sophisticated and complex GUI techniques and visual styles than anything shown by Apple.
For servers and workstations, you can go with companies like Penguin Computing (there are many more of them) that put together machines out of Linux-compatible components, integrate it, preinstall everything, and ship it.
For laptops, there are actually plenty of Linux compatible laptops, but there is no single recognizable brand that is consistently Linux compatible, making the problem one of selection, not availability. Fortunately, a number of companies like Emperor Linux do the legwork for you.
With hardware virtualization on the new Intel mobile chips, using Windows or OS X as a "bootstrap loader and device driver" for Linux is another reasonable choice. That way, you get all the goodness of a Linux desktop environment on your hardware, but installation is trivial and you can strip down the host OS to its bare minimum.
The reason I don't run a Linux machine is BECAUSE no vendor (known to me) sells hardware that will be guaranteed to run Linux with 100% hardware working.
You really have to look around a bit more: there are thousands of vendors that sell Linux pre-installed and guarantee that it's working, including same-day hardware and software support.
The lack of Linux adoption is really first and foremost a hardware issue
There is no "lack of Linux adoption"; at this point, Linux is the most common OS after Windows, with OS X trailing a distant third on servers and a closer third on desktops. Linux supports far more hardware than OS X, and far more hardware out of the box than Windows.
The only area where there is any practically significant difficulty with Linux and hardware these days is on laptops and with 3D cards--both of those are real problems, but they don't matter that much to Linux's core market, and they will get fixed sooner or later. It's a shame Lenovo didn't take this opportunity to help address these issues, but it's ultimately their loss.
First of all, Lenovo is not IBM; IBM was shipping Linux.
However small Linux sales were, if they stop Linux sales, they will lose business.
Well, that's not always the case. Shipping or tolerating Linux costs them some money: marketing, support calls, more difficult deals with proprietary hardware vendors. Still, I think all things being equal, Linux is already popular enough so that those costs would have more than been compensated by the sales.
So, I agree that Microsoft probably pushed them with both a carrot (lower Windows licensing costs) and a stick (Microsoft has lots of sticks).
And, yes, Microsoft is clearly scared (as they should be).
They have missed a big opportunity. They could have used this juncture to become a leading Linux supplier for the corporate desktop and server market. Instead, they're just handing more and more control over their business to Microsoft.
And if they think they can always do that later, they're kidding themselves. People already don't trust their brand name and their ability to innovate, and shipping beige boxes to Microsoft specs is going to damage their brand even more.
While only a small fraction of violent criminals are even familiar with video games, nearly all of them have been exposed to the Bible, a book containing and glorifying torture, genocide, incest, and many other despicable acts. Furthermore, many murderers have explicitly stated that they were motivated by the Bible.
(I'm only semi-kidding; I think the Bible cannot be banned, and most criminals would be criminal with or without it. But the Bible really is a horrific document and it really has been used to justify more killing that any other single document. And while the Bible contains some parts that promote moral behavior, large parts of it can only be described as abhorrent and reprehensible.)
The problem with trademarking the term "Web 2.0" is that people have started using it as a generic term for a technology, but now a company wants to claim it for a product. That's clearly tempting, because having a term establish itself as a generic term and then getting a trademark on it is a lot cheaper than creating and marketing a proprietary brand name from scratch.
That is not the same as what happened with Linux or Wikipedia, which all referred specific products. It's like trademarking the term "software engineering" and telling people that they can't hold a conference with the name "software engineering" in the title.
If the trademark on the "Web 2.0 Conference" is narrow, then there is no problem--you could still hold the "Web 2.0 World Congress" and the "Joint Conferences on Web 2.0 Technologies". But if CMP wants to assert control over any and all uses of "Web 2.0" in conference titles, then we should regard the term "Web 2.0" as proprietary and stop using it to refer generically to the next generation of web technologies.
So, the best thing is probably to drop "Web 2.0" from our language (it's pretty silly anyway) and refer to these technologies as something else: NextGenWeb or WebTech 2 whatever. If it helps, just think "CMP Web 2.0" everytime you are tempted to use the term "Web 2.0".
For better or for worse, iPod is probably so enormously popular because of iTunes, in particular playlist synchronization, smart playlists, the iTunes store, and podcasts. Furthermore, people get all that functionality bundled in a single app (which is kind of necessary in order to make synchronization work smoothly).
What's the desktop integration story with RockBox? Does RockBox emulate USB storage when plugged in? What support is there for playlist synchronization? I think without a good desktop tool, RockBox may be a threat to other MP3 players, but not iPod.
The phrase "Apple shouldn't complain" has nothing to do with Apple actually complaining; it's a colloquialism.
As for whether Apple will actually publicly "whine" about it, I expect not. That's not because Apple is a nice company, it's because SanDisk isn't big enough and doesn't have enough brand recognition to bother with.
What I do expect is that if they ever started feeling that RockBox affects them in any way, Apple would try to shut it down with threats of legal action for anything they can find--after all, it wouldn't be the first time.
Apple has made a career out and a fortune out of portraying their competitors as evil and dominating, and people who buy their competitors' products as boring and conforming. It is only fair that when Apple dominates a market, others do the same thing to them.
What I wanted to say is that the FSF efforts are really good, but it would be better to try to focus more on educating the consumers (show them why DRM is bad in the same way the corporations are trying to paint it as a good thing),
That's what the FSF is doing, in the best way they can: by creating and disseminating memes like "DRM = Digital Restrictions Management". Those messages aren't directed at the advertisers, they are directed at the population.
Granted, it doesn't match the slick advertising that highly paid advertising agencies for big media companies come up with, but, I'm sorry, it's the best that the FSF knows how to do.
I don't think an article on Ubuntu for everyday desktop usage should include fiddling with gdm.conf to enable Xgl. That kind of eye candy really is not essential to desktop usage, and that kind of hacking only scares people away.
VB and VB.NET are effective, productive programming languages; on technical grounds, you have very little grounds to argue against them. In fact, for most applications, they are probably better languages to use than C++.
Performance used to be an issue with VB, but is not with VB.NET anymore; even in VB, a good strategy was to write performance critical code in C (as little as possible) and the rest of the application in VB. And the VB language (but not VB.NET) had grown organically, so that, as a language, it was a bit crufty, but I don't think that mattered much.
Of course, VB code frequently has problems, but that has causes outside the language, foremost that the IDE enables people with little experience to write applications, and the way the IDE handles GUI design (also a problem with VC++). Another big problem with VB is that it's proprietary, so you are stuck on the Windows platform; however, there is a VB.NET implementation being created for Linux.
So, overall, I don't think you have much of an argument, in particular if the discussion is about VB.NET
McAllister is apparently some anti-copyright hippie, because otherwise he'd understand that it's the FSF's code and they can choose whatever license they damned well please. If he doesn't like it, he doesn't have to use it. He's welcome to try and use Microsoft's or Apple's or Oracle's code contrary to their licenses or even try to argue with their legal staff about their licenses and see how far he gets.
He also thinks that free software has to prove itself to him or anybody else; here's a piece of news: it doesn't have to prove anything to anybody. In practice, enough people find it useful for free software to be a force in the market. If McAllister can't figure out why, that's his loss and his problem.
As for "neo-political activism", that's what the FSF is about (that's actually why the FSF and the GNU project are separate, but, hey, if you're an Infoworld journalist, why bother with facts). Personally, I consider the FSF's methods a whole lot better than the campaign contributions and other influence peddling that the big commercial software companies engage in. Regardless of whether you agree with their goals (and I don't always myself), politics is supposed to work like the FSF does it, not like corporate America does it.
If McAllister wants to participate in any meaningful debate on free software and free software licenses, he first needs to get rid of some of his assumptions, foremost his assumption that free software owes him anything.
That's not the way it works. It's those that want to deviate from the norm/corporate standard that must demonstrate the benefits/cost of an alternative, and in many cases it must VASTLY outweigh the standard for it to even be considered.
You are describing how many irrational organizations work. I'm stating how rational organizations need to behave.
The fact is that linux is NOT ready for the desktop.
The fact is that you're full of shit. Linux is technically superior as a desktop OS to both Windows and Macintosh: it's more consistent, less prone to security problems, more advanced technically, easier to install, and easier to maintain.
One can argue that there are non-technical reasons why a Windows or Mac purchase still makes sense. For example, I'm using a Macintosh laptop right now simply because OS X is preinstalled on it. And I have a Windows partition for the occasional Windows-only software. But none of those are intrinsic advantages of Windows or Macintosh.
IT shops then have to decide whether it is worth having a single OS throughout the company (Windows) for all desktops, laptops, servers, and even some PDAs, or would it be more cost beneficient to have some machines linux and some machines windows.
First of all, the idea that Microsoft ships a single Windows OS is a myth; Microsoft ships half a dozen different operating systems, some of them wildly incompatible. If you go with all-Microsoft systems, you are already running a multi-platform shop.
Second, in my experience, almost any Windows system you replace with a UNIX or Linux system in an organization, desktop or server, greatly reduces support costs.
Usually, it does right at the point you say it's FREE (But we have to hire another $40,000-$80,000 IT guy to support it). At $30-$50 a license for Windows that most mid/large companies pay for a copy of Windows,
No, usually, at this point, I point out that, in all the organizations I have ever worked, each Windows desktop machine has required about 10x the amount of IT support hours as UNIX or Linux desktop machines.
Windows systems are enormously labor, support, and training intensive. That is one big reason for getting rid of them.
There is a lot more than just what is technologically "better" when deciding on what platform(s) a company uses.
Indeed. But except for compatibility with some proprietary software and corporate inertia, Windows loses in just about every category: TCO, support costs, training costs, security, licensing costs, reliability, usability, consistency, interoperability, technology, business risk, upgrade costs, etc.
All that will happen is that US Immigration will ask you for the same 34 pieces of information, and refuse you entry if you don't supply them.
Well, that is progress already because (1) you know the kind of information that is being collected and (2) you yourself supply it so that you yourself are responsible for any mistakes.
While everyone wants to see China improving its enforcement of IP rights, is this a step too far?"
China is under no intrinsic legal or ethical obligation to respect our copyright laws. The fact that they are making efforts to do so is the result of their trade relationships: basically, we tell them that in order to trade with us, they must implement copyright and patent laws similar to our own, and they comply because they want to trade with us.
That's different from, say, human rights. Whether China trades with us or not, human rights in China are our business, and China is under international legal and ethical obligations to respect them. (Of course, what constitutes human rights, and what constitutes acceptable cultural differences, is something one can debate endlessly; but there is a core of human rights that every nation on this planet must adhere to.)
First of all, just like Americans, Europeans trust their own government more than foreign governments.
Second, do you seriously believe that in the US, there won't be widespread tracking of license plates? It will likely be carried out by some company, who will then sell the data to almost anybody who asks. In fact, in the US, companies can operate with near impunity, and the US government apparently circumvents restrictions on itself by outsourcing.
The real difference in terms of privacy between the US and Europe is that Europeans generally place stronger limits on corporate use of private data and that governmental use is more transparent. That makes it appear as if European governments are more intrusive, but in the end, it probably means that in absolute terms, your personal life is still a little more protected in Europe than in the US.
The US doesn't give "financial aid" to Europe. Instead, Europe and Asia are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the US to keep the US economy afloat (it's not called "financial aid", but "loans and investments", but the end result is not that different). They are doing this because the US is an important export market for Europe and Asia and the world economy would collapse if they didn't do this.
So, the US has some credible economic threats against Europe, but withdrawal of "financial aid" isn't it. The US threat is more like "we can commit economic suicide and take you with us"; it's a threat better exercised with great care.
These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer
Those rights are also there to prevent the government from abusing your data. Just look at Italy over the last few years to see what kind of potential for abuse there exists.
It was also available under license to anyone that wanted to use it, and partly for that reason many variants grew up and lost interoperability - and the Unix wars began
That's a nice, often-repeated story, but it doesn't correspond to reality. In reality, UNIX variants were no worse than the different versions of Windows or MacOS we have had to live with. In fact, once the ABIs were decided upon, arguably, things were somewhat better. And today, at least on x86, the Linux ABI is a de-facto standard that's supported by several UNIX systems. For a brief time, Windows and MacOS had their act together a little bit better in terms of software packaging and installation (driven by necessit), but UNIX and Linux are now lightyears ahead of both Windows and OS X in that area, too.
The primary source of binary incompatibility between machines was, in the end, simply the use of different processors by different vendors; as long as that existed, software vendors had to recompile and ship different binaries anyway. Note that Microsoft briefly tried to handle multiple processors with Windows NT and the effort flopped completely.
First of all, few scientists have the luxury of having dedicated programmers anymore. Second, the team of scientists can generally find other things to do with no problems (grant applications, etc.).
Since everything you can compare Bluray to is proprietary as well it makes no sense to point that out as a reason for its higher price.
The article does not say that it's expensive because it's proprietary.
The article states that Sony chose an expensive format because they have a financial stake in the commercial success of that format. And that is entirely correct.
It's not a question of "zealotry", the word "proprietary" simply means that some entity legally owns and controls it, and that's clearly the case for BlueRay and DVDs. (I believe the patents on CDs and MPEG may be expiring, so they may become non-proprietary fairly soon).
In particular, contrary to what you imagine, standards licensed under RAND licensing terms are, of course, still proprietary.
Yes, which brings us back to only a "tiny fraction" of all scientific programmers dealing with optimizations. In fact, supercomputers are disappearing from all but a few niches.