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Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Pass 10% Market Share, Windows XP Falls Below 30%
An anonymous reader writes "With the release of Windows 8.1 to the world in October, Microsoft ended 2013 with two full months of availability for its latest operating system version. While Windows 8.1 is certainly growing quickly and eating into Windows 8s share, the duo has only now been able to pass 10 percent market share, while Windows 7 seems to be plowing forward unaffected. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 made steady progression in December 2013, gaining a combined 1.19 percentage points (from 9.30 percent to 10.49 percent). More specifically, Windows 8 gained 0.23 percentage points (from 6.66 percent to 6.89 percent), while Windows 8.1 jumped 0.96 percentage points (from 2.64 percent to 3.60 percent)."
Its a bit off topic, but I will come to the defense of Obamacare thing, at least a bit.
Canadian here so I get more less free health care anyway (except Dental, which is odd I think, covered in the UK system I believe).
Two reasons for US health care reform. You say it is the "best" system on the planet, and maybe it is for those that can afford it (hence the actual name Affordable Health Care Act), however A) the US has MILLIONS that have no insurance in an insurance based system, and B) per capita it is probably the most expensive system in the world. Not only for individuals, but for government. A government that has Trillions upon Trillions of debt, and a structural deficit that makes it exponentially worse year over year. The US isn't alone in this regard, Canada and other free healthcare countries have a LOT of budget tied up in healthcare costs, and keeping it down is difficult.
So, something has to change in the US clearly. However due to the political system and the very large insurance lobby, to say that change is unwieldy is probably a vast understatement. So rather than make very radical change (though I know many, probably yourself included, see this current change as pretty radical), Obama had to compromise or accomplish nothing, and did some sort of Frankenstein hybrid system of a public nationalized system using also private insurers. So not exactly perfect (imo anyway), but I don't see how anything better could be done in that sort of climate that wasn't total political suicide. It is a step anyway. However even this, complicates the next step, as you have to now work with all these states and insurance groups.
So that is the policy. Then there was the implementation. As mentioned, this isn't easy for any country. The UK blew BILLIONS trying to make an electronic healthcare system and got nothing. However with the policy, you have to build a system that is vastly complex to begin with, then make it even more complicated by dividing it by 50 states, then even more complicated by integrating I don't even know how many insurance companies. All with different IT structures, standards, software, databases, etc... A monumental task that should take YEARS to implement. Then try and roll it out in a matter of months, and then wonder why things blew up? After the initial blow up, and it came out that they allowed for only a month of actual testing, with a limited number of users, using dummy data, I literately laughed out loud. Doomed to failure comes to mind. I am thinking too many yes men in the room. Anyone with in an inkling or blip of sense could have told the administration that what they were trying to do was impossible, and was fraught with a high amount of risk involved. Political people don't like hearing the word no very often I think.
Something had to be done from my perspective, but the policy was less than half measures due to political partisanship and lobbying, and the implementation was premature and complicated by the a fore mentioned policy decisions.
Just so you know I am not biased, Canada has its own group of problems with its system. Most of which can be boiled down to the fact that it is federally funded, but provincially administered. So you get standards of care with a lot of variation depending on where you actually live. For example a particular drug might be offered in one area, but not in another which uses an alternative standard. I know of one example where to obtain a particular drug privately was so expensive, it was cheaper to enroll the person in university to get the health plan which did include it. Crazy.
Anyway it remains to be seen if eventually the US experiment will work out for the best, and likely no one will know for years, and much of it will depend on actually trying to make it work, which politically unless something changes, may be sabotaged from the start.
From my own experience with insurance companies, they are all a bunch of vultures, and until the US can somehow get out from under their yoke they will be screwed indefinitely.