The government's analysis of the bid would, yes. Exactly as it would when upgrading to a new Microsoft OS, or when replacing a mainframe. That's pretty much procurement basics 101.
I've got no problem with organisations using Windows (etc.) if it's the right decision for them, and I don't subscribe to the notion that Windows is inherently awful or whatnot. But it's ridiculous that a government (of all things) is prepared to spend vast sums of money on a product without even considering a single alternative.
Indeed, this is still the preferred method of speed-testing in the UK- speed cameras are usually of the "Gatso" variety, which take 2 pictures a known time apart, and the distance the car has travelled between the two pictures gives the speed.
"Radar" style speed guns are somewhat discredited in UK courts, as they require all sorts of complex factors to be checked before their evidence is considered reliable. If its maintenance schedule isn't impeccable, it's not been recently calibrated, the constable hasn't been properly trained, and all operational best practice adhered to, there's a good chance a magistrate will just throw it out or offer a reduced penalty just to avoid sending it to a higher court.
I'd be more interested to see a MeeGo slate come around. It already works great on the N900, which is obviously a rival of the iPhone, and has a scaled up version for full laptops/netbooks.
If iPhone OS can make the successful jump from phone to larger tablet, MeeGo seems like a natural enough rival to follow its lead.
How long, I wonder, before WINE is accompanied by "CIDER" (insert own recursive acronym here) to work around this particular problem.
The "stickiness" of Windows stems from exactly the same thing- large libraries of single-platform software. It's a problem that is gradually being tackled for Windows. I thoroughly expect a (very slow) solution to show up for sticky Apples too, in due course.
Don't know about you, but Slashdot gives me a lovely little tick-box that says "Ads Disabled; thanks again for helping make Slashdot great". No need for AdBlock here, TYVM.
I'm still holding out hope for hydrogen fuel cells. They're clean, they're as green as your chosen electricity supply, and you can fill up your tank just as quickly as you can with petrol.
Still a long way from production line ready (not least the pesky problem of making hydrogen in large quantities at a decent price), but that's the future tech I'd be betting on.
"Trademark" is just for logos, names, tag-lines etc. You couldn't trademark a recipe or ingredient.
You could protect it as a "trade secret" through non-disclosure agreements and such what, which is what people like Coca Cola do. But then that's not really "protecting a recipe" as much as "not telling anyone the recipe".
Nope. If it can't be copyrighted, you can't put it under any licence, full stop. But that means it's be Public Domain, which is pretty much as liberal a "licence" as you like. So from a "free and open..." perspective, that's probably a win.
Fair point, but presumably that means we're essentially putting a read/write limit on the disk, similar to an SSD. Might be a problem for day to day usage, but for long term archiving? Presumably you wouldn't be performing a great deal of read/writes once the disk is full of archival material.
He said that, because Android is becoming fragmented in terms of hardware, screen resolution, yada yada, he foresees it being difficult to have high-quality apps that work seamlessly from one Android device to another, comparably to how an iPhone app works seamlessly between different iPhone models.
Presumably, a trying to run an app written for Android on a different device, with different hardware, would require dicking around. He compares this with starting a classic car with a pencil, in comparison to buying an uninspiring new car that runs perfectly.
He also laments that it might have been different if a hardware giant had gotten involved earlier, although I'm not sure I follow the logic.
I'm not saying I agree with him (actually I'm moderately sure I don't), but the point of his post seems clear enough.
Office isn't the problem. They own Office- they could compile it to work on any OS they choose to make. There is a Mac version after all- which actually came first, before the Windows version.
The problem is the 100,000 other programmes on the Windows platform, which MS don't own. They've no way of forcing the owners of those programmes to port them to their brand new OS. If they break backwards compatibility, it's that stack which won't necessarily transition smoothly- and which would cause migrating users the most theoretical pain.
iPhone OS is basically Mac OSX, you know. Or at least is entirely derived from it. The UI, as any good Linux user knows, is not exactly a core part of the OS; the main difference between them is just the changed GUI and a swathe of limitations and disabled features to fit in the new device (not complaining by the way, it all works out well).
In fact, if I remember rightly, they even used to claim "the iPhone will use Mac OSX" during development until they got around to christening their new OS.
In any case, it seems to be pretty much exactly the same approach taken with Win7 / WinMob.
If they broke backwards compatibility, they would soon start haemorrhaging business customers. My employer sticks with Windows mostly because they have a colossal stack of legacy and/or custom software that would cost a metric fortune to replace. If they absolutely had to replace it anyway, there's no guarantee they would pick the newest Windows offering, instead of properly considering the alternatives.
And once people are using something different at work everyday, the knee-jerk loyalty to Windows would disappear. After all, people getting used to it at work is often cited as one of the big factors in Windows adoption way back in the day.
True. But there is nothing stopping you making 20 identical bags in exactly the same style, of exactly the same quality, as long as you don't stick a "Gucci" label on it.
That would be analogous to being allowed to look at the Win7 source code, create an almost-identical derivative programme using all the best bits, and being allowed to sell it in the shops- as long as you call it something other than "Microsoft Windows 7".
I'd say much the same applies to flash-in-the-pan pop music or made-for-video films.
Sure the good stuff might be pretty timeless, but there's an awful lot of stuff that enjoys popularity only briefly, and then is replaced by the next. How many S Club 7 fans do you think still listen to their albums as much as when they were new, and how many of them haven't bought new pop music since?
Also, I've lost most of my VHSs to the ravages of time, as well as a few DVDs and CDs to the scratch monster.
My hard disks are all sealed very safely inside metal boxes. Their delicate little mechanical/magnetic workings are never exposed to the outside world in normal operating conditions. If I were to accidentally smash one open, I'd probably write it off as a goner.
Why should light ever reach the platters of this drive in an archival situation?
And why, pray, should the US government be able to force nationalisation of a global company HQd in the UK, when less than half of it's oil and gas fields are in US territory?
Not that I'm saying you couldn't, but simply nationalising every company that cocks up seems stupid. Bill them for whatever the colossal cost of this mess is, hit them with some big fines for any wrongdoing for good measure, and then either kick them out of the country or (and here's a thought) enforce proper regulations on them and everyone else so they can't do such stupid things in the future.
If they can't abide by sensible regulations while maintaining profitable then you'll find they'll kick themselves out pretty swiftly.
More people than don't want to run any of them at all.
I'm not saying it's perfect: just that cross compatibility is a major issue for non-Windows platforms, and anything that is trying to add compatibility for programmes will inevitably be working on things that are post-release.
Although it has to be said that WINE is getting better and better at running things with no tweaking straight out of the box.
I can't be 100% sure what you've got because I can't find much info about it on the internet, but odds are good that is just a re-stickering of a very prevalent ARM netbook that's doing the rounds.
If so, a developer community can be found below, and there is a full replacement Linux distro available (no promises that it'll work, YMMV etc.).
One of, if not THE, main reasons given by people as to why they prefer MS Windows to other OSs (Mac or Linux) is that all of the software thewy own, and almost all of the software that they need/want, runs on Windows and not anything else.
Take that out of the equation and you remove a major hurdle to switching.
The fact that "it's always following" is neither here nor there.
Should I no longer get salary from the first 2 of my jobs just because it's been 10 years since I worked there?
Should you get salary from the job you left last week? Writing books and creating art is inherently different from working a 9 to 5 job.
You're right. It's more like developing a new invention, device, etc. It takes a lot of work, and then that work pays off once you've completed it and have something to sell.
And for that we recognise that the inventor should have exclusive use of their invention for, oh, 20 years. And that's for hard, complicated, technical things.
Why should writing a light comedy novel receive greater protection of exclusivity (what is it now, a century or so in most cases) than serious engineering? That was never intended by the people who invented these laws.
And "because Mickey Mouse says so" is not an answer.
Surely if you're already getting a hefty dose of radiation every time you fly, the last thing you want to do is give someone another hefty dose of radiation.
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The government's analysis of the bid would, yes. Exactly as it would when upgrading to a new Microsoft OS, or when replacing a mainframe. That's pretty much procurement basics 101.
I've got no problem with organisations using Windows (etc.) if it's the right decision for them, and I don't subscribe to the notion that Windows is inherently awful or whatnot. But it's ridiculous that a government (of all things) is prepared to spend vast sums of money on a product without even considering a single alternative.
Indeed, this is still the preferred method of speed-testing in the UK- speed cameras are usually of the "Gatso" variety, which take 2 pictures a known time apart, and the distance the car has travelled between the two pictures gives the speed.
"Radar" style speed guns are somewhat discredited in UK courts, as they require all sorts of complex factors to be checked before their evidence is considered reliable. If its maintenance schedule isn't impeccable, it's not been recently calibrated, the constable hasn't been properly trained, and all operational best practice adhered to, there's a good chance a magistrate will just throw it out or offer a reduced penalty just to avoid sending it to a higher court.
I'd be more interested to see a MeeGo slate come around. It already works great on the N900, which is obviously a rival of the iPhone, and has a scaled up version for full laptops/netbooks.
If iPhone OS can make the successful jump from phone to larger tablet, MeeGo seems like a natural enough rival to follow its lead.
How long, I wonder, before WINE is accompanied by "CIDER" (insert own recursive acronym here) to work around this particular problem.
The "stickiness" of Windows stems from exactly the same thing- large libraries of single-platform software. It's a problem that is gradually being tackled for Windows. I thoroughly expect a (very slow) solution to show up for sticky Apples too, in due course.
Don't know about you, but Slashdot gives me a lovely little tick-box that says "Ads Disabled; thanks again for helping make Slashdot great". No need for AdBlock here, TYVM.
I'm still holding out hope for hydrogen fuel cells. They're clean, they're as green as your chosen electricity supply, and you can fill up your tank just as quickly as you can with petrol.
Still a long way from production line ready (not least the pesky problem of making hydrogen in large quantities at a decent price), but that's the future tech I'd be betting on.
"Trademark" is just for logos, names, tag-lines etc. You couldn't trademark a recipe or ingredient.
You could protect it as a "trade secret" through non-disclosure agreements and such what, which is what people like Coca Cola do. But then that's not really "protecting a recipe" as much as "not telling anyone the recipe".
Nope. If it can't be copyrighted, you can't put it under any licence, full stop. But that means it's be Public Domain, which is pretty much as liberal a "licence" as you like. So from a "free and open..." perspective, that's probably a win.
Fair point, but presumably that means we're essentially putting a read/write limit on the disk, similar to an SSD. Might be a problem for day to day usage, but for long term archiving? Presumably you wouldn't be performing a great deal of read/writes once the disk is full of archival material.
On the subject, you actually can't copyright a recipe. Probably.
http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/copyright/copyright-realworld/recipe-copyrighting.html
Reading comprehension much?
He said that, because Android is becoming fragmented in terms of hardware, screen resolution, yada yada, he foresees it being difficult to have high-quality apps that work seamlessly from one Android device to another, comparably to how an iPhone app works seamlessly between different iPhone models.
Presumably, a trying to run an app written for Android on a different device, with different hardware, would require dicking around. He compares this with starting a classic car with a pencil, in comparison to buying an uninspiring new car that runs perfectly.
He also laments that it might have been different if a hardware giant had gotten involved earlier, although I'm not sure I follow the logic.
I'm not saying I agree with him (actually I'm moderately sure I don't), but the point of his post seems clear enough.
Office isn't the problem. They own Office- they could compile it to work on any OS they choose to make. There is a Mac version after all- which actually came first, before the Windows version.
The problem is the 100,000 other programmes on the Windows platform, which MS don't own. They've no way of forcing the owners of those programmes to port them to their brand new OS. If they break backwards compatibility, it's that stack which won't necessarily transition smoothly- and which would cause migrating users the most theoretical pain.
They can't bundle a mobile device in with windows...
There's a thought. Free smartphone with every Windows 7 Ultimate licence. That'd certainly soften the blow to the wallet.
You may have just sole the WinMo problem AND the piracy issue all at once. Kudos!
iPhone OS is basically Mac OSX, you know. Or at least is entirely derived from it. The UI, as any good Linux user knows, is not exactly a core part of the OS; the main difference between them is just the changed GUI and a swathe of limitations and disabled features to fit in the new device (not complaining by the way, it all works out well).
In fact, if I remember rightly, they even used to claim "the iPhone will use Mac OSX" during development until they got around to christening their new OS.
In any case, it seems to be pretty much exactly the same approach taken with Win7 / WinMob.
If they broke backwards compatibility, they would soon start haemorrhaging business customers. My employer sticks with Windows mostly because they have a colossal stack of legacy and/or custom software that would cost a metric fortune to replace. If they absolutely had to replace it anyway, there's no guarantee they would pick the newest Windows offering, instead of properly considering the alternatives.
And once people are using something different at work everyday, the knee-jerk loyalty to Windows would disappear. After all, people getting used to it at work is often cited as one of the big factors in Windows adoption way back in the day.
True. But there is nothing stopping you making 20 identical bags in exactly the same style, of exactly the same quality, as long as you don't stick a "Gucci" label on it.
That would be analogous to being allowed to look at the Win7 source code, create an almost-identical derivative programme using all the best bits, and being allowed to sell it in the shops- as long as you call it something other than "Microsoft Windows 7".
I'd say much the same applies to flash-in-the-pan pop music or made-for-video films.
Sure the good stuff might be pretty timeless, but there's an awful lot of stuff that enjoys popularity only briefly, and then is replaced by the next. How many S Club 7 fans do you think still listen to their albums as much as when they were new, and how many of them haven't bought new pop music since?
Also, I've lost most of my VHSs to the ravages of time, as well as a few DVDs and CDs to the scratch monster.
In short, I think the analogy fits quite well.
My hard disks are all sealed very safely inside metal boxes. Their delicate little mechanical/magnetic workings are never exposed to the outside world in normal operating conditions. If I were to accidentally smash one open, I'd probably write it off as a goner.
Why should light ever reach the platters of this drive in an archival situation?
Although it's not. As already mentioned above, the Zeppelin NT is a little bigger.
And why, pray, should the US government be able to force nationalisation of a global company HQd in the UK, when less than half of it's oil and gas fields are in US territory?
Not that I'm saying you couldn't, but simply nationalising every company that cocks up seems stupid. Bill them for whatever the colossal cost of this mess is, hit them with some big fines for any wrongdoing for good measure, and then either kick them out of the country or (and here's a thought) enforce proper regulations on them and everyone else so they can't do such stupid things in the future.
If they can't abide by sensible regulations while maintaining profitable then you'll find they'll kick themselves out pretty swiftly.
More people than don't want to run any of them at all.
I'm not saying it's perfect: just that cross compatibility is a major issue for non-Windows platforms, and anything that is trying to add compatibility for programmes will inevitably be working on things that are post-release.
Although it has to be said that WINE is getting better and better at running things with no tweaking straight out of the box.
I can't be 100% sure what you've got because I can't find much info about it on the internet, but odds are good that is just a re-stickering of a very prevalent ARM netbook that's doing the rounds.
If so, a developer community can be found below, and there is a full replacement Linux distro available (no promises that it'll work, YMMV etc.).
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/
One of, if not THE, main reasons given by people as to why they prefer MS Windows to other OSs (Mac or Linux) is that all of the software thewy own, and almost all of the software that they need/want, runs on Windows and not anything else.
Take that out of the equation and you remove a major hurdle to switching.
The fact that "it's always following" is neither here nor there.
Should I no longer get salary from the first 2 of my jobs just because it's been 10 years since I worked there?
Should you get salary from the job you left last week?
Writing books and creating art is inherently different from working a 9 to 5 job.
You're right. It's more like developing a new invention, device, etc. It takes a lot of work, and then that work pays off once you've completed it and have something to sell.
And for that we recognise that the inventor should have exclusive use of their invention for, oh, 20 years. And that's for hard, complicated, technical things.
Why should writing a light comedy novel receive greater protection of exclusivity (what is it now, a century or so in most cases) than serious engineering? That was never intended by the people who invented these laws.
And "because Mickey Mouse says so" is not an answer.
Surely if you're already getting a hefty dose of radiation every time you fly, the last thing you want to do is give someone another hefty dose of radiation.