Well a gui desktop is a terrible concept for use on a phone or a tablet... A gui desktop is also a terrible concept for a server etc too.
Something actually designed for the role will almost always do a better job than something else that's just been repurposed, and the repurposing might make it very poor at doing its original job (see metro).
But iPhone OS was designed for touch, there's a reason why they used this and not desktop OSX which isn't. The ipad is basically a large iphone or ipod touch... Had they used OSX and made it run desktop applications it likely would have flopped.
And yes they muddied the waters with windows mobile and windows ce, i know a few people who bought old phones or the cheap wince-based laptops expecting to be able to run windows applications on them, only to find they can't.
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.
Similarly microsoft refuse to accept that windows is a poison pill, they seem to think that people love the brand and will buy anything thats branded as windows when in reality they are more like an incumbent monopoly telco - they have lots of customers in their core market because they are seen as the only game in town, but they are almost universally despised and people will actively avoid them when they have a choice.
Windows is associated with crashing, unreliability, complexity and malware... Users now believe that these are inherent and unavoidable problems in the computer market, and don't want to bring these problems to their phones.
Complaining about lack of updates for android? think of all the poor suckers who had windows phone 7, or windows mobile, both of which got dropped leaving users with existing handsets high and dry...
And MS have always been worse than apple when it comes to lock-in.
I would hardly say OSX is third-class... OSX is far more open than windows, key parts of the system are open source and most parts of the system do a good job of supporting open standards (eg the calendar app supports caldav, whereas outlook is tied to exchange via proprietary protocols)...
That's one of the biggest problems... windows may be extremely buggy, but its ubiquity has resulted in people becoming used to its bugs and working around them... linux may be less buggy, but those bugs it does have are unexpected and take the users by surprise.
OpenOffice is close enough to msoffice 2003 that users usually have very little problems... The differences between different msoffice versions are often much larger, and yet users aren't given any training for that.
Also it says they were already running openoffice on windows, so that bit is already solved.
As for file formats, using standard file formats like odf is an extremely sensible course of action in any case... And given that they are the government, and they are using an openly documented file format it wont be their problem, but the problem of anyone else who wants to sell into the organisation... Companies often bend over backwards to get a piece of government spending.
Unfortunately that seems to be the standard approach, leave your machines terribly insecure and just hide them from the internet using firewalls... As soon as someone gets a tiny foothold behind the firewall, and there are many ways in which they could do so, everything inside is trivially easy to compromise and very poorly monitored.
Depends which governments you trust the least... There are various ARM cores designed by the british, and other implementations of the instruction set designed elsewhere... Then you have some MIPS cores developed by the chinese...
They also say that their training software already runs on windows, its highly unlikely their current training software would run exclusively in windows rt and far more likely that it currently runs on x86 windows, therefore they would be buying x86 based tablets.
The bacteria, or the material they consume will ultimately have extracted carbon from the air... If production and consumption are roughly equal then you end up with a closed loop. The only problem with fossil fuels is that production is much slower than consumption.
At what percentage of "added value" does this thinking kick in? That is, if someone takes your code and adds improvements that make up say 5% of the codebase, then thats still predominantly your code and yet that person could be profiting from the entire package.
The key word is "rewarded appropriately"... Continuing to pay someone for years after they performed a work is inappropriate. Paying someone for performing their work (eg at a live concert) is perfectly appropriate. And like everyone else, they should be required to save their money while they are earning it in order to pay for their retirement etc.
People were creating artwork long before copyright was invented... All copyright has done, is encourage the greedy by allowing someone to continue getting paid for work they did long ago.
If you're running a 32bit distro then some do, most compile for something a bit newer (eg 686) and the kernel doesnt even support i386 anymore... If you run a 64bit distro (and what possible reason would you have for not doing so on compatible hardware) then it will usually be compiled for a baseline amd64 cpu, so sse2 etc...
Ofcourse you could always run gentoo, then you can have the entire system compiled specifically for your cpu and using the latest compiler too.
The problem is that people were naive enough to think they could entrust their data to products and services provided by a foreign company, without the government to which that company is beholden getting their claws on it.
There's an important distinction to make between software which is becoming essential to our day to day lives (like a browser), or is used to store our data, vs entertainment software like games...
The former are pretty much essential, in most developed countries almost everyone needs access to the internet and the basic software to do so these days. The idea of commercial companies locking up key resources, or your own personal data are extremely dangerous and definitely need to be avoided.
On the other hand, none of us *need* games. They are a luxury that we can do without if necessary, so people are far more willing to compromise when the stakes are so much lower.
It's not just about gamers... Lots of people are using GPUs for processing these days, and Linux has a much bigger market share of compute servers than it does gaming.
What advantage does x86 have in the context of a tablet? 99% of tablet software is written for ARM... The only advantage x86 brings is if you don't intend to use it as a tablet, in which case a laptop is cheaper and more powerful.
They had fully functional x86 tablets long before the ipad... Apple could have made the ipad x86 (or ppc) compatible, and therefore able to run desktop osx applications... Android tablets can run existing linux applications with just a recompile (there are chroot setups for debian/ubuntu on android to provide the necessary libs etc).
Fact is the ability to run desktop software on a tablet is not a selling point... Such software is awkward to use on a touchscreen, and just results in a subpar experience. Apple succeeded with the ipad mainly because it ran touch centric software and didn't encourage users to run existing non-touch software.
Their first few years made HUGE losses, and subsequent years made moderate profits... Overall they're still in the hole purely on numerical value, and even more so once you consider inflation.
Microsoft products still generally suck... They generally make their products suck a bit less, just enough that combined with their weight in a related market they can strong arm their way in... They used DOS (and later windows) to push word, dos pushed windows, and dos itself was put there by ibm. Things like Zune are either products that sucked so much that people still couldn't be coerced into using them, or they existed in a market where they couldn't exert sufficient influence to force people to use an inferior product.
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Well a gui desktop is a terrible concept for use on a phone or a tablet...
A gui desktop is also a terrible concept for a server etc too.
Something actually designed for the role will almost always do a better job than something else that's just been repurposed, and the repurposing might make it very poor at doing its original job (see metro).
But iPhone OS was designed for touch, there's a reason why they used this and not desktop OSX which isn't.
The ipad is basically a large iphone or ipod touch... Had they used OSX and made it run desktop applications it likely would have flopped.
And yes they muddied the waters with windows mobile and windows ce, i know a few people who bought old phones or the cheap wince-based laptops expecting to be able to run windows applications on them, only to find they can't.
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.
Similarly microsoft refuse to accept that windows is a poison pill, they seem to think that people love the brand and will buy anything thats branded as windows when in reality they are more like an incumbent monopoly telco - they have lots of customers in their core market because they are seen as the only game in town, but they are almost universally despised and people will actively avoid them when they have a choice.
Windows is associated with crashing, unreliability, complexity and malware... Users now believe that these are inherent and unavoidable problems in the computer market, and don't want to bring these problems to their phones.
Complaining about lack of updates for android? think of all the poor suckers who had windows phone 7, or windows mobile, both of which got dropped leaving users with existing handsets high and dry...
And MS have always been worse than apple when it comes to lock-in.
I would hardly say OSX is third-class... OSX is far more open than windows, key parts of the system are open source and most parts of the system do a good job of supporting open standards (eg the calendar app supports caldav, whereas outlook is tied to exchange via proprietary protocols)...
IOS and OSX are entirely different products.
That's one of the biggest problems... windows may be extremely buggy, but its ubiquity has resulted in people becoming used to its bugs and working around them... linux may be less buggy, but those bugs it does have are unexpected and take the users by surprise.
OpenOffice is close enough to msoffice 2003 that users usually have very little problems...
The differences between different msoffice versions are often much larger, and yet users aren't given any training for that.
Also it says they were already running openoffice on windows, so that bit is already solved.
As for file formats, using standard file formats like odf is an extremely sensible course of action in any case...
And given that they are the government, and they are using an openly documented file format it wont be their problem, but the problem of anyone else who wants to sell into the organisation... Companies often bend over backwards to get a piece of government spending.
Thats a self perpetuating problem... So long as buyers don't reject such software, developers will continue to produce it.
Some banks in switzerland actually sign their emails using S/MIME...
Unfortunately that seems to be the standard approach, leave your machines terribly insecure and just hide them from the internet using firewalls...
As soon as someone gets a tiny foothold behind the firewall, and there are many ways in which they could do so, everything inside is trivially easy to compromise and very poorly monitored.
Depends which governments you trust the least...
There are various ARM cores designed by the british, and other implementations of the instruction set designed elsewhere...
Then you have some MIPS cores developed by the chinese...
They also say that their training software already runs on windows, its highly unlikely their current training software would run exclusively in windows rt and far more likely that it currently runs on x86 windows, therefore they would be buying x86 based tablets.
The bacteria, or the material they consume will ultimately have extracted carbon from the air... If production and consumption are roughly equal then you end up with a closed loop. The only problem with fossil fuels is that production is much slower than consumption.
At what percentage of "added value" does this thinking kick in?
That is, if someone takes your code and adds improvements that make up say 5% of the codebase, then thats still predominantly your code and yet that person could be profiting from the entire package.
The key word is "rewarded appropriately"...
Continuing to pay someone for years after they performed a work is inappropriate.
Paying someone for performing their work (eg at a live concert) is perfectly appropriate. And like everyone else, they should be required to save their money while they are earning it in order to pay for their retirement etc.
People were creating artwork long before copyright was invented...
All copyright has done, is encourage the greedy by allowing someone to continue getting paid for work they did long ago.
If you're running a 32bit distro then some do, most compile for something a bit newer (eg 686) and the kernel doesnt even support i386 anymore...
If you run a 64bit distro (and what possible reason would you have for not doing so on compatible hardware) then it will usually be compiled for a baseline amd64 cpu, so sse2 etc...
Ofcourse you could always run gentoo, then you can have the entire system compiled specifically for your cpu and using the latest compiler too.
I don't know about xbox 360, but the ps3 is most definitely using a 64bit cpu, i was running a powerpc64 linux distribution on it.
The problem is that people were naive enough to think they could entrust their data to products and services provided by a foreign company, without the government to which that company is beholden getting their claws on it.
There's an important distinction to make between software which is becoming essential to our day to day lives (like a browser), or is used to store our data, vs entertainment software like games...
The former are pretty much essential, in most developed countries almost everyone needs access to the internet and the basic software to do so these days. The idea of commercial companies locking up key resources, or your own personal data are extremely dangerous and definitely need to be avoided.
On the other hand, none of us *need* games. They are a luxury that we can do without if necessary, so people are far more willing to compromise when the stakes are so much lower.
It's not just about gamers... Lots of people are using GPUs for processing these days, and Linux has a much bigger market share of compute servers than it does gaming.
What advantage does x86 have in the context of a tablet?
99% of tablet software is written for ARM...
The only advantage x86 brings is if you don't intend to use it as a tablet, in which case a laptop is cheaper and more powerful.
They had fully functional x86 tablets long before the ipad...
Apple could have made the ipad x86 (or ppc) compatible, and therefore able to run desktop osx applications...
Android tablets can run existing linux applications with just a recompile (there are chroot setups for debian/ubuntu on android to provide the necessary libs etc).
Fact is the ability to run desktop software on a tablet is not a selling point... Such software is awkward to use on a touchscreen, and just results in a subpar experience. Apple succeeded with the ipad mainly because it ran touch centric software and didn't encourage users to run existing non-touch software.
Their first few years made HUGE losses, and subsequent years made moderate profits... Overall they're still in the hole purely on numerical value, and even more so once you consider inflation.
Microsoft products still generally suck... They generally make their products suck a bit less, just enough that combined with their weight in a related market they can strong arm their way in... They used DOS (and later windows) to push word, dos pushed windows, and dos itself was put there by ibm.
Things like Zune are either products that sucked so much that people still couldn't be coerced into using them, or they existed in a market where they couldn't exert sufficient influence to force people to use an inferior product.