They have such a backlog of patents that the USPO basically has decided that it is up to the courts to decide if a patent is valid or not. I cannot find the exact article that states this, but I did find this one in a past/. article.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100819/12015210689.shtml
The USTR has stated time and again why we are on this list. It comes down to the business laws of Canada. When you pay for something, you get something in return. That thing in return is either a product, a license, or in some very controlled circumstances a limited license which is what renting falls under.
Under Canadian law when you buy a product, you can do anything you want with it and cannot be restricted by the creator except to void the warranty, though there are some restrictions there as well. If you sell a license to something, then you can put restrictions on how that license can be used, to an extent. When you give something, you have to get something in return. This giving and getting does not have to involve currency.
The CMPDA and CRIA had movies and music classified as licenses instead of as a product. This allowed them to restricts you from public showings or broadcast of their media. You do not own the media, you own a license to that performance. It doesn't matter how you got that performance, thus why downloading content isn't illegal in Canada. It is only illegal if you watch, or listen to something you don't have a license for. If you download something you don't have a license for and use it, that is illegal.
This does not fit the US laws very well, as right now if you "buy" a DVD in stores in the US, you do not own the media, or have the right to view what you just bought. You have paid for nothing. There is only the possibility that the MPAA will allow you to watch that video. They have no obligation to allow you to watch what you paid for, they can actually say, no, we will not allow you to watch that and it is then illegal for you to watch it, and they don't have to reimburse you.
That is illegal in Canada and always will be as giving and receiving are part of the fundamental laws in Canada that all business law is predicated on. Furthermore, our founders made it unconstitutional for any future government to try to change this and any law passed should be tossed out by the courts.
Basically the US has a problem with our laws that require getting something when you give something.
Ever wondered why when you "win" a contest you have to answer a stupidly easy skill testing question in Canada? It is because that skill testing questing counts as a form of work that you are giving, to receive what ever the prize is.
While it is true that many of the assets are developed on the PC, the games code is mostly developed on the special dev kit hardware that interfaces with the PC, or is a PC/Console hybrid. It is easy to find pictures of the development kits by using a search engine.
Thus it doesn't ever run on a stock PC. There are exceptions to this like anything made in XNA. Also I understand that early versions of the Xbox360 dev hardware were just Mac computers running emulation software, but the code ran at something like 1/10th the speed of the final system.
Hackers were having fun playing around in Sony's little Other OS sandbox. There were a few that weren't happy with 2 SPUs being disabled in the sandbox, so they were looking for a ways to access all the hardware, which they found and lead to the disabling of the Other OS. For the most part everyone was happy.
This gave them basically 4 years where hackers were not trying to break the security. Then they disabled the Other OS functionality not allowing the hackers to play. If you make hackers unhappy, they will find a flaw in your system and exploit it to give them full access to the system and they now had a relatively large number of hackers testing the armor. If they had just left it alone they probably wouldn't have the problem they have now.
If they didn't have the Other OS option from the start, the dent in the armor most likely would have been found not to long after launch, so the last 4 years the key would have probably been out in the open.
Canada looked at joining it's patent system with the US only to conclude that the US patent system is a joke. Yes, the official report used the word joke. The US patent system has since gotten worse
Obvious according to the US system is something that isn't already covered by another patent. Thus the person that got the patent for emoticons represented by graphics on mobile devices was not obvious since there wasn't already a patent for it. Where in the Canadian system it would have been considered obvious because doing something on a mobile device that is already done on a desktop is not considered to take much thought. Also in the Canadian system you can only patent an implementation of an idea, not the idea. If someone else came up with the implementation, you cannot patent it, this does not hold true in the US, you just have to be first to the patent office.
I mentioned about the US system getting worse, this is in response to the US Patent Office announcing that to speed up patent approval they are mostly only checking if the patent applications are correctly done as opposed to making sure they meet the requirements. They let the courts decide if the patent is valid. While this may seem immoral and subject to abuse, it is perfectly legal according to the US system.
While I agree that Amazon does have the right not sell certain eBooks, they have also removed it from people's devices with no refund. Yes I RTFA.
This would be the equivalent of you bought Twinkies at Whole Foods Market and then they decided they were no longer going to sell them, so they sent people around to all the houses that bought the Twinkies and took them back with out repayment.
Fortunately in Canada this is illegal.
Unfortunately our judges don't always uphold our laws. Just look at how Sony somehow won illegally taking the Other OS option away form us. They advertised the PS3 as a computer and you can run another OS, but their false advertising is for some reason acceptable because they are a big company.
When Clinton took office they had 5 bombs that individually each one could destroy the planet. He had 3 of them dismantled and had the other 2 on orders to be dismantled. Bush came into office and stopped that silliness instead ordering 9 more to be built. Thus we can assume right now that the US has at least 11 bombs that if they work according to theory would completely destroy this planet.
We were having a BBQ and I was having a grand old time watching these people try to start the fire. They were using coal (probably face coal, but still not easy to get going) and they had this solid, kind of waxy fire starter substance as well as a lighter. I think 7 different people failed to getting the fire started. The problem is they would light the fire starter on top of the coals. Then someone came along that knew what they were doing, they layered a paper plate with fire started, then shoved it underneath the coals and lit the paper plate.
Eventually I was going to go over and show them how to do it, but it was fascinating me too much that so many people didn't know that you want to generally start a fire from the bottom.
I'm serious. I just tried clicking print from Chrome and it said "No printer found. Please install a printer."
Maybe it doesn't work with network printers? Or maybe it just doesn't work in 7. I don't know. Here at work all I have is a network printer. At home I have a printer attached to a central server. I'll have to try that when I get home.
Yes, the printer works in every other program I've tried. I print Google Maps directions every once in a while from Seamonkey.
It is time for us (Canada) to enact our world domination plan starting by politely asking the US to surrender as they have proven incapable of governing themselves.
Honestly, the HUD can be very useful. I've seen a few stories about companies working on augmenting reality to help people drive.
For example at night, in fog, or in rain infrared and other sensors can see things that you can't. the HUD could show you were these objects are. Things like lines on the road, cars, pedestrians and even show you where they are headed. I know I've been driving a few times where I really couldn't see where I was going because fog, or rain had come in really quickly, but it was more dangerous to stop as someone would have hit me from behind. If my car was augmenting reality and could see things I couldn't and show a representations to me that would have made things safer.
Hey, up until recently 17% or people accessing our client's web site were using IE6. I just checked and it is now fortunately down to 6%. Yes, we check in IE6 because at 17% of people using it and a very low number of bounces from those people made for good customer relations for our client. That being said, we only tested against IE6 on our staging site and it was computer we had to remote into. We don't have IE6 on any of our development boxes.
Word, Office, Excel, Outlook, Access, Powerpoint, DOS, BASIC, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, SourceSafe, Windows NT, NTFS.
What do all the above and and many more have in common? None of them were originally developed by Microsoft. Most were acquired by buying other companies. Some, like IE(Core rendering engine was Spyglass Mosaic) Windows NT(Core OS was the same as OS/2 developed by IBM) and NTFS (slight modification of HPFS from IBM), were acquired in licensing deals where Microsoft was not always honest about their intentions.
No, BASIC was not created by Microsoft, it existed before Microsoft did, but the company that created it was bought out really early on by Microsoft. Any technology that was invented by a company that Microsoft buys out they claim as their own invention as they now own the company and usually the people that created the technology.
That being said, they did create Win16 and Win32. ADO was a really good idea that they got right the first time, then messed up up, then fixed it, messed it up again and I think have finally fixed it. Works I believe is completely Microsoft. DirectX was a Microsoft project that Microsoft was against originally.
In Canada software has always been viewed as a license. So are movies and music.
The law does not allow companies to place restriction on the lending, or selling of a license. Please note I said companies, governments for obvious reasons do not allow this for things such as driver's licenses.
This law is the basis for why downloading a file from a P2P network, or other source is not illegal. The license is for using the material, so you have not committed a crime until you use the material without a license.
For example, if I have All My Loving on a Beatles record and I download the MP3 and listen to it, that is perfectly legal. If I downloaded and listened to Poker Face which I don't have a license to, that would be illegal.
I disagree, Microsoft ships many products feature incomplete, so they wouldn't even qualify as Beta quality.
Windows Vista for example was supposed to ship with EFI and Video Desktop Backgrounds support. These didn't come until later.
Some of the software engineers on Windows 95 and 98 have complained that some of the code they finished the day of RTM was in the RTM build with no testing done at all.
TFS 2005 was being sold and delivered before the client tools were completed.
Basically I think I'm saying at Microsoft alpha = RTM
An MMO is not impossible on a console. Dreamcast had Phantasy Star Online after all.
Though for the most part that was a fighting game that's areas were hard coded on disk. As mentioned in the subject line the PS3 will be getting Final Fantasy XIV which is an MMO. The PS3 can support all types of MMOs where Xbox360 is pretty much limited to a Phantasy Star Online type game that are very static. The Xbox360 limitation comes from Microsoft restrictions on what they allow on their console. One, which I believe is still in place, is that you cannot create a game that requires you to have a hard drive as the old core bundles did not have hard drives. Though if you have a digital only game then I believe a hard drive is required to install it. They also have/used to have restrictions on how big your digital distributions are.
It's not really that difficult. You just put one of the polarized lenses in front of the camera and shoot though that.You won't get 3D, but you will record the one perspective.
In Canada you are not allowed to have a criminal conviction on your record and be a police officer.
Now, while that's great in theory, a recent study showed that 15% or police officers in Canada currently have a criminal conviction on record. Some of these being police chiefs. When the police get called on this, the government usually pardons the person, which removes the record of the criminal conviction.
And the police wonder why we the people don't trust them.
I constantly see police breaking the law. They especially show a disrespect for traffic laws. Speeding, running red lights when they aren't responding to a situation, illegal turns. Them following the law is more of a shock because it happens so rarely.
Talking about too many version of everything, They keep coming out with new versions of.Net even before most companies have the chance to move to the latest version and with each new version they want you to do everything differently.
The most ridiculous example is LINQ to SQL, it came out with.Net 3.5 which was 1 year ago, now 4.0 is out and it is deprecated, now you are supposed to use their entity framework.
There is also the central contact storage in Vista and Windows 7 and 6 months after the original programming interface came out it was deprecated. I haven't been able to figure out if they've replaced the interface with another API, or if the contact storage is just there for "Legacy" support. Personally I thought that was one of the few properly thought out things in Vista.
The other problem is that the developer tools are not really cheap, sure if you want this limited functionality it isn't bad, but every 2-3 years they have a new version of Visual Studio out. Microsoft has already said they want to go to a yearly subscription where you are forced to use the latest of their products, but I've already commented on how are you supposed to build a house on quicksand.
Obviously you don't know that Microsoft wants to go to a yearly subscription model where you don't own the OS, or any of their other software, you pay something like $50 a year and are forced to install all updates.
It is the market that is pushing against this, not Microsoft. Businesses especially need the stability of a set OS for a number of years. It can take months, or even a year to test if your company can move to a new version of the OS, or even just Service Pack. If Microsoft goes to this model, they effectively remove their OS as an option to be used in the business environment.
I am a programmer and one of the problems we have is with how fast Microsoft releases new versions of.Net. I guess really it is the major changes they make even between minor version. New versions come out every 1-3 years, mostly towards the 1 year time line. Our company is mid-sized and our projects are usually under 7 months development time, but bigger, or more robust software can run 2-3 years to develop with out any changes to the platform. To put this in perspective of the OS that means that the program would come out for 3 OS versions back from what your customers are running.
This release schedule for.Net causes us problems though because we have to quickly find what bugs have been fixed, what commands have been deprecated and what new bugs there are. That takes time. Also we want to maintain the software we write for the companies that employ us. They don't want to pay for us to upgrade the code to a newer version of.Net, unless they get something in return. We have some code that isn't all that old, but it will take us 3 months to upgrade to the latest version of.Net just because of the changes Microsoft has decided to make.
These same development problems would exist with having a yearly OS release cycle. With a constantly changing platform, it would increase development time for programs, increase how buggy code is because of an unstable platform, basically make Windows not a very practical platform to develop for.
BIOS supports basic input-output with the OS handling the complex interactions with hardware through device drivers. The idea behind UEFI is the drivers are built into the hardware's firmware and are OS agnostic. Basically you plug in a piece of hardware and the configuration for that hardware gets added to the CMOS setup. Then when the OS boots you don't need to install a driver as the API interface is already there.
At least that is the idea. You don't have a Window XP/Vista/7/Linux/BSD driver, you have the hardware and the OS subsystems talk to that standard driver. One of the things that stalled this on the Windows hardware side was though Vista was supposed to ship with UEFI supported, it did not. Many motherboard manufacturers were expecting to release this with Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
They have such a backlog of patents that the USPO basically has decided that it is up to the courts to decide if a patent is valid or not. I cannot find the exact article that states this, but I did find this one in a past /. article.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100819/12015210689.shtml
The USTR has stated time and again why we are on this list. It comes down to the business laws of Canada. When you pay for something, you get something in return. That thing in return is either a product, a license, or in some very controlled circumstances a limited license which is what renting falls under.
Under Canadian law when you buy a product, you can do anything you want with it and cannot be restricted by the creator except to void the warranty, though there are some restrictions there as well. If you sell a license to something, then you can put restrictions on how that license can be used, to an extent. When you give something, you have to get something in return. This giving and getting does not have to involve currency.
The CMPDA and CRIA had movies and music classified as licenses instead of as a product. This allowed them to restricts you from public showings or broadcast of their media. You do not own the media, you own a license to that performance. It doesn't matter how you got that performance, thus why downloading content isn't illegal in Canada. It is only illegal if you watch, or listen to something you don't have a license for. If you download something you don't have a license for and use it, that is illegal.
This does not fit the US laws very well, as right now if you "buy" a DVD in stores in the US, you do not own the media, or have the right to view what you just bought. You have paid for nothing. There is only the possibility that the MPAA will allow you to watch that video. They have no obligation to allow you to watch what you paid for, they can actually say, no, we will not allow you to watch that and it is then illegal for you to watch it, and they don't have to reimburse you.
That is illegal in Canada and always will be as giving and receiving are part of the fundamental laws in Canada that all business law is predicated on. Furthermore, our founders made it unconstitutional for any future government to try to change this and any law passed should be tossed out by the courts.
Basically the US has a problem with our laws that require getting something when you give something.
Ever wondered why when you "win" a contest you have to answer a stupidly easy skill testing question in Canada? It is because that skill testing questing counts as a form of work that you are giving, to receive what ever the prize is.
While it is true that many of the assets are developed on the PC, the games code is mostly developed on the special dev kit hardware that interfaces with the PC, or is a PC/Console hybrid. It is easy to find pictures of the development kits by using a search engine.
Thus it doesn't ever run on a stock PC. There are exceptions to this like anything made in XNA. Also I understand that early versions of the Xbox360 dev hardware were just Mac computers running emulation software, but the code ran at something like 1/10th the speed of the final system.
Hackers were having fun playing around in Sony's little Other OS sandbox. There were a few that weren't happy with 2 SPUs being disabled in the sandbox, so they were looking for a ways to access all the hardware, which they found and lead to the disabling of the Other OS. For the most part everyone was happy.
This gave them basically 4 years where hackers were not trying to break the security. Then they disabled the Other OS functionality not allowing the hackers to play. If you make hackers unhappy, they will find a flaw in your system and exploit it to give them full access to the system and they now had a relatively large number of hackers testing the armor. If they had just left it alone they probably wouldn't have the problem they have now.
If they didn't have the Other OS option from the start, the dent in the armor most likely would have been found not to long after launch, so the last 4 years the key would have probably been out in the open.
A simple Wikipedia search shows that "The last US MPEG LA patents for H.264 may not expire until 2028."
I don't know about you, but I consider 17 years a little more than a few years.
Canada looked at joining it's patent system with the US only to conclude that the US patent system is a joke. Yes, the official report used the word joke. The US patent system has since gotten worse
Obvious according to the US system is something that isn't already covered by another patent. Thus the person that got the patent for emoticons represented by graphics on mobile devices was not obvious since there wasn't already a patent for it. Where in the Canadian system it would have been considered obvious because doing something on a mobile device that is already done on a desktop is not considered to take much thought. Also in the Canadian system you can only patent an implementation of an idea, not the idea. If someone else came up with the implementation, you cannot patent it, this does not hold true in the US, you just have to be first to the patent office.
I mentioned about the US system getting worse, this is in response to the US Patent Office announcing that to speed up patent approval they are mostly only checking if the patent applications are correctly done as opposed to making sure they meet the requirements. They let the courts decide if the patent is valid. While this may seem immoral and subject to abuse, it is perfectly legal according to the US system.
I am running Windows 7 64-bit and have IE9 Platform Preview 7.
Note: This code is 2 releases after the Beta
On the second test it crashes.
While I agree that Amazon does have the right not sell certain eBooks, they have also removed it from people's devices with no refund. Yes I RTFA.
This would be the equivalent of you bought Twinkies at Whole Foods Market and then they decided they were no longer going to sell them, so they sent people around to all the houses that bought the Twinkies and took them back with out repayment.
Fortunately in Canada this is illegal.
Unfortunately our judges don't always uphold our laws. Just look at how Sony somehow won illegally taking the Other OS option away form us. They advertised the PS3 as a computer and you can run another OS, but their false advertising is for some reason acceptable because they are a big company.
When Clinton took office they had 5 bombs that individually each one could destroy the planet. He had 3 of them dismantled and had the other 2 on orders to be dismantled. Bush came into office and stopped that silliness instead ordering 9 more to be built. Thus we can assume right now that the US has at least 11 bombs that if they work according to theory would completely destroy this planet.
YAY
This kind of reminds me of what Monty Python creating their own YouTube channel and their sales going up 23,000%. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/monty-python-youtube-move-boosts-dvd-sales-23000
We were having a BBQ and I was having a grand old time watching these people try to start the fire. They were using coal (probably face coal, but still not easy to get going) and they had this solid, kind of waxy fire starter substance as well as a lighter. I think 7 different people failed to getting the fire started. The problem is they would light the fire starter on top of the coals. Then someone came along that knew what they were doing, they layered a paper plate with fire started, then shoved it underneath the coals and lit the paper plate.
Eventually I was going to go over and show them how to do it, but it was fascinating me too much that so many people didn't know that you want to generally start a fire from the bottom.
I'm serious. I just tried clicking print from Chrome and it said "No printer found. Please install a printer."
Maybe it doesn't work with network printers? Or maybe it just doesn't work in 7. I don't know. Here at work all I have is a network printer. At home I have a printer attached to a central server. I'll have to try that when I get home.
Yes, the printer works in every other program I've tried. I print Google Maps directions every once in a while from Seamonkey.
It is time for us (Canada) to enact our world domination plan starting by politely asking the US to surrender as they have proven incapable of governing themselves.
For full information on our plan go here:
http://www.standingonguard.com/index2.html
goatse
It determined that everything in the world lead to goatse because of all the links to it and figured that might happen to it.
Honestly, the HUD can be very useful. I've seen a few stories about companies working on augmenting reality to help people drive.
For example at night, in fog, or in rain infrared and other sensors can see things that you can't. the HUD could show you were these objects are. Things like lines on the road, cars, pedestrians and even show you where they are headed. I know I've been driving a few times where I really couldn't see where I was going because fog, or rain had come in really quickly, but it was more dangerous to stop as someone would have hit me from behind. If my car was augmenting reality and could see things I couldn't and show a representations to me that would have made things safer.
I know someone is going to say where's the proof, so:
http://gajitz.com/heads-up-gm-developing-augmented-reality-driving-system/
Hey, up until recently 17% or people accessing our client's web site were using IE6. I just checked and it is now fortunately down to 6%. Yes, we check in IE6 because at 17% of people using it and a very low number of bounces from those people made for good customer relations for our client. That being said, we only tested against IE6 on our staging site and it was computer we had to remote into. We don't have IE6 on any of our development boxes.
Word, Office, Excel, Outlook, Access, Powerpoint, DOS, BASIC, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, SourceSafe, Windows NT, NTFS.
What do all the above and and many more have in common? None of them were originally developed by Microsoft. Most were acquired by buying other companies. Some, like IE(Core rendering engine was Spyglass Mosaic) Windows NT(Core OS was the same as OS/2 developed by IBM) and NTFS (slight modification of HPFS from IBM), were acquired in licensing deals where Microsoft was not always honest about their intentions.
No, BASIC was not created by Microsoft, it existed before Microsoft did, but the company that created it was bought out really early on by Microsoft. Any technology that was invented by a company that Microsoft buys out they claim as their own invention as they now own the company and usually the people that created the technology.
That being said, they did create Win16 and Win32. ADO was a really good idea that they got right the first time, then messed up up, then fixed it, messed it up again and I think have finally fixed it. Works I believe is completely Microsoft. DirectX was a Microsoft project that Microsoft was against originally.
In Canada software has always been viewed as a license. So are movies and music.
The law does not allow companies to place restriction on the lending, or selling of a license. Please note I said companies, governments for obvious reasons do not allow this for things such as driver's licenses.
This law is the basis for why downloading a file from a P2P network, or other source is not illegal. The license is for using the material, so you have not committed a crime until you use the material without a license.
For example, if I have All My Loving on a Beatles record and I download the MP3 and listen to it, that is perfectly legal. If I downloaded and listened to Poker Face which I don't have a license to, that would be illegal.
I disagree, Microsoft ships many products feature incomplete, so they wouldn't even qualify as Beta quality.
Windows Vista for example was supposed to ship with EFI and Video Desktop Backgrounds support. These didn't come until later.
Some of the software engineers on Windows 95 and 98 have complained that some of the code they finished the day of RTM was in the RTM build with no testing done at all.
TFS 2005 was being sold and delivered before the client tools were completed.
Basically I think I'm saying at Microsoft alpha = RTM
An MMO is not impossible on a console. Dreamcast had Phantasy Star Online after all.
Though for the most part that was a fighting game that's areas were hard coded on disk. As mentioned in the subject line the PS3 will be getting Final Fantasy XIV which is an MMO. The PS3 can support all types of MMOs where Xbox360 is pretty much limited to a Phantasy Star Online type game that are very static. The Xbox360 limitation comes from Microsoft restrictions on what they allow on their console. One, which I believe is still in place, is that you cannot create a game that requires you to have a hard drive as the old core bundles did not have hard drives. Though if you have a digital only game then I believe a hard drive is required to install it. They also have/used to have restrictions on how big your digital distributions are.
It's not really that difficult. You just put one of the polarized lenses in front of the camera and shoot though that.You won't get 3D, but you will record the one perspective.
In Canada you are not allowed to have a criminal conviction on your record and be a police officer.
Now, while that's great in theory, a recent study showed that 15% or police officers in Canada currently have a criminal conviction on record. Some of these being police chiefs. When the police get called on this, the government usually pardons the person, which removes the record of the criminal conviction.
And the police wonder why we the people don't trust them.
I constantly see police breaking the law. They especially show a disrespect for traffic laws. Speeding, running red lights when they aren't responding to a situation, illegal turns. Them following the law is more of a shock because it happens so rarely.
Talking about too many version of everything, They keep coming out with new versions of .Net even before most companies have the chance to move to the latest version and with each new version they want you to do everything differently.
.Net 3.5 which was 1 year ago, now 4.0 is out and it is deprecated, now you are supposed to use their entity framework.
The most ridiculous example is LINQ to SQL, it came out with
There is also the central contact storage in Vista and Windows 7 and 6 months after the original programming interface came out it was deprecated. I haven't been able to figure out if they've replaced the interface with another API, or if the contact storage is just there for "Legacy" support. Personally I thought that was one of the few properly thought out things in Vista.
The other problem is that the developer tools are not really cheap, sure if you want this limited functionality it isn't bad, but every 2-3 years they have a new version of Visual Studio out. Microsoft has already said they want to go to a yearly subscription where you are forced to use the latest of their products, but I've already commented on how are you supposed to build a house on quicksand.
Obviously you don't know that Microsoft wants to go to a yearly subscription model where you don't own the OS, or any of their other software, you pay something like $50 a year and are forced to install all updates.
.Net. I guess really it is the major changes they make even between minor version. New versions come out every 1-3 years, mostly towards the 1 year time line. Our company is mid-sized and our projects are usually under 7 months development time, but bigger, or more robust software can run 2-3 years to develop with out any changes to the platform. To put this in perspective of the OS that means that the program would come out for 3 OS versions back from what your customers are running.
.Net causes us problems though because we have to quickly find what bugs have been fixed, what commands have been deprecated and what new bugs there are. That takes time. Also we want to maintain the software we write for the companies that employ us. They don't want to pay for us to upgrade the code to a newer version of .Net, unless they get something in return. We have some code that isn't all that old, but it will take us 3 months to upgrade to the latest version of .Net just because of the changes Microsoft has decided to make.
It is the market that is pushing against this, not Microsoft. Businesses especially need the stability of a set OS for a number of years. It can take months, or even a year to test if your company can move to a new version of the OS, or even just Service Pack. If Microsoft goes to this model, they effectively remove their OS as an option to be used in the business environment.
I am a programmer and one of the problems we have is with how fast Microsoft releases new versions of
This release schedule for
These same development problems would exist with having a yearly OS release cycle. With a constantly changing platform, it would increase development time for programs, increase how buggy code is because of an unstable platform, basically make Windows not a very practical platform to develop for.
BIOS supports basic input-output with the OS handling the complex interactions with hardware through device drivers. The idea behind UEFI is the drivers are built into the hardware's firmware and are OS agnostic. Basically you plug in a piece of hardware and the configuration for that hardware gets added to the CMOS setup. Then when the OS boots you don't need to install a driver as the API interface is already there.
At least that is the idea. You don't have a Window XP/Vista/7/Linux/BSD driver, you have the hardware and the OS subsystems talk to that standard driver. One of the things that stalled this on the Windows hardware side was though Vista was supposed to ship with UEFI supported, it did not. Many motherboard manufacturers were expecting to release this with Vista.