What changes reducing the use of Microsoft products would make in them is another question altogether, and there are better reasons for controlling MS' behaviour than to gain the income from fines.
"of countries"... working together.
Rather like states combined for common purposes, subsuming some functions and powers into a shared administration. Ours are (still) quite limited in both function and power, but don't assume that looseness is weakness.
people with hobs and ovens that have no particular connection. I don't even know if ours are from teh same maker, but there is no reason whyc they should be.
"so inherently related to a specific set of behaviors"
HIV is not currently restricted to any particular sub-section of sexual behaviour.
The comment might, possibly, statistically, nearly, approach partial correctness in parts of the US, but not in the world.
And ZA's governmental attitude to HIV and anti-HIV drugs has changed recently.
(One of the drivers of it was rapacious capitalism and "intellectual property" pressures in the US)
The argument is that the same reasons that lead big(?) comapnies and governments to retain big consultancy firms apply when the code is Open SOurce as when it is CLosed.
I'm not convinced but neither is it visibly wrong.
This is a steady progression toward using the "publisher pays" model of scientific publication.
The Public Library of Science has been doing it for a while now
www.plos.org
"The big advantages with Windows infrastructure are the tools for managing lots of machines (eg: Group Policy) and the ease of integration."
As found recently by our Department of Work and Pensions?
They managed 80 000 workstations, removing them all from access to their servers, in a way not simply reversible.
Convenience is good, but so is robustness. linux may currently err on the side of robustness, or more precisely I think has had robustness engineered to a more advnaced state than convenience by now. I suspect it is easier to add convenience to robustness than to add robustness to convenience.
I suspect the US government is not dissimilar to the UK government in this respect.
Here, rather than leading the field, government trails, because the decision process is so long (and on huge projects the decision process should take a while) that by the time government buys into something it is on the way out.
So we had X.400 email...and then paid again to rip it out and replace it.
Now the National Health Service is lining up to go Windows Windows Windows, and looking around, I think that if this is the crest of a wave, it is already breaking.
But what you have to remember is that the NHS only installed X.400 as standard 4 years after it was obvious that X.400 was the failed standard and SMTP was the successful one.
Now, what is it that we are doing? Oh yes. Installing Windows for everything, over the next 4 years...
1. Hospitals is what the NHS is looking at nowadays, Practices have solutions (actually we lead the world, but being typically British and understated don't make so much fuss about it) From this end, the need is for ways of sending messages between systems, which IMHO FLOSS people are likely to be better at avoiding combinatorial explosions on a large scale than closed/proprietary ones are.
For hospitals there is VISTA, in which respect the US VA looks like a world-leader (and the three US gov services that use software suites based on the same core seem the closest analogues of the NHS that are readily available, with software.)
This produced a corps of maintainers and supporters www.hardhats.org (the history is well-worth reading) www.openvista.org who are a good bunch, the interesting example of one of the business models for making your crown jewels Open Source (GPL) with Sanchez' GT.M - on Sourceforge but mainly they do big iron stuff for banks.
So, there is an open (public domain, FOIA, with embellishments) hospital and patient management system and medical records system available.
(It has been translated into Finnish, German - Berlin Heart Institute) and Arabic (cancer hospital in Cairo) so there is a sporting chance it can be translated into English - there would be a fair few changes needed to fit into what we use instead of billing and the work the USN MC at San Diego was doing to extend it with Paediatric modules would need to be continued at least, but it is a plausibly promising system with a long pedigree)
VISTA has been ported by WorldVista to run on GT.M which of course runs on Linux. VISTA I am told was designed early on to move platforms, with a bit of alteration to a shim layer, and survived moves across different sorts of M and Unix (and I think VMS before that) so the alteration to run on GT.M and on Linux was not a large task (it looks like a big job to me, but Rick Marshall et al seemed quite happy with it - key points: there is experience, there are people, it was designed for it.)
There is a GUI for VISTA.
Thing about this - a GUI is not a good choice of interface for a proportion of tasks commonly done in healthcare organisations. SO having a GUI that goes alongside a functional plain terminal interface makes excellent sense.
The GUI is behind stuff in use in General Practice in the UK in its development at present, but is generically usable, and does not trail the state of the art in hospitals.
It is in Delphi, so if we use Windows on a desktop that is fine, I do not doubt that it could be ported to Kylix or otherwise moved to GUIs on newer operating systems as they take over.
Tools exist as Open Source and in production, to connect GT.M to SQL and to the Web, so a web interface is a reasonable approach. Jim Self in LA has done a lot of this rather impressively for the Veterinary Hospital he is at.
Others ------- There is also the Care2Ex project which has a lot of energy going into it in Europe, and is a cross-border effort (a nice thing to see in the evolving European Confederacy) this is aimed at hospitals, the University Hospital of Geneva has been using its BolinOs system for Radiology and other records and administrative tasks for a while, and there are a stack of Practice systems in early stages. My source code is available, but in VIsual Basic, so possibly best left buried for now; but Horst Herb's GNUMed project based in Australia www.gnumed.org and www.gnumed.net are promising approaches to doing it all in a provably correct fashion - and hence are taking a long time.
The ontologists - a proper medical automation system requires a sound ontology to be based on or else you end up with a local curiosity - are agreed AFAICS that medical ontologies do not work unless they are Open SOurce and Open Licence (Galen which is one based in Manchester University in the middle of England) has a slogan "Making the impossible very difficult" which semes to accurately reflect the level of c
The interface. Getting an agreement to develop an approved and mandatory user interface appearance for all programs on all kit is a big wedge.
And to develop and provide the software to build that interface onto programs. Charitably put, Microsoft's lack of advertised expertise with Linux would make it seem unlikely that they will write tools to put the interface (the licencing terms of which are not visible at present to me) onto other programs running on Open platforms.
"I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much."
That is just wrong, as many people using NT4 will be prepared to tell you, if not now then soon.
There is a lot of Windows on our desktops, at least in General Practice (hospitals are much less computerised)
However the successful healthcare software tends to have been written in M (MUMPS as was) and is commonly appearing either in a terminal (telnet etc) with added chrome and macro buttons around it (EMIS; MicroTest), or be a somewhat evolved front end on a database that may be running on Unix VMS or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
What changes reducing the use of Microsoft products would make in them is another question altogether, and there are better reasons for controlling MS' behaviour than to gain the income from fines.
"of countries" ... working together.
Rather like states combined for common purposes, subsuming some functions and powers into a shared administration. Ours are (still) quite limited in both function and power, but don't assume that looseness is weakness.
people with hobs and ovens that have no particular connection. I don't even know if ours are from teh same maker, but there is no reason whyc they should be.
"so inherently related to a specific set of behaviors" HIV is not currently restricted to any particular sub-section of sexual behaviour. The comment might, possibly, statistically, nearly, approach partial correctness in parts of the US, but not in the world. And ZA's governmental attitude to HIV and anti-HIV drugs has changed recently. (One of the drivers of it was rapacious capitalism and "intellectual property" pressures in the US)
yesterday! (I think)
perhaps commoditised
I'm not convinced but neither is it visibly wrong.
is looking interesting
This is an unalloyed Good Thing.
Wellcome do a lot of good medical research and this is the best way to make it useful to us all.
as a FLOSS tool in the same niche VB operates in.
Someone might want to port it to Windows I suppose.
would be to consider making some friends.
Machiavelli said "it is better to be feared than to be loved", which was OK for medieval Florence, but Europe has moved beyond that nowadays.
Now it is a good idea to aim for respect and interdependence.
Indeed. Or authors...
Q. How many PhDs does it take to change a light bulb?
A. 4. One to screw in the bulb, and 3 to co-author the paper.
This is a steady progression toward using the "publisher pays" model of scientific publication. The Public Library of Science has been doing it for a while now www.plos.org
even if Olivetti got there first with their ultrasound and radio pointing devices. (From the same English stable as VNC)
If your medicines were not sold at such ridiculous mark-up then there would be less profit in one area of spamming.
Oldest and longest enduring democracy for that matter.
Seeing that RDF feed popping up in Evolution gave me a frisson, I was there.
to a Chinese company. I think this will make a difference.
"The big advantages with Windows infrastructure are the tools for managing lots of machines (eg: Group Policy) and the ease of integration."
As found recently by our Department of Work and Pensions?
They managed 80 000 workstations, removing them all from access to their servers, in a way not simply reversible.
Convenience is good, but so is robustness. linux may currently err on the side of robustness, or more precisely I think has had robustness engineered to a more advnaced state than convenience by now. I suspect it is easier to add convenience to robustness than to add robustness to convenience.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4044085.stm
(I gather) that they have had to pick up the pieces after migrations to Linux have failed...
What is lacking from MS is any indication at all of who the organisations or companies involved might have been.
Is there an example of a badly failed migration to be had?
I suspect the US government is not dissimilar to the UK government in this respect.
Here, rather than leading the field, government trails, because the decision process is so long (and on huge projects the decision process should take a while) that by the time government buys into something it is on the way out.
So we had X.400 email...and then paid again to rip it out and replace it.
Now the National Health Service is lining up to go Windows Windows Windows, and looking around, I think that if this is the crest of a wave, it is already breaking.
But what you have to remember is that the NHS only installed X.400 as standard 4 years after it was obvious that X.400 was the failed standard and SMTP was the successful one.
...
Now, what is it that we are doing? Oh yes. Installing Windows for everything, over the next 4 years
1. Hospitals is what the NHS is looking at nowadays, Practices have solutions (actually we lead the world, but being typically British and understated don't make so much fuss about it)
From this end, the need is for ways of sending messages between systems, which IMHO FLOSS people are likely to be better at avoiding combinatorial explosions on a large scale than closed/proprietary ones are.
For hospitals there is VISTA, in which respect the US VA looks like a world-leader (and the three US gov services that use software suites based on the same core seem the closest analogues of the NHS that are readily available, with software.)
This produced a corps of maintainers and supporters www.hardhats.org (the history is well-worth reading) www.openvista.org who are a good bunch, the interesting example of one of the business models for making your crown jewels Open Source (GPL) with Sanchez' GT.M - on Sourceforge but mainly they do big iron stuff for banks.
So, there is an open (public domain, FOIA, with embellishments) hospital and patient management system and medical records system available.
(It has been translated into Finnish, German - Berlin Heart Institute) and Arabic (cancer hospital in Cairo) so there is a sporting chance it can be translated into English - there would be a fair few changes needed to fit into what we use instead of billing and the work the USN MC at San Diego was doing to extend it with Paediatric modules would need to be continued at least, but it is a plausibly promising system with a long pedigree)
VISTA has been ported by WorldVista to run on GT.M which of course runs on Linux. VISTA I am told was designed early on to move platforms, with a bit of alteration to a shim layer, and survived moves across different sorts of M and Unix (and I think VMS before that) so the alteration to run on GT.M and on Linux was not a large task (it looks like a big job to me, but Rick Marshall et al seemed quite happy with it - key points: there is experience, there are people, it was designed for it.)
There is a GUI for VISTA.
Thing about this - a GUI is not a good choice of interface for a proportion of tasks commonly done in healthcare organisations. SO having a GUI that goes alongside a functional plain terminal interface makes excellent sense.
The GUI is behind stuff in use in General Practice in the UK in its development at present, but is generically usable, and does not trail the state of the art in hospitals.
It is in Delphi, so if we use Windows on a desktop that is fine, I do not doubt that it could be ported to Kylix or otherwise moved to GUIs on newer operating systems as they take over.
Tools exist as Open Source and in production, to connect GT.M to SQL and to the Web, so a web interface is a reasonable approach. Jim Self in LA has done a lot of this rather impressively for the Veterinary Hospital he is at.
Others
-------
There is also the Care2Ex project which has a lot of energy going into it in Europe, and is a cross-border effort (a nice thing to see in the evolving European Confederacy) this is aimed at hospitals, the University Hospital of Geneva has been using its BolinOs system for Radiology and other records and administrative tasks for a while, and there are a stack of Practice systems in early stages. My source code is available, but in VIsual Basic, so possibly best left buried for now; but Horst Herb's GNUMed project based in Australia www.gnumed.org and www.gnumed.net are promising approaches to doing it all in a provably correct fashion - and hence are taking a long time.
The ontologists - a proper medical automation system requires a sound ontology to be based on or else you end up with a local curiosity - are agreed AFAICS that medical ontologies do not work unless they are Open SOurce and Open Licence (Galen which is one based in Manchester University in the middle of England) has a slogan "Making the impossible very difficult" which semes to accurately reflect the level of c
The interface. Getting an agreement to develop an approved and mandatory user interface appearance for all programs on all kit is a big wedge.
And to develop and provide the software to build that interface onto programs. Charitably put, Microsoft's lack of advertised expertise with Linux would make it seem unlikely that they will write tools to put the interface (the licencing terms of which are not visible at present to me) onto other programs running on Open platforms.
"I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much."
That is just wrong, as many people using NT4 will be prepared to tell you, if not now then soon.
There is a lot of Windows on our desktops, at least in General Practice (hospitals are much less computerised)
However the successful healthcare software tends to have been written in M (MUMPS as was) and is commonly appearing either in a terminal (telnet etc) with added chrome and macro buttons around it (EMIS; MicroTest), or be a somewhat evolved front end on a database that may be running on Unix VMS or whatever.
I understood that IBM had declared that they were doing this?