That suggests to me that there is no 'forced upgrade' or 'upgrade treadmill'.
What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you? There's at least two upgrades I can see right away.
The demand that all documents be stored in a standard format immediately forces the upgrade to Office 2007. Once the next version of Office comes out (presumably with support for ISO OOXML Strict), we can reasonably assume that's another forced upgrade right away.
Even if the second forced upgrade never happens, it means that over time thousands of government documents will be converted to a format for which no half-decent, non-patent-infringing Free implementation can ever exist. The same probably can't be said for earlier Office file formats.
so, then, what's the incentive to own the wire then if you cannot use it for your own purposes? You do use it for your own purposes. Specifically, it pays your bills because you are able to lease the use of that wire for significantly more than it cost to lay and the occasional engineer out if it gets broken. This is how the "traditional" (pre-Net Neutrality) ISP business model works.
The big question is: Now that the technology exists to prioritise traffic along that wire according to any one of a hundred different metrics, is it significantly better for society if legislation is passed to make such use of technology illegal?
The question of whether or not someone will come along who doesn't do such prioritisation and thus solve the problem in a free market fashion is only tangentally related - mainly based on the likelihood of that happening. Given the costs involved in setting up an ISP and the likely marginal difference such a policy would make to the number of subscribers you would be able to sign up, there's a very real possibility that this isn't something which can easily be solved by the free market.
Sometimes, society needs laws in order to ensure that it gets what is best for society as a whole.
Although this is kind of a non-issue if only Lenovo is doing that because my employer won't buy from China... what with the phone home possibilities of hardware and all. Tell me, how do they get on with getting assurances that the motherboards aren't made in China and the final product assembled elsewhere?
(This is a genuine question; I was under the impression that Dell bought most of the components from China then assembled them close to the customer in order to maintain their "build-to-order" business model).
Mind you, they get a nice return on that, or used to. Not sure how good BBC programming is these days but I'm willing to wager that it has any of the major American networks beat hands down. It probably still beats most US networks, but as seems to be the fashion with TV these days, they've laid on several more channels without first ensuring that they have the quality material to fill those channels.
So whereas 20 years ago you'd get maybe 8-12 hours per week of good peak-time programming divided between two channels, today you get 6-8 hours divided between four channels. (I've reduced the number of hours because Eastenders is on more than it used to be).
That sounds much too logical for a bureaucrat to have come up with. Indeed.
Wild guess - not based on any knowledge of Russian politics, you understand, but based on a cynical view of most governments - it was dreamt up by a network operator which wants to establish/maintain a monopoly and they "discussed" the matter with the appropriate parties.
- Virgils? this is what happened in India and almost on the same level. I don't understand. How would dragging out the corpse of a long-dead classical Roman poet (even assuming we could find it) help?
Those figures have nothing to do with your original post, which appeared to suggest that the police are institutionally corrupt and spend their time shooting and locking people up random people.
Nice attempt at moving the goalposts, though. Say what?
Alternatively, don't put something on the web that you wouldn't be happy showing to a room full of strangers, regardless of so-called "privacy" options (which have been shown time and again to be broadly meaningless).
However, to pretend that the few mistakes they make cancel out the incredible amount of solved crimes they manage, even under the incredible crippling that the Labour government has inflicted on them with their target-based performance system, is disingenuous. Erm... Go to your local police force's website and download their annual report. It contains figures for the amount of crime they've solved.
I hate to break it to you, but unless the crime is something pretty serious (think armed robbery, murder), the solving rate is depressingly low. As in no higher than 30% for many forces.
The fire department captain said that it did cause the fire, albeit not spontaneously. It caused the fire through a lack of common sense; putting a sticker on something won't ever fix that. All it will do is add fuel to the fire.
(Literally, in this case) I'd agree with the lack of common sense, but not entirely on the part of the owner.
It is, IMO, reasonable to assume that a games console and its PSU will be just put down around the back of the TV where there is poor air circulation. It is also reasonable to assume that no matter how clear the warning in the manual to "locate the PSU somewhere with good air circulation", someone will ignore it.
Therefore, it makes sense to design the unit such that in the event of failure, it won't do anything dangerous like catch fire.
(I'm assuming here that it wasn't a Friday afternoon at the factory when this unit was made - which is a rash assumption)
In fact, the same kind of hardware add-ons work on Linux and on Macintosh: supported hardware with high quality drivers. You completely misunderstand the point I was making.
Even when the drivers are there (eg. scanners, graphics tablets), it is by no means uncommon to find that the available software to make use of them absolutely stinks.
(Mind you, HP seem to have been trying to close that gap by producing appalling user-land software for their printers under Windows for a few years now).
What some people (moronic bosses and industry pundits) seem to forget is that the days of thin clients have already happened, a connection isn't always assured, and people just plain like software on their computers. Who said anything about thin clients? What about a thick client with a license key which expires in 1 month? After 1 month, you have to renew the license and it's only the renewal which requires being online.
I think Apple's track record is decidedly mixed; they have committed awful usability blunders in the past. I think on balance, they are no better than FOSS. I would have to disagree with that one.
Usability is something MacOS hammers Linux into the ground for right now. Hardware add-ons just fscking work, which is far more than can be said for Linux.
Granted, a lot of that is to do with hardware manufacturers refusing to release specs. But I've got a whole pile of examples here where specs are available, drivers have been written and yet still the resulting UI is so clunky compared to Windows or Mac equivalents that it is almost painful to use.
Cnet has this article which goes into a little more detail. From what I've gathered it seems they "just moved" to the new building, and got the address wrong the first time Got the address wrong first time??!
What happened, did all the staff show up to the new address only for the current folk there to say "What are you doing here? Never heard of you."
Yet another interpretation is that IBM couldn't give a fsck about religion, but is aware of how much Microsoft licensing costs (even if you're IBM I'd imagine it's non-trivial).
Combine that with the fact that they're almost certainly using Notes (rather than Exchange) for calendaring and email, and suddenly Windows is a very expensive choice for little benefit.
Seriously, under what circumstance could the RIAA win? Bragging rights? Please tell me that no group of people think it's perfectly OK to brag about suing a homeless man.
It was better a few years ago, when the only people on the internet were academics and geeks, ie people who are generally fairly smart. Yep, back then September was only about 30 days long.
By the time you account for seek time and latency, we've practically got that already with gigabit ethernet unless you're already running a reasonable RAID.
Conduits join at junctions, and when you put the conduits in you run a piece of string with a weight on it through them. Use the string to draw the cable to the first junction box, tie the cable to another string going in another direction off the box and pull again. Lather rinse and repeat until complete.
And corporations like to keep things simple. Why have two distributions (one for the desktops, one for the servers) when one could do the job? This is where Ubuntu outshines. Really?
WTF is fundamentally missing that it can't be a "desktop"?? Are we talking administration? Apps? Screen savers? Spinning cursor add-ons? iTunes? Virus scanners? Boxed software? Every time one problem is solved, it's another one.
It used to be "No serious office software". Then OpenOffice came to be.
Then it was "very difficult to configure" (never mind that in businesses, where much of the money is, a dedicated IT department does all the configuring and they sure as hell don't go around like monkeys clicking "Next Next Next" on every PC). Then Ubuntu came to be.
Right now there are a few more - the first two that spring to mind are "very difficult to manage across a large group in a similar easy fashion to Windows - you can't easily click a button and - poof! - an icon for an application will appear on the desktop of everyone belonging to a particular group, you can't easily centrally disable UI functionality on a per-group basis so end users don't see anything that might confuse them." The general answer to that one is "it's not that hard to roll your own" - which is certainly true but few IT departments want to re-invent the wheel. Canonical have a product called "Landscape" which supposedly solves this but it's only available when you pay for support so how good it is I don't know.
The second argument right now is "all the little business applications which handle boring things like payroll and accounts, of which there are myriad, are conspicuous by their absence on Linux".
Once this problem is solved, I imagine something else will come up. I think what it really boils down to is "a migration would provide little benefit and cause a great deal of work which we can't justify". Which is probably the most sound business reason that exists - make no mistake, it will continue to exist for a very long time. Lots of companies stuck with dumb terminals for years, only to migrate to PCs with a terminal emulator for the business application.
Vista is pretty good because network chips haven't changed much in a long time, mass storage is fairly standardised and it has a pretty good failsafe VGA driver.
I'd be interested to see how it looks in 2 years time if the graphics card vendors carry out their plans to drop 2D support altogether, network chips start moving more functionality to software because the need to implement very much on the chip for GigE has more or less evaporated and 802.11n WLAN cards are commonplace.
You may enjoy three hours of tedium trying to get Xorg to display properly on a new monitor, or god forbid, two monitors. Most people don't. To be fair, Xorg has improved by leaps and bounds since the X11R6 fork a few years ago.
However, it wasn't that far back that Ubuntu announced plans to make sure a generic failsafe VGA driver was set up so that if for some reason Xorg couldn't play nice with your graphics card, it would still have something sane to fall back on. If memory serves, the/. discussion basically consisted of three comments:
1. High time too - Windows has only done this since I-don't-know-when. 2. Not necessary - it detected my graphics card OK. 3. Finally! This will be the year of Linux on the desktop!!oneoneone!
Not many companies the size of Sun would even have let you post a rebuttal on/. in the first place - though I daresay SVP in your job title doesn't hurt.
TBH, I think most of the commenters realised that someone was on the wacky baccy with the note in the summary saying "Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything."
Slashdot Mirror
What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you? There's at least two upgrades I can see right away.
The demand that all documents be stored in a standard format immediately forces the upgrade to Office 2007. Once the next version of Office comes out (presumably with support for ISO OOXML Strict), we can reasonably assume that's another forced upgrade right away.
Even if the second forced upgrade never happens, it means that over time thousands of government documents will be converted to a format for which no half-decent, non-patent-infringing Free implementation can ever exist. The same probably can't be said for earlier Office file formats.
The big question is: Now that the technology exists to prioritise traffic along that wire according to any one of a hundred different metrics, is it significantly better for society if legislation is passed to make such use of technology illegal?
The question of whether or not someone will come along who doesn't do such prioritisation and thus solve the problem in a free market fashion is only tangentally related - mainly based on the likelihood of that happening. Given the costs involved in setting up an ISP and the likely marginal difference such a policy would make to the number of subscribers you would be able to sign up, there's a very real possibility that this isn't something which can easily be solved by the free market.
Sometimes, society needs laws in order to ensure that it gets what is best for society as a whole.
(This is a genuine question; I was under the impression that Dell bought most of the components from China then assembled them close to the customer in order to maintain their "build-to-order" business model).
So whereas 20 years ago you'd get maybe 8-12 hours per week of good peak-time programming divided between two channels, today you get 6-8 hours divided between four channels. (I've reduced the number of hours because Eastenders is on more than it used to be).
Wild guess - not based on any knowledge of Russian politics, you understand, but based on a cynical view of most governments - it was dreamt up by a network operator which wants to establish/maintain a monopoly and they "discussed" the matter with the appropriate parties.
Nice attempt at moving the goalposts, though. Say what?
Go back up and check the comment authors, brains.
TBF, last time I looked it up, Devon & Cornwall were one of the better forces.
Most of the forces covering more urban areas had figures more like what I said originally.
Alternatively, don't put something on the web that you wouldn't be happy showing to a room full of strangers, regardless of so-called "privacy" options (which have been shown time and again to be broadly meaningless).
I hate to break it to you, but unless the crime is something pretty serious (think armed robbery, murder), the solving rate is depressingly low. As in no higher than 30% for many forces.
(Literally, in this case) I'd agree with the lack of common sense, but not entirely on the part of the owner.
It is, IMO, reasonable to assume that a games console and its PSU will be just put down around the back of the TV where there is poor air circulation. It is also reasonable to assume that no matter how clear the warning in the manual to "locate the PSU somewhere with good air circulation", someone will ignore it.
Therefore, it makes sense to design the unit such that in the event of failure, it won't do anything dangerous like catch fire.
(I'm assuming here that it wasn't a Friday afternoon at the factory when this unit was made - which is a rash assumption)
Even when the drivers are there (eg. scanners, graphics tablets), it is by no means uncommon to find that the available software to make use of them absolutely stinks.
(Mind you, HP seem to have been trying to close that gap by producing appalling user-land software for their printers under Windows for a few years now).
Usability is something MacOS hammers Linux into the ground for right now. Hardware add-ons just fscking work, which is far more than can be said for Linux.
Granted, a lot of that is to do with hardware manufacturers refusing to release specs. But I've got a whole pile of examples here where specs are available, drivers have been written and yet still the resulting UI is so clunky compared to Windows or Mac equivalents that it is almost painful to use.
What happened, did all the staff show up to the new address only for the current folk there to say "What are you doing here? Never heard of you."
Yet another interpretation is that IBM couldn't give a fsck about religion, but is aware of how much Microsoft licensing costs (even if you're IBM I'd imagine it's non-trivial).
Combine that with the fact that they're almost certainly using Notes (rather than Exchange) for calendaring and email, and suddenly Windows is a very expensive choice for little benefit.
By the time you account for seek time and latency, we've practically got that already with gigabit ethernet unless you're already running a reasonable RAID.
Conduits join at junctions, and when you put the conduits in you run a piece of string with a weight on it through them. Use the string to draw the cable to the first junction box, tie the cable to another string going in another direction off the box and pull again. Lather rinse and repeat until complete.
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/serveredition
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/desktopedition
It used to be "No serious office software". Then OpenOffice came to be.
Then it was "very difficult to configure" (never mind that in businesses, where much of the money is, a dedicated IT department does all the configuring and they sure as hell don't go around like monkeys clicking "Next Next Next" on every PC). Then Ubuntu came to be.
Right now there are a few more - the first two that spring to mind are "very difficult to manage across a large group in a similar easy fashion to Windows - you can't easily click a button and - poof! - an icon for an application will appear on the desktop of everyone belonging to a particular group, you can't easily centrally disable UI functionality on a per-group basis so end users don't see anything that might confuse them." The general answer to that one is "it's not that hard to roll your own" - which is certainly true but few IT departments want to re-invent the wheel. Canonical have a product called "Landscape" which supposedly solves this but it's only available when you pay for support so how good it is I don't know.
The second argument right now is "all the little business applications which handle boring things like payroll and accounts, of which there are myriad, are conspicuous by their absence on Linux".
Once this problem is solved, I imagine something else will come up. I think what it really boils down to is "a migration would provide little benefit and cause a great deal of work which we can't justify". Which is probably the most sound business reason that exists - make no mistake, it will continue to exist for a very long time. Lots of companies stuck with dumb terminals for years, only to migrate to PCs with a terminal emulator for the business application.
Vista is pretty good because network chips haven't changed much in a long time, mass storage is fairly standardised and it has a pretty good failsafe VGA driver.
I'd be interested to see how it looks in 2 years time if the graphics card vendors carry out their plans to drop 2D support altogether, network chips start moving more functionality to software because the need to implement very much on the chip for GigE has more or less evaporated and 802.11n WLAN cards are commonplace.
However, it wasn't that far back that Ubuntu announced plans to make sure a generic failsafe VGA driver was set up so that if for some reason Xorg couldn't play nice with your graphics card, it would still have something sane to fall back on. If memory serves, the
1. High time too - Windows has only done this since I-don't-know-when.
2. Not necessary - it detected my graphics card OK.
3. Finally! This will be the year of Linux on the desktop!!oneoneone!
Thank you.
/. in the first place - though I daresay SVP in your job title doesn't hurt.
Not many companies the size of Sun would even have let you post a rebuttal on
TBH, I think most of the commenters realised that someone was on the wacky baccy with the note in the summary saying "Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything."