IIRC there was an upgrade based on a DEC StrongARM processor available for the RiscPC. Not sure if there was ever an Xscale upgrade but Castle Technology had a few systems built based on such a chip.
Damn fast, they were. I used them a couple of times at university - I wish I'd known they were binning them, I'd have grabbed one. Came in one day and found the lab had been re-equipped.
The OS itself is still around today, after a fashion. But time has not been kind.
IMV, a fast boot cannot compensate for a spectacular lack of features you'd expect to find in a modern OS. It's a single user OS with co-operative multi-tasking rather than pre-emptive, there's no protected memory or swap support, it's single-user.
And by "significant changes" you mean dumping most of the loser projects and monetizing most of the open source projects with proprietary extensions?
With few exceptions, that's how most successful F/OSS projects work. The free (as in beer) version is essentially subsidised in some way - either with a proprietary version that usually includes a few extras or with a company that provides consulting and support.
Thats because "rich" will have changed. When there are no more "have"s and "have not"s, everybody will be rich,
Not necessarily. It would take time to distribute the theoretical machine and raw materials to make one. I suspect it would be destroyed long before sufficient copies could be made or distributed around the world.
I've already posted a thought experiment along these lines - whereby I invent a 3D copier device that can copy arbitrary items - regardless of how complicated they are - and the end result is composed of the same material as the original. So you could, for instance, put a meat pie in one end and get another, broadly identical and perfectly edible meat pie out the other. On a larger scale, you could put a washing machine or a television in one end and get another - perfectly operational - washing machine/television out the other.
For the purposes of this experiment, we'll assume that the machine is cheap enough to buy, doesn't cost a great deal to run, can produce complicated items as a whole (as opposed to right now when the best you could do would be to build component parts which somebody would have to assemble) and has little in the way of size limits. You could, for instance, walk down the street, see a car you like and say "I like that. I'll have one of those." and poof! You've got your own car.
It sounds like a lovely idea, but I think anyone inventing this would be killed. The reason being that the implications for society are huge - and I don't think society could change quickly enough to cope.
Note Microsoft's choice of target. As a rule, it's companies that:
1. Have sufficiently deep pockets as to be worth pursuing. 2. Are unlikely to have patents that would impact any of Microsoft's products. 3. May not have the expertise to be able to examine the alleged patents and ultimately contest them.
(Interestingly, if you substitute "SCO" for "Microsoft" and broaden the discussion to cover any sort of intellectual property, you note that rules 2 and 3 above were ignored. Perhaps Microsoft took that as an object lesson.)
While IPMI is well-established on the server, so far no form of BIOS-level remote control seems to be doing particularly well on the desktop. It's damn difficult to find definitive statements from any major OEM concerning which lines support it, there's a plethora of versions with varying levels of sophistication, some of which require proprietary software in order to use.
That in itself isn't the end of the world, but even tracking down suitable proprietary software can be like pulling teeth!
Myself, I think that the majority of companies being targeted with this are the huge organisations with offices and staff everywhere - but they tackled the problem 10 years or more ago, they've got a whole stack of solutions and processes already in place and so something which doesn't really bring anything particularly useful to the table isn't all that interesting.
Sounds about right. For someone who's been using a Mac for a couple of years, it's like going back in time to the bad old days of Windows '9x. The platform promises the world and it all looks very pretty but when it comes to actually doing something useful, you spend just as long messing around as you do doing anything useful.
I bought an Android phone myself and it's the first phone I've ever seriously considered buying myself out of the contract of just to change it early. Partly my own fault for buying a cheap phone but even if we overlook that, the fact is that Android has not in any sense revolutionised the mobile phone industry. If anything it's made things worse because you've got Android itself (developed by a company that clearly believes in "release early, update often, the customer can always avail themselves of an update if they need to") being taken up by phone manufacturers (who take a "release once, update never, lock the thing down" approach to their products' firmware).
It's like a vast swathe of the smartphone customer base has been conned into paying to be beta testers without even a stable version at the end to look forward to.
Seriously - let's forget we're all geeks/nerds/whatever for a minute. Let's imagine I'm a normal person who just wants the computer to do a job. What advantages to me would a system like Linux/BSD/Haiku offer?
To make it a little easier for you, I'll forewarn you of what the counter-arguments to the obvious arguments will be:
"You can run whatever you like, you're not limited to the app store" : Okay, but I don't find the app store all that limiting. I have access to all I could possibly want, and I know it's going to work safely. Last time I tried running some random application I downloaded from the Internet I had to pay someone like you to get my computer working again. Cost me almost as much as the computer was worth, as I remember.
"There's no forced obsolescence whereby you need to upgrade your PC in order to use newer versions, you can use your computer until it falls apart" : I can do that now. Sure, the time may come when the app store demands I buy a newer computer - but you know what? By that time my existing computer is going to be so clapped out that I'll be looking to replace it anyway.
"There's implicitly less privacy because the app store requires you to have an account on (SYSTEM)" : My employer already outsources payroll, which means that someone with precisely zero loyalty to me, someone I don't know from Adam already knows my tax details and how much I earned last year. Hell, they probably know enough about me to take out credit cards in my name - but the world keeps turning. I don't think it's a huge concern.
and can all run the same applications (with small exceptions)
My emphasis.
I imagine Google foresaw a future those small exceptions became large exceptions. Android is already rapidly showing signs of fragmenting into a disparate platform full of products that sort-of work, all of which have minor annoyances (but you can fix them with cyanogen! Provided you don't mind voiding the warranty on that phone you're stuck with for 18 months, working or otherwise!); I could easily see it becoming an absolute nightmare.
My needs are slightly different to yours (needed ADSL support, not prepared to have a two-box solution), but the conclusion I came to was that unless it ships (or has as an option from the manufacturer's own website) OpenWRT or a derivative thereof, you'll spend just as long fiddling with the router as you will actually using it. With the added bonus that unlike a standard PC, if something goes wrong then recovery can be fiddly at best and impossible at worst. I wound up opting for a Linksys router - they don't support F/OSS firmware any more, but I've always found the stock firmware to be perfectly stable.
The thing is, RIM had plenty of notice of these things happening. Microsoft were in the process of making EAS a viable alternative to BES a few years before the launch of the iPhone; it was only a matter of time before someone produced a half-decent phone that integrated with EAS and then RIM would have real competition on their hands.
I didn't understand this myself for ages, it's only in the last couple of years I've figured it out.
The selling point (not just with RIM but with any smartphone/sync combination) is a lot more than just email. There's a whole lot of little things which on their own sound utterly inconsequential - but in actual fact add up to enough that for many people they represent real value:
1. Push email. I know about the IMAP IDLE command. Few smartphones implements this; those that implement IMAP in any form frequently do such a ham-fisted job of it you wonder why they bother. 2. Calendar sync. What exactly do you carry around with you that can vibrate or make noises on schedule to remind you of an appointment and can keep your appointments in sync with a central server so others looking to schedule meetings can ensure they choose a convenient time? You and I have maybe a couple of meetings a week, usually at fixed times and they're often not terribly consequential. Missing one is fairly unlikely (because they're at fixed times) and usually of little consequence. The sales manager (whose job basically consists of "Go to meeting, talk about our product and try to sell it, lather rinse and repeat up to several times a day every day for months on end") doesn't have that luxury. 3. Contacts sync. You and I lose our contacts list on our phone, it's mildly annoying but we're probably organised enough to remember to sync it with out computer occasionally so we can always reload it. Worst case, we lose a handful of contacts - but we're probably not using the phone enough to care about a handful of ultimately inconsequential numbers. The people who are buying these phones: A. aren't that organised and B. depend so heavily on their contacts list that without it they are in serious trouble. Salesmen are again the most obvious example of this.
Arguments 2 and 3 also go some way to explaining the continued popularity of Outlook/Exchange. You care to explain to the sales director that as his laptop has been stolen, the information about upcoming meetings and his contact list has gone with it? Bearing in mind that as soon as you've left the room, that sales director is going to have a very difficult meeting with his manager. I guarantee you the second thing out of his mouth (straight after "Oh dear, it looks like the meetings at which I was hoping to secure £several million worth of sales are scuppered, because I can only remember details of one or two of them. We're going to look pretty bad when I don't even show up.") will be "This never happened at my last company where we had Exchange. If I lost a phone or laptop there, it would be replaced and the replacement would get all this information."
I would say it was obvious from the moment Exchange 2003 SP2 (which introduced Exchange ActiveSync 2.5) was released that Microsoft were serious in driving out BES. Once companies started to license Exchange ActiveSync, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the need to go out and buy a separate system to manage smartphones was eliminated.
The thing is, Exchange 2k3 SP2 was released in 2005. ISTR that few people really took alternative smartphones seriously until the iPhone; a few people bought Windows Mobile devices but by and large these were a fairly dismal failure. The iPhone wasn't released until the middle of 2007, didn't gain ActiveSync support until iOS 2.0 in 2008 and didn't really take off until the 3G model was released, also in 2008.
Which means that RIM had three whole years to come up with some other idea. They didn't.
If I'm being honest, I don't think it is the training costs that are the issue. I think it's dependencies.
Let me explain.
Every company I've ever worked in, yes they depend on Office (but could probably get by with Libre/OpenOffice). But dig beneath the surface and you find:
Adam in Accounts needed an application to track forecasted payments, late payments and due payments. The accounts package they use can sort-of do this but it's very crude and very nasty. Fortunately, the accounts package does have the ability to plug into Excel. (Only Excel, I hasten to add. Microsoft provide APIs to allow vendors to write their own Excel plugins) - and Adam's a whiz in Excel. So he threw together something himself using a few spreadsheets. This was 2 years ago and since then it's grown and grown to the point that the old accounts system - the one that IT procured, installed and are still backing up every night religiously - is doing remarkably little. 60% of the work is being farmed out to Adam's spreadsheet. Sure, it can go a bit funny if two people try to use it at once - but everyone's used to that now. Open it in OpenOffice? You're having a laugh. The last time they got an upgrade to Excel it took two days to get it all working again, and that was expected to be a reasonably trouble-free upgrade.
Steve in Sales needed some way of tracking customers from initial inquiry through to purchase order and support. His manager contacted IT and was told that it would have to be formally approved as a project, complete with a budget and director-level visibility. Best case scenario, assuming the IT department could fit them in in the first half of the new financial year was 3 months from start to finish and £tens of thousands. No way this could even start before the new financial year, and that was six months away. But Steve really needed something fast. He and his manager had a little chat and they found something they could run themselves and was cheap enough that it could fly under the radar. It's a bit clunky, but it broadly works. Not web-based, naturally - it's actually based on FoxPro so it just uses files on a Windows share as the database backend.
Pam in Payroll has never calculated wages by hand in her life. There's a reason for this - tax law is a huge convoluted beast at the best of times. The way it usually works is you buy an application that does all this for you, and you get regular updates to account for changes in tax law. These applications tend to be developed and supported by small companies that only operate in a couple of countries. Why? Probably because tax law varies hugely on a per-country basis - the economies of scale you'd get by developing one product and flogging it in every country you can think of don't really work. It's one of the few areas of business software that everybody uses but hasn't yet been completely taken over by the huge multinationals. None of the existing software vendors have even considered porting their product to Linux - they're Windows all the way. And because of the complication tax law imposes, Linux payroll packages are more-or-less nonexistent.
Multiply that sort of thing across every function in the company, and work out how you'd move every damn department. Now you know why - even now, something like ten years after people first started talking about "the year of the Linux desktop", it still hasn't happened.
Maybe Ubuntu next.. Maybe even.. *shudder*.. a Mac.
The big UI changes that Microsoft are demonstrating saw their mass-market debut in OS X Lion, released a couple of months ago.
(Having said that, Lion doesn't thrust a Metro-like UI in your face from the moment you start it up. It's there, you can use it if you like. But you don't have to, and if you didn't you probably wouldn't know it was there.)
There's a whole range of hate speech which starts at "I hate him". It's rather stronger to add "...and I'm glad his daughter's dead", and then there's the matter of how such speech is delivered. You could start with mentioning quietly if the matter comes up in conversation, go through standing on a street corner with a loudhailer announcing the same feelings, posting the object of your hate letters informing them of this fact, posting those same opinions on the Internet and taking out an advert in the national press informing anyone who cares to read of this opinion. (For the purpose of this post, let us suppose you could actually find a national newspaper prepared to run such an advert).
Most countries draw a line somewhere and say "Right, that's it. Step over this line and it's a criminal offence" - even in the US you can get in trouble for sending hate mail. (IIRC there are laws about what you can send through the USPS that are used in such cases. You can hate someone all you like but you're not making the USPS a party to telling the world that!)
Can't say it convinces me myself, but you look at how so many people actually use their PC - only ever using one program at a time, maybe for hours on end - frankly, all the window-dressing of a task bar and window widgets does seem a bit wasted.
I do not get this obsession with trying to make computers work like phones. No, bad idea. When I heard of what they were doing with Lion I said "What a horrible idea." Now MS is doing the same? What the fuck?
Must confess I'm using Lion myself and I'm not particularly convinced. Fullscreen works well when the app designer has thought about how their application will function in fullscreen. (Safari is OK, NeoOffice in its infinite wisdom thinks that when I say fullscreen, I mean "so full I can't easily change any formatting without switching out of fullscreen mode"). There's a number of other glitches that I won't go into or we'll be here all evening.
In terms of MS doing the same, that's easily explained. The one thing that Microsoft have always excelled at is spotting a bandwagon - or something they think is a bandwagon - and jumping on it late. They've spent the better part of thirty years doing that (seriously, I promise you there's not a single product in Microsoft's entire range that doesn't somehow hark back to someone else's product. Hell, trace back Microsoft Paint to the Windows 3.x days and you have something that to a casual observer is damn-near identical to ZSoft Paintbrush).
I only looked at the first link but the first thing that jumped out at me was:
The advent of Windows 8 sees Microsoft introduce a new style of application, dubbed Metro Style apps, and its own app Store. The Metro Style apps are run in full-screen mode, with no Windows taskbar or other menu items getting in the way.
"Every single pixel of your beautiful screen is for your app," said Harris. "You're just immersed in the content."
I'm not sure what the rest of the medical device industry looks like, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was fairly similar. I know the markup on my glasses frames is pretty crazy.
Very few businesses are "guaranteed riches in a couple of years". I looked at the glasses thing myself - the frame markup is silly because that's pretty much the only source of income the optician has. Fitting out a shop, paying well-qualified people to look at your eyesight and buying all the equipment that goes with it is absurdly expensive and probably isn't paid for by the cost of your checkup. So you overprice the frames then let the customer think they're getting a bargain when you run a "2-for-1" offer (which is most of the time).
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC there was an upgrade based on a DEC StrongARM processor available for the RiscPC. Not sure if there was ever an Xscale upgrade but Castle Technology had a few systems built based on such a chip.
Damn fast, they were. I used them a couple of times at university - I wish I'd known they were binning them, I'd have grabbed one. Came in one day and found the lab had been re-equipped.
The OS itself is still around today, after a fashion. But time has not been kind.
IMV, a fast boot cannot compensate for a spectacular lack of features you'd expect to find in a modern OS. It's a single user OS with co-operative multi-tasking rather than pre-emptive, there's no protected memory or swap support, it's single-user.
Look on eBay for an Archimedes.
They're rapidly becoming a collector's item, but they were on the desktop in 1987.
And by "significant changes" you mean dumping most of the loser projects and monetizing most of the open source projects with proprietary extensions?
With few exceptions, that's how most successful F/OSS projects work. The free (as in beer) version is essentially subsidised in some way - either with a proprietary version that usually includes a few extras or with a company that provides consulting and support.
Why don't we, instead of perfecting our killing methods, simply stop initiating economy destroying pointless wars?
Because war is a fantastically good way to seriously sort your country out. All you need to do is have a great big war and lose it.
Sure, it takes a few years but look at, say, Germany or Japan today versus where they were in 1945.
I reckon that's what the US is doing. Starting all these wars with a view to losing one.
Or, for that matter, "device wholly and exclusively for the purpose of running Windows".
Most workstations are bought with an OS pre-installed simply because it is legislated.
What legislation would that be, then?
Thats because "rich" will have changed. When there are no more "have"s and "have not"s, everybody will be rich,
Not necessarily. It would take time to distribute the theoretical machine and raw materials to make one. I suspect it would be destroyed long before sufficient copies could be made or distributed around the world.
I've already posted a thought experiment along these lines - whereby I invent a 3D copier device that can copy arbitrary items - regardless of how complicated they are - and the end result is composed of the same material as the original. So you could, for instance, put a meat pie in one end and get another, broadly identical and perfectly edible meat pie out the other. On a larger scale, you could put a washing machine or a television in one end and get another - perfectly operational - washing machine/television out the other.
For the purposes of this experiment, we'll assume that the machine is cheap enough to buy, doesn't cost a great deal to run, can produce complicated items as a whole (as opposed to right now when the best you could do would be to build component parts which somebody would have to assemble) and has little in the way of size limits. You could, for instance, walk down the street, see a car you like and say "I like that. I'll have one of those." and poof! You've got your own car.
It sounds like a lovely idea, but I think anyone inventing this would be killed. The reason being that the implications for society are huge - and I don't think society could change quickly enough to cope.
Note Microsoft's choice of target. As a rule, it's companies that:
1. Have sufficiently deep pockets as to be worth pursuing.
2. Are unlikely to have patents that would impact any of Microsoft's products.
3. May not have the expertise to be able to examine the alleged patents and ultimately contest them.
(Interestingly, if you substitute "SCO" for "Microsoft" and broaden the discussion to cover any sort of intellectual property, you note that rules 2 and 3 above were ignored. Perhaps Microsoft took that as an object lesson.)
Or at least something very like it - vPro.
While IPMI is well-established on the server, so far no form of BIOS-level remote control seems to be doing particularly well on the desktop. It's damn difficult to find definitive statements from any major OEM concerning which lines support it, there's a plethora of versions with varying levels of sophistication, some of which require proprietary software in order to use.
That in itself isn't the end of the world, but even tracking down suitable proprietary software can be like pulling teeth!
Myself, I think that the majority of companies being targeted with this are the huge organisations with offices and staff everywhere - but they tackled the problem 10 years or more ago, they've got a whole stack of solutions and processes already in place and so something which doesn't really bring anything particularly useful to the table isn't all that interesting.
Sounds about right. For someone who's been using a Mac for a couple of years, it's like going back in time to the bad old days of Windows '9x. The platform promises the world and it all looks very pretty but when it comes to actually doing something useful, you spend just as long messing around as you do doing anything useful.
I bought an Android phone myself and it's the first phone I've ever seriously considered buying myself out of the contract of just to change it early. Partly my own fault for buying a cheap phone but even if we overlook that, the fact is that Android has not in any sense revolutionised the mobile phone industry. If anything it's made things worse because you've got Android itself (developed by a company that clearly believes in "release early, update often, the customer can always avail themselves of an update if they need to") being taken up by phone manufacturers (who take a "release once, update never, lock the thing down" approach to their products' firmware).
It's like a vast swathe of the smartphone customer base has been conned into paying to be beta testers without even a stable version at the end to look forward to.
Nah, definitely the end.
Seriously - let's forget we're all geeks/nerds/whatever for a minute. Let's imagine I'm a normal person who just wants the computer to do a job. What advantages to me would a system like Linux/BSD/Haiku offer?
To make it a little easier for you, I'll forewarn you of what the counter-arguments to the obvious arguments will be:
"You can run whatever you like, you're not limited to the app store" : Okay, but I don't find the app store all that limiting. I have access to all I could possibly want, and I know it's going to work safely. Last time I tried running some random application I downloaded from the Internet I had to pay someone like you to get my computer working again. Cost me almost as much as the computer was worth, as I remember.
"There's no forced obsolescence whereby you need to upgrade your PC in order to use newer versions, you can use your computer until it falls apart" : I can do that now. Sure, the time may come when the app store demands I buy a newer computer - but you know what? By that time my existing computer is going to be so clapped out that I'll be looking to replace it anyway.
"There's implicitly less privacy because the app store requires you to have an account on (SYSTEM)" : My employer already outsources payroll, which means that someone with precisely zero loyalty to me, someone I don't know from Adam already knows my tax details and how much I earned last year. Hell, they probably know enough about me to take out credit cards in my name - but the world keeps turning. I don't think it's a huge concern.
and can all run the same applications (with small exceptions)
My emphasis.
I imagine Google foresaw a future those small exceptions became large exceptions. Android is already rapidly showing signs of fragmenting into a disparate platform full of products that sort-of work, all of which have minor annoyances (but you can fix them with cyanogen! Provided you don't mind voiding the warranty on that phone you're stuck with for 18 months, working or otherwise!); I could easily see it becoming an absolute nightmare.
My needs are slightly different to yours (needed ADSL support, not prepared to have a two-box solution), but the conclusion I came to was that unless it ships (or has as an option from the manufacturer's own website) OpenWRT or a derivative thereof, you'll spend just as long fiddling with the router as you will actually using it. With the added bonus that unlike a standard PC, if something goes wrong then recovery can be fiddly at best and impossible at worst. I wound up opting for a Linksys router - they don't support F/OSS firmware any more, but I've always found the stock firmware to be perfectly stable.
The thing is, RIM had plenty of notice of these things happening. Microsoft were in the process of making EAS a viable alternative to BES a few years before the launch of the iPhone; it was only a matter of time before someone produced a half-decent phone that integrated with EAS and then RIM would have real competition on their hands.
I didn't understand this myself for ages, it's only in the last couple of years I've figured it out.
The selling point (not just with RIM but with any smartphone/sync combination) is a lot more than just email. There's a whole lot of little things which on their own sound utterly inconsequential - but in actual fact add up to enough that for many people they represent real value:
1. Push email. I know about the IMAP IDLE command. Few smartphones implements this; those that implement IMAP in any form frequently do such a ham-fisted job of it you wonder why they bother.
2. Calendar sync. What exactly do you carry around with you that can vibrate or make noises on schedule to remind you of an appointment and can keep your appointments in sync with a central server so others looking to schedule meetings can ensure they choose a convenient time? You and I have maybe a couple of meetings a week, usually at fixed times and they're often not terribly consequential. Missing one is fairly unlikely (because they're at fixed times) and usually of little consequence. The sales manager (whose job basically consists of "Go to meeting, talk about our product and try to sell it, lather rinse and repeat up to several times a day every day for months on end") doesn't have that luxury.
3. Contacts sync. You and I lose our contacts list on our phone, it's mildly annoying but we're probably organised enough to remember to sync it with out computer occasionally so we can always reload it. Worst case, we lose a handful of contacts - but we're probably not using the phone enough to care about a handful of ultimately inconsequential numbers. The people who are buying these phones: A. aren't that organised and B. depend so heavily on their contacts list that without it they are in serious trouble. Salesmen are again the most obvious example of this.
Arguments 2 and 3 also go some way to explaining the continued popularity of Outlook/Exchange. You care to explain to the sales director that as his laptop has been stolen, the information about upcoming meetings and his contact list has gone with it? Bearing in mind that as soon as you've left the room, that sales director is going to have a very difficult meeting with his manager. I guarantee you the second thing out of his mouth (straight after "Oh dear, it looks like the meetings at which I was hoping to secure £several million worth of sales are scuppered, because I can only remember details of one or two of them. We're going to look pretty bad when I don't even show up.") will be "This never happened at my last company where we had Exchange. If I lost a phone or laptop there, it would be replaced and the replacement would get all this information."
Only months?
I would say it was obvious from the moment Exchange 2003 SP2 (which introduced Exchange ActiveSync 2.5) was released that Microsoft were serious in driving out BES. Once companies started to license Exchange ActiveSync, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the need to go out and buy a separate system to manage smartphones was eliminated.
The thing is, Exchange 2k3 SP2 was released in 2005. ISTR that few people really took alternative smartphones seriously until the iPhone; a few people bought Windows Mobile devices but by and large these were a fairly dismal failure. The iPhone wasn't released until the middle of 2007, didn't gain ActiveSync support until iOS 2.0 in 2008 and didn't really take off until the 3G model was released, also in 2008.
Which means that RIM had three whole years to come up with some other idea. They didn't.
If I'm being honest, I don't think it is the training costs that are the issue. I think it's dependencies.
Let me explain.
Every company I've ever worked in, yes they depend on Office (but could probably get by with Libre/OpenOffice). But dig beneath the surface and you find:
Multiply that sort of thing across every function in the company, and work out how you'd move every damn department. Now you know why - even now, something like ten years after people first started talking about "the year of the Linux desktop", it still hasn't happened.
Maybe Ubuntu next.. Maybe even.. *shudder*.. a Mac.
The big UI changes that Microsoft are demonstrating saw their mass-market debut in OS X Lion, released a couple of months ago.
(Having said that, Lion doesn't thrust a Metro-like UI in your face from the moment you start it up. It's there, you can use it if you like. But you don't have to, and if you didn't you probably wouldn't know it was there.)
There's a whole range of hate speech which starts at "I hate him". It's rather stronger to add "...and I'm glad his daughter's dead", and then there's the matter of how such speech is delivered. You could start with mentioning quietly if the matter comes up in conversation, go through standing on a street corner with a loudhailer announcing the same feelings, posting the object of your hate letters informing them of this fact, posting those same opinions on the Internet and taking out an advert in the national press informing anyone who cares to read of this opinion. (For the purpose of this post, let us suppose you could actually find a national newspaper prepared to run such an advert).
Most countries draw a line somewhere and say "Right, that's it. Step over this line and it's a criminal offence" - even in the US you can get in trouble for sending hate mail. (IIRC there are laws about what you can send through the USPS that are used in such cases. You can hate someone all you like but you're not making the USPS a party to telling the world that!)
Can't say it convinces me myself, but you look at how so many people actually use their PC - only ever using one program at a time, maybe for hours on end - frankly, all the window-dressing of a task bar and window widgets does seem a bit wasted.
I do not get this obsession with trying to make computers work like phones. No, bad idea. When I heard of what they were doing with Lion I said "What a horrible idea." Now MS is doing the same? What the fuck?
Must confess I'm using Lion myself and I'm not particularly convinced. Fullscreen works well when the app designer has thought about how their application will function in fullscreen. (Safari is OK, NeoOffice in its infinite wisdom thinks that when I say fullscreen, I mean "so full I can't easily change any formatting without switching out of fullscreen mode"). There's a number of other glitches that I won't go into or we'll be here all evening.
In terms of MS doing the same, that's easily explained. The one thing that Microsoft have always excelled at is spotting a bandwagon - or something they think is a bandwagon - and jumping on it late. They've spent the better part of thirty years doing that (seriously, I promise you there's not a single product in Microsoft's entire range that doesn't somehow hark back to someone else's product. Hell, trace back Microsoft Paint to the Windows 3.x days and you have something that to a casual observer is damn-near identical to ZSoft Paintbrush).
Let me get this straight.
I only looked at the first link but the first thing that jumped out at me was:
The advent of Windows 8 sees Microsoft introduce a new style of application, dubbed Metro Style apps, and its own app Store. The Metro Style apps are run in full-screen mode, with no Windows taskbar or other menu items getting in the way.
"Every single pixel of your beautiful screen is for your app," said Harris. "You're just immersed in the content."
Ok, so there's two big things here. An App Store and a way to run applications in some sort of full-screen interface.
Hmm. I wonder where I've heard these ideas before.
I'm not sure what the rest of the medical device industry looks like, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was fairly similar. I know the markup on my glasses frames is pretty crazy.
Very few businesses are "guaranteed riches in a couple of years". I looked at the glasses thing myself - the frame markup is silly because that's pretty much the only source of income the optician has. Fitting out a shop, paying well-qualified people to look at your eyesight and buying all the equipment that goes with it is absurdly expensive and probably isn't paid for by the cost of your checkup. So you overprice the frames then let the customer think they're getting a bargain when you run a "2-for-1" offer (which is most of the time).