when I go out and forget my iPhone? Or want to leave a key hidden for the kids coming over before we get back? Or the painter?

Simple problems deserve simple solutions.

In the case in the original article, the man's family was quite able to pay the out of pocket costs. Some of the drugs were experimental, some of the combinations of drugs were also in trials. And the choices being made given the descriptions of the man's state at the time the decisions were made were seemingly rational and an end treatment decision was made.

I've been in the room when life ending/extending choices of treatment were made by a patient. Been in the room to hear the Cancer diagnosis too many times. My son is alive for having had a treatment that hadn't been tried often on someone his age...and now is a new data point for someone with the same diagnosis. And I'm a Cancer survivor. In my case, the treatments cost about $50k. Simpler cancer, not nearly as near term fatal a diagnosis. Personal costs were near zero. Thank goodness for great health insurance (I had been paying for more than I used for 40 years), good doctors who had been experimenting for 20 years to document the right doses and thanks to the many people who had been their patients who didn't make it in the early days when their cure rates were awful but whose treatment enabled them to ultimately learn how to treat successfully.

Read the whole article, not just the headline. It sounds more reasonable the more you read...until you get to the estimate that 31% of the health care costs are administrative. Ask you congressman what they are doing to reduce that layer of costs.

a lot more about what the hospital is using computers for, what custom or pre-packaged software they use, what hardware exists, what proportion of the users are Office users and to what level of expertise, are online patients records involved, etc.

It isn't just the OS...it is the whole cost of purchasing the software to run the hospital, the paths future upgrades in response to private and government demands will take, the enforcement of privacy protections, etc. All in the midst of a rapidly changing medical funding environment when everyone is making demands to change...in one direction or another.

When you have a total understanding of the implications of every line in the IT department's budget, who the stakeholders are and the politics of what software they use (doctor driven, insurance company driven, medicare driven etc) then you'll be in a position to discuss what OS they could use in business terms. Once you have compared your hospital's budget for IT against a similar sized and functions hospital using another solution and you present that comparison, I'd bet OS costs are a triviality compared to the other IT costs. What is the cost of eliminating the expertise of all the rest of the IT support staff in terms of patient care, doctor functioning, etc? People resist change..they are scared of it. Not sure they can measure up...no matter how smart they are.

When you make an argument on the basis of a better OS, you just show to the higher-ups you don't understand their real problems...you are just one of those techies.

Of course it is

consolidations are always a mess and ones full of job implications mean political interference (I want em in my district).

But you have to do something as the growth of government IT gets out of hand and we can only afford so much.

IIRC, the government consolidated all the payroll systems it had into about 4 pay centers back about 10 years ago. Went from maintaining hundreds to one s/w run 4 places for redundancy. Everybody screamed they needed theirs because it had unique features, they learned to do without or incorporated the features into the new s/w. Wasn't that fairly successful?

While all govt computing is a bit more complex now than a single application was then, still if we are to afford the things we really need, consolidation and standardization makes sense.

Now the contracting and execution...that will be a challenge. And so what if it takes 5 years, if we are going in the right direction and saving money in the long run. Because we can't sustain even the current government spending on what we are willing to vote as taxes.

Don't ever underestimate the difficulty of porting specialized applications

One Government agency I know of was informed with 5 years advance notice that their long time mainframe computer manufacturer would no longer be in the hardware business nor support the operating system. The Govt let a huge contract to port the applications. After several years, and millions spent in progress payments, that conversion attempt failed. So did several more. So after 10 years and about 4 attempts at conversions using some of the biggest software contract houses in the country they were still running on the original hardware and software and buying used equipment for backup. One of the few in the world.

It got done eventually I suppose.

Why, you ask, was it such a task to convert? Because they were attempting to replace something that had been custom built on top of and inside an operating system over perhaps 20 years. Distributed database and multiple geographic locations processing bits of the data using computers from multiple manufacturers communicating together long before the Internet (not that you could have put that kind of data on the net). So in order to convert, it took an understanding of how the whole thing worked and those that had that level of understanding had long since retired. It wasn't Cobol that was the problem but human limitations.

NASA has spread around the work to the maximum number of congressional districts to maximize their political support. But ask those same congressmen what they are willing to give up...ask them how important it is to balance the budget and even ...gasp..to begin paying off some debts..and they go quiet about what they want to give up...except to demand that the budget be balanced (but let someone else's district pay for it).

Obama puts a freeze on some agencies spending and already the constituencies are whining.

Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?

The way many companies roll out new upgrades is to replace the hardware and software and apps all at once. Say you are a 1k people company with offices scattered in 20 locations. What does a roll out of a totally tested and cookie cutter tested solution to all upgrades cost every 5 years versus the same upgrades performed every 6 months. In disruption, training, lost productivity, support costs, testing time, shipping, etc. And the pace of hardware improvements have slowed enough and the work has become network hosted enough that you don't have to chase every generation of hardware any more...except for a select few where speed translates into profits.

It is a business decision and all you have to do is look at hardware sales to see it is happening at a slower pace.

IT departments aren't there to chase the latest flavor of the day or the techies fondest desires...they are there to support the business of making money. And rollouts cost big bucks so they get budget line scrutiny at the highest level of the corporation. Now if the recent penetrations cause CEOs to ask how well their IP is protected..there could be some acceleration. But when CEOs are worried about this weeks layoffs..it is hard to get their attention on a revision of software that is working..but which might cost 5 more jobs.

the more it was a generational thing. Generations in terms of electronics and generations in terms of users/buyers.

In the 60s, we built our own stereos (Heathkit) and in the 80s the OS of the "home" computer was really more of a loader and the secrets were the functions of the peek/poke locations. The home computers were not much more than a circuit board. The processors and their instruction sets simple. The audience were more the hobbyists who came from the electronics world who were used to schematics and modifications.

Today's computers speak to a different audience. They bought their music players prepackaged. They wouldn't have any interest in a schematic and the appliances they use don't contain resistors and capacitors but ICs. My kids first computer was an Atari 800 and they never ever went to school without a word processor available. Me, I typed my term papers on an electric typewriter if I was lucky.

I used to work with OS writers and their backgrounds and intelligence were far different from the average. Boy were they different and I could relate to them only because I came from a low level background even if I didn't code in their language. But the rest of the people in the corporation didn't relate and the rest of the folks constitute a different and far larger audience.

in machine language...

Few people want to play at that level any more and few need to. Most want to create really cool apps and for them access to the GUI is enough. Heck, C isn't taught in many schools any more.

But if a kid wants to play at low level, there are $25 or less offers on the web for the computers of yore. Or they can start reading code..it isn't like lots isn't available. And even for most OSS, the docs are so much more than the manufacturers manuals were in the 60s.

after you left the company. I received the approval for one about 3 weeks after I left the company who really owned the rights to the patent. I was just one of the "named inventors" even though I had a mostly administrative and management role in its creation. I had been working for the company to secure that patent with appropriate lawyers for 2+ years.

Microsoft releases Alfas and Betas to many different communities of testers

And those releases have multiple cycles and run a long time so there is ample opportunity for developers of dependent s/w and web pages to test against the coming release and provide feedback to Microsoft. How many builds of W95 did I load...including one from floppies that took 20+ hours of feeding floppies before the first boot.

I wonder if Microsoft might just have as many in-house testers using the daily builds of IE as there are total testers for FF, Opera, Safari etc al. They are after all, one humongously huge company. And not everyone grabs the nightly build of the latest OS or browser even from developers who provide it.

In my old place of employment, we had nightly builds and the developers actually were developing on the OS for which they had submitted updates the day before. So if there was a major bug, they felt/found it first. But the release cycle was more like yearly because that is the way the customers wanted it. They were betting important things on the stability of the s/w. They certainly didn't want anything but a long release cycle in which they were heavily involved. It wasn't released until major customers signed off that it didn't break their apps. Daily builds would have distracted them from their mission...luring them into daily regression testing and taking resources from supporting their existing app release and developing for the next release.

Different goals for corporations/agencies. And so different development, customer exposure for comment and release cycles are appropriate.

I had used XP for years and was quite happy.

My wife needed a new PC and it came with Vista. Never had I seen Vista. No manuals. So out of the box it was fully functional in 30 minutes with no confusion and all for Dell's cheapest mail order $400. Now it is a year later ... no crashes or other issues, she doesn't even know what OS is on the machine, she just uses it.

When I needed a new machine, I bought a no-name eMachines from Costco on a whim. Came with Vista and had a trivial experience setting it up and using it. I'd say its actively used 12 hours a day over the last 6 months and I don't recall a crash despite more than a half dozen external peripherals via USB. For $379. I do use a UPS on both machines and they do have 2-3GB of memory but no high end graphics or high speed CPU..both low speed dual processors.

As one whose OS experiences go back 40 years and who did a load of an alfa from floppies of W95 that took over 24 hours, I know OS horror stories. To me...Vista isn't one of them. I've had and have zero issues with it.

IMHO, YMMV

But why should the average user have to worry about tickless
after all other OSs figure out your hardware and install the right options. A distribution could worry about the user experience and take care of this automatically or, at worst, ask you if you are installing on a battery powered system.

There is utility in having one entity responsible for the ease of installation and not punting it to the varying knowledge/skill levels of the user.

If Microsoft and Apple can do it....

One: they appear to have evaluated/proven their own work, always a dangerous thing.

Two: they claim to exceed Common Criteria requirements but don't claim Common Criteria evaluation successfully completed which would require a third party evaluation of their methodologies, designs and code against a Protection Profile. This a is a wonderfully complex process usually involving the developer organization, the evaluators and a national standards body empowered to oversee the effort, make their own tests and ultimately grant formal Common Criteria evaluation. In an effort I participated in, it took at least a dozen documents, millions of dollars and dozens of months to get a robust OS through an evaluation. This was done by a very talented group that had more than a dozen years experience providing evaluated products and getting them approved. And such evaluations are country specific as the spook agencies in each country want to have their own look and say.

Three: what is left out of this OS is what makes an OS usable in the real world to do real things that people want to do...like work over a network or work with files.