Knight Bill | The Coffeehouse

jamie

Bill Gates to Receive Honorary UK Knighthood

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050301/us_nm/people_gates_dc

We are The Knights Who Say Ni!

...and in Redmond Forest..

NeoTOM
OMG WTF REDESIGN

So, will he be allowed to be known as Sir Bill Gates?

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!


No!!!!!	Bill, I am your father.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

NeoTOM wrote:
So, will he be allowed to be known as Sir Bill Gates?

RTFA, only Commonwealth and British citizens can call themselves "Sir".

NeoTOM
OMG WTF REDESIGN

W3bbo wrote:

NeoTOM wrote: So, will he be allowed to be known as Sir Bill Gates?

RTFA, only Commonwealth and British citizens can call themselves "Sir".

I did, but I had trouble understanding it.

lars

Don't forget to bring sugar cubes!!

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

He can call himself Bill Gates, KBE
(IIRC)

rjdohnert
You will never know success until you know failure

T think this is kind of funny, especially when that guy from the british government said that Microsoft had a profound effect on their economy.

|sarcasm|
yep, strong arm their competitors, put a stranglehold on the industry and spit on the little guy thus driving up the unemployment lines.

Sounds like the knights of old, yep Bill Should fit right in.
|/sarcasm|

Rossj

rjdohnert wrote:
T think this is kind of funny, especially when that guy from the british government said that Microsoft had a profound effect on their economy.

|sarcasm|
yep, strong arm their competitors, put a stranglehold on the industry and spit on the little guy thus driving up the unemployment lines.

Sounds like the knights of old, yep Bill Should fit right in.
|/sarcasm|

We recently had this big report that was generated that suggested that the NHS (free healthcare for everyone) look into the use of Open Source Software and less than a week later the contract was given to Microsoft. If that isn't a political (non-business) decision I don't know what is.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Rossj wrote:
We recently had this big report that was generated that suggested that the NHS (free healthcare for everyone) look into the use of Open Source Software and less than a week later the contract was given to Microsoft. If that isn't a political (non-business) decision I don't know what is.

A week is nothing for large government contract. If Microsoft got the contract, it means they've been working on it for months. In fact, I know a Microsoft ISV was working on their RFP for a major health-industry proposal in the UK (it might be the NHS, though I'm not sure) over a year ago.

Organizations like the NHS do not "look into" a technology - they write reams of paper with very specific demands for a solution vendor to respond to. The NHS will not "look into" open source software by itself, but rather contract a vendor that will use OSS software. This will allow the vendor to drop the cost of software licenses from its proposal and allow it charge only for its development time, deployment and ongoing support - using open source software does NOT make a software solution free, or even cheap - it just removes one element from the bottom line.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

The NHS is a massive organisation. 3 years ago the government promised to spend £27 billion over 5 years on it. So, it has more than a handful of vendors looking after very specific parts.

Because the NHS is not a centralised organisation even if it sometimes pretends to be. For example two different parts of the country can be using different software from different vendors to do to do the same thing.

Remember that allot of the NHS is really old, pre-windows and therefore allot of there systems are still Unix, VAX or mainframe based. Linux would seem to be a natural progression of this software.

So one part of the NHS could be looking at Linux, while another part is happily running Windows. Will they ever centralise on the one platform. I very much doubt it, the humble British tax payer will have to come up with even more cash then.

Remember A good precentage of your income tax goes to pay for it.

**************************************************

Back to topic, Nice one Bill!

This also means that Bill can become a British Citizen.

We recently voted for our new ten commandments, which was a very interesting idea.

The top three were,

1. Treat others as you would like to be treated
2. Do not Kill.
3. Do not Steal.

This for me sums up British society right now. I'm actually liking living here again and I'm beginning to feel good about being British again. (I did spend many years abroad trying to forget I was British)

I do admit we still have many large and important issues, but I believe our legendary tolerance is back again and many of our towns and cities now have a very cosmopolitan feel. For example, the food in London is now Outstanding! Speaking of London, because of 'the charge' traffic has dropped by 27%!

We are again moving in a positive direction as long as our leaders don't decided to go and start anymore pointless wars. Anyway, it's election year.