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Please be clear on that fact that if L3 cuts their peering point with Cogent it does not stop anyone on either network from reaching the other as the article suggests. Peering simply gives each providers clients shortcuts to the others IP space. All tier one providers have multiple peering points because the whole point of routing a packet that is not destined for your network is to get that packet to the edge and off your network.

To try for some clarity, just as an example: L3 peers with Cogent, XO, and 4 other providers. Cogent peers with L3, Internap, and 6 other providers. So, if L3 turns off their peering to Cogent, packets that originate from Cogent that are destined for the L3 IP space will have to transit another common peer before they get to L3's network.

For an interesting look at how peering works in the real world take a look at http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition /0,,sid7_gci212768,00.html

So an OSS solution for this type of software doesn't have the familiar advantage of cost due to it being free (as in beer). But this doesn't mean that this mail server software doesn't have a significantly smaller TCO. And the AJAX interface is a nice touch. But things like how well the software can handle disk failures, how easy it is to do backups, how easy it is to handle 1 million mailboxes, etc. are the factors that make mail server software succeed or fail.

Note: Exchange doesn't do any of these things well.

Very well... Here's one

google is your friend

That's how it looks when someone knows how to answer questions. If you go back and look at those questions again you will see some real barbs. Allow me to point out some of the more dangerous ones:

For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?

This question came 2/3rds down the article when Linux was mentioned for the first time outside of the site name. The reporter is asking him to justify his product's and free software's existence. That a big question you can lose in daily details. His answer, "Linux is a first step toward organizational independence from single-vendor IT sources," is just what people want to hear.

Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?

This is a follow up to another question that together are tricky. The first question asked him, "What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3 ..." John avoided the trap by not answering the first question litterally with one or two things and then rejecting the notion Samba is a "niche" product useful only to a few dozen small shops.

Those kinds of questions are classic. His answers are simply up to task. If you don't appreciate it, just let someone like Jan grill you one day. From a distance, behind good cover like John, the words look like honey. When they are in your face and you are trying to get other things done, they can look very hard. She's has been around longer than Linux and knows how to get a story. Bad answers to any of these questions would look bad but good answers are equally good.

This should read...

Mark Brunelli, News Editor of searchEnterpriseLinux.com wrote to mention a SearchEnterpriseLinux column about reducing the negative impact laptops can have on a network's security. From the article: "Portable computers often become an extension of the person using them. It is no surprise that laptop users are inclined to be rather autonomously minded. Many users don't realize that the power they have to install software and change set

I don't mind plugging articles for your own site, but at least practice full disclosure.
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/meetEd itorial/0,289131,sid39,00.html

The TPF Mail server (runs on IBM Mainframes) claims to be designed to support 250 Million mailboxes:

http://search390.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid10 _gci802989,00.html

Typical TPF availability is above 99.99%

I'm sure someone, somewhere within the enterprise is using features of Exchange that they won't get anywhere else. ...and if that someone, somewhere is willing to cough up the annual TCO difference between Exchange and exim et al then you might have a good point. Before you sigh up to be that guy, realize that the difference could be on the order of $100's of millions of dollars.

Houston, we've got a vector. Good thing it's just a concept car.

Here's a link that discusses the measurements done on CAT cables:

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i1059969,00.html

In general you can think of the DARPA layers as completely pragmatic and somewhat modular. You can swap in different network modules, so long as it provides a packet based network to the internetwork layer. You can swap IPv4 with IPv6 (or even IPX. yuck) without breaking TCP and UDP (you may however break plenty of applications that run on them and make incorrect assumptions). Transport is also a block that can be replaced with compatible substitutes, but since there is very little use of anything but TCP or UDP, it's not terribly likely to happen.

With OSI/ISO on the other hand, physical and data link are heavily linked. If you want to replace the physical layer with a modem instead of ethernet, you also need to change the data link from CSMA/CD + Ethernet II framing to V.22bis (or hopefully better) + PPP. The Data Link layer is also over-populated because you almost always need more than one protocol in there (for example, with ethernet, you need both CSMA/CD signalling and Ethernet II framing to make it work). You often need to have two or more protocols in that layer in order to make it fit. On the other hand, the Session and Presentation layers are often completely unused by many protocols (like Telnet, etc), and perhaps shouldn't even exist since they're largely redundant.

The OSI protocols were highly overengineered, somewhat terrifying. A few bits of the OSI protocols still exist in internet protocols. ASN.1 is probably the most notable, since it's used in SNMP, LDAP and most anything that uses certificates with public key encryption. It's fared much better than the X.400 standard which spawned it.

I teach game development and do alot of 3D modelling. Alot of what you say above is false out of the box.

The state of 3D on Linux is far from sucking. Proprietary Nvidia drivers on Linux cannot be beaten, out-doing their Win32 counterparts alot of the time, even where frame rate (Q3a, Doom3, UT2004, AA) is concerned. Nvidia on Linux is an industry standard 3D animation platform in the feature film industry, for good reason. When teaching game development, if my students are sitting at machines running Nvidia binary drivers on a Linux OS, I'm having a very good day. Naturally, I'd love it if an open alternative could compete - you seem only aware of the open-source drivers, which are essentially blind to the rich talents of the Nvidia GPU. ATI's fglrx drivers are now (finally) on par with Win32 where pixel/vertex shaders (GLSL ) are concerned and close to a performance equal generally. The installation process is slightly more annoying, that is all. Many non-free distro's handle this for the user automagically (Mepis Linux comes to mind)

Secondly, binary compatibility is no more troublesome these days than it is between versions of Windows, eg running a game made for Win95 on XP - occassionally an issue. Installation of binaries can be done easily using a system like Autopackage if one doesn't want to find and or become an *.rpm/*.deb package maintainer.

Where devices are concerned, the trouble you speak of is many years in the past - udev works in userspace, and uses hotplug calls that the kernel signals whenever a device is added or removed from the kernel. Permissions, naming and control is all done in userspace.

Finally where sales of Linux games are concerned, I tend to agree that it is perhaps a little harder to market to Linux users, though from experience I am the first to buy a game that comes out for Linux. You will find though that due to existance of compatibility layers like Wine, publishers simply don't know how many Linux users are buying their games. I can account for around 14 windows games I've bought with the pure intention of playing them on Linux (for instance). Linux desktop market share is widely considered to be above or equal to that of the Apple OS. Whatever kind of market it is, it's growing.

Lastly, for the grandfather, Ryan, of Icculus is your best bet for a Linux port.

PS. Game development, as a culture, needs free software if a) small to medium sized developers are to survive and b) if micro-markets (like that of the indie-film industry) are to burgeon. Tools are increasingly expensive and publishers offset this cost with IP tradeoffs (buy outs). If I were you I'd ship the engine as free software (binary checksum for login, cheat protection and validation) and sell the data and/or subscription time. More on why here.

Given that this incident was bound to make ISS and Cisco look pretty bad in the eyes of many of the people who buy and use their products and services, who do you think applied the REAL pressure to impose gag orders?

Suppose you are an intelligence agency charged with monitoring a wide range of network communications and you have learned various way to defeat network security, including the exploitation of a variety of holes that are not yet publicly known. Now you have a vested interested in the holes remaining "unknown." Yes, you must balance this with the risks such holes may pose to the critical infrastructure, but hey, most terrorists want the network infrastructure to stay in place (to communicate, make/move money, teach bomb-making, spread propaganda, etc). That's one reason they blow up buses not POPs. So then the three letter agencies have to balance a "more secure Internet" against "a harder to infiltrate Internet."

With that in mind, read Shawna McAlearney's piece on SearchSecurity.com. This Lynn speaking: "Right after my talk, a big guy comes up to me, pulls out a badge and says, 'We need to talk...now,'" said Lynn. "He pulls me into a maintenance hallway with a bunch of other law enforcement guys and asks where the van is. I start to freak and he says, 'Just kidding, man, you rock. Thanks for letting us know what's going on.'"
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalConte nt/0,289142,sid14_gci1111824,00.html?track=NL-105& ad=524802

Andon Anon

You've probably fallen foul of the fact Dell seems to use the same CD key for all of its restore CDs. Which, incidentally is published all over the net! Those blue Dell OEM XP stickers only work with Dell's XP CDs (so don't loose your Dell CD!).

You can get instructions on how to change the key here:

How to change the Windows XP Product Activation Key Code

I hope this helps.

"A good interface," says Shumin Zhai, a member of the user systems ergonomic research (USER) group at Almaden, "is one that's transparent. That means it is so good you don't notice it, allowing you to fully concentrate on the task at hand.

Transparent computing is a characteristic of pervasive computing, the possible future state in which we will be surrounded by computers everywhere in the environment that respond to our needs without our conscious use.

It doesn't matter. Microsoft already indemnifies customers against IP lawsuits. The did this to make Linux look bad.

However, it might not actually be worth anything.

Swoosh.

Since it isn't possible for one article to explain how to configure identification, authentication, and authorization for all systems, the article contained links to more information.

That's because you often have to learn about things in order to do them. With flexibility comes a price, and that price is work. Luckily, they pay you for that, if you do it well enough.

Or maybe he should have published a GUI along with the article? Sorry for being flippant, but I think you're expecting too much hand-holding.

Swoosh.

Since it isn't possible for one article to explain how to configure identification, authentication, and authorization for all systems, the article contained links to more information.

That's because you often have to learn about things in order to do them. With flexibility comes a price, and that price is work. Luckily, they pay you for that, if you do it well enough.

Or maybe he should have published a GUI along with the article? Sorry for being flippant, but I think you're expecting too much hand-holding.

Stop moving those goal posts around. Your original claim was that Windows was not "designed with IP in mind" based on the rather shaky assertion that all IP-related configuration was "complex". This has since devolved to basing your far-reaching criticism solely on the UI for setting up IP printers (a relatively uncommon task, even in networked environments).

I hope you realise how silly this line of reasoning is. It's like saying "Linux wasn't built with SCSI in mind" because fdisk is hard to use.

In any event, my comment on the OSI model was because you are trying to compare something at the network layer (IP) with something at the session layer (NetBIOS). NetBIOS runs *on top of IP* (or NetBEUI, or IPX, or probably anything else you want it to).

These links may be of assistance.

Windows BY DEFAULT prefers to use NetBIOS to IP.

Assuming you _really_ mean the old, unroutable NetBEUI protocol (that operates at the same level as IP), and not NetBIOS, it hasn't since Windows 98 (and even then, I seem to recall Windows 98 defaults to NetBIOS over IP - but it's been a long time since I've installed Windows 98).

NT variants of Windows have preferred NetBIOS over IP (as opposed to NetBIOS over NetBEUI, which is what I think you're talking about) since at _least_ NT4 (probably even earlier, but it's been a very long time since I've installed earlier versions of NT).

However, all this is irrelevant - Windows is no less (or more) "designed to use IP" than OS X is "designed to use Firewire". IP is simply a minor implementation detail of getting network data from machine A to machine B, just like Firewire is a minor implementation detail of how to connect a hard disk to a computer.

The ad-hoc filesharing which was mentioned earlier in the thread (right click, share this folder): what is that based on?

SMB (or CIFS, depending on what you want to call it). Again, complete independent of the network layer - it can run over IP, NetBEUI, IPX/SPX, etc (just like AFP on MacOS).

However, consider the paradigm: in Unix, EVERYTHING is manually editing obscure text files.

Ah, but some are more obscure than others. By your reasoning, some Linux distributions aren't "designed with IP in mind" and others are, despite being the same OS, merely because they happen to have a more complex UI for IP configuration.

Would you say that windows 95 was "built with IP in mind," or was IP "grafted on"?
Ditto for NT.

I would say it's completely and utterly irrelevant. Both of them were built to be network OSes. It's like asserting an OS was "built with SCSI in mind" or "built with AGP in mind" or "built with SDRAM in mind" whereas others had it "grafted on".

Again, I repeat my claim that IP on windows is in the Mac OS 8 realm: it works, but it's clunky, and it was treated as an afterthought when the OS was written.

And I repeat that basing your criticisms of low-level OS design on one example of clunky *user interface* is idiotic.

SANS Internet Storm Center reported this issue more than a fortnight ago.

...You can expect them to be probing/asking if your tapes are encrypted.

Most backup systems don't have built in encryption, but you can work around it
It's pretty easy for windows when using something like backup exec 9.x +. In my situation, I backup a .bks file to a encrypted folder (Windows EFS where the .bks file takes on the encryption attribute) then duplicate it to tape.

Ntbackup supports encrypted files, but I'm not sure if it has a good duplicate feature or not :-/ ...Kinda important if you can't cipher your whole drive.

Of course you'd best be on the up and up with how EFS and certificates work and of course have a bullet proof PKI - or your kinda hosed during a bare metal recovery. I guess it does "add complexity to restores" but only those formentioned cases
it's a well documented subject

So in theory writing low level code is possible. How effecient is the resulting code is another issue.

July 2004
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/origin alContent/0,289142,sid39_gci992096,00.html

October 2004
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5409773.html?ta g=nl

Sure, OpenOffice is great, but commercial enterprises will stick with commercial solutions for which there is support.

I don't exactly get what you mean by support. My impression from the people and businesses I know personally is that Microsoft Office format is a big success not because of "support", but because there's a wealth of products built around it by third parties.
These 3rd-party products are crucial for the enterprise, stuff like Eletronic Content Management, being able to create document workflow and revision systems, and groupware. All this stuff integrates seamlessly with the Windows desktop and the Windows office applications. In any enterprise with a huge amount of paper and workflow, document management systems are a necessity. This is point OpenOffice proponents frequently forget: office applications are not about just the single desktop user but they are also about integrating seamlessly in an eco-system of content management software provided by theird-parties and accessing legacy documents. For instance, in my country, Brazil, legislation demmands that certain financial documents be stored for a period that outruns any document format you might have seen. This means people have to migrate very old sofware document records.
This is an area ISV working on open-source platforms could explore, an unexplored niche market. AFAIK, not even COLD solutions exists and COLD goes way back decades (ever since computers started processing bills.) And there are no equivalents of proprietary software in the open-source market (this shows you that open source developers are sometimes out of touch with their would-be customer base). People are developing groupware, but there are no ECM (Enterprise Content Management) solutions. Groupware, ERM, and ECM are the bulk of enterprise software.
If only the open-source community would take something like OpenOffice, or further develop AbiWord (which has nice plug-in functionalities), and integrate these with Mono, you would have made a serious dent in the Windows dominance. I mean, who wouldn't want to avoid expensive per-seat Microsoft licenses, plus per-seat ECM licenses? And software houses that provide ECM solution (e.g., the market leader OnBase) work with year-round support and customization, and we know this is a way of doing business that is viable for open-source (of course, they have per-seat licenses).
BTW, I really mean Mono, and not Java. Java is not an alternative on the long term, not only because of the Java's proprietary nature, but because Mono is gearing itself towards Windows-*Nix interoperability, to the point where software build with Windows.Forms will work on Mono. Additionally, having to depend on Sun's finances is a a suicidal investment of resources.
But open-source has major hurdles: it nees to standardize on OpenGroup and LSB That is to say, the Free Standards Group has to advanced by libre *Nix distros and vendors, so that software developers have an easier time with all the distros. De Icaza wrote something about this in this essay. Linux distros need to be reliable in terms of time frame for releases (which the commercial ones are), too.
My feeling is that Microsoft has foreseen a trend going against its closed-source format (OASIS, the Massachusetts imbroglio) and anticipated any possible open-source incursion in the field of content management. If these formats are truly opened, they've raised the bar for the arguments of any future switching to FOSS platforms+OO.org solutions (because, right now, as I've argued, there are no FOSS replacements for content management for the enterprise AFAIK, and there's a huge amo

I think that any case where a network driver will contain a flaw exploitable by stuff sent over the network will be quite rare.

Are you sure?

mvps.org has a lot of the registry hacks needed to make security policy changes. So does windows registry guide, labmice, elder geek, and technet.

Good books to get are the XP Registry Guide and xp hacks. But the easiest thing to do is to run a copy of XP Pro.

XP Pro needs a paired down version of Windows 2003 Server "Security Configuration Wizard (SCW)"

Maybe this is a dumb question, but if the surface gets scratched, wouldn't it prevent all layers from being read correctly? ... an offset on the layers... some kind of raid structure ... if each layer is offset by 180 degrees, the scratch wouldn't harm both copies, but ... sacrificing performance ... to scan the disc, decide if the data was readable, if not find the other copy, and the use that... Also, writing your data would take twice as long.

Some people still make them. A company called Rackable is pretty big into it. I wrote an article on it last week.

If you RTFA on the 'Xen' kernel, you'd see what's news. The Xen kernel supports some Nifty Virtual Machine Stuff which you won't find in a standard kernel

"Since 1972, VM has been providing the capabilities to "virtualize" the complete S/370, S/390, and zSeries architecture allowing a single physical processor to run multiple guest operating system [sic] simultaneously with each guest thinking it has complete control of the system. Historically, MVS and VSE the operating systems most likely to be run as VM guests, but now with the increasing role of Linux in the data center, it is becoming a popular VM guest system as well."

A thousand ergs here or there didn't seem like much, so I googled for a definition, and one erg is almost literally one fleapower:

It has been suggested that 1 erg is approximately the amount of energy required for a mosquito to take off. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_g ci789813,00.html)

Quoting parent's quote of the linked page:

To get an idea of how much energy 1053 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 1033 ergs each second.

Well that's what, about a two percent increase over the Sun's output? Wait a second, The Sun only puts out a thousand fleapower???

Quoting the actual linked-to webpage http://swift.sonoma.edu/about_swift/grbs.html:

To get an idea of how much energy 10^53 ergs really is, our Sun puts out about 10^33 ergs each second.

OH! That's Ten to the power of 33, not a thousand and thirty three for the Sun's output. And the GRB puts out Ten to the 53rd power ergs, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as much as the Sun, for its few seconds of glory.

Oh well, no big deal, what's twenty orders of magnitude between friends?

Intel: Microsoft dropping IA64/Itanium support in WinXP/Win2003/Clusters etc.
HP: Microsoft attempted to use OEM licensing agreement to use for free HPs intellectual property.
Cisco : Microsoft's planned Network Access Protection (NAP) technology.
AMD : At first Microsoft made a big deal about XBox2 having an AMD CPU, now using 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC.
AT+T : Going back in the past a bit, but Microsoft orignally attempted to sell Xenix as a pure clone without paying fees to AT+T for the use of the orignal Unix code. Microsoft had to back down.

Well, here is one report stating that:

> OpenOffice.org, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market...

Though it also states that MS Office share is still 95% when you count all users, including home users.

See Desktop apps ripe turf for open source

I think that having 14% of the large business market is a pretty good indication that OpenOffice is grabbing marketshare away from MS Office, contrary to the claims in the original post. It's also a good indicator of where the market is going in the future, since what is used at work often determines what is used at home.

As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft has such a strangle-hold over the most common document formats that this attempt will be largely useless unless they come on board.

Which they, most obviously, won't.

However, I applaud this group for at least trying.

Well, "this group" has Microsoft as a sponsor organization.

Actually, they're quite a bit involved in OASIS and standardization.

Whenever a hacker (or cracker, distinction here http://searchwindowssecurity.techtarget.com/tip/1, 289483,sid45_gci998037,00.html.) breaks into corporate networks, he's a CRIMINAL, and his purpose is evil. Even if he does not do anything that damages productivity, purported "loss of funds" can get him imprisoned.

Contrarily, when a corporation with no morals or respect for users releases a spyware program for research/marketing with illegal methods, Advertisement, Data mining, etc., no one tends to lift a finger. I salute Spitzer, and hope that this sets some sort of precedent to protect consumers and businesses from these sorts of programs that waste productivity and generally piss people off.

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

if i'm not mistaken, OC-48 is 2.488 Gbps according to http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition /0,,sid7_gci212685,00.html

Before the end of 2005, Sun will very largely _not_ be a proprietary software vendor. OpenSolaris in Q2, OpenOffice.org is already here, and they're already dropping hints about an OSS database and open sourcing their entire JES stack.

Not proprietary, eh? So RedHat or Novell or Debian will be able to use Sun's Open Solaris code in thier distros? Sure. Sun is not being collaborative with Linux at all - they want it dead so they can own the *nix industry again.

People try so very hard to paint Sun in an evil light, but it just doesn't work.

Evil, no - just a company that was once great hanging on to it's huberis and trying to put the OSS genie back in the bottle. Two links relevant to this discussion are here and here. Both demonstrate that Sun is not tryng to be Open in the sense of collaboration with it's peers - which normally benefits customers - it's trying to be Open in the sense of being buzzword compliant and owning of a market segment. IMHO, this won't happen.

Also, IMHO, the two biggest impediments to thier success in the new IT market are Schwartz and McNeally. Egos that big carry too much baggage.

Soko

I have a block for caller ID on my home phone. I know that when I call a 1-800 number though, they still are easily able to discern what my true phone number is. My understanding is that this is by using Automatic Number Identification - ANI. Does Western Union not use this or do VoIP phones allow you to fake this as well as standard caller ID? If the latter, then I think we have bigger problems than Western Union. Most 911 systems use ANI also. Imagine if knuckleheads could make anonymous calls to 911.

OK first off what is an Ethernet cable? You can not buy one at a store. You can buy a CAT5, CAT5E, CAT6...cable at nay computer store.
Second twisted pair UTP)is not shielded. http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition /0,,sid7_gci213234,00.html/

Dear Troll,

Are you refering to the money that DARPA un-donated to OpenBSD? If so, kindly provide some information to back your claims.

Great idea! We can dedicate chips to graphics coprocessing, sound tasks, network relating things, input/output. I hope they build this soon!

Now you could argue that a car review in Car and Driver doesn't bother explaining what a transmission does but RAID is several orders for magnitude more complex and esoteric.

There are so many different flavors of RAID it can be hard to keep them straight if you're not working with them every day.

Anyway there are good explanations of RAID here and here.

"comes online"? it's a port that is listening.
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i212964,00.html

1) In information technology, a server is a computer program that provides services to other computer programs (and their users) in the same or other computers.

the linksys voip router, is darn sure providing 'services' to other computer programs and their users...

it's not like I sent out a request for a web page, it's sitting there, waiting for something (vonage for example) to make a request of it...

Drat, I used the UBB markup tags. Edit:

I thought it was Community Area TV. It was some odd name. Here's one definition I found:

ATV (originally "community antenna television," now often "community access television") is more commonly known as "cable TV."

Source

I'm an editor on Whatis.com. Our mandate has always been to provide readers with the best information we could find, whether it comes from one of our sister sites or a competitor. Naively, we assumed that competitors would appreciate being linked to, as we do. In the past couple of years, a number of the larger online media organizations have ordered us to stop linking to their content, I suppose on the premise that without their deathless prose we would shrivel up and blow away. Hasn't happened yet ;-)

Keep fighting the good fight!

The LoC is normally quoted at 10tb.

Does this mean you can get bluesnarfed at higher speeds and longer range?

Last I checked it already was.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5227102.html/
http://linuxgazette.net/107/pramode.html/
http://kerneltrap.org/node/3240?PHPSESSID=262a094f ee677def32a8cc4d1b858f99/
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/origin alContent/0,289142,sid39_gci969248,00.html/

Just to name a few

IT Doesn't Matter
Article Text

Here's another Debian-related example: http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/origin alContent/0,289142,sid39_gci938279,00.html

The origial ./ article mentions that the extensible system would have special modules to manage the display/compilation of source code. Like ActiveX controls, this will make the compiler extensible, but fragile.

My point was: what if, instead of infecting your machine directly, the attack hidden in the source would generate unexpected viral or backdoor code. Upon review the source code would look ok. But during compilation the attack (e.g. a buffer overflow connected to some meta-information) would lead to the generation of different code - which will then be embedded in the produced executable.

The first example above uses a syntax detail of the standard C language. But with an extensible compiler, opportunities to sneak unexpected behavior into the generated code may proliferate...

Killer APP Reading your reply about the games developers made me go hmmm... If software developers put out a "killer app" and/or great games, that run in an open source environment, then by definition you "...buy the system the application runs on", else it is not a killer app.