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Microsoft Asks Fed For Bailout
snydeq writes "Microsoft requested on Tuesday some $20 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, claiming that as the company controls an overwhelming share of the OS market, it is too big to fail. Low adoption rates for Vista, the ensuing ad campaign trying to convince people that they really do like Vista, and the increased need for development resources to rush Windows 7 to market to make people forget about Vista have necessitated the bailout, the company said. 'We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement,' said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. 'This is simply a crisis of dollars — a crisis of not having enough dollars coming our way.'"
As a linux user for a long time now, I've pretty much been impartial to their actions, although I've disagreed with a lot of them.
But, don't they have 60 billion $ in the bank? You know what MS? I hope you fall off a fuckin cliff.
Seriously, enough of this shit already.
Kamakura, Japan (AP) While the technology press has produced a spate of recent stories about the disappointing adoption rates of the next generation of protocols to run the Internet, the administrators of that standard (dubbed IPv6), the little-known Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, are privately wrestling with an even more embarrassing problem:
IPv6 may already be running out of address space.
That may seem hard to believe, given that businesses and consumers in the West have seen little need to give up the tried-and-true current generation of 'Net protocols (IPv4 in geek-speak). "Ask me [about IPv6] again in two years", scoffed Web entrepreneur Tim Bray, a typical refrain heard over the 12-plus years of IPv6's existence.
However, the Net's new "plumbing" has been received with open arms in the Far East. Manufacturers, web entrepreneurs, and service providers have snapped up huge blocks of IPv6 addresses, much to the amazement of IANA officials, who were once confident that the new, expanded address space would be sufficient for hundreds of years. The frenzied demand has reached the point where nervous IANA administrators have begun demanding business justification for new requests.
"Japan and South Korea are the worst", explains the IANA's Howard Hunter. "They want a separate address for each individual item that rolls off their assembly line. In fact, Nihatsu [a conglomerate that also makes prepackaged noodles and electronic plush toys] wanted to dole out 20,000 IP addresses for each unit of their new urban assault vehicle. I didn't even know there were 20,000 parts in that truck."
An IANA official who requested anonymity said that the IPv6 address space could be exhausted within 60 years at the current rate. That might not seem alarming, but what worries official is that widespread adoption of the standard by the West has scarcely begun; when that happens, demand for addresses will surely accelerate.
Some pundits weren't sympathetic to the IANA's plight. "Boy, what a screwup", said technology analyst John Dvorak. "That's the first thing I thought of when I read the standard ten years ago. They didn't plan ahead."
Meanwhile, members of the IANA's sister engineering organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force, have begun circulating competing proposals for mitigating the address space problem, among them GNAT (Ginormous Network Address Translation).
-1 Foreign
Let me just say FUCK YOU SLASHDOT! Every year you pull this shit and it's never funny. Last actual funny thing you did on this stupid fucktard of a day was the pig latin.
Once again, FUCK YOU! Try actually being professional next year, kthxbye.
"Publicly accessible" is the spin. It's connecting one MS parking lot to another MS parking lot. It's not like it's connecting two public streets.
It's not like the MS drones are going to walk anyway, they'll still use the free MS shuttles they have driving all over the city.
No, I need nothing. I have my eyes, and my memory. Nothing more is required to develop a distaste for Microsoft's business practices. You can disagree, of course, but you shouldn't stoop to trolling. Xanax indeed.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Where have you been for the last ten years that you haven't noticed the US trying to foist its vision of IP law off on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world struggling valiantly to tell the mafia goon "no thanks"? In order to distribute that stuff under profitable terms you have to have western IP law which isn't working out well for financial stability in the west. Anyway, that idea was already proven to be unworkable, which is why the Gates Foundation won't provide vaccinations to your country for free unless you provide full patent protection for pharmaceutical companies. Again, the purpose of their for-profit venture (they make for-profit investments in corporations which are doing direct medical harm to people they're giving vaccinations to, pretty much proving hypocrisy) is to push western IP law. Hopefully you were just kidding anyway :/ HHOS = FAIL in this case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"