Arsenic is present naturally in the ground, but not nearly in the levels found in Bangladesh and India. All hypotheses that the well water pollution is a natural source have been discounted over the past 5-10 years, and all evidence (mostly gathered by British researchers) points to manmade arsenic sources (fertizer primirily) leaching into the ground water.
India and other countries have proposed massively expensive projects to contend with the disaster (which India still contends is not manmade, but that's because it's in their best interest to do so), but most of these do not address the issue that contaminated water is depositing arsenic into ground water stores and aquifers.
This method sounds like it could eventually have some potential, but it's not like you'll be able to take water directly from the Ganges, add some nanorust, and have fresh sparkling drinking water. In developing nations, the key is ensuring factories and agriculture do not dump their waste into the drinking supply (one of the big problems in India), that the sewage and drinking systems are separated, and that modern filtration units are used. Implementing all of these would be far cheaper than having people boil their water, and would ensure that bacteria, lead, and other impurities are removed.
The article itself admits that nanorust is still too expensive to be used widely, while filtration units already exist that cheaply remove arsenic plus many other things cheaply. In the U.S., home filters (and even cheap Britas) remove 99% of all arsenic, along with similar levels of other chemicals and heavy metals... so why spend tons of money making nanorust if something else already exists that is cheaper and just as effective?
OK, you caught me! I am eternally optimistic that technology has and will continue to provide Americans with a greater political voice and presence, along with better political accountability.
Look at the influence of the internet and viral/social media on Howard Dean's campaign (before he made a fool of himself), on the net neutrality debate (where it's now basically dead after popular backlash driven by bloggers and internet petitions), and on corruption (where perverts like Mark Foley would never have been caught had they been operating in a less tech saturated world).
We can poo poo the honesty and integrity of our politicians, but it's difficult to discount the increased importance that the tech savvy, non-elite, individual (or group) now has.
I hear ya. I wouldn't have chosen the same path today as 6 years ago. But back then, it was NT 4.0 with SQL Server 7 on a server that wasn't secure, or buy a smallish HP server with Oracle 8i... the decision was pretty easy then.
Ah, the net neutrality battle all over again. It's no surprise that the infrastructure and telecom firms are spending the most money. These are the firms that have the most to lose if Congress begins to support net neutrality and increased competition. Luckily the rise of the internet, message boards (like slashdot), and social networking has allowed Americans to increase their knowledge of the issues addressed by Congress on a daily basis, which allows us to raise our voices and dissent much earlier... often before poor decisions are made.
Haha... not entirely. They had Unix and Oracle administrators on staff, but the division where this security breach occurred didn't want to pony up for the systems that most of the other divisions had. We actually didn't sell them the HP-UX and Oracle, we just recommended HP and Oracle implementation teams to do the work (I was doing performance tuning work at the time, so my only input was a few hours each week after the systems were installed).
This just reconfirms my belief that Google should have waited a few months/years to buy YouTube. I think Mark Cuban was right, YouTube was a big ole lawsuit waiting to happen. Google could have waited until the copyright lawsuits hit then sweeped in to buy it for a fraction of the price. Now they've just increased their liability.
At some point massive data centers won't provide incremental benefits unless the massive increases in processing power are met with proportional decreases in bandwidth prices. Sure, bandwidth prices have dropped, but not by nearly the rate of price/teraflop processing has. Companies like Google recognize this, and are investing in their own fiber to compensate. But the telecommuncations companies are the ones that originally build these lines, and it's unfortunately in their best interest to keep the supply of spare bandwidth very low.
Worst cleanup by far was on a corporate Windows server in 2000 or 2001. The system did not have any anti-virus, and doubled as a SQL Server and File server. A couple viruses got on the drive and started trashing files. Unfortunately, they had been on there for months before anyone noticed, so backups were basically useless. We had to go file by file to retrieve important data, and then have users manually validate exported/imported SQL Server data. Uggghhhh. It took us months before everything was sorted out, but it was an easy sell to get the client onto Oracle and a HP-UX system soon after.
Help, help... the sky is falling! Oops, sorry... same plot, wrong story.
Seriously though, the author completely ignores the vast geographic differences between the US and other industrialized country when categorizing the US as falling behind in broadband acceptance. The US has an average population density of ~30 people per square km, industrialized Europe's is ~100, while Japan's is 336. The higher the population density, the less cable is needed (and hence, the lower the cost) to provide broadband to all these people.
In addition, the US is HIGHLY suburban, with the vast majority of broadband users living in sprawling neighborhoods with relatively large amounts of land (e.g. 1/4 to 1/2 acre+). Compare this to Europe/Japan, where a larger proportion of broadband users (and the population) live in densely populated cities. As an example, I live in a typical suburban U.S. neighborhood where almost everyone has broadband. To hit every one of the 100 homes, it would take 1.3 to 2.6 miles of cable (depending on cable location). In a European city, this same amount of cable could easily cover 2-10X the # of families living in typical apartments/condos.
Also, I don't see how large-scale adoptance of broadband in the US would help the economy by the stated $500Billion (a whopping 5% of GDP). The only people I know who don't have broadband either: don't own a computer (lack of money, interest, or live on a farm), are worried about their kids hitting the porn sites, or are grandparent types who just have no clue what the internet is and have no desire to learn. If we got all these people surfing online watching YouTube videos, searching for nudie pics, playing solitaire, and creating myspace pages, how would the economy grow by 5%?
Now that there's international precedence, expect to see the RIAA lobbying for similarly harsh enforcement of copyright law around here (OK, maybe not this bad). The trouble with copyright infringement cases like these is where to draw the line. Logically a band covering another song in a large venue for a paying crowd should pay some type of usage fees, while little Johnny shouldn't need to pay anything for playing the Star Wars theme at his small piano recital. But everywhere between those two extremes it gets pretty murky.
This is such a great idea, particularly for male college students. I wish something like this existed 10 years ago when my friends and I traveled through Europe. To maximize the length of our stay, we slept in $10 grimy hostels and ate basically nothing (or other people's leftovers). Given that some of these services boast well over 100,000 members, I wonder at what point they start impacting the Hostel industry?
While this is likely a great resource for men, I couldn't imagine using one if I were a woman traveling in Europe. Even the hostels were pretty sketchy, and the women we ran into often traveled in groups (or with a bunch of guys) to make it safer. While they offer feedback systems like eBay, it would be pretty easy for sexual predators to fake the feedback to lure young foreign women.
It's actually pretty surprising that the DX10-compatible 8800 runs $450-$600 given it's brand new and has huge performance gains over NVidia's current cards. I don't understand why someone would say only buy it if you have a 24" monitor though... it seems like buying a single 8800 would be just as good (and cheaper) than buying a couple 7800's...
There ARE tons of open jobs in IT, so you should have no problem finding a job if you get a Computer Science major. However, whether or not a CS major is a good idea is really dependant on what you want to do with your degree. If you want to be a software engineer and cut code exclusively, there is probably no better major than Computer Science. But if you want to go into Project Management, start your own business, become a system admin, or become a consultant, then there other options that may be better (such as an Engineering, IT Management, or Business degree)
For any technology related career though, I'd suggest taking at least 2 programming courses and 1 other computer course (or just getting a minor in Computer Science). Getting a summer internship doing development will also be helpful, even if you never want to become a programmer. The skills you learn programming can be applied to almost any technology career and will certainly look good on a resume. Even wall street firms love to hire folks with CS classes/minors, as it's typically an assurance that they're 'smart'.
NOW you're talking! That would be great... exchange is such a bloated piece of @#$@ it's virtually inconceivable that there hasn't been anything good to take it's place. Google certainly could do it... and probably even make some decent $$$ from it.
Already does... gmail has a POP3 server, so you can just download into Evolution (unless you want the actual GMail GUI in Evolution, which seems rather bizarre since the Evolution interface is already pretty "sweet").
Definitely, but not much to lose if a handful stop using it. If ADP stops using Salesforce, it would have serious implications to their bottom line. If you and I stop using GMail, they'll probably lose about $3/year in advertising revenue. That's the crux of the problem... the risk is so much greater than the reward for companies that have complex systems with high revenue/client, while the reward and PR far outweighs the risk for companies like Google with hundreds of millions of customers and very little revenue/customer.
It's applaudable that Google is doing this, although not at all surprising. But most of the user data they store is pretty simple (spreadsheets, e-mails, etc.), so making it portable is relatively easy. This is far more difficult to do for real business data, like hosted CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce). Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.
This has to be some of the worst timing for any policy decision. If only he would have resigned a few days ago (and Bush not said he was going to stick around to the end), the Republicans would have had a real chance.
Sure, he may not have specifically offered until today, but he has offered his resignation at least twice in the past... last week would have been the perfect time to finally accept his prior offers and for Bush to say "hey, we've made some mistakes in Iraq, it's time we all sit down together and figure out how to do it right" instead of his continued stubborn insistence on staying the course and doing things his way.
Another thought... what if Microsoft just released their.NET framework (basically taking over the Mono project) on Linux? Since.NET (C# in particular) is an interpretted language, it would then be possible to run closed-source C# programs on Linux. This would give MS the Linux "in" that they apparently desire. Then all they'd need to do is rewrite Office (or any other apps) under.NET, and they'd have cross platform apps. I realize that this isn't trivial, but it seems a lot easier than supporting multiple code bases over a long period of time.
As scary as a 'Microsoft Linux' sounds, there'd actually be some significant advantages to Microsoft apps being able to run on Linux (as pointed out to me by another/. reader yesterday). To a system administrator, the prospect of having servers that cooperate better, and possibly a single secure desktop, is enticing. Hardcore Linux users probably scoff at the idea of running Office on a Linux box, but as a IT manager myself it sounds like a great idea. All of a sudden, I could rollout a single secure Linux O/S to all desktops and servers, then have the ability to run Windows apps when needed.
Is this Microsoft's intent? Unfortunately, probably not. I don't see them providing users with the ability to get rid of their Windows PCs... they will probably either maintain a cooperative capability (a la Virtualization) that the Novell deal provides, or use their Linux foothold as a means to eventually entice Linux users back to Windows.
Who knows, the end result will be interesting for sure.
This project, along with CMU's Tower of Babel, certainly get props in the coolness category, but the practicality is still lacking. I believe DARPA is barking up the wrong tree for now, or at least biting off more than they can chew.
Speech Recognition is the hardest problem to tackle on the path to recognition, and MUST be addressed before there is a viable real-time (or even delayed) translation engine. Currently, even the best speech recognition software can achieve at best ~80% accuracy when faced with a large vocabulary with no limits on speakers/dialects, and this level of accuracy is typically not achieved in real-time. While this 80% level is actually pretty good when transcribing to text (since the reader can typically decipher what the computer meant), it's downright awful if trying to translate the resulting text to another language.
For example, if I say "I like ice cream" into voice recognition software and 'hears' "I like, I scream", the reader might understand what this means, particularly if they say it in context and aloud. However, let's say we translate each sentence into Spanish ("Tengo gusto del helado" and "Tengo gusto, yo grito" respectively, according to Babel Fish), and the speaker would be completely lost as the out of context phrases don't sound anything alike. In a natural language translation, even under relatively accurate recognition scenarios, would be frought with misunderstandings.
Once speech recognition is tackled, it's just a matter of translation then voice synthesis. Fortunately these problems aren't nearly as difficult, and current solutions would suffice (with the only pitfall being poor grammer in the destination language, and a robotic sounding voice).
And all this time I've been deleting spam I could have been using it to fund my retirement! Not sure what the wife will think when she logs into our joint e-mail account and finds a folder called "Special evidence" filled with Viagra and Penile enlargement ads though.
My fear was more on the standard distros including too much MS code that may have security issues. You are right that enterprises could just pick and choose what they want... but many smaller shops (and definitely home users) just install the basic distro without much customization.
Is a Linux kernel with MS shims and apps better than MS by itself? Probably... and your take on "MS Linux" being more interoperable is certainly attractive...
As scary as this initially sounds (Microsoft Linux anyone?), the partnership makes sense. Microsoft gains the capability to run Linux better in a virtualized environment (or vice versa), and Novell gets a ton of much needed cash. For years, it's been obvious that at some point Microsoft would have to start recognizing the fast growth of Linux as an enterprise platform, and it appears that this move is Microsoft's first step.
The only concern I have is that Microsot continues further down the path and begins to create closed source applications or kernel modules specifically to run Microsoft apps. If they can swing this, the potential for degradation of the upward Linux momentum is high. John Dvorak of PC Magazine figures that Microsoft will develop GPL work-arounds, and eventually begin releasing Linux apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Arsenic is present naturally in the ground, but not nearly in the levels found in Bangladesh and India. All hypotheses that the well water pollution is a natural source have been discounted over the past 5-10 years, and all evidence (mostly gathered by British researchers) points to manmade arsenic sources (fertizer primirily) leaching into the ground water.
India and other countries have proposed massively expensive projects to contend with the disaster (which India still contends is not manmade, but that's because it's in their best interest to do so), but most of these do not address the issue that contaminated water is depositing arsenic into ground water stores and aquifers.
This method sounds like it could eventually have some potential, but it's not like you'll be able to take water directly from the Ganges, add some nanorust, and have fresh sparkling drinking water. In developing nations, the key is ensuring factories and agriculture do not dump their waste into the drinking supply (one of the big problems in India), that the sewage and drinking systems are separated, and that modern filtration units are used. Implementing all of these would be far cheaper than having people boil their water, and would ensure that bacteria, lead, and other impurities are removed.
... so why spend tons of money making nanorust if something else already exists that is cheaper and just as effective?
The article itself admits that nanorust is still too expensive to be used widely, while filtration units already exist that cheaply remove arsenic plus many other things cheaply. In the U.S., home filters (and even cheap Britas) remove 99% of all arsenic, along with similar levels of other chemicals and heavy metals
OK, you caught me! I am eternally optimistic that technology has and will continue to provide Americans with a greater political voice and presence, along with better political accountability.
Look at the influence of the internet and viral/social media on Howard Dean's campaign (before he made a fool of himself), on the net neutrality debate (where it's now basically dead after popular backlash driven by bloggers and internet petitions), and on corruption (where perverts like Mark Foley would never have been caught had they been operating in a less tech saturated world).
We can poo poo the honesty and integrity of our politicians, but it's difficult to discount the increased importance that the tech savvy, non-elite, individual (or group) now has.
I hear ya. I wouldn't have chosen the same path today as 6 years ago. But back then, it was NT 4.0 with SQL Server 7 on a server that wasn't secure, or buy a smallish HP server with Oracle 8i ... the decision was pretty easy then.
Ah, the net neutrality battle all over again. It's no surprise that the infrastructure and telecom firms are spending the most money. These are the firms that have the most to lose if Congress begins to support net neutrality and increased competition. Luckily the rise of the internet, message boards (like slashdot), and social networking has allowed Americans to increase their knowledge of the issues addressed by Congress on a daily basis, which allows us to raise our voices and dissent much earlier ... often before poor decisions are made.
Haha ... not entirely. They had Unix and Oracle administrators on staff, but the division where this security breach occurred didn't want to pony up for the systems that most of the other divisions had. We actually didn't sell them the HP-UX and Oracle, we just recommended HP and Oracle implementation teams to do the work (I was doing performance tuning work at the time, so my only input was a few hours each week after the systems were installed).
This just reconfirms my belief that Google should have waited a few months/years to buy YouTube. I think Mark Cuban was right, YouTube was a big ole lawsuit waiting to happen. Google could have waited until the copyright lawsuits hit then sweeped in to buy it for a fraction of the price. Now they've just increased their liability.
At some point massive data centers won't provide incremental benefits unless the massive increases in processing power are met with proportional decreases in bandwidth prices. Sure, bandwidth prices have dropped, but not by nearly the rate of price/teraflop processing has. Companies like Google recognize this, and are investing in their own fiber to compensate. But the telecommuncations companies are the ones that originally build these lines, and it's unfortunately in their best interest to keep the supply of spare bandwidth very low.
Worst cleanup by far was on a corporate Windows server in 2000 or 2001. The system did not have any anti-virus, and doubled as a SQL Server and File server. A couple viruses got on the drive and started trashing files. Unfortunately, they had been on there for months before anyone noticed, so backups were basically useless. We had to go file by file to retrieve important data, and then have users manually validate exported/imported SQL Server data. Uggghhhh. It took us months before everything was sorted out, but it was an easy sell to get the client onto Oracle and a HP-UX system soon after.
Help, help ... the sky is falling! Oops, sorry ... same plot, wrong story.
Seriously though, the author completely ignores the vast geographic differences between the US and other industrialized country when categorizing the US as falling behind in broadband acceptance. The US has an average population density of ~30 people per square km, industrialized Europe's is ~100, while Japan's is 336. The higher the population density, the less cable is needed (and hence, the lower the cost) to provide broadband to all these people.
In addition, the US is HIGHLY suburban, with the vast majority of broadband users living in sprawling neighborhoods with relatively large amounts of land (e.g. 1/4 to 1/2 acre+). Compare this to Europe/Japan, where a larger proportion of broadband users (and the population) live in densely populated cities. As an example, I live in a typical suburban U.S. neighborhood where almost everyone has broadband. To hit every one of the 100 homes, it would take 1.3 to 2.6 miles of cable (depending on cable location). In a European city, this same amount of cable could easily cover 2-10X the # of families living in typical apartments/condos.
Also, I don't see how large-scale adoptance of broadband in the US would help the economy by the stated $500Billion (a whopping 5% of GDP). The only people I know who don't have broadband either: don't own a computer (lack of money, interest, or live on a farm), are worried about their kids hitting the porn sites, or are grandparent types who just have no clue what the internet is and have no desire to learn. If we got all these people surfing online watching YouTube videos, searching for nudie pics, playing solitaire, and creating myspace pages, how would the economy grow by 5%?
Now that there's international precedence, expect to see the RIAA lobbying for similarly harsh enforcement of copyright law around here (OK, maybe not this bad). The trouble with copyright infringement cases like these is where to draw the line. Logically a band covering another song in a large venue for a paying crowd should pay some type of usage fees, while little Johnny shouldn't need to pay anything for playing the Star Wars theme at his small piano recital. But everywhere between those two extremes it gets pretty murky.
This is such a great idea, particularly for male college students. I wish something like this existed 10 years ago when my friends and I traveled through Europe. To maximize the length of our stay, we slept in $10 grimy hostels and ate basically nothing (or other people's leftovers). Given that some of these services boast well over 100,000 members, I wonder at what point they start impacting the Hostel industry?
While this is likely a great resource for men, I couldn't imagine using one if I were a woman traveling in Europe. Even the hostels were pretty sketchy, and the women we ran into often traveled in groups (or with a bunch of guys) to make it safer. While they offer feedback systems like eBay, it would be pretty easy for sexual predators to fake the feedback to lure young foreign women.
It's actually pretty surprising that the DX10-compatible 8800 runs $450-$600 given it's brand new and has huge performance gains over NVidia's current cards. I don't understand why someone would say only buy it if you have a 24" monitor though ... it seems like buying a single 8800 would be just as good (and cheaper) than buying a couple 7800's ...
There ARE tons of open jobs in IT, so you should have no problem finding a job if you get a Computer Science major. However, whether or not a CS major is a good idea is really dependant on what you want to do with your degree. If you want to be a software engineer and cut code exclusively, there is probably no better major than Computer Science. But if you want to go into Project Management, start your own business, become a system admin, or become a consultant, then there other options that may be better (such as an Engineering, IT Management, or Business degree)
For any technology related career though, I'd suggest taking at least 2 programming courses and 1 other computer course (or just getting a minor in Computer Science). Getting a summer internship doing development will also be helpful, even if you never want to become a programmer. The skills you learn programming can be applied to almost any technology career and will certainly look good on a resume. Even wall street firms love to hire folks with CS classes/minors, as it's typically an assurance that they're 'smart'.
NOW you're talking! That would be great ... exchange is such a bloated piece of @#$@ it's virtually inconceivable that there hasn't been anything good to take it's place. Google certainly could do it ... and probably even make some decent $$$ from it.
Already does ... gmail has a POP3 server, so you can just download into Evolution (unless you want the actual GMail GUI in Evolution, which seems rather bizarre since the Evolution interface is already pretty "sweet").
Definitely, but not much to lose if a handful stop using it. If ADP stops using Salesforce, it would have serious implications to their bottom line. If you and I stop using GMail, they'll probably lose about $3/year in advertising revenue. That's the crux of the problem ... the risk is so much greater than the reward for companies that have complex systems with high revenue/client, while the reward and PR far outweighs the risk for companies like Google with hundreds of millions of customers and very little revenue/customer.
It's applaudable that Google is doing this, although not at all surprising. But most of the user data they store is pretty simple (spreadsheets, e-mails, etc.), so making it portable is relatively easy. This is far more difficult to do for real business data, like hosted CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce). Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable ... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.
This has to be some of the worst timing for any policy decision. If only he would have resigned a few days ago (and Bush not said he was going to stick around to the end), the Republicans would have had a real chance.
... last week would have been the perfect time to finally accept his prior offers and for Bush to say "hey, we've made some mistakes in Iraq, it's time we all sit down together and figure out how to do it right" instead of his continued stubborn insistence on staying the course and doing things his way.
Sure, he may not have specifically offered until today, but he has offered his resignation at least twice in the past
Another thought ... what if Microsoft just released their .NET framework (basically taking over the Mono project) on Linux? Since .NET (C# in particular) is an interpretted language, it would then be possible to run closed-source C# programs on Linux. This would give MS the Linux "in" that they apparently desire. Then all they'd need to do is rewrite Office (or any other apps) under .NET, and they'd have cross platform apps. I realize that this isn't trivial, but it seems a lot easier than supporting multiple code bases over a long period of time.
As scary as a 'Microsoft Linux' sounds, there'd actually be some significant advantages to Microsoft apps being able to run on Linux (as pointed out to me by another /. reader yesterday). To a system administrator, the prospect of having servers that cooperate better, and possibly a single secure desktop, is enticing. Hardcore Linux users probably scoff at the idea of running Office on a Linux box, but as a IT manager myself it sounds like a great idea. All of a sudden, I could rollout a single secure Linux O/S to all desktops and servers, then have the ability to run Windows apps when needed.
... they will probably either maintain a cooperative capability (a la Virtualization) that the Novell deal provides, or use their Linux foothold as a means to eventually entice Linux users back to Windows.
Is this Microsoft's intent? Unfortunately, probably not. I don't see them providing users with the ability to get rid of their Windows PCs
Who knows, the end result will be interesting for sure.
This project, along with CMU's Tower of Babel, certainly get props in the coolness category, but the practicality is still lacking. I believe DARPA is barking up the wrong tree for now, or at least biting off more than they can chew.
Speech Recognition is the hardest problem to tackle on the path to recognition, and MUST be addressed before there is a viable real-time (or even delayed) translation engine. Currently, even the best speech recognition software can achieve at best ~80% accuracy when faced with a large vocabulary with no limits on speakers/dialects, and this level of accuracy is typically not achieved in real-time. While this 80% level is actually pretty good when transcribing to text (since the reader can typically decipher what the computer meant), it's downright awful if trying to translate the resulting text to another language.
For example, if I say "I like ice cream" into voice recognition software and 'hears' "I like, I scream", the reader might understand what this means, particularly if they say it in context and aloud. However, let's say we translate each sentence into Spanish ("Tengo gusto del helado" and "Tengo gusto, yo grito" respectively, according to Babel Fish), and the speaker would be completely lost as the out of context phrases don't sound anything alike. In a natural language translation, even under relatively accurate recognition scenarios, would be frought with misunderstandings.
Once speech recognition is tackled, it's just a matter of translation then voice synthesis. Fortunately these problems aren't nearly as difficult, and current solutions would suffice (with the only pitfall being poor grammer in the destination language, and a robotic sounding voice).
And all this time I've been deleting spam I could have been using it to fund my retirement! Not sure what the wife will think when she logs into our joint e-mail account and finds a folder called "Special evidence" filled with Viagra and Penile enlargement ads though.
Great point!
... but many smaller shops (and definitely home users) just install the basic distro without much customization.
... and your take on "MS Linux" being more interoperable is certainly attractive ...
My fear was more on the standard distros including too much MS code that may have security issues. You are right that enterprises could just pick and choose what they want
Is a Linux kernel with MS shims and apps better than MS by itself? Probably
As scary as this initially sounds (Microsoft Linux anyone?), the partnership makes sense. Microsoft gains the capability to run Linux better in a virtualized environment (or vice versa), and Novell gets a ton of much needed cash. For years, it's been obvious that at some point Microsoft would have to start recognizing the fast growth of Linux as an enterprise platform, and it appears that this move is Microsoft's first step.
The only concern I have is that Microsot continues further down the path and begins to create closed source applications or kernel modules specifically to run Microsoft apps. If they can swing this, the potential for degradation of the upward Linux momentum is high. John Dvorak of PC Magazine figures that Microsoft will develop GPL work-arounds, and eventually begin releasing Linux apps.
What then? Mac servers for everyone?