Ok.. Under RIPE terms, it seems ISPs & such (RIPE members) are LIRs in their own respect.
I was referring to LIRs as entities being solely responsible for a geographic territory and for the aggregate resources assigned to them by a RIR - as a subdivision of the RIR (the same way as country TLD organization is responsible for assigning zones within a country TLD).
But nonetheless, RIPE 'LIRs' are nothing much but 'members' or 'customers' since each and every assignment made by a 'LIR' has to be approved by the RIPE (even if the LIR is assigning a portion of an assigned aggregate space).
Not that this is *that* important. Also note that I had some dealing with the RIPE once - over an ISP that was refusing to delegate reverse resolution over a/29 PA block I had been assigned (With a block smaller than a/24, the PA super-block owner has to setup reverse resolution.. it's mechanical !). And although RIPE does state it does not deal with final end-users directly, I received a very kind answer saying they were going to shake that tree because it was not acceptable per their charter ! the situation was resolved within a day after that!
I could be wrong but I was under the impression that, actually, IP address blocks and Autonomous System numbers are managed by LIRs which get their blocks from RIRs (like RIPE, APNIC, ARIN, etc..) (except Europe which has no LIR) which in turn get their blocks from....
The IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority)
And ICANN also gets its authority from IANA.
So it's not centralized per-se, but it's highly hierarchical
A [name insitution here] study has determined that using electric cars does not get you from point A to point B any faster than combustion engine powered cars..
If you have a Remington 1100 : Unscrew the magazine cap, remove the 1st sealing ring, pull away the barrel, remove the piston seal, the piston, the action bar and the 2nd sealing O-Ring. Using a screwdriver or any thin but sturdy object, remove the front cap to release the magazine spring. With a pin chaser and a rubber mallet, remove the 2 pins that lock in the trigger mechanism. With a pair of pliers, remove the fork spring inside the chamber. Remove the bolt by pushing it forward.
Use the bolt with the shell extractor in place as a can opener !
Once the can is empty, clean the spare parts with some lighter fuel, spray generously with WD-40, wipe with a soft cloth, re-assemble, load a shell (no larger than 2"3/4 shells though) and shoot the can.
And I'm not going to go into the Open Source vs Free Software debate !
Do they mean : Open specification ? Or is it : With an Open Source/Free Software implementation ? Or again : Used to write code that is Open Source/Free Software ?
Because for some or all of these, there are proprietary specifications, there are proprietary implementation and they are used to write proprietary code too..
And yeah.. Why only present those Web oriented languages (although Perl could probably be taken out)..
After removing the tax, applying the exchange rate and dropping the price a bit, I've worked out that it'll retail for around $6,500,000.50 (+/- $.50) in the US.
Blasphemy targets the deity in which religious people believe, NOT the people themselves.
Now, I am quite convinced that if any supernatural being existed, it would be quite capable of handling "blasphemy" gracefully, which may be untrue for cultural/religous/lifestyle groups - which the "hate speech" laws in certain countries attempt to protect.
Nonetheless, I am also opposed to those anti "hate speech" laws since it both creates a breach in freedom of speech - but - even more dangerous - segregates those groups unto special status - and - de-facto - creates a rift between group of individuals.
To push my point further, when a country promotes a law prohibiting "hate speech" towards - say - homosexuals, they are specifically stating that homosexual have *different* rights than heterosexuals ! and *I* believe this is wrong.
How in the world is Nintendo (a worldwide known manufacturer of Video game consoles) is going to fight Piracy (the Commandeering of ships at sea and the killing of the crews - and then asking for Million of $ to give the ship back).
And will someone tell me how running bootleg copies of games (a petty offense) relates to pirating (a capital crime) ?
Yer right matey ! let's send Nintendo to Somalia !
Granted, there is probably some common silicon real-estate between z10 engines and Power6 chips (be it i or p - since they are now the exact same anyway), but they are otherwise 2 completely different beasts.
This may change in the future though ! Who knows.. maybe a z12 will be Power8 based or something - with the whole ISA being millicoded.
PS (Thanks to IBM's habit of constant rebranding, zSeries, iSeries and pSeries are no longer 'official' terms.. The current (as of today 2/16/2009 13:30 GMT) is IBM System z (capable of running 6 or 7 different OSes) and IBM Power - capable of running IBM i, AIX and Linux on Power)
A foreword of caution : Although this might look like a hostile or contentious discussion, it's not ! we have diverging views, granted (and that's a good thing). But there is no hatred or anything negative here - just people expressing divergent views with their arguments.. so with no further ado..
About anti-trust laws & countries :
Err.. No I don't have specific examples. The fact is I was confusing anti trust laws & monopoly. Point taken.
About the U.S. anti-trust laws & damage :
I understand anti-trust laws should be enforced on negotiable goods. However, the "zero priced" scheme was set forth very early by the early browsers (remember Mosaic ?) - so from this point on - browser stopped being a negotiable good.
Now.. If you would be kind enough to describe the *ACTUAL* extent of the damage (laid forth by MS windows shipping IE for free in their OS - like Red Hat is.. like Suse is, Like IBM AIX is.. like *any* OS potentially usable on a desktop is..)
About the deal offered :
You get IE for free.. you can download & install any alternative browser of your choice.. *WHERE* is the damage ?
About Anti trust laws being there to prevent predatory practices :
Point taken. However, I still fail to see how this applies to the browser (non) market.
About Sites requiring IE :
They lost me as a patron !
About the fact the Microsoft broke the law and ruined the web :
Please indicate what law was broken and how the actually did ruin the web ? (Oh my... The web is ruined ! the Internetz is crashing ! we're doomed !)
About having to pay the price :
So should Red Hat, Suse, Apple... (who are all offering pre-installed browsers.. and Some of them do not even allow you to get an alternate one).
And this is not "free" market.. That's overly regulated market. Apparently, they (EU, WTO, name it..) are regulating what doesn't need to be/shouldn't (browser monopolies, software patents, etc..) and forgetting to regulate what should (lever effect of stock options, uncontrolled credit securitization, a couple of Ponzi schemes that just fell through, etc..)
Competition comes from offering for sale what the people want at a price that's convenient to them - offering a better deal than your competitor, not what the law dictates.
Anti trust laws are here solely to prevent a single entity from being the sole provider of a commodity (and thus being able to set the price at will) - and THIS is clearly not the case (since not only are they are not the only ones, but no-one is ever pretending to make you pay for it)!
As long as 'free' (a la RMS) ACME-Browsers exists, people will *ALWAYS* have a choice.. The only thing that can prevent them from offering the alternative is *over regulation*. And *THIS* will keep the MS (commercial enterprise), FireFox (Mozilla - Commercial enterprise), Opera (Commercial enterprise) or Safari (Apple - Commercial Enterprise) from ever getting a monopoly ! Not whatever is proposed by the EU (which is obviously on an agenda).
Note that there are some countries where a monopoly is considered legal - most especially when the monopoly is state controlled.
And I don't think insulting me bore any more weight to your point - although you have a right to do so..
Because when I say 'focus on more important matters' I am talking about something that's more important than the big company's 1 in a million shareholder's fat wallets.. and that's : US - whether the tax we pay gets into the proper infrastructure we paid for, or that the 1/5th to 1/3rd of my income I give back is not given back to financial gamblers.. those sorts of things
Google does make money from searches, not that it's relevant to the point I was making. No searches, no ads, remember?
Not unless a browser vendor is found guilty of breaking the law as Microsoft has been.
As far as I know, IE is the only browser offering a choice as to what default search engine to use ! (not that I like being redirected to a search engine because I mistyped an URL though !
Why don't we just let the people decide instead of pushing through those ridiculous laws ?
Because in this case, Microsoft has unlawfully prevented people from deciding by destroying competition in the market.
How do you come to the conclusion that MS prevents one from choosing whichever browser he chooses ? Providing and bundling a default one can't be that bad.. Doesn't Mac OSX, KDE, AIX and whatnot do the same ?
Dear EU.. Please, focus on more important matters..
Antitrust cases are important to protect the market from abuse. The US has antitrust laws as well. In fact, all countries in the world have them. You only think they aren't important because you lack knowledge.
I am not denying antitrust laws are important.. I am disputing that THIS particular case should be considered a monopoly situation (no more than the iPhone's browser, konqueror under KDE... or shoving Posix down the neck of Un*x/Linux developers.. or.. whatnot..)
Note that I am not a stench supporter of MS.. far from it.. I disagree with most of their policies.. but the browser war is OVER! It has distracted too many of us for too long a time from the real issues that this should come to an end.. and now ! Way too much emphasis has been put on HTML UA.. There are WAY more important things than this.. more important things than deciding whether the people are intelligent enough to get another browser by themselves or whether the LAW should point them in the right direction.. yes.. more important things.. like people dying because it doesn't fit into a politician's agenda..
Thou shalt not teleport information from 1 atom to another atom at a speed greater than thy Lord hath deemed forbidden[1] lest thou wishes to kill thy grandfather before thou art born - and create earth engulfing black holes in the process[2].
Fools ! we are doomed !
--Ivan
[1] Ok.. I didn't read TA.. so what ? [2] That's last sentence is not in the original text - consider this creative license.
Opera and Mozilla make money by forwarding searches to Google. Google makes money from searches. If people use Chrome instead of IE, more people use Google, which means that Google makes more money from searches.
I don't think google makes money from searches !
Google makes money by selling advertisement space..
Now, if the EU *really* want to make this a "competitive" space, they're going to have to ask the browser providers to make the same treatment towards search engines that they do towards browsers..
Why don't we just let the people decide instead of pushing through those ridiculous laws ?
Dear EU.. Please, focus on more important matters..
Usable energy sources basically comes in 3 forms : Nuclear fusion, nuclear fission and kinetic energy.. and all of them are just transformation of mass into energy.
Oil & coal is nothing more than stored energy from the sun's nuclear fusion. (the result of the high pressure decay of photosynthesizing organisms).
Wind energy is just grabbing the energy from the sun's nuclear fusion power & earth' momentum.. Tide generators are solely tapping into the leftover kinetic energy from earth' spin, the moon's movement around earth & earth movement around the sun..
Geothermal energy is just tapping into earth' radioactive decay energy (which thanks to earth' interior's fairly adiabatic environment means it's being kept in store for a long time).
So..
What do they mean by "renewable energy ?"
(and I'm not going to go into the "No CO2" ads I've seen recently which - were they ever successful - would mean the end of all photosynthesizing organisms on earth - since they would be depleted of one of their food!).
I'm pretty sure a lot of the OEMs will be ok with installing Chrome (and take the $ that comes with it) as long as they are allowed to keep IE !
Not having IE is going to generate a lot of support calls.. so I'm sure if the browser people ask for 'exclusivity' (like.. it's Chrome and *NO IE*), the OEMs are going to ask for hefty amounts of monies !
So basically.. as usual.. getting IE out of the picture is going to be help for the Googles and Operas (who want to have their own little monopoly of their own) and the Dells/HPs/Lenovos (who want their wallet fatter)..
But.. *NOT* to the end users who are going to be faced with less and less choice, more complicated procedures, more dependencies on the OEMs & browser providers.. be swamped with more & more Google ads..
But then again, I'm pretty OEMs only need to support programs they declare as supporting.
But now again.. If you're taking this example, then we should also ask to have a choice (and possibility) to run another kernel, to have a different basic API - something else than Win32 (which is basically what is already asked since the Win32 API now partially depends on IE components - namely trident)..
This focus on the HTML renderer+HTTP engine specifically seems just completely (to me anyway) superfluous.
When Real Media came crying claiming that Windows Media Player was stripping them of their market through unfair competition - and the EC complied - we wound up with a windows version no-one wanted.
When OEMs are faced with a decision on what browser to offer (assuming windows can be stripped of IE) - I'm pretty sure they'll go with IE anyway - because it's supported as part of windows ANYWAY - and NOT shipping IE will probably generate more support requests than not shipping IE anyway !
Slashdot Mirror
Ok.. Under RIPE terms, it seems ISPs & such (RIPE members) are LIRs in their own respect.
I was referring to LIRs as entities being solely responsible for a geographic territory and for the aggregate resources assigned to them by a RIR - as a subdivision of the RIR (the same way as country TLD organization is responsible for assigning zones within a country TLD).
But nonetheless, RIPE 'LIRs' are nothing much but 'members' or 'customers' since each and every assignment made by a 'LIR' has to be approved by the RIPE (even if the LIR is assigning a portion of an assigned aggregate space).
Not that this is *that* important. Also note that I had some dealing with the RIPE once - over an ISP that was refusing to delegate reverse resolution over a /29 PA block I had been assigned (With a block smaller than a /24, the PA super-block owner has to setup reverse resolution.. it's mechanical !). And although RIPE does state it does not deal with final end-users directly, I received a very kind answer saying they were going to shake that tree because it was not acceptable per their charter ! the situation was resolved within a day after that!
--Ivan
I could be wrong but I was under the impression that, actually, IP address blocks and Autonomous System numbers are managed by LIRs which get their blocks from RIRs (like RIPE, APNIC, ARIN, etc..) (except Europe which has no LIR) which in turn get their blocks from ....
The IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority)
And ICANN also gets its authority from IANA.
So it's not centralized per-se, but it's highly hierarchical
--Ivan
A [name insitution here] study has determined that using electric cars does not get you from point A to point B any faster than combustion engine powered cars..
Doh !
--Ivan
And also.. how in the world can a computer "run" if no program is running ?
--Ivan
Ridnick's way man !
--Ivan
Tss tss tss..
If you have a Remington 1100 : Unscrew the magazine cap, remove the 1st sealing ring, pull away the barrel, remove the piston seal, the piston, the action bar and the 2nd sealing O-Ring. Using a screwdriver or any thin but sturdy object, remove the front cap to release the magazine spring. With a pin chaser and a rubber mallet, remove the 2 pins that lock in the trigger mechanism. With a pair of pliers, remove the fork spring inside the chamber. Remove the bolt by pushing it forward.
Use the bolt with the shell extractor in place as a can opener !
Once the can is empty, clean the spare parts with some lighter fuel, spray generously with WD-40, wipe with a soft cloth, re-assemble, load a shell (no larger than 2"3/4 shells though) and shoot the can.
--Ivan
And I'm not going to go into the Open Source vs Free Software debate !
Do they mean : Open specification ?
Or is it : With an Open Source/Free Software implementation ?
Or again : Used to write code that is Open Source/Free Software ?
Because for some or all of these, there are proprietary specifications, there are proprietary implementation and they are used to write proprietary code too..
And yeah.. Why only present those Web oriented languages (although Perl could probably be taken out)..
Looks like large scale trolling to me !
--Ivan
Ooops.. Here is a correction for you..
After removing the tax, applying the exchange rate and dropping the price a bit, I've worked out that it'll retail for around $6,500,000.50 (+/- $.50) in the US.
--Ivan
Blasphemy is not "hate speech"
Blasphemy targets the deity in which religious people believe, NOT the people themselves.
Now, I am quite convinced that if any supernatural being existed, it would be quite capable of handling "blasphemy" gracefully, which may be untrue for cultural/religous/lifestyle groups - which the "hate speech" laws in certain countries attempt to protect.
Nonetheless, I am also opposed to those anti "hate speech" laws since it both creates a breach in freedom of speech - but - even more dangerous - segregates those groups unto special status - and - de-facto - creates a rift between group of individuals.
To push my point further, when a country promotes a law prohibiting "hate speech" towards - say - homosexuals, they are specifically stating that homosexual have *different* rights than heterosexuals ! and *I* believe this is wrong.
--Ivan
But when you don't have such have a tool, and you almost never will, then it's great to use a library that makes the job easy to well and do quickly.
My point is : what's the difference between a "tool" and a "library" ?
In the *real* olden days it was a mislabeled box of punched cards
--Ivan
Why don't they just call it ISS Module #n ? (n being the current number of modules on the ISS starting with module number 1).
Keep it simple !
--Ivan
How in the world is Nintendo (a worldwide known manufacturer of Video game consoles) is going to fight Piracy (the Commandeering of ships at sea and the killing of the crews - and then asking for Million of $ to give the ship back).
And will someone tell me how running bootleg copies of games (a petty offense) relates to pirating (a capital crime) ?
Yer right matey ! let's send Nintendo to Somalia !
--Ivan
Obviously something to do with how sonar mapping is done..
(30 miles S-E of Cape Lookout).
--Ivan
Well z is not really Power based !
Granted, there is probably some common silicon real-estate between z10 engines and Power6 chips (be it i or p - since they are now the exact same anyway), but they are otherwise 2 completely different beasts.
This may change in the future though ! Who knows.. maybe a z12 will be Power8 based or something - with the whole ISA being millicoded.
PS (Thanks to IBM's habit of constant rebranding, zSeries, iSeries and pSeries are no longer 'official' terms.. The current (as of today 2/16/2009 13:30 GMT) is IBM System z (capable of running 6 or 7 different OSes) and IBM Power - capable of running IBM i, AIX and Linux on Power)
--Ivan
A foreword of caution : Although this might look like a hostile or contentious discussion, it's not ! we have diverging views, granted (and that's a good thing). But there is no hatred or anything negative here - just people expressing divergent views with their arguments.. so with no further ado..
About anti-trust laws & countries :
Err.. No I don't have specific examples. The fact is I was confusing anti trust laws & monopoly. Point taken.
About the U.S. anti-trust laws & damage :
I understand anti-trust laws should be enforced on negotiable goods. However, the "zero priced" scheme was set forth very early by the early browsers (remember Mosaic ?) - so from this point on - browser stopped being a negotiable good.
Now.. If you would be kind enough to describe the *ACTUAL* extent of the damage (laid forth by MS windows shipping IE for free in their OS - like Red Hat is.. like Suse is, Like IBM AIX is.. like *any* OS potentially usable on a desktop is..)
About the deal offered :
You get IE for free.. you can download & install any alternative browser of your choice.. *WHERE* is the damage ?
About Anti trust laws being there to prevent predatory practices :
Point taken. However, I still fail to see how this applies to the browser (non) market.
About Sites requiring IE :
They lost me as a patron !
About the fact the Microsoft broke the law and ruined the web :
Please indicate what law was broken and how the actually did ruin the web ? (Oh my... The web is ruined ! the Internetz is crashing ! we're doomed !)
About having to pay the price :
So should Red Hat, Suse, Apple... (who are all offering pre-installed browsers.. and Some of them do not even allow you to get an alternate one).
--Ivan
Antitrust laws do not exist in *ALL* countries.
And this is not "free" market.. That's overly regulated market. Apparently, they (EU, WTO, name it..) are regulating what doesn't need to be/shouldn't (browser monopolies, software patents, etc..) and forgetting to regulate what should (lever effect of stock options, uncontrolled credit securitization, a couple of Ponzi schemes that just fell through, etc..)
Competition comes from offering for sale what the people want at a price that's convenient to them - offering a better deal than your competitor, not what the law dictates.
Anti trust laws are here solely to prevent a single entity from being the sole provider of a commodity (and thus being able to set the price at will) - and THIS is clearly not the case (since not only are they are not the only ones, but no-one is ever pretending to make you pay for it)!
As long as 'free' (a la RMS) ACME-Browsers exists, people will *ALWAYS* have a choice.. The only thing that can prevent them from offering the alternative is *over regulation*. And *THIS* will keep the MS (commercial enterprise), FireFox (Mozilla - Commercial enterprise), Opera (Commercial enterprise) or Safari (Apple - Commercial Enterprise) from ever getting a monopoly ! Not whatever is proposed by the EU (which is obviously on an agenda).
Note that there are some countries where a monopoly is considered legal - most especially when the monopoly is state controlled.
And I don't think insulting me bore any more weight to your point - although you have a right to do so..
Because when I say 'focus on more important matters' I am talking about something that's more important than the big company's 1 in a million shareholder's fat wallets.. and that's : US - whether the tax we pay gets into the proper infrastructure we paid for, or that the 1/5th to 1/3rd of my income I give back is not given back to financial gamblers.. those sorts of things
--Ivan
If that particular post was posted on last week's article, then you may claim success !
--Ivan
Google does make money from searches, not that it's relevant to the point I was making. No searches, no ads, remember?
Blast ! actually missed the most important point :
IE holds 80% of browser market share
Google holds 90% of search market share
IE's default search engine (unless changed) is MSN search
What did I miss ?
--Ivan
Google does make money from searches, not that it's relevant to the point I was making. No searches, no ads, remember?
Not unless a browser vendor is found guilty of breaking the law as Microsoft has been.
As far as I know, IE is the only browser offering a choice as to what default search engine to use ! (not that I like being redirected to a search engine because I mistyped an URL though !
Why don't we just let the people decide instead of pushing through those ridiculous laws ?
Because in this case, Microsoft has unlawfully prevented people from deciding by destroying competition in the market.
How do you come to the conclusion that MS prevents one from choosing whichever browser he chooses ? Providing and bundling a default one can't be that bad.. Doesn't Mac OSX, KDE, AIX and whatnot do the same ?
Dear EU.. Please, focus on more important matters..
Antitrust cases are important to protect the market from abuse. The US has antitrust laws as well. In fact, all countries in the world have them. You only think they aren't important because you lack knowledge.
I am not denying antitrust laws are important.. I am disputing that THIS particular case should be considered a monopoly situation (no more than the iPhone's browser, konqueror under KDE... or shoving Posix down the neck of Un*x/Linux developers.. or .. whatnot..)
Note that I am not a stench supporter of MS.. far from it.. I disagree with most of their policies.. but the browser war is OVER! It has distracted too many of us for too long a time from the real issues that this should come to an end.. and now ! Way too much emphasis has been put on HTML UA.. There are WAY more important things than this.. more important things than deciding whether the people are intelligent enough to get another browser by themselves or whether the LAW should point them in the right direction.. yes.. more important things.. like people dying because it doesn't fit into a politician's agenda..
I'll just let go the 'lack of knowledge' part..
--Ivan
Didn't they read the c'eth commandment ?
Thou shalt not teleport information from 1 atom to another atom at a speed greater than thy Lord hath deemed forbidden[1] lest thou wishes to kill thy grandfather before thou art born - and create earth engulfing black holes in the process[2].
Fools ! we are doomed !
--Ivan
[1] Ok.. I didn't read TA.. so what ?
[2] That's last sentence is not in the original text - consider this creative license.
Opera and Mozilla make money by forwarding searches to Google. Google makes money from searches. If people use Chrome instead of IE, more people use Google, which means that Google makes more money from searches.
I don't think google makes money from searches !
Google makes money by selling advertisement space..
Now, if the EU *really* want to make this a "competitive" space, they're going to have to ask the browser providers to make the same treatment towards search engines that they do towards browsers..
Why don't we just let the people decide instead of pushing through those ridiculous laws ?
Dear EU.. Please, focus on more important matters..
There is no such thing as renewable energy !
Usable energy sources basically comes in 3 forms : Nuclear fusion, nuclear fission and kinetic energy.. and all of them are just transformation of mass into energy.
Oil & coal is nothing more than stored energy from the sun's nuclear fusion. (the result of the high pressure decay of photosynthesizing organisms).
Wind energy is just grabbing the energy from the sun's nuclear fusion power & earth' momentum.. Tide generators are solely tapping into the leftover kinetic energy from earth' spin, the moon's movement around earth & earth movement around the sun..
Geothermal energy is just tapping into earth' radioactive decay energy (which thanks to earth' interior's fairly adiabatic environment means it's being kept in store for a long time).
So..
What do they mean by "renewable energy ?"
(and I'm not going to go into the "No CO2" ads I've seen recently which - were they ever successful - would mean the end of all photosynthesizing organisms on earth - since they would be depleted of one of their food!).
--Ivan
I'll have to disagree on that..
I'm pretty sure a lot of the OEMs will be ok with installing Chrome (and take the $ that comes with it) as long as they are allowed to keep IE !
Not having IE is going to generate a lot of support calls.. so I'm sure if the browser people ask for 'exclusivity' (like.. it's Chrome and *NO IE*), the OEMs are going to ask for hefty amounts of monies !
So basically.. as usual.. getting IE out of the picture is going to be help for the Googles and Operas (who want to have their own little monopoly of their own) and the Dells/HPs/Lenovos (who want their wallet fatter)..
But .. *NOT* to the end users who are going to be faced with less and less choice, more complicated procedures, more dependencies on the OEMs & browser providers.. be swamped with more & more Google ads..
--Ivan
I hear you..
But then again, I'm pretty OEMs only need to support programs they declare as supporting.
But now again.. If you're taking this example, then we should also ask to have a choice (and possibility) to run another kernel, to have a different basic API - something else than Win32 (which is basically what is already asked since the Win32 API now partially depends on IE components - namely trident)..
This focus on the HTML renderer+HTTP engine specifically seems just completely (to me anyway) superfluous.
When Real Media came crying claiming that Windows Media Player was stripping them of their market through unfair competition - and the EC complied - we wound up with a windows version no-one wanted.
When OEMs are faced with a decision on what browser to offer (assuming windows can be stripped of IE) - I'm pretty sure they'll go with IE anyway - because it's supported as part of windows ANYWAY - and NOT shipping IE will probably generate more support requests than not shipping IE anyway !
--Ivan