Re:Brief Plot Description
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 2
It it a Civil war thingy? Space epic? A Harry Potter ripoff?
Imagine if the British and Spanish empires had endured 'til the 23rd century and were fighting in starships instead of sailing ships, and you're close. Except the Spanish are a lot like the Soviet Empire, and no-one really has control of the Americas. Earth itself doesn't really feature. Honor herself starts out like Hornblower, then becomes like Nelson. In every book it's touch-and-go for a while, but eventually the Spanish get their asses handed to them on a plate, just like that time they sent an Armada over. Rule Britannia!
Are you saying that this concept somehow eludes anyone over, say, the age of 5?
It certainly eluded every CEO of every dotcom, and all their investors. It continues to elude everyone who thinks that a viable business can be built by giving the product away for free.
As for the rest of it, I guess I had just not made the logical jump to "pirate" from "storing episodes on your hard drive". I store photos that I have taken, music that I have purchased, and video I have recorded on my hard drive.
The important thing is not the media that it is stored on. If you own bought copies, then you've done your part to support the show. Pat yourself on the back. However, anyone who has a copy on their HD that they didn't pay for has no business complaining if the show is cancelled.
I second the opinion that you must be some sort of entertainment industry hardliner.
Not really. I just understand that even if a thing can be reproduced for near-zero cost, it doesn't necessarily follow that it can be originally created for near-zero cost. FarScape, like any other product, cost money to produce, and it's being axed because the investors could not recoup their money from selling the product. Any true fan of the show, who really wants it to continue, would be willing to support it by contributing to the cost of production by buying it as a product.
People who "pirate" it are literally hurting themselves; the studio will just go on to make another programme and make their money that way, so long as they are making and getting paid for something, that's all they really care about. Perhaps they'll steer clear of genres that attract a tech-savvy fanbase, even. There are far more scripts in existance than there are shows that get made.
Remember that a studio accountant couldn't care less about the "story arc" or the "character development". A show is like a black box to them, with input and output. If more money comes out than goes in, make another series, if not, cancel it.
Re:Problems with WoH
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Unfortunately the characters suffer in WoH. The bad guy Manties (and peep) are just too easy to hate. It's almost as it they wore big black moustaches, black cloaks,top hats and were tying young heiresses onto railway tracks.
The thing I most liked about the Honor Harrington series is that altho' it is "space opera", Weber takes the time to do the orbital mechanics involved. Fighting a battle in space is a lot like playing chess: everyone involved has a perfect view of the board, and decisions often have to be made well in advance of their implications actually playing a part in the battle. You have to think, I'll accelerate now, because in 6 hrs, I might have to do something else. In the Honor Harrington books, no-one ever pulls a Star Trek-style technobabble solution out of their asses and no-one ever ignores an inconvenient law of physics. These things are merely crutches for weak writers, so respect to Weber for creating as much realism as possible within the genre.
with these many people willing to strongly support it, it makes one wonder why the show is in danger of being cancelled in the first place
Let me draw you an analogy. There are (or were) lots of companies trying to make Linux products. The problem was that although many people love Linux, a very small minority are willing to actually pay for it. Like that games company whose name escapes me just now... there was a lot of clamour on/. for Linux ports of games, but at the end of the day, everyone bought the Windows version and dual-booted, so the company went bust.
There's a poster in this topic who says he has 13G of FarScape on his HD, that's how much he loves it. Umm, no, if he loved it he would have bought the DVDs. People like him in fact killed the show.
(FWIW, I thought FarScape was utter rubbish, but I have plenty of channels so I am counting myself as a neutral observer here).
WTF are you getting those numbers? 2.5Mbps cable line here in NS, Canada is $40CND/month ($25US). Perhaps the real problem is that the people with the keys to the onramp are being a little to stingy in the US?
If you're referring to a cable or DSL service, then that's a theoretical peak speed. You see, a DSL provider has a contention ratio, usually 50:1 for users to bandwidth, which means you are actually sharing that 2.5Mbps with 50 other users.
If you have a typical network utilization profile (email, some web surfing, the occasional download) then your access is very sporadic. So long as everyone only actually accesses the network 2% of the time (quite reasonable, after all it takes time to read a web page, and you probably won't be using the connection very heavily during working hours because you're at work or at night because you're busy partying/asleep) then everyone gets their 2.5. And if everyone uses it 4% of the time, then still, you get an average of 1.25, which is fine.
If you bought a link that gives you a full 2.5Mbps guaranteed 24/7 like an ISP does, then you would be paying a lot more. The only reason your connection is so cheap is because they've bought one of those and are sharing it among many paying customers.
Allowing the police to profit from confiscating property only gives them incentive to manufacture crimes where there are none.
We are seeing this in the UK too. Since the police were able to keep money raised from speeding fines, they now concentrate their efforts on motorists at the expense of fighting other crimes like burglary, street mugging, assault, etc.
Do you really expect that this company would be able to limit the bandwith at the server end, when they can't understand how the users increased their bandwith at the modem end?
I expect that they understand that the users told their equipment to ignore the throttle... Joe Marketing could have just walked into the Tech Department and had that explained in a minute. I reckon what they (and their techs) don't understand yet is how the security measures on the client device were circumvented, particularly if they just supply their users with "black boxes" with two ports, one for the PC and another for the wall socket.
A "console application" connecting to a server via DOS? I bet his "console application" is a telnet client
The older it is, the lower the probability that it uses TCP/IP. There were and are plenty of other protocols that were in common use back in the day, especially for an application on slow hardware with a slow connection, which wouldn't cope with the overheads of TCP/IP.
Roads do not benefit everyone; they only benefit motorists (that is, those who own cars). Public transit, on the other hand, benefit everyone, especially motorists, either if they leave their car and take transit, or simply by REMOVING CARS FROM THE STREET by providing an alternative.
Let me ask you a question: do you shop? Do you buy, say, groceries? At all? And how do you suppose they got to the store? On a tram?
You are wholly reliant on the roads and you don't even know it.
Like multiple desktops and mouse focus, you mean? Or a multi-user system, for that matter?
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but Linux wasn't the first OS to have those features... in fact if anything, Linux copied them from other Unix implementations, many of them commercial.
Not the most popular truth around here is that there's not much in Linux that wasn't done elsewhere before.
I believe you've misunderstood the article. This isn't about Microsoft publishing specs to their.DOC format (which Kotar-Kotelly's Final Decree requires them to do) but rather their unwillingness to participate in the creation in a new format that will be the doom of Microsoft Word.
Will it? StarOffice isn't a replacement for MS Office by any means. Seriously, even the word processor isn't feature-competitive, nor performance-competitive, with Word, let alone Excel, Visio, Powerpoint, etc. All they are is cheaper up-front compared with Word's list price, and if you're buying several hundred seats or getting it bundled you won't be paying that anyway.
Let me ask you a hypothetical question, then... say I'm running windows 2000. Fresh installation, no weird third-party software installed. I pop open Task Manager and ponder a number of mysteriously-named standard system processes, call them foo32 and bar1337. Where do I go to read about these? How do I un-confuse myself, iow. On any decent unix, I have apropos and man... what is the equivalent on windows?
Well, I just looked in Task Manager, and I saw lsass.exe, and I'd no idea what that was. So I found it in \windows\system32, right clicked, and the properties dialog said it was the "LSA Shell", whatever that is. So I went here and typed it in, and got this.
Yeah, it isn't the most intuitive process in the world, but then again, neither is typing man instead of help:-)
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products.
Indeed and it goes both ways. For example the open source community have been imitating features from commercial software for years - GIMP and Photoshop, KDE and CDE, ext3 and XFS, Mesa and OpenGL, OpenOffice and MS Office etc, etc. It's hardly fair to criticize a commercial entity for studying BSD. Or are the/. editors just bitter because Microsoft hasn't found anything worth incorporating from Linux?
If W2000 is so fast and efficient why can't I run it on a P133 with 24MB of RAM like I can Linux?
If you want to be taken seriously, you have to compare like with like. For example, compare Windows 2000's hardware requirements to that of the complete KDE 2.
Because you can run MS-DOS on a 286 but you can't run even the earliest Linux on a 286, does that make MS-DOS a better operating system? No, of course not.
The point of Unix is not the shell. The point of Unix is the kernel, the lack of a registry and the level of transparency when it comes to services/daemons.
Umm, yeah. Back in the day, the original Unix developers though "Hey! Let's write an operating system without a registry!". NOT. As for transparency, it's all a matter with what you are familiar with. I've just look at a ps -ef on my Octane and there are at least half a dozen daemons running that I'd have to look at the docs to work out what they were - and I've been using Unix for over a decade. If you only knew Unix and you looked at Windows Task Manager, of course you'd be confused, and vice versa.
Oh, and Windows has a kernel too, btw.
Unix is better for some things, Windows is better for others. As I've said many times, a skilled engineer has many tools in his toolbox and knows how to use them all, and how to pick the right one for the job at hand.
Hell I though people around here would see the logic in all this, but guess there are to many bleeding heart liberals around here.....
You are mistaken - arguing that jobs should be protected no matter what is happening in the economy, and regardless of whether the worker has kept their skills current is a socialist position, not a capitalist one. All the people criticizing you are real capitalists, and you are the "bleeding heart".
Protecting jobs at home in the US is good for a few employees, but it's bad for the people who buy those employees services. It's like the steel tarriffs: good for American steelworkers, bad for American autoworkers who have to buy expensive domestic steel instead of cheap foreign steel, and bad for American drivers, who have to pay for it all.
I think there are many reasons Salon is failing: too much overhead, lack of a print version, content too stagnant for the medium(NET). But the real nail in the coffin is their far-left reporting/editorial. The Fray is great, but if you are going to post a bunch of baseless rhetoric to get readers fired up you had better have a convenient method for opposing views to reply.
You are exactly right, that's the main reason I stopped reading Salon just after they launched their subscription programme. I enjoy exposure to ideas that are in conflict with my own, but only if as you say there is an avenue for real debate and opposing views to be put. When they started to run into financial problems, I thought huh, maybe the Democrats can bail you out, 'cos I sure as hell won't be subsidizing you to attack my beliefs.
Who the heck is going to pay for artsy films, if not for studios who want to prove that they have some taste, after all?
The hard, cold truth is that if the market can't or won't support them being made, then they shouldn't be made at all. Either the fans are willing to pay a ticket price that reflects the smaller audience, or they aren't. Either way, it is ridiculous to suggest that fans of mainstream films should subsidise productions that they will gain no enjoyment from themselves.
"Corporations are like cockroaches. They'll survive everything,"
Says the man who has grown extraordinarily wealthy through nothing but marketing hype. From releasing a slightly different Star Wars Special Edition every christmas to designing the new trilogy from scratch for the maximum possible merchandising opportunities, George Lucas is the epitome of what corporations do to exploit the public. He is hardly in a position to criticize anyone. Sure, he once had some artistic integrity, but he sold out the moment that he realized he could put Star Wars on hamburgers, lunchboxes, pencils, toys, you name it.
True. The more relevant question would be: is AIX worth the bother of maintaining and porting? What value does IBM derive from that R&D expenditure. Does any of that serve to distinguish IBM from it's rivals in the marketplace?
IBM (and Sun and SGI) are hardware companies, so you might think that they would prefer a common OS and to compete on hardware. But that strategy has been shown to be disasterous for HP, Gateway, Compaq and even IBM themselves in the PC market. All these companies use their OS to position their hardware and leverage its capabilities to their target market.
Even today, the Linux community are working on the questions "how do we make a free Unix?", and the answer is of course Linux. But from day 1, IBM thought "how do we facilitate people running their data processing applications on our hardware?" and their answer was AIX. Sun thought "how do we facilitate people running their network applications on our hardware?" and their answer was Solaris.
So there is a lot of stuff in proprietary Unix implementations that adds value to them. I don't think anyone (not even IBM) seriously thinks Linux will ever replace AIX, but it does represent an avenue for them to penetrate back into the low-end space. (If you recall, IBM got their asses handed to them on a plate in the commodity x86 marketplace by Compaq and others). SGI have, for whatever reason, decided to make an Intel-based mainframe, and Linux is the way they can do that... but absolutely the last thing they can do is give away any IP that IBM could use to bolster its own Linux offering at their expense.
Slashdot Mirror
It it a Civil war thingy? Space epic? A Harry Potter ripoff?
Imagine if the British and Spanish empires had endured 'til the 23rd century and were fighting in starships instead of sailing ships, and you're close. Except the Spanish are a lot like the Soviet Empire, and no-one really has control of the Americas. Earth itself doesn't really feature. Honor herself starts out like Hornblower, then becomes like Nelson. In every book it's touch-and-go for a while, but eventually the Spanish get their asses handed to them on a plate, just like that time they sent an Armada over. Rule Britannia!
Are you saying that this concept somehow eludes anyone over, say, the age of 5?
It certainly eluded every CEO of every dotcom, and all their investors. It continues to elude everyone who thinks that a viable business can be built by giving the product away for free.
As for the rest of it, I guess I had just not made the logical jump to "pirate" from "storing episodes on your hard drive". I store photos that I have taken, music that I have purchased, and video I have recorded on my hard drive.
The important thing is not the media that it is stored on. If you own bought copies, then you've done your part to support the show. Pat yourself on the back. However, anyone who has a copy on their HD that they didn't pay for has no business complaining if the show is cancelled.
I second the opinion that you must be some sort of entertainment industry hardliner.
Not really. I just understand that even if a thing can be reproduced for near-zero cost, it doesn't necessarily follow that it can be originally created for near-zero cost. FarScape, like any other product, cost money to produce, and it's being axed because the investors could not recoup their money from selling the product. Any true fan of the show, who really wants it to continue, would be willing to support it by contributing to the cost of production by buying it as a product.
People who "pirate" it are literally hurting themselves; the studio will just go on to make another programme and make their money that way, so long as they are making and getting paid for something, that's all they really care about. Perhaps they'll steer clear of genres that attract a tech-savvy fanbase, even. There are far more scripts in existance than there are shows that get made.
Remember that a studio accountant couldn't care less about the "story arc" or the "character development". A show is like a black box to them, with input and output. If more money comes out than goes in, make another series, if not, cancel it.
Unfortunately the characters suffer in WoH. The bad guy Manties (and peep) are just too easy to hate. It's almost as it they wore big black moustaches, black cloaks,top hats and were tying young heiresses onto railway tracks.
The thing I most liked about the Honor Harrington series is that altho' it is "space opera", Weber takes the time to do the orbital mechanics involved. Fighting a battle in space is a lot like playing chess: everyone involved has a perfect view of the board, and decisions often have to be made well in advance of their implications actually playing a part in the battle. You have to think, I'll accelerate now, because in 6 hrs, I might have to do something else. In the Honor Harrington books, no-one ever pulls a Star Trek-style technobabble solution out of their asses and no-one ever ignores an inconvenient law of physics. These things are merely crutches for weak writers, so respect to Weber for creating as much realism as possible within the genre.
with these many people willing to strongly support it, it makes one wonder why the show is in danger of being cancelled in the first place
/. for Linux ports of games, but at the end of the day, everyone bought the Windows version and dual-booted, so the company went bust.
Let me draw you an analogy. There are (or were) lots of companies trying to make Linux products. The problem was that although many people love Linux, a very small minority are willing to actually pay for it. Like that games company whose name escapes me just now... there was a lot of clamour on
There's a poster in this topic who says he has 13G of FarScape on his HD, that's how much he loves it. Umm, no, if he loved it he would have bought the DVDs. People like him in fact killed the show.
(FWIW, I thought FarScape was utter rubbish, but I have plenty of channels so I am counting myself as a neutral observer here).
WTF are you getting those numbers? 2.5Mbps cable line here in NS, Canada is $40CND/month ($25US). Perhaps the real problem is that the people with the keys to the onramp are being a little to stingy in the US?
If you're referring to a cable or DSL service, then that's a theoretical peak speed. You see, a DSL provider has a contention ratio, usually 50:1 for users to bandwidth, which means you are actually sharing that 2.5Mbps with 50 other users.
If you have a typical network utilization profile (email, some web surfing, the occasional download) then your access is very sporadic. So long as everyone only actually accesses the network 2% of the time (quite reasonable, after all it takes time to read a web page, and you probably won't be using the connection very heavily during working hours because you're at work or at night because you're busy partying/asleep) then everyone gets their 2.5. And if everyone uses it 4% of the time, then still, you get an average of 1.25, which is fine.
If you bought a link that gives you a full 2.5Mbps guaranteed 24/7 like an ISP does, then you would be paying a lot more. The only reason your connection is so cheap is because they've bought one of those and are sharing it among many paying customers.
Allowing the police to profit from confiscating property only gives them incentive to manufacture crimes where there are none.
We are seeing this in the UK too. Since the police were able to keep money raised from speeding fines, they now concentrate their efforts on motorists at the expense of fighting other crimes like burglary, street mugging, assault, etc.
Do you really expect that this company would be able to limit the bandwith at the server end, when they can't understand how the users increased their bandwith at the modem end?
I expect that they understand that the users told their equipment to ignore the throttle... Joe Marketing could have just walked into the Tech Department and had that explained in a minute. I reckon what they (and their techs) don't understand yet is how the security measures on the client device were circumvented, particularly if they just supply their users with "black boxes" with two ports, one for the PC and another for the wall socket.
A "console application" connecting to a server via DOS? I bet his "console application" is a telnet client
The older it is, the lower the probability that it uses TCP/IP. There were and are plenty of other protocols that were in common use back in the day, especially for an application on slow hardware with a slow connection, which wouldn't cope with the overheads of TCP/IP.
Roads do not benefit everyone; they only benefit motorists (that is, those who own cars). Public transit, on the other hand, benefit everyone, especially motorists, either if they leave their car and take transit, or simply by REMOVING CARS FROM THE STREET by providing an alternative.
Let me ask you a question: do you shop? Do you buy, say, groceries? At all? And how do you suppose they got to the store? On a tram?
You are wholly reliant on the roads and you don't even know it.
Like multiple desktops and mouse focus, you mean? Or a multi-user system, for that matter?
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but Linux wasn't the first OS to have those features... in fact if anything, Linux copied them from other Unix implementations, many of them commercial.
Not the most popular truth around here is that there's not much in Linux that wasn't done elsewhere before.
I believe you've misunderstood the article. This isn't about Microsoft publishing specs to their .DOC format (which Kotar-Kotelly's Final Decree requires them to do) but rather their unwillingness to participate in the creation in a new format that will be the doom of Microsoft Word.
Will it? StarOffice isn't a replacement for MS Office by any means. Seriously, even the word processor isn't feature-competitive, nor performance-competitive, with Word, let alone Excel, Visio, Powerpoint, etc. All they are is cheaper up-front compared with Word's list price, and if you're buying several hundred seats or getting it bundled you won't be paying that anyway.
Let me ask you a hypothetical question, then ... say I'm running windows 2000. Fresh installation, no weird third-party software installed. I pop open Task Manager and ponder a number of mysteriously-named standard system processes, call them foo32 and bar1337. Where do I go to read about these? How do I un-confuse myself, iow. On any decent unix, I have apropos and man ... what is the equivalent on windows?
:-)
Well, I just looked in Task Manager, and I saw lsass.exe, and I'd no idea what that was. So I found it in \windows\system32, right clicked, and the properties dialog said it was the "LSA Shell", whatever that is. So I went here and typed it in, and got this.
Yeah, it isn't the most intuitive process in the world, but then again, neither is typing man instead of help
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products.
/. editors just bitter because Microsoft hasn't found anything worth incorporating from Linux?
Indeed and it goes both ways. For example the open source community have been imitating features from commercial software for years - GIMP and Photoshop, KDE and CDE, ext3 and XFS, Mesa and OpenGL, OpenOffice and MS Office etc, etc. It's hardly fair to criticize a commercial entity for studying BSD. Or are the
If W2000 is so fast and efficient why can't I run it on a P133 with 24MB of RAM like I can Linux?
If you want to be taken seriously, you have to compare like with like. For example, compare Windows 2000's hardware requirements to that of the complete KDE 2.
Because you can run MS-DOS on a 286 but you can't run even the earliest Linux on a 286, does that make MS-DOS a better operating system? No, of course not.
Windows 2000 provides much better throughput than UNIX.
/. headline? Figures.
Windows 2000 provides slightly better performance than UNIX.
So what the article actually says is the exact opposite of the
They have been immune from market pressures since at least 1987.
Yes, that's why we're all accessing the Internet via MSN, and MS Bob is on every desktop.
Microsoft are big, but they are as subject to market forces as any other company.
The point of Unix is not the shell. The point of Unix is the kernel, the lack of a registry and the level of transparency when it comes to services/daemons.
Umm, yeah. Back in the day, the original Unix developers though "Hey! Let's write an operating system without a registry!". NOT. As for transparency, it's all a matter with what you are familiar with. I've just look at a ps -ef on my Octane and there are at least half a dozen daemons running that I'd have to look at the docs to work out what they were - and I've been using Unix for over a decade. If you only knew Unix and you looked at Windows Task Manager, of course you'd be confused, and vice versa.
Oh, and Windows has a kernel too, btw.
Unix is better for some things, Windows is better for others. As I've said many times, a skilled engineer has many tools in his toolbox and knows how to use them all, and how to pick the right one for the job at hand.
// Fixed a bug (Bob - Marketing Department)
return true;
Surely you mean:
REM FIXED A BUGG
REM BY BOB FROM MARKETTING (HI MOM!!!!)
GOTO 10
Hell I though people around here would see the logic in all this, but guess there are to many bleeding heart liberals around here.....
You are mistaken - arguing that jobs should be protected no matter what is happening in the economy, and regardless of whether the worker has kept their skills current is a socialist position, not a capitalist one. All the people criticizing you are real capitalists, and you are the "bleeding heart".
Protecting jobs at home in the US is good for a few employees, but it's bad for the people who buy those employees services. It's like the steel tarriffs: good for American steelworkers, bad for American autoworkers who have to buy expensive domestic steel instead of cheap foreign steel, and bad for American drivers, who have to pay for it all.
I think there are many reasons Salon is failing: too much overhead, lack of a print version, content too stagnant for the medium(NET). But the real nail in the coffin is their far-left reporting/editorial. The Fray is great, but if you are going to post a bunch of baseless rhetoric to get readers fired up you had better have a convenient method for opposing views to reply.
You are exactly right, that's the main reason I stopped reading Salon just after they launched their subscription programme. I enjoy exposure to ideas that are in conflict with my own, but only if as you say there is an avenue for real debate and opposing views to be put. When they started to run into financial problems, I thought huh, maybe the Democrats can bail you out, 'cos I sure as hell won't be subsidizing you to attack my beliefs.
Probably because Fox is owned by News corporation, for most intents and purposes Fox is News corporation. Its just a title, its really the same job
:-)
Yes, that's why they have that show, Fox News
Who the heck is going to pay for artsy films, if not for studios who want to prove that they have some taste, after all?
The hard, cold truth is that if the market can't or won't support them being made, then they shouldn't be made at all. Either the fans are willing to pay a ticket price that reflects the smaller audience, or they aren't. Either way, it is ridiculous to suggest that fans of mainstream films should subsidise productions that they will gain no enjoyment from themselves.
"Corporations are like cockroaches. They'll survive everything,"
Says the man who has grown extraordinarily wealthy through nothing but marketing hype. From releasing a slightly different Star Wars Special Edition every christmas to designing the new trilogy from scratch for the maximum possible merchandising opportunities, George Lucas is the epitome of what corporations do to exploit the public. He is hardly in a position to criticize anyone. Sure, he once had some artistic integrity, but he sold out the moment that he realized he could put Star Wars on hamburgers, lunchboxes, pencils, toys, you name it.
True. The more relevant question would be: is AIX worth the bother of maintaining and porting? What value does IBM derive from that R&D expenditure. Does any of that serve to distinguish IBM from it's rivals in the marketplace?
IBM (and Sun and SGI) are hardware companies, so you might think that they would prefer a common OS and to compete on hardware. But that strategy has been shown to be disasterous for HP, Gateway, Compaq and even IBM themselves in the PC market. All these companies use their OS to position their hardware and leverage its capabilities to their target market.
Even today, the Linux community are working on the questions "how do we make a free Unix?", and the answer is of course Linux. But from day 1, IBM thought "how do we facilitate people running their data processing applications on our hardware?" and their answer was AIX. Sun thought "how do we facilitate people running their network applications on our hardware?" and their answer was Solaris.
So there is a lot of stuff in proprietary Unix implementations that adds value to them. I don't think anyone (not even IBM) seriously thinks Linux will ever replace AIX, but it does represent an avenue for them to penetrate back into the low-end space. (If you recall, IBM got their asses handed to them on a plate in the commodity x86 marketplace by Compaq and others). SGI have, for whatever reason, decided to make an Intel-based mainframe, and Linux is the way they can do that... but absolutely the last thing they can do is give away any IP that IBM could use to bolster its own Linux offering at their expense.