Let me put it like this; suppose you have a sphere, and in orbit around that sphere at 1 lightyear in a perfect circle, centered on the sphere, there is a lamp pointed at it. At any time, you'd expect the lamp's light to reach one half of the sphere; the far side of the sphere won't be illuminated, but the front is. As the lamp starts moving, you'll see the light creep across the globe, the "far side" is relative to where the lamp was to begin with. Now, at near-c speeds, the position of the "far side" lags w.r.t the position of the lamp, but still, there can be only one "far side", as each photon that hits the sphere was emitted a year ago by the lamp. If both sides were illuminated, the lamp would have to have been on both sides a year ago! If no sides are illuminated, the lamp would have to have been nowhere at all! Only if the lamp is travelling in orbit at, say, 1 revolution per second, and it's emitting photons at a rate of 1 photon per 2 seconds would you have momentary lapses of both-side darkness. (Likewise for overlapping shadows).
If you entertain a perfect sphere as "the wall", being twice as big in circumference than the orbit of the lamp, again centered on the illuminated sphere, and the lamp was moving at c, then the shadow on the wall would appear to move at 2c, which is just the lever effect; the shadow appears to traverse the wall, which has double the circumference of the orbit, and the lamp is moving about its orbit at c. That just means that 360 degrees on the wall are farther apart, but since the photons never move *along* the wall, they only slam into it from different angles, there's no speed of light being broken.
Work it out for yourself. Unfortunately, though experiments tend to go wrong if you're not thinking right.
The shadow doesn't move. A shadow is the absence of light being reflected from a wall. You wouldn't see "a shadow that was cast in the past". You're always seeing (the lack of) light that was emitted in the past. Think of rays of light just like you would of a "beam" of water being squirted from a supersoaker watery-squirty-gun device, but in zero gravity. And in slowmotion if it helps.
The only problem would be authenticating the SIM cards, since you "can't" extract the shared secret key from them; the home network is always the one that authenticates SIMs - using challenge response - during normal roaming.
You could try your luck with restricting/allowing access on the basis of IMEI number though (though IMEIs are famously spoofable, much like MAC adresses).
However, the titles MS is offering leaves much to be desired.
It could be worse (or rather; more humorous). My friendly local cable internet company had an offer where you'd rent a bundle of games for a nominal fee.
One of the star titles on offer was America's Army. Ah-yup.
900 is unlicensed in the US for certain uses, which do not include GSM. Unlicensed only means that the end-user doesn't need to get an FCC license (and learn morse-code!), but the equipment and use still has to comply with FCC rules. Check here.
Long answer: The main restriction here is the use of restricted frequencies, and some "minor" technical hurdles.
while it's perfectly OK for you, as a lone individual, or a company, to operate a GSM handset, operating a base-station is another thing. First, you'd have to get your greedy paws on a basestation, then you'd have to make your own SIM cards (hijacking calls that should be on the regular operator's network is highly illegal (DMCA); there's all sorts of (broken) encryption going on), and you'd have to outfit phones with 2 SIM cards, switching from your own network to the other (which entails switching the phone off and on again) every time you enter or leave the building. (This is doable, but annoying).
Now, assuming you don't want the legal hassles of paying for multi-million dollar cell network licenses, you could operate a "pirate" basestation on some frequencies that aren't used too much where you're at (you'd have to measure it through first).
In other words; you're better off investing in a handset that does both GSM and DECT(or whatever you use for domestic wireless phones in the US) or even both GSM and WiFi. There aren't many of those (though BritishTelecom has announced their model), but there should be some out there.
Great news! This mean my co-workers can now chat about WoW incessantly during work AND play a version of Wow during lunch break, so they won't run out of things to say to each other in the afternoon! They'll never have to leave their fantasy world at all!
A 128 bithash, has got a lot of possible values. 2 to the power of 128 values. Which is estimated to be a bit more than there are atoms in the universe. So the lack of possible permutations is not a problem (otherwise you could just take a larger hash), there are just weaknesses in the algorithm.
Detecting minute differences, like the ones between twins, is EXACTLY what hashes should do. The minute differences between a check in the amount of $100 or a check in the amount of $1000, for example. They both start out as the same sort of thing, but the environment adds information that you want to authenticate.
This is not really a philosophical issue, it's a numbers game.
It's a not very well known feature that windows XP (when run on a windows server 2003 active directory) can have Software Restriction Policies, which check executables MD5 hash or digital signature, so only 'blessed' (by IT) applications can run. (This alone is a good reason to want to have 2003 servers, though it's just a bunch of bits that are set in a policy/registry hive, so it's a bit OTT to purchase an entire OS for it, since it's wholly interpreted client side)
This should really be extended, besides execute permissions, to permissions to access the network, hard drive paths, run as a particular user (automatic "run as" some guest user for unblessed apps), etc. etc. With plenty of default settings and grouping of apps of course.
In the case of something like ZOTOB, this means that even if a firewalled machine became infected (because vulnerable Windows components had been granted network permissions), the worm wouldn't be able to spread from that firewalled machine. The software firewall would show a popup window saying something like "ZOTOB.EXE is attempting to access the network. Allow it?" Even a minimally-clued user could take the opportunity to Google "ZOTOB.EXE" and decide to click "No!"
Doesn't help if, like zotob.G, the critter is called "WinDrg32", or like Mytob "LSASS", or even "iexplore.exe" or "explorer.exe".
Yes gzip can compress. Count the number of pages that use this. Not enough. Sadly, quite few. Could more apps do this? Sure. But we don't.
Sadly, netcraft doesn't keep stats on this. They should. Mod_gzip/mod__deflate and "http compression" aren't on by default in apache and IIS, which is a shame. Also, gzip support in the squid proxy is an add-on.
Could we compress non-English fonts? You bet. Just because there's an extra 'bit' used to do things causes little compression pain. Extend that to the tough or tokenized characters sets and you still buy lots of bandwidth back.
Unicode isn't (primarily) about fonts. Browsers aren't fetching.ttf files, are they. (Actually, UTF-8 is a kind of compression-code to begin with, seeing as how non-common codepoints require more bytes than common ones - though if your page is in Chinese another encoding will be more benificial, size-wise; still I'd say go with one of the UTFs). Please do not ever again suggest using 7-bit or 8-bit encodings exclusively, in order to save on size. That's like saying 2 digits will suffice to encode the year. If you're going to go and say things like that, please invent a timemachine and go back to 1975.
When we get into MPEG codecs, you can get pretty lossy without pixelation, but again, it's not a zoned compression (zoned meaning that content like a face receives no compression while the pretty hillside in the background gets pounded by it, but your eyes focus on the human face where discernablity is needed).
MPEG already compresses out-of-focus backgrounds better than in-focus-foregrounds, because out-of-focus images leave less information in the discrete cosine transform. Also, the foreground is more likely to change, which motion detection will pick up on, so static content won't get as many bits of the stream to update its content. Still, go ahead and use H.264 if you want. The bleeding edge GPUs from ATI have it built-in.
You must not be in the same Europe that I am, my cellular coverage sucks! I don't get service in my apartment, hell, I didn't get coverage in large parts of Nuremberg. Last time I checked that was a major city. Meanwhile, while I was in the US, I was out in some pretty remote areas and still had cell phone coverage, it just depends on your carrier(I used Verizon).
When were you in Germany? It must have been a while back, as these days Eastern Germany is no longer Communist, and as a result they have more than one carrier (shock, horror). E-plus, O2, T-mobile and Vodafone. coverage maps. BTW, remote areas usually have a lot less concrete in them than inner cities, so you're bound to have better coverage for an equal amount of base stations.
And unlike in the US, they all use GSM, so you can use the same phone on any network, just switch out a SIM. T-mobile and Vodafone will have the best coverage, but are also the most expensive options.
Not to friggin' mention that it cost me 5x as much to call a cell phone in Germany FROM MY HOME PHONE than it is for me to call the US.
Which only goes to show that the tightly regulated local loop monopoly is forced by regulators to compete better than the mobile networks with their oligopoly. Yay for regulation. Of which the US is surely a shining example (NOT).
This reality distortion field with cell phones has got to end. You can claim that it works all over Europe, but the truth is it doesn't. Coverage here is as spotty as it is in the US. Given the choice, I would take the US system over the European one in a heartbeat.
Dude, WTF does what insurance I have have to do with what price they charge me for something?
If I have insurance, that's between me an my insurer, not me, the insurer and the watchmaker.
Some plans will refund the entire cost, some only in part. End-result; different amount of money out-of-pocket to the end-user (since you'd have paid the insurance premiums anyway).
Some plans (e.g. in the US: HMOs) don't refund your costs, but give you a certain level of healthcare; some of which will be fully covered, some of which you'll be billed for additional to your premiums.
Some insurers may, as a service, buy stuff like this in bulk, acting as a wholesaler on their clients' behalves, passing along the savings (or a part thereof). (Also, some big HMOs will get discounts from the manufacturer).
Some countries (you're not alone in the world) will have different regulatory regimes, increasing the price (more testing to be done due to stricter rules; restricting the demand by allowing it only for certain conditions, exclusion from basic plans) or decreasing it (subsidies, more relaxed testing compared to FDA allowing it to be marketed abroad earlier than in the US, broader allowed prescriptions, mandatory price-caps).
Have you ever bought health insurance? Have you read the booklet with all the terms and conditions, the schedules of what they do and donot refund, hospitals and doctors that are contracted, etc? You should.
- This is all seven bit stuff, every single line of it, yet we use no basic compression on the Internet to send pages, because somehow, that would be evil.
As the other poster pointed out; mod_gzip. As I will point out: 7-bit?? Are you mad? There are people out here who speak languages that have such subtleties as accented letters! Or even entirely different scripts, like Arabic. Use UTF-8 by default.
Most codecs produce lousy compression and very lossy, too
Then use H.264. Go on. You'll need to buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card. But it's small!
Why are you expecting "your leaders" to provide you with Internet access? Is there anything wrong with you, that you must depend on the government?
Yeah. Just lay down your own community owned fiber over publicly owned land and see how little you have to do with the government. Or use a wireless link, that way the FCC can't get to you?
Ever wonder why people are more willing to buy a product at $99.99 rather than $100.00(or why things are always 39.99 or 19.99 rather than adding a penny?) $99.99 is cheaper than $100, only by a cent, but to the regular consumer, it looks much cheaper, even though it's only 1c.
They're not, because it isn't and it doesn't. You see, somewhere in the 1950s, about two weeks after every store started "rounding down" prices to.99 everyone rolled their eyes and started ignoring this marketing "ploy" - if it can even be called that.
How often does someone tell you "I bought this new gadget, and it was only 99.99" or "It was just under 100 dollars"? Never, that's when. They'll be like "Check this shizzle, I dropped a c-note on it." and you'd be all "Word".
The fact that so many prices still end in ".99" and ".95" is a testiment to the foolhardy persistent of advertising folk.
Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders. Supercomputers are super due to a heck of a lot of CPUs all working on different parts of a problem that can be broken into chunks. How exactly do you break a series of operations that depend on the priors into chunks for a supercomputer to rip through?
Use the BBP Formula. Pifast is just a benchark, like all benchmarks it's rather silly. The record is for PCs, the top 500 supercomputers are benchmarked using another silly benchmark (LINPACK).
Or forget about all that artificial intelligence, and instead of spending precious programmer time and money on it, let your players pay you for the privilege of taking on other (paying!) customers online!
Yeah, I figured it out from the context, too, but it's still clearly a neologism.
Unlike "World Wide Web" itself, which was in use as early as William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream;
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin, Weed wide web enough to wrap a fairy in: And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes, And make her full of hateful fantasies.
As I assume you know, the "free" comment refers to the support/maint cost of linux, and not the actual purchase price of the software.
Oh give it up. I suppose you want a pony too? Well tough luck, even if I gave you a pony, you'd still have to feed it and take care of it. So you'll just have to suck up and make do with the freely modifiable, open standards based, non-vendor-locked-in, free-as-in-beer linux kernel and associated operating system, utilities, office suites and other freebies thrown in. Feel free to go sit in a corner and pout if you want. Then go and call SCOX to give you some free software, free support, and a pony. I doubt they'll come through, given that they already want to charge you $699 for something that's free.
Was it not a wise man who said "O tempora, O mores"? (Cicero 106 - 43 BC, though obviously he didn't take that long to say it, the one with the stutter was that I, Claudius dude)
Slashdot Mirror
Computers are for serious work.
You elitist snob - my computer is for whatever I choose to use it for, and I'll not have anyone tell me different.
Ok ok, let me rephrase that on behalve of the grand-parent poster; computers are for serious work AND porn.
A camera set on negative? *frowns*
Let me put it like this; suppose you have a sphere, and in orbit around that sphere at 1 lightyear in a perfect circle, centered on the sphere, there is a lamp pointed at it. At any time, you'd expect the lamp's light to reach one half of the sphere; the far side of the sphere won't be illuminated, but the front is. As the lamp starts moving, you'll see the light creep across the globe, the "far side" is relative to where the lamp was to begin with. Now, at near-c speeds, the position of the "far side" lags w.r.t the position of the lamp, but still, there can be only one "far side", as each photon that hits the sphere was emitted a year ago by the lamp. If both sides were illuminated, the lamp would have to have been on both sides a year ago! If no sides are illuminated, the lamp would have to have been nowhere at all! Only if the lamp is travelling in orbit at, say, 1 revolution per second, and it's emitting photons at a rate of 1 photon per 2 seconds would you have momentary lapses of both-side darkness. (Likewise for overlapping shadows).
If you entertain a perfect sphere as "the wall", being twice as big in circumference than the orbit of the lamp, again centered on the illuminated sphere, and the lamp was moving at c, then the shadow on the wall would appear to move at 2c, which is just the lever effect; the shadow appears to traverse the wall, which has double the circumference of the orbit, and the lamp is moving about its orbit at c. That just means that 360 degrees on the wall are farther apart, but since the photons never move *along* the wall, they only slam into it from different angles, there's no speed of light being broken.
Work it out for yourself. Unfortunately, though experiments tend to go wrong if you're not thinking right.
The shadow doesn't move. A shadow is the absence of light being reflected from a wall. You wouldn't see "a shadow that was cast in the past". You're always seeing (the lack of) light that was emitted in the past. Think of rays of light just like you would of a "beam" of water being squirted from a supersoaker watery-squirty-gun device, but in zero gravity. And in slowmotion if it helps.
The only problem would be authenticating the SIM cards, since you "can't" extract the shared secret key from them; the home network is always the one that authenticates SIMs - using challenge response - during normal roaming.
You could try your luck with restricting/allowing access on the basis of IMEI number though (though IMEIs are famously spoofable, much like MAC adresses).
However, the titles MS is offering leaves much to be desired.
It could be worse (or rather; more humorous). My friendly local cable internet company had an offer where you'd rent a bundle of games for a nominal fee.
One of the star titles on offer was America's Army. Ah-yup.
900 is unlicensed in the US for certain uses, which do not include GSM. Unlicensed only means that the end-user doesn't need to get an FCC license (and learn morse-code!), but the equipment and use still has to comply with FCC rules. Check here.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: The main restriction here is the use of restricted frequencies, and some "minor" technical hurdles.
while it's perfectly OK for you, as a lone individual, or a company, to operate a GSM handset, operating a base-station is another thing. First, you'd have to get your greedy paws on a basestation, then you'd have to make your own SIM cards (hijacking calls that should be on the regular operator's network is highly illegal (DMCA); there's all sorts of (broken) encryption going on), and you'd have to outfit phones with 2 SIM cards, switching from your own network to the other (which entails switching the phone off and on again) every time you enter or leave the building. (This is doable, but annoying).
Now, assuming you don't want the legal hassles of paying for multi-million dollar cell network licenses, you could operate a "pirate" basestation on some frequencies that aren't used too much where you're at (you'd have to measure it through first).
In other words; you're better off investing in a handset that does both GSM and DECT(or whatever you use for domestic wireless phones in the US) or even both GSM and WiFi. There aren't many of those (though BritishTelecom has announced their model), but there should be some out there.
Great news! This mean my co-workers can now chat about WoW incessantly during work AND play a version of Wow during lunch break, so they won't run out of things to say to each other in the afternoon! They'll never have to leave their fantasy world at all!
A 128 bithash, has got a lot of possible values. 2 to the power of 128 values. Which is estimated to be a bit more than there are atoms in the universe. So the lack of possible permutations is not a problem (otherwise you could just take a larger hash), there are just weaknesses in the algorithm.
Detecting minute differences, like the ones between twins, is EXACTLY what hashes should do. The minute differences between a check in the amount of $100 or a check in the amount of $1000, for example. They both start out as the same sort of thing, but the environment adds information that you want to authenticate.
This is not really a philosophical issue, it's a numbers game.
It's a not very well known feature that windows XP (when run on a windows server 2003 active directory) can have Software Restriction Policies, which check executables MD5 hash or digital signature, so only 'blessed' (by IT) applications can run. (This alone is a good reason to want to have 2003 servers, though it's just a bunch of bits that are set in a policy/registry hive, so it's a bit OTT to purchase an entire OS for it, since it's wholly interpreted client side)
This should really be extended, besides execute permissions, to permissions to access the network, hard drive paths, run as a particular user (automatic "run as" some guest user for unblessed apps), etc. etc. With plenty of default settings and grouping of apps of course.
In the case of something like ZOTOB, this means that even if a firewalled machine became infected (because vulnerable Windows components had been granted network permissions), the worm wouldn't be able to spread from that firewalled machine. The software firewall would show a popup window saying something like "ZOTOB.EXE is attempting to access the network. Allow it?" Even a minimally-clued user could take the opportunity to Google "ZOTOB.EXE" and decide to click "No!"
Doesn't help if, like zotob.G, the critter is called "WinDrg32", or like Mytob "LSASS", or even "iexplore.exe" or "explorer.exe".
Yes gzip can compress. Count the number of pages that use this. Not enough. Sadly, quite few. Could more apps do this? Sure. But we don't.
.ttf files, are they. (Actually, UTF-8 is a kind of compression-code to begin with, seeing as how non-common codepoints require more bytes than common ones - though if your page is in Chinese another encoding will be more benificial, size-wise; still I'd say go with one of the UTFs). Please do not ever again suggest using 7-bit or 8-bit encodings exclusively, in order to save on size. That's like saying 2 digits will suffice to encode the year. If you're going to go and say things like that, please invent a timemachine and go back to 1975.
Sadly, netcraft doesn't keep stats on this. They should. Mod_gzip/mod__deflate and "http compression" aren't on by default in apache and IIS, which is a shame. Also, gzip support in the squid proxy is an add-on.
Could we compress non-English fonts? You bet. Just because there's an extra 'bit' used to do things causes little compression pain. Extend that to the tough or tokenized characters sets and you still buy lots of bandwidth back.
Unicode isn't (primarily) about fonts. Browsers aren't fetching
When we get into MPEG codecs, you can get pretty lossy without pixelation, but again, it's not a zoned compression (zoned meaning that content like a face receives no compression while the pretty hillside in the background gets pounded by it, but your eyes focus on the human face where discernablity is needed).
MPEG already compresses out-of-focus backgrounds better than in-focus-foregrounds, because out-of-focus images leave less information in the discrete cosine transform. Also, the foreground is more likely to change, which motion detection will pick up on, so static content won't get as many bits of the stream to update its content. Still, go ahead and use H.264 if you want. The bleeding edge GPUs from ATI have it built-in.
You must not be in the same Europe that I am, my cellular coverage sucks! I don't get service in my apartment, hell, I didn't get coverage in large parts of Nuremberg. Last time I checked that was a major city. Meanwhile, while I was in the US, I was out in some pretty remote areas and still had cell phone coverage, it just depends on your carrier(I used Verizon).
When were you in Germany? It must have been a while back, as these days Eastern Germany is no longer Communist, and as a result they have more than one carrier (shock, horror). E-plus, O2, T-mobile and Vodafone. coverage maps. BTW, remote areas usually have a lot less concrete in them than inner cities, so you're bound to have better coverage for an equal amount of base stations.
And unlike in the US, they all use GSM, so you can use the same phone on any network, just switch out a SIM. T-mobile and Vodafone will have the best coverage, but are also the most expensive options.
Not to friggin' mention that it cost me 5x as much to call a cell phone in Germany FROM MY HOME PHONE than it is for me to call the US.
Which only goes to show that the tightly regulated local loop monopoly is forced by regulators to compete better than the mobile networks with their oligopoly. Yay for regulation. Of which the US is surely a shining example (NOT).
This reality distortion field with cell phones has got to end. You can claim that it works all over Europe, but the truth is it doesn't. Coverage here is as spotty as it is in the US. Given the choice, I would take the US system over the European one in a heartbeat.
Take it, we don't want it.
Dude, WTF does what insurance I have have to do with what price they charge me for something?
If I have insurance, that's between me an my insurer, not me, the insurer and the watchmaker.
Some plans will refund the entire cost, some only in part. End-result; different amount of money out-of-pocket to the end-user (since you'd have paid the insurance premiums anyway).
Some plans (e.g. in the US: HMOs) don't refund your costs, but give you a certain level of healthcare; some of which will be fully covered, some of which you'll be billed for additional to your premiums.
Some insurers may, as a service, buy stuff like this in bulk, acting as a wholesaler on their clients' behalves, passing along the savings (or a part thereof). (Also, some big HMOs will get discounts from the manufacturer).
Some countries (you're not alone in the world) will have different regulatory regimes, increasing the price (more testing to be done due to stricter rules; restricting the demand by allowing it only for certain conditions, exclusion from basic plans) or decreasing it (subsidies, more relaxed testing compared to FDA allowing it to be marketed abroad earlier than in the US, broader allowed prescriptions, mandatory price-caps).
Have you ever bought health insurance? Have you read the booklet with all the terms and conditions, the schedules of what they do and donot refund, hospitals and doctors that are contracted, etc? You should.
- This is all seven bit stuff, every single line of it, yet we use no basic compression on the Internet to send pages, because somehow, that would be evil.
As the other poster pointed out; mod_gzip. As I will point out: 7-bit?? Are you mad? There are people out here who speak languages that have such subtleties as accented letters! Or even entirely different scripts, like Arabic. Use UTF-8 by default.
Most codecs produce lousy compression and very lossy, too
Then use H.264. Go on. You'll need to buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card. But it's small!
Why are you expecting "your leaders" to provide you with Internet access? Is there anything wrong with you, that you must depend on the government?
Yeah. Just lay down your own community owned fiber over publicly owned land and see how little you have to do with the government. Or use a wireless link, that way the FCC can't get to you?
Oh wait. That's what they do, isn't it?
(homer)Hmmm... KFC...(/homer)
... while some guy in Korea murdered another guy over a rare sword that existed only in an MMORPG.
CHINA, not Korea. It happened in SHANGHAI. Geez, do a little research, tens of thousands of people are going to read your submission...
Also he spelled the name Sum Gai wrong..
Ever wonder why people are more willing to buy a product at $99.99 rather than $100.00(or why things are always 39.99 or 19.99 rather than adding a penny?) $99.99 is cheaper than $100, only by a cent, but to the regular consumer, it looks much cheaper, even though it's only 1c.
.99 everyone rolled their eyes and started ignoring this marketing "ploy" - if it can even be called that.
They're not, because it isn't and it doesn't. You see, somewhere in the 1950s, about two weeks after every store started "rounding down" prices to
How often does someone tell you "I bought this new gadget, and it was only 99.99" or "It was just under 100 dollars"? Never, that's when. They'll be like "Check this shizzle, I dropped a c-note on it." and you'd be all "Word".
The fact that so many prices still end in ".99" and ".95" is a testiment to the foolhardy persistent of advertising folk.
But it's been a while since we've had a good/effective worm.
In the virus top-10 7 out of 10 spots are variants of the (self-updating, turning your machine into a spam-zombie) MyTob worm, accounting for 39% of infections (excluding any that the virusscanner can't pick up because MyTob will stop it from updating itself). That's fairly effective. MyTob accepts commands from a channel on IRC (of course) and usually makes your zombie machine send out a lot of spam.
Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders. Supercomputers are super due to a heck of a lot of CPUs all working on different parts of a problem that can be broken into chunks. How exactly do you break a series of operations that depend on the priors into chunks for a supercomputer to rip through?
Use the BBP Formula. Pifast is just a benchark, like all benchmarks it's rather silly. The record is for PCs, the top 500 supercomputers are benchmarked using another silly benchmark (LINPACK).
Or forget about all that artificial intelligence, and instead of spending precious programmer time and money on it, let your players pay you for the privilege of taking on other (paying!) customers online!
Unlike "World Wide Web" itself, which was in use as early as William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream;
As I assume you know, the "free" comment refers to the support/maint cost of linux, and not the actual purchase price of the software.
Oh give it up. I suppose you want a pony too? Well tough luck, even if I gave you a pony, you'd still have to feed it and take care of it. So you'll just have to suck up and make do with the freely modifiable, open standards based, non-vendor-locked-in, free-as-in-beer linux kernel and associated operating system, utilities, office suites and other freebies thrown in. Feel free to go sit in a corner and pout if you want. Then go and call SCOX to give you some free software, free support, and a pony. I doubt they'll come through, given that they already want to charge you $699 for something that's free.
Was it not a wise man who said "O tempora, O mores"? (Cicero 106 - 43 BC, though obviously he didn't take that long to say it, the one with the stutter was that I, Claudius dude)