This is Microsoft. Microsoft sells retail products, but it is also a technology company. When you say customer, that's not the same thing as consumer.
MS core customers are corporate IT departments and computer manufacturers who buy OEM licenses who sell their products to distributors or to end users. DRM does nothing for these constituents other than increase risk and cost. It does let them open a new market at the expense of damaging exisitng customers. MS's core business is worth more than the entire US record industry if you go look at US Department of Commerce industry numbers.
OneNote, Sharepoint Services, and XML file formats are three that come to mind.
Changing file formats from one proprietary format (althought wrapped with convenient XML) to another hardly counts as an improvement. I'm the only person I know that even knows OneNote exists because I use a tablet PC. SharePoint is expensive as hell and requires more servers.
Oh, yeah, you don't get these new features without paying more for them - so one could argue even though it's part of the office product family it's not part of the office product.
Also, is it wrong to cede a market that there's no money in? Are any Microsoft shareholders going to revolt because Microsoft doesn't want to compete for tissue-thin margins on the low end?
There's a big problem when that market will eventually start eating into the commodity level market that your company is totally dependent on for at least half of revenues. And the same technology is already eating into the server business something fierce. The candle is buring on both ends.
You really think the kind of person who only has $250 to spend on a computer is going to learn Linux?
You need to actually use a Linspire box before making this assertion - it's not all that different. You don't need to know linux to log on and surf or write a letter.
WTF is the problem with you americans?!? GREED over ALL? No wonder your lousy country is in such a state.
WTF is wrong with you? This guy went out of his way to hurt someone that was literally helping him by sending traffic. A polite please stop would have ended the issue. Instead the guy goes out and basically damages the other guy's business to the tune of thousands of dollars for doing something that probably had a financial impact of $20 on him and could have helped promote his game.
I'm having a hard time connecting greed to this one.
It just demonstrates the Bush administration's priorities.
I don't think whoever occupied the white house would have made 1 hours difference in the response. This was a failure by the military to take swift action. This was a planning failure by the bureaucrats. And it was largely a total and complete PR failure by Bush.
Here's what gets me: you know how many military facilities have empty barracks and housing within 400 miles of New Orleans? Personally, I'd like to
Like it or not, complex systems like J2EE and Oracle do have what it takes to handle such requirements, which is why they is used in sites like stock exchanges which may need to handle volumes of up to tens of thousands of write transactions per second.
Look - last I looked PHP.net was ranked by alexa in the top 500 sites on the net. You really need to go there, perhaps zope.org (you will be amazed at the number of media sites running zope to power newspapers and TV stations all of which are huge traffic) and then take a look at netcraft. You'll start to get a sense that the LAMP stack is fairly popular. Hell, last I looked a good number of the top 20,000 websites on the net used Invision Power Board(a LAMP applications).
The absense of one layer of the stack doesn't make any point in particular as most open source based websites are going to be built fairly pragmatically. If you have huge traffic, you use a load ballancer and multiple servers. If you have huge data needs, then you tear out the MySQL and maybe move up to Postgress or a commercial database. You start with LAMP, then as you grow you port and adapt as needed. Sometimes you do part with LAMP and part with something else... that's the beauty of the platform - it's flexible compatible and fairly fast.
You are right that if you are running a stock exchange you probably want something like oracle simply so you can sue someone if it blows up in total. Your are wrong to apply some standard that says only applications that write large numbers of transactions matter. Websites and applications are more likely to be used in a read mode by the user anyway. Regardless, I suppose you thinkg that some of the CMS, forum software and ad servers out there don't do any writing...
As far as switching to LAMP goes, you don't just tear out legacy systems on a lark because PHP is newer and shinier that whatever.
Your use of help wanted ads to prove your point is still possibly the least useful evidence I've seen since I started reading Slashdot.
Go ask Google, Skype, Symantec, Apple, the local Linux guy, all of which benefit immensely from Microsoft not getting it until it's too late.
I used to work for a company that had a mini MS complex: we thought everyone in IT industry services sector or reseller channel was a competition. The result: we fought a war on 900 fronts and could not bring critical resources to bear on our real competitors (other national mega resellers). Eventually, we were spending more money on trying to out-market and out business develop inconsequential competitors and our sales guys were losing sales because we were not able to deliver hardware on time to customers.
Right now, MS is showing signs of what I saw at Inacom:
* Changes and delays with their OS product. * Development of huge initiatives that business partners want and customers don't want like DRM and trusted computing * Not adapting to changing business models - open source for example. * Ability to market, but not deliver - like the MSN search that was going to be more accurate, etc... * Competing against yourself - AXAPTA, NAVISION, GreatPlains... how many competing and overlapping ERP/CRM packages do you need? * When was the last time there was a major real change in office, anyway? * Oh, and ceeding the entire low end of the computer industry to Linspire and linux (when was the last time you saw a new windowsXP computer for $250)?
If you have 1/2 a brain you find a way to benefit by fuddruckers linking to you. Put up a redirect to your page with google ads or something where you can profit. Instead what this asshat did was do something that will damage fuddrucker's business in a way that cost fuddruckers $1000's in free meals and create a publicity storm for them. Whatever the bandwith costs (and it won't be much given you can get a metric ton of bandwith for $100 anymore) it will pale in comparison to the damage done to Fuddruckers.
Reminds me of the sales guy that worked for me thought because we held up reimbursing $1,500 in expenses until we got his laptop and cell phone back he somehow had the right to piss on said cell phone and laptop, bag and box it and send it in. Instead of getting his $1,500 reimbursement, he got a bill for $2280 (value of laptop & cell phone minus his $1500).
Before you do something mallicious, understand that you don't have a right to retaliate, only a right to defend your self.
I still can't believe how stupid the guy was to make a stink out of getting free pr from someone.
Nothing you've said changes the only assertion I ever made: your original evidence sucked. As I recall you were using positions being hired to make the claim that no one has big LAMP sites.
Of course it makes sense! The companies hire employees to maintain and adapt current software implementations. Job adverts indicate the range of systems and languages that are used in those
You would be right if:
a) Hiring b) were not outsourcing development c) don't have things under control already d) aren't retraining existing staff e) use public recruiting strategies f) don't have other systems that are more important in other languagess.
Can you provide evidence of a really high-volume site that runs primarily on LAMP?
I'm not your personal research assistant. You said something that was based on the worst evidence I've seen in a long time - and got called out. I did give some hints as to where you can find some informaiton. Perhaps you should add PHP.org to the list - I hear it gets a little traffic:)
But of course, there was no organized evacuation. No buses, nothing. People were just told to leave on their own. Some people don't own cars. Or gasoline. They live paycheck to paycheck. Lots of these people rely on government checks that arrive on the first of the month.
What really struck me is how many of the people of New Orleans decided to steal from each other instead of help each other. It's really sad to see people busy stealing watches, camcorders and cadilacs while people are dying around them.
Equally tragic was the response of especially the Army and Air Force - they did not deploy nearly fast enough. Just the presence of troops would have prevented a lot of the carnage.
I love how all the "real" Americans among us are the first to turn on their less fortunate countrymen when a disaster strikes.
I don't think this is the case at all. I think people are sickened by victims of a disaster turning on each other and stealing cars, jewelry, electronics and other luxury items while people are dying that could be as easily saved from the water as the five rolexes they grabbed. One thing is certain: we as a nation need to re-think how we deal with disasters and focus on 1) making sure everyone has food shelter and security 2) helping get people relocated quickly so they can be reunited with their families and get on with the business of living and 3) dealing with those who would rather steal luxury items rather than help their fellow man appropriately.
Who cares about money and luxuries when people are literally dying around you?
The EFF does not have a track record of success in litigation and I for one would not want them on my team because they are more interested in establishing case law and precident than in swift and efficient wins in the trial court.
Profit. I can charge developers a fee for applying my signature to thier code, therefore enabling trusted installation and a trusted transaction at my bank that pays for my yacht.
Even better yet, I can expire the cert, requiring the developer to buy a signing again in a year or two.
And the best part: End users have no idea what it's all about and are totally used to getting a pop up durring the install that says click on install anyway when the security notice comes up.
But wait, there's more: One day I'll be able to embed the signing stuff in the hardware so only stuff people pay me to sign will run on the PC they paid for. Then we all make more becase we can expire certs and lock the users out then both of us get to make money when the user says uncle and wants get access to their pr0n database...
LAMP handles a lot less of those sites than you might think. Check up on job adverts for Google, Amazon etc. and you will find a strong demand for Java and C++ as well as LAMP.
This makes absolutely no sense:
Assertion:There aren't that many huge-ass LAMP sites on the internet. Evidence:See job adverts for Google and Amazon.
It's kind of like:
We have a low murder rate in Detroit because the department of corrections isn't hiring executioners right now.
If you want to make a point, then use evidence that matters. Job listings do not indicate what is in production except on the system needing attention at the organization needing the employee. Perhaps something relevent from http://www.netcraft.com/ or http://www.alexa.com/.
Using TCO for IT is not a good idea because it is like using powerpoint to develop a web application server. TCO looks goof from a distance, but has very little capability to get heavy programmativ lifting done.
Seriously, why are companies so litigious these days? Why try to control what your customers do with your product after you buy it? Why put limits where limits where never there?
Putting genies back in bottles is very difficult - and I wonder how long business people will look at that model as a viable way to make money. Did Apple actually think they would be able to prevent the totally inevitable result of their port to x86?
Look, TCO is sales device that has gone amuck. Back in the 60s the mainframe guys came up with TCO to justify the purchase of more expensive iron against lest expensive systems by bundling the kitchen sink and some intangible, "soft" numbers with actual prices. TCO had all but dissappeared by the early 90s when Gartner suddenly came out with the now famous TCO report that applied the old TCO concept to newer computers. Sales people everywhere rejoiced because you could easily:
Bundle software, hardware, networking and professional services and compare that against existing infrastructure and the IT departments salaries.
Include whole cloth fabricated numbers such as "downtime costs" "lost productivity costs" and so on that existing systems have that superwhamadyne new systems don't have.
IT executives liked TCO because the CFO like numbers. Salespeople liked TCO because they had underutilized MS Excel chops and could create pretty convincing slides with cost comparisons. CEOs liked TCO because they like bar graphs.
Finally, the IT media which really could be rebranded as "PR Newswire for Dummies, Technology Edition" liked TCO because their articles took on an air of gravitas that they never had before.
The Board found problems with NASA... beurocracy is certainly a large part of it. A lavish budget is not.
This is typical of blue ribbon panel reports: lets not cut to the chase and instead blame bureucrats and organization inefficiencies for a very simple bad decision. NASA is too big and can't focus any longer. The best thing that could happen is either breaking NASA up into smaller more focused agencies or eliminating all the cruft. Neither of these are going to be easy because allmighty funding is involved.
As long as they're pebble bed reactors, I'm all for it.
Because they are:
a) Unproven b) Sound Cool c) Prevent Recycling of Fissile Material (the expensive and rare part) e) Not the kind at 3 Mile Island f) all of the above
Seriously - the whole concept of pebble bed was to make small light & portable reactors. That concept is not the same as producing large ammounts of power.
As an old Navy Nuclear technician that was personally involved in atleast one radiation clean-up,
Cite source for clean-up as the Navy had not yet had one accident by the time he was discharged. To this day, we are still waiting for a screw up.
Frankly, I've always thought that Carter's moves on energy were irrational and borderline cookoo given that he and I attended the same nuclear power training several decades appart. He was also responsible for bringing Scheleshenger and Duncan in as energy secretaries. It's interesting that when something becomes cabinet level how quickly politicised it becomes - hence the current situation where market economics do not really apply to energy as EVERYTHING has become a regulated monopoly.
This kind of behavior is just one more indicator our education is obsolete. Colleges long ago replaced the propagation of knowledge with the propogation of administration and faculty income long ago. If you are teaching something that is obsolete in five or six months, it probably is not appropriate for a college class, but is for a professional seminar. Every day colleges pull shinanagins like DRMed 5 month licenses to course materials, they reduce the value of having a degree further.
It sounds to me like Massport "generously" offered to license its network at such an unreasonably high rate that it would be more expensive than Continental maintaining their own network.
You nailed the real problem with the Wifi business: WIFI IS FREAKING CHEAP TO GIVE AWAY FOR RETAILERS. You don't even need nice equipment if you are doing free Wifi. Continental gives me one good reason to fly their airline - I don't have the hassle of messing with logging into airpath, SBC or evil of evils TMobile.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Microsoft. Microsoft sells retail products, but it is also a technology company. When you say customer, that's not the same thing as consumer.
MS core customers are corporate IT departments and computer manufacturers who buy OEM licenses who sell their products to distributors or to end users. DRM does nothing for these constituents other than increase risk and cost. It does let them open a new market at the expense of damaging exisitng customers. MS's core business is worth more than the entire US record industry if you go look at US Department of Commerce industry numbers.
OneNote, Sharepoint Services, and XML file formats are three that come to mind.
Changing file formats from one proprietary format (althought wrapped with convenient XML) to another hardly counts as an improvement. I'm the only person I know that even knows OneNote exists because I use a tablet PC. SharePoint is expensive as hell and requires more servers.
Oh, yeah, you don't get these new features without paying more for them - so one could argue even though it's part of the office product family it's not part of the office product.
Also, is it wrong to cede a market that there's no money in? Are any Microsoft shareholders going to revolt because Microsoft doesn't want to compete for tissue-thin margins on the low end?
There's a big problem when that market will eventually start eating into the commodity level market that your company is totally dependent on for at least half of revenues. And the same technology is already eating into the server business something fierce. The candle is buring on both ends.
You really think the kind of person who only has $250 to spend on a computer is going to learn Linux?
You need to actually use a Linspire box before making this assertion - it's not all that different. You don't need to know linux to log on and surf or write a letter.
WTF is the problem with you americans?!? GREED over ALL? No wonder your lousy country is in such a state.
WTF is wrong with you? This guy went out of his way to hurt someone that was literally helping him by sending traffic. A polite please stop would have ended the issue. Instead the guy goes out and basically damages the other guy's business to the tune of thousands of dollars for doing something that probably had a financial impact of $20 on him and could have helped promote his game.
I'm having a hard time connecting greed to this one.
It just demonstrates the Bush administration's priorities.
I don't think whoever occupied the white house would have made 1 hours difference in the response. This was a failure by the military to take swift action. This was a planning failure by the bureaucrats. And it was largely a total and complete PR failure by Bush.
Here's what gets me: you know how many military facilities have empty barracks and housing within 400 miles of New Orleans? Personally, I'd like to
Like it or not, complex systems like J2EE and Oracle do have what it takes to handle such requirements, which is why they is used in sites like stock exchanges which may need to handle volumes of up to tens of thousands of write transactions per second.
Look - last I looked PHP.net was ranked by alexa in the top 500 sites on the net. You really need to go there, perhaps zope.org (you will be amazed at the number of media sites running zope to power newspapers and TV stations all of which are huge traffic) and then take a look at netcraft. You'll start to get a sense that the LAMP stack is fairly popular. Hell, last I looked a good number of the top 20,000 websites on the net used Invision Power Board(a LAMP applications).
The absense of one layer of the stack doesn't make any point in particular as most open source based websites are going to be built fairly pragmatically. If you have huge traffic, you use a load ballancer and multiple servers. If you have huge data needs, then you tear out the MySQL and maybe move up to Postgress or a commercial database. You start with LAMP, then as you grow you port and adapt as needed. Sometimes you do part with LAMP and part with something else... that's the beauty of the platform - it's flexible compatible and fairly fast.
You are right that if you are running a stock exchange you probably want something like oracle simply so you can sue someone if it blows up in total. Your are wrong to apply some standard that says only applications that write large numbers of transactions matter. Websites and applications are more likely to be used in a read mode by the user anyway. Regardless, I suppose you thinkg that some of the CMS, forum software and ad servers out there don't do any writing...
As far as switching to LAMP goes, you don't just tear out legacy systems on a lark because PHP is newer and shinier that whatever.
Your use of help wanted ads to prove your point is still possibly the least useful evidence I've seen since I started reading Slashdot.
What kind of chilling effect is this having?
Go ask Google, Skype, Symantec, Apple, the local Linux guy, all of which benefit immensely from Microsoft not getting it until it's too late.
I used to work for a company that had a mini MS complex: we thought everyone in IT industry services sector or reseller channel was a competition. The result: we fought a war on 900 fronts and could not bring critical resources to bear on our real competitors (other national mega resellers). Eventually, we were spending more money on trying to out-market and out business develop inconsequential competitors and our sales guys were losing sales because we were not able to deliver hardware on time to customers.
Right now, MS is showing signs of what I saw at Inacom:
* Changes and delays with their OS product.
* Development of huge initiatives that business partners want and customers don't want like DRM and trusted computing
* Not adapting to changing business models - open source for example.
* Ability to market, but not deliver - like the MSN search that was going to be more accurate, etc...
* Competing against yourself - AXAPTA, NAVISION, GreatPlains... how many competing and overlapping ERP/CRM packages do you need?
* When was the last time there was a major real change in office, anyway?
* Oh, and ceeding the entire low end of the computer industry to Linspire and linux (when was the last time you saw a new windowsXP computer for $250)?
If you have 1/2 a brain you find a way to benefit by fuddruckers linking to you. Put up a redirect to your page with google ads or something where you can profit. Instead what this asshat did was do something that will damage fuddrucker's business in a way that cost fuddruckers $1000's in free meals and create a publicity storm for them. Whatever the bandwith costs (and it won't be much given you can get a metric ton of bandwith for $100 anymore) it will pale in comparison to the damage done to Fuddruckers.
Reminds me of the sales guy that worked for me thought because we held up reimbursing $1,500 in expenses until we got his laptop and cell phone back he somehow had the right to piss on said cell phone and laptop, bag and box it and send it in. Instead of getting his $1,500 reimbursement, he got a bill for $2280 (value of laptop & cell phone minus his $1500).
Before you do something mallicious, understand that you don't have a right to retaliate, only a right to defend your self.
I still can't believe how stupid the guy was to make a stink out of getting free pr from someone.
Meaning you aren't going to back your assertions?
Nothing you've said changes the only assertion I ever made: your original evidence sucked. As I recall you were using positions being hired to make the claim that no one has big LAMP sites.
Of course it makes sense! The companies hire employees to maintain and adapt current software implementations. Job adverts indicate the range of systems and languages that are used in those
:)
You would be right if:
a) Hiring
b) were not outsourcing development
c) don't have things under control already
d) aren't retraining existing staff
e) use public recruiting strategies
f) don't have other systems that are more important in other languagess.
Can you provide evidence of a really high-volume site that runs primarily on LAMP?
I'm not your personal research assistant. You said something that was based on the worst evidence I've seen in a long time - and got called out. I did give some hints as to where you can find some informaiton. Perhaps you should add PHP.org to the list - I hear it gets a little traffic
But of course, there was no organized evacuation. No buses, nothing. People were just told to leave on their own. Some people don't own cars. Or gasoline. They live paycheck to paycheck. Lots of these people rely on government checks that arrive on the first of the month.
What really struck me is how many of the people of New Orleans decided to steal from each other instead of help each other. It's really sad to see people busy stealing watches, camcorders and cadilacs while people are dying around them.
Equally tragic was the response of especially the Army and Air Force - they did not deploy nearly fast enough. Just the presence of troops would have prevented a lot of the carnage.
I love how all the "real" Americans among us are the first to turn on their less fortunate countrymen when a disaster strikes.
I don't think this is the case at all. I think people are sickened by victims of a disaster turning on each other and stealing cars, jewelry, electronics and other luxury items while people are dying that could be as easily saved from the water as the five rolexes they grabbed. One thing is certain: we as a nation need to re-think how we deal with disasters and focus on 1) making sure everyone has food shelter and security 2) helping get people relocated quickly so they can be reunited with their families and get on with the business of living and 3) dealing with those who would rather steal luxury items rather than help their fellow man appropriately.
Who cares about money and luxuries when people are literally dying around you?
THIS is a case the EFF should take
The EFF does not have a track record of success in litigation and I for one would not want them on my team because they are more interested in establishing case law and precident than in swift and efficient wins in the trial court.
Profit. I can charge developers a fee for applying my signature to thier code, therefore enabling trusted installation and a trusted transaction at my bank that pays for my yacht.
Even better yet, I can expire the cert, requiring the developer to buy a signing again in a year or two.
And the best part: End users have no idea what it's all about and are totally used to getting a pop up durring the install that says click on install anyway when the security notice comes up.
But wait, there's more: One day I'll be able to embed the signing stuff in the hardware so only stuff people pay me to sign will run on the PC they paid for. Then we all make more becase we can expire certs and lock the users out then both of us get to make money when the user says uncle and wants get access to their pr0n database...
LAMP handles a lot less of those sites than you might think. Check up on job adverts for Google, Amazon etc. and you will find a strong demand for Java and C++ as well as LAMP.
This makes absolutely no sense:
Assertion:There aren't that many huge-ass LAMP sites on the internet.
Evidence:See job adverts for Google and Amazon.
It's kind of like:
We have a low murder rate in Detroit because the department of corrections isn't hiring executioners right now.
If you want to make a point, then use evidence that matters. Job listings do not indicate what is in production except on the system needing attention at the organization needing the employee. Perhaps something relevent from http://www.netcraft.com/ or http://www.alexa.com/.
This is what PDF files are for - it frees the writer from having to use the same document processor as the reader.
Frankly, I'm surpised your prof won't take a PDF file.
Have the entire IT staff sit down with the owner of the company
Just have an answer for who organized this and how long have you been planning to talk to me. Your jobs will depend on it.
Get an agency to sell ads for you. You aren't good at it.
Using TCO for IT is not a good idea because it is like using powerpoint to develop a web application server. TCO looks goof from a distance, but has very little capability to get heavy programmativ lifting done.
Seriously, why are companies so litigious these days? Why try to control what your customers do with your product after you buy it? Why put limits where limits where never there?
Putting genies back in bottles is very difficult - and I wonder how long business people will look at that model as a viable way to make money. Did Apple actually think they would be able to prevent the totally inevitable result of their port to x86?
I suggest we googlebomb "2012 Olympics" to that goat whatever .cz site which contains the appropriate photograpic response to this sort of behavior.
Look, TCO is sales device that has gone amuck. Back in the 60s the mainframe guys came up with TCO to justify the purchase of more expensive iron against lest expensive systems by bundling the kitchen sink and some intangible, "soft" numbers with actual prices. TCO had all but dissappeared by the early 90s when Gartner suddenly came out with the now famous TCO report that applied the old TCO concept to newer computers. Sales people everywhere rejoiced because you could easily:
Bundle software, hardware, networking and professional services and compare that against existing infrastructure and the IT departments salaries.
Include whole cloth fabricated numbers such as "downtime costs" "lost productivity costs" and so on that existing systems have that superwhamadyne new systems don't have.
IT executives liked TCO because the CFO like numbers. Salespeople liked TCO because they had underutilized MS Excel chops and could create pretty convincing slides with cost comparisons. CEOs liked TCO because they like bar graphs.
Finally, the IT media which really could be rebranded as "PR Newswire for Dummies, Technology Edition" liked TCO because their articles took on an air of gravitas that they never had before.
The Board found problems with NASA... beurocracy is certainly a large part of it. A lavish budget is not.
This is typical of blue ribbon panel reports: lets not cut to the chase and instead blame bureucrats and organization inefficiencies for a very simple bad decision. NASA is too big and can't focus any longer. The best thing that could happen is either breaking NASA up into smaller more focused agencies or eliminating all the cruft. Neither of these are going to be easy because allmighty funding is involved.
NASA succeeded before it became a behemouth.
As long as they're pebble bed reactors, I'm all for it.
Because they are:
a) Unproven
b) Sound Cool
c) Prevent Recycling of Fissile Material (the expensive and rare part)
e) Not the kind at 3 Mile Island
f) all of the above
Seriously - the whole concept of pebble bed was to make small light & portable reactors. That concept is not the same as producing large ammounts of power.
As an old Navy Nuclear technician that was personally involved in atleast one radiation clean-up,
Cite source for clean-up as the Navy had not yet had one accident by the time he was discharged. To this day, we are still waiting for a screw up.
Frankly, I've always thought that Carter's moves on energy were irrational and borderline cookoo given that he and I attended the same nuclear power training several decades appart. He was also responsible for bringing Scheleshenger and Duncan in as energy secretaries. It's interesting that when something becomes cabinet level how quickly politicised it becomes - hence the current situation where market economics do not really apply to energy as EVERYTHING has become a regulated monopoly.
This kind of behavior is just one more indicator our education is obsolete. Colleges long ago replaced the propagation of knowledge with the propogation of administration and faculty income long ago. If you are teaching something that is obsolete in five or six months, it probably is not appropriate for a college class, but is for a professional seminar. Every day colleges pull shinanagins like DRMed 5 month licenses to course materials, they reduce the value of having a degree further.
It sounds to me like Massport "generously" offered to license its network at such an unreasonably high rate that it would be more expensive than Continental maintaining their own network.
You nailed the real problem with the Wifi business: WIFI IS FREAKING CHEAP TO GIVE AWAY FOR RETAILERS. You don't even need nice equipment if you are doing free Wifi. Continental gives me one good reason to fly their airline - I don't have the hassle of messing with logging into airpath, SBC or evil of evils TMobile.
Are you taliking about Unix or some other product that is all caps?