In 1992 I finally convinced management at Corel to let me hook them up to the Internet. How did I do it? By telling them that a lot of the bright engineers they were hiring fresh from university were going to expect it, and if they didn't have it those people might seek placement elsewhere.
Management has to realize that keeping their engineers both productive and happy (through unrestricted access to Internet resources) is a {good thing} and will be beneficial to their bottom line. You just need to let them know that fact in your own subtle hacker way:-)
I'm currently working on getting approval from my current management for table tennis equipment...
Late last year when it was Quantum Fireball drives that were dropping like flies in our office I got on the phone with a drive repair center in Canada. We were going through the "How much will it cost us to actually retrieve the data from these drives?" discussion and I thought to ask him what brand of drives he sees the *least*.
"SCSI" was his response. "Oh sure," he said "there are fewer of them out there -- but we hardly see any at all."
One of the other interesting things he told me is that the drives included in Quantum's Snap Server appliances, despite being IDE, are *NOT* drives you can buy off the shelf. And he hasn't gotten in a single Snap Server drive in the two years they had been selling them.
I switched from Quantum to IBM drives at the time (ugh!) but had the forsight to put them all in a RAID-1 configuration. We've sent three DeathStars back for repair so far. The good news? IBM had replacements to us in under a week.
I recently switched from IBMs to Maxtor (making sure I wasn't buying Quantum's old stock) and have already had one of their 80Gb drives fail. For the record they are not as responsive as IBM in the RMA department.
So what's the answer folks? You get what you pay for. If you care about your data buy an Adaptec 1200A RAID-1 controller and two drives, or spend the money on a SCSI controller and SCSI drives. So far I haven't found any IDE drive vendors that can sell you a reliable drive (I have dead fujitsu drives around here as well, but must admit that I still haven't tried Western Digital.)
I share your desire for reliable backups, but I'm afraid that my experience in this area suggests to me that this isn't it. Backups and backup software seem to be inherently complex - and avoiding as much of that complexity as possible seems to create the most reliable backups. In a single acronym:
K.I.S.S.
Your future manager might agree with this principle as well. Imagine telling him or her that the company data is spread all over the world in little encrypted pieces... My belief is that the complexity of storage where it relates to this project will be its downfall, not its killer application.
Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 1
First let me compliment you on your excellent post. There is one point I completely disagree on however. You said: The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.
Maybe, but I think you're wrong to suggest that they stop this practice. While they may sometimes pick their involvements for reasons of self-interest, I believe it is important that they do so for two reasons:
It is the responsibilty of the strong to protect the weak. Period.
America is nationalistic enough without becoming absolutely introverted besides.
Imagine a U.S. that thinks only of itself and takes no interest in outside affairs. You as a Canadian should understand just how terrible that would be. When nations stop taking an interest in foreign affairs, they end up with ideas like those of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Every nation needs a global perspective. I don't think you can have that perspective without also getting involved.
Today, the most travelled people in the world (to their credit) are the Japanese, followed closely by the Germans. That was definately NOT the case before WWII. Think about it.
And, of course, I wouldn't be a good Canadian if I didn't take a shot at my own country. Perhaps Canadians would understand the French culture in their own country better if they did a little travelling of their own...
Of course, with your background this would be a "fun" project to try. There would be logistical problems - the prog. would have to be run on your mail server (it would be hellish to send the entire contents of every email to a special nnet server somewhere to ask if it was spam. You would probably want to install a pre-trained one on your own mail server and go from there.
Seriously though - 90% of all the slashdot posts here are "wouldn't my email address break this?" or some variant thereof. Sure if the programmers who built it were really really stupid. Do this instead:
Strip the headers (all you have left is the body)
Remove all blank lines (not carriage returns)
Remove the top 5 and bottom 5 lines
Checksum
Bulk emailers (the software) don't want to be adding random words or characters within the body of a message -- too much processing for something you're doing 500,000 times.... Pretty tough to do with changing content anyway (very difficult to make it work in a generic fashion).
Of course the original article alluded to this: ...the main DCC checksum is fuzzy and ignores various aspects of messages. But slashdot readers don't read the articles in much the same way the moderators don't read the postings...:-)
I remember many years ago when a friend of mine, armed with his Newton and newly-acquired gesture software challenged a colleague of mine with a Psion 3a to a "race". His claim was that gesture was faster than trying to type on the tiny keyboard included with the clamshell-like 3a.
He was so embarassed by the results that after the 3a owner showed him what he had typed, he wouldn't admit how he had done and refused to reveal his results.
Styluses are sexy - tiny keyboards aren't. The 3a could be folded up and put in your pocket despite the keyboard, and the Psion display form-factor facilitated really good spreadsheet work (which it came with). For businessmen and women on the go, it was an excellent tool for keeping track of your expenses, etc. As a consultant at the time, I actually used mine to generate invoices (it could be plugged directly into any HP printer).
As a pre-cursor to Palm, and containing all of this cool technology, why didn't it rule the PDA world? Same old story:
Poor marketing in it's biggest potential market - the U.S. and Canada
No manufacturing facilities in N.A. kept the price too high
Poor distribution channels in N.A.
Lesson learned: If you have cool technology that you want to be successful, you have to build it in N.A., market it in N.A., and sell it in N.A.
Q.E.D.
Robert A. Heinlein gave ongoing low-level doses of radiation as the cause of evolution (natural selection kills off bad random DNA changes) years ago. I don't remember what book of his it was in (could have been The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, or possibly The Number of the Beast) but I would have read it more than 15 years ago and the book could be older than that by at least as much.
Seems like he was right on the money again. But what can you expect from the guy who invented (conceptualized?) the waterbed... in 1962.
A *VERY* long time ago when Corel was but a 50-person company, I asked Mike Cowpland to hire me before I had finished university. The fact was, I was learning far more at my part-time job at Corel than I was in school (in fact, as I remember it, my next programming course was in Fortran...)
Mike said that he would be more than happy to bring me on full-time, and made an additional offer. He told me that he would pay 100% of my university tuition costs if I wanted to keep taking courses at the university. If I only managed a C grade, he would pay %50 and for a D or less I was on my own.
More high tech companies need to consider making offers like this to their employees. Educational institutions cannot keep up with the high-tech market - it is simply impossible to teach the teachers while they themselves are busy teaching their students.
I don't know about other "nerds" but taking random courses that I am interested in paid for by the company I work for seems a lot more appealing than going through someone's idea of the perfect high-tech ciriculum. All you prove in the end is that you've learned how to memorize.
The U.S. tops the world in the number of nuclear devices detonated with just over 2000. France comes in second with just under 2000. How many nuclear devices are too many for Earth anyway?
Read Isaac Asimov's short story "Silly Asses".
We don't nuke people, and it's not because we fear for our own skins (exclusively) as you suggest, but also because we value human life. We don't hate each other so much that we cherish the idea of killing children... While it does happen, the civilized among us don't partake in it, certainly not on a large scale (how many innocent civilians died in Hiroshima? - enough to sicken us) We may use nuclear weapons as a scare tactic, but nobody is just itching to pull the trigger...
When will humans live on Mars and other planets? Easy. When we are immortal. When we have time within the span of our life to do it in. Once we have seen through the genetic age, into the era of nanotech and the diamond age, we will leave our mother Earth and travel the cosmos. I think the diamond age should be called the space age - because that is where the biggest gains will be made.
If you are likely to live for 1000 years (read anything from Robert Heinlein about Lazarus Long (Methuselah's Children for instance) - or just pick up your bible and turn to Genesis 5) then what difference does it make that you spend 30 years getting to Alpha Centauri? A small risk it would be if you could make the trip 30 times in your life...
It will come. But probably for your children. Space takes time. We're going to have to overcome the laws of physics by human (being) engineering, not by hoping for teseracts or warp drive...
Lots of money has and is going to be made in the Linux market
That people and corporations are making money on the backs of the good people who have produced code for free under the GPL (in many cases)
The capitalization of Linux will be and has been very good for it
I feel that it is the responsibility of people and corporations who are ALREADY making money in the Linux market to find innovative ways of supporting those who have put them in a position to do so.
I struggled with this one personally recently, so I've spent some time thinking about it. I wanted to carry a line of digital cameras on my Linux electronic commerce site and realized that the only reason I was able to sell them at all to the Linux market was that some nice people had created GPLed software for them.
So what to do? If I rolled some kind of dontation into the price of the software, and then kicked that back to gPhoto, I'd lose business as my prices would be higher and people would go elsewhere. I could just make a single donation to the group but without knowing how many cameras I would sell as a result of their software, putting a price on that donation was almost impossible. Plus doing that would still up the price of the cameras unless I ate it somewhere else.
So I started the Canux OSS Support Program. Customers who are in the process of purchasing an Epson digital camera can simply click on a link and add the "donation" item to their shopping basket! This does three important things:
The camera owner ends up supporting the group that provided the software in the first place - and feels good about doing so
I eat the merchant transaction costs and do the sales part of the job - and feel that I'm contributing
The OSS team (gPhoto) gets funding, can buy equipment, and in turn produces even better software.
So far I've only done this with the gPhoto group (a test case). When I approached them about it they were very appreciative and thought it was a wonderful idea.
I understand that this kind of thing only works for certain types of OSS, and that many of the larger projects have already found innovative ways of getting funding. Still, I have to wonder if people were given some kind of convenient way of supporting the OSS groups they cared about, would they??
I think they would, but I'm an optimist. I'll keep you posted...
I am the semi-proud owner of the Amiga Flow program originally written by New Horizons (I purchased the rights to it and some other progs. when they went boom).
There is no substitute for a really good technical writer, but I wonder if some better tools for actually documenting an app as you are putting it together might be in order (the way Flow allowed you to). At least when you are done you can hand off a well ordered, concise document with everything that needs to be said (at least in point form) to a writer for smoothing...
Maybe Linux has apps like this already - tell me what is available. It should integrate easily into a progammers development environment and form some kind of tree structure for organizing topics. Should also link to your favourite text editor so you don't end up coding in one and writing in another.
I doubt that the Flow source would be useful to anybody but I'd be more than happy to give it to whomever wanted it (I'd have to re-compile a kernel with FFS support in it:-). There is probably stuff for Linux like this already.
If not, however, I'd be more than happy to organize something in this area.
Of course the OS was in ROM - a distinct advantage (in some ways).
But then again, video RAM == System RAM in a 512K Amiga...
But then it's screen res/depth was no hell....
Hmm.... The Amiga sure was a differet beast - but you're right, 512K was enough to impress most people in those days on an Amiga.
OBGates: The way he will (eventually) attempt to control Linux is well rehersed for him:
1. Adopt it. 2. Extend it (Microsoft it).
Smells like Java... While Gates is still talking about how he's not worried about Linux, I'm happy. When he says he's going to embrace it - run for the hills.
What the Linux community will do about this when it happens remains to be seen. If I was Gates I'd:
1. Wait until desktop Linux is a prevalent technology (I'd say within 2 years). I (Gates) never get into something until it's a "sure bet" and well established - you know, like the Internet. Look what I did with it!
2. Put out my *OWN* Linux desktop distribution that incorportated the Windows API.
3. Show everyone how easily ALL Windows applications (particularly *Mine*) worked on MSLinux (with the API).
4. After new Linux users flood to MSLinux and every time "Linux" is spoken in the news people think of Microsoft, the OSS programmers of the world would fade away under the enormous volume of programmers the world over who already know all about Win API programming and who suddenly started coding for MSLinux.
5. New apps for Linux would *have* to be written for MSLinux because no other distribution would be allowed to ship the Win API with their distributions. And nobody would *want* to run a distribution that could not run MS Word...
6. Turn my attention to MSLinux Pro where I would then attack the much harder to crack server market. Of course there are always plenty of Network Admins out there who "fear" command line stuff and just can't *stand* the pressure of doing something complex like Linux... They'll adopt MSLinux Pro easily (just like they did NT). And with my help and my DevKits, most of my 3rd party supporters will be able to easily port their NT apps to MSLinux Pro...
-sigh-. Enjoy it now. I'll bet while he's downplaying Linux in public (gently - have you noticed?), Microsoft is already porting the API. Your only hope is to amass as much great software as possible under WMs such as KDE and Gnome (but there again, the Linux community is already shooting itself in the foot by 'fragging the apps. (Yes - competition is good, but not when that competition is soon to be a Jaggernaught). Gates will be seen as the great unifier... The Linux Hero!
(ugh, I'm feeling sick)
Personally I think you had all better send Corel your money... While they too are doing their own distrib. they don't have an API or dev. environments that they can leverage against other distributions.
Of course, you never know - Microsoft might just roll over and play dead! No matter how popular Linux got, Gates might just say "Hey, we can use the competition!" or "Hell, we deserve to die a horrible slow death" or maybe even "You know, I never did like that API anyway..."
Slashdot Mirror
In 1992 I finally convinced management at Corel to let me hook them up to the Internet. How did I do it? By telling them that a lot of the bright engineers they were hiring fresh from university were going to expect it, and if they didn't have it those people might seek placement elsewhere.
:-)
Management has to realize that keeping their engineers both productive and happy (through unrestricted access to Internet resources) is a {good thing} and will be beneficial to their bottom line. You just need to let them know that fact in your own subtle hacker way
I'm currently working on getting approval from my current management for table tennis equipment...
Late last year when it was Quantum Fireball drives that were dropping like flies in our office I got on the phone with a drive repair center in Canada. We were going through the "How much will it cost us to actually retrieve the data from these drives?" discussion and I thought to ask him what brand of drives he sees the *least*.
"SCSI" was his response. "Oh sure," he said "there are fewer of them out there -- but we hardly see any at all."
One of the other interesting things he told me is that the drives included in Quantum's Snap Server appliances, despite being IDE, are *NOT* drives you can buy off the shelf. And he hasn't gotten in a single Snap Server drive in the two years they had been selling them.
I switched from Quantum to IBM drives at the time (ugh!) but had the forsight to put them all in a RAID-1 configuration. We've sent three DeathStars back for repair so far. The good news? IBM had replacements to us in under a week.
I recently switched from IBMs to Maxtor (making sure I wasn't buying Quantum's old stock) and have already had one of their 80Gb drives fail. For the record they are not as responsive as IBM in the RMA department.
So what's the answer folks? You get what you pay for. If you care about your data buy an Adaptec 1200A RAID-1 controller and two drives, or spend the money on a SCSI controller and SCSI drives. So far I haven't found any IDE drive vendors that can sell you a reliable drive (I have dead fujitsu drives around here as well, but must admit that I still haven't tried Western Digital.)
- warez.google.com
- porn.google.com
- ogg.google.com
- divx.google.com
We should have a poll! Ah crap, I guess they probably won't do any of that. Instead we'll probably get:I share your desire for reliable backups, but I'm afraid that my experience in this area suggests to me that this isn't it. Backups and backup software seem to be inherently complex - and avoiding as much of that complexity as possible seems to create the most reliable backups. In a single acronym:
K.I.S.S.
Your future manager might agree with this principle as well. Imagine telling him or her that the company data is spread all over the world in little encrypted pieces... My belief is that the complexity of storage where it relates to this project will be its downfall, not its killer application.
The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.
Maybe, but I think you're wrong to suggest that they stop this practice. While they may sometimes pick their involvements for reasons of self-interest, I believe it is important that they do so for two reasons:
- It is the responsibilty of the strong to protect the weak. Period.
- America is nationalistic enough without becoming absolutely introverted besides.
Imagine a U.S. that thinks only of itself and takes no interest in outside affairs. You as a Canadian should understand just how terrible that would be. When nations stop taking an interest in foreign affairs, they end up with ideas like those of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Every nation needs a global perspective. I don't think you can have that perspective without also getting involved.Today, the most travelled people in the world (to their credit) are the Japanese, followed closely by the Germans. That was definately NOT the case before WWII. Think about it.
And, of course, I wouldn't be a good Canadian if I didn't take a shot at my own country. Perhaps Canadians would understand the French culture in their own country better if they did a little travelling of their own...
Seriously though - 90% of all the slashdot posts here are "wouldn't my email address break this?" or some variant thereof. Sure if the programmers who built it were really really stupid. Do this instead:
- Strip the headers (all you have left is the body)
- Remove all blank lines (not carriage returns)
- Remove the top 5 and bottom 5 lines
- Checksum
Bulk emailers (the software) don't want to be adding random words or characters within the body of a message -- too much processing for something you're doing 500,000 times.... Pretty tough to do with changing content anyway (very difficult to make it work in a generic fashion).Of course the original article alluded to this:
...the main DCC checksum is fuzzy and ignores various aspects of messages. But slashdot readers don't read the articles in much the same way the moderators don't read the postings... :-)
He was so embarassed by the results that after the 3a owner showed him what he had typed, he wouldn't admit how he had done and refused to reveal his results.
Styluses are sexy - tiny keyboards aren't. The 3a could be folded up and put in your pocket despite the keyboard, and the Psion display form-factor facilitated really good spreadsheet work (which it came with). For businessmen and women on the go, it was an excellent tool for keeping track of your expenses, etc. As a consultant at the time, I actually used mine to generate invoices (it could be plugged directly into any HP printer).
As a pre-cursor to Palm, and containing all of this cool technology, why didn't it rule the PDA world? Same old story:
- Poor marketing in it's biggest potential market - the U.S. and Canada
- No manufacturing facilities in N.A. kept the price too high
- Poor distribution channels in N.A.
Lesson learned: If you have cool technology that you want to be successful, you have to build it in N.A., market it in N.A., and sell it in N.A.Q.E.D.
Seems like he was right on the money again. But what can you expect from the guy who invented (conceptualized?) the waterbed ... in 1962.
Mike said that he would be more than happy to bring me on full-time, and made an additional offer. He told me that he would pay 100% of my university tuition costs if I wanted to keep taking courses at the university. If I only managed a C grade, he would pay %50 and for a D or less I was on my own.
More high tech companies need to consider making offers like this to their employees. Educational institutions cannot keep up with the high-tech market - it is simply impossible to teach the teachers while they themselves are busy teaching their students.
I don't know about other "nerds" but taking random courses that I am interested in paid for by the company I work for seems a lot more appealing than going through someone's idea of the perfect high-tech ciriculum. All you prove in the end is that you've learned how to memorize.
The U.S. tops the world in the number of nuclear devices detonated with just over 2000. France comes in second with just under 2000. How many nuclear devices are too many for Earth anyway?
Read Isaac Asimov's short story "Silly Asses".
We don't nuke people, and it's not because we fear for our own skins (exclusively) as you suggest, but also because we value human life. We don't hate each other so much that we cherish the idea of killing children... While it does happen, the civilized among us don't partake in it, certainly not on a large scale (how many innocent civilians died in Hiroshima? - enough to sicken us) We may use nuclear weapons as a scare tactic, but nobody is just itching to pull the trigger...
When will humans live on Mars and other planets? Easy. When we are immortal. When we have time within the span of our life to do it in. Once we have seen through the genetic age, into the era of nanotech and the diamond age, we will leave our mother Earth and travel the cosmos. I think the diamond age should be called the space age - because that is where the biggest gains will be made.
If you are likely to live for 1000 years (read anything from Robert Heinlein about Lazarus Long (Methuselah's Children for instance) - or just pick up your bible and turn to Genesis 5) then what difference does it make that you spend 30 years getting to Alpha Centauri? A small risk it would be if you could make the trip 30 times in your life...
It will come. But probably for your children. Space takes time. We're going to have to overcome the laws of physics by human (being) engineering, not by hoping for teseracts or warp drive...
- Lots of money has and is going to be made in the Linux market
- That people and corporations are making money on the backs of the good people who have produced code for free under the GPL (in many cases)
- The capitalization of Linux will be and has been very good for it
I feel that it is the responsibility of people and corporations who are ALREADY making money in the Linux market to find innovative ways of supporting those who have put them in a position to do so.I struggled with this one personally recently, so I've spent some time thinking about it. I wanted to carry a line of digital cameras on my Linux electronic commerce site and realized that the only reason I was able to sell them at all to the Linux market was that some nice people had created GPLed software for them.
So what to do? If I rolled some kind of dontation into the price of the software, and then kicked that back to gPhoto, I'd lose business as my prices would be higher and people would go elsewhere. I could just make a single donation to the group but without knowing how many cameras I would sell as a result of their software, putting a price on that donation was almost impossible. Plus doing that would still up the price of the cameras unless I ate it somewhere else.
So I started the Canux OSS Support Program. Customers who are in the process of purchasing an Epson digital camera can simply click on a link and add the "donation" item to their shopping basket! This does three important things:
- The camera owner ends up supporting the group that provided the software in the first place - and feels good about doing so
- I eat the merchant transaction costs and do the sales part of the job - and feel that I'm contributing
- The OSS team (gPhoto) gets funding, can buy equipment, and in turn produces even better software.
So far I've only done this with the gPhoto group (a test case). When I approached them about it they were very appreciative and thought it was a wonderful idea.I understand that this kind of thing only works for certain types of OSS, and that many of the larger projects have already found innovative ways of getting funding. Still, I have to wonder if people were given some kind of convenient way of supporting the OSS groups they cared about, would they??
I think they would, but I'm an optimist. I'll keep you posted...
At least that's how I've always seen it. And I believe for reasons that have been well outlined in replies to this thread, that it works.
Does voluntary socialism work? Sure. Why wouldn't it?
I am the semi-proud owner of the Amiga Flow program originally written by New Horizons (I purchased the rights to it and some other progs. when they went boom).
:-). There is probably stuff for Linux like this already.
There is no substitute for a really good technical writer, but I wonder if some better tools for actually documenting an app as you are putting it together might be in order (the way Flow allowed you to). At least when you are done you can hand off a well ordered, concise document with everything that needs to be said (at least in point form) to a writer for smoothing...
Maybe Linux has apps like this already - tell me what is available. It should integrate easily into a progammers development environment and form some kind of tree structure for organizing topics. Should also link to your favourite text editor so you don't end up coding in one and writing in another.
I doubt that the Flow source would be useful to anybody but I'd be more than happy to give it to whomever wanted it (I'd have to re-compile a kernel with FFS support in it
If not, however, I'd be more than happy to organize something in this area.
Of course the OS was in ROM - a distinct advantage (in some ways).
But then again, video RAM == System RAM in a 512K Amiga...
But then it's screen res/depth was no hell....
Hmm.... The Amiga sure was a differet beast - but you're right, 512K was enough to impress most people in those days on an Amiga.
OBGates: The way he will (eventually) attempt to control Linux is well rehersed for him:
1. Adopt it.
2. Extend it (Microsoft it).
Smells like Java... While Gates is still talking about how he's not worried about Linux, I'm happy. When he says he's going to embrace it - run for the hills.
What the Linux community will do about this when it happens remains to be seen. If I was Gates I'd:
1. Wait until desktop Linux is a prevalent technology (I'd say within 2 years). I (Gates) never get into something until it's a "sure bet" and well established - you know, like the Internet. Look what I did with it!
2. Put out my *OWN* Linux desktop distribution that incorportated the Windows API.
3. Show everyone how easily ALL Windows applications (particularly *Mine*) worked on MSLinux (with the API).
4. After new Linux users flood to MSLinux and every time "Linux" is spoken in the news people think of Microsoft, the OSS programmers of the world would fade away under the enormous volume of programmers the world over who already know all about Win API programming and who suddenly started coding for MSLinux.
5. New apps for Linux would *have* to be written for MSLinux because no other distribution would be allowed to ship the Win API with their distributions. And nobody would *want* to run a distribution that could not run MS Word...
6. Turn my attention to MSLinux Pro where I would then attack the much harder to crack server market. Of course there are always plenty of Network Admins out there who "fear" command line stuff and just can't *stand* the pressure of doing something complex like Linux... They'll adopt MSLinux Pro easily (just like they did NT). And with my help and my DevKits, most of my 3rd party supporters will be able to easily port their NT apps to MSLinux Pro...
-sigh-. Enjoy it now. I'll bet while he's downplaying Linux in public (gently - have you noticed?), Microsoft is already porting the API. Your only hope is to amass as much great software as possible under WMs such as KDE and Gnome (but there again, the Linux community is already shooting itself in the foot by 'fragging the apps. (Yes - competition is good, but not when that competition is soon to be a Jaggernaught). Gates will be seen as the great unifier... The Linux Hero!
(ugh, I'm feeling sick)
Personally I think you had all better send Corel
your money... While they too are doing their own distrib. they don't have an API or dev. environments that they can leverage against other distributions.
Of course, you never know - Microsoft might just roll over and play dead! No matter how popular Linux got, Gates might just say "Hey, we can use the competition!" or "Hell, we deserve to die a horrible slow death" or maybe even "You know, I never did like that API anyway..."