That is a ridiculous statement. They basically made iconsets and themes and some shortcuts different than the defaults. They did a few more feature enhancement patches than they have done in the past, but it is all trivial.
OSX has at its core a BSD kernel and a development platform centered around gcc, but most of the system is proprietary and closed source.
RedHat is still Linux with glibc, the GNU utilities, XFree86, and other stuff with slight modifications. The changes in RedHat 8 do nothing to hurt compatibility with other distributions. In fact, moving to the more acceptable gcc 3.2 helps cross-distribution situation. The system behaves essentially identical to everything else under the hood.
OSX, on the other hand uses Quartz, for example. Completely closed, with a lot of features that are different from X. applications written for Quartz aren't really helpful for other non-OSX systems by any stretch of the imagination...
Watermarking...
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Is probably the most fair method, so long as it in no way impacts audio quality. It won't be effective (once known, removing, or at least making a watermark uselsess through distortion is likely trivial), but if it was, it would have the potential to be most fair.
I mean, nothing stops a user from doing anything with the music. You can play and copy as much as you like.
As companies scan P2P networks and use the watermarks to identify huge distributers, those would be cracked down on.
This is the ideal, but the reality probably wouldn't work within those bounds.
Of course, there are privacy concerns, but if it is distributed, the law is broken. However, the music industries would likely use this as a foot in the door, producing players that required that Watermarks match the current system. If lack of the correct watermark becomes 'wrong', then the system loses the fairness...
Ultimately, there is no practical and fair solution. Nothing will be bullet proof. Somehow books have gotten by without strange measures to protect them from scanning.... Amazing, isn't it?
This is being typed from a Mac. Linux is great and offers great flexibility, but does lack a good deal of commercial software. OSX is a fantastic desktop OS. Hell, if you grok a *BSD, you can make a decent server out of it too.
Of course, Mac prices and the inability of the hardware to run windows could contribute to any potential edge Linux systems may have.
*If* the results are viable, does this mean that commercial software will come more quickly to Linux? Probably not, at least not yet at this low a margin.
One, Mac customers obviously are not afraid to put out some cash, and software companies recognize this. While the potential userbase is small, the percentage of that userbase willing to dish out more cash for software is probably the highest of the platforms. A great deal of Intel architecture Windows machines out there just sit and run web browsers and check email, run by people who don't care about a lot of the software out there. Those who run linux come to expect to get a lot for free, and often criticize companies for trying to make money. Besides, distributing compiled binaries for linux is a huge pain in the ass compared to other systems, as part of what has made linux so good is a willingness to tear down things and start over as needed, royally screwing over ABIs (i.e. g++). Linux is a binary-hostile platform with users that are the least likely to put out more cash.
This, added to the ability of Windows versions of the software to run on their hardware, makes porting to linux less appealing. Whether by dual booting or wine, much Windows software runs on those systems and the need for a porting is too low to be profitable. Companies take one look at Loki's failure and transgaming's relative success and discount linux ports. Sad really. And now since OSX Mac is falling into some of those problems linux has, through the use of g++. First developers had to put up with OS 9 to OS X transition, and now every.x release can break their software, not cool.... Apple has produced a great system, but they have to be careful about relying too much on ambitious open source projects that don't care enough about ABI compatibility....
Well, under Windows, there is a directshow filter at http://tobias.everwicked.com/oggds.htm.
There is a quicktime component for.ogg, but it really sucks.
iTunes is the only player whose possible support is so poor (QuickTime component, as mentioned before, sucks), and that has a relatively small user base. WMP lacks it by default, but as mentioned the DirectShow filter corrects this. Winamp and others support it out of the box.
The problem is playing hardware, not software. The entrenchment of mp3 technology means that it will be difficult to migrate. If Fraunhofer gets too greedy with royalties, they will shoot themselves in the foot, and the markets will try to push.ogg more...
Turn back the clock a few years and I'll bet you'd say the same thing about mp3. Now you say it sounds high tech and cool, but back then you would probably criticize it for being too technical. With hindsight, the technology was so superior, that people didn't give a rat's ass about the name, it was the only way of encoding. Look at every thing else,.rm,.avi,.mov,.mpg..... Maybe mov is familiar, but the rest just go to show that the name has little to do with success, it is about technical quality. The other issue at hand is entrenchment. On this count, you can argue the case that mp3 may be hopelessly in place since ogg is only marginally better, there is little incentive for the common person to fork over resources required to go to.ogg. But it won't likely be over the name. This is not a boy band, this is a file format. If the tech is good, people learn to live with the name. In this case, if the populace really couldn't stand the name, they'd probably say Vorbis or something. Crticism over the name is just too uptight.
If somehow.ogg comes to dominate in five years and another tech comes around, I'll bet you'd argue that.ogg is a good name, because it seems cute and peculiar and therefore intriguing, and x format is stupid because it's name....
There are 25,600 total pixels on a 160x160 display. 12 bit color means you cannot have a scenario with each pixel being a different color. More importantly, it's not so much about simultaneous color, but the total palette. With 12 bit precision, each color has 16 levels. If there is a pure red gradient, it would look like crap, for example. The difference is non-trivial for those who intend to view images on it.
That being said, I have an m130 and don't care about the refund. I don't use my palm to view images, no matter how many colors it could display, the 160x160 restriction is too much to deal with. Even with a 320x320 display, images don't look good enough.
Used a palm? The displays are so low end that redraws should be avoided like the plague. Full motion rapid image changes would just give a blurry mess, the ghosting on those displays is too bad to acheive the described effect.
From a practical perspective, as a non-sysadmin about the best you can easily do is WEP. Though weak, it is better than nothing and is certainly sufficient to keep all but the most determined attackers at bay.
When having to settle for WEP, you should regularly change keys. Since this is a home situation, manually changing it every couple of days or so should suffice. In a corporate enviornment, some sort of automatic rekeying should be implemented to complement WEP. If you do not rekey, and you have a persistant attacker sniffing your packets constantly, your traffic could be compromised in less than a week (I've managed overnight in my tests when constantly saturating the wireless bandwidth with data). Some equipment is better about the weak points of WEP than others, but assume you have the weakest and change every day or two. Chances are slim that a house would have a person trying hard to crack when so many open APs can be found.
Personally, I back up my wireless configuration with IPSec in addition to WEP. With WEP alone, all they can do is get a dhcp response, talk to other wireless systems, and hit the router on udp port 500 and esp (for ipsec). Once in IPSec, they get access to the wired network and the outside world. Still not the perfect solution (plan to force traffic through routing table when I get around it), but still serves to protect some of the more important stuff pretty reliably.
This is a bit offtopic, but is there any projects making use of the ipsec API in OSX to do VPN connectivity? The 'VPN' used in MacOS is PPTP by default, and I would like to integrate an OSX system into the VPN configuration here for free..
I love ogg, but now have a MacOSX system, and was wondering if anyone could recommend any players? I tried the Quicktime component only to see it do nothing and even if it did work I understand the framework will make it sound worse. Anyone have suggestions?
BTW, if anyone also happens to know some resources about bulding a vpn configuration that plays nice with Windows, Linux, and OSX, let me know. I know PPTP as a possibility, but I would prefer standard ipsec..
A nitpick, but what is the point of using an acronym and then the whole thing in parenthesis because the acronym isn't used by anyone? Why not say the whole thing and forget about the acronym? SPSTM (Seems Pretty Stupid To Me)
This is just a brand new low. This isn't just an editorial slant, this could be shown to be slandering Toho. There is no evidence that this in any way relates to a strategy regarding mozilla. The key issue with davezilla is that there is a portrayed character named godzilla on the site with a similar appearance, head on infringement. To say definitively that this is just their strategy to take down mozilla is just damn stupid.
IT as it was during the.com was a bust and a failure. I was part of a department that paid 80,000 dollars for tape changers to eliminate the need for IT people to take five minutes out of the day to change a few tapes. There was a line of Sun Enterprise servers, the cheapest of which shipping with a price tag of 45,000..... There were 23 of those damn servers... Ultra 60 workstations were being phased out for Ultra 80s for software developers just for the hell of it. The ratio of IT support people to users was about 1 to 4.5..... Damn cushy job with all kinds of brand new high end hardware all the time. Supporting fewer than five people is easy...
That is the kind of IT spending associated with the.com mess that is just flat out worthless. There is a point of diminishing returns, particularly with concern to equipment. Even with people, quality IT can go a long way with few people. That place folded fast when the bubble burst.
Now I'm making more at a smaller company that has pretty much stayed at about 25 people or so total for the last 15 years and has pulled in about 14 million this year. Equipment is purchased usually refurb, upgrade cycles usually wait for about a 3x upgrade, and leans heavily on intel architecture machines for cost reasons, only as many non-intel machines are used as are necessary for testing. When a second internet connection was needed, I took a retired PC and put linux on it, not requisitioned some high end cicsco hardware. Same with a backup for our SonicWall gateway (purchased before my arrival), made out of a P60. VPN is FreeS/WAN powered, not hosted on a PIX. I am the only IT guy supporting those people, and really one good IT person is all you need for most situations with 25 people involved. Good IT people can support a lot of users with fewer resources. Upgrading Ultra60s to Ultra80s for code monkeys won't help them code faster. Having a humongous team of IT support people that spend more time thinking someone else will fix it than doing anything themselves will not help things.... And this realization is hitting the business world, and in this light it is a correct assessment. To say it is completely worthless would be foolish, but to say pouring money into IT works would be equally foolish.
It's easier to have 20% of a small number switch over, especially if that small number of users is ver saavy and knowledgable about their platform. Mac users tend to be enthusiasts of a sort, and of course want the latest and greatest. Just like nealy every linux user keeps their system up to date with the distribution of their choice.
Windows users on average just want it to do something, and as long as it does, why switch?
Though I agree the pipeline lengthening is mostly for the sake of marketing, the technical reasoning behind it, accepting their presumptions, is sound and not merely sacrificing performance for clock.
The thinking is that Intel further complicated the instruction set with SSE2. The nature of the SSE2 lends itself to be more predictable on branches. So if intensive operations are more accurately predicted at the branches, there are fewer mispredictions (duh) and thus the pipeline need not be flushed. As more companies jump on the SSE2 bandwagon, pipeline flushes will decrease and P4 behaves as it should rather than how it does currently...
Neat link... Though seems strange to do it in flash, I mean, it's a damn picture, not a movie:)
For anyone thinking they don't get it and give up, just keep trying, I'm positive that it will come to you. Just might want to be mindful of being around other people, as you might just exclaim when you figure it out...
Way offtopic and replying to a sig, but the link was neat.
No, there is a difference. Sure people can post signs, they can put up websites, they can do all sorts of things, but forcing the issue down the end-users throats through a medium in which the recipient may be paying just to receive it. Spamming is for a number of people the equivalent of having a telemarketer call you collect and the receiver having no choice to decline (this is illegal, of course).
But it doesn't stop there. It is bad enough that end users are abused in this fashion, but the distribution channels for the spam is just exceptionally bad. It is one thing if they had to foot the bill for mail servers and associated bandwidth, but instead they are scanning for open relays to *exploit* for their mail capacity and bandwidth usage. I was called in by one company with mediocre IT infrastructure, enough to be dangerous. They called saying that over the last few days mail through their server was taking hours to get anywhere, if it got anywhere at all. Well I go in and find it is an open relay, and the thing had 400,000 queued messages, among which there where about 350 legitimate messages to retrieve. I closed the exploit, and eventually recovered the messages of interest for them, but they lost a lot of time because of it and their bandwidth charges were really high because of it. Spammer's are doing wrong and they know it, why else hide behind other companies resources?
Hate to break it to you, but while there is certainly an editorial slant against MS seen quite frequently, this is meant as more of a tech site and that includes MS. Hell, even those who dislike MS might have to use Visual Studio, it makes sense. It's not 'selling' out. They are taking money to put up what is obviously an ad and easily recognized as one. Selling out would be changing stories so that MS looks good...
I say don't knock it until you have tried it and become somewhat accustomed to it. While I admit there is insufficient benefit to start retraining everyone, it is more comfortable for me to type in dvorak. I'm also a bit faster, but the key for me is the comfort. The less I have to move my fingers, the happier I am.
I thought that whole bit was misrepresented and really dumb from a technical standpoint.
But from a business standpoint, that is exactly correct. They have a legacy, Unix based system for performing these calculations. Getting it to work on Windows would be extremely expensive if possible at all. Also, getting Windows to work as they expect in a clustering configuration would also not likely help the cost of migration in any case....
But when stuck with whatever Unix they had, they were also tied down to Sun, HP, or IBM equipment. Those pieces of hardware are expensive as *hell*, upgrading a few systems is bad enough, but a cluster of 32 would take some serious cash.
Now enters Linux (from the business perspective). They can run a full-fledged Unixy system on commodity PC hardware. Coughing up the cash for 40 PCs is no problem at all. The commodity, high speed hardware is the difference here, and Linux is perceived as the enabling technology to let this happen.
Now was Linux required? No, not at all. x86 Solaris might have worked, but it is seen (rightfully so) as Sun's red-headed stepchild, dismal hardware support and performance, meant to give a taste for Sparc computing or learning the system rather than be a production system. Any BSD could have been used just as easily as Linux, but Linux was tipped into the light by the lingering hype and broader userbase/community support. They aren't looking at redistribution, so the GPL/BSD argument is a moot point, so Linux is just a valid choice as FreeBSD.
The point is a new PC with Linux can compete competently with super-high-priced Unix workstations. In the really super high end single servers where intel architecture cannot adequately scale on a hardware, Unix systems are still king (Linux may run on some of them, but if you are dishing out that much cash, you can get the system supported top to bottom by a single source), but in the workstation and clustering arena, PCs with a competent *nix (Linux or BSD) are quickly becoming king....
Slashdot Mirror
That is a ridiculous statement. They basically made iconsets and themes and some shortcuts different than the defaults. They did a few more feature enhancement patches than they have done in the past, but it is all trivial.
OSX has at its core a BSD kernel and a development platform centered around gcc, but most of the system is proprietary and closed source.
RedHat is still Linux with glibc, the GNU utilities, XFree86, and other stuff with slight modifications. The changes in RedHat 8 do nothing to hurt compatibility with other distributions. In fact, moving to the more acceptable gcc 3.2 helps cross-distribution situation. The system behaves essentially identical to everything else under the hood.
OSX, on the other hand uses Quartz, for example. Completely closed, with a lot of features that are different from X. applications written for Quartz aren't really helpful for other non-OSX systems by any stretch of the imagination...
Is probably the most fair method, so long as it in no way impacts audio quality. It won't be effective (once known, removing, or at least making a watermark uselsess through distortion is likely trivial), but if it was, it would have the potential to be most fair.
I mean, nothing stops a user from doing anything with the music. You can play and copy as much as you like.
As companies scan P2P networks and use the watermarks to identify huge distributers, those would be cracked down on.
This is the ideal, but the reality probably wouldn't work within those bounds.
Of course, there are privacy concerns, but if it is distributed, the law is broken. However, the music industries would likely use this as a foot in the door, producing players that required that Watermarks match the current system. If lack of the correct watermark becomes 'wrong', then the system loses the fairness...
Ultimately, there is no practical and fair solution. Nothing will be bullet proof. Somehow books have gotten by without strange measures to protect them from scanning.... Amazing, isn't it?
This is being typed from a Mac. Linux is great and offers great flexibility, but does lack a good deal of commercial software. OSX is a fantastic desktop OS. Hell, if you grok a *BSD, you can make a decent server out of it too.
.x release can break their software, not cool.... Apple has produced a great system, but they have to be careful about relying too much on ambitious open source projects that don't care enough about ABI compatibility....
Of course, Mac prices and the inability of the hardware to run windows could contribute to any potential edge Linux systems may have.
*If* the results are viable, does this mean that commercial software will come more quickly to Linux? Probably not, at least not yet at this low a margin.
One, Mac customers obviously are not afraid to put out some cash, and software companies recognize this. While the potential userbase is small, the percentage of that userbase willing to dish out more cash for software is probably the highest of the platforms. A great deal of Intel architecture Windows machines out there just sit and run web browsers and check email, run by people who don't care about a lot of the software out there. Those who run linux come to expect to get a lot for free, and often criticize companies for trying to make money. Besides, distributing compiled binaries for linux is a huge pain in the ass compared to other systems, as part of what has made linux so good is a willingness to tear down things and start over as needed, royally screwing over ABIs (i.e. g++). Linux is a binary-hostile platform with users that are the least likely to put out more cash.
This, added to the ability of Windows versions of the software to run on their hardware, makes porting to linux less appealing. Whether by dual booting or wine, much Windows software runs on those systems and the need for a porting is too low to be profitable. Companies take one look at Loki's failure and transgaming's relative success and discount linux ports. Sad really. And now since OSX Mac is falling into some of those problems linux has, through the use of g++. First developers had to put up with OS 9 to OS X transition, and now every
Well, under Windows, there is a directshow filter at http://tobias.everwicked.com/oggds.htm.
.ogg, but it really sucks.
.ogg more...
There is a quicktime component for
iTunes is the only player whose possible support is so poor (QuickTime component, as mentioned before, sucks), and that has a relatively small user base. WMP lacks it by default, but as mentioned the DirectShow filter corrects this. Winamp and others support it out of the box.
The problem is playing hardware, not software. The entrenchment of mp3 technology means that it will be difficult to migrate. If Fraunhofer gets too greedy with royalties, they will shoot themselves in the foot, and the markets will try to push
Turn back the clock a few years and I'll bet you'd say the same thing about mp3. Now you say it sounds high tech and cool, but back then you would probably criticize it for being too technical. With hindsight, the technology was so superior, that people didn't give a rat's ass about the name, it was the only way of encoding. Look at every thing else, .rm, .avi, .mov, .mpg..... Maybe mov is familiar, but the rest just go to show that the name has little to do with success, it is about technical quality. The other issue at hand is entrenchment. On this count, you can argue the case that mp3 may be hopelessly in place since ogg is only marginally better, there is little incentive for the common person to fork over resources required to go to .ogg. But it won't likely be over the name. This is not a boy band, this is a file format. If the tech is good, people learn to live with the name. In this case, if the populace really couldn't stand the name, they'd probably say Vorbis or something. Crticism over the name is just too uptight.
.ogg comes to dominate in five years and another tech comes around, I'll bet you'd argue that .ogg is a good name, because it seems cute and peculiar and therefore intriguing, and x format is stupid because it's name....
If somehow
Think he was commenting more about Steve Ballmer's ridiculous stomping around and saying 'developers' than trying to assign blame...
BTW, after further research, I found that the instructions at http://www.kame.net/ to be helpful, since IPSEC under 10.2 is kame (racoon and all)
There are 25,600 total pixels on a 160x160 display. 12 bit color means you cannot have a scenario with each pixel being a different color. More importantly, it's not so much about simultaneous color, but the total palette. With 12 bit precision, each color has 16 levels. If there is a pure red gradient, it would look like crap, for example. The difference is non-trivial for those who intend to view images on it.
That being said, I have an m130 and don't care about the refund. I don't use my palm to view images, no matter how many colors it could display, the 160x160 restriction is too much to deal with. Even with a 320x320 display, images don't look good enough.
Used a palm? The displays are so low end that redraws should be avoided like the plague. Full motion rapid image changes would just give a blurry mess, the ghosting on those displays is too bad to acheive the described effect.
From a practical perspective, as a non-sysadmin about the best you can easily do is WEP. Though weak, it is better than nothing and is certainly sufficient to keep all but the most determined attackers at bay.
When having to settle for WEP, you should regularly change keys. Since this is a home situation, manually changing it every couple of days or so should suffice. In a corporate enviornment, some sort of automatic rekeying should be implemented to complement WEP. If you do not rekey, and you have a persistant attacker sniffing your packets constantly, your traffic could be compromised in less than a week (I've managed overnight in my tests when constantly saturating the wireless bandwidth with data). Some equipment is better about the weak points of WEP than others, but assume you have the weakest and change every day or two. Chances are slim that a house would have a person trying hard to crack when so many open APs can be found.
Personally, I back up my wireless configuration with IPSec in addition to WEP. With WEP alone, all they can do is get a dhcp response, talk to other wireless systems, and hit the router on udp port 500 and esp (for ipsec). Once in IPSec, they get access to the wired network and the outside world. Still not the perfect solution (plan to force traffic through routing table when I get around it), but still serves to protect some of the more important stuff pretty reliably.
This is a bit offtopic, but is there any projects making use of the ipsec API in OSX to do VPN connectivity? The 'VPN' used in MacOS is PPTP by default, and I would like to integrate an OSX system into the VPN configuration here for free..
I love ogg, but now have a MacOSX system, and was wondering if anyone could recommend any players? I tried the Quicktime component only to see it do nothing and even if it did work I understand the framework will make it sound worse. Anyone have suggestions?
BTW, if anyone also happens to know some resources about bulding a vpn configuration that plays nice with Windows, Linux, and OSX, let me know. I know PPTP as a possibility, but I would prefer standard ipsec..
Dell's servers usually ship with just a disc to automate install of OSes, no actual OS license.
Write 'refused' conspicuously on the package and leave it behind, let the post office deal with it/return to sender...
This is out of line, but he has no obligation to deal with the book at all, you can refuse shipment and it goes back into the void from which it came.
A nitpick, but what is the point of using an acronym and then the whole thing in parenthesis because the acronym isn't used by anyone? Why not say the whole thing and forget about the acronym? SPSTM (Seems Pretty Stupid To Me)
This is just a brand new low. This isn't just an editorial slant, this could be shown to be slandering Toho. There is no evidence that this in any way relates to a strategy regarding mozilla. The key issue with davezilla is that there is a portrayed character named godzilla on the site with a similar appearance, head on infringement. To say definitively that this is just their strategy to take down mozilla is just damn stupid.
IT as it was during the .com was a bust and a failure. I was part of a department that paid 80,000 dollars for tape changers to eliminate the need for IT people to take five minutes out of the day to change a few tapes. There was a line of Sun Enterprise servers, the cheapest of which shipping with a price tag of 45,000..... There were 23 of those damn servers... Ultra 60 workstations were being phased out for Ultra 80s for software developers just for the hell of it. The ratio of IT support people to users was about 1 to 4.5..... Damn cushy job with all kinds of brand new high end hardware all the time. Supporting fewer than five people is easy...
.com mess that is just flat out worthless. There is a point of diminishing returns, particularly with concern to equipment. Even with people, quality IT can go a long way with few people. That place folded fast when the bubble burst.
That is the kind of IT spending associated with the
Now I'm making more at a smaller company that has pretty much stayed at about 25 people or so total for the last 15 years and has pulled in about 14 million this year. Equipment is purchased usually refurb, upgrade cycles usually wait for about a 3x upgrade, and leans heavily on intel architecture machines for cost reasons, only as many non-intel machines are used as are necessary for testing. When a second internet connection was needed, I took a retired PC and put linux on it, not requisitioned some high end cicsco hardware. Same with a backup for our SonicWall gateway (purchased before my arrival), made out of a P60. VPN is FreeS/WAN powered, not hosted on a PIX. I am the only IT guy supporting those people, and really one good IT person is all you need for most situations with 25 people involved. Good IT people can support a lot of users with fewer resources. Upgrading Ultra60s to Ultra80s for code monkeys won't help them code faster. Having a humongous team of IT support people that spend more time thinking someone else will fix it than doing anything themselves will not help things.... And this realization is hitting the business world, and in this light it is a correct assessment. To say it is completely worthless would be foolish, but to say pouring money into IT works would be equally foolish.
It's easier to have 20% of a small number switch over, especially if that small number of users is ver saavy and knowledgable about their platform. Mac users tend to be enthusiasts of a sort, and of course want the latest and greatest. Just like nealy every linux user keeps their system up to date with the distribution of their choice.
Windows users on average just want it to do something, and as long as it does, why switch?
Though I agree the pipeline lengthening is mostly for the sake of marketing, the technical reasoning behind it, accepting their presumptions, is sound and not merely sacrificing performance for clock.
The thinking is that Intel further complicated the instruction set with SSE2. The nature of the SSE2 lends itself to be more predictable on branches. So if intensive operations are more accurately predicted at the branches, there are fewer mispredictions (duh) and thus the pipeline need not be flushed. As more companies jump on the SSE2 bandwagon, pipeline flushes will decrease and P4 behaves as it should rather than how it does currently...
Neat link... Though seems strange to do it in flash, I mean, it's a damn picture, not a movie :)
For anyone thinking they don't get it and give up, just keep trying, I'm positive that it will come to you. Just might want to be mindful of being around other people, as you might just exclaim when you figure it out...
Way offtopic and replying to a sig, but the link was neat.
But potentially not so great if you have come back from a business trip by yourself..
'honey, I swear I didn't do anything, it's just spam, honest!'
No, there is a difference. Sure people can post signs, they can put up websites, they can do all sorts of things, but forcing the issue down the end-users throats through a medium in which the recipient may be paying just to receive it. Spamming is for a number of people the equivalent of having a telemarketer call you collect and the receiver having no choice to decline (this is illegal, of course).
But it doesn't stop there. It is bad enough that end users are abused in this fashion, but the distribution channels for the spam is just exceptionally bad. It is one thing if they had to foot the bill for mail servers and associated bandwidth, but instead they are scanning for open relays to *exploit* for their mail capacity and bandwidth usage. I was called in by one company with mediocre IT infrastructure, enough to be dangerous. They called saying that over the last few days mail through their server was taking hours to get anywhere, if it got anywhere at all. Well I go in and find it is an open relay, and the thing had 400,000 queued messages, among which there where about 350 legitimate messages to retrieve. I closed the exploit, and eventually recovered the messages of interest for them, but they lost a lot of time because of it and their bandwidth charges were really high because of it. Spammer's are doing wrong and they know it, why else hide behind other companies resources?
Hate to break it to you, but while there is certainly an editorial slant against MS seen quite frequently, this is meant as more of a tech site and that includes MS. Hell, even those who dislike MS might have to use Visual Studio, it makes sense. It's not 'selling' out. They are taking money to put up what is obviously an ad and easily recognized as one. Selling out would be changing stories so that MS looks good...
I say don't knock it until you have tried it and become somewhat accustomed to it. While I admit there is insufficient benefit to start retraining everyone, it is more comfortable for me to type in dvorak. I'm also a bit faster, but the key for me is the comfort. The less I have to move my fingers, the happier I am.
I thought that whole bit was misrepresented and really dumb from a technical standpoint.
But from a business standpoint, that is exactly correct. They have a legacy, Unix based system for performing these calculations. Getting it to work on Windows would be extremely expensive if possible at all. Also, getting Windows to work as they expect in a clustering configuration would also not likely help the cost of migration in any case....
But when stuck with whatever Unix they had, they were also tied down to Sun, HP, or IBM equipment. Those pieces of hardware are expensive as *hell*, upgrading a few systems is bad enough, but a cluster of 32 would take some serious cash.
Now enters Linux (from the business perspective). They can run a full-fledged Unixy system on commodity PC hardware. Coughing up the cash for 40 PCs is no problem at all. The commodity, high speed hardware is the difference here, and Linux is perceived as the enabling technology to let this happen.
Now was Linux required? No, not at all. x86 Solaris might have worked, but it is seen (rightfully so) as Sun's red-headed stepchild, dismal hardware support and performance, meant to give a taste for Sparc computing or learning the system rather than be a production system. Any BSD could have been used just as easily as Linux, but Linux was tipped into the light by the lingering hype and broader userbase/community support. They aren't looking at redistribution, so the GPL/BSD argument is a moot point, so Linux is just a valid choice as FreeBSD.
The point is a new PC with Linux can compete competently with super-high-priced Unix workstations. In the really super high end single servers where intel architecture cannot adequately scale on a hardware, Unix systems are still king (Linux may run on some of them, but if you are dishing out that much cash, you can get the system supported top to bottom by a single source), but in the workstation and clustering arena, PCs with a competent *nix (Linux or BSD) are quickly becoming king....