Am I missing something, or is the implication made that Linux became a fullblown and mature OS overnight?
Evidently Mr. Brown does seem to think that. The fact that he believes that the first version of Linux was "1.0" speaks volumes about his complete lack of any real research.
He was hoping to get a juicy sound bite out of Dennis Ritchie about how Linux 1.0 was lifted from Unix 1.0. Naturally, he didn't get it. Nor did he get any juicy sound bites from Tannenbaum claiming that Linux 1.0 came from Minix 1.0. Frustrated, Mr. Brown simply ignored his interviewees and pulled his "facts" out of thin air.
There's that word again. Facts. Now we know that Ken Brown and Martin Taylor use the same dictionary -- the one where "facts" is defined as "pretty much anything you want to make up."
"Look, you only need to look at what we've done with Java to understand how Sun views the value of incorporating community feedback. Java could not exist if only Sun is supporting it. It exists because there are hundreds and thousands of partners. We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris," he said.
Ok, so... according to Mr. Schwartz, Solaris will be open source soon, just like Java is open source today. Evidently this is some new definition of "open source" that I was not previously aware of.
I want some of whatever he's been smoking.
It's a shame, because if they would truly open source Solaris and Java, the open source community would rally around both products and actually help Sun get out of the death spiral they seem to be in right now. If they have any doubt about that, all they have to do is look in their own source repositories to see how well it's worked for OpenOffice.org.
Sun needs a regime change. The current crop of morons are not fit for management.
...is that spammers have access to the anti-spam tools.
They have access to DSPAM. They have access to SpamAssassin. They have access to the Bayesian filters found in Mozilla and other products.
When crafting their spams, they run them through these tools, and they keep obfuscating their spams until they get one through. Once they've got it perfect, they send a hundred million copies out to the world, and whammo! Your mo.rt-gage has been ap.prov/ed, and your v1ag---ra is ordered!
Sun has hinted more than once that they'd like JDS to be based on Solaris x86. I would expect at some point that they'll either start pushing a Solaris-based JDS, or even worse, "seamlessly upgrade" Linux-based JDS to Solaris-based JDS and load up a Linux binary compatibility layer to run those "legacy" apps.
Linux is a nuisance to Sun. It's really a shame, because Sun has done (or acquired and re-released) some great things: NFS, Java, OpenOffice... but they're so stuck on Solaris that they just can't handle the fact that it's all about Linux now. IBM "gets it" -- they do AIX when customers ask for it, Linux when customers ask for that, but they're pushing for unified Linux everywhere. But anyone who's experienced IBM's distribution of the GNU toolset on AIX knows that Sun absolutely kicks IBM's butt in terms of integration of the tools into a legacy Unix OS.
Anyway, I'd wager that Sun is going to continue to be schizophrenic about Linux until the board wises up and cans McNealy.
You want the Shockwave player for Linux? This is where the Slashdot Effect can actually help.
Go to the Macromedia 'wish form' and tell them you want Shockwave Player for Linux! Development over there seems to be demand-driven, so fill out the form. If they get enough requests, they might just do it.
Doesn't Microsoft hold a patent on their 'Caller ID for email' specification? Are they dedicating the patent as part of their submission of this spec to the IETF?
Or is this Microsoft's attempt to not-so-subtly obtain a lock-in on email?
This question must be VERY CLEARLY answered before anyone moves forward.
Don't buy this product. The Alexis de Tongueville Institute has released an independent, objective, un-biased, and totally honest study which concludes that you should only buy Xbox video game hardware, and that video game products from Sony and Nintendo are directly responsible for terrorism and the collapse of the global economy.
Damn buncha Slashbots and their anti-Real groupthink. What is it that's always being said? "It's the applications." Here we have Real, an ISV that has finally committed to supporting Linux... and y'all are bitching about it.
RealPlayer 10 (alpha) was an easy install... I just plugged in the RPM and went on my merry way. I didn't even have to go find some eastern European web site where software patents haven't been legalized, to get a player with actual codecs in it. Sure, everything can play OGG. Big deal. Go find me a media site that has OGG feeds available. RealPlayer is a great way to output not only Real's own formats, but stuff like MP3 as well.
Real needs our support, not our scorn. If you have a problem with their business model, or the 'extras' that are installed on the Windows platform, it would behoove you to politely tell them what your problems are. You are, after all, a customer. But please, for the sake of all of us, shut off the Slashbot hive mind for a couple of minutes and consider that Real is one of the VERY FEW things standing between Microsoft and a total WMA/WMV monopoly.
Does anyone know how well the included OpenOffice.org is integrated with the rest of the desktop? This is the main thing that keeps me coming back to Ximian -- their OOo is extremely well-integrated. Xft2/fontconfig support throughout, tight hooks to CUPS and Ghostscript so you don't have to futz around with the printers separately (once it's defined in the OS, it's defined in OOo, and there's really no excuse to have otherwise).
Microsoft is clearly unloading the source for things that they're no longer interested in. Perhaps they think they can score a few quick PR points by doing this.
Yawn. Wake me up when they publish the source to Windows.Forms, or anything else that's current and relevant in the Microsoft developer world. Then I might believe they're playing nice. Maybe.
You could write the server-side of the protocol this client expects for instance. That should not be too hard.
Sounds doable. I'm a developer on the Citadel project, which has an open source groupware server. Now that the Connector is open source, we might give some serious consideration towards implementing the required WebDAV API in our web service.
Microsoft is, obviously, pushing.NET as hard as it can, making every effort to deploy it as widely as possible.
What is the Wine project's strategy for enabling compatibility with applications that are not "pure.NET" i.e. partially in Win32, partially in.NET ? Is there going to be lots of thunking between Wine and Mono, or is the Wine team going to attempt to get Microsoft's CIL interpreter and other tools running on Linux?
Furthermore, what are the pros and cons of each approach?
This sounds very similar, except they'll be using the web as an interface, instead of X-windows.
Larger organizations really ought to be giving the X Window System a good hard look. Remember 20 years ago when the cube farm was nothing but acre upon acre of IBM 3270 terminals? Those were the days when a single desktop flunkie could service hundreds of users, because a terminal either worked or it didn't, and when it didn't, you just swapped it out for a working one.
Now it's 2004, and we have IBM behind Linux. Imagine the power of LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project) running on a big mainframe serving applications to hundreds, or even thousands, of LTSP client stations. This is the true power of Network Computing -- and yes, it's still a good idea. It failed in the late 1990's because the McNealy/Ellison idea of Network Computing meant that you had to throw away all your Windows applications on day one and replace them with pure Java applications. Not so with what I'm suggesting here -- you can mix Java apps, web apps, native Linux apps, and even Windows apps using your choice of emulation (Wine, etc.) or rdesktop to a Windows appserver.
The desktop as we know it needs to disappear for large installations. It makes sense for small installations, and for developers, and hackers, etc. but for your typical large office full of hundreds of nontechnical users, we need to go back to the "glass house" model of computing that worked so well for so long. And we'd be there already, if Microsoft and Intel weren't so good at preserving the inefficient, bloated status quo.
If Linux is adopted overseas, all it means it that interoperability will probably have to be maintained between Linux and Windows. Once that happens though, managers in the US may start to see the cost savings, and switch.
This cannot be understated!
And the next step after that, is where US corporations are almost forced to adopt Linux and other OSS just to keep their costs in line with their overseas competitors.
Not to mention, any company that wants to do business globally won't be able to deploy future lockers-in like XAML or DRM'ed Office fileformats for fear of cutting off interoperability with customers, suppliers, and partners overseas. And that benefits American Linux users as well.
Never forget that Microsoft must maintain a monopoly to win -- well over 90 percent market share. Linux wins simply by breaking Microsoft's monopoly -- which requires less than 10 percent market share.
Believe it or not, everyone that works for Microsoft isn't an evil person trying to crush the free software movement.
Clearly you haven't met any 'softies, either in person or online.
The corporate culture at Microsoft is downright scary. The influence of their megalomaniacal chairman permeates through every level of the company. These people really do believe that they're saving the world with their technology -- and that they're the only ones capable of doing so.
If I were a tinfoil-hatter I might even suspect that the reason soft drinks are still free in Redmond has something to do with the "they drank the Kool-Aid" effect -- the level of groupthink over there really is that consistent.
* Placate the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, and other corporate terrorists by letting them monitor your network for "illegal content"
How many folks will let their guard down by being foolish enough to trust this thing to be their home firewall, and then get whacked by the corporate goons? Quite a few, I'd imagine.
I'm running Ximian Desktop at home, and I've got a remote X display in a comfortable, sunny room (servers are in the basement). I can definitely attest that full support of LTSP would be a wonderful thing.
There's lots of talk about Linux desktops replacing Windows desktops, but too many people want to use Linux as a drop-in Windows replacement. That's unfortunate, because to really get the most out of Linux, you have to treat it like Linux -- play up its strengths. The remotability of X11 on a window by window basis (as opposed to the whole desktop, which is how it's done in Windows) is central to this.
This is, in fact, how the folks in Largo, FL made their system work so well. Everything runs from big servers. The nice thing about this model is that you can roll out dedicated servers for various applications. You could have a big box dedicated to OpenOffice, for example. It would run lots of instances of that application (and you get the associated memory footprint savings) being displayed on everyone's desktops. Easy to deploy, too: you just publish the icon or menu item to fire it up, and it executes remotely and transparently. The user doesn't even know that the app is running on a different server -- not even when he/she goes to load and save files, because you're using NIS and NFS to unify the authentication and the document directories across all servers.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Elegant and seamless. And it's only possible in a Unix/Linux environment -- Microsoft doesn't have anything even close to this. They can't, because it screws up their pricing model. And we all know that money is more important than technology in their world.
Let's be realistic here. What Linux user doesn't have Acrobat Reader, Flash, a Java runtime, and RealPlayer loaded on their machine? It's nice to have 100 percent open source, and that should continue to be a goal... but in practical terms, there are ISV's delivering applications to the Linux platform, they are adding value, and we should be taking advantage of that!
If users are not provided with the functionality they want, they will find another vendor. Red Hat is doing what they need to do to get Linux onto mainstream desktops. I, for one, applaud this move, and I hope they make inroads. Every computer that has Red Hat Desktop installed is a computer whose presence will help stop the spread of XAML/Avalon apps in a couple of years. And that's important, because unless we start to get some real market share soon, your precious little Debian uber-free utopiOS won't be viable for any mainstream tasks anymore.
Yes, they do have it available as an extension. But they need to do several things:
Include it by default, or at least make it SUPER EASY to install. (It's not click-and-run like some other extensions are, because it's not pure XUL -- there's a native library involved.)
Allow Thunderbird to handle sending and receiving of meeting invitations (I understand this is in the works)
Schedule meetings while looking at the invitees' free/busy times. Since Thunderbird already has LDAP support, it should be trivial to look in LDAP for someone's free/busy list URL.
Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store! The open source community appears to want to standardize on IMAP (just a folder called "Calendar" full of vCalendar objects), and that's just a dandy way of doing it. Nobody (and I mean nobody at all) has implemented CAP because it's so damn hairy. WCAP has a small following because it's what Netscape...iPlanet...SunONE Calendar Server uses, but IMAP is still the better solution because every mail program already supports it.
This is important stuff, and it needs to get implemented and put into the hands of users ASAP.
(And to answer the Slashbots' next question: yes, I'm already involved and working. Are you?)
I know that some people will flame on about the "small tools" approach, but it would really make sense to tightly integrate Mozilla Calendar into Thunderbird. Like it or not, people have expectations, and the general expectation is that their email program will be a full PIM suite (Calendar, Tasks, Contacts). As nice as Thunderbird is, there's a large segment of the population that will take a look at it and say "No calendar? Then I'll stick with Outlook." And that's a shame, because getting rid of Outlook is one step on the road to getting rid of Windows.
Hopefully google will be able to use the money it raises to actually grow their business, and not do as so many other companies have done and just go out and spend their new cash on worthless crap.
Perhaps they could use the money to buy Microsoft... and dismantle it.:)
Hell, sign me up for half a zillion shares if that's the plan!
Slashdot Mirror
Am I missing something, or is the implication made that Linux became a fullblown and mature OS overnight?
Evidently Mr. Brown does seem to think that. The fact that he believes that the first version of Linux was "1.0" speaks volumes about his complete lack of any real research.
He was hoping to get a juicy sound bite out of Dennis Ritchie about how Linux 1.0 was lifted from Unix 1.0. Naturally, he didn't get it. Nor did he get any juicy sound bites from Tannenbaum claiming that Linux 1.0 came from Minix 1.0. Frustrated, Mr. Brown simply ignored his interviewees and pulled his "facts" out of thin air.
There's that word again. Facts. Now we know that Ken Brown and Martin Taylor use the same dictionary -- the one where "facts" is defined as "pretty much anything you want to make up."
"Look, you only need to look at what we've done with Java to understand how Sun views the value of incorporating community feedback. Java could not exist if only Sun is supporting it. It exists because there are hundreds and thousands of partners. We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris," he said.
... according to Mr. Schwartz, Solaris will be open source soon, just like Java is open source today. Evidently this is some new definition of "open source" that I was not previously aware of.
Ok, so
I want some of whatever he's been smoking.
It's a shame, because if they would truly open source Solaris and Java, the open source community would rally around both products and actually help Sun get out of the death spiral they seem to be in right now. If they have any doubt about that, all they have to do is look in their own source repositories to see how well it's worked for OpenOffice.org.
Sun needs a regime change. The current crop of morons are not fit for management.
...is that spammers have access to the anti-spam tools.
They have access to DSPAM. They have access to SpamAssassin. They have access to the Bayesian filters found in Mozilla and other products.
When crafting their spams, they run them through these tools, and they keep obfuscating their spams until they get one through. Once they've got it perfect, they send a hundred million copies out to the world, and whammo! Your mo.rt-gage has been ap.prov/ed, and your v1ag---ra is ordered!
The JDS is their Linux desktop system.
Not for long.
Sun has hinted more than once that they'd like JDS to be based on Solaris x86. I would expect at some point that they'll either start pushing a Solaris-based JDS, or even worse, "seamlessly upgrade" Linux-based JDS to Solaris-based JDS and load up a Linux binary compatibility layer to run those "legacy" apps.
Linux is a nuisance to Sun. It's really a shame, because Sun has done (or acquired and re-released) some great things: NFS, Java, OpenOffice... but they're so stuck on Solaris that they just can't handle the fact that it's all about Linux now. IBM "gets it" -- they do AIX when customers ask for it, Linux when customers ask for that, but they're pushing for unified Linux everywhere. But anyone who's experienced IBM's distribution of the GNU toolset on AIX knows that Sun absolutely kicks IBM's butt in terms of integration of the tools into a legacy Unix OS.
Anyway, I'd wager that Sun is going to continue to be schizophrenic about Linux until the board wises up and cans McNealy.
You want the Shockwave player for Linux? This is where the Slashdot Effect can actually help.
Go to the Macromedia 'wish form' and tell them you want Shockwave Player for Linux! Development over there seems to be demand-driven, so fill out the form. If they get enough requests, they might just do it.
Didn't Coleco prove very well nearly two decades ago that consumers do not want a video game console that can be upgraded to a home computer?
This sounds a lot like the school of thought which suggests that "If you allow yourself to live in fear, then the terrorists have already won."
It isn't much of a stretch to draw a parallel and assert that "If you allow yourself to live in legal paranoia, then SCO has already won."
Doesn't Microsoft hold a patent on their 'Caller ID for email' specification? Are they dedicating the patent as part of their submission of this spec to the IETF?
Or is this Microsoft's attempt to not-so-subtly obtain a lock-in on email?
This question must be VERY CLEARLY answered before anyone moves forward.
Don't buy this product. The Alexis de Tongueville Institute has released an independent, objective, un-biased, and totally honest study which concludes that you should only buy Xbox video game hardware, and that video game products from Sony and Nintendo are directly responsible for terrorism and the collapse of the global economy.
Damn buncha Slashbots and their anti-Real groupthink. What is it that's always being said? "It's the applications." Here we have Real, an ISV that has finally committed to supporting Linux ... and y'all are bitching about it.
... I just plugged in the RPM and went on my merry way. I didn't even have to go find some eastern European web site where software patents haven't been legalized, to get a player with actual codecs in it. Sure, everything can play OGG. Big deal. Go find me a media site that has OGG feeds available. RealPlayer is a great way to output not only Real's own formats, but stuff like MP3 as well.
RealPlayer 10 (alpha) was an easy install
Real needs our support, not our scorn. If you have a problem with their business model, or the 'extras' that are installed on the Windows platform, it would behoove you to politely tell them what your problems are. You are, after all, a customer. But please, for the sake of all of us, shut off the Slashbot hive mind for a couple of minutes and consider that Real is one of the VERY FEW things standing between Microsoft and a total WMA/WMV monopoly.
Does anyone know how well the included OpenOffice.org is integrated with the rest of the desktop? This is the main thing that keeps me coming back to Ximian -- their OOo is extremely well-integrated. Xft2/fontconfig support throughout, tight hooks to CUPS and Ghostscript so you don't have to futz around with the printers separately (once it's defined in the OS, it's defined in OOo, and there's really no excuse to have otherwise).
How does Fedora Core 2 do in this department?
Microsoft is clearly unloading the source for things that they're no longer interested in. Perhaps they think they can score a few quick PR points by doing this.
Yawn. Wake me up when they publish the source to Windows.Forms, or anything else that's current and relevant in the Microsoft developer world. Then I might believe they're playing nice. Maybe.
You could write the server-side of the protocol this client expects for instance. That should not be too hard.
Sounds doable. I'm a developer on the Citadel project, which has an open source groupware server. Now that the Connector is open source, we might give some serious consideration towards implementing the required WebDAV API in our web service.
Microsoft is, obviously, pushing .NET as hard as it can, making every effort to deploy it as widely as possible.
.NET" i.e. partially in Win32, partially in .NET ? Is there going to be lots of thunking between Wine and Mono, or is the Wine team going to attempt to get Microsoft's CIL interpreter and other tools running on Linux?
What is the Wine project's strategy for enabling compatibility with applications that are not "pure
Furthermore, what are the pros and cons of each approach?
This sounds very similar, except they'll be using the web as an interface, instead of X-windows.
Larger organizations really ought to be giving the X Window System a good hard look. Remember 20 years ago when the cube farm was nothing but acre upon acre of IBM 3270 terminals? Those were the days when a single desktop flunkie could service hundreds of users, because a terminal either worked or it didn't, and when it didn't, you just swapped it out for a working one.
Now it's 2004, and we have IBM behind Linux. Imagine the power of LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project) running on a big mainframe serving applications to hundreds, or even thousands, of LTSP client stations. This is the true power of Network Computing -- and yes, it's still a good idea. It failed in the late 1990's because the McNealy/Ellison idea of Network Computing meant that you had to throw away all your Windows applications on day one and replace them with pure Java applications. Not so with what I'm suggesting here -- you can mix Java apps, web apps, native Linux apps, and even Windows apps using your choice of emulation (Wine, etc.) or rdesktop to a Windows appserver.
The desktop as we know it needs to disappear for large installations. It makes sense for small installations, and for developers, and hackers, etc. but for your typical large office full of hundreds of nontechnical users, we need to go back to the "glass house" model of computing that worked so well for so long. And we'd be there already, if Microsoft and Intel weren't so good at preserving the inefficient, bloated status quo.
If Linux is adopted overseas, all it means it that interoperability will probably have to be maintained between Linux and Windows. Once that happens though, managers in the US may start to see the cost savings, and switch.
This cannot be understated!
And the next step after that, is where US corporations are almost forced to adopt Linux and other OSS just to keep their costs in line with their overseas competitors.
Not to mention, any company that wants to do business globally won't be able to deploy future lockers-in like XAML or DRM'ed Office fileformats for fear of cutting off interoperability with customers, suppliers, and partners overseas. And that benefits American Linux users as well.
Never forget that Microsoft must maintain a monopoly to win -- well over 90 percent market share. Linux wins simply by breaking Microsoft's monopoly -- which requires less than 10 percent market share.
Believe it or not, everyone that works for Microsoft isn't an evil person trying to crush the free software movement.
Clearly you haven't met any 'softies, either in person or online.
The corporate culture at Microsoft is downright scary. The influence of their megalomaniacal chairman permeates through every level of the company. These people really do believe that they're saving the world with their technology -- and that they're the only ones capable of doing so.
If I were a tinfoil-hatter I might even suspect that the reason soft drinks are still free in Redmond has something to do with the "they drank the Kool-Aid" effect -- the level of groupthink over there really is that consistent.
And let's not forget...
* Placate the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, and other corporate terrorists by letting them monitor your network for "illegal content"
How many folks will let their guard down by being foolish enough to trust this thing to be their home firewall, and then get whacked by the corporate goons? Quite a few, I'd imagine.
I'm running Ximian Desktop at home, and I've got a remote X display in a comfortable, sunny room (servers are in the basement). I can definitely attest that full support of LTSP would be a wonderful thing.
There's lots of talk about Linux desktops replacing Windows desktops, but too many people want to use Linux as a drop-in Windows replacement. That's unfortunate, because to really get the most out of Linux, you have to treat it like Linux -- play up its strengths. The remotability of X11 on a window by window basis (as opposed to the whole desktop, which is how it's done in Windows) is central to this.
This is, in fact, how the folks in Largo, FL made their system work so well. Everything runs from big servers. The nice thing about this model is that you can roll out dedicated servers for various applications. You could have a big box dedicated to OpenOffice, for example. It would run lots of instances of that application (and you get the associated memory footprint savings) being displayed on everyone's desktops. Easy to deploy, too: you just publish the icon or menu item to fire it up, and it executes remotely and transparently. The user doesn't even know that the app is running on a different server -- not even when he/she goes to load and save files, because you're using NIS and NFS to unify the authentication and the document directories across all servers.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Elegant and seamless. And it's only possible in a Unix/Linux environment -- Microsoft doesn't have anything even close to this. They can't, because it screws up their pricing model. And we all know that money is more important than technology in their world.
Let's be realistic here. What Linux user doesn't have Acrobat Reader, Flash, a Java runtime, and RealPlayer loaded on their machine? It's nice to have 100 percent open source, and that should continue to be a goal ... but in practical terms, there are ISV's delivering applications to the Linux platform, they are adding value, and we should be taking advantage of that!
If users are not provided with the functionality they want, they will find another vendor. Red Hat is doing what they need to do to get Linux onto mainstream desktops. I, for one, applaud this move, and I hope they make inroads. Every computer that has Red Hat Desktop installed is a computer whose presence will help stop the spread of XAML/Avalon apps in a couple of years. And that's important, because unless we start to get some real market share soon, your precious little Debian uber-free utopiOS won't be viable for any mainstream tasks anymore.
- Include it by default, or at least make it SUPER EASY to install. (It's not click-and-run like some other extensions are, because it's not pure XUL -- there's a native library involved.)
- Allow Thunderbird to handle sending and receiving of meeting invitations (I understand this is in the works)
- Schedule meetings while looking at the invitees' free/busy times. Since Thunderbird already has LDAP support, it should be trivial to look in LDAP for someone's free/busy list URL.
- Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store! The open source community appears to want to standardize on IMAP (just a folder called "Calendar" full of vCalendar objects), and that's just a dandy way of doing it. Nobody (and I mean nobody at all) has implemented CAP because it's so damn hairy. WCAP has a small following because it's what Netscape...iPlanet...SunONE Calendar Server uses, but IMAP is still the better solution because every mail program already supports it.
This is important stuff, and it needs to get implemented and put into the hands of users ASAP.(And to answer the Slashbots' next question: yes, I'm already involved and working. Are you?)
I know that some people will flame on about the "small tools" approach, but it would really make sense to tightly integrate Mozilla Calendar into Thunderbird. Like it or not, people have expectations, and the general expectation is that their email program will be a full PIM suite (Calendar, Tasks, Contacts). As nice as Thunderbird is, there's a large segment of the population that will take a look at it and say "No calendar? Then I'll stick with Outlook." And that's a shame, because getting rid of Outlook is one step on the road to getting rid of Windows.
Easy solution:
Open the code base. Slap a GPL or multi-license (such as is currently done with OpenOffice) on it.
But, be very strict about the name. Only a build that has passed Sun's compatibility tests would be able to be called "Java."
I think that would make everyone happy -- even hotheads like McNealy and Stallman.
Heh, well I still can't sleep next to the thing when it's on. There must actually be some phantom device in there making noise.
Have you considered turning the computer off when you go to sleep?
Hopefully google will be able to use the money it raises to actually grow their business, and not do as so many other companies have done and just go out and spend their new cash on worthless crap.
... and dismantle it. :)
Perhaps they could use the money to buy Microsoft
Hell, sign me up for half a zillion shares if that's the plan!