Highway patrols, etc. are free? So are those gas taxes and registration fees all just figments of my imagination?
They are "free" to the users of the road system. Police are usually paid for out of local taxes, not fuel taxes. As for the fees on take offs and landings and the jet fuel taxes, they hardly pay for all the costs involved in running airports and keeping the skies managed. The funding and revenue sources don't all go into and out of the same pot so accurate accounting is just about impossible, but often localities throw in money to help their airports with the excuse that the indirect income received through increase tourism, sales taxes, and employment will offset the expense. Some smaller communities pay subsidies (tax benefits or whatever) to encourage airlines to continue to provide service to them.
The long distance Amtrak trains exist only to pacify members of Congress who scream each time Amtrak wants to pull out of their state. Look at am Amtrak map sometime. It touches every state except South Dakota. Think that is a coincidence? So Amtrak is screwed in having to provide service to 47 states yet get threatened to be cut off because they can't make that profitable. They should be allowed to concentrate on providing service in dense corridors like BOS-WAS, SF-LA, etc... They pay property taxes on tracks they own, and have to rent time on tracks they don't own.
About 50 years ago, the ambitious Interstate highway project was kicked off. It's almost done. There are no big huge highway expansion plans on the books now. Nothing is planned but tweaking existing corridors. Most corridors have no room to expand so we're faced with huge condemnations of expensive property or double-decking many highways. The only way we can grow is to encourage a smart multi-modal transportation system where users have choices. Not everyone can take a bus to work, for example, but those that can keep cars off the road so those who can't or don't want to, can enjoy less congestion going to work.
Amtrak also pays $800 million a year in property taxes on the ground their tracks are on. They also have to pay for their own police force. All of these similar items are free to users of highways. They pay for their own "traffic control" personnel, which is provided free by the government to airlines.
I don't understand the rationale for wanting to eliminate Amtrak. Anyone who lives in the Northeast, Amtrak goes away, then all of those people going between major cities would either clog up I-95 or the airports, which are themselves are already over capacity. Just in the Philadelphia area alone, the feds are going to pour in 2 billion dollars (reference www.dvrpc.org) into minor airports in the area trying to move some smaller regional air traffic out of Philadelphia.
Yeah, the invasion of privacy issue is a concern. Just pay cash. You don't have to provide your ID.
There are laws against indecency on the radio. The FCC has a tough job on this front. From reading the full report, it looks like they are doing a pretty good job. The blatant innuendos (like the milk duds one) are pretty obviously indecent in purpose where just saying a "fleeting" fuck isn't. I particularly was encouraged by their allowing the word "fuck" to be spoken seven times on a news story that reported some wiretap contents of a mafia boss.
When you think about it, it's all in how you say the word "fuck" and if the FCC was just hung up on a few words, you end up banning a statement like "Fuck the FCC" which is not offensive in and of itself while letting the milk duds skit go by.
I think they are doing a good job by the looks of the full report (meaning, if the will of the people of the United States is to keep sexually explicit material off the public airwaves, then this is a far better approach than just banning seven naughty words).
Hint: Don't get hung up on my post too much. I'm not expressing any opinion on whether or not the laws against indencent material are laudible. My opinion above is referencing the enforcement and interpretation of that law only.
I disagree with almost all of you. Having HTML-rendering code available as an API for all programs to invoke if needed is not a bad thing. The problem here is the crap that comes along with that, and the numero uno biggy is Active X.
When Active X was first announced, all security-minded folks heaved, sighed, and worried. "Download native code with full privs and it runs on my box?" Microsoft assured everyone that it wasn't a problem cause all code would be signed and you could limit what gets run on your box.
As history has shown, this promise has failed. We've had hacks exploiting weak Microsoft-supplied active X controls, Active X controls that come with Windows (and hence already installed) with problems that get exploited (hence no prompting), and bogus verisign certs that appear to come from Microsoft and problems revoking it. And finally, just plain stupid users who will press OK on any dialog box that comes there way...
So it's not the bundling of an HTML rendering engine that bothers me, it's the crap that comes with it.
BTW, on my windows boxen, I just set the option for active x code and scripting to "prompt" instead of enable or disable. It can be a pain at times, but unless I'm doing something like visiting the Windows update site, I usually deny any active x invokations on almost all web sites I visit.
Re:Dreamcast's failure is all my fault. Sorry...
on
Dreamcast Postmortem
·
· Score: 2
...did Nintendo maybe bury a Sega Genesis in your backyard, or something?
Hmm, no. But I did rent a Mega drive system from a corner shop while visiting friends in the UK several years ago...
Dreamcast's failure is all my fault. Sorry...
on
Dreamcast Postmortem
·
· Score: 5
I jinxed the console. I predicted it's death the day I bought one at midnight on 9/9/99.
You see, any console I buy fails. Any console I don't purchase succeeds.
My history:
Nintendo NES: Didn't buy one. Was interested in something that blew the socks off of NES. It was the...
3DO: $700 when it first came out, but I waited until it dropped to only $400. Soon after I purchased it, it was clear it was doomed due to the success of...
Playstation: I never got one. It's been a ragging success. I figured I'd wait for the next generation of gaming system which was:
Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64 was just so incredible at the time. I had to get one. Games dribbled out, and most of them sucked. They all looked like Super Mario 64 but with a different script. The only decent game I ever bought was Zelda 64. An incredible title. But I felt like N64 was a loser system. So I set out to find a new love. It was...
Sega Dreamcast: I got my hands on a Japanesse model in early 99 and was blown away. Couldn't wait until 9/9/99 to get my own. I had heard about this PS2 thing coming out, but figured that history would doom it. Atari was once a dominant game system but never repeated it. Nintendo was #1 with NES but never recovered that title. So this "PS2" thing just had to fail. I figured, screw the PS2, I'll get me a Dreamcast. Sigh...
Playstation 2: So now the PS2 is selling as fast as they can make them. Even though many say the Dreamcast is still a better system, it's now dead. Well, I'm not buying a PS2. Instead I think I'll wait and buy a...
X Box: If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, I'll consider a large cash bribe not to buy your box. But I think I will anyway. Microsoft deserves to be a victim of my curse...
I find it hard to argue any moral dillema against pirating a full version of software that is designed solely for the purpose of piracy.
Speak for yourself. I used it to make a copy of my diablo 2 play disk so I could play at home on battle.net and also do the same at work (er, during my lunch hour of course...)
And I bought the copy myself. Don't believe me? My CDKEY is D2666DEAD666E11E7
Don't filter, install a linux gateway in the basement, protect it under lock-and-key, install firewall rules, and a proxy server that logs web access. Don't hide it, tell your kids that it's there and logging and you WILL check it and they must police themselves. Then make occasionally allowances for a mistake or two, like when clicking on an innocent looking site and being redirected to that goatse site.
Either that or sit with your kids at all times when they are on the net.
Filtering software is a parent's worse enemy.. WTF people can't understand that is beyond me. Even if it worked 99% of the time (and they don't), that 1% will be found and if so, it might as well not be there. Filtering software lulls parents into a false sense of security.
Logging via a secure box and self-policing with consequences if the house rules are violated is the only sane way I can see of handling this problem.
Is this easy? Not for many. And that means a business opportunity. Put an (often) free ad in your civic association or community newsletter advertising that you will take their old unused obsolete computer, like a 486, set it up as a linux firewall, give the parents a way to view the logs, you'll be a hero. Almost everyone has an old POS computer laying around these days. My basement has its own 486/66 Linux box too!:)
Another nice feature is you can cancel a number if it hasn't posted yet. I tried to order CloneCD before and they claimed that Amex denined my card. I called Amex, they said they never got an authorization request from them (actually, the site that does their payments for them).
So, since I used a one-time number from AMEX, I logged into their web site and canceled that number. This means if that site decided to try again or use it, they couldn't and it would be denied for real this time.
Chad Edwards, when asked about the possibility of online gaming to Mars, said that they were concerned about high ping times. Edwards did say that they are confident, however, that their ping times will be lower than those currently enjoyed by players on Blizzard's battle.net service.
That's funny, I went to that story and all I saw there was this large beige box with some distorted/stretched text that seems to say "advertising blocked by squid.redir"
My first encounter with session IDs was on the pathfinder.com web site. This *had* to have been around 1995 or so. I remember being annoyed by them when trying to bookmark them.
They had a URL with a session ID the @ signs surrounding them, so
pathfinder.com/somestory/ expanding to pathfinder.com/@344656654645@/somestory/
pathfinder.com was registered in 1993. It was where Time-Warner gathered all of their print publication stories at. It's now defunct.
Jesus Christ, I'm not a Stallman fanatic. For example, the BSD license is OK in my book. If someone wants to release code and don't mind if some company takes it, mods it, makes millions and locks it up so no one else can use the changes, that's fine with me.
But this license sounds dangerous. If you make mods, you HAVE to give it back to Apple and THEN they can decide to revoke the license retroactively. Sounds to me like in that case you have NO rights to even your own code (oh, I guess maybe to the diff, but what good is that if you can no longer legally grab the source to apply your patches against?)
Now please explain to me again why Stallman is a fanatic for being against this?
Apple has the right to retroactively change the terms of the license?
How would you feel if you spent months making mods to a package and then all of a sudden couldn't release it cause the code you based it on had its license revoked? (and to top it off, you'd STILL be obligated to give Apple your changes anyway).
That doesn't sound "free" to me.
What about the lack of freedom to make mods and NOT release them if you just doing for internal company use?
That sounds like less freedom to me too.
I really don't understand why/.'ers hate Stallman so much...
This is a big problem. All the binary-only "free" software like various plugins, players, and web browsers come with restrictive licenses. Go ahead, read them next time you download Real Player or something like that. They pretty much all say "redistribution prohibited."
A real pain for support departments trying to deploy software across an organization. Some have ways to get a blessed redistributable package (like IEAK) but you have to agree to some insane requirements like reporting number of copies installed, of their software AND competitor's software.
Another great example of how there's a big difference between free (beer) and free (speech) when it comes to software. Just cause you download it for free, doesn't mean you're free to do with it whatever you want.
Region 8 seems to be a waste. Does anything actually get produced that is region 8? It sounds to me that region 8 would only effectively play non-regioned disks...
A few years ago in Delaware (during the infamous Blizzard of 96), a plow was pushing its way up US 301 with a trail of cars following it. Well, the driver apparently lost track of the road and started plowing a trail into a farm field.
Cars behind him started to get stuck and the truck eventually sunk into the field too, before any of them realized they weren't on the road!
(Note that it rarely snows here and when it does it's only a few inches. That day saw 24 inches drop in 24 hours. The state doesn't have the equipment to handle that kind of snow. It was great fun!)
Among the things these trademarks cover is the use of X to describe an OS that can play games. I half expect Microsoft to go suing Linux distros and UNIX vendors to drop games from their distributions or stop using the term X.
This is all because someone wrote that damn
xbill game. Trademarking X gives Bill Gates the right to sue that game out of existence!
Actually, in all seriousness, I have to wonder. I was in an EB store and saw a large green X displayed and saw the tm sign and went searching and found the two above trademarks for X.
I'm sure it's just poetic license, but Apollo 11 landed on the moon in mid-summer. What were you doing in school?:-)
Oh no, you've shaken up my long term memories. It wasn't intentional. I have vivid memories of often going into the auditorium to watch launches and I could have sworn a moon walk or two. Hell I was 9 at the time. I also remember watching Armstrong too. I guess the two memories aren't the same.:(
Once upon a time, Cellular was created, and God (the gov) said there'd be two carriers in each market, the "A" side and the "B" side. The baby bells got the B side and the A side went to various other companies, telcos, independants.
Most of the As got together and franchised a name, Cellular One. They also created roaming agreements between them so they could compete with the less diverse B side (which is a good thing when you want seemless roaming).
Then the various PCS and GSM outfits came along, and Bs started buying As and each other. Verizon (a mish mash of a helluva lot of telcos) eventually bought a cellular one franchise in Southeast U.S. and with it somehow the rights to the name Cellular One. This forced the other Cellular One franchiesees to rename their franchise.
So now we have two of the biggest cell companies with two stupid names, Verizon and Cingular.
But I have a feeling they may not have had much choice. These days, you look for an available domain name first, and then name your company, not the other way around! There probably isn't many domain names left that are less than 10 chars with a few vowels in them....
Yeah, they were routine. That's what was so neat about the shuttles back then. It was something to be proud of. It was the only real neat thing left of the space program.
When *I* was in elementary school in 1969 I remember we all got out of class and gathered in the auditorium to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Now *that* was a rush. Looking up in the sky, seeing the moon, and knowing some human was up there walking around on it.
What the fuck happened to this (U.S.) country's pride? We just don't care about doing something like that anymore. All we care is whining about taxes, buying bigger SUVs, and building expensive missle defense systems (when the nuke that takes out NYC will be a back-pack nuke sailed in the bottom of a cargo ship into the Hudson probably. No SDI will protect us from that...)
Our priorities are just pathetic. An entire generation of people now are alive that have never seen a live moon walk. Nice progress.....
Our space program died long before 1986 I'm afraid. The shuttles were neat, but the drive to expand our frontier was already dead. Space Shuttles were moving into deployment and repair of communications sattelites for the most part.
EMC has storage that can be mirrored over a fiber or even copper at speeds as low as 100 Mbps allowing a mirrored HA array to be stashed off-site. It tracks disk writes and duplicates them at the other site. It can even batch up the sync writes to occur in off-peak hours if desired.
I guess it's how much availability you want. That last 0.001% drives costs through the roof. Many modern disk arrays have everything redundant and hot swappable, including not just disk modules, but power supplies, fans, and controllers.
Set up a nice HA disk array and cluster the servers and you too can run all of your critical services on one subnet!
That news release was obviously fake people, but don't be too fooled. Those trademark numbers are legit (look them up on www.uspto.gov) and it does cover the above mentioned areas.
Redmond Washington, April 1, 2001: Microsoft announced today that the operating system that will be driving the X-box will be called X-windows. Games compatible with the new X-box will sport a large stylized X on the sleeve to help the customer easily identify software compatible with the new system.
In separate news, Microsoft announced suits against upwards of 35 programmers and several hardware manufacturers for using the term "X" or "X-windows." Ballmer stated "We don't want consumers to be confused in the marketplace. X is a very strong branding image and is a registered trademark owned by Microsoft (76041367 and 76041368). These other individuals and companies are introducing confusion into the marketplace."
Microsoft's above trademarks cover the use of the X trademark in conjuction with games, operating systems that can run games, chat and message services involving gaming situations, e-mail, text-editing, and OS utilities supporting gaming.
Insiders at Microsoft hinted that Microsoft is willing to drop the suit against companies distributing UNIX and LINUX products if they remove all games and ability to play games on their product or cease the use of the X trademark in conjuction with above products.
Slashdot Mirror
They are "free" to the users of the road system. Police are usually paid for out of local taxes, not fuel taxes. As for the fees on take offs and landings and the jet fuel taxes, they hardly pay for all the costs involved in running airports and keeping the skies managed. The funding and revenue sources don't all go into and out of the same pot so accurate accounting is just about impossible, but often localities throw in money to help their airports with the excuse that the indirect income received through increase tourism, sales taxes, and employment will offset the expense. Some smaller communities pay subsidies (tax benefits or whatever) to encourage airlines to continue to provide service to them.
The long distance Amtrak trains exist only to pacify members of Congress who scream each time Amtrak wants to pull out of their state. Look at am Amtrak map sometime. It touches every state except South Dakota. Think that is a coincidence? So Amtrak is screwed in having to provide service to 47 states yet get threatened to be cut off because they can't make that profitable. They should be allowed to concentrate on providing service in dense corridors like BOS-WAS, SF-LA, etc... They pay property taxes on tracks they own, and have to rent time on tracks they don't own.
About 50 years ago, the ambitious Interstate highway project was kicked off. It's almost done. There are no big huge highway expansion plans on the books now. Nothing is planned but tweaking existing corridors. Most corridors have no room to expand so we're faced with huge condemnations of expensive property or double-decking many highways. The only way we can grow is to encourage a smart multi-modal transportation system where users have choices. Not everyone can take a bus to work, for example, but those that can keep cars off the road so those who can't or don't want to, can enjoy less congestion going to work.
Amtrak also pays $800 million a year in property taxes on the ground their tracks are on. They also have to pay for their own police force. All of these similar items are free to users of highways. They pay for their own "traffic control" personnel, which is provided free by the government to airlines.
I don't understand the rationale for wanting to eliminate Amtrak. Anyone who lives in the Northeast, Amtrak goes away, then all of those people going between major cities would either clog up I-95 or the airports, which are themselves are already over capacity. Just in the Philadelphia area alone, the feds are going to pour in 2 billion dollars (reference www.dvrpc.org) into minor airports in the area trying to move some smaller regional air traffic out of Philadelphia.
Yeah, the invasion of privacy issue is a concern. Just pay cash. You don't have to provide your ID.
When you think about it, it's all in how you say the word "fuck" and if the FCC was just hung up on a few words, you end up banning a statement like "Fuck the FCC" which is not offensive in and of itself while letting the milk duds skit go by.
I think they are doing a good job by the looks of the full report (meaning, if the will of the people of the United States is to keep sexually explicit material off the public airwaves, then this is a far better approach than just banning seven naughty words).
Hint: Don't get hung up on my post too much. I'm not expressing any opinion on whether or not the laws against indencent material are laudible. My opinion above is referencing the enforcement and interpretation of that law only.
Maybe he could hire a Bush's brother-in-law to lobby for him.
When Active X was first announced, all security-minded folks heaved, sighed, and worried. "Download native code with full privs and it runs on my box?" Microsoft assured everyone that it wasn't a problem cause all code would be signed and you could limit what gets run on your box.
As history has shown, this promise has failed. We've had hacks exploiting weak Microsoft-supplied active X controls, Active X controls that come with Windows (and hence already installed) with problems that get exploited (hence no prompting), and bogus verisign certs that appear to come from Microsoft and problems revoking it. And finally, just plain stupid users who will press OK on any dialog box that comes there way...
So it's not the bundling of an HTML rendering engine that bothers me, it's the crap that comes with it.
BTW, on my windows boxen, I just set the option for active x code and scripting to "prompt" instead of enable or disable. It can be a pain at times, but unless I'm doing something like visiting the Windows update site, I usually deny any active x invokations on almost all web sites I visit.
Hmm, no. But I did rent a Mega drive system from a corner shop while visiting friends in the UK several years ago...
I jinxed the console. I predicted it's death the day I bought one at midnight on 9/9/99.
You see, any console I buy fails. Any console I don't purchase succeeds.
My history:
Speak for yourself. I used it to make a copy of my diablo 2 play disk so I could play at home on battle.net and also do the same at work (er, during my lunch hour of course...)
And I bought the copy myself. Don't believe me? My CDKEY is D2666DEAD666E11E7
Either that or sit with your kids at all times when they are on the net.
Filtering software is a parent's worse enemy.. WTF people can't understand that is beyond me. Even if it worked 99% of the time (and they don't), that 1% will be found and if so, it might as well not be there. Filtering software lulls parents into a false sense of security.
Logging via a secure box and self-policing with consequences if the house rules are violated is the only sane way I can see of handling this problem.
Is this easy? Not for many. And that means a business opportunity. Put an (often) free ad in your civic association or community newsletter advertising that you will take their old unused obsolete computer, like a 486, set it up as a linux firewall, give the parents a way to view the logs, you'll be a hero. Almost everyone has an old POS computer laying around these days. My basement has its own 486/66 Linux box too! :)
So, since I used a one-time number from AMEX, I logged into their web site and canceled that number. This means if that site decided to try again or use it, they couldn't and it would be denied for real this time.
Chad Edwards, when asked about the possibility of online gaming to Mars, said that they were concerned about high ping times. Edwards did say that they are confident, however, that their ping times will be lower than those currently enjoyed by players on Blizzard's battle.net service.
That's funny, I went to that story and all I saw there was this large beige box with some distorted/stretched text that seems to say "advertising blocked by squid.redir"
They had a URL with a session ID the @ signs surrounding them, so
pathfinder.com/somestory/ expanding to pathfinder.com/@344656654645@/somestory/
pathfinder.com was registered in 1993. It was where Time-Warner gathered all of their print publication stories at. It's now defunct.
But this license sounds dangerous. If you make mods, you HAVE to give it back to Apple and THEN they can decide to revoke the license retroactively. Sounds to me like in that case you have NO rights to even your own code (oh, I guess maybe to the diff, but what good is that if you can no longer legally grab the source to apply your patches against?)
Now please explain to me again why Stallman is a fanatic for being against this?
How would you feel if you spent months making mods to a package and then all of a sudden couldn't release it cause the code you based it on had its license revoked? (and to top it off, you'd STILL be obligated to give Apple your changes anyway).
That doesn't sound "free" to me.
What about the lack of freedom to make mods and NOT release them if you just doing for internal company use?
That sounds like less freedom to me too.
I really don't understand why /.'ers hate Stallman so much...
This is a big problem. All the binary-only "free" software like various plugins, players, and web browsers come with restrictive licenses. Go ahead, read them next time you download Real Player or something like that. They pretty much all say "redistribution prohibited."
A real pain for support departments trying to deploy software across an organization. Some have ways to get a blessed redistributable package (like IEAK) but you have to agree to some insane requirements like reporting number of copies installed, of their software AND competitor's software.
Another great example of how there's a big difference between free (beer) and free (speech) when it comes to software. Just cause you download it for free, doesn't mean you're free to do with it whatever you want.
Region 8 seems to be a waste. Does anything actually get produced that is region 8? It sounds to me that region 8 would only effectively play non-regioned disks...
Cars behind him started to get stuck and the truck eventually sunk into the field too, before any of them realized they weren't on the road!
(Note that it rarely snows here and when it does it's only a few inches. That day saw 24 inches drop in 24 hours. The state doesn't have the equipment to handle that kind of snow. It was great fun!)
Among the things these trademarks cover is the use of X to describe an OS that can play games. I half expect Microsoft to go suing Linux distros and UNIX vendors to drop games from their distributions or stop using the term X.
This is all because someone wrote that damn xbill game. Trademarking X gives Bill Gates the right to sue that game out of existence!
Actually, in all seriousness, I have to wonder. I was in an EB store and saw a large green X displayed and saw the tm sign and went searching and found the two above trademarks for X.
Oh no, you've shaken up my long term memories. It wasn't intentional. I have vivid memories of often going into the auditorium to watch launches and I could have sworn a moon walk or two. Hell I was 9 at the time. I also remember watching Armstrong too. I guess the two memories aren't the same. :(
Most of the As got together and franchised a name, Cellular One. They also created roaming agreements between them so they could compete with the less diverse B side (which is a good thing when you want seemless roaming).
Then the various PCS and GSM outfits came along, and Bs started buying As and each other. Verizon (a mish mash of a helluva lot of telcos) eventually bought a cellular one franchise in Southeast U.S. and with it somehow the rights to the name Cellular One. This forced the other Cellular One franchiesees to rename their franchise.
So now we have two of the biggest cell companies with two stupid names, Verizon and Cingular.
But I have a feeling they may not have had much choice. These days, you look for an available domain name first, and then name your company, not the other way around! There probably isn't many domain names left that are less than 10 chars with a few vowels in them....
When *I* was in elementary school in 1969 I remember we all got out of class and gathered in the auditorium to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Now *that* was a rush. Looking up in the sky, seeing the moon, and knowing some human was up there walking around on it.
What the fuck happened to this (U.S.) country's pride? We just don't care about doing something like that anymore. All we care is whining about taxes, buying bigger SUVs, and building expensive missle defense systems (when the nuke that takes out NYC will be a back-pack nuke sailed in the bottom of a cargo ship into the Hudson probably. No SDI will protect us from that...)
Our priorities are just pathetic. An entire generation of people now are alive that have never seen a live moon walk. Nice progress.....
Our space program died long before 1986 I'm afraid. The shuttles were neat, but the drive to expand our frontier was already dead. Space Shuttles were moving into deployment and repair of communications sattelites for the most part.
I guess it's how much availability you want. That last 0.001% drives costs through the roof. Many modern disk arrays have everything redundant and hot swappable, including not just disk modules, but power supplies, fans, and controllers.
Set up a nice HA disk array and cluster the servers and you too can run all of your critical services on one subnet!
Let's hope it just remains a bad joke.... :(
In separate news, Microsoft announced suits against upwards of 35 programmers and several hardware manufacturers for using the term "X" or "X-windows." Ballmer stated "We don't want consumers to be confused in the marketplace. X is a very strong branding image and is a registered trademark owned by Microsoft (76041367 and 76041368). These other individuals and companies are introducing confusion into the marketplace."
Microsoft's above trademarks cover the use of the X trademark in conjuction with games, operating systems that can run games, chat and message services involving gaming situations, e-mail, text-editing, and OS utilities supporting gaming.
Insiders at Microsoft hinted that Microsoft is willing to drop the suit against companies distributing UNIX and LINUX products if they remove all games and ability to play games on their product or cease the use of the X trademark in conjuction with above products.