Some people hate radio because it is the same music repeated over and over and over and over and you get the idea.
So before HD players you had two kinda people. Those that don't mind listening to the same music over and over, those who did but only used their player for short times and those like me who carried a lot of tapes -> cd's -> mini-discs with them. Of course you then still listened to the same songs in a small time frame but at least there was some change.
But with my 20gb zen I can listen at work to music and not hear the same song twice in 8 hours. Is it important? Well no. I like it however.
So to me there would be no maximum (I am afraid to check the size of my PC music collection, it is several modern HD's but checking it would mean realizing I have a music addiction). Ideally the player would hold my entire music collection and allow me to easily switch between types of music. The zen sucks at this. I follow a language course and it is impossible to switch between playing music and the language course easily. For some reason it keeps adding the course to the music and playing lessons in the music shuffle. Crap.
On the other hand I know plenty of people that are happy with their 128mb players. The snob in me however must state that with their taste in music they could do with a 128kb player. It is all just the same drum beat repeated endlessly anyway.
Oh I also got a 1.5gb iRiver (because the zen's battery life is not enough for an entire work shift and travel anymore) and the iRiver has a lesser user interface (to many funtions to some buttons while others remains unused) but the sound is better. EAX sounds nice but all the effects are useless when you have more then one type of music and the other "enhancements" don't work well for me.
The book has a new voice but they handle it very well and it is one of the few times there is a perfectly story integrated reason for the actor change.
There is enough "new" stuff and difference for it to be intresting to those of us who haved read the books to often.
If I must be critical it seems the acting is slightly less fluid then the originals.
On the whole a "sequel" that doesn't disappoint and rapes my memory. George Lucas should take note.
Needing silly things like props or other actors to be able to act is the sure mark of a bad actor. The really good ones can do it on bare stage in solo and sweep the audience along.
Well this is nothing new and it been dealt with
on
Would You Bid for a Job?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Cargo used to be dealt with this way. Put a piece of cargo up for shipment and whoever have the lowest bid got to ship it. USED to be dealt with this way. Eventually the people owning the ships and trucks realized that if they got organized they could force better prices. We are of course talking union here.
These kinda things only work when there are people willing to undercut the rest and think they can make a living that way. In a world where you gotta work with the people you undercut that might not be to enjoyable. Especially if you consider that there always is someone willing to work for less.
I also see another problem. The old army joke tells you to remember that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder. Now your life is in the hands of the lowest bidder far more directly.
Nurses have a lot of power and responsibilty. Why do you think we keep hearing these stories about a nurse getting away for years killing 20+ patients?
All that the nurses need to do is to make sure no-one undercuts the organized bid. Good job america, you just invited the mafia into your hospitals.
Moderation is a time consuming task and the person who does it needs to be pretty tough. Not a nice job to read hate mail. Why do you think telephone support operators burn out so fast?
But maybe you can help yourselve limit the exposure. Filter each new post on some keywords that are likely to be in a hate post. Also do a regular syntax check. Most hate posts are badly spelled.
Combine this with "trusted" vs "untrusted" members, new accounts and you should be able to determine easily wich posts are highly suspect and wich don't have to be moderated at all.
A new member from a dialup referred from an other site and a first post with even 1 keyword wrong would only become visible after being moderated. With say a dozen keywords it would simply get dropped.
Maintaining an online communtity is going to become harder and harder. Either you create a secure site or you are going to have to deal with the AOL people.
It certainly be tried after all the real reason we hate spam is because they have like jerks by getting us to pay their advertising cost (you don't see people that upset about bulkmail for wich you don't pay that directly (you do pay for taking out the trash don't you?))
But spam is easy to define. Exactly how do you define a troll? Just look at/. people often classify someone as a troll just because the person doesn't say what they want to hear or doesn't sugarcoat it enough.
With the ever increasing access to the internet this is going to be a bigger and bigger trouble. I seen several sites close down because some asshole went about disrupting it. Slashdot was early enough and grew big enough to be able to withstand the assaults but many smaller sites just can't cope.
Sadly this would suggest that the invention of a "trusted" net is unavoidable. Not just for companies and their business sites but for the sake of all the amateur sites as well.
Remove the anonimity and many trolls will be forced to behave by their own nature. The simple fact that they are all cowards. Troll courage runs fast when they think they been found out.
Let her think that when she grows up she will do a wonderfull job. Rescueing people. Creating things. Travelling far and wide. In a decade or two she will realize that the truth is cubicle space or the production line. Until then let her dream.
On the other hand showing her the work of a sysadmin is easy. Just change her diaper. That is your work. Cleaning up other peoples shit.
His entire argument hangs on the assumption that the tech industry will swallow the poisoned new USB hook line and sinker. Yet he himself points to several instances when the tech industry did not follow what the "ruler of the PC" said was to be done. The fact that compaq broke IBM-compatible by going to the 386 and all the bus standards IBM tried to introduce that failed.
Intel recently tried that rambus and failed. Motherboard makers knew their market and went against the leader. MS has tried soundcards and failed. People stuck to creative labs (soundblaster).
MS has tried to flex it muscles often enough and yet it rarely works and seems to be working less and less. Name a big PC company that is not doing linux however small. Do you really think MS likes that Dell ships linux machines?
If MS really had as much muscle as this guy seems to think then we wouldn't have had a fraction of the linux stories that we have had.
So hardware makers have not bowed to MS before (well not always) so why should they with USB? His scenario just doesn't make sense. You see there is the tiny little problem of people not upgrading their OS. Oh I am not talking about the/. people and their like. I am talking about the millions still running windows 98, according to MS own figures.
Say I make a new device and make it a requirement that you first have to upgrade your OS? Oh yeah that would work. Companies don't even like to say "Windows 98 or later" to avoid scaring away the 95 crowd. Exactly how many products do you see that only work with windows XP SP2? Do you remember how long things like joysticks and mice came with both USB and either a PS/2 or a gameport cable?
Also MS can not exclude old devices. If they could they would have ditced ISA support ages ago. They haven't. If longhorn suddenly wouldn't work with your old MP3 player you wouldn't buy a new one, you simply wouldn't upgrade.
What they can do is create a win-usb. Like those win-modems and win-printers that exist. Are they a threath? Well only if you care about the "my crap piece of cheap tech that everybody told me was crap but it was such a deal and now it doesn't work with linux it sucks" people.
If MS really plans to do it they would fail as they have failed as they and others have failed before when trying to control the PC.
The PC is free and there are to many players who have everything to loose by MS or anyone else gaining control.
The biggest failure of all the recent american presidents is that they have been totally unable to unite the country behind them. In those countries you mention the collation goverments where the active goverment is formed by multiple parties, Holland being the most extreme example, you get the effect that the all the parties involve adjust themselves to fit the choice of the people.
So in holland we have had goverments made up of socialists + liberals + slighly right wing. This meant that each of them had to accept that not all their policies would be accepted and to accept some policies that they don't like but that apparantly enough people do like.
Bush and Clinton and Bush and reagan etc etc have seen the election as something to be won and once you won you lay down your will on the defeated enemey.
Currently you have a republican goverment, you may get a democrat goverment next but if you really look at the way people vote then what you need is a democrat/republican or republican/democrat goverment. That is the way people voted. 50-50.
Don't however glorify consensus goverment to much. There is the very real danger that the voter loses contact with "his" party. This leaves the door wide open for a new party to spring up, say the right thing and sweep the elections as the old stuffy backroom deal parties that were doing what the people voted for get replaced. Read up on holland and pim fortuyn. The direct result of the "polder model".
You are free in america to have any political believe that you want, just as long as it is capatalist. Yup that is freedom alright.
Russian reporters at the Bush vs Clinton elections found themselves right at home. Two candidates answering no deep questions differing only on minor points. Exactly like the elections in the old ussr.
Read up on some real democracies like they exist in europe where we got every party from left to right. Then come back.
In theorie that is. Most western people will have no real idea what warfare is like. I am one of the last people to be drafted in Holland so most younger then me won't even know what a rifle feels like. Not just the bloody size of it, we trained with the FAL, but how bloody impossible it is to do anything when you are constently supposed to keep it with you.
To many guns are not real and war is not real. You can see an excellent example in many young americans whose response to vietnam is that they should go back and finish the job. TV and movies have made them believe that they could have won and that is was the hippies that made america withdraw.
Make a realistic war game and people will at least get a real fast lesson in what war is really really like. No med packs. No magic armour. No "secret" weapons. Just you, a rifle designed by someone behind a desk, grenades wich hurt you just as easily as the enemy, friendly fire and of course the enemey. You die, you die.
Want to know what real war is like? Well real war does not allow you to retry the mission from the latest save point.
Just as motorist organisations use "drunk" driver simulations to safely teach the folly of driving a good war game can tell you the folly of war.
A good vietnam game would tell the story from both sides and not be afraid to be extremely controversial. America was defintly not the good guy in vietnam. Considering the amount of civilians killed you can not come to any other conclusion that they must have been deliberate targets.
A realistic vietnam game could never be made since it would not sell. Oliver stone made 3 vietnam movies. 2 showed the americans as "heroes". One did not. Guess wich one failed at the box office.
WW2 games are plentifull and many allow you to play both sides yet none reflect the true nature of WW2, the rounding up of civilians and the transports to the extermination camps, the shooting of prisoners of war. The punishment details against cities and towns.
Maybe china will make a game showing vietnam from the communist side.
He didn't commit suicide. If the "hero" was killed it was because the hunter shot him. Although it never says anything except that there was a sound of thunder. Wich could be a poetic way of saying gunshot but that is not clear. Nor needs to be clear. Maybe the hunter killed himself after all he is the one who objected most in the story to the guy now in power.
The ones you mention, and I am fairly certain iRiver one is not out yet, are NON-MS-windows media players. This is the first Microsoft windows media player. Does that explain it to you?
McCarty witch hunts. Where the United States goverment hunted people for their political believes. So yes there is a very good reason in americas own recent history for having your vote be secret.
You know, the people who actually do the work. The original series had them in a couple of episodes. Miners mostly but TNG seemed to have kept the A and B arks and shot the C ark out into space.
Armour has a two different functions. The simplest and most obvious is to protect against damage. Depending on the kind of armour you get different kind of protections. Chain mail works well against slashing but is far less usefull against arrows and totally useless against bashing weapons. Plate mail is good against arrows and slashing but is heavy and still mostly useless against a good bashing weapon.
But a for more important reason for wearing armour in modern time and I think this was the reason for the Star Wars armour, is to create a uniform anonymous look. Just as the face mask worn by special forces it is not really there to protect by to create a scary opponent. In a movie setting it also neatly allows you to have only a handfull of stunt soldiers and have them die and die again without people noticing. It also allowed the plot device of luke and han dressing up as storm troopers without being noticed.
Plenty of movies use complex full body armour that seems to do absolutly nothing to protect the soldiers inside as the hero goes through them like a knife through butter. It is hollywood.
On a more classic Sci-Fi note it is nothing new that super advanced species get slaughtered by primitive weapons.
Simple, time spend spending them
on
Make Money Fast
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· Score: 4, Informative
Say you got a big stack of 10.000 notes. Now you want to convert them to real money. There are a numbed of ways to do it but the simplest is either selling the stack to someone else for real money who will then spend the fake or spend the fakes yourselve.
The way to do it is to buy goods with fake money and get real goods and real change. You can then return or resale the goods for more real money.
So why not $1 dollar bills? What exactly would that buy you? 1 Mars bar? That would only work if you had a very low initial investment to counterfeit and were just using it to take care of living expenses. Just the small problem then that there would be a steady stream of counterfits near your house with your finger prints on it.
You can buy more expensive goods with $1 dollar bills but people get suspiscious when you pay for a new car with a pallet of cash.
Counterfit money is the balance between being low enough in value to be easily accepted and high enough in value to be worthwhile spending.
He really isn't, he is advertising Linux. Really
on
Ballmer on Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Think about it. Who has spend more on spreading the Linux name and general awareness of the possibilties of switching to an other OS? IBM? Nah. HP? Get real? The linux distros? No way.
The answer of course is MS. How many people have seen the name Linux for the first time in an MS ad or press release?
You don't see car company A constantly talking about car company B. Imagine your a store owner on a triple A location selling X. Are you then really going to talk to the customer about you really are much much cheaper then this totally unknown store that is in fact just around the corner? Of course not.
So either MS doesn't know shit about marketing,don't tell the customer he can in fact go somewhere else, or they think they got no other choice.
Keep talking about Linux MS. The only thing you are achieving is that Linux is becoming more widely known. Each time you say linux is more expensive you just alert them to the fact that there is in fact another OS they can buy.
You don't see Archos or Creative or iRiver running ads on how they are cheaper then Apple do you? And everyone knows about the iPod.
1 windows. 1 one not windows. The not windows one has the longest codec list. I didn't know it was out yet either although it is promised around this time.
Try fitting a laptop in your pocket. This thing you can hold in your hand while waiting on the platform, good luck with a laptop. This thing can be dropped in your pocket or in your bag in a second. Good luck doing that with laptop. It has a far simpler cpu meaning it will run far less hot.
It is a fraction of the weight.
You basiclly wanted to show how smart you are eh. Oooh you can buy a totally different device for 100 dollars more so it is crap. Kinda like saying a mercedes is bad car since for a few thousand more you can buy a lorry.
I am waiting for the iRiver NON-ms version. At least that one seems capable of playing the kinda files most people (who are in the market for this kinda device) would have.
WMV? Sure sign of a noob encoder. ASF? Extremly noob AOL encoder.
Music you repeat over and over but tv and movies you would probabaly delete. Fill it in the weekend with downloaded/recorded stuff, watch over the week then whipe clean and upload the next batch.
20gb is not gigantic but it helps keep the price sane and is more then enough for 20 high quality movies or a shit load of tv captures.
It seems to suggest that just now the american army has decided that Linux may be used within its service. That is not the case at all. The army has been using Linux for a long time already and decided it was safe enough.
This news is that Linux has been chosen as THE os for the future replacing the other OSes currently in use. This is a far greater story.
Slashdot Mirror
So before HD players you had two kinda people. Those that don't mind listening to the same music over and over, those who did but only used their player for short times and those like me who carried a lot of tapes -> cd's -> mini-discs with them. Of course you then still listened to the same songs in a small time frame but at least there was some change.
But with my 20gb zen I can listen at work to music and not hear the same song twice in 8 hours. Is it important? Well no. I like it however.
So to me there would be no maximum (I am afraid to check the size of my PC music collection, it is several modern HD's but checking it would mean realizing I have a music addiction). Ideally the player would hold my entire music collection and allow me to easily switch between types of music. The zen sucks at this. I follow a language course and it is impossible to switch between playing music and the language course easily. For some reason it keeps adding the course to the music and playing lessons in the music shuffle. Crap.
On the other hand I know plenty of people that are happy with their 128mb players. The snob in me however must state that with their taste in music they could do with a 128kb player. It is all just the same drum beat repeated endlessly anyway.
Oh I also got a 1.5gb iRiver (because the zen's battery life is not enough for an entire work shift and travel anymore) and the iRiver has a lesser user interface (to many funtions to some buttons while others remains unused) but the sound is better. EAX sounds nice but all the effects are useless when you have more then one type of music and the other "enhancements" don't work well for me.
There is enough "new" stuff and difference for it to be intresting to those of us who haved read the books to often.
If I must be critical it seems the acting is slightly less fluid then the originals.
On the whole a "sequel" that doesn't disappoint and rapes my memory. George Lucas should take note.
Oh and it is realplayer so it works fine under linux.
Needing silly things like props or other actors to be able to act is the sure mark of a bad actor. The really good ones can do it on bare stage in solo and sweep the audience along.
These kinda things only work when there are people willing to undercut the rest and think they can make a living that way. In a world where you gotta work with the people you undercut that might not be to enjoyable. Especially if you consider that there always is someone willing to work for less.
I also see another problem. The old army joke tells you to remember that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder. Now your life is in the hands of the lowest bidder far more directly.
Nurses have a lot of power and responsibilty. Why do you think we keep hearing these stories about a nurse getting away for years killing 20+ patients?
All that the nurses need to do is to make sure no-one undercuts the organized bid. Good job america, you just invited the mafia into your hospitals.
But maybe you can help yourselve limit the exposure. Filter each new post on some keywords that are likely to be in a hate post. Also do a regular syntax check. Most hate posts are badly spelled.
Combine this with "trusted" vs "untrusted" members, new accounts and you should be able to determine easily wich posts are highly suspect and wich don't have to be moderated at all.
A new member from a dialup referred from an other site and a first post with even 1 keyword wrong would only become visible after being moderated. With say a dozen keywords it would simply get dropped.
Maintaining an online communtity is going to become harder and harder. Either you create a secure site or you are going to have to deal with the AOL people.
But spam is easy to define. Exactly how do you define a troll? Just look at /. people often classify someone as a troll just because the person doesn't say what they want to hear or doesn't sugarcoat it enough.
With the ever increasing access to the internet this is going to be a bigger and bigger trouble. I seen several sites close down because some asshole went about disrupting it. Slashdot was early enough and grew big enough to be able to withstand the assaults but many smaller sites just can't cope.
Sadly this would suggest that the invention of a "trusted" net is unavoidable. Not just for companies and their business sites but for the sake of all the amateur sites as well.
Remove the anonimity and many trolls will be forced to behave by their own nature. The simple fact that they are all cowards. Troll courage runs fast when they think they been found out.
Maybe he reads at +5 and thinks we are wonderfull? Often misguided and clueless but wonderfull nonetheless?
On the other hand showing her the work of a sysadmin is easy. Just change her diaper. That is your work. Cleaning up other peoples shit.
Me bitter? Nah.
Intel recently tried that rambus and failed. Motherboard makers knew their market and went against the leader. MS has tried soundcards and failed. People stuck to creative labs (soundblaster).
MS has tried to flex it muscles often enough and yet it rarely works and seems to be working less and less. Name a big PC company that is not doing linux however small. Do you really think MS likes that Dell ships linux machines?
If MS really had as much muscle as this guy seems to think then we wouldn't have had a fraction of the linux stories that we have had.
So hardware makers have not bowed to MS before (well not always) so why should they with USB? His scenario just doesn't make sense. You see there is the tiny little problem of people not upgrading their OS. Oh I am not talking about the /. people and their like. I am talking about the millions still running windows 98, according to MS own figures.
Say I make a new device and make it a requirement that you first have to upgrade your OS? Oh yeah that would work. Companies don't even like to say "Windows 98 or later" to avoid scaring away the 95 crowd. Exactly how many products do you see that only work with windows XP SP2? Do you remember how long things like joysticks and mice came with both USB and either a PS/2 or a gameport cable?
Also MS can not exclude old devices. If they could they would have ditced ISA support ages ago. They haven't. If longhorn suddenly wouldn't work with your old MP3 player you wouldn't buy a new one, you simply wouldn't upgrade.
What they can do is create a win-usb. Like those win-modems and win-printers that exist. Are they a threath? Well only if you care about the "my crap piece of cheap tech that everybody told me was crap but it was such a deal and now it doesn't work with linux it sucks" people.
If MS really plans to do it they would fail as they have failed as they and others have failed before when trying to control the PC.
The PC is free and there are to many players who have everything to loose by MS or anyone else gaining control.
So in holland we have had goverments made up of socialists + liberals + slighly right wing. This meant that each of them had to accept that not all their policies would be accepted and to accept some policies that they don't like but that apparantly enough people do like.
Bush and Clinton and Bush and reagan etc etc have seen the election as something to be won and once you won you lay down your will on the defeated enemey.
Currently you have a republican goverment, you may get a democrat goverment next but if you really look at the way people vote then what you need is a democrat/republican or republican/democrat goverment. That is the way people voted. 50-50.
Don't however glorify consensus goverment to much. There is the very real danger that the voter loses contact with "his" party. This leaves the door wide open for a new party to spring up, say the right thing and sweep the elections as the old stuffy backroom deal parties that were doing what the people voted for get replaced. Read up on holland and pim fortuyn. The direct result of the "polder model".
Russian reporters at the Bush vs Clinton elections found themselves right at home. Two candidates answering no deep questions differing only on minor points. Exactly like the elections in the old ussr.
Read up on some real democracies like they exist in europe where we got every party from left to right. Then come back.
To many guns are not real and war is not real. You can see an excellent example in many young americans whose response to vietnam is that they should go back and finish the job. TV and movies have made them believe that they could have won and that is was the hippies that made america withdraw.
Make a realistic war game and people will at least get a real fast lesson in what war is really really like. No med packs. No magic armour. No "secret" weapons. Just you, a rifle designed by someone behind a desk, grenades wich hurt you just as easily as the enemy, friendly fire and of course the enemey. You die, you die.
Want to know what real war is like? Well real war does not allow you to retry the mission from the latest save point.
Just as motorist organisations use "drunk" driver simulations to safely teach the folly of driving a good war game can tell you the folly of war.
A good vietnam game would tell the story from both sides and not be afraid to be extremely controversial. America was defintly not the good guy in vietnam. Considering the amount of civilians killed you can not come to any other conclusion that they must have been deliberate targets.
A realistic vietnam game could never be made since it would not sell. Oliver stone made 3 vietnam movies. 2 showed the americans as "heroes". One did not. Guess wich one failed at the box office.
WW2 games are plentifull and many allow you to play both sides yet none reflect the true nature of WW2, the rounding up of civilians and the transports to the extermination camps, the shooting of prisoners of war. The punishment details against cities and towns.
Maybe china will make a game showing vietnam from the communist side.
He didn't commit suicide. If the "hero" was killed it was because the hunter shot him. Although it never says anything except that there was a sound of thunder. Wich could be a poetic way of saying gunshot but that is not clear. Nor needs to be clear. Maybe the hunter killed himself after all he is the one who objected most in the story to the guy now in power.
The ones you mention, and I am fairly certain iRiver one is not out yet, are NON-MS-windows media players. This is the first Microsoft windows media player. Does that explain it to you?
Now go and read a book.
You know, the people who actually do the work. The original series had them in a couple of episodes. Miners mostly but TNG seemed to have kept the A and B arks and shot the C ark out into space.
But a for more important reason for wearing armour in modern time and I think this was the reason for the Star Wars armour, is to create a uniform anonymous look. Just as the face mask worn by special forces it is not really there to protect by to create a scary opponent. In a movie setting it also neatly allows you to have only a handfull of stunt soldiers and have them die and die again without people noticing. It also allowed the plot device of luke and han dressing up as storm troopers without being noticed.
Plenty of movies use complex full body armour that seems to do absolutly nothing to protect the soldiers inside as the hero goes through them like a knife through butter. It is hollywood.
On a more classic Sci-Fi note it is nothing new that super advanced species get slaughtered by primitive weapons.
The way to do it is to buy goods with fake money and get real goods and real change. You can then return or resale the goods for more real money.
So why not $1 dollar bills? What exactly would that buy you? 1 Mars bar? That would only work if you had a very low initial investment to counterfeit and were just using it to take care of living expenses. Just the small problem then that there would be a steady stream of counterfits near your house with your finger prints on it.
You can buy more expensive goods with $1 dollar bills but people get suspiscious when you pay for a new car with a pallet of cash.
Counterfit money is the balance between being low enough in value to be easily accepted and high enough in value to be worthwhile spending.
The answer of course is MS. How many people have seen the name Linux for the first time in an MS ad or press release?
You don't see car company A constantly talking about car company B. Imagine your a store owner on a triple A location selling X. Are you then really going to talk to the customer about you really are much much cheaper then this totally unknown store that is in fact just around the corner? Of course not.
So either MS doesn't know shit about marketing,don't tell the customer he can in fact go somewhere else, or they think they got no other choice.
Keep talking about Linux MS. The only thing you are achieving is that Linux is becoming more widely known. Each time you say linux is more expensive you just alert them to the fact that there is in fact another OS they can buy.
You don't see Archos or Creative or iRiver running ads on how they are cheaper then Apple do you? And everyone knows about the iPod.
1 windows. 1 one not windows. The not windows one has the longest codec list. I didn't know it was out yet either although it is promised around this time.
It is a fraction of the weight.
You basiclly wanted to show how smart you are eh. Oooh you can buy a totally different device for 100 dollars more so it is crap. Kinda like saying a mercedes is bad car since for a few thousand more you can buy a lorry.
WMV? Sure sign of a noob encoder. ASF? Extremly noob AOL encoder.
Quicktime ain't any better.
20gb is not gigantic but it helps keep the price sane and is more then enough for 20 high quality movies or a shit load of tv captures.
This news is that Linux has been chosen as THE os for the future replacing the other OSes currently in use. This is a far greater story.