Jesus, could this "story's" headline be any less thought out? When Adm. Poindexter was leading the Total Information Awareness project, this sort of digital dumpster diving was news three years ago. If someone wants to report on something fresh, they'll need to exploit search engines to find agents when you don't know who they are.
Ah yes, the "if only everyone would step on it when the light turns green" falacy. I'd normally use harsh language at this point, but for the fact that I was the same [expletive deleted] as you, not too long ago. Here's the deal:
When you're driving at speed, you maintain distance X from the car ahead. And, when you end up at the end of a line of cars at a stoplight, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that you close to within X/20 of the car ahead. Once the light turns green, the safety margin you and everyone else sucked up to avoid stopping a few seconds sooner than you actually did takes everyone a few seconds apiece to reestablish.
For the "everyone step on it now" plan to work, everyone needs to either 1) slow down and stop the moment they see a red light waaaaaay off in the distance, or 2) the USDOT needs to deploy that autopilot system they've been testing that would make it possible for everyone to tailgate at 100 mph. I just don't want to be in that system when it goes south, see "The Gold Coast" for a sample of the result.
Back on topic, a possible near-term result of the London test will be more accidents. During periods when traffic permits, many drivers will be moving at the governed speed limit. When a situation evolves when someone needs to make a quick brake/accelerate/maneuver decision, the quickest reaction is to step on it, which won't respond. It will take drivers a while to internalize this. In the meantime, somebody's gonna get screwed.
I think the English examples you give (ie. "should have" vs. "should of") show the difference between those who read English widely and regularly (ie. news magazines, non-tabloid newspapers, the New Yorker) and those whose main exposure is colloquil speech.
Next, there's the difference between those who can recognize proper patterns through repeated exposure (me), and those who were properly schooled in English grammar (my wife).
I should add, the main source of Carbon in HFC exhaust would be from using petrol or natural gas as fuel. If Aerovironment is using pure Hydrogen, then the tiny bit of environmental gaseous Carbon oxides sucked into the system would barely register.
An ideal hydrogen fuel cell takes in H and O, resulting in H20, electricity, and heat. A real HFC also emits some unburned H and a bit of CO and CO2 left over from incomplete catalyzation (maybe 10ppm if we're efficient).
H20 is staple, so it won't react with O3. CO, CO2 and free H all work to create Ozone in smog, so this may apply at high altitude as well.
Ozone depletion is mainly the work of Nitrogen oxides, which when expelled from your car or Whippet catridges, survives the year or so it takes to difuse to the upper atmoshpere.
IIRC, for a local broadcast tv station to make it onto basic cable, they've got to be... broadcasting. This issue first raised its head when the FCC was considering reallocating ("selling") most of the UHF bands. In most communities this meant PBS and the small guys were going to take it in the ass, since if they weren't on the air, they weren't a manditory carry on basic cable.
Back then, the big broadcasters didn't care. But, I'd bet they care now that VHF is in play, unless the laws regarding cable access have changed.
If you've got an old Nubus or PCI Powermac lying around, the combination of Sustworks' IPNetRouter and IPNetSentry is relatively cheap, easy to set up, and modify. They're available for both OS X and OS8/9, $140 for the pair. There's a 30% edu discount available, which knocks it to under $100.
I can't say that my home network has stress tested it, but someone on their mail list (sustworks.com/site/detailed_search.htm) probably has. I've run it on OS 9 for months at a time, interruped only by #@%^&! power outages. Yep, time for an UPS.
There's a pretty wide ranging trade embargo against sale of US products in Iran, particularly technical products. If Cisco or another US company or its overseas affiliates were selling cool tools to the Iranis, it's likely the Feds would be on their ass.
Naturally, there are leaks in any embargo. But the tech support and upgrades a "Great Qanat Plug" (ouch!) would require, at least for initial installation, would probably preclude any US products. It's not like they can't get it from an EU-based company, or grabbing one of the numerous books on IOS/Linux/BSD firewalls and filtering and giving it a go locally.
16 months? Jesus, I was in Orlando for a tech trade show for two weeks last November, and I didn't have a clue that there was open access wifi anywhere but at the bistro in the Millenium Mall. On top of that, there are virtually zip public internet access sites listed in the Yellow Pages, other than the downtown city library.
It was only into my second week that I realized the wall jack in my hotel room provided internet access at no additional cost [sheepish grin].
Salon is wrong: I picked them almost at random for background on Mellon. The New Yorker had a much better article, and there are plenty of other sources.
Strangled the US military: The massive DoD cutbacks were launched on George Sr.'s watch, immediately after the Gulf War.
Started...9/11 by sending tomahawks into Afghanistan: OBL was a target because he was ALREADY killing Americans. You might as well say George Sr. caused 9/11, since it was the GW I troop build up in SA that gave OBL a serious woody for the US.
Sold the US out to the UN in Serbia/Albania: You forgot Bosnia, too. The Serbs would have finished cleaning non-Serbs out of Bosnia, Kosovo, and most of Croatia if the US hadn't stepped in when the EU and UN proved dickless. The UN has usually worked just swell for the US, because it gave a forum for other countries to feel empowered pissing and moaning while we did pretty much what we wanted.
You need to broaden your reading beyond John Birch Society flyers.
Clue #1: Nixon wasn't impeached, he bailed 'cause he knew he had one cheak in the crapper, because... Clue #2: Using the FBI and IRS to harass his political enemies. Clue #3: Withholding evidence supoenaed by Congress. Clue #4: Use of CIA and Army intellegence agents for domestic spying. Clue #5: Armed intervention in Cambodia w/o running it by Congress. Clue #6: (Plausably) Signing off on the Watergate break in. Clue #7: Covering up his staffs' involvement in #6.
Hokay, let's compare this to Mr. Clinton, who... Was set up by a multi-millionare who paid at least 40 people to perjure themselves, and as a result, lied in court about fingering Monica.
Hell brother, I don't know what I was thinking. You're right, Slick Willie was a frickin' Enemy Of The Republic.
they never say who actually added the material to the bill
I'm not sure this is a general comment, or in reference to the Broadcast Flag rider in particular, so I'll just come out and ask: Which Senator Is Trying To Add The Broadcast Flag Rider?
Did the word get passed around because there is some buzz on the Hill, or is someone on the record as the author? I've been up and down www.senate.gov for an hour, but haven't spotted anything yet.
Aw shit, Byrd's on the committee... I'll bet it's him.
Although a few well placed H-bombs would do a good job at sturring up the thin veneer of industrial society, I don't think the entire US arsenal would liberate enough heat to make more than a superficial mess at the Martian poles. The effects of 40 years of testing on Earth have been exceedingly minor, if the potential for mutating DNA and radiation sickness are discounted.
To build up the kind of heat you'd need requires redirecting lots of solar energy. Keeping human energy inputs to a minimum would probably involve large mirrors in orbit, or big solar evaporator farms on the surface.
You don't need an advanced math degree to see this. What was killing Apple was not the clones, but the poor management.
That's a guess. The fact is that during the clone wars, the MacOS slice of new PC sales remained about the same. What changed was Apple's smaller piece of it. Whether this was a function of bad management or not, Jobs came in when the company was hemorrhaging money. Jobs may be/have been a control freak, but he came in as a turn-around man, and the mandate of any turn-around manager is to get his company back in black, fast. As such, he would have been an idiot not to shit-can the clone competition as quickly as possible.
Maybe the software division will be able to make it on it's own in the future, but that future is several tens of points of market share away... and if Apple ever gained those tens of points, why would it want to give away perfectly good profits on h/w sales? Successful companies ditch lower margin (but profitable) product lines only if they've got something with a better return lined up... unless you're envisioning a trainload of R&D.
If Microsoft had ever had a major piece of profitable hardware business, I seriously doubt they would have dropped it. Never having sold anything h/w other than rebranded mice, keyboards, and (briefly) IBM PC/XT accelerator boards, it's a resource allocation decision Gates and Balmer have never had to make.
I've checked out Powerlab's site, and it's great looking stuff. No sooner did I wonder how the DoD has been doing than a new engineer joined my lab. At her previous job, she was measuring muzzle velocities of 6km/s from a 1 meter long rail gun... about the same length as the Powerlabs device. I'm guessing the amateurs are a little short of power.;-)
Your point is well taken, that the PPC and Power arch are used widely outside of Apple, especially in consoles and embedded applications. However, I think that - outside of the kernel - work on PPC-based distributions are going to tend to trail off, if it's true that desktop/server platforms are what puts code in front of the most eyeballs. Granted, the trailing off will occur over a loooooooooong period of time, given the size of the installed base as of next year. Hell, my Debian-based web server runs on a 11 year old Nubus Powermac.
Calm down. Dvorak, as a trade rag columnist, by definition has to pull at least one prediction a week out of his ass. Like any number of other trade columnists, he frequently targets Apple because it makes good copy. With as many prognostications as he's made, he's going to get it right about as often as the next person.
Having taken the time to RTFA, it's obvious to me he's making it up as he goes. Linux PPC work will will slack off as it's platform moves to legacy status, but otherwise a MacIntelosh won't make a bit of difference to Linux. Addressing his comments:
Run Windows On A Mac: I seriously doubt it, unless the only thing preventing Windows from running on - say - a G5 is the CPU. Apple isn't going to submit a Mac for Windows certification, isn't going to sign one of those #@$!% OEM deals with MS, and the only effort at making a port work at Redmond will be on someone's lunch hour. Obviously harmful to the computer makers in general and to Microsoft: Assuming a Macx86 won't run Windows, the current market inertia will continue. A Mac will remain a nicely made boutique system. For developers, it ain't the CPU, it's the API. x86 Competition: The rest of his piece assumes that there's a significant number of x86 developers who work with desktop Linux applications because it's the only non-MS game in town, and they'd love to get out from under the GPL if only they could. This is the fantasy of a (arguably) paid MS shill. So the people working on Open Office, Abi Word, GNU Cash, et al are going to drop everything and run to Apple's API because of an ENDIAN change? At least now we have solid proof Dvorak hasn't written a line of code since he last ran BASIC on a TRS-80.
I believe the main reason the USAF ditched the MOL was that unmanned platforms had matured to the point where a space crew would have been an unneccessary complication and expense. Back in the late 50's and early sixties, it wasn't a given that robotic spacecraft would pass muster, hence the manned AF programs.
The Soviets eventually came to the same conclusion, only after blowing the big rubles on Almaz and military Salyuts.
Incidentally, the first successful US launch after Challenger was an SDI experiment that used guidance systems from existing guided missiles. Although it was about as rushed as the Polyus battle station you reference, it didn't require major gymnastics to achieve orbit, and provided Reagan with a negotiation advantage over Gorbachev... although I don't think he fully realized the size of it. For a change, the Russians were in the position of attempting to field a system we could all too easily counter, given that the Delta 180 SDI test articles were mostly off the shelf, and could be cheaply integrated and lofted by the trainload, had the need arisen.
Will this be the real end of innovation in videogames? Ah hell, innovation has been dead for a while. What I'm looking forward to is for this to put a stake in the heart of the entire industry. As a 45 year old fart, I can only see good things outta this. Consider:
Brings kids back to traditional values of sex, drugs, and RnR, experienced live.
Improves US and European balance of payments by eliminating shiploads of Chinese electronics imports.
Transfers vast sums of cash from a productivity-killing industry into the pockets of attorneys, who might just invest in something worthwhile.... whoa, that's a bit too much BS even for me!
Newly worthless consoles and portable gaming systems sell for pennies on the dollar, providing me a vast stock of future LCD picture frames and Beowulf nodes.
30 years of evidence shows that anorexia and bulimia, while existant, are virtually a non-issue as a serious public health problem. Lindsey Lohan is about the only American LOSING weight nowadays, while all the rest of the kids and adults are getting seriously fat. They've got drastically increasing type 2 (dietary) diabetes rates to prove it. Jesus, get out of the house and look around you. You want to talk about deadly boundaries? Look no further. The CDC diabetes and obesity maps for the last 15 years track each other in lockstep.
There may be a few overexposed upper middle class teenage princesses that are wasting away because daddy's an asshole, but parents for most kids need control of what goes down the pie hole if they want their brats to live long enough to slap them into an old folks home.
How on earth did you deduce that? Consider the rate structure. As a whole:
Corporate income tax: US < EU
Individual income tax: US < EU
Public retirement tax: US < EU
Public medical tax: US < EU
VAT/Sales tax: US < EU
That you pick out the corporate (presumably income) tax is particular egregious, since the US as always been known for having a considerably lower rate than virtually any nation in western Europe.
All unions do today is drive a wedge between employees and management.
This is a classic anti-union argument, and can be quote verbatum back to the "robber barron" days of the late 1800s. On its face, it assumes that the union leadership dictates, and the rank-and-file follow like sheep, being too stupid to consider their "best" interests. If true, then one might as well eliminate the middle man since management is already perfectly capable of dictating.
On the other hand, it just might be that the rank-and-file are as capable of recognizing their best interests as a stock market is at allocating capital resources.... that is to say, usually they can, occasionally they lack 20/20 vision to think through new circumstances, and sometimes a small clique can fool everyone for a while.
Circumstances since the end of the Cold War shows that you can only count on management (and stockholders) to look after their own interests. Now that there's not even the mirage of "another way", w/in the US at least quite a few of them seem to feel that putting the screws to their employees isn't only possible, it's a mandate from the Almighty.
I'm sure that a portion of the labor pool doesn't want to work in a union shop. The size of that portion is difficult to assertain, given the tread towards smaller work sites (you're easier to single out) and legal roadblocks (in legislatures, executive branches, and courts).
Someone at ZDNet or the blogs is trolling. A buyout would only work if it were a private transaction. Redhat is a publically traded company. The moment MSFT made a play for a major stake in RDHT, the market would drive the share prices through the roof. In the meantime, Balmer would need to give his shareholders a really good explaination why blowing their money on this boondoggle was a good idea. About the only ideas that would fly are:
Break up Redhat to disrupt the Linux market
Make Linux the core of MS' business model
The former would be lame, since IBM is in the position to pick up the RH Enterprise Edition business with SuSE. The latter would be too revolutionary, and MSFT share prices would see an unacceptable drop. It would be reasonable to assume that IBM might react with a bid of its own. If IBM absorbed RDHT, it would still leave MS customers, shareholders, and employees with lots of (for MS) counterproductive FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus, could this "story's" headline be any less thought out? When Adm. Poindexter was leading the Total Information Awareness project, this sort of digital dumpster diving was news three years ago. If someone wants to report on something fresh, they'll need to exploit search engines to find agents when you don't know who they are.
When you're driving at speed, you maintain distance X from the car ahead. And, when you end up at the end of a line of cars at a stoplight, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that you close to within X/20 of the car ahead. Once the light turns green, the safety margin you and everyone else sucked up to avoid stopping a few seconds sooner than you actually did takes everyone a few seconds apiece to reestablish.
For the "everyone step on it now" plan to work, everyone needs to either 1) slow down and stop the moment they see a red light waaaaaay off in the distance, or 2) the USDOT needs to deploy that autopilot system they've been testing that would make it possible for everyone to tailgate at 100 mph. I just don't want to be in that system when it goes south, see "The Gold Coast" for a sample of the result.
Back on topic, a possible near-term result of the London test will be more accidents. During periods when traffic permits, many drivers will be moving at the governed speed limit. When a situation evolves when someone needs to make a quick brake/accelerate/maneuver decision, the quickest reaction is to step on it, which won't respond. It will take drivers a while to internalize this. In the meantime, somebody's gonna get screwed.
Next, there's the difference between those who can recognize proper patterns through repeated exposure (me), and those who were properly schooled in English grammar (my wife).
I should add, the main source of Carbon in HFC exhaust would be from using petrol or natural gas as fuel. If Aerovironment is using pure Hydrogen, then the tiny bit of environmental gaseous Carbon oxides sucked into the system would barely register.
H20 is staple, so it won't react with O3. CO, CO2 and free H all work to create Ozone in smog, so this may apply at high altitude as well.
Ozone depletion is mainly the work of Nitrogen oxides, which when expelled from your car or Whippet catridges, survives the year or so it takes to difuse to the upper atmoshpere.
Back then, the big broadcasters didn't care. But, I'd bet they care now that VHF is in play, unless the laws regarding cable access have changed.
I can't say that my home network has stress tested it, but someone on their mail list (sustworks.com/site/detailed_search.htm) probably has. I've run it on OS 9 for months at a time, interruped only by #@%^&! power outages. Yep, time for an UPS.
Naturally, there are leaks in any embargo. But the tech support and upgrades a "Great Qanat Plug" (ouch!) would require, at least for initial installation, would probably preclude any US products. It's not like they can't get it from an EU-based company, or grabbing one of the numerous books on IOS/Linux/BSD firewalls and filtering and giving it a go locally.
It was only into my second week that I realized the wall jack in my hotel room provided internet access at no additional cost [sheepish grin].
Strangled the US military: The massive DoD cutbacks were launched on George Sr.'s watch, immediately after the Gulf War.
Started...9/11 by sending tomahawks into Afghanistan: OBL was a target because he was ALREADY killing Americans. You might as well say George Sr. caused 9/11, since it was the GW I troop build up in SA that gave OBL a serious woody for the US.
Sold the US out to the UN in Serbia/Albania: You forgot Bosnia, too. The Serbs would have finished cleaning non-Serbs out of Bosnia, Kosovo, and most of Croatia if the US hadn't stepped in when the EU and UN proved dickless. The UN has usually worked just swell for the US, because it gave a forum for other countries to feel empowered pissing and moaning while we did pretty much what we wanted.
You need to broaden your reading beyond John Birch Society flyers.
Clue #2: Using the FBI and IRS to harass his political enemies.
Clue #3: Withholding evidence supoenaed by Congress.
Clue #4: Use of CIA and Army intellegence agents for domestic spying.
Clue #5: Armed intervention in Cambodia w/o running it by Congress.
Clue #6: (Plausably) Signing off on the Watergate break in.
Clue #7: Covering up his staffs' involvement in #6.
Hokay, let's compare this to Mr. Clinton, who...
Was set up by a multi-millionare who paid at least 40 people to perjure themselves, and as a result, lied in court about fingering Monica.
Hell brother, I don't know what I was thinking. You're right, Slick Willie was a frickin' Enemy Of The Republic.
A bit of trivia. I hit the Senate Appropriations site at http://appropriations.senate.gov/releases/pressroo m.cfm, and entered "S-128" as a search term. Result: Cold Fusion runtime struct dump.
I'm not sure this is a general comment, or in reference to the Broadcast Flag rider in particular, so I'll just come out and ask: Which Senator Is Trying To Add The Broadcast Flag Rider?
Did the word get passed around because there is some buzz on the Hill, or is someone on the record as the author? I've been up and down www.senate.gov for an hour, but haven't spotted anything yet.
Aw shit, Byrd's on the committee... I'll bet it's him.
To build up the kind of heat you'd need requires redirecting lots of solar energy. Keeping human energy inputs to a minimum would probably involve large mirrors in orbit, or big solar evaporator farms on the surface.
That's a guess. The fact is that during the clone wars, the MacOS slice of new PC sales remained about the same. What changed was Apple's smaller piece of it. Whether this was a function of bad management or not, Jobs came in when the company was hemorrhaging money. Jobs may be/have been a control freak, but he came in as a turn-around man, and the mandate of any turn-around manager is to get his company back in black, fast. As such, he would have been an idiot not to shit-can the clone competition as quickly as possible.
Maybe the software division will be able to make it on it's own in the future, but that future is several tens of points of market share away... and if Apple ever gained those tens of points, why would it want to give away perfectly good profits on h/w sales? Successful companies ditch lower margin (but profitable) product lines only if they've got something with a better return lined up... unless you're envisioning a trainload of R&D.
If Microsoft had ever had a major piece of profitable hardware business, I seriously doubt they would have dropped it. Never having sold anything h/w other than rebranded mice, keyboards, and (briefly) IBM PC/XT accelerator boards, it's a resource allocation decision Gates and Balmer have never had to make.
I've checked out Powerlab's site, and it's great looking stuff. No sooner did I wonder how the DoD has been doing than a new engineer joined my lab. At her previous job, she was measuring muzzle velocities of 6km/s from a 1 meter long rail gun... about the same length as the Powerlabs device. I'm guessing the amateurs are a little short of power. ;-)
I to have been using a couple of different password apps, first on my Handspring, then moving to "Keyring" on my Tungsten last year. Unless you're in an environment where there's a government sanction against recording certain passwords on your PDA, it just can't be beat.
Your point is well taken, that the PPC and Power arch are used widely outside of Apple, especially in consoles and embedded applications. However, I think that - outside of the kernel - work on PPC-based distributions are going to tend to trail off, if it's true that desktop/server platforms are what puts code in front of the most eyeballs. Granted, the trailing off will occur over a loooooooooong period of time, given the size of the installed base as of next year. Hell, my Debian-based web server runs on a 11 year old Nubus Powermac.
Having taken the time to RTFA, it's obvious to me he's making it up as he goes. Linux PPC work will will slack off as it's platform moves to legacy status, but otherwise a MacIntelosh won't make a bit of difference to Linux. Addressing his comments:
Run Windows On A Mac: I seriously doubt it, unless the only thing preventing Windows from running on - say - a G5 is the CPU. Apple isn't going to submit a Mac for Windows certification, isn't going to sign one of those #@$!% OEM deals with MS, and the only effort at making a port work at Redmond will be on someone's lunch hour.
Obviously harmful to the computer makers in general and to Microsoft: Assuming a Macx86 won't run Windows, the current market inertia will continue. A Mac will remain a nicely made boutique system. For developers, it ain't the CPU, it's the API.
x86 Competition: The rest of his piece assumes that there's a significant number of x86 developers who work with desktop Linux applications because it's the only non-MS game in town, and they'd love to get out from under the GPL if only they could. This is the fantasy of a (arguably) paid MS shill. So the people working on Open Office, Abi Word, GNU Cash, et al are going to drop everything and run to Apple's API because of an ENDIAN change? At least now we have solid proof Dvorak hasn't written a line of code since he last ran BASIC on a TRS-80.
Made On A Mac (tm)
The Soviets eventually came to the same conclusion, only after blowing the big rubles on Almaz and military Salyuts.
Incidentally, the first successful US launch after Challenger was an SDI experiment that used guidance systems from existing guided missiles. Although it was about as rushed as the Polyus battle station you reference, it didn't require major gymnastics to achieve orbit, and provided Reagan with a negotiation advantage over Gorbachev... although I don't think he fully realized the size of it. For a change, the Russians were in the position of attempting to field a system we could all too easily counter, given that the Delta 180 SDI test articles were mostly off the shelf, and could be cheaply integrated and lofted by the trainload, had the need arisen.
Brings kids back to traditional values of sex, drugs, and RnR, experienced live.
Improves US and European balance of payments by eliminating shiploads of Chinese electronics imports.
Transfers vast sums of cash from a productivity-killing industry into the pockets of attorneys, who might just invest in something worthwhile.... whoa, that's a bit too much BS even for me!
Newly worthless consoles and portable gaming systems sell for pennies on the dollar, providing me a vast stock of future LCD picture frames and Beowulf nodes.
30 years of evidence shows that anorexia and bulimia, while existant, are virtually a non-issue as a serious public health problem. Lindsey Lohan is about the only American LOSING weight nowadays, while all the rest of the kids and adults are getting seriously fat. They've got drastically increasing type 2 (dietary) diabetes rates to prove it. Jesus, get out of the house and look around you. You want to talk about deadly boundaries? Look no further. The CDC diabetes and obesity maps for the last 15 years track each other in lockstep.
There may be a few overexposed upper middle class teenage princesses that are wasting away because daddy's an asshole, but parents for most kids need control of what goes down the pie hole if they want their brats to live long enough to slap them into an old folks home.
This is a classic anti-union argument, and can be quote verbatum back to the "robber barron" days of the late 1800s. On its face, it assumes that the union leadership dictates, and the rank-and-file follow like sheep, being too stupid to consider their "best" interests. If true, then one might as well eliminate the middle man since management is already perfectly capable of dictating.
On the other hand, it just might be that the rank-and-file are as capable of recognizing their best interests as a stock market is at allocating capital resources.... that is to say, usually they can, occasionally they lack 20/20 vision to think through new circumstances, and sometimes a small clique can fool everyone for a while.
Circumstances since the end of the Cold War shows that you can only count on management (and stockholders) to look after their own interests. Now that there's not even the mirage of "another way", w/in the US at least quite a few of them seem to feel that putting the screws to their employees isn't only possible, it's a mandate from the Almighty.
I'm sure that a portion of the labor pool doesn't want to work in a union shop. The size of that portion is difficult to assertain, given the tread towards smaller work sites (you're easier to single out) and legal roadblocks (in legislatures, executive branches, and courts).
Break up Redhat to disrupt the Linux market
Make Linux the core of MS' business model
The former would be lame, since IBM is in the position to pick up the RH Enterprise Edition business with SuSE. The latter would be too revolutionary, and MSFT share prices would see an unacceptable drop. It would be reasonable to assume that IBM might react with a bid of its own. If IBM absorbed RDHT, it would still leave MS customers, shareholders, and employees with lots of (for MS) counterproductive FUD.