I get to metamoderate somebody's rating of this article as "Flamebait". I'm going to mark it unfair, but with mixed feelings. It's a great over-the-top flame, concise and well-deserved, but it's also an attractive nuisance that *ought* to attract flaming responses (and hasn't:-)
I've got no idea what it looks like - BitTorrent tells me I'll have to wait 26 hours to finish downloading (:-), but at least it knows how big the file is supposed to be. The torrent had 2 seeders and 20 downloaders a couple of minutes ago, but one of the seeders has left and the number of downloaders has dropped to 14, which is pretty silly for something that download thing *torrent* is that badly slashdotted:-)
It sounds like it's more advanced vaporware than in the past, but it's still vaporware. One of the news articles has a bit more information: "Wisconsin communications company Sanswire unveiled its almost-finished prototype of a hard-framed, unmanned airship designed to fly in the stratosphere 21 km above the earth and send broadband and mobile phone signals to an area the size of Texas." and quotes them discussing FAA certification as "We don't have a test date, but we're hoping for midsummer," "But we're still years ahead of any other program doing anything like this."
They've been hyping this for years, and while the telecom crash of the early 2000s kicked the chair out from under their business plans, they'd still be really really cool if they ever deployed the bloody things.
By the way, their PR mockup picture of the Stratellite looks amazingly like the whale in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
IPv6 is useful, and at some point we'll need the address space, but basically until Cisco and Juniper make routers that perform well using IPv6, nobody feels motivated to move wholesale - almost half the IPv4 space is still unused.. Microsoft is doing a bunch of IPv6 work that'll help the chicken&egg problem in a couple of years, but without a killer app, there's no real motivation.
The big problem I've seen with IPv6 is that its goals not only included bigger address space, which we've been able to slack off by using RFC1918 private space, firewalls, and NAT, but it also promised to do Really Cool Things to make routing infrastructures more scalable and better behaved, and that doesn't appear to have panned out yet. That means that not only do routing tables get bigger because the addresses are longer (which you fix by waiting for a couple of year's of Moore's Law to fix memory pricing), but there's likely to be a repeat of the "IPv4 Class C Address Swamp" which nobody wants, or the "Upstream-Provider Non-Portable Address Space Lock-In" features which customers don't like, and which makes multi-homing for reliability much harder. And that doesn't seem to have been done yet.
It's definitely a radical assumption, which is why it's the kind of problem for an academic "Grand Challenge" rather than incremental private-sector development, either by businesses or typical hobbyists. The issues that make it worth considering
Research/Development of Quantum Computers has progressed far enough that they *might* become actually possible and practical in 10-20 years.
If they do work, and scale up adequately, they can do amazingly different kinds of computation than conventional machines.
We haven't a bloody clue how to network the things together, so it's a potentially interesting Long-Range Research Topic
We do know that if they work, they'll totally hose the assumptions that near-NP-hard problems like factoring can be used to provide security, which trashes the public-key privacy and authentication structures that anybody who bothers with security uses today, which means we need to be ready to restructure the system if they get close to reality. Otherwise, it's the End Of The Internet Commerce World As We Know It (tm)!
I'm personally skeptical about QC, but if it does work then things will become Very Interesting. In particular, if Quantum Computers are limited by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Planck's Constant is about 10**-47, so you can work around it by adding ~150 (or ~1500, if there are log-scaling issues) bits to your crypto keys and not worry about it, but if they can get around this by chaining individual qubit cells together, then they really can bother factoring-based crypto.
Chuck Bigelow's history of Times Roman is a great document, and I should have included it along with Linotype's. Bigelow & Holmes did a number of important computer fonts, such as Lucida.
Fonts have a whole bunch of bizarre rules covering the intellectual property involved with them, so it's not surprising the GPL needs to e tweaked a bit to deal with them. The names tend to be trademarks (so you'll see fonts named "TmsRmn" which are obviously trying to indicate their similarity to the canonical Linotype "Times" Roman font("Times is a Trademark of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG".) The black marks on paper tend not to be actually covered by copyright - if you design a font that makes the same black marks on paper as "Times", either using lead slugs or tiny bitmaps or whatever, you can use and sell it. That doesn't mean you can copy somebody else's copyrighted Postscript code, and you're probably not allowed to directly copy somebody else's bitmaps, even though you can make identical bitmaps of your own. (Yes, it's a really dodgy field...)
Some fonts *are* programs, like Postscript. Some are bunches of black dots (or other shapes like lines or ovals, or other colors, especially grays if you like anti-aliasing.) Some are bunches of equations. Some are programs in languages other than Postscript that implement equations to produce black dots. Some are stacks of twisty little metal pieces, all different, carved by hand. Some are programs to produce stacks of twisty little metal pieces.
The font exception wording does clarify that using the fonts doesn't mean that all your text are belong to us. I don't see that meaningfully saying that without the exception, that you've got legal problems, though it may be useful to calm down some lawyers, especially armchair lawyers or lawyers who are already paranoid about contaminating their intellectual property.
In some cases, a font is a program, especially in Postscript; in other cases, it's a set of bitmaps or curves or equations. Using a GPLed font *could* require that if you're including the binaries of the font in a document you give somebody, you might be required to tell them where to get source code for the font (if the font is the kind of program where there's a meaningful difference between the source and the binary, which isn't usually the case for Postscript fonts.) At worst, some people could argue that it could require that if you've printed a document using the GPL'd font, that you provide information on how to get the font program, but that's somewhat like saying that if you use a GPL'd version of printf, then anything you print out needs to include a GPL notice and information on where to get the source code.
So calm down. This isn't a case of GNU/RMS being expansively greedy for ownership of everything everybody writes or prints. On the other hand, if you do modify GPL'd fonts, then GPL coverage of the modified versions is a perfectly reasonably thing.
It sounds like they've built a cool piece of hardware, but why not just handle the overlays and blending functions in a graphics card which is perfectly good at it, instead of making it happen in a harder-to-manufacture overpriced monitor?
I can see that there might be occasional military applications where it actually makes sense, because you really really really don't want the different data streams on the same computer (e.g. the CNN feed on the background and the crosshairs for the satellite laser aiming system in the foreground:-) and need more control than a multi-level-secure operating system can really provide. And there might be occasional gamer applications where nobody makes a video card hefty enough to blend the two images while running full-blast computation on both sets of image processing. But that's all weird minor niche stuff.
I really don't get it. It doesn't sound like the screen depth is enough to let your eyes see really different things, unlike some of the parallax monitor stuff that's been in the news.
Hey, providing ISOs for FTP without also providing Torrent files was their own choice - it's not like Suse's never issued a popular release before, so if the Novell takeover made them forget to use the torrent, that's their own choice.
However, I haven't found a torrent for it. Torrent Reactor has some 9.3 versions, including a 5 CD set, but not this one LiveDVD version.
If what he's looking for is a "ramdisk", then that has a good chance of being the right direction, depending on how fast I/O his application needs (e.g. is the problem just that he needs 0-latency retrievals, or does he also need a fast bus speed?) (Cost is obviously an issue also - these devices are sometimes pricy.)
I'm curious how a device like this would get 3GB/s bandwidth - what kind of bus is it using? It's certainly way past PCI. Perhaps PCI-X, or plugging into AGP or something?
Another possibility, if cost is more of a problem, and bus speed is less of a problem, is to network a couple of motherboards together, with as much RAM as possible on each of them, and either GigE or Firewire.
Oh, definitely, there are applications like that. In this case, it's likely that the antivirus stuff wants to be on the same processor as the application so it can check the stuff that's in the cache - probably L2 cache rather than L1.
Sure, I know you were trying to make a joke and I'm sidetracking...
It really does sound like the DART is designed for multiple uses - sure, there are good applications like deploying extra supplies to a manned system, or deploying extra batteries or fuel to a system that has the capability to use them, but that's not really a separate problem from what an ASAT weapon needs to do to park itself next to an enemy satellite and destroy it. And no, I really wasn't thinking of this as a lead-in to saying "Somebody set up us the bomb", but it's precisely legitimate for this application... because you could deliver a bomb that way, and DART gives you better precision in getting it to your target, and can either get away for future use or clamp on tight and explode, depending on the military necessities and the prices of the hardware.
As the parent article had said, "you know your operating system sucks when..."
A decent operating system can run multiple processes at once efficiently on the main processor (and if it's got multiprocessor support, either with discrete processor chips or just multiple cores, it can do a reasonable job of spreading the load.) Doing the job right includes managing the caches of user programs and user data and the caches of system-utility programs and data, and the right way to do that is to use an operating system that's good at managing such things. And if monitoring the user's application for safety takes as much horsepower as running the user's application, that's sometimes an indication that either the user is running really really simple applications, but more often an indication that the operating system is fundamentally not very good at protecting processes from each other and needs all the help it can get.
There may be occasional interesting research applications where it's worth wasting most of the horsepower of the second core or second processor having it monitoring the rest of the system by having it run as a trusted security monitor that's outside the primary operating system. Some of the DRM systems do things like that, though their trust-enforcement chip is a lot lower in horsepower than the main CPU, because it's basically just checking on file I/O and running checksums on the IOS and the operating system used to boot the machine.
I absolutely loved the books. Our local PBS station has been replaying the TV show lately, and for the most part it sucked (sorry, but it did), perhaps because it simply doesn't look as good rendered on a small screen as it does rendered in the reader's imagination, but also because it was chopped up way too much. I've haven't heard much of the radio version, though I had the script and sometime I need to dig the box of the attic and find a 5.25" floppy drive to try the game again.
We'll see if the movie does a better job in the limited time budget it has to work with.
I live near San Francisco, occasionally work there, and read their newspapers. They're in fact not likely to be able to run a real wireless network very well. They'll be happy to take credit for it if it happens to work, but they'd be a lot better off letting the market evolve naturally, or at most giving a grant to BAWUG and staying out of their way. As far as non-free wireless goes, there *is* a Starbucks on every other street corner, so that job's pretty well covered (:-) Many competing coffeeshops provide free wireless. And there are enough insecure wireless networks in much of the city that you can pretty much leech off of somebody within a block or two, at least if you're willing to carry an antenna.
If the city *really* wanted to spank Verizon, who aren't the local wireline telco, they could offer to let SBC or Comcast use lamppost space or some similar favor in return for providing free wireless. Of course, The City Government (and also the Bay Guardian) appear to have hated every cable TV provider in the last few decades, so it may not happen with Comcast, but perhaps SBC could do it.
So I can BUY CELLPHONE MINUTES FROM HIM instead of using my wireline phone for short business calls.
So I can carry a cellphone that's reliable enough for almost all my calls instead of carrying a pager for reliability.
So people can call me without having to find out where I am by calling five different locations.
So people from work can call my work cell phone rather than calling my home phone and either waking up my wife or having a long discussion with the answering machine in the kitchen (that's for relatives and spammers...)
So my cellular answering service doesn't need to say "I'm sorry, but I can't answer the phone now because I'm here. Please leave a message, and I'll call you back when I'm not here".
So I can get rid of the second voice line at home which I use for work and used to use for modems before I got DSL.
It's pure and utter marketing scam. The cellphone "generation" bit was a way for competing technology developers to define the market in a way that would brand their competition as "outdated" before either technology was working, and to get people who had older cellphones to buy their version when they upgraded. (People *always* upgraded, especially in the boom years, because Moore's Law types of trends meant that phones continually got smaller formats, longer battery life, and more features, pretty much orthogonally to what the carriers did with the underlying transport technology.)
SIM cards are useful, but what's really useful about GSM is that almost everywhere in the world uses it, except for a couple of small specialized markets like the US and Japan (:-) That basically means that the Europeans had better sales people, not necessarily better technology. It was largely driven by the fragmented European PTT markets where the economies of scale worked much better if everybody who was upgrading from older analog systems went with the same newer technology, while the US markets had much larger markets with multiple carriers in them so technology fights were more realistic.
Very few wireless telcos are focused on serving data customers well - they're focused on extracting money from people however the market will let them, and if that's crippled overpriced data services used to deliver ringtones, texting, and low-res animated Hello Kitty pictures to teenagers at 10 eurocents or yen per pop, then that's what they'll deliver. Most of the US carriers that sell data are trying to sell phone-to-phone casual data services - if what you want is to replace Metricom with a truly portable always-on connection for your laptop, most of them don't want to sell that except for very high prices. Doesn't matter whether the data service underneath could do far more - if it's not what they're selling at a rational price, it's not useful.
Oh, come on now. Do you think if you had wireless on your laptop that you'd really pay as much attention in class?
I had enough trouble paying attention in college back when the only distractions were windows or female students. (Cue the "when I was a boy we had to walk to school through the snow, uphill both ways" music, but since this was Cornell that was pretty accurate, except when I was bicycling through the snow uphill both ways. Portable computers hadn't come out yet, but we did have calculators except for chemistry where we still used slide rules.) (And none of this "didn't have a girlfriend, eh?" business either - being in the same classes she was in was even more distracting, except of course that it was only physics so it didn't need a lot of attention:-)
I don't know if there *are* really good scalable mesh systems, but Somebody ought to design them (:-) There are things like the Nokia Rooftop Network that did mesh networks with rooftop antennas - probably outdated given the evolution of 802.11 variants, but probably easy enough to update if they want to. Sonic.net, an ISP based in Sonoma County CA, runs a rooftop network in Santa Rosa using them, providing DSL-like performance. Obviously this means that some fraction of their locations are seeded with real DSL, but it's not a big deal to do that.
Also, most DSL systems are fairly oversubscribed, in terms of number of users per megabit of upstream bandwidth. So to do a rooftop network, you put more real bandwidth in the wired sites and do the oversubscription out on the radio side instead of in the DSL router side, and it works fine.
San Francisco is not only fairly compact, and has a very high-tech working population (albeit a history of anti-technology anti-new-business clueless governmetns), but it also has a couple of well-placed big hills. The Sutro Tower, a big honking antenna tower on top of one of them, has visibility to most of the city, which is why the volunteer-run free wireless organizations have space on the tower along with radio and TV stations and anybody else who needs coverage. There are a few places that can't see it (the northeast side of Russian Hill, presumably), so they'd need one or two other antennas to get line-of-sight, but it's basically well-covered.
That doesn't mean that one 802.11 setup will really serve the entire city on its three non-overlapping channels with tens of thousands of users. But it'd be a great place to put a WiMax antenna to feed a bunch of 802.11g local pods.
Foreign Aid has been described as taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. Some appalling fraction of it is money given to US-friendly militaries to buy military hardware from US arms manufacturers (not to say that the European governments don't play the same games) to protect politically-well-connected trade like US oil companies, other US natural-resource-using companies, and US agribusinesses. Traditionally this was excused as "protecting the Third World from EEEEVILLLL Communists", but since the only remaining Commies are in our big trade partner China (or in Berkeley) we've had to substitute Moslem Terrorists as the new enemy.
Ok, so you've got fast broadband and you're only trying to speed up your browser's interface. Sounds like a great job for an http/html cleanup proxy at 127.0.0.1 (or on some machine in your LAN if there's a better choice, but if you do that, make sure it isn't an easily-spammer-abused open proxy.)
You probably can't clean up everything, and there are some pages you're perfectly willing to put up with lots of graphics from, so you probably want to do more than just run a Lynx relative (:-), but you could do a good first cut. On the other hand, the Firefox ad-blocker proxies can work pretty well.
Of course many of the tools are popular open-source material - they work well, and they're extensible for people who want to add capabilities or connect them to report generators or other tools or whatever. You should be running these things yourself on occasion - perhaps regularly if there's a convenient way to do so, but certainly when you do major changes. Some of the things they'll find really are minor (e.g. somebody could cause a denial of service attack by sending a gigabit per second of UDP traffic to your company's T1 line, because you're filtering out unwanted packets at your end of the wire and not the ISP's), and they're low on your priority list. Others are important things that you missed, or they're configuration mistakes that you didn't catch and ought to fix.
And do make sure the consultant gives you some recommendations about prioritization.
I'm used to the opposite problem - leasing hardware because we could expense it as opposed to having to take it out of the capital budget. But I've seen both, and in both cases it's usually stupid.
Of course, for your place, the real way to save money would be to downgrade the Office 2003 application to Office 2000 or Office 97, because it was probably doing something gratuitously non-backward-compatible. On the other hand, that *is* the *real* hook that's kept Microsoft in business so long.
Slashdot Mirror
I get to metamoderate somebody's rating of this article as "Flamebait". I'm going to mark it unfair, but with mixed feelings. It's a great over-the-top flame, concise and well-deserved, but it's also an attractive nuisance that *ought* to attract flaming responses (and hasn't :-)
I've got no idea what it looks like - BitTorrent tells me I'll have to wait 26 hours to finish downloading (:-), but at least it knows how big the file is supposed to be. The torrent had 2 seeders and 20 downloaders a couple of minutes ago, but one of the seeders has left and the number of downloaders has dropped to 14, which is pretty silly for something that download thing *torrent* is that badly slashdotted :-)
They've been hyping this for years, and while the telecom crash of the early 2000s kicked the chair out from under their business plans, they'd still be really really cool if they ever deployed the bloody things.
By the way, their PR mockup picture of the Stratellite looks amazingly like the whale in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The big problem I've seen with IPv6 is that its goals not only included bigger address space, which we've been able to slack off by using RFC1918 private space, firewalls, and NAT, but it also promised to do Really Cool Things to make routing infrastructures more scalable and better behaved, and that doesn't appear to have panned out yet. That means that not only do routing tables get bigger because the addresses are longer (which you fix by waiting for a couple of year's of Moore's Law to fix memory pricing), but there's likely to be a repeat of the "IPv4 Class C Address Swamp" which nobody wants, or the "Upstream-Provider Non-Portable Address Space Lock-In" features which customers don't like, and which makes multi-homing for reliability much harder. And that doesn't seem to have been done yet.
I'm personally skeptical about QC, but if it does work then things will become Very Interesting. In particular, if Quantum Computers are limited by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Planck's Constant is about 10**-47, so you can work around it by adding ~150 (or ~1500, if there are log-scaling issues) bits to your crypto keys and not worry about it, but if they can get around this by chaining individual qubit cells together, then they really can bother factoring-based crypto.
Chuck Bigelow's history of Times Roman is a great document, and I should have included it along with Linotype's. Bigelow & Holmes did a number of important computer fonts, such as Lucida.
Some fonts *are* programs, like Postscript. Some are bunches of black dots (or other shapes like lines or ovals, or other colors, especially grays if you like anti-aliasing.) Some are bunches of equations. Some are programs in languages other than Postscript that implement equations to produce black dots. Some are stacks of twisty little metal pieces, all different, carved by hand. Some are programs to produce stacks of twisty little metal pieces.
In some cases, a font is a program, especially in Postscript; in other cases, it's a set of bitmaps or curves or equations. Using a GPLed font *could* require that if you're including the binaries of the font in a document you give somebody, you might be required to tell them where to get source code for the font (if the font is the kind of program where there's a meaningful difference between the source and the binary, which isn't usually the case for Postscript fonts.) At worst, some people could argue that it could require that if you've printed a document using the GPL'd font, that you provide information on how to get the font program, but that's somewhat like saying that if you use a GPL'd version of printf, then anything you print out needs to include a GPL notice and information on where to get the source code.
So calm down. This isn't a case of GNU/RMS being expansively greedy for ownership of everything everybody writes or prints. On the other hand, if you do modify GPL'd fonts, then GPL coverage of the modified versions is a perfectly reasonably thing.
I can see that there might be occasional military applications where it actually makes sense, because you really really really don't want the different data streams on the same computer (e.g. the CNN feed on the background and the crosshairs for the satellite laser aiming system in the foreground :-) and need more control than a multi-level-secure operating system can really provide. And there might be occasional gamer applications where nobody makes a video card hefty enough to blend the two images while running full-blast computation on both sets of image processing. But that's all weird minor niche stuff.
I really don't get it. It doesn't sound like the screen depth is enough to let your eyes see really different things, unlike some of the parallax monitor stuff that's been in the news.
However, I haven't found a torrent for it. Torrent Reactor has some 9.3 versions, including a 5 CD set, but not this one LiveDVD version.
I'm curious how a device like this would get 3GB/s bandwidth - what kind of bus is it using? It's certainly way past PCI. Perhaps PCI-X, or plugging into AGP or something?
Another possibility, if cost is more of a problem, and bus speed is less of a problem, is to network a couple of motherboards together, with as much RAM as possible on each of them, and either GigE or Firewire.
Oh, definitely, there are applications like that. In this case, it's likely that the antivirus stuff wants to be on the same processor as the application so it can check the stuff that's in the cache - probably L2 cache rather than L1.
It really does sound like the DART is designed for multiple uses - sure, there are good applications like deploying extra supplies to a manned system, or deploying extra batteries or fuel to a system that has the capability to use them, but that's not really a separate problem from what an ASAT weapon needs to do to park itself next to an enemy satellite and destroy it. And no, I really wasn't thinking of this as a lead-in to saying "Somebody set up us the bomb", but it's precisely legitimate for this application... because you could deliver a bomb that way, and DART gives you better precision in getting it to your target, and can either get away for future use or clamp on tight and explode, depending on the military necessities and the prices of the hardware.
A decent operating system can run multiple processes at once efficiently on the main processor (and if it's got multiprocessor support, either with discrete processor chips or just multiple cores, it can do a reasonable job of spreading the load.) Doing the job right includes managing the caches of user programs and user data and the caches of system-utility programs and data, and the right way to do that is to use an operating system that's good at managing such things. And if monitoring the user's application for safety takes as much horsepower as running the user's application, that's sometimes an indication that either the user is running really really simple applications, but more often an indication that the operating system is fundamentally not very good at protecting processes from each other and needs all the help it can get.
There may be occasional interesting research applications where it's worth wasting most of the horsepower of the second core or second processor having it monitoring the rest of the system by having it run as a trusted security monitor that's outside the primary operating system. Some of the DRM systems do things like that, though their trust-enforcement chip is a lot lower in horsepower than the main CPU, because it's basically just checking on file I/O and running checksums on the IOS and the operating system used to boot the machine.
We'll see if the movie does a better job in the limited time budget it has to work with.
If the city *really* wanted to spank Verizon, who aren't the local wireline telco, they could offer to let SBC or Comcast use lamppost space or some similar favor in return for providing free wireless. Of course, The City Government (and also the Bay Guardian) appear to have hated every cable TV provider in the last few decades, so it may not happen with Comcast, but perhaps SBC could do it.
SIM cards are useful, but what's really useful about GSM is that almost everywhere in the world uses it, except for a couple of small specialized markets like the US and Japan (:-) That basically means that the Europeans had better sales people, not necessarily better technology. It was largely driven by the fragmented European PTT markets where the economies of scale worked much better if everybody who was upgrading from older analog systems went with the same newer technology, while the US markets had much larger markets with multiple carriers in them so technology fights were more realistic.
Very few wireless telcos are focused on serving data customers well - they're focused on extracting money from people however the market will let them, and if that's crippled overpriced data services used to deliver ringtones, texting, and low-res animated Hello Kitty pictures to teenagers at 10 eurocents or yen per pop, then that's what they'll deliver. Most of the US carriers that sell data are trying to sell phone-to-phone casual data services - if what you want is to replace Metricom with a truly portable always-on connection for your laptop, most of them don't want to sell that except for very high prices. Doesn't matter whether the data service underneath could do far more - if it's not what they're selling at a rational price, it's not useful.
I had enough trouble paying attention in college back when the only distractions were windows or female students. (Cue the "when I was a boy we had to walk to school through the snow, uphill both ways" music, but since this was Cornell that was pretty accurate, except when I was bicycling through the snow uphill both ways. Portable computers hadn't come out yet, but we did have calculators except for chemistry where we still used slide rules.) (And none of this "didn't have a girlfriend, eh?" business either - being in the same classes she was in was even more distracting, except of course that it was only physics so it didn't need a lot of attention :-)
Also, most DSL systems are fairly oversubscribed, in terms of number of users per megabit of upstream bandwidth. So to do a rooftop network, you put more real bandwidth in the wired sites and do the oversubscription out on the radio side instead of in the DSL router side, and it works fine.
That doesn't mean that one 802.11 setup will really serve the entire city on its three non-overlapping channels with tens of thousands of users. But it'd be a great place to put a WiMax antenna to feed a bunch of 802.11g local pods.
Foreign Aid has been described as taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. Some appalling fraction of it is money given to US-friendly militaries to buy military hardware from US arms manufacturers (not to say that the European governments don't play the same games) to protect politically-well-connected trade like US oil companies, other US natural-resource-using companies, and US agribusinesses. Traditionally this was excused as "protecting the Third World from EEEEVILLLL Communists", but since the only remaining Commies are in our big trade partner China (or in Berkeley) we've had to substitute Moslem Terrorists as the new enemy.
You probably can't clean up everything, and there are some pages you're perfectly willing to put up with lots of graphics from, so you probably want to do more than just run a Lynx relative (:-), but you could do a good first cut. On the other hand, the Firefox ad-blocker proxies can work pretty well.
And do make sure the consultant gives you some recommendations about prioritization.
Of course, for your place, the real way to save money would be to downgrade the Office 2003 application to Office 2000 or Office 97, because it was probably doing something gratuitously non-backward-compatible. On the other hand, that *is* the *real* hook that's kept Microsoft in business so long.