Yeh, there's a lot of Linux programmers who wouldn't know how to write portable code if the portable code fairy shat clue down their throats. Last decade it was SunOS programmers, the decade before that it was people who thought all the world was a VAX. The world is full of people like that.
Yup, and that makes it easier for people like me to get jobs.
Ask your friends about porting Linux code from people who think portable means "it compiles on Red Hat and Suse... ship it!"
Well, I will grant that embedding system level and environment level calls in common code is a bad idea, but it has been my experience that porting from Linux to something is easier than porting from something like "Windows" or "Mac" to Linux.
Oh, while we're on the subject, you do know that Jordan Hubbard works at Apple now, don't you?
A Mac is a genuine Unix workstation that is much easier to administer, and has much better software and hardware support than Linux.
It has *better* software support from major ISVs, I will grant you that, but it does not have better software support generally and Linux supports far more hardware than MacOS. Not all Linux software runs on the macOS either.
My wife and son have macs, and I tell you, I'll take Linux every time.
I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac, both command-line and GUI, while not having to worry about wireless networking drivers, printer support, power management / sleep support on my laptop, getting accelerated 3D drivers working, or any of the other minor hassles that are involved with setting up and maintaining a Linux install.
I have a couple printers that don't work on my wife's, son's or mom's mac.
I have an AMD noname and a Dell desktop as well as an HP pavilion laptop, and I don't have any real problems. I have to use the unsupported nVidia driver, but that isn't too hard to install. Things like Skype just work.
If you walk into the computer science department at MIT, basically all the faculty have a Mac, and fully half the students do. These people are not buying Macs because they saw a cool ad on the bus - they're buying them because a Mac is the best tool available.
That is a fairly subjective statement of a dubious conclusion. Most of the guys that I have worked with use macs at work because the "organization" in which they work requires MSOffice which is not supported on Linux. They would rather use Linux or FreeBSD.
Yeah, they're more expensive. If you value your time at all, you should realize that spending an extra $100 on a Mac is well worth it if it improves your productivity. Hell, if you ever spend two hours fighting with some weird issue on your Linux box, it's no longer saved you any money.
I am less productive on Mac, and I've spent my time fixing macs as well. I have a standing free bottle of Wine from an upscale wine shop because I was able to get their printer working on their mac. They had been trying for months.
When it comes to productivity, lets see a Mac do this:
ssh -X hostaddr application
And have the GUI application pop up on a remote screen without the WHOLE screen like VNC.
in Mac OS X, in the five years I've been using a Mac? Zero. I'm not exaggerating. It lives up to the hype. It "just works". It gets out of my way and lets me get things done.
Its funny, EVERY SYSTEM has issues. People who claim they do not are lying. Like I said, my wife, mom, and son have macs. I've developed software on macs periodically for about 15 years. OS/X does have its issues. There are hardware issues on macs.
For average users I recommend mac because it has far fewer problems than Windows. For techies, there is no substitute for Linux or FreeBSD. (I prefer Linux, but I have friends who prefer FreeBSD.)
Sure it is, you know what I'm saying, you just want to purposefully misunderstand and ignore context. If a person says "I'm going to kill you, asshole" the phrase has different meanings in different contexts. A friend saying that to another after after getting sacked in a puck up football game is entirely different than when someone say it to another while pointing a loaded gun.
Likewise, when it is said that when presented evidence, you must prove or disprove it. Is perfectly reasonable statement, but then you go on about how, in science, "nothing is ever proved." Give me a break. The words "prove" or "disprove," in this context are acceptable and it would be understood by a reasonable person.
You can't have a reasonable discussion with a person who does not want to address your points, but wants to intentionally and pedantically misinterpret your statements in order not to.
You may want to re-read that book on the scientific method. The scientist cannot prove anything. The scientist can only disprove alternative theories and gather evidence in support of a particular theory.
If you want to argue pedantic points in the canonical use of language, have fun with that. Life is too short.
True however government subsidizing creates winners and losers.
True, but so does everything else in the world.
those who get the most in subsidies can come out on top despite any technical merit.
Again, true, but the system is inherently unfair. People who get into the game with more money tend to come out on top despite any technical merit. Granting money to people with less may improve fairness.
Then how's the money to be given out?
In an abstract, I would suppose based on a "need" of the developer and "value" of the idea.
Secondly, even TFA spends more time slagging Microsoft for past behaviour than it does discussing what Ballmer has said. The disingenous suggestion that we're then going to discuss the statement from Ballmer on its own merits, isn't even a facade, it's a joke.
is it not important to consider past behavior when evaluating future expectations? A rational discussion about Microsoft can not disregard past behavior and be serious.
Apple is a publicly traded company and their only real obligation is making a profit for their shareholders.
That, of course, is not true. Making money for the shareholders is right up there with their priorities, but ethics and legalities are just as important.
That's a bad idea. Government shouldn't be funding either open source or proprietary software. They should let people keep the money they work to earn and let them decide who they want to support.
Ideology aside, government investment in technology is what created the computer and the internet and a great deal of wealth that far exceeds the initial investment.
Is actually incorrect, it should more correctly be "correlation does not necessarily mean causation."
Correlation can be a pretty strong indicator of causation. It isn't the whole story, obviously, but on its own, it is evidence. When a scientist has evidence -- he must then prove or disprove the relationship.
When I see statistics, I don't automatically believe what they imply, but more often than not they are an indicator.
Two examples;
(1) If you own a hand gun you are more likely to die of gun violence. It could also be that if you own a hand gun, you live in an environment that is inherently more dangerous. If explored even closer, it may show that in "dangerous urban environments" you are MUCH more likely to die from gun violence UNLESS you own a gun. While still being more likely to die of gun violence, on average, the gun actually helps your chances in some circumstances.
(2) if you smoke tobacco cigarettes you are more likely to get lung cancer. In this case correlation *IS* causation.
As for the guys who writes it for love, do nothing. They will continue doing what they love regardless of financial gain. A stable economy will take care of them.
I have more than one or two open source projects that could EASILY be valuable based on feedback from users, but I can't get them completed because I need to focus on regular work to pay the bills.
So, I have a recommendations engine, a text search engine, and a couple other projects languishing on a hard disk because I need to keep my day job.
You may say, boo fucking hoo, and you are right, however, a quality open source / free software recommendations system may increase sales for a lot of small companies, not to mention drive some competition in the market place.
Perhaps we should invest more in research on why correlation does not mean causation.
But also remember that correlation is typically the first clue of causation. Correlation can not be dismissed out of hand, it must be studied. To ignore it completely is just as stupid as jumping too quickly to a conclusion.
Nice thought, but you didn't really explain why my tax dollars should go to open source.
For the same reason we build roads, bridges, schools, and libraries. The "common good" of a working infrastructure fuels industry and creates wealth.
You didn't explain why open source hasn't eclipsed "traditional" license software, if it's superior.
That is a question with a complex answer. Microsoft's monopoly has a strangle hold on large segments of the computing industry. In these segments it is purposefully and illegally difficult to choose. However, in segments of the industry where Microsoft does not have a strong showing, Free GPL and Open Source offerings compete side by side with commercial vendors.
For YOU or some government official to decide that open source is better than other options is arrogant, and it's decisions like that which have caused our government to make "investments" on inferior alternatives throughout modern (read: since the income tax) history.
Well, ideologies aside, we as a society have ALWAYS invested in development of technology. Be it through weapons programs, weather forecasting, research grants for universities, and so on. This would be nothing more than a continuation of that strategy that has fueled the U.S. economy for so long.
Interestingly, it is when we have reduced these investments under the recent republican presidents, the economy takes a hit.
The open source movement is exactly what should be funded. Create a grant application program for open source projects.
I had an argument with a microsoftie a while ago, who was convinced that open source was destroying the software industry. I countered that all it was doing was creating a rich infrastructure on top of which other industry could be built.
The open source infrastructure is a national (international) treasure that, by making infrastructure basically free, like roads and bridges, makes other projects that would have been too big and expensive to develop from scratch, almost trivial to develop.
It achieves persistence by using a cluster of nodes storing data in memory and being tolerant of nodes dropping out, rather than storing on disk. This is, admittedly, not the usual means in which databases achieve persistent data storage, but so what? It provides data storage and retrieval and is transactional and persistent. A database is defined by function, not by how the function is acheived. It is, pretty clearly, a database, albeit a non-relational one.
Arguments just to win arguments are useless. It is not a database. It may have some redundancy, but it does not have persistence.
This sort of thing happens all the time. I did a technology contract for "Servo-lift Eastern" who is a big vendor for the prison system.
Privately run prisons are a big business in the U.S.A. Why do you think we imprison more of our population than any other western country? Because the good 'ol boys make money in jailing poor people who can't defend themselves.
Hey, I understand politics. I don't expect human beings to be pillars of integrity, everyone is corrupt on some level. However, if you are willing to knowingly cause material harm to another human being for money, you need to die.
All I can think of is DRAM. You need to keep refreshing the memory by re-addressing it and recharging the cells. By moving the eye, you are just refreshing the pixels.
I am also reminded by the probably nonsensical warning to "hold still" because the T-REX's vision was based on movement. It seems our vision is also based on movement, except we supply the movement with our eyes.
You sound very wedded to relational database technology, to the point where you are impugning other technologies based on preconceptions and strawmen.
I've been in the industry for over 25 years, I've learned a thing or two about databases both theoretically and practically. I made no strawmen and I evaluate everything with an open mind. An "open mind" does not need to be an empty one.
It isn't very hard to understand that BerkeleyDB is a simple persistent hashtable (with some support for automatically updating indexes with newly hashed values).
There is no lack of understanding.
I am not a database expert at all but I can't imagine how you could store name/value pairs with less overhead.
Well, as a database expert, I assure you that "overhead" in databases is there for a reason. A "simple" system does not have the ability or the functionality to manage scalability correctly. Any dumb system can have one process and store and retrieve and not have an issue.
A more complex system embodies a lot of knowledge about data and access. Techniques like ordered writes, MVCC, lazy writes, and others are far more complex and provide much higher throughput than a simpler system.
But to argue that within this limited domain, something as straightforward as BerkeleyDB wouldn't be the most efficient solution, must come simply from an unwillingness to divorce yourself from relational database technology.
You are assuming because I disagree with you, that I am inflexible or something. That's your mistake.
Now, if you have more than one process accessing your BerkeleyDB database, say a web site, I'll bet you PostgreSQL will outperform BerkeleyDB under load with 50 processes. The performance curve of berkeleyDB under load is bad. PostgreSQL, on the other hand, stays fairly flat.
And with regards to locks, you do realize that BerkeleyDB is developed by a professional software company that seems to know pretty well what they are doing?
This is not argument. It has no place in this discussion.
Do you really think that with data access mechanisms as simple as a persisted hashtable, they can't implement very efficient locking?
There is no such thing as efficient locking.
Do you really think that in this very simple type of database, it's not possible to achieve fast operation by 50 or more concurrent readers/writers?
I have written many high speed system with a high degree of concurrency, and it is possible to get "high performance," but locking is ALWAYS a performance hit. ALWAYS. Think of it this way, all locking mechanisms rely on the OS process scheduling to synchronize processes to a single resource.
As a final point, I am pretty sure that MySQL was originally developed as a layer on top of BerkeleyDB. People were in love with MySQL because it was so fast. And it was a wrapper around BerkeleyDB. Doesn't that indicate that BerkeleyDB itself used without a wrapping layer might even be faster? Once again note, that this is only for some kinds of applications. I am not claiming that every huge database application could use BerkeleyDB sanely.
(I used to work for Gateway, and yes, I was in on the meetings).
Microsoft OEM marketers contact big-name computer manufacturer. They offer huge discount on their entire line of Micro$oft products. The catch is, they *have* to buy one license of their current O.S. for every computer sold, period. If they don't, then the deal is off, and they get to pay full retail, or whatever they can wrangle from an intermediate reseller, but nowhere near the price originally offered by Microsoft.
Intel did the same thing for their processors, but only if you don't offer to sell AMD.
Its all been well documented, but 8 years ago, G.W.Bush and his gang of thieves stopped the Justice department from enacting a remedy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeh, there's a lot of Linux programmers who wouldn't know how to write portable code if the portable code fairy shat clue down their throats. Last decade it was SunOS programmers, the decade before that it was people who thought all the world was a VAX. The world is full of people like that.
Yup, and that makes it easier for people like me to get jobs.
Ask your friends about porting Linux code from people who think portable means "it compiles on Red Hat and Suse... ship it!"
Well, I will grant that embedding system level and environment level calls in common code is a bad idea, but it has been my experience that porting from Linux to something is easier than porting from something like "Windows" or "Mac" to Linux.
Oh, while we're on the subject, you do know that Jordan Hubbard works at Apple now, don't you?
And?
A Mac is a genuine Unix workstation that is much easier to administer, and has much better software and hardware support than Linux.
It has *better* software support from major ISVs, I will grant you that, but it does not have better software support generally and Linux supports far more hardware than MacOS. Not all Linux software runs on the macOS either.
My wife and son have macs, and I tell you, I'll take Linux every time.
I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac, both command-line and GUI, while not having to worry about wireless networking drivers, printer support, power management / sleep support on my laptop, getting accelerated 3D drivers working, or any of the other minor hassles that are involved with setting up and maintaining a Linux install.
I have a couple printers that don't work on my wife's, son's or mom's mac.
I have an AMD noname and a Dell desktop as well as an HP pavilion laptop, and I don't have any real problems. I have to use the unsupported nVidia driver, but that isn't too hard to install. Things like Skype just work.
If you walk into the computer science department at MIT, basically all the faculty have a Mac, and fully half the students do. These people are not buying Macs because they saw a cool ad on the bus - they're buying them because a Mac is the best tool available.
That is a fairly subjective statement of a dubious conclusion. Most of the guys that I have worked with use macs at work because the "organization" in which they work requires MSOffice which is not supported on Linux. They would rather use Linux or FreeBSD.
Yeah, they're more expensive. If you value your time at all, you should realize that spending an extra $100 on a Mac is well worth it if it improves your productivity. Hell, if you ever spend two hours fighting with some weird issue on your Linux box, it's no longer saved you any money.
I am less productive on Mac, and I've spent my time fixing macs as well. I have a standing free bottle of Wine from an upscale wine shop because I was able to get their printer working on their mac. They had been trying for months.
When it comes to productivity, lets see a Mac do this:
ssh -X hostaddr application
And have the GUI application pop up on a remote screen without the WHOLE screen like VNC.
in Mac OS X, in the five years I've been using a Mac? Zero. I'm not exaggerating. It lives up to the hype. It "just works". It gets out of my way and lets me get things done.
Its funny, EVERY SYSTEM has issues. People who claim they do not are lying. Like I said, my wife, mom, and son have macs. I've developed software on macs periodically for about 15 years. OS/X does have its issues. There are hardware issues on macs.
For average users I recommend mac because it has far fewer problems than Windows. For techies, there is no substitute for Linux or FreeBSD. (I prefer Linux, but I have friends who prefer FreeBSD.)
Oh the irony.
Not really.
This is not an issue of language.
Sure it is, you know what I'm saying, you just want to purposefully misunderstand and ignore context. If a person says "I'm going to kill you, asshole" the phrase has different meanings in different contexts. A friend saying that to another after after getting sacked in a puck up football game is entirely different than when someone say it to another while pointing a loaded gun.
Likewise, when it is said that when presented evidence, you must prove or disprove it. Is perfectly reasonable statement, but then you go on about how, in science, "nothing is ever proved." Give me a break. The words "prove" or "disprove," in this context are acceptable and it would be understood by a reasonable person.
You can't have a reasonable discussion with a person who does not want to address your points, but wants to intentionally and pedantically misinterpret your statements in order not to.
You may want to re-read that book on the scientific method. The scientist cannot prove anything. The scientist can only disprove alternative theories and gather evidence in support of a particular theory.
If you want to argue pedantic points in the canonical use of language, have fun with that. Life is too short.
True however government subsidizing creates winners and losers.
True, but so does everything else in the world.
those who get the most in subsidies can come out on top despite any technical merit.
Again, true, but the system is inherently unfair. People who get into the game with more money tend to come out on top despite any technical merit. Granting money to people with less may improve fairness.
Then how's the money to be given out?
In an abstract, I would suppose based on a "need" of the developer and "value" of the idea.
Secondly, even TFA spends more time slagging Microsoft for past behaviour than it does discussing what Ballmer has said. The disingenous suggestion that we're then going to discuss the statement from Ballmer on its own merits, isn't even a facade, it's a joke.
is it not important to consider past behavior when evaluating future expectations? A rational discussion about Microsoft can not disregard past behavior and be serious.
Apple is a publicly traded company and their only real obligation is making a profit for their shareholders.
That, of course, is not true. Making money for the shareholders is right up there with their priorities, but ethics and legalities are just as important.
If Microsoft wants any sort of "openness" it should act in good faith and open up Windows protocols and application formats first.
Until that time, it is just a ironic tantrum of a monopolist.
That's a bad idea. Government shouldn't be funding either open source or proprietary software. They should let people keep the money they work to earn and let them decide who they want to support.
Ideology aside, government investment in technology is what created the computer and the internet and a great deal of wealth that far exceeds the initial investment.
Your quote:
correlation does not mean causation.
Is actually incorrect, it should more correctly be "correlation does not necessarily mean causation."
Correlation can be a pretty strong indicator of causation. It isn't the whole story, obviously, but on its own, it is evidence. When a scientist has evidence -- he must then prove or disprove the relationship.
When I see statistics, I don't automatically believe what they imply, but more often than not they are an indicator.
Two examples;
(1) If you own a hand gun you are more likely to die of gun violence. It could also be that if you own a hand gun, you live in an environment that is inherently more dangerous. If explored even closer, it may show that in "dangerous urban environments" you are MUCH more likely to die from gun violence UNLESS you own a gun. While still being more likely to die of gun violence, on average, the gun actually helps your chances in some circumstances.
(2) if you smoke tobacco cigarettes you are more likely to get lung cancer. In this case correlation *IS* causation.
As for the guys who writes it for love, do nothing. They will continue doing what they love regardless of financial gain. A stable economy will take care of them.
I have more than one or two open source projects that could EASILY be valuable based on feedback from users, but I can't get them completed because I need to focus on regular work to pay the bills.
So, I have a recommendations engine, a text search engine, and a couple other projects languishing on a hard disk because I need to keep my day job.
You may say, boo fucking hoo, and you are right, however, a quality open source / free software recommendations system may increase sales for a lot of small companies, not to mention drive some competition in the market place.
Perhaps we should invest more in research on why correlation does not mean causation.
But also remember that correlation is typically the first clue of causation. Correlation can not be dismissed out of hand, it must be studied. To ignore it completely is just as stupid as jumping too quickly to a conclusion.
Nice thought, but you didn't really explain why my tax dollars should go to open source.
For the same reason we build roads, bridges, schools, and libraries. The "common good" of a working infrastructure fuels industry and creates wealth.
You didn't explain why open source hasn't eclipsed "traditional" license software, if it's superior.
That is a question with a complex answer. Microsoft's monopoly has a strangle hold on large segments of the computing industry. In these segments it is purposefully and illegally difficult to choose. However, in segments of the industry where Microsoft does not have a strong showing, Free GPL and Open Source offerings compete side by side with commercial vendors.
For YOU or some government official to decide that open source is better than other options is arrogant, and it's decisions like that which have caused our government to make "investments" on inferior alternatives throughout modern (read: since the income tax) history.
Well, ideologies aside, we as a society have ALWAYS invested in development of technology. Be it through weapons programs, weather forecasting, research grants for universities, and so on. This would be nothing more than a continuation of that strategy that has fueled the U.S. economy for so long.
Interestingly, it is when we have reduced these investments under the recent republican presidents, the economy takes a hit.
But that's COMMUNIST, big-government, tax-and-spend thinking! You are a pinko liberal!
correction, PROUD LIBERAL!
I ain't no "progressive" I'm a liberal. I would rather be a "tax and spend" liberal, than a "spend into debt" neo-con.
The open source movement is exactly what should be funded. Create a grant application program for open source projects.
I had an argument with a microsoftie a while ago, who was convinced that open source was destroying the software industry. I countered that all it was doing was creating a rich infrastructure on top of which other industry could be built.
The open source infrastructure is a national (international) treasure that, by making infrastructure basically free, like roads and bridges, makes other projects that would have been too big and expensive to develop from scratch, almost trivial to develop.
DOJ should intervene on the side of customers.
Let me correct that statement:
DOJ should intervene on the side of citizens.
That and the Selective War on Harmless Drug Users.
Cause and effect.
Its a persistent, transactional data store.
Persistent in what way?
It achieves persistence by using a cluster of nodes storing data in memory and being tolerant of nodes dropping out, rather than storing on disk. This is, admittedly, not the usual means in which databases achieve persistent data storage, but so what? It provides data storage and retrieval and is transactional and persistent. A database is defined by function, not by how the function is acheived. It is, pretty clearly, a database, albeit a non-relational one.
Arguments just to win arguments are useless. It is not a database. It may have some redundancy, but it does not have persistence.
This sort of thing happens all the time. I did a technology contract for "Servo-lift Eastern" who is a big vendor for the prison system.
Privately run prisons are a big business in the U.S.A. Why do you think we imprison more of our population than any other western country? Because the good 'ol boys make money in jailing poor people who can't defend themselves.
Hey, I understand politics. I don't expect human beings to be pillars of integrity, everyone is corrupt on some level. However, if you are willing to knowingly cause material harm to another human being for money, you need to die.
What kind of phone book? A white pages? I can't search for plumbers, drug dealers or assassins in a phone book
Yellow Pages:
Plumbers: Under Plumbers
Drug Dealers: See physicians
Assassins: See police.
In what way is Scalaris" anything like a database? It doesn't even store data on disk.
All I can think of is DRAM. You need to keep refreshing the memory by re-addressing it and recharging the cells. By moving the eye, you are just refreshing the pixels.
I am also reminded by the probably nonsensical warning to "hold still" because the T-REX's vision was based on movement. It seems our vision is also based on movement, except we supply the movement with our eyes.
AFAIK they are forced to offer tiered pricing to OEMs.
Yes, but you should look into vendor bonuses. It is a shell game, "good" vendors get bonuses which actually reduce the cost of Windows.
I mean, you're not just outright lying, your comments are just plain slanderous.
Technically speaking, if I were intentionally writing something false, it would be libel.
You sound very wedded to relational database technology, to the point where you are impugning other technologies based on preconceptions and strawmen.
I've been in the industry for over 25 years, I've learned a thing or two about databases both theoretically and practically. I made no strawmen and I evaluate everything with an open mind. An "open mind" does not need to be an empty one.
It isn't very hard to understand that BerkeleyDB is a simple persistent hashtable (with some support for automatically updating indexes with newly hashed values).
There is no lack of understanding.
I am not a database expert at all but I can't imagine how you could store name/value pairs with less overhead.
Well, as a database expert, I assure you that "overhead" in databases is there for a reason. A "simple" system does not have the ability or the functionality to manage scalability correctly. Any dumb system can have one process and store and retrieve and not have an issue.
A more complex system embodies a lot of knowledge about data and access. Techniques like ordered writes, MVCC, lazy writes, and others are far more complex and provide much higher throughput than a simpler system.
But to argue that within this limited domain, something as straightforward as BerkeleyDB wouldn't be the most efficient solution, must come simply from an unwillingness to divorce yourself from relational database technology.
You are assuming because I disagree with you, that I am inflexible or something. That's your mistake.
Now, if you have more than one process accessing your BerkeleyDB database, say a web site, I'll bet you PostgreSQL will outperform BerkeleyDB under load with 50 processes. The performance curve of berkeleyDB under load is bad. PostgreSQL, on the other hand, stays fairly flat.
And with regards to locks, you do realize that BerkeleyDB is developed by a professional software company that seems to know pretty well what they are doing?
This is not argument. It has no place in this discussion.
Do you really think that with data access mechanisms as simple as a persisted hashtable, they can't implement very efficient locking?
There is no such thing as efficient locking.
Do you really think that in this very simple type of database, it's not possible to achieve fast operation by 50 or more concurrent readers/writers?
I have written many high speed system with a high degree of concurrency, and it is possible to get "high performance," but locking is ALWAYS a performance hit. ALWAYS. Think of it this way, all locking mechanisms rely on the OS process scheduling to synchronize processes to a single resource.
As a final point, I am pretty sure that MySQL was originally developed as a layer on top of BerkeleyDB. People were in love with MySQL because it was so fast. And it was a wrapper around BerkeleyDB. Doesn't that indicate that BerkeleyDB itself used without a wrapping layer might even be faster? Once again note, that this is only for some kinds of applications. I am not claiming that every huge database application could use BerkeleyDB sanely.
No.
There's a very simple reason for this.
(I used to work for Gateway, and yes, I was in on the meetings).
Microsoft OEM marketers contact big-name computer manufacturer. They offer huge discount on their entire line of Micro$oft products. The catch is, they *have* to buy one license of their current O.S. for every computer sold, period. If they don't, then the deal is off, and they get to pay full retail, or whatever they can wrangle from an intermediate reseller, but nowhere near the price originally offered by Microsoft.
Intel did the same thing for their processors, but only if you don't offer to sell AMD.
Its all been well documented, but 8 years ago, G.W.Bush and his gang of thieves stopped the Justice department from enacting a remedy.