Diamond won, not because mp3s are not digital recordings, but because RIO is not a digital recorder. It's a player. The law says nothing about players; just about recorders.
Mind you, I think that they would have won anyway, but this made it a slam-dunk.
I work in the 3D CG business, doing visual effects as opposed to animation.
In 20 years of working with hundreds of 3D animators I've found that an absurd percentage of the best ones started out as 2D animators. I believe that nothing can teach motion, layout, action, and representation of emotion like painstaking 2D work -- when you draw every frame, or review every frame of other people's work you really see it in a way that you just can't see in CG.
It will be interesting to see where we get our 3D animators twenty years from now if 2D is really dead. I guess Japan is the most likely place.
My favorite example of the loss of privacy is domainia.com
This site lists the last sale price of a house, or every house along a street. As near as I can tell, it's accurate, complete, and up to date. I think that the data is from public records of leins against property.
John Brunner's incomparable The Shockwave Rider described a world where almost all information was free. Anybody could find anybody's history of interaction with the ubiquitous 'net -- including all purchases. Anonymity and privacy were so long forgotten that they weren't even mentioned in the book.
Shockwave was a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock. The protagonist is able to surf the tsunami of change that was rearranging the landscape of the world...any hacker that hasn't read it should run to their favorite used-book store to get a copy.
I did the shot called out in Newsweek, of Wolverine spreading his claws around the neck of the guy in the bar. It was one of the weirder moments of my life to see criticism of my work in the pages of something as mass-market as Newsweek.
It is interesting that this movie has truly been influenced by the devoted (not to say rabid, no, I'd never say that!) X-Men fans...the story had to be good, the characters had to be good, but they also had to be true to what the fans expected. I think Singer did a great job balancing those pressures.
My favorite line was 'Participation is voluntary'.
Now, what possessed them to write that? What could they have been thinking? That people might read this flyer and think that perhaps participation wasn't voluntary? That by reading the flyer you were automatically a member of the group?
Could they have thought that there is any possible way that they could make participation non-voluntary?
Little sentences like 'Participitation is voluntary' show how much Microsoft operates in a different world than everybody else. Which is the 'real world' is an exercise for the reader.
I'm in the movie business, and I know that the music business is just like the movie business, but a few years ahead of us.
It's interesting that the porno industry apparently works very much like the independent music business described above. Female porn stars use 'movies' to promote their own 'tours' to clubs, where the make the majority of their money. Perhaps all movies will be that way one of these days.
thad
Already happened in Hong Kong, a disaster preview
on
Movies Online?
·
· Score: 2
Ten years ago, Hong Kong had a thriving movie making industry. Hundreds of movies being made a year, with reasonable budgets and a strong fan base.
About five years ago, though, VCD (video-CD, a fairly poor technology, but cheap) absolutely destroyed the industry. You could get a VCD of a movie the day it appeard in theaters for a couple of bucks, instead of paying the 6 bucks to get into the theater.
Film production budgets plummeted to about ten percent of the previous value; because there was no profit to be made on more expensive films. Good actors and directors came to America, where this revolution hasn't happened. Yet.
There are plenty of people building rockets that go pretty high these days (say, 10-80 thousand feet). He could learn something from attending their launches at Black Rock desert.
In particular, he needs to learn about guidance. His plan (if reported accurately, which is unlikely at best) will fail miserably -- once he is flying gravity will have no influence whatsoever on his orientation. A V2 (similar in scope to what he is working on) had both huge fins and thrust vectoring vanes to keep it stable. He desparately needs some kind of active guidance or he's going to end up a smoking hole in the ground.
Of course, if he's an engineer he probably knows this and the article was reported poorly.
I wonder if the book teaches the correct pronounciation of C++; it's not "see plus plus" but "see double-cross" [original, I believe, by Rob Pike) thad
You can buy really cheap, accurate, 2D, solid state, low power accelerometers from Analog Devices. You could build a wonderful mouse from these, that would respond to motion but would have no holes, wheels, balls, or windows to get dirty.
The Register goes on, in this article to quote from the Intel/Rambus contract.
Intel will use its continuing best efforts in marketing, public relations, and engineering to make the Rambus-D DRAM the primary DRAM for PC main memory applications through December 31, 2002; and (b)Intel will communicate to the top (10) DRAM manufacturers, Intel's intention to support the Rambus-D Interface Technology in its integrated circuits for low end workstation, performance desktop, and basic PC platforms.
Intel may have sold its soul to the devil in this case, if Rambus turns out the be the flop that it apparently is. Over the next two years, it appears that Intel has little choice but to flog this steaming pile of technology. It's really too bad, AMD needs the competition.
The most important two things that we get from our Linux Alpha box are:
1. It keeps you honest. Alpha Linux by default core-dumps on divide-by-zero error, where Intel Linux and SGI Irix silently return infinity. Also, Alpha seems much more likely to dump core on memory access error. Running the heterogenous environment that we do helps us find those errors more quickly. All of you that write perfect code the first time need not consider this reason.
2. Alpha is the first of the 64 bit systems. When trying out new ideas for animation tools (which is what we build at my company) it is useful to try them on the 64-bit machine, to see what performance gains there are due to the 64 bit-ness. All of our workstations will be 64-bit machines someday; it's useful to have a prototype today.
One interesting note is that (at least with gcc) a 'long' on an Alpha is 64 bits; while an 'int' is still 32 bits. This revealed not a few bugs (or, perhaps, future anachronisms) in our code.
Actually, I think that this is the big deal. Music is not a marginal medium, it is a far bigger medium than movies or TV; if you look at box-office sales.
Don't think of music as a test-case for the bigger battles of the future. It is the big battle.
I agree with the other people that posted, that Napster users just got a cheap reality-check. On the other hand, I can understand the Katz' frustration on this issue.
The big problem is that the laws are not enforced. Property laws work the same way. If I build a storage shed that sticks over into my neighbor's land, and he doesn't complain for 10 years until he tries to sell the house; then I can legitimately and legally claim that part of his land. I forget what the name of this custom is; but it is well established.
Similarly with speeding. If the California Highway Patrol started stopping everybody who exceeded the speed limit; people would be legitmately outraged -- because the de-facto law is that only egregious speeders get stopped. The real laws are the de-facto ones; the ones enforced as opposed to those on the books.
So, Katz is outraged because laws that haven't been enforced might possibly be enforced in the future. Certainly, if the status quo persists for the next five years then it's all over -- copyright will be dead. The next year or two will determine the law.
I agree that on a level playing field, Microsoft would not have a chance with this defense. If they were suing IBM, say, Big Blue's lawyers would be able to make your argument.
But, when it comes to attacking Open Source projects, the field is not level. Not only do the Open Source projects have little money to hire lawyers, they are often not even in the same country as Microsoft. We've seen that it's quite easy for rich companies to get restraining orders against groups or individuals like this.
So -- it works as a threat; and that's all it has to be. That last line, that by reading this you agree to the terms of the license, is laughable legally -- but they are the ones laughing all the way to the bank.
I don't blame you if you missed it during the DeCSS imbroglio, but this is so clear that it is unmistakable.
A way to get *permanent* protection over an idea or an implementation is to cause the secret to be leaked illegally.
Then, you sue everybody who implements the idea, at any time in the future, saying that they were inspired, or at least tainted, by the illegal release of the information. Trade secret laws do not allow the use of a secret if 'sufficient protections are taken'.
Previously, I had thought that a company would need a shill to do the publication of the secret; which is of course dangerous if the shill squeals. Microsoft has shown their ability to innovate here; publishing it as a secret sure to be 'improperly' released is a much better scheme.
Scramjets are not purely theoretical; or at least the theory will be tested quite soon; on the Hyper-X. This is a relatively small test vehicle, to be boosted by a Pegasus rocket to Mach 7 to Mach 10 (depending on the test) and then fly for a little while; before plunging into the ocean.
My favorite factoid about Hyper-X is that the front half of the plane, more or less, is solid tungsten -- one of the densest materials there is; significantly denser than lead or even gold. Tungsten is very resistant to heat; and the weight serves as ballast to keep the pointy end forward -- but as I build model planes out of balsa wood using something 100 times as dense tickles my funny bone.
Friedo says: >People who have been using Word will still buy Word, people who have been >using IE will still use IE. Further, it is still to each Baby Bill's advantage > to simply license software to one another; nothing has changed.
I think that it would be relatively simple to proscribe the new companies from licensing software to one another; that would have to part of any remedy.
And as for people still buying Word, what's the problem with that? If it has to compete on its own, and succeeds, then that is the way it OK. Monopolies are fine if they are not exploited. I still have a problem with IE; that even if it could compete on it's own today it would not have succeeded except for the previous exploitation of the Windows monopoly.
But -- I hope that Microsoft is broken up, to as fine a pieces as possible, and then I hope that those pieces all succeed without the legacy of being tied to the albatross of the operating system.
To me, the biggest concern here is about the permanent record that these anonymous reports will create. Perhaps it is the conspiracy theorist in me, but I believe that Pinkerton (and their partners-in-slime, Wackenhut) would like nothing better than to compile dossiers on everybody; and these hotlines are just one of many funnels leading into this database.
I know that no laws will prevent this; and that Pinkerton will find other avenues to get similar information -- but I feel that reminding people that this is going on can never hurt.
thad
Re:Do we understand the implications?
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 2
I have never used IE, so I can't say whether it's better or worse that Netscape.
Still, even if it is better, it didn't get to be better fairly. Microsoft poured billions of dollars of their stockholder's money into IE, then gave it away for free; while at the same time well-nigh forcing people to install it at the expense of Netscape.
That is what the Judge is saying is illegal, and he is right.
I thought it was an interesting article. It's not too surprising, really, to see the tradeoffs that were made. Overall, it seems to me that by throwing lots of functional units in the box, with a minimum of glue, you can get a lot of performance at a slow clock rate. Unfortunately, it is the lack of glue that is going to make this a wretched beast to program (the difficulty of programming has been confirmed by my friends in the game development community.)
A general-purpose CPU like a PIII or an Athlon is designed to get reasonable performance executing a tremendous variety of programs; where the PSII/EmotionEngine is going to have to be painstakingly coded to get good performance.
I don't think I'd want to run Linux on the box, as the CPU is really pretty slow. By the time the PSII comes out, the *slowest* chips available from AMD and Intel will probably be on the order of 600 Mhz. As a web-browsing machine, it would be fine; but you don't need the Linux infrastructure for that.
From what I read here, a good PC and graphics board, christmas time this year, should still blow the PSII out of the water -- at many times the price, of course. 1.5 GHz/KNI (or 3DNow) will beat.25GHz/10 MACs.
Actually, the point here is that you could write beautiful, easy to understand, logical code; and not have to worry so much about optimization. When it gets to the point that I have to go an optimize a program to a fare-thee-well, it gets ugly and unreadable. Maybe with this on-the-fly technology, the optimizations will happen automatically and the code can stay pretty.
We'll see. I think that PI is trying to prevent a split in XFree86 that will permanently cripple Linux as a 3D workstation. Of course Frank LaMonica is being self-serving...the whole charter of Precision Insight was to unify OpenGL for Linux. nVidia will destroy that, and destroy his company's reason for being.
The good people at Precision Insight thought long and hard when they designed the DRI. It is as fast as possible, given the restrictions of security and the desire to do graphics-in-a-window. The amount of overhead is remarkably small.
Because it is an public, open-source system, generic problems across all graphics cards can be fixed. The common problems probably outweigh the specific problems by a huge margin.
If you doubt this, download the papers from www.precisioninsight.com, and skim them (there are too many too read, but an overview will give you the idea). They have solved problems with robust, elegant solutions, whose existence I would never have dreamed of.
Frank LaMonica is good to point out nVidia's policy at this time -- as nVidia can choose the correct path now with minimal loss-of-face. I have no problem if they want to release closed-source drivers, but if they think that they can release and maintain a closed-source equivalent of DRI and all the parts of XFree86 that are dependent on the DRI, they are almost certainly wrong. Precision Insight has the very best people in the world working on it's own interface, and years of time invested, and they are only just now able to release something that begins to work. Precision Insight can, and has, taken advantage of the goodwill of the rest of the open-source community -- amplifying their efforts many times. nVidia, if they turn their back on the DRI, will not be a factor on Linux.
Perhaps they don't care. Truly, this wouldn't bother me very much at all except that nVidia is wedded to SGI; and will pervert SGI's ability to work with Linux; and that saddens me greatly.
First, it's interesting that none of the pre-announcment announcements said anything about graphics -- which is what makes all the difference in a console. All the rumors have had it that nVidia was going to be making the chips.
But, my real question is, "Why make this box?" It appears that it will be a pretty damn standard Wintel box. It is hard to imagine that it wouldn't be trivial to port games back and forth between the console and the PC platform.
The problem with this, from the X-Box manufacturer's point of view, is that it destroys the typical game profit center -- that is, that all consoles are sold at breakeven at best; if not at a significant loss. The money is made back in licensing of the games. But the PC game platform has no licensing cost whatsoever!
So -- it will have to be something like this -- to get the 'Plays in X-Box' cutesy-poo logo on your game, you'll have to pay a royalty to MS -- and MS would require that even games that are for PCs would have to have the royalty paid (or not undersold, anyway) Otherwise, would people really pay the extra 10 bucks to get the game for their console that they could otherwise get for their PC?
Perhaps, you say, the X-Box will has some dramatically great API for games that is not available on Windows, and legally protected from reverse engineering somehow. Would Microsoft really do this, really cut off their nose to spite their face? Microsoft dumped a lot of money into something called 'Talisman' a few years back; it was meant to be a revolutionary game enabling technology. Basically, instead of rerendering 3D geometry every frame, it was rendered every 10th frame (say) and then the various elements were distorted into position in subsequent frames. Nothing has been heard of Talisman in a year or so, though; even though MS made a huge hoopla at Siggraph about it. Still, it was a stupid idea then, and even more stupid today.
I really don't see how they are going to get the licensing money that is critical to the game market.
The obvious answer, of course, is that they are not in it for the money, at least, not in it for the gaming money. They are in it to establish a beachhead in the living room; a box with a highspeed line connecting your eyeballs directly back to MS. The myriad ways of milking that connection for money are left to the reader's imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, I think that they would have won anyway, but this made it a slam-dunk.
thad
In 20 years of working with hundreds of 3D animators I've found that an absurd percentage of the best ones started out as 2D animators. I believe that nothing can teach motion, layout, action, and representation of emotion like painstaking 2D work -- when you draw every frame, or review every frame of other people's work you really see it in a way that you just can't see in CG.
It will be interesting to see where we get our 3D animators twenty years from now if 2D is really dead. I guess Japan is the most likely place.
thad
This site lists the last sale price of a house, or every house along a street. As near as I can tell, it's accurate, complete, and up to date. I think that the data is from public records of leins against property.
John Brunner's incomparable The Shockwave Rider described a world where almost all information was free. Anybody could find anybody's history of interaction with the ubiquitous 'net -- including all purchases. Anonymity and privacy were so long forgotten that they weren't even mentioned in the book.
Shockwave was a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock. The protagonist is able to surf the tsunami of change that was rearranging the landscape of the world...any hacker that hasn't read it should run to their favorite used-book store to get a copy.
thad
It is interesting that this movie has truly been influenced by the devoted (not to say rabid, no, I'd never say that!) X-Men fans...the story had to be good, the characters had to be good, but they also had to be true to what the fans expected. I think Singer did a great job balancing those pressures.
thad
Now, what possessed them to write that? What could they have been thinking? That people might read this flyer and think that perhaps participation wasn't voluntary? That by reading the flyer you were automatically a member of the group?
Could they have thought that there is any possible way that they could make participation non-voluntary?
Little sentences like 'Participitation is voluntary' show how much Microsoft operates in a different world than everybody else. Which is the 'real world' is an exercise for the reader.
thad
It's interesting that the porno industry apparently works very much like the independent music business described above. Female porn stars use 'movies' to promote their own 'tours' to clubs, where the make the majority of their money. Perhaps all movies will be that way one of these days.
thad
About five years ago, though, VCD (video-CD, a fairly poor technology, but cheap) absolutely destroyed the industry. You could get a VCD of a movie the day it appeard in theaters for a couple of bucks, instead of paying the 6 bucks to get into the theater.
Film production budgets plummeted to about ten percent of the previous value; because there was no profit to be made on more expensive films. Good actors and directors came to America, where this revolution hasn't happened. Yet.
thad
In particular, he needs to learn about guidance. His plan (if reported accurately, which is unlikely at best) will fail miserably -- once he is flying gravity will have no influence whatsoever on his orientation. A V2 (similar in scope to what he is working on) had both huge fins and thrust vectoring vanes to keep it stable. He desparately needs some kind of active guidance or he's going to end up a smoking hole in the ground.
Of course, if he's an engineer he probably knows this and the article was reported poorly.
thad
I wonder if the book teaches the correct pronounciation of C++; it's not "see plus plus" but "see double-cross" [original, I believe, by Rob Pike) thad
I'll just have to build one myself, I suppose.
thad
Intel will use its continuing best efforts in marketing, public relations, and engineering to make the Rambus-D DRAM the primary DRAM for PC main memory applications through December 31, 2002; and (b)Intel will communicate to the top (10) DRAM manufacturers, Intel's intention to support the Rambus-D Interface Technology in its integrated circuits for low end workstation, performance desktop, and basic PC platforms.
Intel may have sold its soul to the devil in this case, if Rambus turns out the be the flop that it apparently is. Over the next two years, it appears that Intel has little choice but to flog this steaming pile of technology. It's really too bad, AMD needs the competition.
thad
1. It keeps you honest. Alpha Linux by default core-dumps on divide-by-zero error, where Intel Linux and SGI Irix silently return infinity. Also, Alpha seems much more likely to dump core on memory access error. Running the heterogenous environment that we do helps us find those errors more quickly. All of you that write perfect code the first time need not consider this reason.
2. Alpha is the first of the 64 bit systems. When trying out new ideas for animation tools (which is what we build at my company) it is useful to try them on the 64-bit machine, to see what performance gains there are due to the 64 bit-ness. All of our workstations will be 64-bit machines someday; it's useful to have a prototype today.
One interesting note is that (at least with gcc) a 'long' on an Alpha is 64 bits; while an 'int' is still 32 bits. This revealed not a few bugs (or, perhaps, future anachronisms) in our code.
So, long live heterogenaity!
thad
Don't think of music as a test-case for the bigger battles of the future. It is the big battle.
I agree with the other people that posted, that Napster users just got a cheap reality-check. On the other hand, I can understand the Katz' frustration on this issue.
The big problem is that the laws are not enforced. Property laws work the same way. If I build a storage shed that sticks over into my neighbor's land, and he doesn't complain for 10 years until he tries to sell the house; then I can legitimately and legally claim that part of his land. I forget what the name of this custom is; but it is well established.
Similarly with speeding. If the California Highway Patrol started stopping everybody who exceeded the speed limit; people would be legitmately outraged -- because the de-facto law is that only egregious speeders get stopped. The real laws are the de-facto ones; the ones enforced as opposed to those on the books.
So, Katz is outraged because laws that haven't been enforced might possibly be enforced in the future. Certainly, if the status quo persists for the next five years then it's all over -- copyright will be dead. The next year or two will determine the law.
thad
But, when it comes to attacking Open Source projects, the field is not level. Not only do the Open Source projects have little money to hire lawyers, they are often not even in the same country as Microsoft. We've seen that it's quite easy for rich companies to get restraining orders against groups or individuals like this.
So -- it works as a threat; and that's all it has to be. That last line, that by reading this you agree to the terms of the license, is laughable legally -- but they are the ones laughing all the way to the bank.
thad
A way to get *permanent* protection over an idea or an implementation is to cause the secret to be leaked illegally.
Then, you sue everybody who implements the idea, at any time in the future, saying that they were inspired, or at least tainted, by the illegal release of the information. Trade secret laws do not allow the use of a secret if 'sufficient protections are taken'.
Previously, I had thought that a company would need a shill to do the publication of the secret; which is of course dangerous if the shill squeals. Microsoft has shown their ability to innovate here; publishing it as a secret sure to be 'improperly' released is a much better scheme.
thad
You can see pictures of the plane at this page.
My favorite factoid about Hyper-X is that the front half of the plane, more or less, is solid tungsten -- one of the densest materials there is; significantly denser than lead or even gold. Tungsten is very resistant to heat; and the weight serves as ballast to keep the pointy end forward -- but as I build model planes out of balsa wood using something 100 times as dense tickles my funny bone.
thad
>using IE will still use IE. Further, it is still to each Baby Bill's advantage
> to simply license software to one another; nothing has changed.
I think that it would be relatively simple to proscribe the new companies from licensing software to one another; that would have to part of any remedy.
And as for people still buying Word, what's the problem with that? If it has to compete on its own, and succeeds, then that is the way it OK. Monopolies are fine if they are not exploited. I still have a problem with IE; that even if it could compete on it's own today it would not have succeeded except for the previous exploitation of the Windows monopoly.
But -- I hope that Microsoft is broken up, to as fine a pieces as possible, and then I hope that those pieces all succeed without the legacy of being tied to the albatross of the operating system.
thad
I know that no laws will prevent this; and that Pinkerton will find other avenues to get similar information -- but I feel that reminding people that this is going on can never hurt.
thad
Still, even if it is better, it didn't get to be better fairly. Microsoft poured billions of dollars of their stockholder's money into IE, then gave it away for free; while at the same time well-nigh forcing people to install it at the expense of Netscape.
That is what the Judge is saying is illegal, and he is right.
thad
A general-purpose CPU like a PIII or an Athlon is designed to get reasonable performance executing a tremendous variety of programs; where the PSII/EmotionEngine is going to have to be painstakingly coded to get good performance.
I don't think I'd want to run Linux on the box, as the CPU is really pretty slow. By the time the PSII comes out, the *slowest* chips available from AMD and Intel will probably be on the order of 600 Mhz. As a web-browsing machine, it would be fine; but you don't need the Linux infrastructure for that.
From what I read here, a good PC and graphics board, christmas time this year, should still blow the PSII out of the water -- at many times the price, of course. 1.5 GHz/KNI (or 3DNow) will beat .25GHz/10 MACs.
thad
thad
thad
Because it is an public, open-source system, generic problems across all graphics cards can be fixed. The common problems probably outweigh the specific problems by a huge margin.
If you doubt this, download the papers from www.precisioninsight.com, and skim them (there are too many too read, but an overview will give you the idea). They have solved problems with robust, elegant solutions, whose existence I would never have dreamed of.
Frank LaMonica is good to point out nVidia's policy at this time -- as nVidia can choose the correct path now with minimal loss-of-face. I have no problem if they want to release closed-source drivers, but if they think that they can release and maintain a closed-source equivalent of DRI and all the parts of XFree86 that are dependent on the DRI, they are almost certainly wrong. Precision Insight has the very best people in the world working on it's own interface, and years of time invested, and they are only just now able to release something that begins to work. Precision Insight can, and has, taken advantage of the goodwill of the rest of the open-source community -- amplifying their efforts many times. nVidia, if they turn their back on the DRI, will not be a factor on Linux.
Perhaps they don't care. Truly, this wouldn't bother me very much at all except that nVidia is wedded to SGI; and will pervert SGI's ability to work with Linux; and that saddens me greatly.
thad
But, my real question is, "Why make this box?" It appears that it will be a pretty damn standard Wintel box. It is hard to imagine that it wouldn't be trivial to port games back and forth between the console and the PC platform.
The problem with this, from the X-Box manufacturer's point of view, is that it destroys the typical game profit center -- that is, that all consoles are sold at breakeven at best; if not at a significant loss. The money is made back in licensing of the games. But the PC game platform has no licensing cost whatsoever!
So -- it will have to be something like this -- to get the 'Plays in X-Box' cutesy-poo logo on your game, you'll have to pay a royalty to MS -- and MS would require that even games that are for PCs would have to have the royalty paid (or not undersold, anyway) Otherwise, would people really pay the extra 10 bucks to get the game for their console that they could otherwise get for their PC?
Perhaps, you say, the X-Box will has some dramatically great API for games that is not available on Windows, and legally protected from reverse engineering somehow. Would Microsoft really do this, really cut off their nose to spite their face? Microsoft dumped a lot of money into something called 'Talisman' a few years back; it was meant to be a revolutionary game enabling technology. Basically, instead of rerendering 3D geometry every frame, it was rendered every 10th frame (say) and then the various elements were distorted into position in subsequent frames. Nothing has been heard of Talisman in a year or so, though; even though MS made a huge hoopla at Siggraph about it. Still, it was a stupid idea then, and even more stupid today.
I really don't see how they are going to get the licensing money that is critical to the game market.
The obvious answer, of course, is that they are not in it for the money, at least, not in it for the gaming money. They are in it to establish a beachhead in the living room; a box with a highspeed line connecting your eyeballs directly back to MS. The myriad ways of milking that connection for money are left to the reader's imagination.
thad
At least we at Hammerhead are using Linux to make X-Men :)