The page you link to is graphs of PPC binaries being either run on a PPC machine or an Intel one(under Rosetta). Shockingly enough, PPC binaries ran rather faster on PPC. The previous page, where they benchmarked universal binaries, shows the C2D(a now not-very-exciting 1.8GHz unit) crushing the single core 1.8GHz G5 like a bug, and pulling approximate parity with a dual 2.5GHz PPC powermac, which was a firebreathing wind-tunnel of a machine.
Back when Intel was busy pretending that the P4 could actually cut it as a laptop processor, the G4 based PPC systems were pretty cool. Reasonable punch, battery life that didn't suck. The G5s, though, where the end of the line for a reason. Not especially fast, unless you were leaning really hard on Altivec, and continually hobbled by IBM's inability to hit the clock speeds they wanted at a power envelope that wasn't nutty.
In terms of arguments founded upon rights, the two cases could hardly be more different(which is why homosexuals are doing better these days, while pedophiles are, if anything, at lower stock than ever(pedophiles have not, in recent history, ever enjoyed approval; but society's willingness to care about the rights of some kid, rather than respect the privilege of an adult, especially a socially powerful one, as increased markedly); but in terms of emotional appeals, the rhetoric surrounding homosexuals and the rhetoric surrounding pedophiles has always been strikingly similar(in fact, to this day, some people make a habit of casually equating the two, when it suits them, ie. when the catholic church responded to their pedophilia problem by doubling down on keeping homosexuals out of seminaries...)
As best research has been able to determine, pedophila(in the sense of sexual interest in prepubescent individuals by postpubescent ones, particularly those with a significant age delta) behaves pretty much the same as any other sexual orientation. It is substantially more problematic than most; because virtually all outlets for its satisfaction involve either raping children or employing material with a very problematic production history; but structurally it works about the same.
Given the pretty severe legal risks that pedophiles run(not only can they go to jail, they won't exactly receive a warm welcome on the inside, and if they survive, they will face extremely severe residency and employment restrictions post release), there is strong reason to suspect that the legal options don't do it for them.
This probably does not apply to those people who are commonly called "pedophiles"; but who are actually interested in post-pubescent individuals. This population includes people who are arguably victims of witch hunts(your 18-19/16-17 no evidence of any coercion types); and also includes much nastier opportunists(teens tend to be comparatively naive, economically and socially powerless, and otherwise very convenient victims) who are either hetero or homosexual; but who have a taste for easy targets. In terms of strictly sexual taste, they are much closer to the norm, post-pubescent but youthful partners being desirable almost across the board; but they presumably have other psychological abnormalities that make them target children rather than associate with peers. I suspect(admittedly without statistical evidence) that this class is much less likely to be caught in internet porn sweeps(since, visually, it isn't going to be hard to find perfectly legal 18 year olds who function for the fantasy purposes of somebody who prefers a couple of years younger, and possessing illegal porn where legal porn would do is unbelievably idiotic); but probably a bit more likely to be caught in real-world law-enforcement situations.
This is about sex. People's IQ points just drain away in proximity to that subject. Your garden-variety heterosexual is bad enough, they are liable to do transparently stupid things even though their sexual partners of choice are widely available and often legal. If somebody's sexual tastes can only be satisfied illegally, the odds are quite good that they will, eventually, get themselves caught trying to satisfy them.
Based on the particular phrasing in TFS, it may not have been a computer(except in some embedded sense) at all.
"'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.'"
Everybody uses computers these days, and knows that they "crash"(they may not be able to distinguish between hangs and crashes; but the word is in common consciousness). "Turn blue", though, sounds much more like what most analog video hardware does when it isn't receiving an input...
Obviously, in any modern system of any complexity, there is a computer or more in the loop somewhere; but "You'd have no data coming through" and "it would just turn blue" sounds like a description of a video monitor suddenly losing its video source(presumably from a robotic camera somewhere, possibly with a bunch of vital stats being overlaid on it by an embedded video processor device).
Only a caricature of an utter n00b would describe a computer blue-screening in those terms.
Or, with the relatively low cost of CnC time these days, and the wide availability of barcodes with impressive robustness against partial defacement/destruction, just combine the old and the new: Encode your data in 2D barcode form, with a chosen level of redundancy, and have it machined into some suitably durable material...
As it happens, there is (at least) one ARM processor in many xbox 360 systems:
The Microsoft xbox360 wifi adapter is based on the Marvell Libertas 8388, which has an embedded ARM946 onboard. (In a curious twist, the OLPC XO-1 uses the same chipset, in order to have a core to handle mesh networking duties when the main CPU is off.)
It is something of a story, though: "Many semiconductor or IC design firms hold ARM licenses". Microsoft is, historically, neither of those things and; because of the number of existing ARM licensees, they can already get virtually any ARM based SoC configuration that you could reasonably desire, at highly competitive prices, off the shelf, without any sort of license.
Microsoft using ARM cores would be a total non-story. I'm pretty sure that they already do, in a number of capacities. Becoming an ARM licensee, though, means that you have a plan that goes well beyond shoving some off-the-shelf chips into your product. Since MS doesn't seem like a logical entrant into the chip fab market, this development means that they have some kind of design demand up their sleeve that the market for commodity SoCs hasn't delivered....
I wonder what MS has in mind. You don't have to be an ARM licensee to use ARM chips in your designs. For large enough orders, there are already a number of outfits that will implement customized ARM SoCs with your choice of functional blocks, and either fab them or farm the design out to somebody else, on a variety of processes. For smaller orders, there are even more outfits who have ARM SoCs, in a variety of common configurations, in stock and ready to go. Lead times pretty much limited by Fedex for small orders, some weeks for big ones. Buying an actual license seems to indicate Serious Business of some sort.
Without any particular background in chip design, what does MS want to do that they couldn't do at off-the-shelf prices just by calling one of the existing ARM licensees and asking for a quote? For the sake of my faith in their executive team, they couldn't be doing this just because Apple is, could they?
What will it be? Massive arrays of power optimized ARMs supporting a CLR environment as the future of Windows Server technologies? Xbox720 is going to be ARM based with some sort of secret sauce?
Digital cameras have gotten better, over time, particularly if you are willing to compromise on resolution, and don't go for the cheap seats(a high-quality sensor dumping images into a huge RAM buffer will be worlds ahead of a crummy sensor struggling to gather enough light, and dumping directly to a cheap SD card); but a good mechanical transport can be pretty damn fast(just ask Hiram Maxim...)
10FPS is totally doable for a pro film camera with a motorized transport(where the DSLR will really shine, if equipped with enough RAM buffer and a fast storage card, though, is sustained shooting. 10FPS is cute; but it will empty a 36 or even a 48 shot roll in under 5 seconds. A digital could easily be shooting into a multi-thousand frame storage device...)
The kicker with analog storage, though, is that while a lot of it has good retention time without special storage(unless you get one of the chemically problematic ones, like early wood fiber papers, or certain types of movie film...); but getting great retention time can be quite tricky or even impossible, and getting perfect retention simply isn't happening.
Digital, on the other hand, tends to degrade good and fast if neglected(HDD probably won't spin up in 10 years, unless you are fairly lucky. CD/DVD blanks may well have re-blanked in similar time, Flash typically has a rated retention time of only about that long, archival tape should still be OK, but you probably didn't use that...); but it is relatively easy to achieve perfect retention for as long as you can attend to it. Just copy to new media, and store multiple copies.
I'd be pretty shocked at "much" higher. You aren't going to get your pick of first-run 22nm silicon in a $35 device; but you aren't going to get screaming clock speeds, either. I'd assume that you are looking at a more or less standard ARM SoC, probably one of the slightly older ones, manufactured on a slightly older process; but a small die running pretty slowly.
If you wanted the same performance; but were willing to pay $100, you could almost certainly get better efficiency; but this isn't one of those "using your old full-tower ATX Pentium as a router" 'older=inefficient' stories...
Anybody would be perfectly free to chase down a contributor and ask them to offer their contribution under different terms(or buy it from them and offer it themselves). The issue is just that there are a lot of contributors, including some who may be virtually impossible to get ahold of(releases under GPL2, dies, copyright is still owned by estate, who could sue your ass; but estate doesn't even know that the copyright exists, until mony-grubbing grandson graduates from law school and goes hunting, or any number of other horror stories, in addition to the entities that are perfectly easy to find; but just don't want to.)
For maximum practicality, you'd probably want to go after contributors(in order of importance) and ask for a change from "GPL2" to "GPL2 or later"(so that you don't break compatibility with "GPL2" components; but could, in the future, build a GPL3+ one). My understanding is that you would almost certainly encounter people very much not interested in doing that, so it would mean a lot of legwork, possibly a bit of cash, and some re-writing of obstinate portions; but there is no binding constraint.
It would be merely unfeasibly annoying, not impossible.
No. The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing.
Already, most distros maintain slightly forked versions of the kernel, to suit their needs(ie. enterprise-ish ones like RedHat might do more driver backports, MontaVista introduces BSPs for a variety of oddball boards, etc.) Because novelty costs money, people don't generally go further from mainline than they have a good justification for; but there are already dozens of quiet, not-very-adversarial, slight forks floating around, mostly in the hands of the various distros, and some of the embedded engineering houses.
Given that, in practice, virtually every distro maintains its own kernel, or set of patches, to suit their needs, I don't really see the big deal.
As long as Linus is performing his role of keeping the "official" repository basically the easiest and most standard starting point, all the peripheral kernel tweaks maintained by other entities will cluster more or less closely around it for cost reasons.
If he starts to slip, the center of gravity will shift toward one of the distro kernel repositories, or whatever other third party is doing the best job of filling the role, and the "official" repository will fade in prominence a bit.
Because of how kernel code is licensed, the "official" repository could either come back quickly(if Linus or his chosen successor get back on the ball, they could update from the prior leader, and start taking the comit lead again), or it could just fade away, mostly, and development could center around the RedHat tweak of the kernel, or the Debian one, or whatever...
More dangerous are situations(like the X11/X.org one) where there is a major licensing split that actually requires a decisive move one way or the other. Linux graphics are certainly not its strongest suit; but, had the defection to X.org not been so complete, things there could have been a lot uglier today.
My comparison was merely in the service of expressing surprise: Given that Microsoft has OSS competitors, most of which are extremely poor(other than a couple of well-sugar-daddied projects), I would have expected them to adopt some sort of vulnerability payment scheme as a PR move(Look at the benefits of quality proprietary software, where we care so much that we pay for bug reports, unlike those penniless hippies), in addition to the practical benefits of scoring a few more bug reports.
Based on the assumption(which I suspect is correct) that relatively small amounts of money can modify the behavior of security researchers not already in the pockets of the spammers or hostile entities, I would expect that Microsoft could convert a fairly small slice of its war chest into a substantial body of useful bug reports, as well as researchers who now have a much stronger incentive to comply with Microsoft's disclosure preferences, rather than just slamming it up on some public forum in order to gain street cred.
Apple has some security issues(more than they let on, if anything); but they don't have a security PR problem, so I would expect them to be much less motivated about trying to buff their image.
Plus, having all the usual cooling methods not work at all would be a bit of a downer(ok, yeah, normal servers do lose some tiny amount of energy by radiation, so I guess that counts).
No conductive cooling, you are floating in the depths of space, surrounded by nothing.
No convection. There isn't any atmosphere, nor any gravity(of use, obviously gravitation is universal)
Even in sealed capsules with humans, forced air just moves the problem around, there isn't nearly enough air to treat it as an arbitrarily deep heatsink.
The ability to make up for several hundreds or thousands of watts of heat dissipation just by pointing a few cheap fans at something is really a huge luxury...
On the other hand, given that the custom of deifying emperors had taken off by that point, trying to use religion to threaten an incipient god probably wouldn't have worked all that well either...
The video makes it impossible to tell if this guy is the real thing, or if The Thing has had a change to catch him in the cold isle and duplicate him.
I fear to imagine what it would be capable of once it uses the base's internet connection to discover tentacle-rape hentai...
The motivation is largely financial; but I think that there are a couple of psychologically salient wrinkles:
PR is financial in the sense that it is basically a flavor of advertising; but it is also the case that (some people) really do derive happiness from being seen as rockstars/badasses. As in the music/entertainment business, being seen as a rockstar is also a sound financial move; but it it something that certain sorts of people really do value for its own sake.
(Most) people respond differently to money depending on how they got it. People are much more likely to feel an obligation to spend 'routine' money(salary, etc.) in some boring and sensible way, and much more likely to feel a sense of psychological freedom when dealing with 'windfall' money(even if they actually worked hard enough for it that their hourly for that 'windfall' was worse than for their day job). Assuming that you are already comfortable enough, which is probably reasonable for a lot of the people with the software chops to do nontrivial bug-hunts, 3k isn't huge money; but 3k that feels like 'windfall' that you can spend on whatever amuses you will have psychological value higher than 3k out of your paycheck, which will automatically conjure up the list of boring household expenses that it needs to be applied to.
There are certainly downsides to the bounty approach(once you put money on the table, priority disputes turn from prima donna drama bullshit into actual-with-lawyers drama shit; not to mention the hideous quibbling about exactly what constitutes a "vulnerability", how severe it is, and so forth).
On the other hand, handing out hard cash, in addition to credit, can certainly be motivational(yes, the monetary rewards on the criminal side will always be better; but I'd wager that there are a lot of people who would take 'steady job with some research firm, at dev/analyst pay levels+occasional fun money bounties+credit, all legal' over 'substantial monetary rewards, clandestine work for unsavory and occasionally downright problematic characters, nontrivial legal exposure'), and one might expect that MS, with their formidable war chest and serious security issues(both actual and perception-based) would find a way of converting fairly modest amounts of money into additional security. Particularly since(with the exception of Google's pet projects, and maybe a handful of other high-profile OSS projects) they could easily afford to bid better for vulnerability reports that team FOSS could, which would seem like a natural marketing bullet point...
Not really. I don't actually derive pleasure from playing games, just from feeling my graphics card's suffering(like an audiophile; but for graphics), so Alien Swarm FPS was much more enjoyable...
Slashdot Mirror
The page you link to is graphs of PPC binaries being either run on a PPC machine or an Intel one(under Rosetta). Shockingly enough, PPC binaries ran rather faster on PPC. The previous page, where they benchmarked universal binaries, shows the C2D(a now not-very-exciting 1.8GHz unit) crushing the single core 1.8GHz G5 like a bug, and pulling approximate parity with a dual 2.5GHz PPC powermac, which was a firebreathing wind-tunnel of a machine.
Back when Intel was busy pretending that the P4 could actually cut it as a laptop processor, the G4 based PPC systems were pretty cool. Reasonable punch, battery life that didn't suck. The G5s, though, where the end of the line for a reason. Not especially fast, unless you were leaning really hard on Altivec, and continually hobbled by IBM's inability to hit the clock speeds they wanted at a power envelope that wasn't nutty.
HDD firmware, though, is typically stored in flash, and an HDD with blank or corrupt firmware is a paperweight...
In terms of arguments founded upon rights, the two cases could hardly be more different(which is why homosexuals are doing better these days, while pedophiles are, if anything, at lower stock than ever(pedophiles have not, in recent history, ever enjoyed approval; but society's willingness to care about the rights of some kid, rather than respect the privilege of an adult, especially a socially powerful one, as increased markedly); but in terms of emotional appeals, the rhetoric surrounding homosexuals and the rhetoric surrounding pedophiles has always been strikingly similar(in fact, to this day, some people make a habit of casually equating the two, when it suits them, ie. when the catholic church responded to their pedophilia problem by doubling down on keeping homosexuals out of seminaries...)
As best research has been able to determine, pedophila(in the sense of sexual interest in prepubescent individuals by postpubescent ones, particularly those with a significant age delta) behaves pretty much the same as any other sexual orientation. It is substantially more problematic than most; because virtually all outlets for its satisfaction involve either raping children or employing material with a very problematic production history; but structurally it works about the same.
Given the pretty severe legal risks that pedophiles run(not only can they go to jail, they won't exactly receive a warm welcome on the inside, and if they survive, they will face extremely severe residency and employment restrictions post release), there is strong reason to suspect that the legal options don't do it for them.
This probably does not apply to those people who are commonly called "pedophiles"; but who are actually interested in post-pubescent individuals. This population includes people who are arguably victims of witch hunts(your 18-19/16-17 no evidence of any coercion types); and also includes much nastier opportunists(teens tend to be comparatively naive, economically and socially powerless, and otherwise very convenient victims) who are either hetero or homosexual; but who have a taste for easy targets. In terms of strictly sexual taste, they are much closer to the norm, post-pubescent but youthful partners being desirable almost across the board; but they presumably have other psychological abnormalities that make them target children rather than associate with peers. I suspect(admittedly without statistical evidence) that this class is much less likely to be caught in internet porn sweeps(since, visually, it isn't going to be hard to find perfectly legal 18 year olds who function for the fantasy purposes of somebody who prefers a couple of years younger, and possessing illegal porn where legal porn would do is unbelievably idiotic); but probably a bit more likely to be caught in real-world law-enforcement situations.
This is about sex. People's IQ points just drain away in proximity to that subject. Your garden-variety heterosexual is bad enough, they are liable to do transparently stupid things even though their sexual partners of choice are widely available and often legal. If somebody's sexual tastes can only be satisfied illegally, the odds are quite good that they will, eventually, get themselves caught trying to satisfy them.
Based on the particular phrasing in TFS, it may not have been a computer(except in some embedded sense) at all.
"'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.'"
Everybody uses computers these days, and knows that they "crash"(they may not be able to distinguish between hangs and crashes; but the word is in common consciousness). "Turn blue", though, sounds much more like what most analog video hardware does when it isn't receiving an input...
Obviously, in any modern system of any complexity, there is a computer or more in the loop somewhere; but "You'd have no data coming through" and "it would just turn blue" sounds like a description of a video monitor suddenly losing its video source(presumably from a robotic camera somewhere, possibly with a bunch of vital stats being overlaid on it by an embedded video processor device).
Only a caricature of an utter n00b would describe a computer blue-screening in those terms.
Or, with the relatively low cost of CnC time these days, and the wide availability of barcodes with impressive robustness against partial defacement/destruction, just combine the old and the new: Encode your data in 2D barcode form, with a chosen level of redundancy, and have it machined into some suitably durable material...
As it happens, there is (at least) one ARM processor in many xbox 360 systems:
The Microsoft xbox360 wifi adapter is based on the Marvell Libertas 8388, which has an embedded ARM946 onboard. (In a curious twist, the OLPC XO-1 uses the same chipset, in order to have a core to handle mesh networking duties when the main CPU is off.)
It is something of a story, though: "Many semiconductor or IC design firms hold ARM licenses". Microsoft is, historically, neither of those things and; because of the number of existing ARM licensees, they can already get virtually any ARM based SoC configuration that you could reasonably desire, at highly competitive prices, off the shelf, without any sort of license.
Microsoft using ARM cores would be a total non-story. I'm pretty sure that they already do, in a number of capacities. Becoming an ARM licensee, though, means that you have a plan that goes well beyond shoving some off-the-shelf chips into your product. Since MS doesn't seem like a logical entrant into the chip fab market, this development means that they have some kind of design demand up their sleeve that the market for commodity SoCs hasn't delivered....
I wonder what MS has in mind. You don't have to be an ARM licensee to use ARM chips in your designs. For large enough orders, there are already a number of outfits that will implement customized ARM SoCs with your choice of functional blocks, and either fab them or farm the design out to somebody else, on a variety of processes. For smaller orders, there are even more outfits who have ARM SoCs, in a variety of common configurations, in stock and ready to go. Lead times pretty much limited by Fedex for small orders, some weeks for big ones. Buying an actual license seems to indicate Serious Business of some sort.
Without any particular background in chip design, what does MS want to do that they couldn't do at off-the-shelf prices just by calling one of the existing ARM licensees and asking for a quote? For the sake of my faith in their executive team, they couldn't be doing this just because Apple is, could they?
What will it be? Massive arrays of power optimized ARMs supporting a CLR environment as the future of Windows Server technologies? Xbox720 is going to be ARM based with some sort of secret sauce?
They are licensing ARM so that they will be able to implement the 'halt_and_catch_fire" instruction specifically for that event...
Digital cameras have gotten better, over time, particularly if you are willing to compromise on resolution, and don't go for the cheap seats(a high-quality sensor dumping images into a huge RAM buffer will be worlds ahead of a crummy sensor struggling to gather enough light, and dumping directly to a cheap SD card); but a good mechanical transport can be pretty damn fast(just ask Hiram Maxim...)
10FPS is totally doable for a pro film camera with a motorized transport(where the DSLR will really shine, if equipped with enough RAM buffer and a fast storage card, though, is sustained shooting. 10FPS is cute; but it will empty a 36 or even a 48 shot roll in under 5 seconds. A digital could easily be shooting into a multi-thousand frame storage device...)
The kicker with analog storage, though, is that while a lot of it has good retention time without special storage(unless you get one of the chemically problematic ones, like early wood fiber papers, or certain types of movie film...); but getting great retention time can be quite tricky or even impossible, and getting perfect retention simply isn't happening.
Digital, on the other hand, tends to degrade good and fast if neglected(HDD probably won't spin up in 10 years, unless you are fairly lucky. CD/DVD blanks may well have re-blanked in similar time, Flash typically has a rated retention time of only about that long, archival tape should still be OK, but you probably didn't use that...); but it is relatively easy to achieve perfect retention for as long as you can attend to it. Just copy to new media, and store multiple copies.
"I've got a flat screen monitor, 40 inches wide, I believe that yours says 'etch-a-sketch' on the side..."
I'd be pretty shocked at "much" higher. You aren't going to get your pick of first-run 22nm silicon in a $35 device; but you aren't going to get screaming clock speeds, either. I'd assume that you are looking at a more or less standard ARM SoC, probably one of the slightly older ones, manufactured on a slightly older process; but a small die running pretty slowly.
If you wanted the same performance; but were willing to pay $100, you could almost certainly get better efficiency; but this isn't one of those "using your old full-tower ATX Pentium as a router" 'older=inefficient' stories...
Anybody would be perfectly free to chase down a contributor and ask them to offer their contribution under different terms(or buy it from them and offer it themselves). The issue is just that there are a lot of contributors, including some who may be virtually impossible to get ahold of(releases under GPL2, dies, copyright is still owned by estate, who could sue your ass; but estate doesn't even know that the copyright exists, until mony-grubbing grandson graduates from law school and goes hunting, or any number of other horror stories, in addition to the entities that are perfectly easy to find; but just don't want to.)
For maximum practicality, you'd probably want to go after contributors(in order of importance) and ask for a change from "GPL2" to "GPL2 or later"(so that you don't break compatibility with "GPL2" components; but could, in the future, build a GPL3+ one). My understanding is that you would almost certainly encounter people very much not interested in doing that, so it would mean a lot of legwork, possibly a bit of cash, and some re-writing of obstinate portions; but there is no binding constraint.
It would be merely unfeasibly annoying, not impossible.
No. The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing.
Already, most distros maintain slightly forked versions of the kernel, to suit their needs(ie. enterprise-ish ones like RedHat might do more driver backports, MontaVista introduces BSPs for a variety of oddball boards, etc.) Because novelty costs money, people don't generally go further from mainline than they have a good justification for; but there are already dozens of quiet, not-very-adversarial, slight forks floating around, mostly in the hands of the various distros, and some of the embedded engineering houses.
Given that, in practice, virtually every distro maintains its own kernel, or set of patches, to suit their needs, I don't really see the big deal.
As long as Linus is performing his role of keeping the "official" repository basically the easiest and most standard starting point, all the peripheral kernel tweaks maintained by other entities will cluster more or less closely around it for cost reasons.
If he starts to slip, the center of gravity will shift toward one of the distro kernel repositories, or whatever other third party is doing the best job of filling the role, and the "official" repository will fade in prominence a bit.
Because of how kernel code is licensed, the "official" repository could either come back quickly(if Linus or his chosen successor get back on the ball, they could update from the prior leader, and start taking the comit lead again), or it could just fade away, mostly, and development could center around the RedHat tweak of the kernel, or the Debian one, or whatever...
More dangerous are situations(like the X11/X.org one) where there is a major licensing split that actually requires a decisive move one way or the other. Linux graphics are certainly not its strongest suit; but, had the defection to X.org not been so complete, things there could have been a lot uglier today.
My comparison was merely in the service of expressing surprise: Given that Microsoft has OSS competitors, most of which are extremely poor(other than a couple of well-sugar-daddied projects), I would have expected them to adopt some sort of vulnerability payment scheme as a PR move(Look at the benefits of quality proprietary software, where we care so much that we pay for bug reports, unlike those penniless hippies), in addition to the practical benefits of scoring a few more bug reports.
Based on the assumption(which I suspect is correct) that relatively small amounts of money can modify the behavior of security researchers not already in the pockets of the spammers or hostile entities, I would expect that Microsoft could convert a fairly small slice of its war chest into a substantial body of useful bug reports, as well as researchers who now have a much stronger incentive to comply with Microsoft's disclosure preferences, rather than just slamming it up on some public forum in order to gain street cred.
Apple has some security issues(more than they let on, if anything); but they don't have a security PR problem, so I would expect them to be much less motivated about trying to buff their image.
Plus, having all the usual cooling methods not work at all would be a bit of a downer(ok, yeah, normal servers do lose some tiny amount of energy by radiation, so I guess that counts).
No conductive cooling, you are floating in the depths of space, surrounded by nothing.
No convection. There isn't any atmosphere, nor any gravity(of use, obviously gravitation is universal)
Even in sealed capsules with humans, forced air just moves the problem around, there isn't nearly enough air to treat it as an arbitrarily deep heatsink.
The ability to make up for several hundreds or thousands of watts of heat dissipation just by pointing a few cheap fans at something is really a huge luxury...
No, it certainly didn't do Seneca any good.
On the other hand, given that the custom of deifying emperors had taken off by that point, trying to use religion to threaten an incipient god probably wouldn't have worked all that well either...
The video makes it impossible to tell if this guy is the real thing, or if The Thing has had a change to catch him in the cold isle and duplicate him. I fear to imagine what it would be capable of once it uses the base's internet connection to discover tentacle-rape hentai...
The motivation is largely financial; but I think that there are a couple of psychologically salient wrinkles:
PR is financial in the sense that it is basically a flavor of advertising; but it is also the case that (some people) really do derive happiness from being seen as rockstars/badasses. As in the music/entertainment business, being seen as a rockstar is also a sound financial move; but it it something that certain sorts of people really do value for its own sake.
(Most) people respond differently to money depending on how they got it. People are much more likely to feel an obligation to spend 'routine' money(salary, etc.) in some boring and sensible way, and much more likely to feel a sense of psychological freedom when dealing with 'windfall' money(even if they actually worked hard enough for it that their hourly for that 'windfall' was worse than for their day job). Assuming that you are already comfortable enough, which is probably reasonable for a lot of the people with the software chops to do nontrivial bug-hunts, 3k isn't huge money; but 3k that feels like 'windfall' that you can spend on whatever amuses you will have psychological value higher than 3k out of your paycheck, which will automatically conjure up the list of boring household expenses that it needs to be applied to.
There are certainly downsides to the bounty approach(once you put money on the table, priority disputes turn from prima donna drama bullshit into actual-with-lawyers drama shit; not to mention the hideous quibbling about exactly what constitutes a "vulnerability", how severe it is, and so forth).
On the other hand, handing out hard cash, in addition to credit, can certainly be motivational(yes, the monetary rewards on the criminal side will always be better; but I'd wager that there are a lot of people who would take 'steady job with some research firm, at dev/analyst pay levels+occasional fun money bounties+credit, all legal' over 'substantial monetary rewards, clandestine work for unsavory and occasionally downright problematic characters, nontrivial legal exposure'), and one might expect that MS, with their formidable war chest and serious security issues(both actual and perception-based) would find a way of converting fairly modest amounts of money into additional security. Particularly since(with the exception of Google's pet projects, and maybe a handful of other high-profile OSS projects) they could easily afford to bid better for vulnerability reports that team FOSS could, which would seem like a natural marketing bullet point...
Not really. I don't actually derive pleasure from playing games, just from feeling my graphics card's suffering(like an audiophile; but for graphics), so Alien Swarm FPS was much more enjoyable...