1) Employees. Oh yeah. They probably have stock options up the wazoo, making many of them probably paper millionaires.
True, but this is still the "bail-out" theory. If they have more discipline and enough resources, they can tough it out and just pay them more. Besides, it's not necessarily the employees making the decisions (well, I guess it is, but not necessarily all of them). It's the owners (who, again, happen to be the founders, who are still employees).
2) Netscape/AOL and IBM are going to want their money back. How better to repay then giving them x% of RH stock?
Why not just pay them back with cash? It's an investment. Of course, none of us knows the exact terms of the deals (at least I don't), so they might already own parts of Red Hat.
3) (did I say two?) Buy up smaller companies. Not a real advantage for RH and the technology it uses (since much of it is GPL), but stock swaps seem to be the way buyouts work.
This is a good point, I guess. They would need a lot of capital to buy other companies. I just don't know if that's enough.
Do they even need to go public? As much as I would like them to offer me a job and make me rich, do they even need to go public? They have people like Netscape/AOL and IBM investing in them. They can live off that pretty well and continue to grow. The only reasons they would need to go public (correct me if I'm wrong) would be to raise more capital, which they seem to have plenty of, or to have their stock go sky-high and then bail out. This is what tech companies tend to do, but why should they? If Linux really is the next-big-thing, they can just wait until it really takes off, and then both Red Hat and VA (as well as their long-time employees) should be raking in big dough on their own merit, not because of the overspeculation of a million tech-hyper investors. Am I wrong here? Why should they go public? They have more than enough momentum and private investment that they can survive quite well until they hit the big time. True, they could become a billion-dollar company overnight if they went public, but they wouldn't own as much of that company any more. Why not wait a few years and try to become the billion-dollar company on their own merit?
This is grossly off-topic (I would moderate myself down to 0 if I could), but I'm just amazed that there are two people on Slashdot with usernames from The Dark Crystal. And not only that, someone from Raleigh! (I go to Duke). Ok, prepare to be moderated . . .
I know Myth I (and I think the sequel) were released for Macs too. That means that Bungie had to have it at least somewhat abstracted, unless they're masochists.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. I don't know Perl, so I can't really comment, but it struck me (as an outsider, though I do know some Python) that his earlier comment about requiring extra punctuation (is it a $?) for variables making CS people mad is exactly the same thing as Python's whitespace. But it's just an example, I suppose. He's trying to say it's postmodern. I don't quite get that, but what the hey! If Python's only limitation is that your code can't look like modern art, I can deal with it.
Well, I can answer the second part of my question from reading the end of the article. Since this is about making commerce laws the same within states (not necessarily interstate), it couldn't be done federally without bending over backwards. So it was a part of the Uniform Commercial Code, a law making commerce rules the same in states. They then made it a separate bill. It will be decided upon by the American Law Institute, which is not made up of state attorneys general but by lawyers appointed by the state (quite often the same people, I'm sure). But who do I write to?
Ok, I've found they're at www.ali.org, but I can't find a member list. Anyone?
Yes, I can see how this might help OSS (or whatever), but I can see how it would hurt it just as bad. You do realize this has the potential to kill WINE and Samba, right? The reverse-engineering clause would kill those. I suppose you could do something with WINE by using the programming references, but you're not going to get as far as you might by reverse engineering Windows (and no telling how liberal their definition of reverse engineering will be; you really can't be bug-for-bug compatible without doing some kind of reverse engineering).
One thing I'm not clear on: what kind of a law is this? It says that once it's ratified by a group of state attorneys general and then passed by a few state legislatures, it will become law. Since when is that how things work?
We've established that Raster is not a whining, immature employee, as some suggested. His response seems to be pretty level-headed, and his letter from yesterday is understandable. I'd be mad at first too.
We've established that Red Hat is not evil. Well, maybe not, but at least we've established that Red Hat was not evil in this case.
These were the big problems, right? (besides that mini-KDE/GNOME flame war, but hey, what else is new?) It just seems that Red Hat had a bad manager, and what company doesn't have a bad manager or two? The only problem I see is that maybe Red Hat should have put a little more distance between RHAD and themselves, at least assigning a more open-minded manager (or a more tactful one at least!) or, if he was from another department, keeping more distance between the two. A no-badmouthing-the-users-in-public policy is always a good thing!
He did go through the trash learning how to program! He said so himself!
It used to be my sig on Slashdot:
You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. -- Bill Gates
So I made a webpage explaining it (it has a lot of typos since I made it in 5 minutes). See Gates himself admit that he went through the trash looking for source code here
No,no, I have plenty of hard disk space. But how am I supposed to fit a 2.7MB disk image onto a 1.44MB disk? What do I do? Copy it to a ramdisk, then dd if=boot.img of=/dev/hda1? That doesn't seem very safe at all!
Surely there's a better way, but please tell me what.
I can't tell from the webpage (admittedly, I didn't look too hard) how much they've merged with Berolinux. Do they have pentium/k6 optimized distributions like Bero did? I never actually got Berolinux to install. For some reason the boot image was over 2MB. What's with that? I guess I'll stick with actual Red Hat, recompiling the SRPMs for now (though Stampede is looking very, very nice; we'll see if I'm too lazy to learn a new packaging system).
It seems that the goal of this release was so that the Australians could limit which Australians the UKUSA nations could tap. If they didn't fulfil some special requirements (foreign agent, criminal suspect, etc.) they would have to be "Australian national" rather than the actual name "Crocodile Dundee":) This will obviously not work, as the story points out. Australia, to my knowledge, is not the biggest member of this league and saying "You can't spy on Australians anymore" is pretty useless. I'm sure America and UK spy on Canada. We spy on everybody, including ourselves, and I doubt the Australian government, which isn't in too much of a position to make demands, is going to be able to convince any of the other countries not to do it.
What this does accomplish is defeating the whole point anyway. When they say outloud, "We're spying on Japanese trade ministers, Pakistani scientists, and North Korean government officials." doesn't this mean that they'll start using encrypted emails or something? I know everyone suspected those were the people they were spying on anyway (though the Japanese economic people was news to me), there was at least some doubt before. This guy went and spoiled it for everybody!
Wow, that is a really good point you have. I had never thought of it that way. I suppose Star Wars really isn't "science fiction" by that definition.
This reminds me of a scholarship interview I had. One of the blanks on the form that we gave them so they'd know more about us was "List 4 books which you have found interesting or influential." I put down two books from Orson Scott Card's Ender series. Why I did that, I don't know. I should have put one. But, hey, I thought they were interesting.
They saw this (my panel was led by an English professor), and asked me a lot of questions about it. I had to essentially justify reading science fiction as opposed to "real" literature. I don't think I did that great a job relating what I was thinking, but I at least had the ideas right in my head. A foreign languages professor asked me why someone like him should read Sci-fi if the author has to spend that much more time setting up the gimmicks and gizmos and that much less time setting up the characters and plot.
My argument was that only really bad sci-fi relies on the gimmicks. The good stuff (your definition may vary) is more about the human reaction to the slight changes in the "real world" that the author provides. That was one of the strengths of Gattaca. Nothing in there couldn't have happened. It was about what humanity might do if circumstances went along a certain path.
It all started going downhill once they asked "Do you think Hamlet would have been better written as science fiction?" Ughhh. I did get the scholarship, though, so it couldn't have been that bad.
Oh, and how can you not include Contact as one of the real science fiction movies of recent years?! I did love Gattaca, though. I own both movies . . . and I've seen The Phantom Menace twice already.
But there's another intellectual property type: trademarks. Of course Microsoft should be allowed to make their own clean-room version of Java, but will they be able to call it "Java"? Isn't this a lot like Mesa, which can't call itself OpenGL, or ghostscript, which can't call itself postscript? Isn't the best Microsoft can do is call it "Java compliant" or something like that?
Use the (admittedly overused) expanding balloon example. You're on a balloon, on the surface. Someone starst blowing up the balloon. All the other points on the balloon start moving away from you. The points right next to you are moving away from you slowly, but the point on the far side of the balloon are moving away really fast (as fast as the diameter is growing). The universe is something like that (only a tad bit more complicated) So yeah, it actually is moving away from you. And yes, there is a doppler shift.
Then again, every time I mention anything related to physics on slashdot, I'm wrong, so who knows.
Comments to stories are not unique to slashdot, but they're done much better here. I can imagine if this were a Hanson or Raiders site (we can dream, can't we;-), there would be a lot fewere good comments, becuase the people who are good at tech are necessarily drawn onto the Internet and to places like Slashdot, but other interest groups haven't reached Internet critical-mass yet.
Other websites have comments, but they quite often get filtered through an editor first. Slashdot's anonymous posting (as much as it can be annoying) and moderation have been very helpful in promoting real discussion (the latter especially)
Perfect time for segue into moderation FAQ discussion:
No mention of maintaining anonymity when you're a moderator, unless I missed that part. Does that mean that this requirement is now waived (which would make sense now that you're a moderator until you spend your 5 points)?
Ah, but that will only work unitl those corporations or schools have a disgruntled former employee or the SPA creates an incentive program (5% of the fine or something; do they already have something like this?) and then you're toast.
And a donation to a library only helps people who can read. It's not that big of a difference, after all. It is a donation for something that is freely available to all, just like a donation to a library or museum. Or maybe it's more like sponsoring a poet or author on the condition that he/she release the work to the public for free. The point is, there is much more to charity and donations than feeding and clothing the homeless. Sure that's a great way to make the world a better place, but it's far from the only way.
I have yet to see an argument for NT that can't be answered with the domain name hotmail.com.
It's owned by Microsoft, but according to Netcraft:
hotmail.com is running Apache/1.2.1 on FreeBSD
Hmm, I thought they were running Solaris, but this is even better! They've tried to switch to NT more than once, and it just couldn't keep up. What more do you need?
Well, it varies greatly. It's leaps and bounds above Software, that's for sure, but it's not up to 3dfx performance yet. Part of that has to do with Matrox not releasing quite all of the specs. They left out something called "Warp" which is their triangle setup engine (I believe; I don't really know anything about this; this is just from the mailing list). People seem optimistic that Matrox may eventually release that too. Another thing to wait for is the direct rendering (i.e., not through X) protoctol that Precision Insight is working on and won't release until June. It's very good progress so far, and the people on the list seem very intelligent--not that I know anything about this stuff, but when Carmack himself has looked at the code and said "I don't see anything blatantly wrong" I take that as meaning these people know what they're doing!
No, they can't. This only rules for sourcode. So, mozilla.org could export things as source but could not distribute binaries to people. Free speech doesn't protect executables. This ruling is just about source code.
First, it is not at all obvious that the government's view reflects a proper understanding of source code. As noted ear- lier, the distinguishing feature of source code is that it is meant to be read and understood by humans, and that it cannot be used to control directly the functioning of a com- puter. While source code, when properly prepared, can be eas- ily compiled into object code by a user, ignoring the distinction between source and object code obscures the important fact that source code is not meant solely for the computer, but is rather written in a language intended also for human analysis and understanding.
Second, and more importantly, the government's argu- ment, distilled to its essence, suggests that even one drop of "direct functionality" overwhelms any constitutional protec- tions that expression might otherwise enjoy. This cannot be so.16 The distinction urged on us by the government would prove too much in this era of rapidly evolving computer capabilities. The fact that computers will soon be able to respond directly to spoken commands, for example, should not confer on the government the unfettered power to impose prior restraints on speech in an effort to control its "functional " aspects. The First Amendment is concerned with expression, and we reject the notion that the admixture of functionality necessarily puts expression beyond the protections of the Constitution.
I just downloaded it and got it to compile (I had to comment out a line calling XMesaSetFXmode to fullscreen to get it to compile, but it did eventually, and this is an amazing game! It's not really much of a game yet. You just walk around and eat fish, but Tux can jump and dive and burp like he never could before! Don't try it on software Mesa, though. It's SLOW. I was getting about 5 seconds per frame. But I did get it to work with the in-development G200 driver, and it was more than playable (except that there's not much of a point to the game yet). It's far from finished, from the looks of it, but the graphics engine is very impressive. I can see the game ending up with great appeal for kids.
It depends on what you mean by "support." You can throw in the Marox G200, if you're lenient. The driver is so alpha it's just CVS right now, but it works pretty well considering how young it is. To give you an idea, people are getting ~5-10fps in Q3Test, which is very little, I know, but much better than the 2spf that you get with software.
Re:Anyone going to the Expo have a solution?
on
Taking May 19 Off?
·
· Score: 2
I'm in the Triangle right now, putting of studying for my math and econ exams tomorrow. I'll be back home by the 19th, but I looked into the ticket-thing a little bit. The Raleigh Grand Cinema, probably the best theatre in the Triangle, is starting to sell tickets Wed, May 12th, at 3pm. They are listed under Moviefone as well. Your best bet is to try Moviefone (which lists about 30 theatres in the Triangle) on May 12th, when they start selling (but I don't remember what time Moviefone starts selling).
Slashdot Mirror
1) Employees. Oh yeah. They probably have stock options up the wazoo, making many of them probably paper millionaires.
True, but this is still the "bail-out" theory. If they have more discipline and enough resources, they can tough it out and just pay them more. Besides, it's not necessarily the employees making the decisions (well, I guess it is, but not necessarily all of them). It's the owners (who, again, happen to be the founders, who are still employees).
2) Netscape/AOL and IBM are going to want their money back. How better to repay then giving them x% of RH stock?
Why not just pay them back with cash? It's an investment. Of course, none of us knows the exact terms of the deals (at least I don't), so they might already own parts of Red Hat.
3) (did I say two?) Buy up smaller companies. Not a real advantage for RH and the technology it uses (since much of it is GPL), but stock swaps seem to be the way buyouts work.
This is a good point, I guess. They would need a lot of capital to buy other companies. I just don't know if that's enough.
Do they even need to go public? As much as I would like them to offer me a job and make me rich, do they even need to go public? They have people like Netscape/AOL and IBM investing in them. They can live off that pretty well and continue to grow. The only reasons they would need to go public (correct me if I'm wrong) would be to raise more capital, which they seem to have plenty of, or to have their stock go sky-high and then bail out. This is what tech companies tend to do, but why should they? If Linux really is the next-big-thing, they can just wait until it really takes off, and then both Red Hat and VA (as well as their long-time employees) should be raking in big dough on their own merit, not because of the overspeculation of a million tech-hyper investors. Am I wrong here? Why should they go public? They have more than enough momentum and private investment that they can survive quite well until they hit the big time. True, they could become a billion-dollar company overnight if they went public, but they wouldn't own as much of that company any more. Why not wait a few years and try to become the billion-dollar company on their own merit?
This is grossly off-topic (I would moderate myself down to 0 if I could), but I'm just amazed that there are two people on Slashdot with usernames from The Dark Crystal. And not only that, someone from Raleigh! (I go to Duke). Ok, prepare to be moderated . . .
I know Myth I (and I think the sequel) were released for Macs too. That means that Bungie had to have it at least somewhat abstracted, unless they're masochists.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. I don't know Perl, so I can't really comment, but it struck me (as an outsider, though I do know some Python) that his earlier comment about requiring extra punctuation (is it a $?) for variables making CS people mad is exactly the same thing as Python's whitespace. But it's just an example, I suppose. He's trying to say it's postmodern. I don't quite get that, but what the hey! If Python's only limitation is that your code can't look like modern art, I can deal with it.
Well, I can answer the second part of my question from reading the end of the article. Since this is about making commerce laws the same within states (not necessarily interstate), it couldn't be done federally without bending over backwards. So it was a part of the Uniform Commercial Code, a law making commerce rules the same in states. They then made it a separate bill. It will be decided upon by the American Law Institute, which is not made up of state attorneys general but by lawyers appointed by the state (quite often the same people, I'm sure). But who do I write to?
Ok, I've found they're at www.ali.org, but I can't find a member list. Anyone?
Yes, I can see how this might help OSS (or whatever), but I can see how it would hurt it just as bad. You do realize this has the potential to kill WINE and Samba, right? The reverse-engineering clause would kill those. I suppose you could do something with WINE by using the programming references, but you're not going to get as far as you might by reverse engineering Windows (and no telling how liberal their definition of reverse engineering will be; you really can't be bug-for-bug compatible without doing some kind of reverse engineering).
One thing I'm not clear on: what kind of a law is this? It says that once it's ratified by a group of state attorneys general and then passed by a few state legislatures, it will become law. Since when is that how things work?
What from yesterday was not resolved with this?
We've established that Raster is not a whining, immature employee, as some suggested. His response seems to be pretty level-headed, and his letter from yesterday is understandable. I'd be mad at first too.
We've established that Red Hat is not evil. Well, maybe not, but at least we've established that Red Hat was not evil in this case.
These were the big problems, right? (besides that mini-KDE/GNOME flame war, but hey, what else is new?) It just seems that Red Hat had a bad manager, and what company doesn't have a bad manager or two? The only problem I see is that maybe Red Hat should have put a little more distance between RHAD and themselves, at least assigning a more open-minded manager (or a more tactful one at least!) or, if he was from another department, keeping more distance between the two. A no-badmouthing-the-users-in-public policy is always a good thing!
He did go through the trash learning how to program! He said so himself!
It used to be my sig on Slashdot:
You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code.
-- Bill Gates
So I made a webpage explaining it (it has a lot of typos since I made it in 5 minutes). See Gates himself admit that he went through the trash looking for source code here
No,no, I have plenty of hard disk space. But how am I supposed to fit a 2.7MB disk image onto a 1.44MB disk? What do I do? Copy it to a ramdisk, then dd if=boot.img of=/dev/hda1? That doesn't seem very safe at all!
Surely there's a better way, but please tell me what.
I can't tell from the webpage (admittedly, I didn't look too hard) how much they've merged with Berolinux. Do they have pentium/k6 optimized distributions like Bero did? I never actually got Berolinux to install. For some reason the boot image was over 2MB. What's with that? I guess I'll stick with actual Red Hat, recompiling the SRPMs for now (though Stampede is looking very, very nice; we'll see if I'm too lazy to learn a new packaging system).
It seems that the goal of this release was so that the Australians could limit which Australians the UKUSA nations could tap. If they didn't fulfil some special requirements (foreign agent, criminal suspect, etc.) they would have to be "Australian national" rather than the actual name "Crocodile Dundee" :) This will obviously not work, as the story points out. Australia, to my knowledge, is not the biggest member of this league and saying "You can't spy on Australians anymore" is pretty useless. I'm sure America and UK spy on Canada. We spy on everybody, including ourselves, and I doubt the Australian government, which isn't in too much of a position to make demands, is going to be able to convince any of the other countries not to do it.
What this does accomplish is defeating the whole point anyway. When they say outloud, "We're spying on Japanese trade ministers, Pakistani scientists, and North Korean government officials." doesn't this mean that they'll start using encrypted emails or something? I know everyone suspected those were the people they were spying on anyway (though the Japanese economic people was news to me), there was at least some doubt before. This guy went and spoiled it for everybody!
Wow, that is a really good point you have. I had never thought of it that way. I suppose Star Wars really isn't "science fiction" by that definition.
This reminds me of a scholarship interview I had. One of the blanks on the form that we gave them so they'd know more about us was "List 4 books which you have found interesting or influential." I put down two books from Orson Scott Card's Ender series. Why I did that, I don't know. I should have put one. But, hey, I thought they were interesting.
They saw this (my panel was led by an English professor), and asked me a lot of questions about it. I had to essentially justify reading science fiction as opposed to "real" literature. I don't think I did that great a job relating what I was thinking, but I at least had the ideas right in my head. A foreign languages professor asked me why someone like him should read Sci-fi if the author has to spend that much more time setting up the gimmicks and gizmos and that much less time setting up the characters and plot.
My argument was that only really bad sci-fi relies on the gimmicks. The good stuff (your definition may vary) is more about the human reaction to the slight changes in the "real world" that the author provides. That was one of the strengths of Gattaca. Nothing in there couldn't have happened. It was about what humanity might do if circumstances went along a certain path.
It all started going downhill once they asked "Do you think Hamlet would have been better written as science fiction?" Ughhh. I did get the scholarship, though, so it couldn't have been that bad.
Oh, and how can you not include Contact as one of the real science fiction movies of recent years?! I did love Gattaca, though. I own both movies . . . and I've seen The Phantom Menace twice already.
But there's another intellectual property type: trademarks. Of course Microsoft should be allowed to make their own clean-room version of Java, but will they be able to call it "Java"? Isn't this a lot like Mesa, which can't call itself OpenGL, or ghostscript, which can't call itself postscript? Isn't the best Microsoft can do is call it "Java compliant" or something like that?
Use the (admittedly overused) expanding balloon example. You're on a balloon, on the surface. Someone starst blowing up the balloon. All the other points on the balloon start moving away from you. The points right next to you are moving away from you slowly, but the point on the far side of the balloon are moving away really fast (as fast as the diameter is growing). The universe is something like that (only a tad bit more complicated) So yeah, it actually is moving away from you. And yes, there is a doppler shift.
Then again, every time I mention anything related to physics on slashdot, I'm wrong, so who knows.
Comments to stories are not unique to slashdot, but they're done much better here. I can imagine if this were a Hanson or Raiders site (we can dream, can't we ;-), there would be a lot fewere good comments, becuase the people who are good at tech are necessarily drawn onto the Internet and to places like Slashdot, but other interest groups haven't reached Internet critical-mass yet.
Other websites have comments, but they quite often get filtered through an editor first. Slashdot's anonymous posting (as much as it can be annoying) and moderation have been very helpful in promoting real discussion (the latter especially)
Perfect time for segue into moderation FAQ discussion:
No mention of maintaining anonymity when you're a moderator, unless I missed that part. Does that mean that this requirement is now waived (which would make sense now that you're a moderator until you spend your 5 points)?
Ah, but that will only work unitl those corporations or schools have a disgruntled former employee or the SPA creates an incentive program (5% of the fine or something; do they already have something like this?) and then you're toast.
And a donation to a library only helps people who can read. It's not that big of a difference, after all. It is a donation for something that is freely available to all, just like a donation to a library or museum. Or maybe it's more like sponsoring a poet or author on the condition that he/she release the work to the public for free. The point is, there is much more to charity and donations than feeding and clothing the homeless. Sure that's a great way to make the world a better place, but it's far from the only way.
I have yet to see an argument for NT that can't be answered with the domain name hotmail.com.
It's owned by Microsoft, but according to Netcraft:
hotmail.com is running Apache/1.2.1 on FreeBSD
Hmm, I thought they were running Solaris, but this is even better! They've tried to switch to NT more than once, and it just couldn't keep up. What more do you need?
Well, it varies greatly. It's leaps and bounds above Software, that's for sure, but it's not up to 3dfx performance yet. Part of that has to do with Matrox not releasing quite all of the specs. They left out something called "Warp" which is their triangle setup engine (I believe; I don't really know anything about this; this is just from the mailing list). People seem optimistic that Matrox may eventually release that too. Another thing to wait for is the direct rendering (i.e., not through X) protoctol that Precision Insight is working on and won't release until June. It's very good progress so far, and the people on the list seem very intelligent--not that I know anything about this stuff, but when Carmack himself has looked at the code and said "I don't see anything blatantly wrong" I take that as meaning these people know what they're doing!
No, they can't. This only rules for sourcode. So, mozilla.org could export things as source but could not distribute binaries to people. Free speech doesn't protect executables. This ruling is just about source code.
Their arguments against the export:
First, it is not at all obvious that the government's view
reflects a proper understanding of source code. As noted ear-
lier, the distinguishing feature of source code is that it is
meant to be read and understood by humans, and that it
cannot be used to control directly the functioning of a com-
puter. While source code, when properly prepared, can be eas-
ily compiled into object code by a user, ignoring the
distinction between source and object code obscures the
important fact that source code is not meant solely for the
computer, but is rather written in a language intended also for
human analysis and understanding.
Second, and more importantly, the government's argu-
ment, distilled to its essence, suggests that even one drop of
"direct functionality" overwhelms any constitutional protec-
tions that expression might otherwise enjoy. This cannot be so.16
The distinction urged on us by the government would prove
too much in this era of rapidly evolving computer capabilities.
The fact that computers will soon be able to respond directly
to spoken commands, for example, should not confer on the
government the unfettered power to impose prior restraints on
speech in an effort to control its "functional " aspects. The
First Amendment is concerned with expression, and we reject
the notion that the admixture of functionality necessarily puts
expression beyond the protections of the Constitution.
I just downloaded it and got it to compile (I had to comment out a line calling XMesaSetFXmode to fullscreen to get it to compile, but it did eventually, and this is an amazing game! It's not really much of a game yet. You just walk around and eat fish, but Tux can jump and dive and burp like he never could before! Don't try it on software Mesa, though. It's SLOW. I was getting about 5 seconds per frame. But I did get it to work with the in-development G200 driver, and it was more than playable (except that there's not much of a point to the game yet). It's far from finished, from the looks of it, but the graphics engine is very impressive. I can see the game ending up with great appeal for kids.
It depends on what you mean by "support." You can throw in the Marox G200, if you're lenient. The driver is so alpha it's just CVS right now, but it works pretty well considering how young it is. To give you an idea, people are getting ~5-10fps in Q3Test, which is very little, I know, but much better than the 2spf that you get with software.
I'm in the Triangle right now, putting of studying for my math and econ exams tomorrow. I'll be back home by the 19th, but I looked into the ticket-thing a little bit. The Raleigh Grand Cinema, probably the best theatre in the Triangle, is starting to sell tickets Wed, May 12th, at 3pm. They are listed under Moviefone as well. Your best bet is to try Moviefone (which lists about 30 theatres in the Triangle) on May 12th, when they start selling (but I don't remember what time Moviefone starts selling).