That type of cooler is called an evaporative or swamp cooloer. It's no air conditioner, but it can be effective in some cases and is definitely not a tech scam.
The controversy eventually spawned the Child's Play charity fundraiser, which ended up raising almost $150,000 worth of toy/game-related donations for the Seattle Children's Hospital
Almost $150,000? Try over $200,00. Significantly over. I guess nobody here actually reads the Penny Arcade comments:
'The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child's Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they're still retarded. When they came to the Children's Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say "Ghosts!", but that's neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That's above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here's where the depression sets in.'
This is not really news. Jason Wilkins, the creator if the Unofficial GBA DevKit, released it to the public at least a year ago. Also, there is a Win32 version (it came first).
This DevKit is basically just a port of GCC to the ARM with some AGB specific startup code for interrupt handling and whatnot. The official DevKit from Nintendo is the same thing (although using an older version of GCC), but you get some extra hardware and software also. Having done AGB development for a while, it is nice to have alternatives like this unofficial devkit available, but it is nothing revolutionary. The impressive thing is actually how good the emulators have gotten recently, they should begin to allow even official developers to rely less on the expensive Nintendo hardware for normal day-to-day development.
Free access to public information by the citizen.
Permanence of public data.
Security of the State and citizens.
While I loved reading this letter and the thoughtful way Microsoft's arguments were torn apart, perhaps the proposed law is not the solution to these problems.
For example, given that having data in open formats is of critical importance, wouldn't it make sense to legislate that any software the government uses has to store data in a format which is publicly documented? That would accomplish the desired goal, and would not require the huge paradigm shift to a service based business model that their approach dictates. Remember, we are not just talking about Microsoft here, we are talking about all software companies that might sell software to the governement. Many of them simply do not have the resources to revamp their whole business model for a small market like the Peruvian government, and Peru might be missing out on some good products.
Also, while security is certainly a huge concern given the sensitivity of the data the government deals with, do we really care if some bureaucrat deep within the government system is using a word processor with security holes or not? What really matters is that they have tough firewalls, good physical security practices, difficult-to-crack passwords, and up-to-date antivirus software. If those things are possible to legislate wouldn't it be more reasonable to base the law on them instead? And since even open source software which is thought to be extremely secure can have lots of vulnerabilities, it certainly won't make you completely safe.
Despite the very well written and reasoned response to Microsoft, their admirable determination to use open source software probably won't be the solution to their problems unless they really put their fundamental concerns into law.
It's really a shame that you would follow up such a brilliant letter with such a poorly thought out analogy. Because actually, if you want to use a car as an analog for a software product, what Peru is legislating is that the car companies give the government the manufacturing plant and all the blueprints for the vehicle or some such ridiculous equivalent. There are two possible results I could see if this scenario took place.
1) Automobile manufactures would not make money from selling new vehicles for the government, so they would not sell vehicles to the government. Your analogy completely falls apart here because there are no free alternatives where the government could obtain vehicles and the ability to produce them itself (unlike the software industry).
2) Automobile manufactures would not make money from selling new vehicles for the government, so they would need to make money on related services. They would probably make cars less fuel efficient, less durable, and generally design the cars in a way that would require more frequent and more expensive servicing. They would also have to start buying up gas stations, repair shops, and so on. The overall quality of the vehicles would suffer and the goverment would drive vehicles that were lower quality and more expensive to maintain.
Basically, cars are not software, and open source may not have any good analog in the business world as we currently know it.
The strange thing about this whole thing is that the game industry has already instituted a ratings system called the ESRB. The real problem seems to be that many retailers aren't enforcing this system. In theory it should work just like the movie ratings system: if your kid sees a movie that they aren't old enough for, you blame the theater, not the film studio.
Slashdot Mirror
That type of cooler is called an evaporative or swamp cooloer. It's no air conditioner, but it can be effective in some cases and is definitely not a tech scam.
The controversy eventually spawned the Child's Play charity fundraiser, which ended up raising almost $150,000 worth of toy/game-related donations for the Seattle Children's Hospital
Almost $150,000? Try over $200,00. Significantly over. I guess nobody here actually reads the Penny Arcade comments:
'The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child's Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they're still retarded. When they came to the Children's Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say "Ghosts!", but that's neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That's above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here's where the depression sets in.'
Good luck
This is not really news. Jason Wilkins, the creator if the Unofficial GBA DevKit, released it to the public at least a year ago. Also, there is a Win32 version (it came first).
This DevKit is basically just a port of GCC to the ARM with some AGB specific startup code for interrupt handling and whatnot. The official DevKit from Nintendo is the same thing (although using an older version of GCC), but you get some extra hardware and software also. Having done AGB development for a while, it is nice to have alternatives like this unofficial devkit available, but it is nothing revolutionary. The impressive thing is actually how good the emulators have gotten recently, they should begin to allow even official developers to rely less on the expensive Nintendo hardware for normal day-to-day development.
Free access to public information by the citizen.
Permanence of public data.
Security of the State and citizens.
While I loved reading this letter and the thoughtful way Microsoft's arguments were torn apart, perhaps the proposed law is not the solution to these problems. For example, given that having data in open formats is of critical importance, wouldn't it make sense to legislate that any software the government uses has to store data in a format which is publicly documented? That would accomplish the desired goal, and would not require the huge paradigm shift to a service based business model that their approach dictates. Remember, we are not just talking about Microsoft here, we are talking about all software companies that might sell software to the governement. Many of them simply do not have the resources to revamp their whole business model for a small market like the Peruvian government, and Peru might be missing out on some good products.
Also, while security is certainly a huge concern given the sensitivity of the data the government deals with, do we really care if some bureaucrat deep within the government system is using a word processor with security holes or not? What really matters is that they have tough firewalls, good physical security practices, difficult-to-crack passwords, and up-to-date antivirus software. If those things are possible to legislate wouldn't it be more reasonable to base the law on them instead? And since even open source software which is thought to be extremely secure can have lots of vulnerabilities, it certainly won't make you completely safe. Despite the very well written and reasoned response to Microsoft, their admirable determination to use open source software probably won't be the solution to their problems unless they really put their fundamental concerns into law.
It's really a shame that you would follow up such a brilliant letter with such a poorly thought out analogy. Because actually, if you want to use a car as an analog for a software product, what Peru is legislating is that the car companies give the government the manufacturing plant and all the blueprints for the vehicle or some such ridiculous equivalent. There are two possible results I could see if this scenario took place.
1) Automobile manufactures would not make money from selling new vehicles for the government, so they would not sell vehicles to the government. Your analogy completely falls apart here because there are no free alternatives where the government could obtain vehicles and the ability to produce them itself (unlike the software industry).
2) Automobile manufactures would not make money from selling new vehicles for the government, so they would need to make money on related services. They would probably make cars less fuel efficient, less durable, and generally design the cars in a way that would require more frequent and more expensive servicing. They would also have to start buying up gas stations, repair shops, and so on. The overall quality of the vehicles would suffer and the goverment would drive vehicles that were lower quality and more expensive to maintain.
Basically, cars are not software, and open source may not have any good analog in the business world as we currently know it.
The strange thing about this whole thing is that the game industry has already instituted a ratings system called the ESRB. The real problem seems to be that many retailers aren't enforcing this system. In theory it should work just like the movie ratings system: if your kid sees a movie that they aren't old enough for, you blame the theater, not the film studio.
Wouldn't that qualify as a terrorist act now?
"Even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space."
- Indelible, "Fire In Which You Burn"