No, throughout the design of a product the specifications slowly evolve from rough paper tigers to a final specification. Interim specifications aren't released as they're part of the design process and could potentially assist others in either reverse engineering exercises or in avoiding pitfalls in competing projects.
I'm trying to recall where I originally read this, it was probably a trade magazine like EE times but it wasn't something I thought I'd ever reference again.
The old software doesn't stop working, or at least the majority of it won't. There will be backwards compatibility, but software running in backwards compatible mode won't make use of the new 'modern' features. Apple has already gone through these exercises at least twice: The original 68K based macs had a 24 bit memory address. Programmers would play tricks and use the otherwise wasted 8 bits for a variety of things. Great... except when 32 bit memory busses were introduced, some of the software that made use of these hacks broke very badly. The next event I know of was the transition from 68K processors to the PowerPC. They wrote a fairly decent 68K emulator. The fastest 68K mac shortly after the introduction of the PowerPC was a PowerPC. It wasn't perfect, some things did break, but by and large it worked.
Some possibly lesser changes were the introduction of PCI (no backwards compatibility with NuBUS at all) and USB (you can get USB->ADB converters)
Motorola is fabricating it, but the original champion for adding a vector processor was an engineer at Apple who came up with the original spec. I'm sure Motorola did an awful lot of modifications to it in order to make it feasible.
They didn't call it an FPU because it isn't just an FPU, its a vector processor. Floating point units (and integer units) are part of this vector processor but calling it a FPU doesn't define its operation. The G4 or whatever its eventually named will contain an FPU, it will also contain this AltiVec processor which happens to be a vector processor.
Vector processors are what power the traditional supercomputers like the Cray T90 or the NEC machines. They are capable of performing dot product or vector operations on multiple data in a single cycle. The vector processors on machines like the T90 are much more powerful than AltiVec.
You are correct on one thing, special code will need to be made to make use of the AltiVec enabled processors but Apple has had the compiler available to the general public for some time now, as well as AltiVec emulators.
Not all code works well on a vector processor, but the return on investment for code that does is rather stunning. It so happens that a lot of graphical operations do play very nicely on a vector processor.
This is will get out of hand and unwieldly in a hurry. If an ISP is liable for any material that a user makes public if they're aware of it then unless they make it policy that employees don't ever look at that ISP's 'output' and keep the complaints department on strong mind altering substances they can be sued for anything. Web pages are easy: yank the page and possibly yank the account of the user who did the page. What about more permanent things such as news postings? They're potentially archived out of their jurisdiction. I don't know how affirmitively DejaNews would respond to requests from a British ISP to remove potentially defamatory posts. There are many similar storage mechanisms such as guest books, free web sites etc.
Alright, Microsoft pays somebody to extend Perl. So what? If it's OpenSource then the community can take whatever, if anything, they want. If not its a waste of money on their part. There's still a lot more non-NT stuff out their and Perl itself is still evolving. So if they take an anti-OpenSource attitude NT users will be faced with using revisions of Perl that are behind the Open Source community.
Most of the article was FUD. So what if people make money off of writing installers based on Perl? People make money already writing Perl as developers.
One other thing, suppose the piracy is really rampant, and the company is left with tonnes of unsold product. This is a loss, but its caused by poor forecasting. Fire your executives.
The 2/5 number actually seems low to me, though I suppose Microsoft Office is the primary business app and it may be bundled with just about everything. The loss numbers quoted are unrealistic though regardless of the amount of piracy that goes on. To get a realistic number you'd have to break down software theft into a number of categories:
1) Pirating software w/ no intention of purchasing. There is no monetary loss here since the individual never intended to purchase the software. This is probably the majority of the cases. There is no concept of property loss since the media etc. wasn't stolen, just a copy of the software.
2) Pirated software that causes the loss of a software sale. This would represent a monetary loss to the software publisher and to the distributor. The publisher loses their profit as well as the distributor. Again no physical property is stolen so they've only lost out on the profit, not on the costs for the media and packaging. This would most likely be the second most common form, somebody gives a copy of a package to a friend who would otherwise purchase it.
3) Physically stolen software. This is basically shoplifting, the publisher and distributor both lose out on the profit itself as well as the costs for the product.
I'm not trying to condone software piracy, I'm just trying to understand and explain the losses involved. It's not a victimless crime because money is lost, but its nowhere near as staggering as the BSA would indicate.
I suppose a fourth entry would be:
4) Theft of source code. This is a big bad one that could potentially cause huge losses. It's also probably the rarest.
The main problem is that Fleischmann and Pons went to press far to early and didn't go through due process in checking there results. They also had done this on a number of other occasions. So, maybe they had something and maybe they didn't. In the mean time all the press that quickly published their results in the first place looked awfully bad when it looked like the scientists were overstating their results.
Was cold fusion total bunk? I don't know, but now to get any press at all for it the results are going to have to be pretty darned conclusive. Reporting excess energy that may or may not be the result of a nuclear reaction probably won't get a nod in the mainstream scientific media anymore.
This is why normally when you read a scientific press release there are a lot of caveats added by any interviewed scientists, even when the main stream press adds on a more sensationalistic headline. The fact that something happened takes the back seat to a plausible explanation of why that something happened.
Shareholders don't necessarily have the final say in the operation of a company. There is the CEO and the board of directors. For instance when Apple was at there very lowest point many investors were vocally calling for them to embrace Intel and Microsoft and slap the Apple logo on a Wintel clone. RedHat is also further constrained from changing licensing agreements because the code is already GPL'd. Even if they wanted to, which I'm sure they don't, they can't repackage GPL'd source code under some other license. They could come out with their own OS of course, but that would be corporate suicide.
It's a rather scary thing for privacy of any kind, but it shouldn't come as a suprise that the NSA refused to provide information on it to congress. Perhaps the bluntness of the response was suprising, but not the gist.
The NSA is charged with signal intelligence, or intercepting communications from foreign countries whether friend or foe. From the text of the story they aren't so concerned about them directly spying on US citizens, but rather on them collecting intelligence from foreign countries who are collecting intelligence on US citizens. So us damned Canadians spy on you damned Americans and the NSA in turn spies on the Canadians. Insert your favourite foreign country where appropriate.
The answer to the question "What safeguards are in place to prevent the NSA from intercepting foreign communications with US citizens?" is probably "Nothing".
Part of being a scientist of any flavour is realizing and admitting you're wrong or don't know the answer. That's how scientific progress works. You start with a model of reality, as reality starts not to fit well with the model you discard it and use a revised model, repeat ad infinitum. Try reading A Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, it spends some time talking about the scientific principle.
Actually, I just read the write up in the newspaper. The $60K figure that has been bandied about is what the owners of the theater (a small 140 seat theater) estimated as their losses. The cost for a print of the movie is $2500. This sounds a bit low, it may well be $2500 per reel. I'll pretend that the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram is occasionally factually correct.
At this point they're charged being charged with relatively minor crimes and are all ready talking plea bargaining.
The film that was returned was useless, damaged beyond repair (I live in the same neck of the woods as where it happened) the local news said last night. In the news report they said that a couple reals were returned but one was retrieved from a field someplace. Their lawyer said it was just a prank that went awry. Maybe a bit of jail time will help them figure out a better prank next time...
Censoring films is one thing, I don't agree with it, but its feasible. There's a finite number of movies produced that need to be examined and a whole industry that can just be disallowed based on the genre (the hardcore porn genre, or maybe even soft core, I have no idea what the Australian censorship board views as offensive)
Censoring web sites is pretty close to impossible. There are the obvious ones, I would expect that Hustler and any page attached to that domain would be blocked for instance. What about individual pages though? I can set up a page on a free web server such as Tripod or GeoCities with objectionable content. GeoCities would eventually yank it, but Tripod seems to not care. Personal web pages with material they would find offensive probably numbers in the millions. For an ISP to selectively block these pages isn't feasible, so their only choice would be to block sites that have one or more user pages with objectionable material. I.e. block GeoCities, Tripod, AOL and a large number of other providers. Great, except for the small fraction of objectionable pages on these servers there is a large number of non-objectional pages. A few of these even have useful material.
Basically the end result would be that a site such as slashdot could be censored from all Australian internet users if it ever were to fail Australia's movie screening process. Oh yeah, there's a small box on slashdot which contains the latest image from JenniCam as well as links to Rotten.com and so on.
Star Wars Prequel hype v.s. Star Wars hype
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In 1977 I was in grade five. I don't recall an inordinant amount of hype leading up to Star Wars. I remember rave reviews and almost an instant cult like following. Cult like in that just as people would go and see Rocky Horror Picture Show umpteen times they would also go and see Star Wars umpteen times. Obviously Star Wars was very main stream, but the following could best be described as a cult like following.
I went to see it, I think I've seen it in the theater two times. It was a good movie. For the time the special effects were amazing. I've been in a variety of places in a variety of drunken states as its been played, but I really haven't watched it again. A few years later when it appeared on HBO and my parents had purchased a VCR I did record it, but mostly because it was hiliarious in fast forward or reverse.
By then the quality of the special effects weren't as spectacular compared to other movies of the time. It was still a good movie though.
This prequel is a bit different though, there is an amazing amount of hype being dished out in advance. I happen to be pretty hard for the media to get to since I don't watch a lot of main stream TV and find playing CD's in my jeep more interesting than listening to the latest Howard Stern impersonator during my drives to and from work. I still can't avoid the hype though. The front page story on the local fish wrap was a review of the movie. I didn't read it but I might later. I'd like to see if its a totally favourable review and if not how many letters to the editor are going to be published lambasting the reviewer.
I will go and see the prequel. I'd like to say that I'll wait till the hype dies down, but I doubt if it ever will.
Not all people working as engineers are licensed nor are they all engineers. For instance I'm working as an electrical engineer, have an electrical engineering degree but am not licensed as an engineer in the state I'm working. At this point in time I choose not to license myself because in my present circumstances there is no benefit for me, my credibility or the people who have hired me.
Being a licensed engineer in general doesn't mean that you are tested on your engineering proficiency. You're tested on ethics, the law as it relates to contracts and your responsibilities as an engineer. Passing this exam and getting your license then entitles you to call yourself an engineer (your jurisdiction may vary, in Ontario Canada you're not an engineer unless you're licensed, I'm not sure about the jurisdiction where I am)
Passing the exam also changes the playing field. If you make poor engineering choices or somebody insinuates you have done so then a lawsuit can be brought about. A lawsuit can be brought about even on something said in passing or as a favour. This is the reason doctors and lawyers don't dispense free advice. They can still be sued no matter what caveats they apply. The governing body who granted your license will be on the publics side, not yours.
In some industries the above is important for your credibility: if I were designing biomedical electronics for instance; if I were a consultant etc. The same possibly goes for programmers as well. Most programmers don't write code that directly effects the public safety. Most programmers shouldn't be licensed. There is a pretty strong case that the programmer who designs the firmware that runs on the microcontroller that operates an insulin pump or EKG machine should be licensed.
Requiring all people working as programmers or engineers would drive the costs of any programmed or engineered products through the roof. The insurance to protect you against lawsuits is phenomenally expensive (although many large companies have blanket insurance for their engineers)
Right now the basic question is: Does GLX work under Linux? If it doesn't nVidia has two choices:
Make GLX work which is the best long term solution but may not be a feasible short term project. Best in this case is defined as best for the Linux community, not necessarily best for nVidia.
Roll their own drivers. Quick and dirty maybe, but to get them out in '2 weeks time' it may be required. This may also be the best for nVidia.
I'm sure IP comes into play here. I'm not sure how far along GLX is and whether IP would have to be released to the development community to support TNT2 with GLX. Basically when GLX was proprietary to SGI NDA agreements could be reached with the company itself. Though shall not release proprietary information or we'll hit you with a really big stick! This doesn't work as well in a distributed work environment.
Unfortunately individual share holders opinions are meaningless. Huge chunks of stocks are bought up by funds etc. and they generally have the biggest stick when dealing with the board of directors. That said it isn't a forgone conclusion that things will go awry at the whims of shareholders. I'm sure many of the big shareholders of Apple have told them to dump MacOS/MacOS X Server, go Intel and sell Windows boxes, obviously it hasn't worked.
As long as the board of directors is supportive of the direction of the company there won't be any 180 degree phase shifts, regardless of the opinions of even the major shareholders.
Of course it hasn't been officially announced that Red Hat is going public.
The access that kids have to guns is generally through two channels: 1) they get them from home or, 2) they buy them on the black market. The solution to the first channel is for gun owning parents to be responsible and secure their weapons. The bigger problem, however, is the second channel, the black market.
By definition, anyone obtaining anything from a black market is breaking the law, so more laws will not eliminate the market, they will only expand its scope.
The guns in the black market for the most part are weapons which were once legally owned either by individuals or a gun shop. These weapons get stolen via breaking and entering and turned over to a fence for a quick profit. There is some number of guns that are actually imported illegaly but the number is a relatively low percentage. Cut off the source of the black market (i.e. restrict the sale of non-sporting fire arms to the general public) and most of the problem will quickly diminish. Some criminals will still manage to find weapons but by and large this won't be the case. Case in point: Canada, its fairly difficult to get a license for a handgun therefore most home owners don't have them (you need to prove you're in imminent danger, or have to be a member of a gun club in which case you don't have the right to keep it at home anyway). Compare the violent crime statistics of any large Canadian city to an appropriately sized American city: the murder rate will be much lower. There is crime in Canada, but murder is much lower per capita than in the US.
Other weapon types aren't restricted, if you want to hunt and want rifles or shotguns thats fine though you do have to be licensed. It's much more difficult to conceal a twelve gauge shotgun however.
The black market for firearms isn't very large, regardless of Canada's own war on drugs, because the ready source of firearms is missing.
I was thinking about this last night after listening to a couple of discussions and maybe catching some commentary about the massacre on TV. I'm not going to comment on why they did what they did because I honestly don't have any insight into it. It was horrid and brutish and senseless, but thats just a description of the act, not commentary on why. I think I do understand a bit about why all of the perpetrators of these various acts of violence are being stereotyped as nerds and geeks though.
People have always felt the need to segregate those who do horrible things from themselves. In the publicized cases over the last couple of years there have been a few common characteristics of the people behind the murders:
Young
Male
An outsider to the normal society
An unusual amount of interest in computer gaming
An unusual amount of time spent with computers
This to the public is the definition of a geek. It lets society get off the hook of delving into the real problems. Instead the symptoms get labeled as the problems. What does this mean? Rather than looking at why they preferred gaming so much, gaming is seen as the problem. "Censor computer games!" cries the public. "While you're at it, ban death metal!" shouts the clergy. This is much easier than having "What caused these people to be ostricized by their 'peers' in the first place?" as your battle cry. That would require real work and real thought.
There are very few journalists left in media, be it television, print or radio. For the most part they've all become socially acceptable versions of Geraldo Rivera and will carefully repeat what the public wants to hear. Nobody does interviews with youths seen as outsiders to let society see why they've become outsiders, instead they interview friends of the victims who just label them as outsiders. So they reinforce the myth or misdiagnosis.
Chances are a large section of the slashdot readership at one time or another has been labeled as an outsider. A better editorial interjection on the part of Hemos would have been "were you ever seen as an outsider, and if so why?"
I actually didn't miss that point, I know that people are developing out of an enjoyment of the act of developing. The point I'm trying to make is that it is possible for RedHat to make an honest living out of distributing the software and providing support. For the average person who has contributed something to the kernel or a command line utility this isn't the case without resorting to some convoluted logic (it made me a better and more renowned coder, therefore I got a good job). It's a bit like saying that depending on your field going to university is making money. No, going to university in my case enabled me to make fist-fulls of cash. On a similar token I'm probably going to start a free software project in the near future (this weekend if payed work doesn't get in the way), but since I purposely avoided writing software for a living by wiring together transistors it really won't make one iotas difference to my career unless I change careers. Monetary gain isn't why I'm doing what I'm going to do and I don't expect any. For some people however even a small stipend which either helps pay the rent or lets them upgrade there old reliable 80386 to a dizzyingly fast 133 MHz pentium can make a difference in their ability to contribute.
It'd be more interesting if the I/O interface was changed. USB interface circuitry is relatively cheap and is all microcontroller based. Cypress sells a development board for about a hundred bucks. Chop off that parallel port and the serial port and interface with USB. Go to your favourite store and get either an USB CD or a USB hard drive (I think these are pricey, they're made for the super mobile crowd who want a hard drive that fits in a shirt pocket)
You've now got a portable MP3 player. This may be impeded if the people who make USB devices won't tell you how to talk with their CD or hard drive (or is it like SCSI and a standard?)
Slashdot Mirror
No, throughout the design of a product the specifications slowly evolve from rough paper tigers to a final specification. Interim specifications aren't released as they're part of the design process and could potentially assist others in either reverse engineering exercises or in avoiding pitfalls in competing projects.
I'm trying to recall where I originally read this, it was probably a trade magazine like EE times but it wasn't something I thought I'd ever reference again.
The old software doesn't stop working, or at least the majority of it won't. There will be backwards compatibility, but software running in backwards compatible mode won't make use of the new 'modern' features. Apple has already gone through these exercises at least twice: The original 68K based macs had a 24 bit memory address. Programmers would play tricks and use the otherwise wasted 8 bits for a variety of things. Great... except when 32 bit memory busses were introduced, some of the software that made use of these hacks broke very badly. The next event I know of was the transition from 68K processors to the PowerPC. They wrote a fairly decent 68K emulator. The fastest 68K mac shortly after the introduction of the PowerPC was a PowerPC. It wasn't perfect, some things did break, but by and large it worked.
Some possibly lesser changes were the introduction of PCI (no backwards compatibility with NuBUS at all) and USB (you can get USB->ADB converters)
Motorola is fabricating it, but the original champion for adding a vector processor was an engineer at Apple who came up with the original spec. I'm sure Motorola did an awful lot of modifications to it in order to make it feasible.
They didn't call it an FPU because it isn't just an FPU, its a vector processor. Floating point units (and integer units) are part of this vector processor but calling it a FPU doesn't define its operation. The G4 or whatever its eventually named will contain an FPU, it will also contain this AltiVec processor which happens to be a vector processor.
Vector processors are what power the traditional supercomputers like the Cray T90 or the NEC machines. They are capable of performing dot product or vector operations on multiple data in a single cycle. The vector processors on machines like the T90 are much more powerful than AltiVec.
You are correct on one thing, special code will need to be made to make use of the AltiVec enabled processors but Apple has had the compiler available to the general public for some time now, as well as AltiVec emulators.
Not all code works well on a vector processor, but the return on investment for code that does is rather stunning. It so happens that a lot of graphical operations do play very nicely on a vector processor.
This is will get out of hand and unwieldly in a hurry. If an ISP is liable for any material that a user makes public if they're aware of it then unless they make it policy that employees don't ever look at that ISP's 'output' and keep the complaints department on strong mind altering substances they can be sued for anything. Web pages are easy: yank the page and possibly yank the account of the user who did the page. What about more permanent things such as news postings? They're potentially archived out of their jurisdiction. I don't know how affirmitively DejaNews would respond to requests from a British ISP to remove potentially defamatory posts. There are many similar storage mechanisms such as guest books, free web sites etc.
Alright, Microsoft pays somebody to extend Perl. So what? If it's OpenSource then the community can take whatever, if anything, they want. If not its a waste of money on their part. There's still a lot more non-NT stuff out their and Perl itself is still evolving. So if they take an anti-OpenSource attitude NT users will be faced with using revisions of Perl that are behind the Open Source community.
Most of the article was FUD. So what if people make money off of writing installers based on Perl? People make money already writing Perl as developers.
One other thing, suppose the piracy is really rampant, and the company is left with tonnes of unsold product. This is a loss, but its caused by poor forecasting. Fire your executives.
The 2/5 number actually seems low to me, though I suppose Microsoft Office is the primary business app and it may be bundled with just about everything. The loss numbers quoted are unrealistic though regardless of the amount of piracy that goes on. To get a realistic number you'd have to break down software theft into a number of categories:
1) Pirating software w/ no intention of purchasing. There is no monetary loss here since the individual never intended to purchase the software. This is probably the majority of the cases. There is no concept of property loss since the media etc. wasn't stolen, just a copy of the software.
2) Pirated software that causes the loss of a software sale. This would represent a monetary loss to the software publisher and to the distributor. The publisher loses their profit as well as the distributor. Again no physical property is stolen so they've only lost out on the profit, not on the costs for the media and packaging. This would most likely be the second most common form, somebody gives a copy of a package to a friend who would otherwise purchase it.
3) Physically stolen software. This is basically shoplifting, the publisher and distributor both lose out on the profit itself as well as the costs for the product.
I'm not trying to condone software piracy, I'm just trying to understand and explain the losses involved. It's not a victimless crime because money is lost, but its nowhere near as staggering as the BSA would indicate.
I suppose a fourth entry would be:
4) Theft of source code. This is a big bad one that could potentially cause huge losses. It's also probably the rarest.
The main problem is that Fleischmann and Pons went to press far to early and didn't go through due process in checking there results. They also had done this on a number of other occasions. So, maybe they had something and maybe they didn't. In the mean time all the press that quickly published their results in the first place looked awfully bad when it looked like the scientists were overstating their results.
Was cold fusion total bunk? I don't know, but now to get any press at all for it the results are going to have to be pretty darned conclusive. Reporting excess energy that may or may not be the result of a nuclear reaction probably won't get a nod in the mainstream scientific media anymore.
This is why normally when you read a scientific press release there are a lot of caveats added by any interviewed scientists, even when the main stream press adds on a more sensationalistic headline. The fact that something happened takes the back seat to a plausible explanation of why that something happened.
Shareholders don't necessarily have the final say in the operation of a company. There is the CEO and the board of directors. For instance when Apple was at there very lowest point many investors were vocally calling for them to embrace Intel and Microsoft and slap the Apple logo on a Wintel clone. RedHat is also further constrained from changing licensing agreements because the code is already GPL'd. Even if they wanted to, which I'm sure they don't, they can't repackage GPL'd source code under some other license. They could come out with their own OS of course, but that would be corporate suicide.
It's a rather scary thing for privacy of any kind, but it shouldn't come as a suprise that the NSA refused to provide information on it to congress. Perhaps the bluntness of the response was suprising, but not the gist.
The NSA is charged with signal intelligence, or intercepting communications from foreign countries whether friend or foe. From the text of the story they aren't so concerned about them directly spying on US citizens, but rather on them collecting intelligence from foreign countries who are collecting intelligence on US citizens. So us damned Canadians spy on you damned Americans and the NSA in turn spies on the Canadians. Insert your favourite foreign country where appropriate.
The answer to the question "What safeguards are in place to prevent the NSA from intercepting foreign communications with US citizens?" is probably "Nothing".
Part of being a scientist of any flavour is realizing and admitting you're wrong or don't know the answer. That's how scientific progress works. You start with a model of reality, as reality starts not to fit well with the model you discard it and use a revised model, repeat ad infinitum. Try reading A Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, it spends some time talking about the scientific principle.
We missed our chance, we should've named it the A ark and sent some of the less sentient humans on a free trip to colonize the moon.
They are suing Apple Computer. I'm not sure about the others, but I'm sure if they're aware of them they will.
Actually, I just read the write up in the newspaper. The $60K figure that has been bandied about is what the owners of the theater (a small 140 seat theater) estimated as their losses. The cost for a print of the movie is $2500. This sounds a bit low, it may well be $2500 per reel. I'll pretend that the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram is occasionally factually correct.
At this point they're charged being charged with relatively minor crimes and are all ready talking plea bargaining.
The film that was returned was useless, damaged beyond repair (I live in the same neck of the woods as where it happened) the local news said last night. In the news report they said that a couple reals were returned but one was retrieved from a field someplace. Their lawyer said it was just a prank that went awry. Maybe a bit of jail time will help them figure out a better prank next time...
Censoring films is one thing, I don't agree with it, but its feasible. There's a finite number of movies produced that need to be examined and a whole industry that can just be disallowed based on the genre (the hardcore porn genre, or maybe even soft core, I have no idea what the Australian censorship board views as offensive)
Censoring web sites is pretty close to impossible. There are the obvious ones, I would expect that Hustler and any page attached to that domain would be blocked for instance. What about individual pages though? I can set up a page on a free web server such as Tripod or GeoCities with objectionable content. GeoCities would eventually yank it, but Tripod seems to not care. Personal web pages with material they would find offensive probably numbers in the millions. For an ISP to selectively block these pages isn't feasible, so their only choice would be to block sites that have one or more user pages with objectionable material. I.e. block GeoCities, Tripod, AOL and a large number of other providers. Great, except for the small fraction of objectionable pages on these servers there is a large number of non-objectional pages. A few of these even have useful material.
Basically the end result would be that a site such as slashdot could be censored from all Australian internet users if it ever were to fail Australia's movie screening process. Oh yeah, there's a small box on slashdot which contains the latest image from JenniCam as well as links to Rotten.com and so on.
In 1977 I was in grade five. I don't recall an inordinant amount of hype leading up to Star Wars. I remember rave reviews and almost an instant cult like following. Cult like in that just as people would go and see Rocky Horror Picture Show umpteen times they would also go and see Star Wars umpteen times. Obviously Star Wars was very main stream, but the following could best be described as a cult like following.
I went to see it, I think I've seen it in the theater two times. It was a good movie. For the time the special effects were amazing. I've been in a variety of places in a variety of drunken states as its been played, but I really haven't watched it again. A few years later when it appeared on HBO and my parents had purchased a VCR I did record it, but mostly because it was hiliarious in fast forward or reverse.
By then the quality of the special effects weren't as spectacular compared to other movies of the time. It was still a good movie though.
This prequel is a bit different though, there is an amazing amount of hype being dished out in advance. I happen to be pretty hard for the media to get to since I don't watch a lot of main stream TV and find playing CD's in my jeep more interesting than listening to the latest Howard Stern impersonator during my drives to and from work. I still can't avoid the hype though. The front page story on the local fish wrap was a review of the movie. I didn't read it but I might later. I'd like to see if its a totally favourable review and if not how many letters to the editor are going to be published lambasting the reviewer.
I will go and see the prequel. I'd like to say that I'll wait till the hype dies down, but I doubt if it ever will.
Not all people working as engineers are licensed nor are they all engineers. For instance I'm working as an electrical engineer, have an electrical engineering degree but am not licensed as an engineer in the state I'm working. At this point in time I choose not to license myself because in my present circumstances there is no benefit for me, my credibility or the people who have hired me.
Being a licensed engineer in general doesn't mean that you are tested on your engineering proficiency. You're tested on ethics, the law as it relates to contracts and your responsibilities as an engineer. Passing this exam and getting your license then entitles you to call yourself an engineer (your jurisdiction may vary, in Ontario Canada you're not an engineer unless you're licensed, I'm not sure about the jurisdiction where I am)
Passing the exam also changes the playing field. If you make poor engineering choices or somebody insinuates you have done so then a lawsuit can be brought about. A lawsuit can be brought about even on something said in passing or as a favour. This is the reason doctors and lawyers don't dispense free advice. They can still be sued no matter what caveats they apply. The governing body who granted your license will be on the publics side, not yours.
In some industries the above is important for your credibility: if I were designing biomedical electronics for instance; if I were a consultant etc. The same possibly goes for programmers as well. Most programmers don't write code that directly effects the public safety. Most programmers shouldn't be licensed. There is a pretty strong case that the programmer who designs the firmware that runs on the microcontroller that operates an insulin pump or EKG machine should be licensed.
Requiring all people working as programmers or engineers would drive the costs of any programmed or engineered products through the roof. The insurance to protect you against lawsuits is phenomenally expensive (although many large companies have blanket insurance for their engineers)
I'm sure IP comes into play here. I'm not sure how far along GLX is and whether IP would have to be released to the development community to support TNT2 with GLX. Basically when GLX was proprietary to SGI NDA agreements could be reached with the company itself. Though shall not release proprietary information or we'll hit you with a really big stick! This doesn't work as well in a distributed work environment.
Unfortunately individual share holders opinions are meaningless. Huge chunks of stocks are bought up by funds etc. and they generally have the biggest stick when dealing with the board of directors. That said it isn't a forgone conclusion that things will go awry at the whims of shareholders. I'm sure many of the big shareholders of Apple have told them to dump MacOS/MacOS X Server, go Intel and sell Windows boxes, obviously it hasn't worked.
As long as the board of directors is supportive of the direction of the company there won't be any 180 degree phase shifts, regardless of the opinions of even the major shareholders.
Of course it hasn't been officially announced that Red Hat is going public.
The guns in the black market for the most part are weapons which were once legally owned either by individuals or a gun shop. These weapons get stolen via breaking and entering and turned over to a fence for a quick profit. There is some number of guns that are actually imported illegaly but the number is a relatively low percentage. Cut off the source of the black market (i.e. restrict the sale of non-sporting fire arms to the general public) and most of the problem will quickly diminish. Some criminals will still manage to find weapons but by and large this won't be the case. Case in point: Canada, its fairly difficult to get a license for a handgun therefore most home owners don't have them (you need to prove you're in imminent danger, or have to be a member of a gun club in which case you don't have the right to keep it at home anyway). Compare the violent crime statistics of any large Canadian city to an appropriately sized American city: the murder rate will be much lower. There is crime in Canada, but murder is much lower per capita than in the US.
Other weapon types aren't restricted, if you want to hunt and want rifles or shotguns thats fine though you do have to be licensed. It's much more difficult to conceal a twelve gauge shotgun however.
The black market for firearms isn't very large, regardless of Canada's own war on drugs, because the ready source of firearms is missing.
People have always felt the need to segregate those who do horrible things from themselves. In the publicized cases over the last couple of years there have been a few common characteristics of the people behind the murders:
This to the public is the definition of a geek. It lets society get off the hook of delving into the real problems. Instead the symptoms get labeled as the problems. What does this mean? Rather than looking at why they preferred gaming so much, gaming is seen as the problem. "Censor computer games!" cries the public. "While you're at it, ban death metal!" shouts the clergy. This is much easier than having "What caused these people to be ostricized by their 'peers' in the first place?" as your battle cry. That would require real work and real thought.
There are very few journalists left in media, be it television, print or radio. For the most part they've all become socially acceptable versions of Geraldo Rivera and will carefully repeat what the public wants to hear. Nobody does interviews with youths seen as outsiders to let society see why they've become outsiders, instead they interview friends of the victims who just label them as outsiders. So they reinforce the myth or misdiagnosis.
Chances are a large section of the slashdot readership at one time or another has been labeled as an outsider. A better editorial interjection on the part of Hemos would have been "were you ever seen as an outsider, and if so why?"
I actually didn't miss that point, I know that people are developing out of an enjoyment of the act of developing. The point I'm trying to make is that it is possible for RedHat to make an honest living out of distributing the software and providing support. For the average person who has contributed something to the kernel or a command line utility this isn't the case without resorting to some convoluted logic (it made me a better and more renowned coder, therefore I got a good job). It's a bit like saying that depending on your field going to university is making money. No, going to university in my case enabled me to make fist-fulls of cash. On a similar token I'm probably going to start a free software project in the near future (this weekend if payed work doesn't get in the way), but since I purposely avoided writing software for a living by wiring together transistors it really won't make one iotas difference to my career unless I change careers. Monetary gain isn't why I'm doing what I'm going to do and I don't expect any. For some people however even a small stipend which either helps pay the rent or lets them upgrade there old reliable 80386 to a dizzyingly fast 133 MHz pentium can make a difference in their ability to contribute.
It'd be more interesting if the I/O interface was changed. USB interface circuitry is relatively cheap and is all microcontroller based. Cypress sells a development board for about a hundred bucks. Chop off that parallel port and the serial port and interface with USB. Go to your favourite store and get either an USB CD or a USB hard drive (I think these are pricey, they're made for the super mobile crowd who want a hard drive that fits in a shirt pocket)
You've now got a portable MP3 player. This may be impeded if the people who make USB devices won't tell you how to talk with their CD or hard drive (or is it like SCSI and a standard?)