Since it's a gaming machine and doesn't need an independant os for much more than thread management, This also means that those 3MBs will probably be dedicated to what is currently on screen.
From a texture memory perspective, one texel (texture pixel) is 4 bytes, assuming 32 bit color with no compression. This means theres room for a million pixels in that memory at one time, or just shy of a 1024x1024 pic. That memory can be manipulated quickly too!</I>
Umm, except you've got it a bit wrong. The GameCube's Flipper GPU uses 1MB for texture cache and 2MB for Frame buffer and z-buffer. Also, the frame buffer that is written to screen is actually in main memory and usually statically allocated to PAL TV sizes so that there are no performance differences between US/Janpan NTSC and European PAL systems.
Also, S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) is 6:1 in 24-bit color and Flipper can decompress the texture data directly out of the 1MB texture cache. You can also only fill the cache with the particular chunks of textures you need (I forget the exact details but the texture cache is split up into many addressable chunks).
The Z-buffer and indirect texture mapping hardware are responsible for so many of the real nifty Gamecube effects. That heat shimmering in _Wind Waker_ and _RE4_ is one example, as are the shadowing effects in RE4 that are also not present in the PS2 version.
Its all in the Nintendo Patents and its all pretty interesting stuff.
Also, the X360 has 10 MB eDRAM embedded in its GPU. My understanding is that this is the direct-to-screen frame buffer (I could be wrong), which is not what that 3MB of 1T-SRAM is used for in the Gamecube (and presumably Revolution). Again, the Gamecube has its to-screen frame buffer in main memory.
You set up a bunch of people who pray for another group, perhaps to cure them of cancer. The experimental group has no knowledge they are even in a survey, nor do the doctors or anyone working with them. You come back a year later and see if there is a difference between them and a control group.
Such work has actually been published in respected, peer-reviewed journals. Please forgive me for not remember the researcher and journal. The end result was that the prayer did nothing more than placebos.
If Genesis is the literal and complete truth in every detail[1], who did Cain and Abel have kids with?
I don't know about you, but in the version I read, Abel got shitcanned and Cain and Seth had kids:-)
The thing that always (not really, though) mystifies me is that the people complaining about a stable interface could just do it themselves. Maybe not J. Random Hacker, but the big companies could do so. I mean, nVidia does just such a thing, seperating the in-kernel part from the driver proper.
So, why don't these folks just make their own driver API out-of-tree and provide a patch for the vanilla kernel and popular vendor branches? Then they get to write their ABI or API compatible drivers and only port the interface between in-branch kernel releases. Boom, they write easy drivers, stay legal (debateable, but likely), and don't even have to answer to the mainline kernel developers. They won't get a lot of mainline help, but heh, it makes writing their drivers easier.
Answer: they don't want to do it. They simply don't value having ABI or API stable drivers enough to do the work themselves. That's it, simple. They can't or won't provide or partner with other players to provide such an interface. Its too much work, for too little gain.
Funny, that's also the story from the mainline kernel devs! Ironic how that works out, no?
I guess noone's reading the blurb (go figure), but the deal is made with Wayport and McDonald's. Wayport operates the wireless equipement, which is pay-for-access normally. This deal lets DS users access the Wayport network for free to play Wi-Fi enabled games.
I find it a bit disconcerting that my town (largest in 60 miles) has at least two McD's and no Wayport access, but the dinky towns 30 miles away do. C'est la vie!
i can still hear ducktails playing but i can't tell you the theme music from a single game released post SNES
The single reason I still prefer _Ocarina of Time_ to _Wind Waker_ is the music. The music from WW is simply not very memorable, whereas I can easily remember half-a-dozen songs from OoT, which I played 5 years ago. Hell, I've never gotten the theme from the starting zone out of my head; it just keeps playing and playing and playing and playing.
That song's been in my head every day for 5 years. My GF knows it. All my friends know it. I can't even remember the name of it, but I can remember it and I can remember the scenes of the game that used it.
Never mind the better graphics, camera, battle system, art style (loved it, btw), and everything else (except sailing time, blech) in _Wind Waker_. OoT is nearly unplayable to me after playing WW, but the damn music won't get out of my head, so I still prefer it more (and yes, I did replay it after playing WW, so its not simply nostalgia).
The only trouble we've had is when we set our prices too low -- below $99.00, no one will take the product seriously. We've tried multiple times to set it lower, as we're well down the ROI curve, but it just won't sell below $99.95.
And Wendy's doesn't actually sell many triple-cheeseburgers. They took it off of the menu once and found that sails of double-cheeseburgers (a product with good profit margins) fell off dramatically. Lesson: the availability of a higher-priced product increases sales of some lower-priced products.
If you desperate to sell your software at a lower cost (maybe selling more copies), then offer a "higher-priced" version and reduce the price on the regular version. It probably doesn't even need to be very different. Heck, print out the help pages and call it a manual you sell for $30 (and costs you $3 to print on demand).
Basically, a web server written in Erlang, which supports lightweight processes and high concurrency. In other words, each connection is a completely separate process and shares no information with other processes except by message passing.
Also, a
recent paper from the primary designer of Erlang, Joe Armstrong.
The key points are that Erlang process creation and message passing are orders of magnitude faster than Java/C# threads. Also, YAWS could handle dedicated traffic from a 16 machines. It handled over 80,000 connections, maintaining 800 kB/s traffic. Apache died around 4,000 connections. The key graphic is on page 4 of the paper. The red lines denote YAWS; notice haw it maintains that bandwidth (even though particular connections may drop, the web server keeps chugging along). Threaded Apache is in green; process-forking Apache is in blue.
Just because you can't disprove the tooth fairy theory, doesn't make it a viable option.
In fact, that's the precise reason to reject the "theory". The ability to test a hypothesis is the BIG difference between science and all the other junk people come up with. Lose the ability to disprove and idea and you're left with something that, no matter how appealing or intuitive, is simply NOT science.
If you want to get rid of side-effects and make parallelization easy, try using a pure functional language. But people don't like programming in pure functional languages (well, I don't), they like programming in C (or other procedural-style language).
Or Fortran. No joking! One of the great things about Fortran code is fewer cases of pointer aliasing. Its still possible, but pointers are used for fewer things and there's ways to specify "pure" procedures. Heck there's even "elemental" procedures to write a procedure to execute on every element of an array. A bit of compiler hacking and those procedures could get turned into vector operations. I'm pretty sure the Intel ifort compiler does this, but not what extent.
let's sell NASA to a private company, maybe they would have the balls to continue into space and do their jobs instead of screwing around with politics and allow the engineers and scientists to do their jobs?
So why aren't there any private space stations again?
Re:I refuse to finish reading this post.
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
Ouch, you're right. Its hypotheses. Long day, very tired. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You failed science class, didn't you?
Actually, I have a BS in Physics and have studied some physics at the graduate level.
You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge.
I apologize for being unclear. As you say, we use the knowledge we have to make a hypothesis to support a scientific theory. The act of testing the hypothesis helps to strengthen the body of scientific evidence atributable to a theory. However, a test must not only be passable, but also capable of failure.
The ability to test for failure is a hallmark of scientific endeavors. It is true that scientific theories and hypothesii rest on a body of proof. However, it is somewhat more accurate (IMHO, and I'm not being original in this) that its not the success of the tests that demonstrates the power of a theory (say the Theory of Evolution), but the inability of tests to disprove the theory.
Its a slightly different wording and way to perceive science and scientific endeavors, but I think its utimately a more powerful statement. That is why I would argue with anyone that ID or creationism is not science. Neither of those things are disprovable, a prerequisite for testing and the methods of scientific observation.
I won't answer your other questions because my stance is basically the same as yours. I don't believe in or condone the labeling of ID or creationism as science. Those things are beliefs or faiths, something a lot of people place stock in, but they are not science. I think you seriously missinterpreted my statement, but I guess I was pretty unclear. I'm still trying to find a more concise way to state all of this.
Feel free to email me if you want to talk more about this.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
My reply for ID and creationism as a science.
To scientifically prove the existance of an Intelligent Designer or application of evolution to God you must show me how to disprove that existance or application. Remember, all science is known by testing for it be disproven.
So, you tell me how to find out God doesn't exist, and I'll tell you why creationism is science!
I caught exactly 30 seconds of this "Awards Show" before changing the channel. The only thing I saw was the game "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater" being nominated for "Game of the Year". Is it just me, or has that game only been released for about two weeks. Also, the year's not yet over.
So, if they'll nominate brand new titles (i.e., one's that haven't been evaluated over time to see if they hold that special something) for "Game of the Year" and they'll do this before the end of the year, it leaves one conclusion.
The "Awards Show" was nothing more than a hackneyed marketing shceme to showcase this season's holiday lineup. Nothing more, nothing less.
As for SciFi being there first, that's hardly an argument we (Geeks) want to see used.
Heinlein claimed that the water bed couldn't be patented because he described exactly how one worked in _Stranger in a Strange Land_. So, there's at least a precedent for such a thing.
He also said that one of the manufacuters sent him a free water bed in thanks.
Re:A lot of people seem to be missing something...
on
A College Guide to EA
·
· Score: 1
AC,
Did you perhaps attend Full Sail? I'm thinking of applying there and attending their Game Development program. Even if you're not an alumni, could you give me any pointers about their graduates that you've met in "the field"?
Now, substitue that by income level of families and then we're talking.
My basic point is that less-well-to-do families have a harder time producing children that do well in school. Economic health is a good indicator for many other problems that less able students face. Lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper materials (i.e., paper, pencils, clothes, shoes, coats, etc.), parents that are less able to spend quality time with the kids, kids from families with a poor social life together, stigmatization from their peers, and families that just resent the kid for ever being born.
You can quibble with me on details and specific cases, but I've been there and seen all of it in action throughout my life. I was a poor kid, but my mother was smart and loving enough to do the right things to help me get ahead in life. She's now a teacher, teaching many children from the POOREST parts of southeast Georgia.
Her kids are the poorest economically and educationally. She does her best, but there's no escaping the effects of simply being dirt poor.
So, in a roundabout way, my point is that comparing performance by economic groups is probably a better way to compare school performance in each state. I don't have the data for this, but maybe I'll look into it.
My suspicion (and I've been told by others that there is data to back this up, any pointers are helpful to confirm this), is that middle-class and up kids do quite damn good across the nation. Poor kids don't do so good across the nation. Differences in other states can probably be correlated to distribution of incomes among populations across the nation.
In other words, poor-performing schools and states are more likely to be such because of a larger share of economically poor families (students) to better-off families.
So what does stop a Panzer division have to do with offense?
I mean, stopping your enemy is the friggin' definition of strong national defense.
Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I seriously suggest you check out the 10-15% long term unemplyment and microscopic growth rates in France and Germany.
IIRC, the unemployment rates in France include measurement of discouraged workers. The number that gets flashed on TV in the US does not include such persons. If you compare fairly, our current unemployment rate is 9.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
So, doesn't look like such a good comparison after all, does it?
I still don't get it, its not like he bought the rights to Casablanca and then made a completely different movie, he added things that at the time he didn't have the budget/technology for.
IIRC, that would be Ted Turner. He colorized a lot of classic black-and-white films.
One parting thought, I would rather have an idiot controled by greedy men in office than a bunch of self-righteous, eletist bastards because the idiot and his greedy men are much more predictable and can only screw the country so much before people kick them out.
While your vote is your business, I just couldn't help but note the bull-headed wrongness in this sentence.
First off, if the idiot can only "screw the country so much before people kick them out", then what do you think is being asked of you come November 2nd? Its your job to decide if the idiot has screwed up and needs to be kicked out.
Second, all serious candidates for President of the USA (the most influential political position in the world) are elites. George Bush is just as much a patrician elite as John Kerry, if not more so (Kerry's family and friends haven't made careers out of bailing him out). I've not seen Kerry being self-righteous, but I did see and American President tell my nation that our opinion on the subject of war in our names was none of his concern as he, and he alone, got to make the decisions.
Now, Mike Moore is a big guy and can take care of himself, but what was so wrong in his movie? He took liberty with his opinions, but I didn't see any place he really forced opinion into truth. Was it biased, misleading, or the work of someone with strong opinions? Of course. However, *none* of the criticisms has been placed on the major points and thrusts of the movie. All criticism has been on the minor points, on MM's opinions, which pale in comparison to the major truths: 1.) GWB and his family and friends have long standing relationships with regimes and families at the center of international terrorism, 2.) the war in Iraq was sold through deception, 3.) that war has caused a lot of heart-break in America and the world, 4.) the war is not going well (even in 2003), 5.) it is the underprivelidged youth that are fighting the bulk of this war (and I would say this is true on all sides).
It could simply be that Microsoft does not trust the open source community not to flagrantly disregard all microsoft patents....
As a general rule-of-thumb, this is already true of most FOSS developers. Let developers concentrate on technology, let the lawyers concentrate on patents.
Well, its true except for the "flagrant" part, as I'm pretty sure most FOSS developers don't know about patents in their relevant products.
Slashdot Mirror
Since it's a gaming machine and doesn't need an independant os for much more than thread management,
This also means that those 3MBs will probably be dedicated to what is currently on screen.
From a texture memory perspective, one texel (texture pixel) is 4 bytes, assuming 32 bit color with
no compression. This means theres room for a million pixels in that memory at one time, or just shy
of a 1024x1024 pic. That memory can be manipulated quickly too!</I>
Umm, except you've got it a bit wrong. The GameCube's Flipper GPU uses 1MB for texture cache and 2MB for Frame buffer and z-buffer. Also, the frame buffer that is written to screen is actually in main memory and usually statically allocated to PAL TV sizes so that there are no performance differences between US/Janpan NTSC and European PAL systems.
Also, S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) is 6:1 in 24-bit color and Flipper can decompress the texture data directly out of the 1MB texture cache. You can also only fill the cache with the particular chunks of textures you need (I forget the exact details but the texture cache is split up into many addressable chunks).
The Z-buffer and indirect texture mapping hardware are responsible for so many of the real nifty Gamecube effects. That heat shimmering in _Wind Waker_ and _RE4_ is one example, as are the shadowing effects in RE4 that are also not present in the PS2 version.
Its all in the Nintendo Patents and its all pretty interesting stuff.
Also, the X360 has 10 MB eDRAM embedded in its GPU. My understanding is that this is the direct-to-screen frame buffer (I could be wrong), which is not what that 3MB of 1T-SRAM is used for in the Gamecube (and presumably Revolution). Again, the Gamecube has its to-screen frame buffer in main memory.
Such work has actually been published in respected, peer-reviewed journals. Please forgive me for not remember the researcher and journal. The end result was that the prayer did nothing more than placebos.
If Genesis is the literal and complete truth in every detail[1], who did Cain and Abel have kids with? :-)
I don't know about you, but in the version I read, Abel got shitcanned and Cain and Seth had kids
The thing that always (not really, though) mystifies me is that the people complaining about a stable interface could just do it themselves. Maybe not J. Random Hacker, but the big companies could do so. I mean, nVidia does just such a thing, seperating the in-kernel part from the driver proper.
So, why don't these folks just make their own driver API out-of-tree and provide a patch for the vanilla kernel and popular vendor branches? Then they get to write their ABI or API compatible drivers and only port the interface between in-branch kernel releases. Boom, they write easy drivers, stay legal (debateable, but likely), and don't even have to answer to the mainline kernel developers. They won't get a lot of mainline help, but heh, it makes writing their drivers easier.
Answer: they don't want to do it. They simply don't value having ABI or API stable drivers enough to do the work themselves. That's it, simple. They can't or won't provide or partner with other players to provide such an interface. Its too much work, for too little gain.
Funny, that's also the story from the mainline kernel devs! Ironic how that works out, no?
Its all here: Wayport Products
And a location finder is here: Wayport locator
I find it a bit disconcerting that my town (largest in 60 miles) has at least two McD's and no Wayport access, but the dinky towns 30 miles away do. C'est la vie!
The single reason I still prefer _Ocarina of Time_ to _Wind Waker_ is the music. The music from WW is simply not very memorable, whereas I can easily remember half-a-dozen songs from OoT, which I played 5 years ago. Hell, I've never gotten the theme from the starting zone out of my head; it just keeps playing and playing and playing and playing.
That song's been in my head every day for 5 years. My GF knows it. All my friends know it. I can't even remember the name of it, but I can remember it and I can remember the scenes of the game that used it.
Never mind the better graphics, camera, battle system, art style (loved it, btw), and everything else (except sailing time, blech) in _Wind Waker_. OoT is nearly unplayable to me after playing WW, but the damn music won't get out of my head, so I still prefer it more (and yes, I did replay it after playing WW, so its not simply nostalgia).
And Wendy's doesn't actually sell many triple-cheeseburgers. They took it off of the menu once and found that sails of double-cheeseburgers (a product with good profit margins) fell off dramatically. Lesson: the availability of a higher-priced product increases sales of some lower-priced products.
If you desperate to sell your software at a lower cost (maybe selling more copies), then offer a "higher-priced" version and reduce the price on the regular version. It probably doesn't even need to be very different. Heck, print out the help pages and call it a manual you sell for $30 (and costs you $3 to print on demand).
Just an idea.
Then you'll want to look into YAWS.
Basically, a web server written in Erlang, which supports lightweight processes and high concurrency. In other words, each connection is a completely separate process and shares no information with other processes except by message passing.
Also, a recent paper from the primary designer of Erlang, Joe Armstrong.
The key points are that Erlang process creation and message passing are orders of magnitude faster than Java/C# threads. Also, YAWS could handle dedicated traffic from a 16 machines. It handled over 80,000 connections, maintaining 800 kB/s traffic. Apache died around 4,000 connections. The key graphic is on page 4 of the paper. The red lines denote YAWS; notice haw it maintains that bandwidth (even though particular connections may drop, the web server keeps chugging along). Threaded Apache is in green; process-forking Apache is in blue.
Just because you can't disprove the tooth fairy theory, doesn't make it a viable option.
In fact, that's the precise reason to reject the "theory". The ability to test a hypothesis is the BIG difference between science and all the other junk people come up with. Lose the ability to disprove and idea and you're left with something that, no matter how appealing or intuitive, is simply NOT science.
If you want to get rid of side-effects and make parallelization easy, try using a pure functional language. But people don't like programming in pure functional languages (well, I don't), they like programming in C (or other procedural-style language).
Or Fortran. No joking! One of the great things about Fortran code is fewer cases of pointer aliasing. Its still possible, but pointers are used for fewer things and there's ways to specify "pure" procedures. Heck there's even "elemental" procedures to write a procedure to execute on every element of an array. A bit of compiler hacking and those procedures could get turned into vector operations. I'm pretty sure the Intel ifort compiler does this, but not what extent.
let's sell NASA to a private company, maybe they would have the balls to continue into space and do their jobs instead of screwing around with politics and allow the engineers and scientists to do their jobs?
So why aren't there any private space stations again?
Ouch, you're right. Its hypotheses. Long day, very tired. Yeah, that's the ticket.
You failed science class, didn't you?
Actually, I have a BS in Physics and have studied some physics at the graduate level.
You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge.
I apologize for being unclear. As you say, we use the knowledge we have to make a hypothesis to support a scientific theory. The act of testing the hypothesis helps to strengthen the body of scientific evidence atributable to a theory. However, a test must not only be passable, but also capable of failure.
The ability to test for failure is a hallmark of scientific endeavors. It is true that scientific theories and hypothesii rest on a body of proof. However, it is somewhat more accurate (IMHO, and I'm not being original in this) that its not the success of the tests that demonstrates the power of a theory (say the Theory of Evolution), but the inability of tests to disprove the theory.
Its a slightly different wording and way to perceive science and scientific endeavors, but I think its utimately a more powerful statement. That is why I would argue with anyone that ID or creationism is not science. Neither of those things are disprovable, a prerequisite for testing and the methods of scientific observation.
I won't answer your other questions because my stance is basically the same as yours. I don't believe in or condone the labeling of ID or creationism as science. Those things are beliefs or faiths, something a lot of people place stock in, but they are not science. I think you seriously missinterpreted my statement, but I guess I was pretty unclear. I'm still trying to find a more concise way to state all of this.
Feel free to email me if you want to talk more about this.
My reply for ID and creationism as a science.
To scientifically prove the existance of an Intelligent Designer or application of evolution to God you must show me how to disprove that existance or application. Remember, all science is known by testing for it be disproven.
So, you tell me how to find out God doesn't exist, and I'll tell you why creationism is science!
I presume that's not your objective.
I caught exactly 30 seconds of this "Awards Show" before changing the channel. The only thing I saw was the game "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater" being nominated for "Game of the Year". Is it just me, or has that game only been released for about two weeks. Also, the year's not yet over.
So, if they'll nominate brand new titles (i.e., one's that haven't been evaluated over time to see if they hold that special something) for "Game of the Year" and they'll do this before the end of the year, it leaves one conclusion.
The "Awards Show" was nothing more than a hackneyed marketing shceme to showcase this season's holiday lineup. Nothing more, nothing less.
As for SciFi being there first, that's hardly an argument we (Geeks) want to see used.
Heinlein claimed that the water bed couldn't be patented because he described exactly how one worked in _Stranger in a Strange Land_. So, there's at least a precedent for such a thing.
He also said that one of the manufacuters sent him a free water bed in thanks.
On Arrakis, Chani stalks YOU!
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
You fogot "wabbit season", huhuhuhuh!
AC,
Did you perhaps attend Full Sail? I'm thinking of applying there and attending their Game Development program. Even if you're not an alumni, could you give me any pointers about their graduates that you've met in "the field"?
Now, substitue that by income level of families and then we're talking.
My basic point is that less-well-to-do families have a harder time producing children that do well in school. Economic health is a good indicator for many other problems that less able students face. Lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper materials (i.e., paper, pencils, clothes, shoes, coats, etc.), parents that are less able to spend quality time with the kids, kids from families with a poor social life together, stigmatization from their peers, and families that just resent the kid for ever being born.
You can quibble with me on details and specific cases, but I've been there and seen all of it in action throughout my life. I was a poor kid, but my mother was smart and loving enough to do the right things to help me get ahead in life. She's now a teacher, teaching many children from the POOREST parts of southeast Georgia.
Her kids are the poorest economically and educationally. She does her best, but there's no escaping the effects of simply being dirt poor.
So, in a roundabout way, my point is that comparing performance by economic groups is probably a better way to compare school performance in each state. I don't have the data for this, but maybe I'll look into it.
My suspicion (and I've been told by others that there is data to back this up, any pointers are helpful to confirm this), is that middle-class and up kids do quite damn good across the nation. Poor kids don't do so good across the nation. Differences in other states can probably be correlated to distribution of incomes among populations across the nation.
In other words, poor-performing schools and states are more likely to be such because of a larger share of economically poor families (students) to better-off families.
So what does stop a Panzer division have to do with offense?
I mean, stopping your enemy is the friggin' definition of strong national defense.
I seriously suggest you check out the 10-15% long term unemplyment and microscopic growth rates in France and Germany.
IIRC, the unemployment rates in France include measurement of discouraged workers. The number that gets flashed on TV in the US does not include such persons. If you compare fairly, our current unemployment rate is 9.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
So, doesn't look like such a good comparison after all, does it?
I still don't get it, its not like he bought the rights to Casablanca and then made a completely different movie, he added things that at the time he didn't have the budget/technology for.
IIRC, that would be Ted Turner. He colorized a lot of classic black-and-white films.
One parting thought, I would rather have an idiot controled by greedy men in office than a bunch of self-righteous, eletist bastards because the idiot and his greedy men are much more predictable and can only screw the country so much before people kick them out.
While your vote is your business, I just couldn't help but note the bull-headed wrongness in this sentence.
First off, if the idiot can only "screw the country so much before people kick them out", then what do you think is being asked of you come November 2nd? Its your job to decide if the idiot has screwed up and needs to be kicked out.
Second, all serious candidates for President of the USA (the most influential political position in the world) are elites. George Bush is just as much a patrician elite as John Kerry, if not more so (Kerry's family and friends haven't made careers out of bailing him out). I've not seen Kerry being self-righteous, but I did see and American President tell my nation that our opinion on the subject of war in our names was none of his concern as he, and he alone, got to make the decisions.
Now, Mike Moore is a big guy and can take care of himself, but what was so wrong in his movie? He took liberty with his opinions, but I didn't see any place he really forced opinion into truth. Was it biased, misleading, or the work of someone with strong opinions? Of course. However, *none* of the criticisms has been placed on the major points and thrusts of the movie. All criticism has been on the minor points, on MM's opinions, which pale in comparison to the major truths: 1.) GWB and his family and friends have long standing relationships with regimes and families at the center of international terrorism, 2.) the war in Iraq was sold through deception, 3.) that war has caused a lot of heart-break in America and the world, 4.) the war is not going well (even in 2003), 5.) it is the underprivelidged youth that are fighting the bulk of this war (and I would say this is true on all sides).
It could simply be that Microsoft does not trust the open source community not to flagrantly disregard all microsoft patents....
As a general rule-of-thumb, this is already true of most FOSS developers. Let developers concentrate on technology, let the lawyers concentrate on patents.
Well, its true except for the "flagrant" part, as I'm pretty sure most FOSS developers don't know about patents in their relevant products.