It won't... it will make piracy even more lucrative because *everyone* buying new machines will be forced to buy pirated Windows (potentially the only way to get it) to play their games and such.
I guess they may start throwing people in jail for using Microsoft products which may deter some folks.
People think that this decree will suddenly mean that everyone will stop using Windows there, which will end the piracy. In actuality it will just make piracy even worse and more common.
I doubt it will have that much effect on piracy, to be honest, and may even make it worse. People are assuming that just because they will inact this means that everyone will suddenly stop using Windows and switch, which isn't likely to happen.
As many other people have stated, people will just have to spend $5 more per computer purchase to go down on the street to buy a pirated copy of Windows XP to play their games since the machine won't come with it. If anything, it will make piracy much more lucrative because now *everyone* who wants Windows will buy pirated copies, even those buying new machines, instead of only the ones who are upgrading from older OSs (this is assuming that pre-built PCs bundled with Windows are giving out legit copies of Windows and not already pirated ones). The same goes for all the bundled software that vendors usually ship with the computers. I see the market for pirated software will increase instead of decrease as long as the $5 per pirated CD (which frequently contains more than one application on it) is a "reasonable" price. Even if it isn't, the market will drive the price down.
If the pre-built PC manufacturers are already shipping pirated Windows and bundled software, then there will be little, if any change.
So... I think that piracy will either be minimally effected or will grow.
I have to ask, if you work for a private company, why would you let your company control that level of detail?
Quite simply, you *don't* have to. When you interview for a job, you are typically given a bit of paperwork to sign. In this package, you usually get NDAs and the like that tell you what you can and cannot do with respect to information that you will have and/or be privy to at the job as well as things you can and cannot do with the expected results if you break the agreement. It is YOUR DUTY to READ and UNDERSTAND the documents BEFORE YOU SIGN them. If you find something you do not understand, you should ask them to clarify it and/or consult your own lawyer BEFORE YOU SIGN. If you have specific "what ifs" to test the terms, do this BEFORE YOU SIGN. If you find certain terms are not agreeable, you can then negotiate for more agreeable terms BEFORE YOU SIGN. AFTER YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND what you are AGREEING to IF you sign the document, YOU make the CHOICE of whether to sign the document or not, thereby agreeing to the terms. If you found that you cannot agree to the terms and/or haven't arrived at a reasonable set of terms through negotiation, you have the option of NOT SIGNING and going about your own business elsewhere.
Otherwise, you file this sort of situation under YO FAULT. He agreed to something then broke his agreement, the penalty for which is termination of employment. Case closed.
Yeah, the major cause of code bloat and slow apps is that fast processors have allowed people to just ignore or write off being efficient and/or go ahead and add all those other features into the app because they have plenty of room and processing power to deal with it or... to just be sloppy. Back in the day, you had to distill your designs to include the most important stuff and chop out the fat because you didn't have the space or processing power to do some things. Try fitting a word processor that handled fonts, underline, bold, etc. in 64KB of memory. Today's word processors can't even fit in less than 1MB.
I've always been amused when folks from "normal" CS came to work in our embedded labs. "You want me to do *what*? and I only have 1MB of space?" Heh... people just don't realize what you can do in even 1KB of space.
Yeah, this is what I was gonna say. We sold a commercial application and a part of selling it was the escrow clause. When we were bought by the competition and closed down, all those who bought it had the source code to it.
Just sounds like a post saying "these people were stupid".
IIRC, battle.net is not much more than a gathering place that you go to to hook up with other people... not much more than an IRC server or something. You don't need a lot of machines to do that and they really don't do much except provide a meeting place. I don't know much about battle.net but from what I've seen the few times I've used it, I imagine that it can be handled by not much more than a couple machines.
The last I heard, the SOE EverQuest farm was over 1000 machines (maybe even more than 1500 now) that make up their server farm. That many machines requires a few IT personnel and also the MTBF of hard drives and other equipment will definitely be an issue as I imagine that there are a number of hardware failures per week that need replacing and such. It also requires a bit of real estate to set it all on and a fairly large supply of electricity.
I could probably run battle.net in my home, to be honest.
".NET Remoting" is fairly broad. It covers everything from Web Services down to old fashioned RPC. The protocols you can select from for your purposes include (but is not limited to) SOAP/XML down to a binary protocol for higher performance.
ah... I thought the original ARM was not related to the AXP but I thought the StrongARM actually used a subset of the AXP (first, only the 32-bit stuff and then a limited subset of even that) instruction set. Of course, the design goals were for low power for the StrongARM. I did a little searching and what it seems is that DEC used some of the design techniques they used on the AXP on the ARM to produce the StrongARM. Thanks for the correction.
The timeline of the AXP and PA8000 may be as you state and I stated that wrong anyway. My train of thought at the time of writing that was the SPEC benchmarking of the two. I remember the SPEC wars between the PA8000 family and the AXP as the thing to watch in the HPC as an attempt at validation of the two different design philosophies (Brainiac vs. SpeedFreak).
The fact that the EV6 was so smart meant that the compiler didn't need to be all that clever to make code that Alpha could run very quickly.
I guess "smart" is a relative term I guess how you apply it. If you say the designers were smart in making the chip very simple (dumb) which made compilers easy to write because there weren't that many ways to do a particular thing well, then I'd agree with this statement.
The thing about the Alphas were they really were RISC. The 21064 has *horrible* performance with strings and byte oriented operations because byte level addressing was not present in the instruction set. String manipulation and the like were synthesized in the libraries by using shifts, masks, and such. Not a very *smart* CPU... quite dumb actually (not that this is a bad thing... it made it simple). The story was that the designers were a little too purist with the first Alpha and "underestimated" the amount of byte level operation/addressing that was used or something or just wanted to really make the Alpha a number cruncher. At this level of the architecture, there was no out of order execution or the like. A pipeline stall caused *everything* to stop until the memory request was handled.
Very shortly after the 21064, byte level addressing and manipulation was put into the Alpha line. Of course, this was really nice and improved a lot of those type operations. Also, out of order execution was put in at a later point. That was the really nice Alpha.
As far as living on... there are many CPUs today that have at least a part of their lineage with the Alpha. Either their FSB (Athlon), their philosphy (high clock speeds), or direct decendents (StrongARM).
Another bit of history: at the time the Alpha was released, HP had another CPU that they liked a lot. It was the PA8000 family. The PA followed the "wide" philosophy of processor speed - it had lots of execution units, out of order execution, and all the other stuff that we see a lot of today. The problem was that all of that extra circuitry made it *extremely* difficult to ramp up the clock speed. People referred to this camp of design as the "Brainiacs" because they did a lot per clock cycle and the clock speed was fairly low because of the complexity of the chip. The Alpha camp was called the "Speed freaks" in that they believed high clock speed was first, then later design in the complexity. Anyway, the PA8000 and the Alpha started out about the same speed but HP just couldn't keep up with the clock speed ramp up of the Alpha.
So... I guess back to the original topic... the Alpha was easy to write compilers for early on because of the simplicity of the instruction set (the chip is "dumb"). Later, when the Alpha crew added the byte operations/addressing it simplified some library writing. Later, out of order execution and such were added which didn't really impact the complexity of the instruction set as much as just made the compiler better. The OOE is where the "smarts" came in.
Complete opinion. I say inconsistencies in GUI suck more... what takes more time? using something you know works or having to learn 10 different arcane ways of doing it and remembering it to use it the next time and remembering which arcane way goes with what app? You can easily spend more time dorking with trying to figure out how to paste than simply using the couple of keystroke combinations... but hey... maybe you'd rather have to learn 80 ways to do the same operation.
You can even bind specific actions to data using regexps....and this is useful how? I can invision maybe one or two scenarios where this may be useful but not worth the trouble in my opinion. Maybe there are others that I haven't thought of.
There is a nagscreen that comes up and stays in the taskbar for a about 5 minutes everytime I boot up. This is one of the "features" in the latest service pack.
Go to the Control Panel, select System. One of the tabs is named "Automatic Updates". Uncheck the box that says "Keep my system up to date". I set this by default on all my pesonal machines.
You could also have found this by running Help, the query string being: "windows update", then look under the "Full text search matches" and the 11th entry (out of 15) is "Changing settings for automatic updating"
Wait a couple of years when the full force of DRMd closed systems hit you.
I want to play games today... probably in a few years as well... but "today" being the operative word.
"A Windows Hater Forces Himself to Use The Ever-Hated Windows XP for a Week and Complains About It"
At least that would give the reader fair warning about what the post was about.
As far as the cut/paste issue, I'm quite fast at it even in Windows... in fact, I don't often use the mouse to do it so I am not forced to stop what I'm doing and grab the mouse to perform this action. I do it all from the keyboard (ctrl/shift/arrows and ctrl-A are your friends). And at least all the applications use the same key sequence/combination and I don't have to spend time figuring out how to paste what I just copied in another window.
Back around 1997 my group built a cluster of laptops running MPI for kicks. We laughed at how small it was stacked so we talked about making things even smaller. We talked about getting a number of Palms together or some other such tiny form factor machines and selling "6-packs" of clustered computing power - even to the point of laughing about making flanisters to put them in or cardboard "beer-like" holdersr Of course, back then, the aggregate computing power of a "6-pack Cluster" was about equal to that of just a regular PC.
So you want government funded advertising for open source? How would you rationalize that? You want to raise taxes on everyone to fund these advertising campaigns?
Sorry, it is not the government's (at least the USA government) job to advertise products of any type, nor would I want it to be.
And yes, raising awareness of a product is advertising.
OSS typically advertises by word of mouth. If that's not enough to keep it going and other methods that the projects employ do not work either, it should die as per its own rules (survival of the fittest). Otherwise, it is WelfareOSS.
The UN shouldn't be a soapbox about markets, imo. Would the UN talk about sale and distribution of bread, milk, or CocaCola? (not talking about humanitarian aid)
When Java was released, it was quite obvious what it was. Sun saw that wide-appeal applications weren't being developed/ported on/to Sun platforms. The OSS productivity application suits were still pretty much in their infancy if even existing and Windows was where stuff was happening (Linux still being a tiny blip on the radar at that time). They knew that Sun also needed things like productivity packages and such applications to "round out" their offerings so they could continue to market their homogenous system workplace because many sites were forced to also bring in Windows boxes because Suns couldn't be the complete solution.
So, Sun came up with this language/system that incorporated many of the latest/best programming features with the additional benefit (especially to them) of being portable - called Java and if they could convert folks to Java, then Sun could get its applications for "free" no matter what platform the application was originally developed on.
Overall it has been somewhat of a success for Sun except that Linux started becoming interesting (even to some degree being enabled by Java) and eroding their workstation/desktop sales. With this new platform, you could still buy a Sun server for the stuff the servers are supposed to do but go with Linux clients. This isn't what Sun wanted. Java is close to what they wanted but it still requires a bit of work to port Java apps across JVMs at times.
At least to me, it is interesting to see how an effort by them to bolster and strengthen their offerings against Windows encroachment (and basically leech off of other development efforts in effect) also helps what is now one of their biggest non-Windows competitors take marketshare away from them.
I've used Suns before there was a Sparc all the way up to the E10k and have liked their hardware and support quite well. They've always had a problem offering the complete spectrum of applications even though they tried to be the whole solution.
Yup... this could cost Valve a lot of money and even lead to bankruptcy. Several years for lots of programmers' and artists' salaries doesn't come cheap. Now folks can just download for free their software. It will be interesting to see how this effects Valve and if they can continue game development.
Yes, but for many people, buying the product is much cheaper than buying the knowledge. Buying a car is much cheaper than going to school to know all things car. In fact, many people do not want to know how to write/develop/maintain software, nor do they want to have someone on-staff to do this (a person's salary for a year is much higher than the cost of buying a shrinkwrap license). This is why there is a support model for those who take it upon themselves to buy support.
I wouldn't mind working on any project that is useful to someone, but I still have to pay my own bills and eat. Writing free software will not allow me to pay for electicity to run my computers to write the software that they will use. It's a nice idea and all to write software so that other folks can keep their jobs, but not if it requires me to quit my job and do it for free. I'm not wealthy enough to do that.
Yeah, almost 3 years old now I believe. It's still pretty darn awesome even without considering its origin. That some fans put together something of this quality on a low budget really is incredible. On the makers' site, they go into detail of how they made the costumes and such (like one of the Sith's mask is really a juiced up paintball mask and how they made the Emperor's clothes).
NUMA has its bad cases as well. It's pretty easy to bring an O2K to its knees if you do stupid things (or do things on purpose to bring it to its knees).
Slashdot Mirror
It won't... it will make piracy even more lucrative because *everyone* buying new machines will be forced to buy pirated Windows (potentially the only way to get it) to play their games and such.
I guess they may start throwing people in jail for using Microsoft products which may deter some folks.
People think that this decree will suddenly mean that everyone will stop using Windows there, which will end the piracy. In actuality it will just make piracy even worse and more common.
I doubt it will have that much effect on piracy, to be honest, and may even make it worse. People are assuming that just because they will inact this means that everyone will suddenly stop using Windows and switch, which isn't likely to happen.
As many other people have stated, people will just have to spend $5 more per computer purchase to go down on the street to buy a pirated copy of Windows XP to play their games since the machine won't come with it. If anything, it will make piracy much more lucrative because now *everyone* who wants Windows will buy pirated copies, even those buying new machines, instead of only the ones who are upgrading from older OSs (this is assuming that pre-built PCs bundled with Windows are giving out legit copies of Windows and not already pirated ones). The same goes for all the bundled software that vendors usually ship with the computers. I see the market for pirated software will increase instead of decrease as long as the $5 per pirated CD (which frequently contains more than one application on it) is a "reasonable" price. Even if it isn't, the market will drive the price down.
If the pre-built PC manufacturers are already shipping pirated Windows and bundled software, then there will be little, if any change.
So... I think that piracy will either be minimally effected or will grow.
I have to ask, if you work for a private company, why would you let your company control that level of detail?
Quite simply, you *don't* have to. When you interview for a job, you are typically given a bit of paperwork to sign. In this package, you usually get NDAs and the like that tell you what you can and cannot do with respect to information that you will have and/or be privy to at the job as well as things you can and cannot do with the expected results if you break the agreement. It is YOUR DUTY to READ and UNDERSTAND the documents BEFORE YOU SIGN them. If you find something you do not understand, you should ask them to clarify it and/or consult your own lawyer BEFORE YOU SIGN. If you have specific "what ifs" to test the terms, do this BEFORE YOU SIGN. If you find certain terms are not agreeable, you can then negotiate for more agreeable terms BEFORE YOU SIGN. AFTER YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND what you are AGREEING to IF you sign the document, YOU make the CHOICE of whether to sign the document or not, thereby agreeing to the terms. If you found that you cannot agree to the terms and/or haven't arrived at a reasonable set of terms through negotiation, you have the option of NOT SIGNING and going about your own business elsewhere.
Otherwise, you file this sort of situation under YO FAULT. He agreed to something then broke his agreement, the penalty for which is termination of employment. Case closed.
Yeah, the major cause of code bloat and slow apps is that fast processors have allowed people to just ignore or write off being efficient and/or go ahead and add all those other features into the app because they have plenty of room and processing power to deal with it or... to just be sloppy. Back in the day, you had to distill your designs to include the most important stuff and chop out the fat because you didn't have the space or processing power to do some things. Try fitting a word processor that handled fonts, underline, bold, etc. in 64KB of memory. Today's word processors can't even fit in less than 1MB.
I've always been amused when folks from "normal" CS came to work in our embedded labs. "You want me to do *what*? and I only have 1MB of space?" Heh... people just don't realize what you can do in even 1KB of space.
Wow... never noticed it before... but the apple logo reminds me of Homestarrunner when he talks...
http://www.homestarrunner.com
Yeah, this is what I was gonna say. We sold a commercial application and a part of selling it was the escrow clause. When we were bought by the competition and closed down, all those who bought it had the source code to it.
Just sounds like a post saying "these people were stupid".
IIRC, battle.net is not much more than a gathering place that you go to to hook up with other people... not much more than an IRC server or something. You don't need a lot of machines to do that and they really don't do much except provide a meeting place. I don't know much about battle.net but from what I've seen the few times I've used it, I imagine that it can be handled by not much more than a couple machines.
The last I heard, the SOE EverQuest farm was over 1000 machines (maybe even more than 1500 now) that make up their server farm. That many machines requires a few IT personnel and also the MTBF of hard drives and other equipment will definitely be an issue as I imagine that there are a number of hardware failures per week that need replacing and such. It also requires a bit of real estate to set it all on and a fairly large supply of electricity.
I could probably run battle.net in my home, to be honest.
No.
".NET Remoting" is fairly broad. It covers everything from Web Services down to old fashioned RPC. The protocols you can select from for your purposes include (but is not limited to) SOAP/XML down to a binary protocol for higher performance.
Yeah, that's what I meant. They didn't use the AXP ISA, just the engineering knowhow to make the ARM fast and low power.
ah... I thought the original ARM was not related to the AXP but I thought the StrongARM actually used a subset of the AXP (first, only the 32-bit stuff and then a limited subset of even that) instruction set. Of course, the design goals were for low power for the StrongARM. I did a little searching and what it seems is that DEC used some of the design techniques they used on the AXP on the ARM to produce the StrongARM. Thanks for the correction.
The timeline of the AXP and PA8000 may be as you state and I stated that wrong anyway. My train of thought at the time of writing that was the SPEC benchmarking of the two. I remember the SPEC wars between the PA8000 family and the AXP as the thing to watch in the HPC as an attempt at validation of the two different design philosophies (Brainiac vs. SpeedFreak).
The fact that the EV6 was so smart meant that the compiler didn't need to be all that clever to make code that Alpha could run very quickly.
I guess "smart" is a relative term I guess how you apply it. If you say the designers were smart in making the chip very simple (dumb) which made compilers easy to write because there weren't that many ways to do a particular thing well, then I'd agree with this statement.
The thing about the Alphas were they really were RISC. The 21064 has *horrible* performance with strings and byte oriented operations because byte level addressing was not present in the instruction set. String manipulation and the like were synthesized in the libraries by using shifts, masks, and such. Not a very *smart* CPU... quite dumb actually (not that this is a bad thing... it made it simple). The story was that the designers were a little too purist with the first Alpha and "underestimated" the amount of byte level operation/addressing that was used or something or just wanted to really make the Alpha a number cruncher. At this level of the architecture, there was no out of order execution or the like. A pipeline stall caused *everything* to stop until the memory request was handled.
Very shortly after the 21064, byte level addressing and manipulation was put into the Alpha line. Of course, this was really nice and improved a lot of those type operations. Also, out of order execution was put in at a later point. That was the really nice Alpha.
As far as living on... there are many CPUs today that have at least a part of their lineage with the Alpha. Either their FSB (Athlon), their philosphy (high clock speeds), or direct decendents (StrongARM).
Another bit of history: at the time the Alpha was released, HP had another CPU that they liked a lot. It was the PA8000 family. The PA followed the "wide" philosophy of processor speed - it had lots of execution units, out of order execution, and all the other stuff that we see a lot of today. The problem was that all of that extra circuitry made it *extremely* difficult to ramp up the clock speed. People referred to this camp of design as the "Brainiacs" because they did a lot per clock cycle and the clock speed was fairly low because of the complexity of the chip. The Alpha camp was called the "Speed freaks" in that they believed high clock speed was first, then later design in the complexity. Anyway, the PA8000 and the Alpha started out about the same speed but HP just couldn't keep up with the clock speed ramp up of the Alpha.
So... I guess back to the original topic... the Alpha was easy to write compilers for early on because of the simplicity of the instruction set (the chip is "dumb"). Later, when the Alpha crew added the byte operations/addressing it simplified some library writing. Later, out of order execution and such were added which didn't really impact the complexity of the instruction set as much as just made the compiler better. The OOE is where the "smarts" came in.
... and interestingly enough, Microsoft is listed as one of the Promoter Members on the BlueTooth membership lists....
http://www.bluetooth.com/sig/membership.asp
Sounds like another round of Apple Benchmarking (tm) conducted like at the release of the G5s :)
So what if it is consistent? It still sucks.
...and this is useful how? I can invision maybe one or two scenarios where this may be useful but not worth the trouble in my opinion. Maybe there are others that I haven't thought of.
Complete opinion. I say inconsistencies in GUI suck more... what takes more time? using something you know works or having to learn 10 different arcane ways of doing it and remembering it to use it the next time and remembering which arcane way goes with what app? You can easily spend more time dorking with trying to figure out how to paste than simply using the couple of keystroke combinations... but hey... maybe you'd rather have to learn 80 ways to do the same operation.
You can even bind specific actions to data using regexps.
There is a nagscreen that comes up and stays in the taskbar for a about 5 minutes everytime I boot up. This is one of the "features" in the latest service pack.
Go to the Control Panel, select System. One of the tabs is named "Automatic Updates". Uncheck the box that says "Keep my system up to date". I set this by default on all my pesonal machines.
You could also have found this by running Help, the query string being: "windows update", then look under the "Full text search matches" and the 11th entry (out of 15) is "Changing settings for automatic updating"
Wait a couple of years when the full force of DRMd closed systems hit you.
I want to play games today... probably in a few years as well... but "today" being the operative word.
Yup... the 2nd post should have the title:
"A Windows Hater Forces Himself to Use The Ever-Hated Windows XP for a Week and Complains About It"
At least that would give the reader fair warning about what the post was about.
As far as the cut/paste issue, I'm quite fast at it even in Windows... in fact, I don't often use the mouse to do it so I am not forced to stop what I'm doing and grab the mouse to perform this action. I do it all from the keyboard (ctrl/shift/arrows and ctrl-A are your friends). And at least all the applications use the same key sequence/combination and I don't have to spend time figuring out how to paste what I just copied in another window.
Back around 1997 my group built a cluster of laptops running MPI for kicks. We laughed at how small it was stacked so we talked about making things even smaller. We talked about getting a number of Palms together or some other such tiny form factor machines and selling "6-packs" of clustered computing power - even to the point of laughing about making flanisters to put them in or cardboard "beer-like" holdersr Of course, back then, the aggregate computing power of a "6-pack Cluster" was about equal to that of just a regular PC.
So you want government funded advertising for open source? How would you rationalize that? You want to raise taxes on everyone to fund these advertising campaigns?
Sorry, it is not the government's (at least the USA government) job to advertise products of any type, nor would I want it to be.
And yes, raising awareness of a product is advertising.
OSS typically advertises by word of mouth. If that's not enough to keep it going and other methods that the projects employ do not work either, it should die as per its own rules (survival of the fittest). Otherwise, it is WelfareOSS.
The UN shouldn't be a soapbox about markets, imo. Would the UN talk about sale and distribution of bread, milk, or CocaCola? (not talking about humanitarian aid)
hmmm... the most expensive geek toy (and the rarest even so you can be that 1337 geek) is.... a girlfriend!!!!!
When Java was released, it was quite obvious what it was. Sun saw that wide-appeal applications weren't being developed/ported on/to Sun platforms. The OSS productivity application suits were still pretty much in their infancy if even existing and Windows was where stuff was happening (Linux still being a tiny blip on the radar at that time). They knew that Sun also needed things like productivity packages and such applications to "round out" their offerings so they could continue to market their homogenous system workplace because many sites were forced to also bring in Windows boxes because Suns couldn't be the complete solution.
So, Sun came up with this language/system that incorporated many of the latest/best programming features with the additional benefit (especially to them) of being portable - called Java and if they could convert folks to Java, then Sun could get its applications for "free" no matter what platform the application was originally developed on.
Overall it has been somewhat of a success for Sun except that Linux started becoming interesting (even to some degree being enabled by Java) and eroding their workstation/desktop sales. With this new platform, you could still buy a Sun server for the stuff the servers are supposed to do but go with Linux clients. This isn't what Sun wanted. Java is close to what they wanted but it still requires a bit of work to port Java apps across JVMs at times.
At least to me, it is interesting to see how an effort by them to bolster and strengthen their offerings against Windows encroachment (and basically leech off of other development efforts in effect) also helps what is now one of their biggest non-Windows competitors take marketshare away from them.
I've used Suns before there was a Sparc all the way up to the E10k and have liked their hardware and support quite well. They've always had a problem offering the complete spectrum of applications even though they tried to be the whole solution.
Yup... this could cost Valve a lot of money and even lead to bankruptcy. Several years for lots of programmers' and artists' salaries doesn't come cheap. Now folks can just download for free their software. It will be interesting to see how this effects Valve and if they can continue game development.
Yes, but for many people, buying the product is much cheaper than buying the knowledge. Buying a car is much cheaper than going to school to know all things car. In fact, many people do not want to know how to write/develop/maintain software, nor do they want to have someone on-staff to do this (a person's salary for a year is much higher than the cost of buying a shrinkwrap license). This is why there is a support model for those who take it upon themselves to buy support.
I wouldn't mind working on any project that is useful to someone, but I still have to pay my own bills and eat. Writing free software will not allow me to pay for electicity to run my computers to write the software that they will use. It's a nice idea and all to write software so that other folks can keep their jobs, but not if it requires me to quit my job and do it for free. I'm not wealthy enough to do that.
Yeah, almost 3 years old now I believe. It's still pretty darn awesome even without considering its origin. That some fans put together something of this quality on a low budget really is incredible. On the makers' site, they go into detail of how they made the costumes and such (like one of the Sith's mask is really a juiced up paintball mask and how they made the Emperor's clothes).
NUMA has its bad cases as well. It's pretty easy to bring an O2K to its knees if you do stupid things (or do things on purpose to bring it to its knees).