While the PS2's CPU has only a mere 300MHz clock speed, it is not an Intel architechture CPU -- it is a MIPS Rx000 (sorry, can't remember which model straight off the top of my head) by SGI (originally). It can execute more instructions in parallell than an Intel CPU can, in fact, enough to be faster than the XBox's 733MHz CPU. That's the same reason an AMD AthlonXP 1800 at 1533MHz can beat a Pentium 4 2000 in all tests but Q3A (Q3A seems to be optimized for Intel over AMD). Performance matters, not numbers. The clock speed is really meaningless when comparing CPUs of different architectures. MIPS (millions of instructions per second) is a much more accurate measurement. So, DivX, DVD, or whatever wouldn't be a problem at all for the PS2, since it can handle HDTV resolution DVD decoding/scaling. It would be MUCH slower to send uncompressed video (24bits/pixel*1280columns*720rows*30fps=79MB/s) over a 100mbit/s network (12.5MB/s theoretical maximum without protocol overhead) than it would be for the PS2's CPU to decode it locally, since DivX video is usually around 500KB/s for transparent quality at 1440x720 (I know - I use DivX to compress my high-res 3D animations from Bryce et al when I'm low on hard drive space). Firewire is only 40MB/s, so this would still be insufficient for uncompressed consumer HDTV video.
Actually, the NUON processor is quite fast. I blame Intel for everybody thinking that MHz/GHz is everything. The NUON processor is extremely superscalar, so much so that it is capable of real-time raytracing. There is a raytracing demo on the NUON page. NUON doesn't need "hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second" because it's got all those features built in, although there's nothing stopping anyone from adding a GeForce3 and 3D sound chip to the PCB as far as I can see. They aren't behind... They are pioneers.
That's what I was working on for the Indrema before it went down (visualization stuff), and I definitely plan to do it for the NUON if they indeed do release the tools, and I can get my hands on a NUON-enabled DVD player (maybe I can finally convince my parents to ditch the VCR..).
...if people know that they can ask you and you'll hunt around like a gopher to have the answers for them, pretty soon they'll get lazy and start using you in that respect
I have a good story about that... A friend of mine once asked me to show him how to build a computer. So, I took him over to my house before his bus came on yearbook day (this was 8th grade) and taught him how to build a box. Eventually, he got a job at a computer store. Occasionally I'd get a call from him something like this: "Hey dude, how do I do this?" and he'd explain some problem he was having with a customer of his, and I'd spend hours of my time scouring the then-"young" web for an answer, and call him back when I found it. By our senior year in high school, he was getting paid during school as a sysop at the school, and he worked at this computer store, and was earning 50K a year (or so he says...). Now we're graduated, and he's earning more than his dad, and I'm still looking for a non-fast-food job.
So, here are a few lessons I've learned, some related to this story and in no particular order:
Humility pays off more than arrogance in the long run, but don't let your dreams and ambitions get trampled by someone else, and don't be afraid to let others know what you're good at. That said, always try hard not to be cocky (which is very hard for all of us egotistical programmers).
Give others credit where credit is due.
Help others with problems, but expect them to give credit as well. "Give props to the little people" without trying to sound better than them, and they'll be much more likely to give props back to you.
You (I) are (am) not perfect. We are prone to make mistakes. Some of us may make them less frequently than others, but everyone does. Also, sometimes other people really do know how to do something better than we do. As programmers, architects, or what have you, it is important to be open minded and willing to compromise and see new ideas.
Well, before I step off my $.50 soap box, I'm sure some of you are wondering, "What place does a 17 year old kid have to counsel me on coding? What kind of experience could he have?" For your information (not my ego), my team placed 3rd in my state's high school programming competition out of 30+ schools. I worked on/wrote anew libfbx, libkbd, libtimer, am a former member of the U4X project (my reasons for leaving are beyond the scope of this post), as well as numerous unreleased toys and XMMS plugins I use at parties and just for fun. I started programming in 6th or 7th grade, in gw-basic, and I wrote a game in QuickBASIC (no, it wasn't a text adventure), which I then ported to C. I have experience too, you know, and my opinions are at least almost as valid as the next guy's.
Don't forget about Linux's QoS/Fair Queueing and Equal Cost Multipath routing options. The Quality of Service could be used to send packets that need high throuput (i.e. video streaming or downloads) to House A's fat, laggy pipe, for example, and game packets could be sent to House B's skinny, but low-latency pipe. The ECM could be used on a central router to send packets sequentially (I think) along each Internet connection, making sure that they all get used equally.
So far as I know this 'policy' - which isn't law and never has been - hasn't been tested in a U.S. court. Just because MS saws it's legal and fair doesn't make it so; even the fanboys can't argue this point (or they could, I suppose, but they'd look like idiots trying to pass themselves off as judges).
The problem is, since MS (or for that matter, big business) owns the government, before anyone even gets a chance to test the EULA in court, they find themselves in an extended stay at the state-sponsored concrete hotel.
Wow! 90WPM? My record is 134 on a cheap keyboard. But yeah, I fully agree that the old 15 pound tactile feedback clunkers are the best for speed typing. Although there's something to be said about those truly ergonomic keyboards, not those cheap knockoffs of the already painful MS natural keyboard... Gosh I hate those wave keyboards. What's worse, they put some of the keys on the wrong side. I'd like to see a split keyboard that duplicates all border keys on either side.
Why not go with the newer digital format that's giving scsi a run for its' [sic] money?
Hmm. That sounds like it came straight from a piece of marketing literature, or a consumer magazine. Honestly, the fact that firewire is digital has no relevance. Of course it's digital. Computers are digital. That's like saying, "Why not go with the newer visual format that's giving eyesight a run for its money." No offense or anything, but there's really no information in that sentence (not that this post is much better so far;), which is why it sounds so much like marketing material.
Okay, now to get to the real point of this post. I've seen how slow a firewire drive is. At school (high school) we made a Star Wars parody movie, where we blew up a rival high school a la the Death Star. Anyway, after we spent 72 straight hours drawing the light sabers on our intel boxen (which, I might add, looked as good as those in Episode I), the final edit was done on an iMac with Adobe Premiere. They had to copy all the files to an external firewire drive for storage, and then back to the internal drive for editing. This took forever, because firewire is a bit slower than SCSI.
(Plug: if anyone from THX is reading, e-mail me at nitrogen@slimetech.com and offer me a job!)
The concept is more like shared memory (/dev/tmpfs anyone?). The user (or the system software) specifies what gets put on the RAM disk, and treats it like a normal device, where as the kernel chooses what goes into the disk cache. So, instead of doing something like capture_video >/mnt/7ms_harddrive/high_bitrate.avi and hoping that the disk cache will keep up, you can do capture_video >/mnt/8ns_ramdrive/high_bitrate.avi and know for sure, and then cp the file to a hard drive for storage. A very large solid state DRAM disk would then allow storing multiple high quality videos, and do all the editing in realtime, then save the result to a disk if needed, or else broadcast the video.
Aah. I write music too. I like MP3 because it allows me to distribute my music more easily to my friends. But, I still like to listen to other peoples music.
So... You have never ripped a CD to your hard drive? What do you do when you run out of songs? I mean, I wouldn't dream of going back to CD audio for my listening-while-coding needs. 74 Minutes in 650MB of CD Audio vs. 500+ minutes in 650MB (depending on bit rate) of OGG or MP3. The choice seems obvious to me. I rip all of my CDs to my hard drive, encode them to MP3, then when I get tired of an artist I don't have to go fetch a new CD. RIAA be fixed. Everything I've said here is within fair use: making archival copies. I can't comprehend how anyone could "Steer clear of this MP3 craze." Napster was a craze. MP3/OGG is the future.
Worldgroup is still in use by a local ISP where I live (WFOL), still running a never-used BBS, that nobody knows exists unless they bother to dial the access number from a non-PAP-enabled computer. I especially like how when I would dial in it would show a menu: 1.) Connect to BBS. It was cool when I typed in 0, since it would give me a free telnet to anywhere on the Internet. I could probably have done some damage that way, if I were a cracker. I used to spend all my time on that BBS, either looking for local people to talk to, or going to the telecafe.com:9999 through a free chat gateway they set up.
Aah, those were mystical times.
This may have been said already, but I was looking at the VectorC site and I noticed that the standard edition does not include Athlon or Pentium 4 support. I just want to comment that if a Linux port is made (and it should be), the standard edition should include Athlon support. I don't care about P4 support so much. That is, if the Linux version uses the same pricing/licensing system as the Windows version.... But, until I'm actually making money from my games, I can't justify spending more than $75 for a compiler, and my main target CPUs are the Athlon/Duron and the P2/P3.
Hmm... $150? I think it would be really cool if they made a $75 version for hobbyist game programmers like me that want to be able to make a decent performing game without spending all my time writing ASM routines. I definitely would like to see it ported to Linux, anyway, though. I bet that a commercial optimizing/vectorizing compiler designed for game performance would attract game makers, since I suspect many game companies are under the impression that Linux is slow. Perhaps the XFree86 team could use VectorC to compile all the display drivers, and nVidia could use it to compile their drivers, and game companies could use it to compile their games... Faster performance would lead to more games, and more games would lead to more Linux, more Linux would lead to more games and other software, etc. Perhaps it (VectorC) would also encourage game developers to release Linux and Windows versions at the same time. That was a major issue that hurt Loki.
Wow. A patent on the SetUID bit? And I thought patents were getting weird now... This was in 1973. Next thing you know people will be patenting the number 4 or something...
VSTa is a very promising upcoming OS, with a microkernel architecture and very modular design. Why wasn't it mentioned in that list? Development seems to be active. I know of someone at MontaVista who spends all his spare time working on VSTa. It's supposed to be similar to Plan9 in a few ways, very advanced, research-based, designed by people experienced with kernel and OS programming... It already supports SMP.
It seems to me that you just contradicted yourself. [paraphrase:] "Standardization kills choice"... "I have standardized on MS." So, you like to see choice, but you'd rather not use it? Interesting.
I have a bunch of old AT power supplies I got from a warehouse clearance thing that have a "Glitchmaster" label on them. When I was first playing with one of these outside the case, I noticed that after I unplugged it it kept running its fan for like 45 seconds. Under a heavy power load (3 or 4 ancient hard drives - one of which was a seagate 1GB full-height 5.25") it lasts for about 1 seconds without power. The only problem I've seen with these Glitchmaster supplies is that the output voltage increases the longer it's been unplugged (weird), and that some of them seem to keep trying to come on for a while after I disconnect the power (or turn off the power switch), causing the drives to click every 30 seconds for the next few minutes. Probably would kill any new hard drive by the power "clicks," but if a better version of this power supply were released in an ATX style it would be very nice for use in rural areas, or with older UPS's that have a slight delay in the switch to battery mode.
While hydrogen would burn with less heat and not as long, an explosion in a collision would seem to be much bigger, causing more immediate damage to the target. I don't think that the WTC towers were levelled by a big roaring fire, but by the damage done to the building immediately upon impact -- the top 20 or so floors eventually caused the damaged floors to collapse, and the force of that falling debris caused the rest of the buildings to disintegrate, perhaps by design.
... and masturbation can lead to abuse of others, especially while viewing child pornography, whether real or virtual. Child pornography, real or virtual, should be banned outright because of the proven mental effects pornography has on people. There's something a bishop of mine always told people that I will never forget (additions in parentheses): there is not a man (or woman?) on the planet that can view pornography (intentionally or unintentionally) and not be affected by it. Pornography is the greatest threat to society today. The deep-rooted effects of these images and videos have yet to be fully understood, but it has already been proven that most predators, of adults and children alike, either were introduced or desensitized to such ideas by pornographic material, or used porn to excite themselves before actually violating someone. Pornography has caused families to fall apart, fathers to abuse wives and children, children to become sexually active, and worse. It takes a great fool to think that he can view this material and remain unaffected, unless he is already as evil as Satan himself.
As for who should decide what adult content is defined as, I see nothing wrong with another organization determining this, as long as restrictions were placed on what organization it was. After all, movie ratings are made by the MPAA, and video game ratings by the ESRB. If it was the government, they might label any web site that disagrees with the DMCA or other laws as inappropriate. If it was a corporation, it might try to find a way to reduce accessibility of competitors pages. In my opinion, a trustworthy religious organization would be the best organization to make such determinations.
People speak of their right to view or create pornography. What about my right not to view it, and to protect the children I will one day have from it? Scientific studies have proven that pornography has a negative effect on self respect, respect for others, and sometimes other areas. While I can't agree with anyone viewing pornographic material, I probably can't stop them from doing it either, but at least give me the ability and means to prevent myself and others who use my home network from accidentally stumbling onto pornographic material cleverly disguised (for example) as a classic video games tribute page.
While this may just be "my two cents," these aren't your ordinary pennies. Wheatback, indian head, lead, or whatever -- valuable pennies they be. Many people share my views.
I thought that's what High School was for. It is my opinion that all general education should be moved to high school, such as literature, arts, history, etc., and that what is the Junior and Senior years now in college should become the Freshman and Sophomore years. High school should be for generic principles, college for details. The opposite seems to be used today, where high school students are bombarded with formulas and algorithms for solving a particular linear programming style of problem, without learning why those rules and formulas work, or even how they are useful in real life. High school should be a time to learn about everything, so that a decision on what to learn in college can be made, and then in college the detailed information would be filled in, while maintaining the option of taking courses outside one's major remaining for personal enjoyment.
Nobody has received any binaries who hasn't purchased the kit, since there'd be no use for them anyway... The only way to get the binaries is by buying a kit from Sony (because nobody else is distributing them). That kit contains the source code for all GPL elements. So, they are complying with the GPL, since nobody else has the binaries.
Slashdot Mirror
While the PS2's CPU has only a mere 300MHz clock speed, it is not an Intel architechture CPU -- it is a MIPS Rx000 (sorry, can't remember which model straight off the top of my head) by SGI (originally). It can execute more instructions in parallell than an Intel CPU can, in fact, enough to be faster than the XBox's 733MHz CPU. That's the same reason an AMD AthlonXP 1800 at 1533MHz can beat a Pentium 4 2000 in all tests but Q3A (Q3A seems to be optimized for Intel over AMD). Performance matters, not numbers. The clock speed is really meaningless when comparing CPUs of different architectures. MIPS (millions of instructions per second) is a much more accurate measurement. So, DivX, DVD, or whatever wouldn't be a problem at all for the PS2, since it can handle HDTV resolution DVD decoding/scaling. It would be MUCH slower to send uncompressed video (24bits/pixel*1280columns*720rows*30fps=79MB/s) over a 100mbit/s network (12.5MB/s theoretical maximum without protocol overhead) than it would be for the PS2's CPU to decode it locally, since DivX video is usually around 500KB/s for transparent quality at 1440x720 (I know - I use DivX to compress my high-res 3D animations from Bryce et al when I'm low on hard drive space). Firewire is only 40MB/s, so this would still be insufficient for uncompressed consumer HDTV video.
Actually, the NUON processor is quite fast. I blame Intel for everybody thinking that MHz/GHz is everything. The NUON processor is extremely superscalar, so much so that it is capable of real-time raytracing. There is a raytracing demo on the NUON page. NUON doesn't need "hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second" because it's got all those features built in, although there's nothing stopping anyone from adding a GeForce3 and 3D sound chip to the PCB as far as I can see. They aren't behind... They are pioneers.
That's what I was working on for the Indrema before it went down (visualization stuff), and I definitely plan to do it for the NUON if they indeed do release the tools, and I can get my hands on a NUON-enabled DVD player (maybe I can finally convince my parents to ditch the VCR..).
--
I should live at home. I'm 17.
I have a good story about that... A friend of mine once asked me to show him how to build a computer. So, I took him over to my house before his bus came on yearbook day (this was 8th grade) and taught him how to build a box. Eventually, he got a job at a computer store. Occasionally I'd get a call from him something like this: "Hey dude, how do I do this?" and he'd explain some problem he was having with a customer of his, and I'd spend hours of my time scouring the then-"young" web for an answer, and call him back when I found it. By our senior year in high school, he was getting paid during school as a sysop at the school, and he worked at this computer store, and was earning 50K a year (or so he says...). Now we're graduated, and he's earning more than his dad, and I'm still looking for a non-fast-food job.
So, here are a few lessons I've learned, some related to this story and in no particular order:
Well, before I step off my $.50 soap box, I'm sure some of you are wondering, "What place does a 17 year old kid have to counsel me on coding? What kind of experience could he have?" For your information (not my ego), my team placed 3rd in my state's high school programming competition out of 30+ schools. I worked on/wrote anew libfbx, libkbd, libtimer, am a former member of the U4X project (my reasons for leaving are beyond the scope of this post), as well as numerous unreleased toys and XMMS plugins I use at parties and just for fun. I started programming in 6th or 7th grade, in gw-basic, and I wrote a game in QuickBASIC (no, it wasn't a text adventure), which I then ported to C. I have experience too, you know, and my opinions are at least almost as valid as the next guy's.
End Sermon
this one actually made me laugh out loud
Don't forget about Linux's QoS/Fair Queueing and Equal Cost Multipath routing options. The Quality of Service could be used to send packets that need high throuput (i.e. video streaming or downloads) to House A's fat, laggy pipe, for example, and game packets could be sent to House B's skinny, but low-latency pipe. The ECM could be used on a central router to send packets sequentially (I think) along each Internet connection, making sure that they all get used equally.
The problem is, since MS (or for that matter, big business) owns the government, before anyone even gets a chance to test the EULA in court, they find themselves in an extended stay at the state-sponsored concrete hotel.
Wow! 90WPM? My record is 134 on a cheap keyboard. But yeah, I fully agree that the old 15 pound tactile feedback clunkers are the best for speed typing. Although there's something to be said about those truly ergonomic keyboards, not those cheap knockoffs of the already painful MS natural keyboard... Gosh I hate those wave keyboards. What's worse, they put some of the keys on the wrong side. I'd like to see a split keyboard that duplicates all border keys on either side.
Hmm. That sounds like it came straight from a piece of marketing literature, or a consumer magazine. Honestly, the fact that firewire is digital has no relevance. Of course it's digital. Computers are digital. That's like saying, "Why not go with the newer visual format that's giving eyesight a run for its money." No offense or anything, but there's really no information in that sentence (not that this post is much better so far ;), which is why it sounds so much like marketing material.
Okay, now to get to the real point of this post. I've seen how slow a firewire drive is. At school (high school) we made a Star Wars parody movie, where we blew up a rival high school a la the Death Star. Anyway, after we spent 72 straight hours drawing the light sabers on our intel boxen (which, I might add, looked as good as those in Episode I), the final edit was done on an iMac with Adobe Premiere. They had to copy all the files to an external firewire drive for storage, and then back to the internal drive for editing. This took forever, because firewire is a bit slower than SCSI. (Plug: if anyone from THX is reading, e-mail me at nitrogen@slimetech.com and offer me a job!)
(roll credits, show bloopers, andThe concept is more like shared memory (/dev/tmpfs anyone?). The user (or the system software) specifies what gets put on the RAM disk, and treats it like a normal device, where as the kernel chooses what goes into the disk cache. So, instead of doing something like capture_video > /mnt/7ms_harddrive/high_bitrate.avi and hoping that the disk cache will keep up, you can do capture_video > /mnt/8ns_ramdrive/high_bitrate.avi and know for sure, and then cp the file to a hard drive for storage. A very large solid state DRAM disk would then allow storing multiple high quality videos, and do all the editing in realtime, then save the result to a disk if needed, or else broadcast the video.
Aah. I write music too. I like MP3 because it allows me to distribute my music more easily to my friends. But, I still like to listen to other peoples music.
So... You have never ripped a CD to your hard drive? What do you do when you run out of songs? I mean, I wouldn't dream of going back to CD audio for my listening-while-coding needs. 74 Minutes in 650MB of CD Audio vs. 500+ minutes in 650MB (depending on bit rate) of OGG or MP3. The choice seems obvious to me. I rip all of my CDs to my hard drive, encode them to MP3, then when I get tired of an artist I don't have to go fetch a new CD. RIAA be fixed. Everything I've said here is within fair use: making archival copies. I can't comprehend how anyone could "Steer clear of this MP3 craze." Napster was a craze. MP3/OGG is the future.
Worldgroup is still in use by a local ISP where I live (WFOL), still running a never-used BBS, that nobody knows exists unless they bother to dial the access number from a non-PAP-enabled computer. I especially like how when I would dial in it would show a menu: 1.) Connect to BBS. It was cool when I typed in 0, since it would give me a free telnet to anywhere on the Internet. I could probably have done some damage that way, if I were a cracker. I used to spend all my time on that BBS, either looking for local people to talk to, or going to the telecafe.com:9999 through a free chat gateway they set up. Aah, those were mystical times.
This may have been said already, but I was looking at the VectorC site and I noticed that the standard edition does not include Athlon or Pentium 4 support. I just want to comment that if a Linux port is made (and it should be), the standard edition should include Athlon support. I don't care about P4 support so much. That is, if the Linux version uses the same pricing/licensing system as the Windows version.... But, until I'm actually making money from my games, I can't justify spending more than $75 for a compiler, and my main target CPUs are the Athlon/Duron and the P2/P3.
Hmm... $150? I think it would be really cool if they made a $75 version for hobbyist game programmers like me that want to be able to make a decent performing game without spending all my time writing ASM routines. I definitely would like to see it ported to Linux, anyway, though. I bet that a commercial optimizing/vectorizing compiler designed for game performance would attract game makers, since I suspect many game companies are under the impression that Linux is slow. Perhaps the XFree86 team could use VectorC to compile all the display drivers, and nVidia could use it to compile their drivers, and game companies could use it to compile their games... Faster performance would lead to more games, and more games would lead to more Linux, more Linux would lead to more games and other software, etc. Perhaps it (VectorC) would also encourage game developers to release Linux and Windows versions at the same time. That was a major issue that hurt Loki.
Now, there's no reason to start a discussion on all the reasons to dump Windows. There are far too many, and would likely fill /.'s hard drives.
Wow. A patent on the SetUID bit? And I thought patents were getting weird now... This was in 1973. Next thing you know people will be patenting the number 4 or something...
VSTa is a very promising upcoming OS, with a microkernel architecture and very modular design. Why wasn't it mentioned in that list? Development seems to be active. I know of someone at MontaVista who spends all his spare time working on VSTa. It's supposed to be similar to Plan9 in a few ways, very advanced, research-based, designed by people experienced with kernel and OS programming... It already supports SMP.
It seems to me that you just contradicted yourself. [paraphrase:] "Standardization kills choice" ... "I have standardized on MS." So, you like to see choice, but you'd rather not use it? Interesting.
There is a solution: shorter, fatter buildings.
I have a bunch of old AT power supplies I got from a warehouse clearance thing that have a "Glitchmaster" label on them. When I was first playing with one of these outside the case, I noticed that after I unplugged it it kept running its fan for like 45 seconds. Under a heavy power load (3 or 4 ancient hard drives - one of which was a seagate 1GB full-height 5.25") it lasts for about 1 seconds without power. The only problem I've seen with these Glitchmaster supplies is that the output voltage increases the longer it's been unplugged (weird), and that some of them seem to keep trying to come on for a while after I disconnect the power (or turn off the power switch), causing the drives to click every 30 seconds for the next few minutes. Probably would kill any new hard drive by the power "clicks," but if a better version of this power supply were released in an ATX style it would be very nice for use in rural areas, or with older UPS's that have a slight delay in the switch to battery mode.
While hydrogen would burn with less heat and not as long, an explosion in a collision would seem to be much bigger, causing more immediate damage to the target. I don't think that the WTC towers were levelled by a big roaring fire, but by the damage done to the building immediately upon impact -- the top 20 or so floors eventually caused the damaged floors to collapse, and the force of that falling debris caused the rest of the buildings to disintegrate, perhaps by design.
As for who should decide what adult content is defined as, I see nothing wrong with another organization determining this, as long as restrictions were placed on what organization it was. After all, movie ratings are made by the MPAA, and video game ratings by the ESRB. If it was the government, they might label any web site that disagrees with the DMCA or other laws as inappropriate. If it was a corporation, it might try to find a way to reduce accessibility of competitors pages. In my opinion, a trustworthy religious organization would be the best organization to make such determinations.
People speak of their right to view or create pornography. What about my right not to view it, and to protect the children I will one day have from it? Scientific studies have proven that pornography has a negative effect on self respect, respect for others, and sometimes other areas. While I can't agree with anyone viewing pornographic material, I probably can't stop them from doing it either, but at least give me the ability and means to prevent myself and others who use my home network from accidentally stumbling onto pornographic material cleverly disguised (for example) as a classic video games tribute page.
While this may just be "my two cents," these aren't your ordinary pennies. Wheatback, indian head, lead, or whatever -- valuable pennies they be. Many people share my views.
I thought that's what High School was for. It is my opinion that all general education should be moved to high school, such as literature, arts, history, etc., and that what is the Junior and Senior years now in college should become the Freshman and Sophomore years. High school should be for generic principles, college for details. The opposite seems to be used today, where high school students are bombarded with formulas and algorithms for solving a particular linear programming style of problem, without learning why those rules and formulas work, or even how they are useful in real life. High school should be a time to learn about everything, so that a decision on what to learn in college can be made, and then in college the detailed information would be filled in, while maintaining the option of taking courses outside one's major remaining for personal enjoyment.
Nobody has received any binaries who hasn't purchased the kit, since there'd be no use for them anyway... The only way to get the binaries is by buying a kit from Sony (because nobody else is distributing them). That kit contains the source code for all GPL elements. So, they are complying with the GPL, since nobody else has the binaries.