Even though I don't like the round cells in Eric's version (I made one with square cells) I have to admit the glider itself is a great choice for an emblem.
However, it's not an emblem for all the hackers, and that's the beauty of it. Only those who want to gang up and work as a team should adopt this emblem.
Individual hackers won't feel the need to use logos. In the Game of Life individual cells die anyway.
The glider represents the effort of hackers that work as a team with the same objective. Remember, the previous cells of a glider also die as the glider moves forward (just as old hackers 'retire'), but the point is that new cells are created (new hackers joining in), in a cycle that makes an entity move forward (hackerdom itself if you will). Can't think of a better choice.
I can see non-voice servers being a minority, for the very few hardcore roleplayers out there. In EQ terms, you'll probably have less non-voice serves than PK ones.
Voice comms in a game like CS is almost an absolute must.
Team-work is essential, and it's so fast paced that communicating via the keyboard is not an option. The only type of non-voice communication I used was moving the mouse to produce quick visual gestures to tell my team-mate things like "you go first", "duck, so I can climb over there", and stuff like that. No way are you going to type those. Getting your hand off the mouse for any length of time is not a good idea (unless you're a camper).
Counter-Strike is not a role-playing game.
I see the point of the article when it comes to role-playing games. Even then, when playing EQ I rarely met people actually roleplaying. When camping for long periods, everyone in the parties would chat about real life stuff. People would exchange email addresses and stuff like that.
It's not about the application, it's about the infrastructure.
It's a poor country. What better way to improve the economy than to provide them with technology that allows them to be productive and earn a living even from such remote places?
A bit of training and you have potentially thousands of Google Answers researchers, or chat-room moderators, or whatever jobs suitable for large amounts of low-qualified, low-wage work force who can work remotely online.
It's the logical step following the call-centres movement.
Reminds me of sometime back in 1999, when a friend and I were browsing the web from college. Suddenly we found someone's entire hard disk content. The whole lot.
It took us a while to recognise the content and realise the browser was pointing at file://....
Duh!
Wow, the amount of time I wasted just by following that link...
I saw this picture with a nice landscape. Decided to investigate and after a bit of Googling it turns out it's from somewhere in Kamioka, Japan. That's where physicists from around the world built this huge toy which they call Super-Kamiokande.
Some pretty impressive pictures, especially when you see that they built many of these to make this, just to fill it with water (warning huge pic, here's a smaller one), and conduct experiments into neutrinos, dark matter, and other cool stuff like that... Wow.
There you go, just learnt a few things, and added Kamioka to my list of places to visit;)
I submitted the JBoss story (not anonymous) 4 hours ago and it got promptly rejected (probably some automated system, 'cause it was too fast). Weird that they'd publish this now.
Regarding who cares, how about all the J2EE application developers out there?
As an European I'm happy to see Europe uniting and producing exciting technologies, but I wouldn't go as far as calling the USA "the enemy".
I don't agree with President Bush's foreign policy but I don't blame the USA and the American people for it. In fact, I think those who are backing Mr Bush (quite a few) are revolted with the rest of the world for things like 9/11. I understand their feelings, and hope that reason will be restored with time. We're not all out to destroy them. We value freedom just like the Americans do.
Developing technologies that compete with the US is a good thing. Not because they're the enemy, but because competition stirs people to work harder and produce "giant leaps" that will benefit us all.
It's about time we have another tech race, but amongst friends;)
I'm surprised how Google is choosing not to implement search features that would greatly enhance advanced queries.
How often I'd wish they allowed wildcards in their queries (where engl* would pull hits with england, english, etc).
Field searches still require you to add keywords, so I cannot just query "site:somesite.com" to get all the currently indexed pages from somesite.com
In this respect Altavista still produces better results, with an excelent range of fields to choose from.
If there is anything that Google is lacking, it's defenitely that.
Having said that, still my number one SE.
I don't know why you assumed the robots were ready. The chassis was, but the work on the electronics/low-level drivers was not.
So if you think all software components can be developed in parallel think again. Ever heard of critical path?
My part of the task as an individual was pushed as far as possible without having the robots ready.
I completed the base-station GUI and implemented the communication protocol at both ends (base-station and robot, taking some of the burden of the electronics guy) in parallel with the other guys, since I could use the radios decoupled from the robots, using a spare HandyBoard (the chosen controller), but this could only be pushed so far.
Any further and I'd be creating a simulator. I didn't want a simulator then, that's why I was investing in the robots.
We agreed on the communication protocol, but we never got as far as reaching the milestone where we could test it, by letting the robots loose, and have them communicate their progress (using dead-reckoning) to the base. Too many hardware glitches and slow low-level software progress (developed by the electronics guy) prevented this from happening in time. This is not a criticism of the electronics guy, he did well with the time available, it is rather a criticism of the task itself. The hardware (and low-level software) was a time-sink, that prevented us from reaching a working system.
It was on the actual day of the competition that the robot caught up with my development, and we could get the little red dots to move on the base-station's map, just to find that the compass (direction of motion) readings were not being properly converted before being sent to the base station. We were doing angle calculations when the speaker announced it was our turn to compete. End.
Of course it's not the robot's fault. It was our fault for underestimating the amount of time (and in my case money) required to get the robot to a working state. This is why I agree with Minsky to a certain extent, in that people spend more time with the soldering iron, than working on the actual AI.
If any lesson was to be learnt, I think the most important is: if AI is what interests you, and time is a constraint, be prepared to invest in (expensive) ready made robotic platforms. Sounds obvious now, but can be overlooked by newbies (such as undergrad or postgrad students).
Regarding my dissertation, I could have written about all this and got my degree (the other 2 guys did), but such a degree was of no value to me. I didn't go to Edinburgh to get a degree, I went there to learn about AI.
Minsky's words regarding robotics are shocking to a lot of people, but I'm no longer surprised, and my own experience completely backs his statement.
Back in 2000 I was at Edinburgh University doing an MSc in AI (Intelligent Robotics theme), when Minsky visited the city to talk in an AI symposium. Unlike all my fellow MSc colleagues (some of them never even heard of Minsky!) I paid the fee to go and listen to what the father of AI had to say.
My jaw dropped to the ground as I heard him speak about robotics, and how useless the whole discipline is. I thought robotics were the future of AI, yet the man was basically saying it was a big waste of money and time. If only I heard him...
He stated that robotics don't offer anything back to science, since you don't have control over all the variables, so he suggested simulators were the way forward.
I almost agreed with him there, but still thought it was an unfair attack on robotics. I wasn't the only one, as someone else in the room voiced his surprise and disagreement with Minsky.
My opinion back then was that robotics research, whether being useful to science or not, would: 1) lure badly needed funding towards the discipline and 2) provide real world solutions, where intelligent autonomous physical presence is required
I'm not saying I no longer feel like that, but my experience has reinforced Minsky's statement "Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart"
My experience then: MSc final project
A team of autonomous mobile rescue robots, to enter the RobocCup Rescue 2001 competition.
I teamed up with 2 other MSc students and we decided to do a joint project, so we had an electronics engineer, a mechanics engineer, and a software engineer (myself). Recipe for success? Not really, at least for me.
We spent most of the time working on the chassis, and electronics (for 2 robots). It was a great learning experience for myself, but that was not the only aim. I worked really hard on the software which would run on a base-station (my laptop). The idea was to have autonomous robots (obstacle avoidance on board, with heat seeking behaviour) and a base station that would communicate via RF to coordinate the 2 robots.
It never worked. We spent the whole time doing and fixing the hardware and never got around to gluing the AI. We still went to Seattle, hoping we'd crack it just in time, but no chance. They still looked cool chasing CNN's cameramen around (the low-level heat seeking behaviour), which earned us a picture of the bot in NY Times, but we didn't take part in the competition itself.
So what did I get out of it? Not much. Big debt (I funded the whole thing myself, using a bank loan), and didn't even finish my MSc, since I didn't feel I had much to write about in the dissertation.
Actually, you don't even need the something_invalid_here The ultimate lazy hacker (oops redundancy here) only types:
<input type>
That tiny tag will currently crash IE, Outlook, etc. It isn't valid HTML but so what. If the aim is to crash the browser, it doesn't really matter if it's valid.
I totally agree with you. We already have speed and quantity (i.e. google) what we need now is quality.
Some have a point in saying google provides much more than the simple search, but it still falls short of what I think could be done. Not that they (google) don't know how to do it, but they rather keep it fast, and you won't get fast AND quality at the same time.
So perhaps what we need is something to complement google. A slow, heavy_meta_data search engine that you can use to make complex queries.
For example, I want to get all the pages that contain the term "Eclipse" as a link text AND within a
(list) element, with at least 5 'incoming' links from distinct servers. And I should be able to provide it with a list of 'related' URLs (i.e. sun.java.com, developer.com) to push up the related context.
A further step still, would be to tick a 'use synonyms' box, and the search engine would automatically search all the combinations of synonyms of each keyword. This is why I said, you can't have it fast.
I seriously thought about distributed indexing back in 1999, and I'm glad I never implemented it. Some of the comments relating Grub are very good (i.e. prone to be poluted by tweaked clients). I'm now working on something related though. A framework for subject-specific web directories (like, mini-yahoos that anyone can produce), in open-source java. When I get it working it'll appear at jsite.org. These mini-directories would then share an API that could be combined into a single front-end (that's where megamap comes in). Still not pollution free, but the indexing clients are now a very select few.
Already some people gave examples of existing vibration -> recharging designs.
I remember watching a program in the BBC about some young engineer's competition. One of the guys (from South Bank University - London?) came up with this doughnut shaped tube, inside which a small iron(?) sphere would roll as you produced a vibration. You know the drill, strap the right kind of metal around one of the sides of the tube... produce magnetic fields... This thing would produce enough energy to recharge your mobile phone, using your body ondulation as you walk. I think that bloke won the competition BTW.
Pretty cool. Even though as someone mentioned before, the concept of using a small spring is quite good, if not better.
Last Xmas I spent a couple of weeks at my mum's, where all my old desktops are, now converted to Linux app & web servers. I couldn't get to terms with the fact that my former gaming machine, a dual P3-800 with a 22" monitor, was just sitting there being wasted. My only Windows (XP) machine left is my laptop, which is hardly good enough to run Chuckie Egg, never mind CS.
After a quick search on google and a couple of days fiddling around with Wine I got Counter-Strike working on the app server. What joy! Frame-rate not the best around (30-60fps) but still playable.
Not all games will run, and I hear EverQuest is the reason why many people need to keep at least one Windows machine lying around, but support for new games and applications is making the list of supported apps grow all the time.
Certainly worth a try...
Dare I suggest that lack of social skills due to computer use will be less of a problem in the future, as computer use will be less dependent on sitting down in a room in front of a desktop to become something you can do just about anywhere, in the company of your friends.
The hacker minority will probably stick to the old fashioned way, at least during heavy-duty programming sessions, but most kids will surely embrace mobile computing when it comes (wearable computers not far off?).
It's probably the right age, because its more or less the average puberty age.
Mind you, since apparently (and in my opinion strangely) such average is coming down people might want to take 1 or 2 years off, so 11 or 12 sounds more appropriate.
You have some good points there.
There are still some little hackers in the making out there, perhaps even more than before, but the great majority of the kids see computers as a toy/tool. I think that's ok, since most of them will be using computers as a tool in their professional careers but not necessarily as programmers. They need to be computer literate as users not as hackers.
What troubles me is that some of these future users when faced with the big decision of choosing their undergraduate course, will choose Software Engineering based on their fondness of computers, not realizing that there's a lot more into these courses than 'mouse wiggling'. I personally have met one such University first year drop-out. The guy just wasn't a hacker, he didn't have it in him. Now he spends his days at home, surfing the net and playing PlayStation (ironic, the very same hobbies that led to his misjudged decision).
Then I think "How should I go about educating my (future) kids about computers?". Well, I'm not going to force them down this or that path. I don't care if they turn up hackers or users. Let them find out for themselves, and be there when they have questions.
Honestly I think proprietary vendors do not expect to see the majority of the developers out there (independent devs or small software houses) to adopt their technologies. I bet they've already stuck their deals with a selected few technology partners who will produce their 'flagship' applications.
So unless you're working for one of these few companies, why worry?
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I don't like the round cells in Eric's version (I made one with square cells) I have to admit the glider itself is a great choice for an emblem.
However, it's not an emblem for all the hackers, and that's the beauty of it. Only those who want to gang up and work as a team should adopt this emblem.
Individual hackers won't feel the need to use logos. In the Game of Life individual cells die anyway.
The glider represents the effort of hackers that work as a team with the same objective. Remember, the previous cells of a glider also die as the glider moves forward (just as old hackers 'retire'), but the point is that new cells are created (new hackers joining in), in a cycle that makes an entity move forward (hackerdom itself if you will). Can't think of a better choice.
You hit the bull there mate.
;)
Many small sized directories, tied together by a common API.
Hopefully you won't have to wait too long for that to happen.
Exactly.
I can see non-voice servers being a minority, for the very few hardcore roleplayers out there. In EQ terms, you'll probably have less non-voice serves than PK ones.
Voice comms in a game like CS is almost an absolute must.
Team-work is essential, and it's so fast paced that communicating via the keyboard is not an option. The only type of non-voice communication I used was moving the mouse to produce quick visual gestures to tell my team-mate things like "you go first", "duck, so I can climb over there", and stuff like that.
No way are you going to type those. Getting your hand off the mouse for any length of time is not a good idea (unless you're a camper).
Counter-Strike is not a role-playing game.
I see the point of the article when it comes to role-playing games. Even then, when playing EQ I rarely met people actually roleplaying. When camping for long periods, everyone in the parties would chat about real life stuff. People would exchange email addresses and stuff like that.
From their website: "Copyright applies to most forms of original, creative expression..."
That rules out most of the movies produced today.
Move along now, there's nothing to see here...
It's not about the application, it's about the infrastructure.
It's a poor country. What better way to improve the economy than to provide them with technology that allows them to be productive and earn a living even from such remote places?
A bit of training and you have potentially thousands of Google Answers researchers, or chat-room moderators, or whatever jobs suitable for large amounts of low-qualified, low-wage work force who can work remotely online.
It's the logical step following the call-centres movement.
Reminds me of sometime back in 1999, when a friend and I were browsing the web from college. Suddenly we found someone's entire hard disk content. The whole lot.
It took us a while to recognise the content and realise the browser was pointing at file://....
Duh!
Wow, the amount of time I wasted just by following that link...
;)
I saw this picture with a nice landscape. Decided to investigate and after a bit of Googling it turns out it's from somewhere in Kamioka, Japan. That's where physicists from around the world built this huge toy which they call Super-Kamiokande.
Some pretty impressive pictures, especially when you see that they built many of these to make this, just to fill it with water (warning huge pic, here's a smaller one), and conduct experiments into neutrinos, dark matter, and other cool stuff like that... Wow.
There you go, just learnt a few things, and added Kamioka to my list of places to visit
don't offer gifts when you can't afford them, because them leeches will not even thank you.
Hold on, if someone can prove that they had that idea first, how can a patent force any shutdown?
"I'm a CEO of a European country"
/. :-)
You mean like, you're a prime minister?
Cool, I didn't know we had such important people here in
Anyways, you're right about people outside the EU not having to pay VAT.
I submitted the JBoss story (not anonymous) 4 hours ago and it got promptly rejected (probably some automated system, 'cause it was too fast). Weird that they'd publish this now.
Regarding who cares, how about all the J2EE application developers out there?
Wow, things are moving fast now.
;)
As an European I'm happy to see Europe uniting and producing exciting technologies, but I wouldn't go as far as calling the USA "the enemy".
I don't agree with President Bush's foreign policy but I don't blame the USA and the American people for it. In fact, I think those who are backing Mr Bush (quite a few) are revolted with the rest of the world for things like 9/11. I understand their feelings, and hope that reason will be restored with time. We're not all out to destroy them. We value freedom just like the Americans do.
Developing technologies that compete with the US is a good thing. Not because they're the enemy, but because competition stirs people to work harder and produce "giant leaps" that will benefit us all.
It's about time we have another tech race, but amongst friends
... is quality.
I'm surprised how Google is choosing not to implement search features that would greatly enhance advanced queries.
How often I'd wish they allowed wildcards in their queries (where engl* would pull hits with england, english, etc).
Field searches still require you to add keywords, so I cannot just query "site:somesite.com" to get all the currently indexed pages from somesite.com
In this respect Altavista still produces better results, with an excelent range of fields to choose from.
If there is anything that Google is lacking, it's defenitely that.
Having said that, still my number one SE.
I don't know why you assumed the robots were ready. The chassis was, but the work on the electronics/low-level drivers was not.
So if you think all software components can be developed in parallel think again. Ever heard of critical path?
My part of the task as an individual was pushed as far as possible without having the robots ready. I completed the base-station GUI and implemented the communication protocol at both ends (base-station and robot, taking some of the burden of the electronics guy) in parallel with the other guys, since I could use the radios decoupled from the robots, using a spare HandyBoard (the chosen controller), but this could only be pushed so far.
Any further and I'd be creating a simulator. I didn't want a simulator then, that's why I was investing in the robots.
We agreed on the communication protocol, but we never got as far as reaching the milestone where we could test it, by letting the robots loose, and have them communicate their progress (using dead-reckoning) to the base. Too many hardware glitches and slow low-level software progress (developed by the electronics guy) prevented this from happening in time. This is not a criticism of the electronics guy, he did well with the time available, it is rather a criticism of the task itself. The hardware (and low-level software) was a time-sink, that prevented us from reaching a working system.
It was on the actual day of the competition that the robot caught up with my development, and we could get the little red dots to move on the base-station's map, just to find that the compass (direction of motion) readings were not being properly converted before being sent to the base station. We were doing angle calculations when the speaker announced it was our turn to compete. End.
Of course it's not the robot's fault. It was our fault for underestimating the amount of time (and in my case money) required to get the robot to a working state. This is why I agree with Minsky to a certain extent, in that people spend more time with the soldering iron, than working on the actual AI.
If any lesson was to be learnt, I think the most important is: if AI is what interests you, and time is a constraint, be prepared to invest in (expensive) ready made robotic platforms.
Sounds obvious now, but can be overlooked by newbies (such as undergrad or postgrad students).
Regarding my dissertation, I could have written about all this and got my degree (the other 2 guys did), but such a degree was of no value to me. I didn't go to Edinburgh to get a degree, I went there to learn about AI.
Minsky's words regarding robotics are shocking to a lot of people, but I'm no longer surprised, and my own experience completely backs his statement.
:(
Back in 2000 I was at Edinburgh University doing an MSc in AI (Intelligent Robotics theme), when Minsky visited the city to talk in an AI symposium. Unlike all my fellow MSc colleagues (some of them never even heard of Minsky!) I paid the fee to go and listen to what the father of AI had to say.
My jaw dropped to the ground as I heard him speak about robotics, and how useless the whole discipline is. I thought robotics were the future of AI, yet the man was basically saying it was a big waste of money and time. If only I heard him...
He stated that robotics don't offer anything back to science, since you don't have control over all the variables, so he suggested simulators were the way forward.
I almost agreed with him there, but still thought it was an unfair attack on robotics. I wasn't the only one, as someone else in the room voiced his surprise and disagreement with Minsky.
My opinion back then was that robotics research, whether being useful to science or not, would: 1) lure badly needed funding towards the discipline and 2) provide real world solutions, where intelligent autonomous physical presence is required
I'm not saying I no longer feel like that, but my experience has reinforced Minsky's statement "Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart"
My experience then: MSc final project
A team of autonomous mobile rescue robots, to enter the RobocCup Rescue 2001 competition.
I teamed up with 2 other MSc students and we decided to do a joint project, so we had an electronics engineer, a mechanics engineer, and a software engineer (myself). Recipe for success? Not really, at least for me.
We spent most of the time working on the chassis, and electronics (for 2 robots). It was a great learning experience for myself, but that was not the only aim. I worked really hard on the software which would run on a base-station (my laptop). The idea was to have autonomous robots (obstacle avoidance on board, with heat seeking behaviour) and a base station that would communicate via RF to coordinate the 2 robots.
It never worked. We spent the whole time doing and fixing the hardware and never got around to gluing the AI. We still went to Seattle, hoping we'd crack it just in time, but no chance. They still looked cool chasing CNN's cameramen around (the low-level heat seeking behaviour), which earned us a picture of the bot in NY Times, but we didn't take part in the competition itself.
So what did I get out of it? Not much. Big debt (I funded the whole thing myself, using a bank loan), and didn't even finish my MSc, since I didn't feel I had much to write about in the dissertation.
I did learn how to solder... hurray
Actually, you don't even need the something_invalid_here
The ultimate lazy hacker (oops redundancy here) only types:
<input type>
That tiny tag will currently crash IE, Outlook, etc. It isn't valid HTML but so what. If the aim is to crash the browser, it doesn't really matter if it's valid.
LOL! :)
Funny but interesting at the same time.
Some one mod that one up.
Some have a point in saying google provides much more than the simple search, but it still falls short of what I think could be done. Not that they (google) don't know how to do it, but they rather keep it fast, and you won't get fast AND quality at the same time.
So perhaps what we need is something to complement google. A slow, heavy_meta_data search engine that you can use to make complex queries.
For example, I want to get all the pages that contain the term "Eclipse" as a link text AND within a
(list) element, with at least 5 'incoming' links from distinct servers. And I should be able to provide it with a list of 'related' URLs (i.e. sun.java.com, developer.com) to push up the related context.
A further step still, would be to tick a 'use synonyms' box, and the search engine would automatically search all the combinations of synonyms of each keyword. This is why I said, you can't have it fast.
I seriously thought about distributed indexing back in 1999, and I'm glad I never implemented it. Some of the comments relating Grub are very good (i.e. prone to be poluted by tweaked clients). I'm now working on something related though. A framework for subject-specific web directories (like, mini-yahoos that anyone can produce), in open-source java. When I get it working it'll appear at jsite.org. These mini-directories would then share an API that could be combined into a single front-end (that's where megamap comes in). Still not pollution free, but the indexing clients are now a very select few.
Already some people gave examples of existing vibration -> recharging designs.
I remember watching a program in the BBC about some young engineer's competition. One of the guys (from South Bank University - London?) came up with this doughnut shaped tube, inside which a small iron(?) sphere would roll as you produced a vibration. You know the drill, strap the right kind of metal around one of the sides of the tube... produce magnetic fields... This thing would produce enough energy to recharge your mobile phone, using your body ondulation as you walk. I think that bloke won the competition BTW. Pretty cool. Even though as someone mentioned before, the concept of using a small spring is quite good, if not better.
Last Xmas I spent a couple of weeks at my mum's, where all my old desktops are, now converted to Linux app & web servers. I couldn't get to terms with the fact that my former gaming machine, a dual P3-800 with a 22" monitor, was just sitting there being wasted. My only Windows (XP) machine left is my laptop, which is hardly good enough to run Chuckie Egg, never mind CS.
After a quick search on google and a couple of days fiddling around with Wine I got Counter-Strike working on the app server. What joy! Frame-rate not the best around (30-60fps) but still playable.
Not all games will run, and I hear EverQuest is the reason why many people need to keep at least one Windows machine lying around, but support for new games and applications is making the list of supported apps grow all the time.
Certainly worth a try...
Dare I suggest that lack of social skills due to computer use will be less of a problem in the future, as computer use will be less dependent on sitting down in a room in front of a desktop to become something you can do just about anywhere, in the company of your friends.
The hacker minority will probably stick to the old fashioned way, at least during heavy-duty programming sessions, but most kids will surely embrace mobile computing when it comes (wearable computers not far off?).
It's probably the right age, because its more or less the average puberty age.
Mind you, since apparently (and in my opinion strangely) such average is coming down people might want to take 1 or 2 years off, so 11 or 12 sounds more appropriate.
You have some good points there.
There are still some little hackers in the making out there, perhaps even more than before, but the great majority of the kids see computers as a toy/tool. I think that's ok, since most of them will be using computers as a tool in their professional careers but not necessarily as programmers. They need to be computer literate as users not as hackers.
What troubles me is that some of these future users when faced with the big decision of choosing their undergraduate course, will choose Software Engineering based on their fondness of computers, not realizing that there's a lot more into these courses than 'mouse wiggling'. I personally have met one such University first year drop-out. The guy just wasn't a hacker, he didn't have it in him.
Now he spends his days at home, surfing the net and playing PlayStation (ironic, the very same hobbies that led to his misjudged decision).
Then I think "How should I go about educating my (future) kids about computers?". Well, I'm not going to force them down this or that path. I don't care if they turn up hackers or users. Let them find out for themselves, and be there when they have questions.
Honestly I think proprietary vendors do not expect to see the majority of the developers out there (independent devs or small software houses) to adopt their technologies. I bet they've already stuck their deals with a selected few technology partners who will produce their 'flagship' applications.
So unless you're working for one of these few companies, why worry?