All we have is some article that says Gnome 2.30 = Gnome 3. Nothing else. No details, nothing. No details on GTK 3, which will have to happen before Gnome 3, and I'm not sure what problems did affect KDE 4.0's release..0 releases are what they are, and it was the same story when Gnome 2.0 came along.
The opposite is also true. New generations still repeat the same dumb mistakes of previous generations. If someone had to stew on their stupidity and mistakes for a few hundred years rather than just fobbing them off on their kids, maybe we'd learn something.
While I agree, without SPARC and Solaris, Sun is just another Linux system integrator, plus Java.
The problem is, that's not any reason to hold on to SPARC and Solaris and it makes an assmption that there is some differentiation people are really going for. They're not differentiating Sun in any tangible way, and are just adding to the costs.
Yeah well, I agree all around. Maybe they're waiting for a major rev of AMD or intel hardware so they can claim "this is what finally makes SPARC irrelevant". I previously thought Hammer might have done it, but it didn't, so I'm probably wrong again.
Love the sarcasm in there;-), but that's the attitude that is killing Sun's financial performance. The performance of SPARC is just far too inadequate, Sun are not able to put the effort in to keep up, they're trying to differentiate SPARC with things like Coolthreads in the same market as x86 and all that's happening is that SPARC's market share and share of Sun's total revenue are being eroded away.
I'd love to say that you're right, but you know what? Compared to x86, SPARC performance still sucks for some tasks...especially serial (non-threaded) ones.
That's my point. In terms of raw performance per task SPARC is just far too inferior to x86. To get anywhere with something like Coolthreads your workloads have to be unbelievably parallel with very little depending on each other. There also comes a tipping point where you can just get so much throughput on one thread that it outweighs the advantages of doing them in parallel.
Rather than improve SPARC Sun are just backing it further and further into a niche.
Sun OBVIOUSLY gets it which is why they are concentrating on Linux on x86 today.
I'm not entirely sure what you think is obvious, and the capital letters aren't going to make it true. The only thing obvious to me is that they've basically been forced into that by market forces, but they still continue to waste R & D time, money and resources on Solaris and SPARC that are not growing and are producing ever decreasing returns. They either need to do something spectacular with them or get rid. They'd be better off cutting costs that way rather than having yet another round of 'restructuring' where they fire thousands of employees and totally demotivate those remaining, wondering when they are next.
On the other hand, it's hard to beat Solaris on SPARC for the big tasks that need a single machine.
SPARC is dead, and it can't handle 'big tasks' in the way that x86 has been doing for years because it just doesn't have the raw performance - as I'd pointed out. Sun have tried to back SPARC into a niche with Coolthreads, but that is a very, very specific niche that few will see any benefit from. SPARC just overlaps too much with the work scenarios of x86 servers, a hangover from the dot com era, and it loses. At least IBM saw sense and put Power into a market where it made sense.
Sun has, and has had, some great products in the past, and some of their hardware is still pretty excellent, but the problem with the company is that they still have a deep rooted protectionist attitude towards SPARC and Solaris. Why do you think it took so long to get Solaris on x86, why it took so long for Sun to accept that x86 servers was where the growth was, why most of Sun's customers still get Linux pre-installed on Sun's systems and why Sun paid a couple of billion for an excellent business opportunity in Cobalt, and then promptly destroyed it?
If they could make Solaris and SPARC stand out and pay off then fine, but they can't hence the half-hearted and pretty sad move to 'open source' Solaris just so all their consultants and execs can run around trying to tell us that it's 'just like Linux'. However, in the cold hard light of day, Linux ate Solaris's lunch, and SPARC just competes too closely with x86 based servers without the comparable performance. SPARC is so inferior to x86 in terms of raw performance it's so laughable. Solaris also suffers from the fact that Sun just don't have the resources to push development to where Linux and other operating systems are, and these days it is increasingly expensive to try and maintain an entire OS yourself.
In terms of open source, Sun's problem is that the vast majority of open source software is written for Linux and the BSDs first. No one thinks of Solaris as their first platform of consideration, and it's difficult to see why they should do so now. It's still like that now, and it was still like that a few years ago when a former employer scratched its head trying to work out why Zope and Python performance was so terrible on Solaris and an UltraSPARC. A Sun guy even recompiled Python in Forte. The bottom line answer we got from the Python devs was "We use open source systems, and possibly Windows, first and foremost on x86 systems, x86 and Linux performs better anyway, and while we'd like to help, we just don't care about your corner case problem on an OS and hardware we don't have access to and can't reproduce. Just use Linux and x86". That's not literal, but it's the general gist, and I couldn't say I blamed them.
The solution? They moved to a far cheaper x86 system with Linux, they had no installation problems with Python as it came within the package management system itself, things were far easier to manage, performance increased exponentially which pleased everyone and Python and Zope ran with no issues whatsoever. That still holds true today.
What is the point of being sure that no one can intercept your communication all the way from your browser to the server if you don't know who you are talking to in the first place?
This adequately demonstrates the fallacy, and the danger, of believing that certificates give this kind of guarantee. Knowing who you are talking to depends on being confident of what address you are putting into the address bar of your browser in the first place (a whole different ball-game not addressed today), not whether the certificate is accepted cleanly by the browser.
It means the possibility of a man-in-the middle attack and many more problems that should be obvious to any self-respecting, computer-literate, intelligent person.
No, and no, you're not computer literate. There is no man-in-the-middle attack at all, but you can have a man-in-the-middle attack if you have another signing authority involved in the process.
This is timely, as I'm looking at implementing SSL for a web system at the moment, and I'm seriously pondering using self-signed certificates. Paying for a certificate from an authority is, quite frankly, a rip-off. The companies don't need to do anything for that money, and the notion that they provide some service where you can trust the site for the issued certificate is laughable. The only reason for doing so is so that peoples' browsers don't complain when they come across a certificate they don't recognise.
The cynic in me believes that Firefox and IE are giving you all sorts of 'helpful' warnings these days, not to protect a user's security, but to push website developers into buying certificates.
Using certificates is about one thing - encrypted communication between browser A and server B. That's it. Certificates have never given you any guarantee as to the integrity of the site that you're visiting, and it gives no guarantee whatsoever of who you are talking to, as some people are stupidly claiming around here. To give a guarantee like that, further technology is needed.
As a rule of thumb, if you have a finite number of users logging into a system then a self-signed certificate is OK, and even preferable. If you have some kind of site where the users you can have can be anyone (shopping site for example), then it's preferable to buy a certificate - if nothing else, to keep people from getting infernal warnings popping up in their browser.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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Running Xen
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· Score: 1
Linux is completely irrelevant to Xen.
It requires a patched Linux, or another OS, to provide its device support, which is completely pointless. Same difference.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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Running Xen
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· Score: 1
You're comparing apples to oranges, and assuming that because KVM works better in a specific scenario that it works better.
Hmmmmm, no. They're both virtualisation technologies, and the point is KVM's future looks a hell of a lot better as part of the kernel than Xen's outside of it. Nice try though.
Xen runs VMs on the bare hardware. In the Xen environment, operating systems run under Xen, not vice versa. The only way to run Xen "under" Linux is to run it in an emulator!
Yep. There's the problem being described;-). It's a daft way to do things when you can just use Linux itself as the hypervisor, and what you've described there is a pointless waste of time.
Really, what you're saying convinces me you haven't really investigated what makes Xen Xen. I would never install Xen on my laptop. I'd never install KVM on my server machine.
That makes no sense at all because there's no dividing line between the two that you've described. Calling them different does not make them so. Xen's approach is simply daft. They're trying to take the OS and kernel out of the equation by having a bare hypervisor (all that hypervisor is the OS bollocks we've heard), but all they've done is forked the Linux kernel to do so - so yes, they are running it under Linux, just not the Linux.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
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Running Xen
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· Score: 1
Xen is a hypervisor. It runs under Linux, not on top
Yes, I know. That's the maintenance problem the OP is pointing out, and its future development doesn't look as great as KVM's does outside of the kernel.
I do think Nokia gets it. There is no other mobile phone company that does as much as Nokia does on Open Source platforms. Additionally most of Nokia phones can be purchased directly from Nokia site without SIM locks or operator limitations. Problem is that then current business models (SIM locks, DRM) are widely spread and Nokia cannot work with it's partners without having these technologies implemented.
That's great, but I'm afraid Nokia having one of its people come out with the stuff that he has done doesn't communicate and come over well.
I would imagine other companies won't dare to venture into Open Source realm because of the hostility and uncompromising attitude.
I don't see anyone being hostile. He's just stirring the waters here, and displays a stunning lack of awareness about open source software, as you are doing as well..
Bottom line is that Nokia won't be using Open Source Software as much as it would like to due to these restrictions.
Tough. There's nothing the open source community can do about DRM and phone locking. They're just fundamentally at odds with getting a piece of hardware to do what you want. An open source project is not going to release open and closed source parts of their project. Any such project dies, and the closed source part just gets reverse engineered anyway.
What Nokia (and Ari Jaaksi) in my understanding is trying to suggest here is that OSS would relax a bit on some deal breakers on manufacturers side and allow them to embrace OSS more.
See above.
Alternatively we will end up completely closed source solutions and this opportunity to change society in large scale is lost for now.
It's Nokia's loss. As the mobile market opens up more over the next couple of decades, and network gets bypassed, the usage of open source software can only increase as manufacturers experience the benefits of shared effort, lower costs and economies of scale. It's just a matter of time.
"We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."
Educate them of what? Lock-ins are totally and fundamentally incompatible with open source software, and the natural reaction is to free up or move on to something you can actually develop software freely for. The notion of open source software means that nothing can be kept secret. That's the direction that things head in, and I would have thought that Nokia would have been all for it as it helps them sell more phones.
As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.
You either play by the rules or there is no dialogue, and it ultimately harms you as well. I've never seen a successful 'mixed source' software company.
Don't make your own version. The original mistake we made was to take the code to our labs, change it and then release it at the last minute. The community had already gone in a different direction than [us], and no-one was pushing it other than [us].
Tough luck. If people want things like ogg support then they'll go and get it. Forking is a fundamental freedom, and it will happen more often unless you play by the rules more.
"a huge responsibility from a desktop and user interface point of view to see how we play our cards"
Rrrrrrrrright. What does that mean?
and expressed a keenness to see KDE and Gnome brought "closer".
Do some Googling on the last ten years. They are divergent codebases, and while they share lots of libraries like X, I don't know what he means by 'closer'. It's as good as it gets.
Jaaksi added that he believed Symbian, the proprietary operating system in which Nokia has a major share, would still "in years to come [be] the best platform on which to create smart phones".
So we get to what the problem really is, and why he's being defensive about LiMo. As time moved on the odds are that the platform of choice will be Linux and an open source GUI because of the very advantages from the very freedoms and rules that he derides. Manufacturers can pick up the code, not have to worry about NDAs, IP and exorbitant fees, and get on with it. Qt will probably lead the way with Qtopia and GUI toolkits on Linux based phones. It's about cost cutting and economies of scale. Nokia will either join the wagon or fall off it, and being defensive with Symbian is a bad idea.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
Running Xen
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· Score: 2, Informative
Xen and KVM are completely different types of virtualization solution.
Well yes they do do things differently, but KVM does it better and simpler by just running on Linux as the base system hypervisor. From a maintenance point of view things get far simpler, as the OP said.
If you want to run a single physical computer with multiple operating system instances, such as replacing a bank of servers with a single machine, Xen is your guy. If you want to run VMs under Linux, KVM is your friend.
That statement is just, well, daft. You're implying that Xen can't run VMs under Linux but KVM can, or Xen can run VMs on systems other than Linux or something that KVM can't do? They're both Linux only at this point, and Xen effectively runs a forked version of Linux because it isn't, and won't be, upstream.
Main Concept is selling a Mac/Win/Linux SDK for encoding WMV content.
That doesn't help open source software's support for it.
Silverlight has native MP3 support.
It might have MP3 support, but you and I both know it's all a question of what people will be using to create their content, and what most people will end up using.
One of the things we're cooperating with Novell on with Moonlight is providing them test and validation suites that are used to test Silverlight internally. So, yes, we're absolutely doing work to make sure it's interoperable.
When a certain level of critical mass has been achieved for Silverlight, that cooperation (and Mac support) will be dropped and left to squander like the hottest potato you've ever seen in you life. Like I said, there is a ton of past form for this sort of thing and reassurances of interoperability are simply not matched up by either past history, or in technologies and markets where you're not behind in terms of widespread usage and critical mass.
From the demo videos I saw that it was up to the content creator to choose for themselves which codec etc they want to use, so no, the tools aren't forcing it (wisely so). They want to sell software...
I don't think you get it. This will continue (and I can only take your word for it at the moment) until Microsoft feels that they have a critical mass of usage for Silverlight. Besides, I'd be very, very surprised if the default wasn't to use and work with Windows Media.
There is past form for this, as Microsoft has been relatively open over many things, including documents formats, until they have a market cornered in terms of people using their technology. By using the phrase "They want to sell software" you make it sound as if Microsoft wants to compete. That's not in their nature, nor in their corporate culture.
Not really. Some people just have a hard time believing that things don't change and people just don't undergo magical life changing transformations;-).
But if you actually got back together a second, third, or fourth time, then she's not the only one who believed that things would be better. And so if you're bitter and cynical now, it's not entirely her fault. Now what were we saying about Microsoft again...?:)
I'm not entirely sure you got the right end of the stick from what was written, but you've loosely described the concept of being used;-).
The object of Moonlight is to essentially be a "feature-complete" implementation of Silverlight, minus those pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs.
Then it's essentially useless because the reference implementation that is first to market is Microsoft's Silverlight, and you can bet your bottom dollar Microsoft's tools will be creating Silverlight content with Windows Media and other components right, left and centre. What comes down in practice is what you have to support.
The question is, then: "Does your Silverlight-based business application really need to use these pesky, patented, DRM-laced multimedia codecs?"
If history has taught us anything, it's that people are just not going to ask themselves pointless questions like that.
Which, in the vast majority of cases, is "probably not." Much of this kind of functionality can be had via calls to external (and FOSS) libraries.
You don't get a choice. You have to deal with whatever comes down, and what comes down will have pretty much all been created on Windows systems. The key thing to remember hear is that people are not writing content for Moonlight. They are writing it for Silverlight. If it stops working on Moonlight they're simply not going to care when it boils down to it.
Really? These are well worked standard tactics from the past twenty-five years. Do they really need to keep being explained?
The upshot is that you should also be able to run IronRuby on the Mono Common Language Runtime, presuming that Microsoft's implementation continues to adhere to it's own ECMA-"approved" CLR standards...
Ummm, actually it isn't, because Silverlight encompasses a lot more then just a subset of WPF and XAML. There are related technologies, particularly related to multimedia, around Silverlight, Windows Media in particular, that are very much a part of creating Silverlight content as we see it now on Microsoft platforms. Everyone else is going to have to replicate that, and even worse, keep up with the moving target of successive implementations. It's another classic example of Microsoft keeping their implementation ahead, and first to market, and it's a well worked routine now.
I'd love to be able to say otherwise, but these 'olive branches' that we're seeing are all designed to get the usage of Microsoft technology on the web to some sort of critical mass. Nothing more. If that is ever achieved, your guess is as good as mine as to whether those branches will stay strong and whether Microsoft will ever have a continued, vested interest in Moonlight or Ruby or Rails. I just find what people say around these stories fascinating. There's all sorts of articles and blog entries written by various people about how Microsoft is changing or asking "Is Microsoft changing?", "Is Microsoft Open Sourcing....." etc. etc. It's ridiculous.
At the moment, I'm trying to get over to a female acquaintance why it's a bad idea to get back together with exes. She persists in believing that it's better the second, third or fourth time around and that things will change. Nothing ever does change though. Any apparent change you think you see is short-lived, a leopard doesn't change it's spots and if it ever was going to happen, well, it would have happened by now. You can't get past someone's history, their history is their problem not yours and you only end up getting used.
I guess my point is that in your example, the original car maker put forth the capital for R&D and manufacturing, and then your neighbor just presses a button to make a duplicate (and I know it's a nonsensical situation that would change the market irreversibly if such a device were to exist).
It's not that nonsensical. The costs of manufacturing have been slashed, and these days factories in the Far East are knocking out genuine counterfeit copies, sometimes from the same factories as the 'original' stuff, which gives an indication of what's to come. Stores like Primark and others copy catwalk fashion for an absolute fraction of the price. It's not a stretch to say that technology will get better to the point where manufacturing will be something you can do in your own home eventually.
You're missing the point though. You're whining about the R and D costs that a car manufacturer is putting in, but their production costs will be absolutely zero! They can come up with all sorts of prototypes, virtually for free. However, their market will have outlived itself and that's the main point.
That doesn't mean that people won't design new cars, as you seem to be claiming, because designing a new car is quite cheap with that kind of technology. Everyone can design a new car, and the best designs will be copied. The value is in the kudos that you came up with something first, and that has value in itself.
While I can understand where they're coming from (using a Blackberry when you're out with your family on holiday is plain bloody sad as well as rude - let's just face it), but I'd love to know how they propose to 'enforce' this. A phone or a PDA is someone's personal property, just about everyone has a mobile phone, and some people sadly do need to remain contactable just in case.
The original Star wars trilogy were some of the most watchable movies ever...
Yes, because Lucas' directors took his stories and told him to take a hike over the implementation. Hopefully, Spielberg has laid it on the line to George here. If ESB had been left to Lucas, the thing would have sucked like a black hole. Not even light would have escaped, and I shudder to think at what we would have lost.
The special effects were better in the originals (they actually looked real, and they actually were special because they weren't in every damn bloody scene) and the choreography of the lightsabre fight scenes was far superior. The Sith consisted of two people standing as close together as possible doing that amateurish back and forth sword fighting you did at school, while the background was chock full of as many effects as Lucas could pack in. In ESB, and even RotJ, you have two people in Vader and Luke who really looked as if they wanted to kill each other. No contest. Take a look at what Lucas did to the 'special editions' to try and improve them. A travesty.
How is romance done in Star Wars films?:
Leia: I love you.
Han: I know.
Tongue firmly planted in cheek. Brilliant. Genius. How is it done in the prequels? I don't know as I've blanked it out of my mind, but watch the second and third films, and I hope you haven't eaten beforehand.
and the prequels were constantly compared to them and were not as good.... but compared with the rubbish touted by the studios nowadays they were still very watchable...
Listen. The only reason why people watched those prequels, and the only reason I stuck around for the third Sith (that's an anagram!) film, was because I got to see how Darth Vader came to be, how he turned to the dark side, how he ended up in the awesome black survival suit and to see the sabre fight and history between Vader and Kanobi.
But at the end of it all Star Wars competely sucked. LotR didn't. It's just that simple.
Never understood the Lord of the Rings worship. I found them cold and dark, with none of the joviality and fun that you get from the hobbits in the book, and full of its own self-fucking importance because they thought they were making a Classic Trilogy(tm). The music was an exceptionally poor 'The Mission' rip-off by Howard Shore and the dialogue was enough to put you to sleep for days on end, nevermind three hours.
Slashdot Mirror
All we have is some article that says Gnome 2.30 = Gnome 3. Nothing else. No details, nothing. No details on GTK 3, which will have to happen before Gnome 3, and I'm not sure what problems did affect KDE 4.0's release. .0 releases are what they are, and it was the same story when Gnome 2.0 came along.
The opposite is also true. New generations still repeat the same dumb mistakes of previous generations. If someone had to stew on their stupidity and mistakes for a few hundred years rather than just fobbing them off on their kids, maybe we'd learn something.
Rather than improve SPARC Sun are just backing it further and further into a niche.
Sun has, and has had, some great products in the past, and some of their hardware is still pretty excellent, but the problem with the company is that they still have a deep rooted protectionist attitude towards SPARC and Solaris. Why do you think it took so long to get Solaris on x86, why it took so long for Sun to accept that x86 servers was where the growth was, why most of Sun's customers still get Linux pre-installed on Sun's systems and why Sun paid a couple of billion for an excellent business opportunity in Cobalt, and then promptly destroyed it?
If they could make Solaris and SPARC stand out and pay off then fine, but they can't hence the half-hearted and pretty sad move to 'open source' Solaris just so all their consultants and execs can run around trying to tell us that it's 'just like Linux'. However, in the cold hard light of day, Linux ate Solaris's lunch, and SPARC just competes too closely with x86 based servers without the comparable performance. SPARC is so inferior to x86 in terms of raw performance it's so laughable. Solaris also suffers from the fact that Sun just don't have the resources to push development to where Linux and other operating systems are, and these days it is increasingly expensive to try and maintain an entire OS yourself.
In terms of open source, Sun's problem is that the vast majority of open source software is written for Linux and the BSDs first. No one thinks of Solaris as their first platform of consideration, and it's difficult to see why they should do so now. It's still like that now, and it was still like that a few years ago when a former employer scratched its head trying to work out why Zope and Python performance was so terrible on Solaris and an UltraSPARC. A Sun guy even recompiled Python in Forte. The bottom line answer we got from the Python devs was "We use open source systems, and possibly Windows, first and foremost on x86 systems, x86 and Linux performs better anyway, and while we'd like to help, we just don't care about your corner case problem on an OS and hardware we don't have access to and can't reproduce. Just use Linux and x86". That's not literal, but it's the general gist, and I couldn't say I blamed them.
The solution? They moved to a far cheaper x86 system with Linux, they had no installation problems with Python as it came within the package management system itself, things were far easier to manage, performance increased exponentially which pleased everyone and Python and Zope ran with no issues whatsoever. That still holds true today.
And?
This is timely, as I'm looking at implementing SSL for a web system at the moment, and I'm seriously pondering using self-signed certificates. Paying for a certificate from an authority is, quite frankly, a rip-off. The companies don't need to do anything for that money, and the notion that they provide some service where you can trust the site for the issued certificate is laughable. The only reason for doing so is so that peoples' browsers don't complain when they come across a certificate they don't recognise.
The cynic in me believes that Firefox and IE are giving you all sorts of 'helpful' warnings these days, not to protect a user's security, but to push website developers into buying certificates.
Using certificates is about one thing - encrypted communication between browser A and server B. That's it. Certificates have never given you any guarantee as to the integrity of the site that you're visiting, and it gives no guarantee whatsoever of who you are talking to, as some people are stupidly claiming around here. To give a guarantee like that, further technology is needed.
As a rule of thumb, if you have a finite number of users logging into a system then a self-signed certificate is OK, and even preferable. If you have some kind of site where the users you can have can be anyone (shopping site for example), then it's preferable to buy a certificate - if nothing else, to keep people from getting infernal warnings popping up in their browser.
Seen it all before.
There is past form for this, as Microsoft has been relatively open over many things, including documents formats, until they have a market cornered in terms of people using their technology. By using the phrase "They want to sell software" you make it sound as if Microsoft wants to compete. That's not in their nature, nor in their corporate culture.
If history has taught us anything, it's that people are just not going to ask themselves pointless questions like that.
You don't get a choice. You have to deal with whatever comes down, and what comes down will have pretty much all been created on Windows systems. The key thing to remember hear is that people are not writing content for Moonlight. They are writing it for Silverlight. If it stops working on Moonlight they're simply not going to care when it boils down to it.
Really? These are well worked standard tactics from the past twenty-five years. Do they really need to keep being explained?
Ummm, actually it isn't, because Silverlight encompasses a lot more then just a subset of WPF and XAML. There are related technologies, particularly related to multimedia, around Silverlight, Windows Media in particular, that are very much a part of creating Silverlight content as we see it now on Microsoft platforms. Everyone else is going to have to replicate that, and even worse, keep up with the moving target of successive implementations. It's another classic example of Microsoft keeping their implementation ahead, and first to market, and it's a well worked routine now.
I'd love to be able to say otherwise, but these 'olive branches' that we're seeing are all designed to get the usage of Microsoft technology on the web to some sort of critical mass. Nothing more. If that is ever achieved, your guess is as good as mine as to whether those branches will stay strong and whether Microsoft will ever have a continued, vested interest in Moonlight or Ruby or Rails. I just find what people say around these stories fascinating. There's all sorts of articles and blog entries written by various people about how Microsoft is changing or asking "Is Microsoft changing?", "Is Microsoft Open Sourcing....." etc. etc. It's ridiculous.
At the moment, I'm trying to get over to a female acquaintance why it's a bad idea to get back together with exes. She persists in believing that it's better the second, third or fourth time around and that things will change. Nothing ever does change though. Any apparent change you think you see is short-lived, a leopard doesn't change it's spots and if it ever was going to happen, well, it would have happened by now. You can't get past someone's history, their history is their problem not yours and you only end up getting used.
You're missing the point though. You're whining about the R and D costs that a car manufacturer is putting in, but their production costs will be absolutely zero! They can come up with all sorts of prototypes, virtually for free. However, their market will have outlived itself and that's the main point.
That doesn't mean that people won't design new cars, as you seem to be claiming, because designing a new car is quite cheap with that kind of technology. Everyone can design a new car, and the best designs will be copied. The value is in the kudos that you came up with something first, and that has value in itself.
While I can understand where they're coming from (using a Blackberry when you're out with your family on holiday is plain bloody sad as well as rude - let's just face it), but I'd love to know how they propose to 'enforce' this. A phone or a PDA is someone's personal property, just about everyone has a mobile phone, and some people sadly do need to remain contactable just in case.
The special effects were better in the originals (they actually looked real, and they actually were special because they weren't in every damn bloody scene) and the choreography of the lightsabre fight scenes was far superior. The Sith consisted of two people standing as close together as possible doing that amateurish back and forth sword fighting you did at school, while the background was chock full of as many effects as Lucas could pack in. In ESB, and even RotJ, you have two people in Vader and Luke who really looked as if they wanted to kill each other. No contest. Take a look at what Lucas did to the 'special editions' to try and improve them. A travesty.
How is romance done in Star Wars films?
Leia: I love you.
Han: I know.
Tongue firmly planted in cheek. Brilliant. Genius. How is it done in the prequels? I don't know as I've blanked it out of my mind, but watch the second and third films, and I hope you haven't eaten beforehand. Listen. The only reason why people watched those prequels, and the only reason I stuck around for the third Sith (that's an anagram!) film, was because I got to see how Darth Vader came to be, how he turned to the dark side, how he ended up in the awesome black survival suit and to see the sabre fight and history between Vader and Kanobi.
That's it, as Vader would say.