No, really? I think every plaintiff in any criminal case would clearly agree that the burden of proving that a violation actually occurred completely wipes out entire categories of law. Cops, for example, and Alberto Gonzalez really think Habeas Corpus is outdated, and prevents all kinds of innovation and progress towards criminalizing EVERYONE. Doubtless, this old legal doctrine deprives lots of copyright plaintiffs as well.
As it turns out, the MPAA, close ally to the RIAA, has come forth with a more controversial view. They suggest that proof of actual distribution shouldn't be required. From their brief (PDF): "Mandating that proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances."
Hey AC: don't be an asshuile. We are all on the same team here no? You are right, but the irony is that because you are right, you are frustrated that people don't get it, and you react in a way that reduces the fraction of readers that will get it.
It's worth noting that the wrongest part of the dintech post you're criticizing has nothing to do with music. It's "Easy Solution"... as if. So is it going to be "give a man a fish" or "teach a man to fish?"
It can work, but how is it any more effective than digital compression algorithms? The real issue here is the same Psycho-Acoustic-Modelling (PAM) that has been beaten completely to death by the MP3 encoding efforts in the last 10 years. They may be able to reduce the digital bandwidth available in general, but they specifically say that they are manipulating inaudible background noise. Steganography can still exploit audible but imperceptible audio data. When they can effectively jam that channel, they will be able to speech-to-text everything, including nonverbal metadata in an audio stream: mood, set and setting, equipment generated noise...
It's a pipe dream: pork barrel research at its finest. Think of the children!
McCain co-sponsored every nasty evil domestic internet wiretap bill for the entire period of time between Congress' discovery of the Internet and the 911 "Patriot" act. He even tried to ban strong encryption like PGP.
Proven courage and loyalty under fire to whom? Not me! Not the America I would be proud to bleed for!
I'm still waiting for the apologies to come out about associating with Rummy.
As a professional cat herder in global mission-critical financial J2EE application environment of a fortune 100 company, I would peg you as a "significant risk" because you are completely willing to judge something on assumption without knowledge of basic requisites like "You are incompetent" without knowing exactly what the guy is trying to do, nor the nature of his difficulty.
I would take it as a personal task to destroy your code's behavior if there were any production impact on any bug. So, mister high-and-mighty "only incompetent people struggle with Java tools or language idiom" you get the prize. Only the best will be tolerated from you. A good teacher will specifically assign work which exposes the limits of a language/tools so that students get real experience learning how to push the envelope. Maybe struggling with Java is *part* of the assignment. I contend that if you went to school and did not struggle in this way, maybe you wasted your tuition and time?
What's wrong with putting the Earth at the center of the solar system? If you don't want people to understand the motions of heavenly bodies, then Sir William of Occam and his petty edict are of no concern! A modern example of this would be tax law. Why isn't it simpler? The authorities would lose a great deal of power which translates directly to material comforts and security--possibly without the need for any real productive labor. Of course, there's the bit about the talking donkey, but a Pope could just claim the interpretation of the miracle and the message about selling out is lost.
Long live BAAAL. I, for one, welcome our end-timer overlords.
I think it's obvious the nonsense that'll come out of this. People will say, x OS is more insecure than y and z because it fell first/so quickly. Regardless of the skewed skill/effort that went into breaking it.
This "twist" is bullshit.
Brute force attacks taking a long/short time using a generic fuzzer do not count as extra/less effort.
For me, vehement PHP basher, it isn't the language specification. It has more to do with 90% of the PHP code I encounter which gleefully intermingles presentation logic with functional application logic, abuses cut and paste, and generally demonstrates blatant disregard for readability.
I have seen a little PHP that is written more like a bunch of page templates with external modular core logic. There just seems to be a bias towards rickety code in PHP. I fully acknowledge that I must seriously fear those programmers whom might abandon PHP for Python without adopting 'Pythonic' code idioms.
I personally have a problem with Python's list comprehension. I totally abuse nested list comprehensions. They are difficult to follow mentally. I must constantly restrain myself.
Apple's strategy hinges on hyped products. The hyperbole doesn't work without the control of information about new products. In many ways this is a counter to Microsoft's liberal use of vaporware to scare customers away from products released by faster and more innovative (better) competitors. If Apple provides the first glimpse of its new product before Microsoft can even cook up a fake future product to compare it to, then Microsoft is left trying to compete on actual technical merit. If the bulletin boards provide Micrsoft with free focus-group marketing research, then they can pitch vaporware at the same time Apple announces an actual product. Vaporware is a little more transparent (doesn't work) when it is announced after the product it intends to sink actually hits shelves. The Apple store is number one a guarantee to Apple that Microsoft can't make side deals with retailers to deny Apple access to product distribution.
Libertarianism is more than anything a sentiment of wanting to cast off the hawsers. People who believe that there is territory left to explore will sooner or later find themselves unable to pull the old familiar world off with them, and so it is only natural to start hacking at the fetters.
The question is not about whether Linus Torvalds, as a Finn, could not possibly understand American freedoms. The question is about whether Linus Torvalds actually understands American freedoms, particularly the precious implied right to privacy, or how the Bush supreme court places that in jeaopardy, or how computers and computer networks are a favorite testing ground for experimental precedent because so few people understand them. Why would he waste his time with that stuff? He isn't a citizen and can always go back to Finland to live out the rest of his life.
I, however, am an American citizen with all of the privileges and burdens. When the American Government gets all screwed up, I have a duty to step up with my hammer and pound out the dents. Without that pressure, I doubt Linus Torvalds, or any other foreigner from a generally better-off country like Finland would opt to spend valuable time studying the nuances of the US Constitution. If I'm wrong there Mr. Anonymous Coward, I'm going to need some help getting straightened out.
I admit, humbly, that I have assumed for the particular freedom: the right of privacy, no other "free" country has an "implied" right but probably rather has an explicit right. I admit there are probably hundreds of people outside the US who could explain all of the legal nuances that flow from the 3rd amendment, but I personally doubt any of them would make the kind of gaffes that Linus Torvalds makes.
...And that Bill O'Reilly crack is way off. Bill and Linus are on the same side of this one. If you don't see it, well, lets just let history play out shall we?
I don't understand what you are talking about. Maybe you've never had to take a test requiring you to understand the implied right to privacy in the US Constitution. It isn't simple, and unless you're American (or just wish you were) I wouldn't assume you know it. Linus Torvalds isn't American, and by corrolary, I tend to assume he doesn't either. Actually his rant against the particular GPL3 feature is empirical evidence that he doesn't understand how that works. I may be wrong, but as a rule of thumb people who haven't studied an issue shouldn't be regarded as an expert opinion on the issue.
Linus can make the best framework for hardware drivers, but he knows little about guaranteeing privacy.
I wouldn't expect you to know why Linus Torvalds would be motivated to rant thus, but GPL3 threatens his world by threatening to take forward versions of GCC. Can you compile Linux on commerical compilers? Yes. Does Linus want to be under their (say Intel's for example) thumb? No. What will he do? Probably like he did with his source code management foible: end up founding yet another project that Linux kernel development requires. GCC is harder than Linux. He doesn't want to have to do the work.
The anti-TiVo clause of the GPL3 is to the GPL what the Third Amendment is to the U.S. Constitution.
DIscuss among yourselves, but Linus Torvalds isn't American, and we should not expect him to teach us about political freedom. If there weren't a whole lot of belligerent and ardently patriotic people like me making a stink about points like this, he would be in a gulag for threatening fascist state sponsored companies' operations.
Go back to your framework for hardware drivers Linus. You're out of your league.
Try to NFS export a ZFS volume and see what happens when multiple apps accessing the volume perform what they believe to be relatively cheap NFS sync RPCs to get a guarantee that the data has been committed.
The ZFS volume will not return from the sync nfsd generates to implement the RPC on the host storage until the ZIL (ZFS Intent Log) has been flushed. This synchronizes operations that should be parallel and makes the ZIL a bottleneck.
There are evil hacks to make ZFS lie about the state of files on disk returning from sync when the IO has been received (written to the ZIL). This apparently creates a race as subsequent reads can return data that has not been affected by the data written to the ZIL.
Please tell me I am wrong. I'd love to try this again, but I just cannot suck up the performance penalty.
See if you can understand Humpty Dumpty's (Lewis Carroll's) angle in the Wikipedia quote.
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't--till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master--that's all.'
[edit] (I love how Wikipedia drops those imperatives all over the place!)
I'm a Gen X techie, but unlike the other wee nee poseurs on Slashdot, I get a bigger picture. I paid ~300 for a BlackBerry because I wanted a *smart* device that could say take a standard meeting invitation from my email and add that to my standard PIM calendar so I could get a standard alarm when the time draws near.
What a disappointment. It is a mediocre phone. It is a dismal web browser. Spam: right to my hip. It doesn't sync my addressbook over bluetooth because RIM crippled the device (no OBEX or BT Sync profile).
You know that flash-mob commercial where (grad school and college aged) kids with sidekicks hit each other with silly-string on a mall escalator? That's some serious organizational power, but mine goes to eleven.
The meat is weak, but having confronted my own mortailty I can say that faith offers no better protection from psychological stress than resignation. "I admit that I cannot guarantee my own survival, so when my best effort falls short I accept death."
Since I have offered a counter example, faith is no longer a necessary condition. It remains to be seen whether faith is a sufficient condition for psychological survival.
The real application of this for money now is to replace the wheelchair with something that can negotiate stairs. So, in a not too distant future, Iraq war vets lacking legs/feet can rent apartments without ADA ramps.
If logic in public discourse is the crucible of refined ideas, why not let the arguments stand on their own merits without questioning the implied rules of the game?
Subject: Open Letter on Wikipedia Academics Date: January 26, 2007 4:50:13 PM CST To: monod@middlebury.edu
I came to your email chasing a reference from a Slashdot which reported that your department chose to disqualify student papers which cite the Wikipedia. You have been chosen mostly because you have the warmest portrait in the Middlebury web site staff and faculty directory. I will not presume whether this policy is or will be in fact in effect, but I will suggest that rather than discouraging students from relying on the Wikipedia as a resource perhaps it would be better to require them to assume responsibility for the ways in which they extend it. I challenge you and anyone else in your department to defend a claim that the field of History is threatened by the Wikipedia. Even if that argument held water, it would be more instructive than a continuation of business as usual assuming the absence or irrelevance of the Wikipedia. I think the only difference between the Wikipedia and any other (even academic) doxa is the blistering speed with which it can change. It is a tall order to demonstrate epistemological differences.
What is good academic work?
Why not simply require students to rise above the doxa in the wikipedia and participate by adopting and authoring and providing good citations for the appropriate entries to academic acceptability? When a History student cites and [mis]represents truths [or falsehoods] in their papers without the aptitude to question validate them isn't the tail wagging the dog? If students were encouraged under academic stewardship to adopt a section of the Wikipedia the opposite lesson is learned. You must consider that you have an opportunity to confront the ivory tower problem on very favorable terms if you choose to see it.
Since we high wizards need you little slackers to start pulling some weight, I will throw you all a rope. If you all begin to inform yourselves we will all get better games, and then all technology will benefit from the developments. So, if you don't do this homework, you forfeit any right to complain about anything that sucks in your life because you declined to avail yourself of the best opportunities to effect a remedy yourself.
Please let me spoon feed you the standing end of the tasty noodle of computer science which the FSM has graciously extended: Amdahl's Law. Since the Cell processor's design depends upon parallel processing in order to achieve its ideal performance, it is subject to the basic limitations of parallel processing. The weakness of the PS3 lies in the inability of people like you (and indeed people much better than you, myself included) to envision games as an embarrassingly parallel problem. Rendering vertexes in a shader algorithm should be such a problem. The new thing in games, according to the video card vendors is physics acceleration. There are plenty of people who can encode Newtonian physics as embarrassingly parallel problems, but they get much better hardware than a PS3 with which to play.
So, the weakness of Sony is their inability to get the Cell processor rolled out into the scientific community ala: "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!" IBM can, but I don't think they want a free flow of ideas to commodify their precious expertise. They get serious premium dollars for programming that stuff. That's where the Linux community is supposed to come in. So GET CRACKING you lazy schmuck! I don't care if your brain hurts! You'll take it and like it!
What happens to an old computer when you can't get software to run on it? You throw it away!
What happens to an old computer when you throw it away? It goes in a landfill! Lead in the solder becomes available to the water supply! What causes severe retardation in children? LEAD!
What happens to an old computer when you can reinstall an up-to-date OS? It gets (possibly) REUSED.
Why can't they use OpenBSD for the OS? Because you have to sign NDAs to get the documentation! That's not so bad except that rewriting the drivers means redoing the reverse-engineering without docs, which makes it prohibitive to support old hardware. What if the original developer of the OpenBSD firmware for Marvell dies in a skiing accident, and Marvell decides to deny access to the docs when the next guy wants to rewrite the firmware for some good reason?
Yeah. We're all so selfish. Theo DeRaadt definitely has some problems with diplomacy in some cases, but here I think his approach is inspired. That's why I think the GPL should not cover blah blah blah. I'm it for me. Does that even make any sense? Who cares! Blah blah blah!
Slashdot Mirror
PR troll.
Precisely targeted literally means NOT "the way we have been doing since the beginning of agriculture."
Your equivocation is either evil, or Dunning Kruger effect.
Tying apps to phones might be illegal by Sherman Act: using dominance in mobile device OS market as leverage in the device app market.
No, really? I think every plaintiff in any criminal case would clearly agree that the burden of proving that a violation actually occurred completely wipes out entire categories of law. Cops, for example, and Alberto Gonzalez really think Habeas Corpus is outdated, and prevents all kinds of innovation and progress towards criminalizing EVERYONE. Doubtless, this old legal doctrine deprives lots of copyright plaintiffs as well.
Hey AC: don't be an asshuile. We are all on the same team here no? You are right, but the irony is that because you are right, you are frustrated that people don't get it, and you react in a way that reduces the fraction of readers that will get it.
It's worth noting that the wrongest part of the dintech post you're criticizing has nothing to do with music. It's "Easy Solution"... as if. So is it going to be "give a man a fish" or "teach a man to fish?"
It can work, but how is it any more effective than digital compression algorithms? The real issue here is the same Psycho-Acoustic-Modelling (PAM) that has been beaten completely to death by the MP3 encoding efforts in the last 10 years. They may be able to reduce the digital bandwidth available in general, but they specifically say that they are manipulating inaudible background noise. Steganography can still exploit audible but imperceptible audio data. When they can effectively jam that channel, they will be able to speech-to-text everything, including nonverbal metadata in an audio stream: mood, set and setting, equipment generated noise...
It's a pipe dream: pork barrel research at its finest. Think of the children!
McCain co-sponsored every nasty evil domestic internet wiretap bill for the entire period of time between Congress' discovery of the Internet and the 911 "Patriot" act. He even tried to ban strong encryption like PGP.
Proven courage and loyalty under fire to whom? Not me! Not the America I would be proud to bleed for!
I'm still waiting for the apologies to come out about associating with Rummy.
As a professional cat herder in global mission-critical financial J2EE application environment of a fortune 100 company, I would peg you as a "significant risk" because you are completely willing to judge something on assumption without knowledge of basic requisites like "You are incompetent" without knowing exactly what the guy is trying to do, nor the nature of his difficulty.
I would take it as a personal task to destroy your code's behavior if there were any production impact on any bug. So, mister high-and-mighty "only incompetent people struggle with Java tools or language idiom" you get the prize. Only the best will be tolerated from you. A good teacher will specifically assign work which exposes the limits of a language/tools so that students get real experience learning how to push the envelope. Maybe struggling with Java is *part* of the assignment. I contend that if you went to school and did not struggle in this way, maybe you wasted your tuition and time?
What's wrong with putting the Earth at the center of the solar system? If you don't want people to understand the motions of heavenly bodies, then Sir William of Occam and his petty edict are of no concern! A modern example of this would be tax law. Why isn't it simpler? The authorities would lose a great deal of power which translates directly to material comforts and security--possibly without the need for any real productive labor. Of course, there's the bit about the talking donkey, but a Pope could just claim the interpretation of the miracle and the message about selling out is lost.
Long live BAAAL. I, for one, welcome our end-timer overlords.
Brute force attacks taking a long/short time using a generic fuzzer do not count as extra/less effort.
For me, vehement PHP basher, it isn't the language specification. It has more to do with 90% of the PHP code I encounter which gleefully intermingles presentation logic with functional application logic, abuses cut and paste, and generally demonstrates blatant disregard for readability.
I have seen a little PHP that is written more like a bunch of page templates with external modular core logic. There just seems to be a bias towards rickety code in PHP. I fully acknowledge that I must seriously fear those programmers whom might abandon PHP for Python without adopting 'Pythonic' code idioms.
I personally have a problem with Python's list comprehension. I totally abuse nested list comprehensions. They are difficult to follow mentally. I must constantly restrain myself.
What a crock!
Apple's strategy hinges on hyped products. The hyperbole doesn't work without the control of information about new products. In many ways this is a counter to Microsoft's liberal use of vaporware to scare customers away from products released by faster and more innovative (better) competitors. If Apple provides the first glimpse of its new product before Microsoft can even cook up a fake future product to compare it to, then Microsoft is left trying to compete on actual technical merit. If the bulletin boards provide Micrsoft with free focus-group marketing research, then they can pitch vaporware at the same time Apple announces an actual product. Vaporware is a little more transparent (doesn't work) when it is announced after the product it intends to sink actually hits shelves. The Apple store is number one a guarantee to Apple that Microsoft can't make side deals with retailers to deny Apple access to product distribution.
Libertarianism is more than anything a sentiment of wanting to cast off the hawsers. People who believe that there is territory left to explore will sooner or later find themselves unable to pull the old familiar world off with them, and so it is only natural to start hacking at the fetters.
Dumbass! For all you know, I could BE Bill O'Reilly!
The question is not about whether Linus Torvalds, as a Finn, could not possibly understand American freedoms. The question is about whether Linus Torvalds actually understands American freedoms, particularly the precious implied right to privacy, or how the Bush supreme court places that in jeaopardy, or how computers and computer networks are a favorite testing ground for experimental precedent because so few people understand them. Why would he waste his time with that stuff? He isn't a citizen and can always go back to Finland to live out the rest of his life.
I, however, am an American citizen with all of the privileges and burdens. When the American Government gets all screwed up, I have a duty to step up with my hammer and pound out the dents. Without that pressure, I doubt Linus Torvalds, or any other foreigner from a generally better-off country like Finland would opt to spend valuable time studying the nuances of the US Constitution. If I'm wrong there Mr. Anonymous Coward, I'm going to need some help getting straightened out.
I admit, humbly, that I have assumed for the particular freedom: the right of privacy, no other "free" country has an "implied" right but probably rather has an explicit right. I admit there are probably hundreds of people outside the US who could explain all of the legal nuances that flow from the 3rd amendment, but I personally doubt any of them would make the kind of gaffes that Linus Torvalds makes.
...And that Bill O'Reilly crack is way off. Bill and Linus are on the same side of this one. If you don't see it, well, lets just let history play out shall we?
I don't understand what you are talking about. Maybe you've never had to take a test requiring you to understand the implied right to privacy in the US Constitution. It isn't simple, and unless you're American (or just wish you were) I wouldn't assume you know it. Linus Torvalds isn't American, and by corrolary, I tend to assume he doesn't either. Actually his rant against the particular GPL3 feature is empirical evidence that he doesn't understand how that works. I may be wrong, but as a rule of thumb people who haven't studied an issue shouldn't be regarded as an expert opinion on the issue. Linus can make the best framework for hardware drivers, but he knows little about guaranteeing privacy. I wouldn't expect you to know why Linus Torvalds would be motivated to rant thus, but GPL3 threatens his world by threatening to take forward versions of GCC. Can you compile Linux on commerical compilers? Yes. Does Linus want to be under their (say Intel's for example) thumb? No. What will he do? Probably like he did with his source code management foible: end up founding yet another project that Linux kernel development requires. GCC is harder than Linux. He doesn't want to have to do the work.
The anti-TiVo clause of the GPL3 is to the GPL what the Third Amendment is to the U.S. Constitution.
DIscuss among yourselves, but Linus Torvalds isn't American, and we should not expect him to teach us about political freedom. If there weren't a whole lot of belligerent and ardently patriotic people like me making a stink about points like this, he would be in a gulag for threatening fascist state sponsored companies' operations.
Go back to your framework for hardware drivers Linus. You're out of your league.
Try to NFS export a ZFS volume and see what happens when multiple apps accessing the volume perform what they believe to be relatively cheap NFS sync RPCs to get a guarantee that the data has been committed.
The ZFS volume will not return from the sync nfsd generates to implement the RPC on the host storage until the ZIL (ZFS Intent Log) has been flushed. This synchronizes operations that should be parallel and makes the ZIL a bottleneck.
There are evil hacks to make ZFS lie about the state of files on disk returning from sync when the IO has been received (written to the ZIL). This apparently creates a race as subsequent reads can return data that has not been affected by the data written to the ZIL.
Please tell me I am wrong. I'd love to try this again, but I just cannot suck up the performance penalty.
There is a subtle power struggle at play here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumptyism
See if you can understand Humpty Dumpty's (Lewis Carroll's) angle in the Wikipedia quote.
I'm a Gen X techie, but unlike the other wee nee poseurs on Slashdot, I get a bigger picture. I paid ~300 for a BlackBerry because I wanted a *smart* device that could say take a standard meeting invitation from my email and add that to my standard PIM calendar so I could get a standard alarm when the time draws near.
What a disappointment. It is a mediocre phone. It is a dismal web browser. Spam: right to my hip. It doesn't sync my addressbook over bluetooth because RIM crippled the device (no OBEX or BT Sync profile).
You know that flash-mob commercial where (grad school and college aged) kids with sidekicks hit each other with silly-string on a mall escalator? That's some serious organizational power, but mine goes to eleven.
The meat is weak, but having confronted my own mortailty I can say that faith offers no better protection from psychological stress than resignation. "I admit that I cannot guarantee my own survival, so when my best effort falls short I accept death."
Since I have offered a counter example, faith is no longer a necessary condition. It remains to be seen whether faith is a sufficient condition for psychological survival.
The real application of this for money now is to replace the wheelchair with something that can negotiate stairs. So, in a not too distant future, Iraq war vets lacking legs/feet can rent apartments without ADA ramps.
If logic in public discourse is the crucible of refined ideas, why not let the arguments stand on their own merits without questioning the implied rules of the game?
Subject: Open Letter on Wikipedia Academics
Date: January 26, 2007 4:50:13 PM CST
To: monod@middlebury.edu
I came to your email chasing a reference from a Slashdot which reported that your department chose to disqualify student papers which cite the Wikipedia. You have been chosen mostly because you have the warmest portrait in the Middlebury web site staff and faculty directory. I will not presume whether this policy is or will be in fact in effect, but I will suggest that rather than discouraging students from relying on the Wikipedia as a resource perhaps it would be better to require them to assume responsibility for the ways in which they extend it. I challenge you and anyone else in your department to defend a claim that the field of History is threatened by the Wikipedia. Even if that argument held water, it would be more instructive than a continuation of business as usual assuming the absence or irrelevance of the Wikipedia. I think the only difference between the Wikipedia and any other (even academic) doxa is the blistering speed with which it can change. It is a tall order to demonstrate epistemological differences.
What is good academic work?
Why not simply require students to rise above the doxa in the wikipedia and participate by adopting and authoring and providing good citations for the appropriate entries to academic acceptability? When a History student cites and [mis]represents truths [or falsehoods] in their papers without the aptitude to question validate them isn't the tail wagging the dog? If students were encouraged under academic stewardship to adopt a section of the Wikipedia the opposite lesson is learned. You must consider that you have an opportunity to confront the ivory tower problem on very favorable terms if you choose to see it.
Since we high wizards need you little slackers to start pulling some weight, I will throw you all a rope. If you all begin to inform yourselves we will all get better games, and then all technology will benefit from the developments. So, if you don't do this homework, you forfeit any right to complain about anything that sucks in your life because you declined to avail yourself of the best opportunities to effect a remedy yourself.
Please let me spoon feed you the standing end of the tasty noodle of computer science which the FSM has graciously extended: Amdahl's Law. Since the Cell processor's design depends upon parallel processing in order to achieve its ideal performance, it is subject to the basic limitations of parallel processing. The weakness of the PS3 lies in the inability of people like you (and indeed people much better than you, myself included) to envision games as an embarrassingly parallel problem. Rendering vertexes in a shader algorithm should be such a problem. The new thing in games, according to the video card vendors is physics acceleration. There are plenty of people who can encode Newtonian physics as embarrassingly parallel problems, but they get much better hardware than a PS3 with which to play.
So, the weakness of Sony is their inability to get the Cell processor rolled out into the scientific community ala: "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!" IBM can, but I don't think they want a free flow of ideas to commodify their precious expertise. They get serious premium dollars for programming that stuff. That's where the Linux community is supposed to come in. So GET CRACKING you lazy schmuck! I don't care if your brain hurts! You'll take it and like it!
What happens to an old computer when you can't get software to run on it? You throw it away!
What happens to an old computer when you throw it away? It goes in a landfill! Lead in the solder becomes available to the water supply! What causes severe retardation in children? LEAD!
What happens to an old computer when you can reinstall an up-to-date OS? It gets (possibly) REUSED.
Why can't they use OpenBSD for the OS? Because you have to sign NDAs to get the documentation! That's not so bad except that rewriting the drivers means redoing the reverse-engineering without docs, which makes it prohibitive to support old hardware. What if the original developer of the OpenBSD firmware for Marvell dies in a skiing accident, and Marvell decides to deny access to the docs when the next guy wants to rewrite the firmware for some good reason?
Yeah. We're all so selfish. Theo DeRaadt definitely has some problems with diplomacy in some cases, but here I think his approach is inspired. That's why I think the GPL should not cover blah blah blah. I'm it for me. Does that even make any sense? Who cares! Blah blah blah!