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No. And don't expect it any time soon. You even still need to buy a license from them to enable the hardware decoder for MPEG-2 (and VC-1) despite all the patents have already expired on February 13, 2018 and can be used freely.

So if you want to enable the hardware MPEG-2 decoder in your RPi you must use a hack.

What keeps me from buying the far superior OrangePi is that LibreElec still doesn't support it.

..NOT XKCD.

WTF/m

Bring back the old Borland No-Nonsense License Agreement!

http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

Riiight, because Linux has such great support for ancient proprietary devices like ISA CNC boards, Serial connections to laser cutters, when Linux can't even keep support for older webcams working.

Doesn't the last DVD patent expire in less than a week (Feb 14, I think)? http://www.osnews.com/story/24... http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wi... Or does VLC already ignore all those because it's based in France? Maybe VLC is already set, and it's just a Handbrake update to look forward to sometime after Wednesday.

Don't forget osnews. I go there every so often and I'm always pleasantly surprised it's still thriving.

> That's what they said when Mac stopped using floppy disks.

No, it's not what ANYONE said then. What they said then was something along the lines of "that's too soon". And they were CORRECT- plenty of iMac purchasers bought an external floppy drive to transfer data to and from, and used it for the life of that computer. No one seriously believed that the 1.44 Megabyte floppy, a reasonable and useful amount of storage in 1987, with hard drives under one hundred megabytes, was "the future" or "would never go away" ten years later, with hard drives in the gigabytes.

Here's the types of things they were saying:

Summary: "It's a publicity stunt to sell more expensive media solutions"
http://www.osnews.com/story/18...

Summary: "People who need floppies will buy USB floppies, networked machines won't care so much, and that's a big part of their target market"
http://articles.latimes.com/19...

Nobody ways saying "Great, but the floppy is so perfect that everyone will use it forever". But you can absolutely make that case for the headphone jack, which doesn't appear to be going away at all. It's just something you can't get on a new iPhone, which is a shame, but it's not new for Apple to ignore a standard for profit.

Two things here:

1. It's more applicable to once a bug is known than to finding new bugs.

2. Even then it still fails though, as there was a bug in BSD readdir for nearly 25 years. Samba developers had coded around the bug rather than try to fix it. See http://www.osnews.com/story/19...

AC3 patents expired on March 20, 2017
For Mpeg2,

OS news says 2018.
http://mobile.osnews.com/story...

But DVD's were sold in the US in 1995(1996 with CSS), so for patents after on mpeg2, DVD is prior art. So 2016 or 2018.

http://www.osnews.com/story/24... A quick Google shows that "app" in reference to "application" has been around in some form since at least 1981.

Last of the US MP3 patents expires a month from today.

Not sure what you mean by "not often used", but OSNews cites the Oxford English Dictionary in tracing the terms "app" and "killer app" back to the 1980s. An early (1985) Object Pascal framework for Macintosh Toolbox applications was called MacApp. Ashton-Tate's Framework II office suite likewise referred to bundled applications as "apps" to save space in the menu.

It probably does. For a long time it was thought to be on 30th December this year when 5703999 would expire, but then it was noticed that they had added 20 years to date of grant, rather than 17 years and come up with the wrong date. It is either 20 years is from date of filing, or 17 from date of grant which ever is the longer. So that has expired.

There are just two patents left 6185539 which expires on the the 19th February and 6009399 which expires on the 16th April 2017. I have had this date in my diary for a long time now.

The last decoding patent expired in September 2015 which is why it has been added to Fedora.

http://www.osnews.com/story/24...

Note that MPEG2 will probably become patent free next year as well. Though this requires you to note that the standard was released in 1996 so anything filed after that is invalidated by the prior art in the standard and was improperly issued. So while the last patent 7334248 expires in 2026, it was first filed in 2002 and should never have been issued. However it probably needs a current licensee with some big Cahoonas to stop paying the license fee and invite the MPEG-LA to sue and get a ruling that the patents are not valid.

Remember that in 2011 the music industry claimed that it deserved 75 trillion dollars in damages in the Lime Wire case.

http://www.osnews.com/comments/24561

But at the time, 75 trillion dollars was more than the gross domestic product of the entire world!

Software Patents? Yes we know. According to OSNews the last of the patents expires in April of 2017. So the base install of the next version of Fedora should be safe to include software for encoding and decoding of MP3 by then.

I guess "Windows isn't done unless Lotus won't run" by your logic is completely reasonable behavior, it WAS their OS...right?

Or maybe if you'd stop waving your little Intel flag as hard as your squeeing fangirl ass can you'd know they didn't "not optimize" for other chips, they purposely designed their compiler to put out broken code on other chips so badly in fact that you could take a Via CPU (the only CPU that allows you to change the CPUID in software) and by simply changing the CPUID from "Centaur Hauls" to "Genuine Intel" you magically got a 30% performance boost...wow, the power of of CPUID huh?

Of course what it really was was a classic case of "Windows isn't done unless Lotus won't run" and this kind of behavior is typical of Intel, hence why they had to shell out 1.4 billion for market rigging and anti competitive behavior in the EU just 2 years ago. Would you like a quote from the judgement?

"The Commission demonstrated to the requisite legal standard that Intel attempted to conceal the anti-competitive nature of its practices and implemented a long term comprehensive strategy to foreclose AMD from the strategically most important sales channels. ... The General Court considers that none of the arguments raised by Intel supports the conclusion that the fine imposed is disproportionate. On the contrary, it must be considered that that fine is appropriate in the light of the facts of the case.

In other words the exact same shit MSFT got busted for and frankly they should get no less than what MSFT did, 10 years of being monitored by the courts to keep them from pulling shit like this again.

But still the point stands, it was common in the 80s and 90s: http://www.osnews.com/story/24...

I guess the AC's lawn belongs to his parents ;-)

Uhhhh...about that? Yeah you see that is how its SUPPOSED to work, in theory at least, but once you start actually digging out the really old hardware to try to test that theory? Yeah you end up like this guy right here.

Right. This is why I think VP9 actually could win and become the new standard (replacing H.264).

H.265 and VP9 seem like they are definitely in the same ballpark on quality. And H.265 is heavily encumbered with patents; you have to pay royalties, and you never know what the royalties might cost in five years. VP9, on the other hand, is simply free: no royalties, no restrictions on what you may do with the video.

Even if VP9 takes a lot more CPU time to encode, and even if H.265 is slightly better than VP9, not having to pay royalties (not even having to keep track of what you do with the video!) is such a huge benefit. It seems like a no-brainer.

And Google will be making sure that all the Android phones at least will have good hardware support for VP9 decoding. VP8 never had a chance against H.264 because the hardware support wasn't there, and large companies were content to pay the capped fees as you noted.

All that's left is possible legal FUD around VP9, but even that seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. MPEG-LA tried for something like a year to find patents to put into their patent pool to extract royalties from VP8, and in the end Google gave them a one-time payment of (to Google) a relatively small amount of money. Thanks to that one-time payment we know MPEG-LA won't ever come after anyone for using a VP8-derived codec, and I have no reason to think anyone would be able to prevail in court if they try it.

Given all of the above, it seems to me that VP9 is the obvious choice for the new video standard, and I kind of wonder why anyone is still interested in using H.265 and paying the royalties.

The problem is us low-uid drones keep coming back and reading (and some of us continue posting to the comment section). Ergo, nothing will change. Just like the anti-beta team that was slowly silenced by the developers forcing the problematic design on us all. Solyent News picked a horrible name and just faded into obscurity (yes they have very similar content but the comment section is desperately lacking). So where else do we have to go.. Reddit? ha. IRC? I know a few that have. But must that I've talked to have just given up. They never login anymore and continue to read slashdot and give into the ad viewership. Which, what is up with that ?autorefresh and waking up to blaring audio ads because I left slashdot open in a tab.

If my ADD didn't need a fix, slashdot would be dead to me now. At least OSNews hasn't strayed from it's path in over 15 years.

It is trivial to tell the difference, thus proving your theory incorrect. if you have to use previous drivers Windows will say "unable to find drivers" and will leave the device a question mark in device manager. At that point you simply manually install the previous driver and voila!

So yes Virginia you can use Win2K drivers on Windows 8.1, probably Windows 10, so we are talking 23 YEARS of driver support (since 8.1 will be supported until 2023) which no Linux comes even close with their driver support which despite all the BS about how "Linux supports more hardware" is in reality quite poor.

If you truly believe what you are preaching? Then step right up and take "The Hairyfeet Challenge", now celebrating its eighth year of watching "consumer friendly" Linux distros puke and die!

Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?

During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.

BTW in case it isn't clear working hardware means WORKING HARDWARE, it does NOT mean wireless that can't use WPA, it does NOT mean a PC with no sound or VESA video, it means FULLY WORKING HARDWARE and again if you are unclear please see the highlighted areas as completing the challenge REQUIRES vids of the final install of each upgrade (last I checked that would be EIGHT for Ubuntu, and around SIX for most others, be sure to have room on your SD Card!) along with a 5 minute video of the end of each install showing that upon completion you could go to hardware manager and had 100% functional hardware with NO FUTZING. After all if you have to futz with the thing just to have functional drivers it isn't on the same level as Windows now is it? BTW the first Windows that passed the challenge was Win2K (RTM to EOL with ZERO failed drivers, 10 years of support) WinXP (14 years, ZERO fails) and both Vista and 7 can go from RTM to current with ZERO failures. So lets see them snappies, otherwise you are just throwing yet more bullshit, which if you want bullshit see "many eyes" which gave us such well vetted code the world lost billions on heartbleed and will probably lose billions more on stopping the current BASHing...what quality!

Just FYI I've already taken the challenge with several distros that guys like you push, Ubuntu (failed in just 2), PCLOS (failed in 1!), Fedora (2) and about a dozen more and I can't wait to see you take the challenge...but you won't, even though 1.- Its free, 2.- Takes less than 3 hours, and 3.- Would show your desktop is ready for the masses....how do I know you won't? Because if you try the challenge you'll see what I've been saying for over a decade is true, that Torvalds 1970s throwback driver model (which just FYI nobody else uses, not even FOSS OSes like BSD) is a pile of shit and his "let the kernel devs handle drivers" worked just fine in 1993 when all the drivers combined could fit on a floppy but just does not scale. That is why you get such "great support" like this for webcams, why even FOSS darling Firefox disables hardware acceleration thus crippling performance, hell I could go on all day!

So p

If you truly believe what you are preaching? Then step right up and take "The Hairyfeet Challenge", now celebrating its eighth year of watching "consumer friendly" Linux distros puke and die!

Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?

During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.

BTW in case it isn't clear working hardware means WORKING HARDWARE, it does NOT mean wireless that can't use WPA, it does NOT mean a PC with no sound or VESA video, it means FULLY WORKING HARDWARE and again if you are unclear please see the highlighted areas as completing the challenge REQUIRES vids of the final install of each upgrade (last I checked that would be EIGHT for Ubuntu, and around SIX for most others, be sure to have room on your SD Card!) along with a 5 minute video of the end of each install showing that upon completion you could go to hardware manager and had 100% functional hardware with NO FUTZING. After all if you have to futz with the thing just to have functional drivers it isn't on the same level as Windows now is it? BTW the first Windows that passed the challenge was Win2K (RTM to EOL with ZERO failed drivers, 10 years of support) WinXP (14 years, ZERO fails) and both Vista and 7 can go from RTM to current with ZERO failures. So lets see them snappies, otherwise you are just throwing yet more bullshit, which if you want bullshit see "many eyes" which gave us such well vetted code the world lost billions on heartbleed and will probably lose billions more on stopping the current BASHing...what quality!

Just FYI I've already taken the challenge with several distros that guys like you push, Ubuntu (failed in just 2), PCLOS (failed in 1!), Fedora (2) and about a dozen more and I can't wait to see you take the challenge...but you won't, even though 1.- Its free, 2.- Takes less than 3 hours, and 3.- Would show your desktop is ready for the masses....how do I know you won't? Because if you try the challenge you'll see what I've been saying for over a decade is true, that Torvalds 1970s throwback driver model (which just FYI nobody else uses, not even FOSS OSes like BSD) is a pile of shit and his "let the kernel devs handle drivers" worked just fine in 1993 when all the drivers combined could fit on a floppy but just does not scale. That is why you get such "great support" like this for webcams, why even FOSS darling Firefox disables hardware acceleration thus crippling performance, hell I could go on all day!

So p

Except that Sooner wasn't the only device planned and Dream (large touchscreen, etc.) was already supported by the software: http://www.osnews.com/permalin...

Nice theory. Too bad that the video (released after you could already buy the iPhone) showing the "support" proves you still needed to use hardware buttons to navigate web pages in the browser. If that's support planned from the start that's fucking shitty support so far in the development progress.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/building-android-a-40000-word-history-of-googles-mobile-os/
"I'm gonna show you an advanced device, with touch screen [that would be your Dream]. Here's the web browser" - and goes on to press lots and lots of hardware keys before he begins what you can do with that advanced touch screen: oh, look, you can jerk the web page around on the screen. In Streetview you can even zoom.

One of the big improvements was a focus on optimization. There were a number of global locks in Windows Vista that were re-engineered in Windows 7 to be much more efficient on multi-core/multi-CPU machines.

BTW, don't pay any attention to the internal version numbers. These were mismatched simply for compatibility reasons, not because it was a "minor" tech upgrade or anything like that.

Announcement:
https://tails.boum.org/news/ve...
https://blog.torproject.org/bl...
http://www.osnews.com/story/28...
http://soylentnews.org/article...

##

Snowden Used the Linux Distro Designed For Internet Anonymity
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

"politicians are desperate to find a solution to the long-running anti-competitive dispute with Google."

And we all know who's really behind this 'dispute'.

link

link

VXDs were .INI based, a hell of a lot like DOS "bare metal" drivers while WDM had a much more sane isolation driver model, in fact last I checked you could run XP WDM drivers on Win 7...try THAT with Linux and see how far you get! But trying to have bare metal drivers AND isolated drivers while dealing with the 16bit GDI memory state just overloaded the OS which eventually would cause a crash thanks to lack of memory for the desktop subsystem. Most folks don't know that all Win9X had a fatal GDI flaw where the GDI would run out of memory, no matter how much you had, because crucial parts of its subsystem were 16bit leftovers and THAT is what killed WinME, trying to fit two completely different driver models into a 16bit limited memory manager was...it was just too much.

As far as Linux? Give it up, because as Linus has a pulse it will NEVER get any better. I mean we'd laugh if Windows still ran with VXD drivers, right? Well Linus' driver model is sooooo old that VXD would be a step up! The simple fact is the "let the kernel devs handle it" worked back when ALL of Linux AND the drivers could fit on a floppy but when you have over 100,000 drivers AND new drivers in the thousands released every quarter AND major parts from the kernel on up in flux? Its easy enough to do basic math and see it doesn't stand a chance of being stable. This is why the "Hairyfeet Challenge" has stood for 8 years now, because Linux just can't update itself without the house of cards that is the drivers falls apart.

And the hilarious part? They claim you are an "anti FOSS shill" for daring to ask for functional drivers, and the best part is its NOT FOSS, as BSD? Has functional drivers, they simply are focused on servers so they don't have drivers for consumer hardware! But NO OTHER OS uses Linus's shit model, not BSD, not OSX, hell even OS fucking 2 has a more functional driver model than Linux!

Mark my words Windows 9 is gonna make Linux look like the POS that it is and gonna slaughter Linux on the desktop...I mean a Windows that is nearly 40% FASTER than Win 7 AND its gonna be less than $40 a pop, possibly even free? And you are right about hardware, I can slap Win 7 on a late model P4 with an IGP and GB of RAM and its fine, that exact same system on the supposedly "lightweight" Linux just crawls unless you use a Win98 looking DE like Blackbox. But you spend any time with Linux and you find out a good 90%+ of their claims? Total bullshit, classic circle of loon. As I go to sleep I'll be having my hexacore process a half a dozen videos AND convert a video to DVD and meanwhile just basic things that Windows has had since 2006 like hardware acceleration? Doesn't work, in fact just basic multitasking is a crapshoot so yeah, don't bother its not worth it.

Shameless plug:

http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

Biggest lesson I learned... Do not claim the compiler is a perfect machine :P

No I'm always buried when I dare to point out the truth, that simple math will show that "let the devs handle it" is simply impossible. You have right now around 250,000 drivers out there for Linux, new hardware probably adds 3k-4k a month and you have MAYBE 500 kernel devs worldwide who have the years of experience in low level coding required to debug a low level driver...starting to see the flaw here? if you pumped the kernel devs full of speed so they did NOTHING but work on drivers 24/7 (and in reality the amount of time they spend on drivers versus the kernel is pretty low, probably 25% at best) then in a perfect scenario you'd have the drivers for a particular piece of hardware looked at by a kernel dev about once every 10 years for a max of 3 minutes! and this isn't even bringing up the facts that 1.- the kernel dev most likely won't have the hardware on hand to test, 2.- Will have little to no hands on exp with said hardware, and 3.- has little to no incentive to spend any real amount of time trying to fix a driver he/she will never need for hardware they will never own...see why it doesn't work?

THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me of about the FOSSie faction, you can show them that something is fucking IMPOSSIBLE to pull off, its as much as dream as fricking zero point energy but as long as Torvalds or Stallman says its true? Well who you gonna believe, that lying math or the saints? I mean its fucking basic math, you have X NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT CAN DO A JOB AND THE JOB IS GROWING BY X+Y*Z THEN THE JOB AIN'T GETTING DONE!!! Seriously how fricking hard is that?

The fatal flaw in both "let the devs" and "many eyes" is that they go by the assumption that because something worked once upon a time that it will work now while ignoring that the situation is VERY different. Both of those worked just fine, in the 1990s when the entire OS with DE and all the drivers could fit on a single zip disc with tons of space left over....that ain't been the case in over a dozen fricking years! Now the kernel alone is over 10 million LOC and the Linux drivers are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, yet as we saw right here not to long ago because the kernel devs are a bunch of arrogant asses its become a "good old boys" club that is not only not growing but is stagnant...and they are supposed to keep up with ALL the devices and ALL the drivers and ALL the changes to every subsystem that could break said drivers AND fix them...really?

I'm sorry but there is bullshit, arrogant bullshit, and the "I can fart hard enough to fly to the moon!" completely unbelievable bullshit and "let the devs" is firmly in the latter by a LARGE margin, just ask these guys about the quality of Linux drivers. But because the fanboys are so fricking cultish about Linux anything other than "Gee Biff isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Bob, it cures cancer and makes rainbows!" is attacked and modbombed.

No I'm always buried when I dare to point out the truth, that simple math will show that "let the devs handle it" is simply impossible. You have right now around 250,000 drivers out there for Linux, new hardware probably adds 3k-4k a month and you have MAYBE 500 kernel devs worldwide who have the years of experience in low level coding required to debug a low level driver...starting to see the flaw here? if you pumped the kernel devs full of speed so they did NOTHING but work on drivers 24/7 (and in reality the amount of time they spend on drivers versus the kernel is pretty low, probably 25% at best) then in a perfect scenario you'd have the drivers for a particular piece of hardware looked at by a kernel dev about once every 10 years for a max of 3 minutes! and this isn't even bringing up the facts that 1.- the kernel dev most likely won't have the hardware on hand to test, 2.- Will have little to no hands on exp with said hardware, and 3.- has little to no incentive to spend any real amount of time trying to fix a driver he/she will never need for hardware they will never own...see why it doesn't work?

THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me of about the FOSSie faction, you can show them that something is fucking IMPOSSIBLE to pull off, its as much as dream as fricking zero point energy but as long as Torvalds or Stallman says its true? Well who you gonna believe, that lying math or the saints? I mean its fucking basic math, you have X NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT CAN DO A JOB AND THE JOB IS GROWING BY X+Y*Z THEN THE JOB AIN'T GETTING DONE!!! Seriously how fricking hard is that?

The fatal flaw in both "let the devs" and "many eyes" is that they go by the assumption that because something worked once upon a time that it will work now while ignoring that the situation is VERY different. Both of those worked just fine, in the 1990s when the entire OS with DE and all the drivers could fit on a single zip disc with tons of space left over....that ain't been the case in over a dozen fricking years! Now the kernel alone is over 10 million LOC and the Linux drivers are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, yet as we saw right here not to long ago because the kernel devs are a bunch of arrogant asses its become a "good old boys" club that is not only not growing but is stagnant...and they are supposed to keep up with ALL the devices and ALL the drivers and ALL the changes to every subsystem that could break said drivers AND fix them...really?

I'm sorry but there is bullshit, arrogant bullshit, and the "I can fart hard enough to fly to the moon!" completely unbelievable bullshit and "let the devs" is firmly in the latter by a LARGE margin, just ask these guys about the quality of Linux drivers. But because the fanboys are so fricking cultish about Linux anything other than "Gee Biff isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Bob, it cures cancer and makes rainbows!" is attacked and modbombed.

No I'm always buried when I dare to point out the truth, that simple math will show that "let the devs handle it" is simply impossible. You have right now around 250,000 drivers out there for Linux, new hardware probably adds 3k-4k a month and you have MAYBE 500 kernel devs worldwide who have the years of experience in low level coding required to debug a low level driver...starting to see the flaw here? if you pumped the kernel devs full of speed so they did NOTHING but work on drivers 24/7 (and in reality the amount of time they spend on drivers versus the kernel is pretty low, probably 25% at best) then in a perfect scenario you'd have the drivers for a particular piece of hardware looked at by a kernel dev about once every 10 years for a max of 3 minutes! and this isn't even bringing up the facts that 1.- the kernel dev most likely won't have the hardware on hand to test, 2.- Will have little to no hands on exp with said hardware, and 3.- has little to no incentive to spend any real amount of time trying to fix a driver he/she will never need for hardware they will never own...see why it doesn't work?

THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me of about the FOSSie faction, you can show them that something is fucking IMPOSSIBLE to pull off, its as much as dream as fricking zero point energy but as long as Torvalds or Stallman says its true? Well who you gonna believe, that lying math or the saints? I mean its fucking basic math, you have X NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT CAN DO A JOB AND THE JOB IS GROWING BY X+Y*Z THEN THE JOB AIN'T GETTING DONE!!! Seriously how fricking hard is that?

The fatal flaw in both "let the devs" and "many eyes" is that they go by the assumption that because something worked once upon a time that it will work now while ignoring that the situation is VERY different. Both of those worked just fine, in the 1990s when the entire OS with DE and all the drivers could fit on a single zip disc with tons of space left over....that ain't been the case in over a dozen fricking years! Now the kernel alone is over 10 million LOC and the Linux drivers are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, yet as we saw right here not to long ago because the kernel devs are a bunch of arrogant asses its become a "good old boys" club that is not only not growing but is stagnant...and they are supposed to keep up with ALL the devices and ALL the drivers and ALL the changes to every subsystem that could break said drivers AND fix them...really?

I'm sorry but there is bullshit, arrogant bullshit, and the "I can fart hard enough to fly to the moon!" completely unbelievable bullshit and "let the devs" is firmly in the latter by a LARGE margin, just ask these guys about the quality of Linux drivers. But because the fanboys are so fricking cultish about Linux anything other than "Gee Biff isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Bob, it cures cancer and makes rainbows!" is attacked and modbombed.

I am surprised that people still want to use OpenVMS.

OpenVMS is the most mature microkernel OS out there. You can have flaky hardware, flaky drivers, flaky software, and it'll just keep running perfectly, restarting whatever services as need, as often as needed. You can't make it panic.

It also has more advanced clustering than most people believe exists... A server's full state is replicated in real-time, so a hardware failure doesn't even need to be handled by applications, they just think everything has been running for the past decade...

OpenVMS has ridiculous uptimes, over a decade, even on heavily utilized systems. Far longer than anything else out there.

http://www.uptimes-project.org...

http://www.osnews.com/comments...

Actually the patch is already distributed without any manufacturer intervention required. http://www.osnews.com/story/27...

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Nvidia PAYS for removal of features that work better on AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Reading the link you posted above, it seems like a bit of a non-factual load of waffle. Nvidia deny paying, Ubisoft deny being paid, and the only sources mentioned are anonymous speculators we have no way of knowing are not just a few paid ATI shills.

Nvidia pays for insertion of USELESS features that work faster on their hardware

http://techreport.com/review/2...

Wow, another example of amazing journalism here.

Some guy moaning about Crysis having loads of detailing that is only used in the DirectX11 game. He give loads of examples of this, then posts a summary page of wild speculation with no sources quoted other than his own imagination. He never asks any of the companies involved, he just posts a bunch of stuff about why this might be the case.

I have another possible suggestion as to why this was the case: Crytek like making stuff look overly detailed and include graphics detailing that means their games continue to max out graphics cards long after they are released. They always make they games playable on the budget cards if you crank the detailing down, but they also like catering to people who buy a new graphics card then go back and play a few oldies that they had to crank the detail down on previously. Crytek also probably also quite like their games being used in hardware reviews because their games hammer the hardware.

Nvidia cripples their own middleware to disadwantage competitors

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Ok, congratulations on actually posting an article that was real journalism, with quote sources and not just made up of the authors own conjecture.

The issue here though seems to be that there was an optimisation, moving from x87 to SSE that they did not do on a bunch of legacy code. Instead they rewrote it from scratch, which took slightly longer to use SSE.

This was not them intentionally doing something to hobble a competitor, this was them not doing anything to help them quickly. That is very different.

They did however ultimately fix it:

"PhysX SDK 3.0 was released in May 2011 and represented a significant rewrite of the SDK, bringing improvements such as more efficient multithreading and a unified code base for all supported platforms"

Intel did the same, but FTC put a stop to it
http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

There is a massive difference here, Intel's were intentionally hobbling the code their complier created based on finding a competing vendor name in the product string. They did not say "wait for version 3" like the PhysX case, they just did something then just sat their tight lipped until it went to court and they were forced to change it.

This is something FTC should weight in just like in Intels case.

As I said earlier, Nvidia made the all important change to use SSE when running PhysX on the CPU without the FTC being involved.

Nvidia PAYS for removal of features that work better on AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Nvidia pays for insertion of USELESS features that work faster on their hardware

http://techreport.com/review/2...

Nvidia cripples their own middleware to disadwantage competitors

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Intel did the same, but FTC put a stop to it
http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

so how exactly is that not Nvidias doing??

Nvidia is evil and plays dirty. They dont want your games to be good, they want them to be fast on Nvidia, any means necessary. They use "means to be played" program to lure developers in, pay them off and hijack their games to further nvidias goal.

For example how come Watch Dogs, a console title build from the grounds up with AMD GPU/CPU optimizations to run good on both current gen consoles, is crippled on PC when played on AMD hardware? How does this shit happen?

This is something FTC should weight in just like in Intels case.

'I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome OS or Mobile Safari in iOS.

The browser bundling argument was always the lamest attack on MS. No other computing vendor has been forced to bend over like MS to provide browser alternatives. Nobody ever complained that Notepad and Wordpad were anti-competetive either.

People latch onto the browser thing because that's the only charge that managed to stick all the way through to a conviction. Microsoft certainly is guilty of much more, but a lot of the actions that generate hate are either not explicitly illegal, or nobody is correctly positioned to sue because of them.

The Windows monopoly was the real problem. I especially hate how Microsoft required OEMs to pay for Windows for every computer, and required computers with Windows not to boot another OS. (Linked Byte.com column is now here.) Gassee tried offering BeOS for free, and nobody would take him up on it, because the Windows monopoly was so complete. Eventually, the BeOS shareholders got a return on their investment, but I would have preferred to have a better operating system in the market.

When Internet Explorer 6 was released, it was a nice browser. Like Safari 7 is a nice browser now. It could have spurred other browser makers in healthy competition. Instead, monopoly secure, Microsoft disbanded the IE team. IE 6 became a curse word.

Other parts of Microsoft are still curses on the industry. This is why we hate Microsoft.

I'd love an open phone as much as anyone. Unfortunately, the proprietary bits of android aren't our only problem. The baseband firmware is regulated, proprietary, and mysterious in virtually every phone on the market. So, unless you want to use your phone exclusively on WIFI, it's never going to be truly open.

Why is this modded offtopic? Seems about as ontopic as one can get and something many of us here have been talking about. Google USED to be this cool "throw cool shit at the wall and see what sticks" kind of company but in the last couple of years...they have started getting nasty. The nasty changes in the TOS, the nasty ways of trying to force you to use G+ whether you want it or not... its gotten so bad I now have a "YouTube browser" just to keep from getting that damned popup trying to get me to tie my real name to G+ and YouTube and had to make a throwaway account for my android phone.

I'm sorry guys but Google just ain't the cool fun nerdy company they was, ever since the IPO and G+ its been about squeezing every last penny out of the users to drum up the stock price, not about just making money off doing cool stuff. How much you wanna bet its gonna turn out to be tied to the "exciting new feature" of tying G+ circle crap into Gmail they recently rolled out?

I swear Brin has a bigger chubby for that crappy G+ than Ballmer has for Metro and in both cases its a giant DO NOT WANT but sadly its not about the users in both cases, its about "gotta beat the FB and make teh monies!" for one and "gotta beat the iPad and make teh monies!" for the other.

Well considering the fact that OpenBSD is in danger of shutting down due to lack of funding I really don't think starting this NOW is the greatest of ideas. Click on the comments to the article I linked to and they have a letter from de Raadt berating some for daring! to suggest that they might not ought to support a shitload of ancient formats like VAX if they are losing THAT much cash so I'd be amazed if they are here next year.

I'm sure I'll get hate from the *BSD fans but truth is truth and when you are bleeding cash like that you can NOT just give everyone a bad attitude and a "we deserve this", not when you are counting on those same people to support you. Either de Raadt stops running that huge mound of servers or they bleed to death, simple as that. And from the looks of that letter he'd be perfectly happy with it being the latter if it means giving an inch otherwise. Sorry guys but I've dealt with "never give an inch" types in business and in my exp they usually end up bankrupt. The wise owner rolls with the punches and accepts there is gonna be downturns, the arrogant owner says "I deserve it all" and runs the company into the ground.

In reality it shows what many of us have known for awhile now, which is that Google, like every other western corp, can't be counted on for anything whether you pay for it or not. FYI Google WAS getting paid for this, Google Reader, and every other app they shuttered THROUGH ADS, THAT is their business model, THAT is what they based the company on, now they are acting like "if it don't make iMoney it ain't worth having" and THAT is what is wrong with western corps and why they frankly ain't worth shit anymore.

Take IBM's PC division, they were making between 8-12% profit every year, year after year. But you see while most countries have companies that would say "solid profits every quarter, that's good right?" they weren't making the same as the #1 company of the time which was Dell, so out it had to go! I bet my last dollar that if you looked at all the apps Google has killed, Reader, Buzz, this? That they were all making a profit but it wasn't the profit of (insert #1 company) so it doesn't matter, its worthless.

This is why I've been telling people that actually like Google+ "Don't care about it, look at it as a throw away fly by night service as Google WILL shit all over it trying to make it FB and when it don't make FB money? It'll be shitcanned" and I have been saying this for months. Now what do we see? Google shitting on Google+ AND on Gmail by making it so ANYBODY can add you to a circle and then spam you. its opt OUT not opt in, why? because G+ isn't making FB money, that's why! this is why you can consider every bit of Google to be as worthless as any fly by night, because if it isn't #1? It WILL be shit on and shitcanned, because all that exists is #1 as far as western business is concerned. being #2? is being shit, doesn't matter if its profitable, doesn't matter if its growing, its not #1 so its shit, its worthless.

It isn't necessarily better. For example, you have a lot of system level software under Windows that you can't even sell for iOS and on Chromebooks. And on Android, your users need root before using them, which very few people have. Not to mention the 30% cut of all revenue on both the big mobile stores. In people's rush to hate MS, everyone's promoting even more restrictive software and data being stored in the cloud which users have no control over.

Linus says it best: Microsoft hatred is a disease
http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_a_Disease

I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

  There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred."

For CES, the discussion is about android / Windows 8. However, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions are developing ARM versions of their software. Gnome could be keyboard free, in two generations (1 year). Android has the apps, but if the Linux world has their way, as will happen, there will be a plethora of soid apps for a tablet/Windows computer. Why should the hardware manufacturers block sales by obliging the tablet side to be strictly Android?

It isn't necessarily better. For example, you have a lot of system level software under Windows that you can't even sell for iOS and on Chromebooks. And on Android, your users need root before using them, which very few people have. Not to mention the 30% cut of all revenue on both the big mobile stores. In people's rush to hate MS, everyone's promoting even more restrictive software and data being stored in the cloud which users have no control over.

Linus says it best: Microsoft hatred is a disease
http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_a_Disease

I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

  There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred."

Would you like citations? Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. How about no browser acceleration for Linux (but yes to Windows) because X is too fucking buggy? Not good enough? How about the head of OSNews having Ubuntu shit itself because..gasp..he tried to do TWO things at once! Still not famous enough? How about one of the fathers of the FOSS movement having to spend hours on what takes seconds in Windows?

At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money? Then the problem isn't a conspiracy, its the simple fact that YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. Want more links? How about over 200 current show stopping bugs with all major hardware from realtek to Nvidia? And I've found the "much vaunted" hardware "support" ends up being a bunch of bullshit and half baked crap so yet again point for Windows.

At the end of the day there is a REALLY easy way to prove this one way or the other, put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge and post the video of you taking the challenge to YouTube. But of course you won't because you'd find out the truth, that even with only having HALF the Windows support cycle Linux FAILS. Linux...good for servers and embedded, deep fried ass on the desktop.

Would you like citations? Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. How about no browser acceleration for Linux (but yes to Windows) because X is too fucking buggy? Not good enough? How about the head of OSNews having Ubuntu shit itself because..gasp..he tried to do TWO things at once! Still not famous enough? How about one of the fathers of the FOSS movement having to spend hours on what takes seconds in Windows?

At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money? Then the problem isn't a conspiracy, its the simple fact that YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. Want more links? How about over 200 current show stopping bugs with all major hardware from realtek to Nvidia? And I've found the "much vaunted" hardware "support" ends up being a bunch of bullshit and half baked crap so yet again point for Windows.

At the end of the day there is a REALLY easy way to prove this one way or the other, put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge and post the video of you taking the challenge to YouTube. But of course you won't because you'd find out the truth, that even with only having HALF the Windows support cycle Linux FAILS. Linux...good for servers and embedded, deep fried ass on the desktop.

Would you like citations? Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. How about no browser acceleration for Linux (but yes to Windows) because X is too fucking buggy? Not good enough? How about the head of OSNews having Ubuntu shit itself because..gasp..he tried to do TWO things at once! Still not famous enough? How about one of the fathers of the FOSS movement having to spend hours on what takes seconds in Windows?

At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money? Then the problem isn't a conspiracy, its the simple fact that YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. Want more links? How about over 200 current show stopping bugs with all major hardware from realtek to Nvidia? And I've found the "much vaunted" hardware "support" ends up being a bunch of bullshit and half baked crap so yet again point for Windows.

At the end of the day there is a REALLY easy way to prove this one way or the other, put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge and post the video of you taking the challenge to YouTube. But of course you won't because you'd find out the truth, that even with only having HALF the Windows support cycle Linux FAILS. Linux...good for servers and embedded, deep fried ass on the desktop.

Uhhh...this is different than Google...how exactly? In case you missed it Google is locking down Android and removing APIs and taking more and more of what was once "open"proprietary and then to add insult to injury they Google is testing giant intrusive banner ads which they swore they would NEVER do which is why some of us switched to them in the first place.

So allow me to say, which since getting engaged I so rarely get to do anymore....I TOLD YOU SO, I did, I told you so. I said "If you all go mobile it will bite you right in the ass, its all proprietary and locked down and nasty" and what do we see? Apple,Google, and MSFT all racing to see who can have the nastiest lock in and worst practices. Hell Google even took what was once a bog standard laptop and locked the thing down so damned badly that the ONLY way to install a different OS is to 1.- Put in a half page of CLI to put the system into "dev mode", 2.-WIPE THE DRIVE, no dual booting allowed citizen, 3.- Then and ONLY then can you ONLY install one of a handful of Linux distros with hacked bootloaders. No BSDs, No windows, nothing.

So I'm sorry folks but we are about to head into another computing dark age, one I call "the return of the consoles" as that is all you re gonna have, consoles that will ONLY run corp approved apps bought through a corp controlled appstore and when they no longer support it? Throw it away as you won't be able to load shit as nobody will support it anymore than they supported the original Xbox after the X360 came out. Its all gonna be locked down, first party crap with the only third party being those that pay their $699 license fees and 30% of every dime they make. And ya know what? Its gonna fucking SUUUUUCCCKKKK.

And just remember when it happens and all you iPhone and Galaxy owners are crying about being screwed old hairy told ya so, he truly did.

Uhhh...this is different than Google...how exactly? In case you missed it Google is locking down Android and removing APIs and taking more and more of what was once "open"proprietary and then to add insult to injury they Google is testing giant intrusive banner ads which they swore they would NEVER do which is why some of us switched to them in the first place.

So allow me to say, which since getting engaged I so rarely get to do anymore....I TOLD YOU SO, I did, I told you so. I said "If you all go mobile it will bite you right in the ass, its all proprietary and locked down and nasty" and what do we see? Apple,Google, and MSFT all racing to see who can have the nastiest lock in and worst practices. Hell Google even took what was once a bog standard laptop and locked the thing down so damned badly that the ONLY way to install a different OS is to 1.- Put in a half page of CLI to put the system into "dev mode", 2.-WIPE THE DRIVE, no dual booting allowed citizen, 3.- Then and ONLY then can you ONLY install one of a handful of Linux distros with hacked bootloaders. No BSDs, No windows, nothing.

So I'm sorry folks but we are about to head into another computing dark age, one I call "the return of the consoles" as that is all you re gonna have, consoles that will ONLY run corp approved apps bought through a corp controlled appstore and when they no longer support it? Throw it away as you won't be able to load shit as nobody will support it anymore than they supported the original Xbox after the X360 came out. Its all gonna be locked down, first party crap with the only third party being those that pay their $699 license fees and 30% of every dime they make. And ya know what? Its gonna fucking SUUUUUCCCKKKK.

And just remember when it happens and all you iPhone and Galaxy owners are crying about being screwed old hairy told ya so, he truly did.