That stat gives a distorted view. Sucessful musicians are not salaried. They get their income from royalty streams which the BLS does not count as salaries. Include the royalty money and those numbers would be much higher.
I've been working fine for a year on Fedora and Win2K dual boot. I am updated to FC2 currently. I even have a wierd setup of a boot SATA drive and a secondary IDE one. Fedora and Win2K do disagree on which is BIOS drive 0 or 1. I had to adjust grub for this.
If you're worried about taking care of a family, house payments, and a salary, then a start-up is not the right place for you to be. I've done two very successful companies now that both started from less than $2,000 in capital.
If a salary is important to you go get a job. If taking an incredible risk for an incredible payoff is your style do a startup. To do a non-financed startup you have to learn to live and make do with nothing. If you just bought a McMansion and have two kids, forget it.
I have a bunch of friends that have worked at VC backed start-ups. They got great salaries and benefits. But in the end the VCs got rich and they still effectively had just a salary with a little bonus. If you're employee #50 at a VC backed start-up you're not going to get rich. And don't forget VC backed start-ups are still start-ups and they fail all of time leaving everyone unemployed.
So if you don't have a plan for living two years without income, forget the zero-dollar startup and go get a job.
If you're bored while waiting, write Open Source software. Give it away and develop a reputation that will help get you hired.
Even if they have third party agreements about releasing driver source, there is nothing preventing them from releasing hardware specs and letting us write drivers. But still they don't do this.
At least ATI has released R2XX hardware specs. The R400 is just about to ship, maybe when it's out they'll release the R3XX specs.
I don't buy the argument about keeping secrets from ATI. ATI has the capability to pull apart the drivers without the source.
Think about a compositing system where the window the app is being drawn into has been transformed into a non-rectangular shape by the compositing engine.
The app thinks it is drawing into a flat rectangle. But the compositing engine distorts the font bitmap with it's transform. With the shader approach the distortion doesn't happen. Same problem happens when the compositing engine does scaling.
You only need one shader program per glyph not matter what point size you want to draw. There is a lot of overhead in managing the bitmaps for all of the different point sizes. These bitmaps can get quite big on a 4K by 3K resolution screen.
Has anyone tried drawing text with GPU shader units? It would work something like this:
1) Each character would have it's own shader program.
2) You would set the shader program, draw a rectange, and the character would appear.
3) The shader programs would be automatically generated by processing TrueType files.
To implement:
1) Break Truetype outline up into a number of convex curve segments.
2) Each of these curve segments would be represented as a set of constants in the shader program
3) For each pixel, test a line from pixel to an edge.
4) If the number of segments crossed is odd the pixel is black else white.
The algorithm can be refined to add antialiasing and hinting.
What you end up with is text that is clear at any resolution. The size of the text is controlled by the rectangle you draw it in. The text can also be clearly rotated and sheared.
An obvious optimization is to get the GPU vendors to add a shader instruction to do the calculation for which side of the bezier curve segment the current point lies.
While not important for games drawing text is critical for desktops. And we all know about the current trends to draw desktops with 3D hardware.
Those contracts are for volume pricing. Walk into a CompUSA to see MS retail pricing. MS is not giving away software in volume to charities. They give away three or four copies to each of 1,000s of charities. You can't get volume pricing for three copies from MS so MS is properly supporting the retail pricing of the donations. You many not like it but they are following the letter of the law.
You have a problem with valuation. If you only gave away the software and never actually had customers buying it at $100, the IRS would say that it is not really worth $100. Same problem if you sold one copy at $100 and gave away 1,000.
But if you buy a Picasso for $4M and donate it, the IRS is fine with that. People also try to buy the painting for $4M and donate it at $6M. Sometimes they get away with it.
It is up to the FSF lawyers to help set a proper valuation on the donated code. The number is somewhere between zero and the cost of it's development. I doubt if the IRS would argue if you picked 50% of it's development cost.
Microsoft sells many more copies than they donate so you can't argue valuation. Since it is given away in small amounts to many places, they can also support retail pricing.
5. Convinvce them to donate it to the FSF. FSF can work with them to set a reasonable valuation. This valuation then becomes a tax shelter to the current owners. FSF releases the code GPL.
Getting a tax shelter is probably worth more that trying to get $$$ from out of work developers.
Valuation could be based on what it cost to create the code. $1M in valuation could be worth $300K real cash as a tax shelter.
One of the reasons Microsoft pays almost zero corporate income tax is because of all of those software donations to schools at full retail. Copy CD for $1, donate to school as $800 MS Office license. $800 x 40% corporate tax bracket equals $320 in taxes saved. $320 is really created by this transaction, without it the $320 would have to be sent to the government. MS does hundreds of millions of dollar worth of these donations each year. It also has the added plus of brain washing everyone to use their software.
You don't need to use MakeCurrent with pbuffers. Each window has it's own pbuffer so it is made current once when it is created. pbuffers can function as textures as well as buffers, so the main window accesses all of the pbuffers in the system as textures. The main window is made current to the framebuffer and then the windows/textures are blited in using multi-texture blits. The binary ATI XFree driver has pbuffers implemented.
Mesa lives at: mesa3d.sf.net In CVS pull the embedded-1-branch. This will give you standalone OpenGL on all Radeons, MGA and framebuffer. With minor work other chips like Rage, i830, i830, etc can be added. Anything that has an existing DRI driver is easy to add.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 2, Informative
>There is no reason why you can't run a X server >over the top of a directFB desktop. This would
X server on top of DirectFB has already been written...
First you need a standalone OpenGL implementation. That is what embedded Mesa is (DirectFBGL and DRI are based on this).
Next you need to build a window manager, probably in a separate process. Check out Embedded QT for a sample one.
X compatibility can be achieved via a proxy process. For example a proxy that listens to the networking layer for remote X clients. The proxy process then creates and draws windows on behalf of the remote process. This allows X compatibility to be a separate, isoloated feature while preserving X's network transparancy. A similar proxy process can be used for remoting OpenGL clients.
The advantage to this is that ten years later when all apps have switched from xlib to OpenGL you can simply get rid of the X proxy process. XFree's window manager is not used in this system so there is no dependency on the core XFree code.
Which OpenGL implementation are you using? I am working on a similar project based on embedded Mesa3d. Embedded Mesa allows you to run OpenGL straight from the command line without X running. Don't be fooled by embedded in the name, embedded Mesa runs just fine on normal hardware. Embedded Mesa is based on the same code that implements DRI in XFree.
My scheme uses pbuffers for each task. The pbuffers are allocated out of the video RAM. This allows direct hardware rendering from each process. A server process then composits these pbuffers into the visible display. The compositing step is necessary to allow for alpha blending.
Right now I am caught up in the problem that embedded Mesa does not have a pbuffer implementation so I've spent the last few weeks working on this. Embedded Mesa is also the code behind DirectFBGL which needs similar pbuffer changes.
For a windowing system I have been modifying Embedded QT/GPL.
http://xpserver.mozdev.org/ xpserver is complicated and not finished, although there is a group in India actively working on it.
From the web site: mod_PX7 then uses XPCOM to load and run the components. The components can be chained using SAX-like events. For example a database component can do a query. The output from the db component is expected to be in XML. This XML can be sent to the browser or fed into another component. For example, an XSLT style sheet. The output from the stylesheet can then go to the browser or be fed into yet another component such as FOP for PDF generation or xmlch to generate a 3D chart using GDChart.
You can think of this as starting with an XML file. The XML file is then transformed by various processes into other intermediate XML files. The final transform may be to SVG, XML, PDF, JPEG, etc. In reality the intermediate files don't exist and the stages are chained together via SAX events.
Transformation stages can be written in XSLT, C or Javascript. Some of the XSLT/Javascript transformation stages were writen to detect browser capabilities, if the browser is capable the stage runs in the browser instead of the server.
If you think about this to the Nth degree, XHTML can be represented via a giant XSLT transform with SVG as output. It would be neat if the W3C spec'ed CSS as transforms on SVG. This would take a lot of the ambiguity out of it.
Re:$336 gets you a complete system from Dell.
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I got this one from Dell for $339 a couple of weeks ago. It is expired now but new ones come out all of the time. No way does it cost $336 to make an XBox.
Another new low price for the Dimension 4550. Dell is trying to boost their quarterly earnings which ends this month.
Dell Small Business has the Dimension 4550 2.53GHz Desktop for $339 after $200 rebate. It has AGP Slot, 4 PCI Slots, Intel 845PE chipset, 256MB DDR, 30GB HD, 48x CDRW or 16x DVD, 32MB Rage, Integrated NIC & Audio, XP Home, WordPerfect, and 1yr warranty.
1. Go to Dell Small Business.
2. Click on "Featured Systems" under the Dimension 4550 column.
3. Click on "Customize It" under the "Advanced Technology" column.
4. Select the following options:
* SPECIAL OFFER! 256MB 333MHz DDR SDRAM for the price of 128MB!
* FREE UPGRADE!! 16x Max DVD-ROM Drive OR
FREE UPGRADE! New 48x/24x/48x Max CD-RW Drive
5. Optional suggested upgrades:
* Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.66GHz w/533MHz front side bus/ 512K L2 Cache [add $20 or $0.75/month1]
* SAVE $100! New 4x DVD+RW/+R Drive w/CD-RW [add $80 or $3/month1] SAVE $100!!
* 64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce4 MX(TM) Graphics Card with TV-Out [add $30 or $1/month1]
6. Continue to check out. Price should be $599.
7. Apply coupon code 4491A592C8BB for 10% off.
8. Send in the $200 rebate.
Final price is $599 - 10% ($60) - $200 rebate = $339 + tax w/ free shipping. The 2.53GHz CPU alone costs $184 at NewEgg.
Slashdot Mirror
That stat gives a distorted view. Sucessful musicians are not salaried. They get their income from royalty streams which the BLS does not count as salaries. Include the royalty money and those numbers would be much higher.
I've been working fine for a year on Fedora and Win2K dual boot. I am updated to FC2 currently. I even have a wierd setup of a boot SATA drive and a secondary IDE one. Fedora and Win2K do disagree on which is BIOS drive 0 or 1. I had to adjust grub for this.
You can do this today with Chromium.
Chromium replaces your OpenGL library with one that farms the OpenGL drawing out to multiple machines. It's how display walls are built.
You can use the same technique for multiple card in the same box.
There is a whole book in the series on OpenGL shader programming
OpenGL(R) Shading Language
If you're worried about taking care of a family, house payments, and a salary, then a start-up is not the right place for you to be. I've done two very successful companies now that both started from less than $2,000 in capital.
If a salary is important to you go get a job. If taking an incredible risk for an incredible payoff is your style do a startup. To do a non-financed startup you have to learn to live and make do with nothing. If you just bought a McMansion and have two kids, forget it.
I have a bunch of friends that have worked at VC backed start-ups. They got great salaries and benefits. But in the end the VCs got rich and they still effectively had just a salary with a little bonus. If you're employee #50 at a VC backed start-up you're not going to get rich. And don't forget VC backed start-ups are still start-ups and they fail all of time leaving everyone unemployed.
So if you don't have a plan for living two years without income, forget the zero-dollar startup and go get a job.
If you're bored while waiting, write Open Source software. Give it away and develop a reputation that will help get you hired.
How much would it cost to build this?
Does anyone make a low cost version that is already built?
Even if they have third party agreements about releasing driver source, there is nothing preventing them from releasing hardware specs and letting us write drivers. But still they don't do this.
At least ATI has released R2XX hardware specs. The R400 is just about to ship, maybe when it's out they'll release the R3XX specs.
I don't buy the argument about keeping secrets from ATI. ATI has the capability to pull apart the drivers without the source.
Do you have any reference supporting this?
With tesselating you can't perform hinting at tiny point sizes.
The app thinks it is drawing into a flat rectangle. But the compositing engine distorts the font bitmap with it's transform. With the shader approach the distortion doesn't happen. Same problem happens when the compositing engine does scaling.
You only need one shader program per glyph not matter what point size you want to draw. There is a lot of overhead in managing the bitmaps for all of the different point sizes. These bitmaps can get quite big on a 4K by 3K resolution screen.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel/documents/fftgpu/
The FFT on a GPU
This page contains supplemental material for the following paper.
Moreland, K and Angel, E. "The FFT on a GPU." In SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2003 Proceedings, pp. 112-119, July 2003.
1) Each character would have it's own shader program.
2) You would set the shader program, draw a rectange, and the character would appear.
3) The shader programs would be automatically generated by processing TrueType files.
To implement:
1) Break Truetype outline up into a number of convex curve segments.
2) Each of these curve segments would be represented as a set of constants in the shader program
3) For each pixel, test a line from pixel to an edge.
4) If the number of segments crossed is odd the pixel is black else white.
The algorithm can be refined to add antialiasing and hinting.
What you end up with is text that is clear at any resolution. The size of the text is controlled by the rectangle you draw it in. The text can also be clearly rotated and sheared.
An obvious optimization is to get the GPU vendors to add a shader instruction to do the calculation for which side of the bezier curve segment the current point lies.
While not important for games drawing text is critical for desktops. And we all know about the current trends to draw desktops with 3D hardware.
From what I recall your info is accruate. I owned both a Mark-8 and Altair. I still have the Altair.
Those contracts are for volume pricing. Walk into a CompUSA to see MS retail pricing. MS is not giving away software in volume to charities. They give away three or four copies to each of 1,000s of charities. You can't get volume pricing for three copies from MS so MS is properly supporting the retail pricing of the donations. You many not like it but they are following the letter of the law.
You have a problem with valuation. If you only gave away the software and never actually had customers buying it at $100, the IRS would say that it is not really worth $100. Same problem if you sold one copy at $100 and gave away 1,000.
But if you buy a Picasso for $4M and donate it, the IRS is fine with that. People also try to buy the painting for $4M and donate it at $6M. Sometimes they get away with it.
It is up to the FSF lawyers to help set a proper valuation on the donated code. The number is somewhere between zero and the cost of it's development. I doubt if the IRS would argue if you picked 50% of it's development cost.
Microsoft sells many more copies than they donate so you can't argue valuation. Since it is given away in small amounts to many places, they can also support retail pricing.
5. Convinvce them to donate it to the FSF. FSF can work with them to set a reasonable valuation. This valuation then becomes a tax shelter to the current owners. FSF releases the code GPL.
Getting a tax shelter is probably worth more that trying to get $$$ from out of work developers.
Valuation could be based on what it cost to create the code. $1M in valuation could be worth $300K real cash as a tax shelter.
One of the reasons Microsoft pays almost zero corporate income tax is because of all of those software donations to schools at full retail. Copy CD for $1, donate to school as $800 MS Office license. $800 x 40% corporate tax bracket equals $320 in taxes saved. $320 is really created by this transaction, without it the $320 would have to be sent to the government. MS does hundreds of millions of dollar worth of these donations each year. It also has the added plus of brain washing everyone to use their software.
You don't need to use MakeCurrent with pbuffers. Each window has it's own pbuffer so it is made current once when it is created. pbuffers can function as textures as well as buffers, so the main window accesses all of the pbuffers in the system as textures. The main window is made current to the framebuffer and then the windows/textures are blited in using multi-texture blits. The binary ATI XFree driver has pbuffers implemented.
Mesa lives at: mesa3d.sf.net In CVS pull the embedded-1-branch. This will give you standalone OpenGL on all Radeons, MGA and framebuffer. With minor work other chips like Rage, i830, i830, etc can be added. Anything that has an existing DRI driver is easy to add.
>There is no reason why you can't run a X server
>over the top of a directFB desktop. This would
X server on top of DirectFB has already been written...
http://www.directfb.org/xdirectfb.xml
First you need a standalone OpenGL implementation. That is what embedded Mesa is (DirectFBGL and DRI are based on this).
Next you need to build a window manager, probably in a separate process. Check out Embedded QT for a sample one.
X compatibility can be achieved via a proxy process. For example a proxy that listens to the networking layer for remote X clients. The proxy process then creates and draws windows on behalf of the remote process. This allows X compatibility to be a separate, isoloated feature while preserving X's network transparancy. A similar proxy process can be used for remoting OpenGL clients.
The advantage to this is that ten years later when all apps have switched from xlib to OpenGL you can simply get rid of the X proxy process. XFree's window manager is not used in this system so there is no dependency on the core XFree code.
Which OpenGL implementation are you using? I am working on a similar project based on embedded Mesa3d. Embedded Mesa allows you to run OpenGL straight from the command line without X running. Don't be fooled by embedded in the name, embedded Mesa runs just fine on normal hardware. Embedded Mesa is based on the same code that implements DRI in XFree.
My scheme uses pbuffers for each task. The pbuffers are allocated out of the video RAM. This allows direct hardware rendering from each process. A server process then composits these pbuffers into the visible display. The compositing step is necessary to allow for alpha blending.
Right now I am caught up in the problem that embedded Mesa does not have a pbuffer implementation so I've spent the last few weeks working on this. Embedded Mesa is also the code behind DirectFBGL which needs similar pbuffer changes.
For a windowing system I have been modifying Embedded QT/GPL.
http://xpserver.mozdev.org/ xpserver is complicated and not finished, although there is a group in India actively working on it.
From the web site: mod_PX7 then uses XPCOM to load and run the components. The components can be chained using SAX-like events. For example a database component can do a query. The output from the db component is expected to be in XML. This XML can be sent to the browser or fed into another component. For example, an XSLT style sheet. The output from the stylesheet can then go to the browser or be fed into yet another component such as FOP for PDF generation or xmlch to generate a 3D chart using GDChart.
You can think of this as starting with an XML file. The XML file is then transformed by various processes into other intermediate XML files. The final transform may be to SVG, XML, PDF, JPEG, etc. In reality the intermediate files don't exist and the stages are chained together via SAX events.
Transformation stages can be written in XSLT, C or Javascript. Some of the XSLT/Javascript transformation stages were writen to detect browser capabilities, if the browser is capable the stage runs in the browser instead of the server.
If you think about this to the Nth degree, XHTML can be represented via a giant XSLT transform with SVG as output. It would be neat if the W3C spec'ed CSS as transforms on SVG. This would take a lot of the ambiguity out of it.
I got this one from Dell for $339 a couple of weeks ago. It is expired now but new ones come out all of the time.
No way does it cost $336 to make an XBox.
Another new low price for the Dimension 4550. Dell is trying to boost their quarterly earnings which ends this month.
Dell Small Business has the Dimension 4550 2.53GHz Desktop for $339 after $200 rebate. It has AGP Slot, 4 PCI Slots, Intel 845PE chipset, 256MB DDR, 30GB HD, 48x CDRW or 16x DVD, 32MB Rage, Integrated NIC & Audio, XP Home, WordPerfect, and 1yr warranty.
1. Go to Dell Small Business.
2. Click on "Featured Systems" under the Dimension 4550 column.
3. Click on "Customize It" under the "Advanced Technology" column.
4. Select the following options:
* SPECIAL OFFER! 256MB 333MHz DDR SDRAM for the price of 128MB!
* FREE UPGRADE!! 16x Max DVD-ROM Drive OR
FREE UPGRADE! New 48x/24x/48x Max CD-RW Drive
5. Optional suggested upgrades:
* Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.66GHz w/533MHz front side bus/ 512K L2 Cache [add $20 or $0.75/month1]
* SAVE $100! New 4x DVD+RW/+R Drive w/CD-RW [add $80 or $3/month1] SAVE $100!!
* 64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce4 MX(TM) Graphics Card with TV-Out [add $30 or $1/month1]
6. Continue to check out. Price should be $599.
7. Apply coupon code 4491A592C8BB for 10% off.
8. Send in the $200 rebate.
Final price is $599 - 10% ($60) - $200 rebate = $339 + tax w/ free shipping. The 2.53GHz CPU alone costs $184 at NewEgg.
RDMA article
VI Architecture
You should be aware of this before chosing C vs S corp.