OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed, and so adding the functionality to support the missing desktop graphics card features would either result in the normal OpenGL again, or an oddly forked version based on where embedded hardware is today. Also it's not that hard to run an implementation of OpenGL ES on the desktop today, it's the basis of WebGL and Chrome and Firefox both happily run it, the render loop is changed to accommodate the fact it's running in a browser but other than that it's pretty much the same OpenGL ES you'll find elsewhere.
I don't think Microsoft cancelling the entire DirectX MVP program can be a good thing for Direct3D unless they then do start a Direct3D-specific MVP program. For one thing I don't think DirectX will become that much more stable as GPUs are still changing dramatically and I would prefer to see the API reflect these changes, but more importantly a good amount of the MVP awards go to people who consistently provide good answers to questions of forums and suchlike. Even when a technology is 100% fixed there will still be people learning it from scratch and those who want to strengthen their skills, and these people will have questions.
They didn't say fixed-path, they said finite state machine and stack. The stack-based part is the pushing and popping of matrices, and the finite state machine is the general approach where you change OpenGL's internal state using the API and that applies to everything you draw from then on.
Thanks for posting this, I was interested to know what was special in this patent over-and-above normal alpha blending and your description makes sense. The patent still seems reasonably obvious but nowhere near as ridiculous as it did beforehand.
Unfortunately it does seem to be the case nowadays. The FSF have done some great things in the past but this is just stupid, giving people copies of a distro which won't act at they expect, and when they search for help they won't find it as it's a marginal distro. They'll just think they've given Linux a try and throw it away, whereas at least with something like Ubuntu or Debian they'd be more able to find forums where they'd be more likely to get given help and less likely to have ideology preached at them for wanting to sin by watching some funny cat videos in Flash, or talk to their relatives abroad using Skype. I really hope Microsoft are paying them a lot for demonstrating that breaking a perfectly good desktop OS to make it work like a tablet OS isn't the stupidest thing you can do.
Oh, and remember the FSF ideology is likely to be completely alien to them- these are people who were in the Microsoft store.
I can see now why my mother told me never to take operating systems from men dressed as animals.
No, it's still an awful name. There is a history of computer products using non-English words as names, such as Ubuntu, Adobe, and Amiga, but the words themselves have to sound good or catchy, and ideally have a strong definition behind it which those who look into it will identify with. 'Trisquel' is a weak-sounding word and given the definition I don't see why people outside of the Isle of Man and Galacia would be interested enough to remember it.
As for me the first time I heard it I assumed it was something to do with SQL, possibly doing something unholy with three different SQL backends.
..and it'd have been so hard for Canonical to disable them by default in order not to annoy their target users? Did they really think that the people who'd choose Linux over Window or OS X on their desktop were the type to happily accept advertisements in their operating systems?
You're right though that extremists do come in all sizes, shapes, and colours. At the time the views of someone like Martin Luther King were pretty damn extreme.
He also childishly started the free software movement and wrote the original GPL, which he revises when he thinks it's broken in some way.
A lot of what he writes annoys me, I think his views are very black-and-white and have an overly idealised slant. I also think he's right quite often though, as in this case, and is able to raise the profile of things such as this a lot better than those of who seem to care what others think of them would be able to do so.
There is a reason that stories about him are posted by the tech media.
Windows is ultimately there for Microsoft's profit, and yet there are a lot of people who put time and effort into building communities for both developers and users on Windows without being employed by Microsoft. These people would, quite rightly, be offended if you said they were just doing it to improve Microsoft's profits- they're there to help others, share their knowledge, talk with others who have similar interests, and other similar personal goals.
It's still true though that Windows is ultimately there for Microsoft's profit.
The non-profits they invest are those which directly benefit themselves. These are the people who're writing the code which Canonical are going to be marketing, is it too surprising that they're throwing them some money? It's practical in that they can't afford for Linux to fall behind Windows or OS X, and they also want to keep community feeling onside as they don't want to lose support from those who recommend their distro.
I'm not saying I dislike Canonical, I am saying they are a business. Without that they probably wouldn't have achieved what they have, a few people with great intentions can't achieve as much as a few people with great intentions and the money and organisation to back them up with. That money has to come from somewhere too, it doesn't just magically appear, but deals like this- especially when give spin this poor- are likely to cost too much goodwill from their audience to make them worthwhile.
The majority of desktop machines run Windows, does yours? If not then it's not like the Presidential election where the votes of others count just as much as yours towards who you personally are governed by.
When it comes to choosing which OS to run you are allowed to make your own decisions, in Presidential elections you aren't allowed to choose your leader- you'll be getting the same one as the rest of your nation. As you point out issues with more mainstream OSes will bleed over to affect you but that's in no way the same.
It couldn't have been worse in port- the ship's been lost and at least one member of the crew has died. In port the ship could have been destroyed but the crew would have been on land, away from the ship, and safe.
Exceptions are intended to be used when a program hits unexpected or fatal issues which cannot be handled locally, and often the low-level library code isn't in a position to be able to judge whether something qualifies as worthy of an exception or whether it's an expected part of the processing cycle and can be safely be ignored.
Take for example asking to open a file for reading and the file not being available for some reason. If I'm just copying a large directory structure then I can reasonably expect to not be able to open a few files due to permissions and, while I'll likely want to log these and display them, treating it as an exception wouldn't be suitable. If my code is part of an online application and it was failing to open a configuration file which it needed to connect to the database then the error would be worthy of promoting to an exception if it could not rectified in the code which detected it. Ultimately though for this type of 'It could be serious, it could be nothing' then the decision should be left to the client code rather than the library.
In my mind a better approach to fixing these type of errors is better support of types which cannot be set to null. For example if I have a FileHandle variable which cannot be set to null and the File.Open() method returns a nullable type then there's going to be a compile-time error, which is the best type of error. This will point out where I'm 'assuming' that the value is not null and as I'm fixing the compile error I'll naturally add the correct checks as the 'This could be null..' issue has been highlighted for me.
He's wrong in that it's not Zero Punctuation saying this. Zero Punctuation is a series of comedy games review videos by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, and which ended up being bought into The Escapist website to produce a weekly series.
This though is a different Escapist column, Jimquisition with Jim Sterling. A very different and series to ZP.
I was going to recommend Unity too- it's very simple to get something up and running, and then you can expand on it with by adding your own components written in C# or Unity Script (A variant of JavaScript) without needing to reengineer the entire game engine yourself, you just write what you need, and because you're writing in a prebuilt framework it's very easy to write things which are reusable.
It's already got a proven pedigree on Steam, being used in games such as Rochard and Endless Space, and although XBLA isn't a normal target you can write for all of the desktop and mobile OSes.
I've also found the Unity community to be a helpful bunch, both in providing tutorial material on the internet and helping with direct questions on the forum, which can be very helpful when you get stuck and to get feedback.
Most on Slashdot may not think it's wrong but I'd be surprised if that was the case in society in general, a lot of people will view sharing/piracy as something they did as kids but which was still the wrong thing to do- and so they buy content now. If that is the case the current situation is the majority imposing their will over the minority. I may well be wrong here though- may have to spend a while trying to find any non-partisan studies on it.
What if you're brain dead? The arms and legs are still there, and the mechanism can still be kept running provided external help, but there's no I in there- nothing which actually perceives and thinks.
They have no vested interest on whether you buy a Windows PC or Mac either. They do have a vested interest in making sure that the content their customers make can be viewed by a large audience though, no one's going to rush out to buy a tool to make content that no one can use.
From reading the Unity forums it seems the customers are quite interested in the Linux support, they've seen the success of the Humble Bundle and want to see if they can manage anything similar themselves.
Today Unity3D also announced that the next major release of the Unity game engine (Unity 4.0) will allow the developers to target DX11, I really don't think they're trying to affect DX/OpenGL so much as do what their customers want.
Recently I've been developing applications using the Unity game engine whilst working on the server back-end on an Ubuntu VMWare virtual machine, running Unity while having Unity via Unity did feel strange.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed, and so adding the functionality to support the missing desktop graphics card features would either result in the normal OpenGL again, or an oddly forked version based on where embedded hardware is today. Also it's not that hard to run an implementation of OpenGL ES on the desktop today, it's the basis of WebGL and Chrome and Firefox both happily run it, the render loop is changed to accommodate the fact it's running in a browser but other than that it's pretty much the same OpenGL ES you'll find elsewhere.
I don't think Microsoft cancelling the entire DirectX MVP program can be a good thing for Direct3D unless they then do start a Direct3D-specific MVP program. For one thing I don't think DirectX will become that much more stable as GPUs are still changing dramatically and I would prefer to see the API reflect these changes, but more importantly a good amount of the MVP awards go to people who consistently provide good answers to questions of forums and suchlike. Even when a technology is 100% fixed there will still be people learning it from scratch and those who want to strengthen their skills, and these people will have questions.
They didn't say fixed-path, they said finite state machine and stack. The stack-based part is the pushing and popping of matrices, and the finite state machine is the general approach where you change OpenGL's internal state using the API and that applies to everything you draw from then on.
Thanks for posting this, I was interested to know what was special in this patent over-and-above normal alpha blending and your description makes sense. The patent still seems reasonably obvious but nowhere near as ridiculous as it did beforehand.
"Linux? Oh, you mean those idiots dressed as animals in the mall?"
Yes, this'll go well. If you're going to do something memorable make sure it's not something stupid.
Unfortunately it does seem to be the case nowadays. The FSF have done some great things in the past but this is just stupid, giving people copies of a distro which won't act at they expect, and when they search for help they won't find it as it's a marginal distro. They'll just think they've given Linux a try and throw it away, whereas at least with something like Ubuntu or Debian they'd be more able to find forums where they'd be more likely to get given help and less likely to have ideology preached at them for wanting to sin by watching some funny cat videos in Flash, or talk to their relatives abroad using Skype. I really hope Microsoft are paying them a lot for demonstrating that breaking a perfectly good desktop OS to make it work like a tablet OS isn't the stupidest thing you can do.
Oh, and remember the FSF ideology is likely to be completely alien to them- these are people who were in the Microsoft store.
I can see now why my mother told me never to take operating systems from men dressed as animals.
No, it's still an awful name. There is a history of computer products using non-English words as names, such as Ubuntu, Adobe, and Amiga, but the words themselves have to sound good or catchy, and ideally have a strong definition behind it which those who look into it will identify with. 'Trisquel' is a weak-sounding word and given the definition I don't see why people outside of the Isle of Man and Galacia would be interested enough to remember it.
As for me the first time I heard it I assumed it was something to do with SQL, possibly doing something unholy with three different SQL backends.
I'm pretty sure that there isn't one of you, who'd not give his right-nut, for just ONE of John McAfee's weekends...
I have heard good things about the weekends in Guatemalan prisons but I doubt they're worth a whole nut.
..and it'd have been so hard for Canonical to disable them by default in order not to annoy their target users? Did they really think that the people who'd choose Linux over Window or OS X on their desktop were the type to happily accept advertisements in their operating systems?
You're right though that extremists do come in all sizes, shapes, and colours. At the time the views of someone like Martin Luther King were pretty damn extreme.
He also childishly started the free software movement and wrote the original GPL, which he revises when he thinks it's broken in some way.
A lot of what he writes annoys me, I think his views are very black-and-white and have an overly idealised slant. I also think he's right quite often though, as in this case, and is able to raise the profile of things such as this a lot better than those of who seem to care what others think of them would be able to do so.
There is a reason that stories about him are posted by the tech media.
...and yet he's also contributed so much to the field and been right often enough that people pay notice to what he has to say.
Windows is ultimately there for Microsoft's profit, and yet there are a lot of people who put time and effort into building communities for both developers and users on Windows without being employed by Microsoft. These people would, quite rightly, be offended if you said they were just doing it to improve Microsoft's profits- they're there to help others, share their knowledge, talk with others who have similar interests, and other similar personal goals.
It's still true though that Windows is ultimately there for Microsoft's profit.
The non-profits they invest are those which directly benefit themselves. These are the people who're writing the code which Canonical are going to be marketing, is it too surprising that they're throwing them some money? It's practical in that they can't afford for Linux to fall behind Windows or OS X, and they also want to keep community feeling onside as they don't want to lose support from those who recommend their distro.
I'm not saying I dislike Canonical, I am saying they are a business. Without that they probably wouldn't have achieved what they have, a few people with great intentions can't achieve as much as a few people with great intentions and the money and organisation to back them up with. That money has to come from somewhere too, it doesn't just magically appear, but deals like this- especially when give spin this poor- are likely to cost too much goodwill from their audience to make them worthwhile.
Indeed, it's so inconvenient having all of those different games to search through.
The majority of desktop machines run Windows, does yours? If not then it's not like the Presidential election where the votes of others count just as much as yours towards who you personally are governed by.
When it comes to choosing which OS to run you are allowed to make your own decisions, in Presidential elections you aren't allowed to choose your leader- you'll be getting the same one as the rest of your nation. As you point out issues with more mainstream OSes will bleed over to affect you but that's in no way the same.
It couldn't have been worse in port- the ship's been lost and at least one member of the crew has died. In port the ship could have been destroyed but the crew would have been on land, away from the ship, and safe.
Exceptions are intended to be used when a program hits unexpected or fatal issues which cannot be handled locally, and often the low-level library code isn't in a position to be able to judge whether something qualifies as worthy of an exception or whether it's an expected part of the processing cycle and can be safely be ignored.
Take for example asking to open a file for reading and the file not being available for some reason. If I'm just copying a large directory structure then I can reasonably expect to not be able to open a few files due to permissions and, while I'll likely want to log these and display them, treating it as an exception wouldn't be suitable. If my code is part of an online application and it was failing to open a configuration file which it needed to connect to the database then the error would be worthy of promoting to an exception if it could not rectified in the code which detected it. Ultimately though for this type of 'It could be serious, it could be nothing' then the decision should be left to the client code rather than the library.
In my mind a better approach to fixing these type of errors is better support of types which cannot be set to null. For example if I have a FileHandle variable which cannot be set to null and the File.Open() method returns a nullable type then there's going to be a compile-time error, which is the best type of error. This will point out where I'm 'assuming' that the value is not null and as I'm fixing the compile error I'll naturally add the correct checks as the 'This could be null..' issue has been highlighted for me.
Information just phoned me, it wants you to know it hates being anthropomorphized.
He's wrong in that it's not Zero Punctuation saying this. Zero Punctuation is a series of comedy games review videos by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, and which ended up being bought into The Escapist website to produce a weekly series. This though is a different Escapist column, Jimquisition with Jim Sterling. A very different and series to ZP.
I was going to recommend Unity too- it's very simple to get something up and running, and then you can expand on it with by adding your own components written in C# or Unity Script (A variant of JavaScript) without needing to reengineer the entire game engine yourself, you just write what you need, and because you're writing in a prebuilt framework it's very easy to write things which are reusable. It's already got a proven pedigree on Steam, being used in games such as Rochard and Endless Space, and although XBLA isn't a normal target you can write for all of the desktop and mobile OSes. I've also found the Unity community to be a helpful bunch, both in providing tutorial material on the internet and helping with direct questions on the forum, which can be very helpful when you get stuck and to get feedback.
Most on Slashdot may not think it's wrong but I'd be surprised if that was the case in society in general, a lot of people will view sharing/piracy as something they did as kids but which was still the wrong thing to do- and so they buy content now. If that is the case the current situation is the majority imposing their will over the minority. I may well be wrong here though- may have to spend a while trying to find any non-partisan studies on it.
What if you're brain dead? The arms and legs are still there, and the mechanism can still be kept running provided external help, but there's no I in there- nothing which actually perceives and thinks.
They have no vested interest on whether you buy a Windows PC or Mac either. They do have a vested interest in making sure that the content their customers make can be viewed by a large audience though, no one's going to rush out to buy a tool to make content that no one can use.
From reading the Unity forums it seems the customers are quite interested in the Linux support, they've seen the success of the Humble Bundle and want to see if they can manage anything similar themselves.
Today Unity3D also announced that the next major release of the Unity game engine (Unity 4.0) will allow the developers to target DX11, I really don't think they're trying to affect DX/OpenGL so much as do what their customers want.
Recently I've been developing applications using the Unity game engine whilst working on the server back-end on an Ubuntu VMWare virtual machine, running Unity while having Unity via Unity did feel strange.