If I'm paying full price for something I would expect it to be an unlocked phone that I could use with any network as and how I see fit. If it's tied to the network, filled with their crapware, or crippled to prevent certain features from interfering with their profits, then screw them.
I think you're being disingenuous here. The point I was making is that a graphics card is a horribly complex state machine. At any given time it could be loaded with shaders (including GPGPU ones), VBOs, textures, frame buffers and other data. It might have multiple applications talking to it, all in possession of handles to these things that they don't suddently expect to change. Interrupting whatever was going on, tearing it all down, saving the state, and restoring it exactly to the way it was so every client doesn't see the difference is hideously difficult.
I bet it's hard enough for AMD or NVidia when they know what's going on inside of the card. It's virtually impossible looking in from the outside. Even on Windows, it is quite common to discover that hibernate / suspend simply doesn't work on certain machines.
As for why Valve is going with SteamOS, I think their motivations are fairly obvious - the more games they get running on Linux, the cheaper it will be to host those games when they launch whatever cloud based gaming platform they're secretly brewing up. I don't believe that fat clients running SteamOS are anything more than a stepping stone to a world where most people would use thin clients (on a stick or in the TV), or their existing Steam on Windows to access it.
The problem for Windows is the same as it is for Linux - drivers. Making a driver which captures the state of complex hardware like a graphics or audio card and then restores it is very hard.
Unless you also substantially reduce the number of cars on the road at the same time, which is entirely plausible.
Which is what London did with a congestion charge. If you drive into the middle of London during office hours in a car you get to pay £10-11.50 for the privilege. The result is many people use public transport or bikes instead which was the intent.
Aside from that, there is a sense that traffic scales with the road size, or conversely shrinks with it. So if the road became congested it's likely that many motorists would drive at a different time, or cycle (the new cycle road is on their route) and the congestion would ease.
Efficient boat fridges draw only 1A or 12W, e.g. this one. Of course that's coming from the battery not directly from the turbine so it's a question of how many watts the battery can store, how many amps it can deliver at once, how many watts the turbine puts back in according to conditions and other factors. If you were living on a boat you'd probably use a bigger turbine and some solar panels and high capacity, higher draw battery so you could run more than a fridge, e.g. a flat panel TV, laptop etc.
Walk along a marina and you'll see yachts with small turbines. They're popular because people don't like running their engines to charge their batteries. Also, if you have no charge in your battery you can't start the engine so it's nice to have something else which can. And of course if your engine breaks down you can still charge the batteries in order to radio for help. But more ordinarily it just saves firing up engines, wasting fuel, wear & tear, noise and pollution from the engine.
And I said 25W and a peak of 60W for a small turbine such as the piddly Rutland 504 one at the bottom of this list. The ones above it are more powerful and more closely resemble what this eco pod thing has.
Even a small turbine is still enough to deliver ~600W in a day - enough to run a fridge and some LED lighting without exhausting the batteries. Throw in a solar panel or two and providing the battery can deliver the amps it could probably run a pressure shower, a TV, a laptop and other things with no difficulty.
So this eco pod can probably do what it claims especially with the larger turbine.
Lots of boats like yachts and cruisers have wind turbines and even small ones can get 25W and peak to 60W. Combine with solar and it's probably sufficient to run a small fridge continuously and lights and small power draw devices at night.
The oval shape of this thing wastes so much volume that could have been used for storage, shelves, cupboards etc. And the gull wing door is just begging to be ripped off its hinges or even risk tipping the house over in strong wind.
I'm sure it wouldn't look so showy if the "world's first ecocapsule" (which is totally not a caravan without wheels) had a more conventional shape but it would have been a lot more practical, and doubtless cheaper to build too.
They managed to do it all by themselves. I used to program set top boxes with J2ME and dear god was it awful. J2ME was so stripped down that it simply wasn't fit for purpose by the end. It didn't even contain fundamental classes that had been in Java since 1.2 like ArrayList! And it was very expensive to licence too.
So we ended up using another VM called Skelmir which was a clean room Java, roughly analogous to Java 1.5 SE albeit missing some stuff mostly in the javax & sun namespaces. Performance was better, it was cheaper and it was possible to develop normal Java code with a reasonable expectation it would work on the STB. I'm sure the same sentiment was felt everywhere. Companies resented being charging an arm and a leg for a piece of shit runtime which was barely fit for purpose.
As for why Google succeeded where Oracle failed... It's because they offered more or less a full Java SE API and a rich mobile API that allowed developers to write apps without making compromises. It didn't really matter that the byte code was compiled into something else because they also provided excellent tools that integrated with Eclipse to take care of all that.
I don't believe for a second that if Google hadn't used Java as their API that Oracle would have triumphed. Not in the slightest. If anything Google did Oracle a favour by using their language and therefore keeping it relevant for portable devices.
Even if it weren't a danger to the flight, it's still an imposition that other passengers end up paying in their fares for the cost of the (wasted) fuel.
Nobody has to build projects from scratch even if they use Java either. e.g. lots of applications make use of the Eclipse RCP to knock together sophisticated IDEs and other tools of their own. Even if you were starting from scratch, it's very easy to use an editor create dialogs and frames with content.
I should say that Electron (under Atom) is no panacea. It's essentially a shell - an empty browser window that hosts your application's content and provides some objects that you can call in JS for creating menus, opening file pickers, reading / writing from the disk and so on. You still have to write the content that the shell hosts using JS, HTML and CSS which is arguably far more difficult than it is in Java. The payoff only comes if you intend your app to look like rich web content which might be desirable for some client-side front end to GitHub. If you want your app to have a native L&F then it would be better off looking at some other tech.
90%+ of the code in Firefox is cross platform. Native platform functionality such as rendering, widgets, theming, event model, drag & drop etc. is pushed behind interfaces and there are cross platform APIs for strings, file / network IO, threads etc. So in general higher level code doesn't really care what platform its running on although there are some exceptions. Most of the code that lives above the engine isn't written in C++ at all - it's Javascript, XML and CSS so it's almost entirely cross platform.
I assume a similar situation exists with Chrome / Chromium which is also cross platform.
QT might be a good choice if the app is to be written in C++. But there is probably no reason to write in C++ unless the app has some speed / performance / memory critical requirement that can't be done another way. And portability of code is only half the story if the code has to be compiled and packaged for each platform.
A better choice would be Java which is already used for a large number of cross platform dev tools like IntelliJ, Eclipse, SmartGit and so on. Most of the code would be inherently cross platform. Or more radical again, take something like Electron (the browser / JS based shell under Atom) and write over that.
The average PC game only has one view to render, a VR headset has a left and a right eye. So on the same hardware something will have to give - resolution or framerate. I can't see cutting framerate as acceptable since framerate affects latency. Some rendering budget might be clawed back by turning off certain effects like anti aliasing. Game design can also pare back on the pace of action / scenery too since not many people are going to fork out for a $500 card to play a VR game.
A small subset? I bet when VR goes public it will fall on its face (bot figuratively and literally) from the number of people who suffer disorientation, nausea, vertigo, headaches, eyestrain plus accidents from falling / tripping on things.
The best games will be those where the person is seated virtually and in real life - racing cars, space & flight sims etc. Even those may suffer unless they figure out how to do huds and so on that minimize eye strain as people switch from looking at infinity to a panel only 30cm away inside the display.
Of course, perhaps VR could be made to work the nausea and disorientation into the games. Imagine a Saving Private Ryan game where you are tossed around so much in the game you hurl your guts up. Just like being in a real landing craft!
Depth of field blur helps game devs since they can drop the level of detail of distant objects while still providing the player a complex panorama that appears to go off into the distance. Games like GTA V, Arkham Knight etc. use this trick. And on a 2D panel the eyes don't have to change focus depending on where you look on the screen so it doesn't cause eye strain.
So I'm going out on the piss and riding a bike - why exactly would I be inclined to take an alco-lock with me? The answer is I wouldn't. Either I intend to ride home regardless or I intend to lock the bike up securely in the morning in which I case I need a big chain. Either way the lock has no purpose. And bluetooth and a smart phone app? For fucks sake....
The only thing that surprises me about this useless gadget is that it actually exists as a thing on sale right now instead of being yet another harebrained kickstarter project.
Yes there are other factors at work. LESSER factors. Metabolism, sleep cycles, portion sizes etc. But in general terms it really is as simple as comparing calorie intake against expenditure. Eat / drink more than your body needs and it will store it for later as fat. Eat less than your body needs and it will make the difference up from fat.
Anyone who claims they are fat because of metabolism is simply making excuses. I bet in virtually every case the causes of their obesity are quite obvious in their eating habits and their lifestyle.
The studio has probably figured a way of converting illegal downloads into a tax writeoff. If you want to hurt the studio, just ignore the movie entirely. It doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm paying full price for something I would expect it to be an unlocked phone that I could use with any network as and how I see fit. If it's tied to the network, filled with their crapware, or crippled to prevent certain features from interfering with their profits, then screw them.
I bet it's hard enough for AMD or NVidia when they know what's going on inside of the card. It's virtually impossible looking in from the outside. Even on Windows, it is quite common to discover that hibernate / suspend simply doesn't work on certain machines.
As for why Valve is going with SteamOS, I think their motivations are fairly obvious - the more games they get running on Linux, the cheaper it will be to host those games when they launch whatever cloud based gaming platform they're secretly brewing up. I don't believe that fat clients running SteamOS are anything more than a stepping stone to a world where most people would use thin clients (on a stick or in the TV), or their existing Steam on Windows to access it.
The problem for Windows is the same as it is for Linux - drivers. Making a driver which captures the state of complex hardware like a graphics or audio card and then restores it is very hard.
Unless you also substantially reduce the number of cars on the road at the same time, which is entirely plausible.
Which is what London did with a congestion charge. If you drive into the middle of London during office hours in a car you get to pay £10-11.50 for the privilege. The result is many people use public transport or bikes instead which was the intent.
Aside from that, there is a sense that traffic scales with the road size, or conversely shrinks with it. So if the road became congested it's likely that many motorists would drive at a different time, or cycle (the new cycle road is on their route) and the congestion would ease.
the clue is "in a day".
the clue is "in a day"
Which part of "~600W in a day" don't you understand dipshit?
25W*24=600W.
Efficient boat fridges draw only 1A or 12W, e.g. this one. Of course that's coming from the battery not directly from the turbine so it's a question of how many watts the battery can store, how many amps it can deliver at once, how many watts the turbine puts back in according to conditions and other factors. If you were living on a boat you'd probably use a bigger turbine and some solar panels and high capacity, higher draw battery so you could run more than a fridge, e.g. a flat panel TV, laptop etc.
And I said 25W and a peak of 60W for a small turbine such as the piddly Rutland 504 one at the bottom of this list. The ones above it are more powerful and more closely resemble what this eco pod thing has.
Even a small turbine is still enough to deliver ~600W in a day - enough to run a fridge and some LED lighting without exhausting the batteries. Throw in a solar panel or two and providing the battery can deliver the amps it could probably run a pressure shower, a TV, a laptop and other things with no difficulty.
So this eco pod can probably do what it claims especially with the larger turbine.
Lots of boats like yachts and cruisers have wind turbines and even small ones can get 25W and peak to 60W. Combine with solar and it's probably sufficient to run a small fridge continuously and lights and small power draw devices at night.
I'm sure it wouldn't look so showy if the "world's first ecocapsule" (which is totally not a caravan without wheels) had a more conventional shape but it would have been a lot more practical, and doubtless cheaper to build too.
So we ended up using another VM called Skelmir which was a clean room Java, roughly analogous to Java 1.5 SE albeit missing some stuff mostly in the javax & sun namespaces. Performance was better, it was cheaper and it was possible to develop normal Java code with a reasonable expectation it would work on the STB. I'm sure the same sentiment was felt everywhere. Companies resented being charging an arm and a leg for a piece of shit runtime which was barely fit for purpose.
As for why Google succeeded where Oracle failed... It's because they offered more or less a full Java SE API and a rich mobile API that allowed developers to write apps without making compromises. It didn't really matter that the byte code was compiled into something else because they also provided excellent tools that integrated with Eclipse to take care of all that.
I don't believe for a second that if Google hadn't used Java as their API that Oracle would have triumphed. Not in the slightest. If anything Google did Oracle a favour by using their language and therefore keeping it relevant for portable devices.
Even if it weren't a danger to the flight, it's still an imposition that other passengers end up paying in their fares for the cost of the (wasted) fuel.
I should say that Electron (under Atom) is no panacea. It's essentially a shell - an empty browser window that hosts your application's content and provides some objects that you can call in JS for creating menus, opening file pickers, reading / writing from the disk and so on. You still have to write the content that the shell hosts using JS, HTML and CSS which is arguably far more difficult than it is in Java. The payoff only comes if you intend your app to look like rich web content which might be desirable for some client-side front end to GitHub. If you want your app to have a native L&F then it would be better off looking at some other tech.
I assume a similar situation exists with Chrome / Chromium which is also cross platform.
A better choice would be Java which is already used for a large number of cross platform dev tools like IntelliJ, Eclipse, SmartGit and so on. Most of the code would be inherently cross platform. Or more radical again, take something like Electron (the browser / JS based shell under Atom) and write over that.
Depends if you want other people to treat you like a weirdo and a psycho.
The average PC game only has one view to render, a VR headset has a left and a right eye. So on the same hardware something will have to give - resolution or framerate. I can't see cutting framerate as acceptable since framerate affects latency. Some rendering budget might be clawed back by turning off certain effects like anti aliasing. Game design can also pare back on the pace of action / scenery too since not many people are going to fork out for a $500 card to play a VR game.
The best games will be those where the person is seated virtually and in real life - racing cars, space & flight sims etc. Even those may suffer unless they figure out how to do huds and so on that minimize eye strain as people switch from looking at infinity to a panel only 30cm away inside the display.
Of course, perhaps VR could be made to work the nausea and disorientation into the games. Imagine a Saving Private Ryan game where you are tossed around so much in the game you hurl your guts up. Just like being in a real landing craft!
Depth of field blur helps game devs since they can drop the level of detail of distant objects while still providing the player a complex panorama that appears to go off into the distance. Games like GTA V, Arkham Knight etc. use this trick. And on a 2D panel the eyes don't have to change focus depending on where you look on the screen so it doesn't cause eye strain.
The visor makes you look like a weirdo and complete psycho thus clearing a space around as people attempt to avoid proximity with you.
The only thing that surprises me about this useless gadget is that it actually exists as a thing on sale right now instead of being yet another harebrained kickstarter project.
Anyone who claims they are fat because of metabolism is simply making excuses. I bet in virtually every case the causes of their obesity are quite obvious in their eating habits and their lifestyle.
The studio has probably figured a way of converting illegal downloads into a tax writeoff. If you want to hurt the studio, just ignore the movie entirely. It doesn't exist.