The vulkan was inspired in the mantle and allows more direct control of the hardware... we already have vulkan out, have initial drivers and developers are starting to play with it.
OpenGL, they are mostly killing their close source drive and trying to push and improve the open source one. It already faster than the close source one in some games, but it still needs more work (features and performance optimization, like all open drivers)
Yes, the AMD close source drive is bad, full of bloat and bugs.. they know that and they are fixing it by replacing it with the open source one. After the open drive is good enough, the close source one will be used only for those that need certified opengl drivers. AMD already recommends the open drivers for all the R600 cards and most radeonSI cards.
nvidia is the one that is doing nothing (or almost nothing) to support the open drivers, both intel and AMD have many developers working in the open drivers, with AMD moving developers from the closed driver team to the open source developer team
Sadly also, nvidia also pushes the game developers to use features that perform well in nvidia, but badly in AMD... and with all the AMD close source driver bugs (and game bugs too), many game developers only test/develop in nvidia, making the AMD cards a lot look worst than they are. With the open drivers, game developers will be able to see why the code is performing badly and fix either ends (check the steam comments how the open drivers allowed to debug performance problems in game engines, that helped the games perform better, even in windows)
So we are all waiting , things are already a lot better than 2 years ago... but AMD IS FIXING THE PROBLEM... not only that, but FIXING IN THE GOOD WAY, with open source drivers.
Actually that article is from 2014... not exactly last year!:)
In the last year, firefox did improved the internal design and is now partially multi-thread, but being a monolith for all these years can't not be solved that fast without breaking things. Only a complete redesign would help doing this faster... but maintain current engine and design and build a new one is still a huge task and takes years, not something mozilla can do, they don't have the MS, Google and Apple money and size.
servo is THE mozilla redesign, it will solve all the current problems... but it required a design of a new language and all the tools around it. If it works as planned, it will make firefox leapfrog all the current browsers tech... lets wait
For me, noscript+request policy (continued)+noredirect and without flash installed, makes firefox perfect, chrome used way too much resources
firefoxos manage hardware and daemons daemons read sensors and other content and generate webpages geko read the webpages (may submit posts for config changes or actions that some daemon will accept and filter)
how is more insecure than a native app that read the sensor and controls everything. At least firefox OS is more contained (say more unix like)
sorry, you are confusing Firefox BROWSER with Firefox OS!
firefox OS is a small linux with geko installed and most of the GUI are webpages. Geko today is light, fast enough and been adding multi-thread.
This is small enough for many application where a easy and fast to develop GUI interface. Being html, you then can point any browser to the fridge and do the same thing. Try that with a android app.
Finally, you will not be opening 30 tabs in firefoxOS, you will probably only see 1 to 3 tabs (if really need) of status/config pages. You could do this with any distro, but X11/wayland+libs+drivers+sdk is always a problem when compared to a cheap sdk that takes care of that for you. You could do that with android, but android is harder to change and may be even slower due to all the garbage required for phones, tables.
Mozilla is trying to overshot the mobile, as they learned that is already a market too hard to break in, and go directly to the "internet of things" to increase market share on a future huge market.
you install your preferred linux distro, load some games (directly, via steam, even wine if you really want) and most of then will work.
For intel and amd cards, that is the true (only very recent cards use the new amdgpu driver that aren't yet on this level, but getting close fast and will be able to easily use either open or close drivers without change kernel driver). Same games have the same performance as the close drivers, other still need more drive optimization. Very new games that require opengl >4.2 in linux are not common and mesa already support many features of higher opengl levels... but yes, one can install a modern linux distro and play games without even knowing anything about linux.
For nvidia cards, as nvidia isn't really helping, the performance is not yet good, but thanks for the nouveau team and the help from intel and amd development, the drivers are getting more and more usable.
If you have a computer with 128MB of RAM, you are talking about pentium 1/2/3/very old athlon computers!!! buy a Raspberry PI !! it have more memory and probably faster and uses a lot less energy.
also, firefox uses as much memory as tabs you have open. a clean firefox with one tab open is using 230MB on a computer with 8GB... a 512MB computer is enough... not fast, but computers from that era aren't fast too
>The six year old car you are driving is not as secure as a car produced this year. You are required to upgrade.
Windows XP is not a six year old car... is more a card without breaks. you are not allowed to drive a car without break on normal roads, but on your private road, you can do anything. you are not forced to trash the car, just can not use it for every day.
XP is way too limited. you can keep it if you want, but after that date, most sites will block you. browser internal networks or any still open site, just don't complain about those sites you can not enter.
mail clients should fix security bugs, but today they don't really change much... you don't need html5 in one email, protocols are still the same, mail storage is fine and stable
No email client had any major development, other than trying to integrate with other "not email" protocols (like RSS, calendar, chat) and even that is more small improvements than majors features.
just because a tool changed from monthly releases to annual releases, it doesn't mean that is broken... it usually mean that is stable and mature and can be used for a long time without change.
Use the open source drivers, they work well on older cards
If you are talking on really old cards, like ati rage and similar... that was not AMD, it was the Xorg developers, as the drivers where broken due X server changes and no one fixed the drivers (because no one cared anymore). If you need this drivers, fix then or pay someone to fix then... or use older distros... because if the have card have 15 years, the remaining hardware should also not be that recent... or get a better (AGP/PCI) card, like a ATI HDxxxxx series
you call the assistance, they bring you a car for you to use and they will take the broken car to the maintenance service where it will be repaired. You can continue traveling to your job and fix the broken computers while someone else will arrive to his work and fix your (old) car. By the way, when you park, someone else will take the car for is own needs or fill a car deficit in another place.
Yes, it can. You have shared resources communities already in the world. It requires a change of mind to reduce the selfish temptations, but it is possible.
Please notice that lack of money doesn't mean lack of rules to access the resources, so if you abuse, you will still be punished.
Jitsi is just like skype, but XMPP based. Choose some server to create accounts (many of the big emails account also have XMPP support). As it build with java, works in all systems and it supports very well video and voice. Android jitsi version is still under developement, but it should work already
for simply saving video messages, use the http://www.videomessageonline.... (webviewer) or the http://mailvu.com/ (via email), but you can always save one locally, using guvcview, cheese or other webcam tools and send the video via email or a shared dropbox or similar
most of those apps can be rebuild for running in the webserver... not only you get the app working in linux, but tablets also so nag the companies to support tablets and you will get the rest:)
doesn't work all the times, but some companies do agree with this of course all depends of the apps... i had apps running still in windows 98 and windows 2000, just because old software is always a big anchor for progress in companies
AMD open source driver is getting better and better, mesa 11, being release this month adds OpenGL 4.1 I'm already playing several OpenGL 4.1 games from steam. OpenGL 4.2 and 4.3 are also with most of the work done so probably in the start of next year it is ready Performance is also getting better. So with mesa11, most people can forget catalyst driver
DirectX... that don't exist anymore, MS killed it... but you are probably talking about Direct3D... you have gallium nine!! that with a patch wine version, you can play many games in wine directly with Direct3D at full speed... but it only works with gallium mesa cards, so nouveau and radeon. Intel and closed sourced drivers can't use it
Games, there are already many GOOD linux games in steam! yes, more the better, but buying and using linux in steam right now helps the port of future games
This is not unexpected... oracle is very expensive, with huge profits levels a big government complains about the price... oracle ignores it a big government complains again about the price... oracle ignores it again a big government complains publicly about the price... oracle ignores it yet another time a big government says it will start to abandon oracle products, knowing that it would be almost impossible to really do it... oracle gives a +10% price discount, just to shut up the complain... government can sing victory, everything is still the same
All this considering no payments under the table
Short term switch from oracle is hard, because if you use oracle, you are already stuck, you will need to change many things but long term switch could save a lot of money, even with the ever increasing discounts oracle
Oracle gives ever increasing discounts oracle depending of the "customer" financial status/portfolio and risk of stopping using oracle product, usually low. As governments and very big corporations/banks are very "change resistant" and have huge amount of money, they usually have little or no discounts. But even a small 10% or 20% discount is a huge saving in oracle costs... but there are companies out there that get even 90% discounts.
do you know that ram double was fake, it just increased the reported size and reverse engineering showed that it didn't even had any compression code!:)
they are fixing it... they new driver policy is to have a generic driver in the kernel. then you plug mesa or catalyst on top of it. The idea is that mesa is getting better and better and support more cards, mesa support up to opengl 4.2 is expected to be release in September. with more features ready, performance is also getting better. For possible more performance, features or too new hardware for mesa, you can plug catalyst and use the closed source driver. With this, even the closed source linux driver is simpler and easier to maintain and should help fix many long standing problems in the driver.
Finally, vulkan is a new start and will help fixing all sort of performance problems and bugs
So yes, catalyst is not good, it is full of historic problems, mesa is already catching up, after septermber most people should use mesa instead of catalyst
it is not more ram, is helping the kernel managing the ram. linux expect to have several layers or memory and taking it out you make it harder for the kernel... everything still will work, but you can actually lose some performance if you have no swap at all. If you don't want to use swap, it is better to put a swappiness=10 or something.
There was a thread in the LKML about this several years ago and the VM maintainers said that one must always have some swap, even if small and if swappiness is 0
either way you should always have a swap partition, even if small (512MB-1GB... even 100MB is better than nothing). the swap is there for to help the kernel, even if you have much free ram
1- suspend != hibernation suspend do not require swap, it will shutdown everything and keep the ram powered, so no need to swap out the information hibernation will transfer all the ram to the swap and shutdown the all machine. This one of course need swap configure.
2- if you don't have ANY swap configure, you should. even a swap of 1GB is used to trash out (without any write) requested memory that is not in use. If one app requests all your machine RAM and never use it, you will be out of memory, but with swap, the kernel can map out that unused/unallocated ram to swap and use the ram for other apps. So yes, everyone should use swap, even if small. google and others added the zram to the kernel, so that even a 100MB swap can help a lot the system, by compressing anything it might want to page out... non-allocated pages compress a lot, as you imagine!! Even if your memory is always with free space, some swap cam help you cache more information from the disk, even from SSD
Slashdot Mirror
They are doing it!
The vulkan was inspired in the mantle and allows more direct control of the hardware... we already have vulkan out, have initial drivers and developers are starting to play with it.
OpenGL, they are mostly killing their close source drive and trying to push and improve the open source one. It already faster than the close source one in some games, but it still needs more work (features and performance optimization, like all open drivers)
Yes, the AMD close source drive is bad, full of bloat and bugs.. they know that and they are fixing it by replacing it with the open source one.
After the open drive is good enough, the close source one will be used only for those that need certified opengl drivers. AMD already recommends the open drivers for all the R600 cards and most radeonSI cards.
nvidia is the one that is doing nothing (or almost nothing) to support the open drivers, both intel and AMD have many developers working in the open drivers, with AMD moving developers from the closed driver team to the open source developer team
Sadly also, nvidia also pushes the game developers to use features that perform well in nvidia, but badly in AMD... and with all the AMD close source driver bugs (and game bugs too), many game developers only test/develop in nvidia, making the AMD cards a lot look worst than they are.
With the open drivers, game developers will be able to see why the code is performing badly and fix either ends (check the steam comments how the open drivers allowed to debug performance problems in game engines, that helped the games perform better, even in windows)
So we are all waiting , things are already a lot better than 2 years ago... but AMD IS FIXING THE PROBLEM... not only that, but FIXING IN THE GOOD WAY, with open source drivers.
Actually that article is from 2014... not exactly last year! :)
In the last year, firefox did improved the internal design and is now partially multi-thread, but being a monolith for all these years can't not be solved that fast without breaking things. Only a complete redesign would help doing this faster... but maintain current engine and design and build a new one is still a huge task and takes years, not something mozilla can do, they don't have the MS, Google and Apple money and size.
servo is THE mozilla redesign, it will solve all the current problems... but it required a design of a new language and all the tools around it. If it works as planned, it will make firefox leapfrog all the current browsers tech... lets wait
For me, noscript+request policy (continued)+noredirect and without flash installed, makes firefox perfect, chrome used way too much resources
you are seeing things the wrong way
firefoxos manage hardware and daemons
daemons read sensors and other content and generate webpages
geko read the webpages (may submit posts for config changes or actions that some daemon will accept and filter)
how is more insecure than a native app that read the sensor and controls everything. At least firefox OS is more contained (say more unix like)
your fridge will not browser the web :)
sorry, you are confusing Firefox BROWSER with Firefox OS!
firefox OS is a small linux with geko installed and most of the GUI are webpages. Geko today is light, fast enough and been adding multi-thread.
This is small enough for many application where a easy and fast to develop GUI interface. Being html, you then can point any browser to the fridge and do the same thing. Try that with a android app.
Finally, you will not be opening 30 tabs in firefoxOS, you will probably only see 1 to 3 tabs (if really need) of status/config pages.
You could do this with any distro, but X11/wayland+libs+drivers+sdk is always a problem when compared to a cheap sdk that takes care of that for you.
You could do that with android, but android is harder to change and may be even slower due to all the garbage required for phones, tables.
Mozilla is trying to overshot the mobile, as they learned that is already a market too hard to break in, and go directly to the "internet of things" to increase market share on a future huge market.
you install your preferred linux distro, load some games (directly, via steam, even wine if you really want) and most of then will work.
For intel and amd cards, that is the true (only very recent cards use the new amdgpu driver that aren't yet on this level, but getting close fast and will be able to easily use either open or close drivers without change kernel driver). Same games have the same performance as the close drivers, other still need more drive
optimization. Very new games that require opengl >4.2 in linux are not common and mesa already support many features of higher opengl levels... but yes, one can install a modern linux distro and play games without even knowing anything about linux.
For nvidia cards, as nvidia isn't really helping, the performance is not yet good, but thanks for the nouveau team and the help from intel and amd development, the drivers are getting more and more usable.
oops, press submit way too fast! :)
If you have a computer with 128MB of RAM, you are talking about pentium 1/2/3 /very old athlon computers!!!
buy a Raspberry PI !! it have more memory and probably faster and uses a lot less energy.
also, firefox uses as much memory as tabs you have open. a clean firefox with one tab open is using 230MB on a computer with 8GB... a 512MB computer is enough... not fast, but computers from that era aren't fast too
Use linux instead of windows. Problem solved!
>The six year old car you are driving is not as secure as a car produced this year. You are required to upgrade.
Windows XP is not a six year old car... is more a card without breaks. you are not allowed to drive a car without break on normal roads, but on your private road, you can do anything. you are not forced to trash the car, just can not use it for every day.
XP is way too limited. you can keep it if you want, but after that date, most sites will block you. browser internal networks or any still open site, just don't complain about those sites you can not enter.
but also keep using thunderbird...
mail clients should fix security bugs, but today they don't really change much... you don't need html5 in one email, protocols are still the same, mail storage is fine and stable
No email client had any major development, other than trying to integrate with other "not email" protocols (like RSS, calendar, chat) and even that is more small improvements than majors features.
just because a tool changed from monthly releases to annual releases, it doesn't mean that is broken... it usually mean that is stable and mature and can be used for a long time without change.
Simple, fast, flexible
Then if you need, do a ssh to a remove *nix machine and use mutt to quick read the email directly from the MH folders
Do people still uses windows?! WTF!! :D
Use the open source drivers, they work well on older cards
If you are talking on really old cards, like ati rage and similar... that was not AMD, it was the Xorg developers, as the drivers where broken due X server changes and no one fixed the drivers (because no one cared anymore). If you need this drivers, fix then or pay someone to fix then... or use older distros... because if the have card have 15 years, the remaining hardware should also not be that recent... or get a better (AGP/PCI) card, like a ATI HDxxxxx series
you call the assistance, they bring you a car for you to use and they will take the broken car to the maintenance service where it will be repaired.
You can continue traveling to your job and fix the broken computers while someone else will arrive to his work and fix your (old) car.
By the way, when you park, someone else will take the car for is own needs or fill a car deficit in another place.
Everyone still have a job and have to do it :)
Yes, it can.
You have shared resources communities already in the world. It requires a change of mind to reduce the selfish temptations, but it is possible.
Please notice that lack of money doesn't mean lack of rules to access the resources, so if you abuse, you will still be punished.
Jitsi is just like skype, but XMPP based. Choose some server to create accounts (many of the big emails account also have XMPP support). As it build with java, works in all systems and it supports very well video and voice.
Android jitsi version is still under developement, but it should work already
for simply saving video messages, use the http://www.videomessageonline.... (webviewer) or the http://mailvu.com/ (via email), but you can always save one locally, using guvcview, cheese or other webcam tools and send the video via email or a shared dropbox or similar
on each libre office release the compatibility improves a lot. I now almost don't have any problem
most of those apps can be rebuild for running in the webserver... not only you get the app working in linux, but tablets also :)
so nag the companies to support tablets and you will get the rest
doesn't work all the times, but some companies do agree with this
of course all depends of the apps... i had apps running still in windows 98 and windows 2000, just because old software is always a big anchor for progress in companies
AMD open source driver is getting better and better, mesa 11, being release this month adds OpenGL 4.1
I'm already playing several OpenGL 4.1 games from steam. OpenGL 4.2 and 4.3 are also with most of the work done so probably in the start of next year it is ready
Performance is also getting better. So with mesa11, most people can forget catalyst driver
DirectX... that don't exist anymore, MS killed it... but you are probably talking about Direct3D ... you have gallium nine!!
that with a patch wine version, you can play many games in wine directly with Direct3D at full speed... but it only works with gallium mesa cards, so nouveau and radeon. Intel and closed sourced drivers can't use it
Games, there are already many GOOD linux games in steam! yes, more the better, but buying and using linux in steam right now helps the port of future games
This is not unexpected ... oracle is very expensive, with huge profits levels
a big government complains about the price... oracle ignores it
a big government complains again about the price... oracle ignores it again
a big government complains publicly about the price... oracle ignores it yet another time
a big government says it will start to abandon oracle products, knowing that it would be almost impossible to really do it... oracle gives a +10% price discount, just to shut up the complain... government can sing victory, everything is still the same
All this considering no payments under the table
Short term switch from oracle is hard, because if you use oracle, you are already stuck, you will need to change many things
but long term switch could save a lot of money, even with the ever increasing discounts oracle
Oracle gives ever increasing discounts oracle depending of the "customer" financial status/portfolio and risk of stopping using oracle product, usually low.
As governments and very big corporations/banks are very "change resistant" and have huge amount of money, they usually have little or no discounts. But even a small 10% or 20% discount is a huge saving in oracle costs... but there are companies out there that get even 90% discounts.
AFAIK, yes
again, everything works without swap, but the kernel likes to have the extra layer that the swap adds for several operations
do you know that ram double was fake, it just increased the reported size and reverse engineering showed that it didn't even had any compression code! :)
they are fixing it... they new driver policy is to have a generic driver in the kernel. then you plug mesa or catalyst on top of it.
The idea is that mesa is getting better and better and support more cards, mesa support up to opengl 4.2 is expected to be release in September. with more features ready, performance is also getting better. For possible more performance, features or too new hardware for mesa, you can plug catalyst and use the closed source driver. With this, even the closed source linux driver is simpler and easier to maintain and should help fix many long standing problems in the driver.
Finally, vulkan is a new start and will help fixing all sort of performance problems and bugs
So yes, catalyst is not good, it is full of historic problems, mesa is already catching up, after septermber most people should use mesa instead of catalyst
it is not more ram, is helping the kernel managing the ram. linux expect to have several layers or memory and taking it out you make it harder for the kernel... everything still will work, but you can actually lose some performance if you have no swap at all. If you don't want to use swap, it is better to put a swappiness=10 or something.
There was a thread in the LKML about this several years ago and the VM maintainers said that one must always have some swap, even if small and if swappiness is 0
either way you should always have a swap partition, even if small (512MB-1GB ... even 100MB is better than nothing). the swap is there for to help the kernel, even if you have much free ram
1- suspend != hibernation
suspend do not require swap, it will shutdown everything and keep the ram powered, so no need to swap out the information
hibernation will transfer all the ram to the swap and shutdown the all machine. This one of course need swap configure.
2- if you don't have ANY swap configure, you should. even a swap of 1GB is used to trash out (without any write) requested memory that is not in use. If one app requests all your machine RAM and never use it, you will be out of memory, but with swap, the kernel can map out that unused/unallocated ram to swap and use the ram for other apps. So yes, everyone should use swap, even if small.
google and others added the zram to the kernel, so that even a 100MB swap can help a lot the system, by compressing anything it might want to page out... non-allocated pages compress a lot, as you imagine!!
Even if your memory is always with free space, some swap cam help you cache more information from the disk, even from SSD