Cairo is ready to take advantage of these advanced X servers whenever they appear, and GTK already uses Cairo for its drawing. EFL looks nice, but it's not clear to me how it's better than Cairo, if at all.
Whenever you read about free wireless access, think free "basic" wireless access, which is likely to be slower than 1 Mbps. I don't expect people to be giving up their 5 Mbps cable modems any time soon. Low-end ISPs will certainly be impacted, though.
Whether ICC will itself build universal binaries is another question.
Indeed. It probably won't.
Perhaps you can build the PPC version with GCC or XL C/XL C++, the x86 version with ICC, and then lipo them together.
That was my thought as well. But this would require actually writing a makefile (which many developers may be too lazy to do) unless Apple puts in some Xcode magic to do it for you. Let's hope for the magic.
Given that processors get cheaper over time, you'd hope that the price never increases.
Pricing according to a Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Also, if the grid is space-shared, your job is consuming the same resources regardless of its IPC.
Sun's pricing is per CPU hour so the more machines you use the more it costs. There would be no price improvement to be had by adding more machines to the cluster.
But there is a value improvement to the customer of getting the job done faster.
Most batch nodes are space-shared, not time-shared. That means only one job is running on a particular node at a particular time. This does not create any perverse incentives; developers are still incented to make their code as efficient as possible. If the job is blocking on I/O, that's the user's fault, not Sun's.
But still, who the hell rips video from a DVI stream? The DVI stream is uncompressed video; it makes a lot more sense to rip the data before it is uncompressed, since having to recompress the video will result in an extra compression stage which reduces quality.
Currently, DVI is not the weakest point in the DRM system, so nobody bothers to try to rip it. But the attackers adapt, so once the MPAA locked down everything else, DVI ripping would happen. So they're locking down DVI before the rippers have a chance to get started.
I wonder how long before we have a box which sits between your monitor and your video card which reports itself as HDCP compliant, but in reality outputs a digital signal for recording.
The box exists already, but it's illegal thanks to the DMCA.
Component video will not be protected, because no one has invented a way to protect it (yet). Instead, component output will be scaled down to 480p, so that it's no longer HD.
"Hey, why won't this movie play? It ran alright on my old computer."
Unfortunately for us, the forces of evil are smarter than that. "output protected" content won't play at all on old XP computers, but it will play on newer Vista+HDCP computers. The result will be pressure to stay on the upgrade treadmill without the appearance of taking anything away from users. Anyone who complains will be labeled a whiny freeloader.
Time Warner (through RoadRunner) is a big ISP. They have a huge market for multicast TV programming, which would seem to be much cheaper and easier to deliver over multicast.
If you have RoadRunner, you probably have cable. It's cheaper to deliver TV over cable than over IP multicast over DOCSIS.
Other big ISPs, including DSL/telcos, are in the same position. Why do you think they haven't already jumped on this?
Telcos are starting to get into IPTV, but the equipment is still new and expensive. Presumably they are using IP multicast, although they probably have some way of making sure that only they can use it.
The Internet does not support multicast, because multicast requires routers to carry lots of routing table entries, and those aren't free. So far I haven't seen any good solutions to this problem.
2. I believe there's still a postscript tax for printers that really render postscript. (as opposed to emulation) I know I would like to see that go away. SVG is the way to make Postscript go away.
Really there's no difference between "PostScript" and "PostScript emulation"; in one case you're licensing code from Adobe and in one case you're licensing code from Artifex. And PDF is the replacement for PS.
3. Imagine a desktop/web page that renders itself by percentages. You could effectively write one thing that renders very well on a desktop, PDA, phone, or other mobile devices.
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At first glance, that looks totally orthogonal to TCG.
Cairo is ready to take advantage of these advanced X servers whenever they appear, and GTK already uses Cairo for its drawing. EFL looks nice, but it's not clear to me how it's better than Cairo, if at all.
App->gtk+->Cairo->XRender->Xgl ->GLX(X)->GL->hw
That's exactly why you don't want to use Xglx. You want to use direct rendering, which looks like:
App -> gtk+ -> Cairo -> glitz -> GL -> hw
Microsoft has a plan for getting CableCard to work with WIndows, but I agree with doormat that CableLabs and its conspirators Motorola and Scientific Atlanta will be very reluctant to let it happen.
Whenever you read about free wireless access, think free "basic" wireless access, which is likely to be slower than 1 Mbps. I don't expect people to be giving up their 5 Mbps cable modems any time soon. Low-end ISPs will certainly be impacted, though.
Whether ICC will itself build universal binaries is another question.
Indeed. It probably won't.
Perhaps you can build the PPC version with GCC or XL C/XL C++, the x86 version with ICC, and then lipo them together.
That was my thought as well. But this would require actually writing a makefile (which many developers may be too lazy to do) unless Apple puts in some Xcode magic to do it for you. Let's hope for the magic.
IIRC it's an Opteron.
Given that processors get cheaper over time, you'd hope that the price never increases.
Pricing according to a Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Also, if the grid is space-shared, your job is consuming the same resources regardless of its IPC.
That part of the article is just confused; it's best to just ignore it altogether.
As much as you would like dual-core minis and iBooks, they're probably not economically viable.
Sun's pricing is per CPU hour so the more machines you use the more it costs. There would be no price improvement to be had by adding more machines to the cluster.
But there is a value improvement to the customer of getting the job done faster.
...Intel sabotaged their own compilers to make their output run badly on AMD processors.
Doesn't matter, since OS X won't (officially) run on AMD processors.
Add to that, we are going to be supporting both PPC and X86 on the Mac for many years to come.
ICC won't prevent you from building universal binaries, so I don't see much of an issue here.
Does Intel's compiler even have solid Objective-C support?
It has no Objective-C support at all.
All the Sun Grid machines are owned by Sun, so that issue does not exist.
Most batch nodes are space-shared, not time-shared. That means only one job is running on a particular node at a particular time. This does not create any perverse incentives; developers are still incented to make their code as efficient as possible. If the job is blocking on I/O, that's the user's fault, not Sun's.
Your costs are way off; try adding 250% for other stuff (especially management).
Also consider the case where your problem needs 20 CPU-days -- in 8 hours.
More like now you can be hit by targeted ads while IMing.
But still, who the hell rips video from a DVI stream? The DVI stream is uncompressed video; it makes a lot more sense to rip the data before it is uncompressed, since having to recompress the video will result in an extra compression stage which reduces quality.
Currently, DVI is not the weakest point in the DRM system, so nobody bothers to try to rip it. But the attackers adapt, so once the MPAA locked down everything else, DVI ripping would happen. So they're locking down DVI before the rippers have a chance to get started.
I wonder how long before we have a box which sits between your monitor and your video card which reports itself as HDCP compliant, but in reality outputs a digital signal for recording.
The box exists already, but it's illegal thanks to the DMCA.
Component video will not be protected, because no one has invented a way to protect it (yet). Instead, component output will be scaled down to 480p, so that it's no longer HD.
If you want HD, you need HDCP.
Atom has two versions: 0.3 and 1.0 (not counting any intermediate drafts that people may have hacked up support for and then forgotten about).
People include HTML in RSS 2.0 feeds all the time. Escaped markup may be gross, but people use it.
Likewise, most RSS 2.0 extensions seem to use namespaces.
Trusted computing allows enforceable open-source DRM (in theory).
"Hey, why won't this movie play? It ran alright on my old computer."
Unfortunately for us, the forces of evil are smarter than that. "output protected" content won't play at all on old XP computers, but it will play on newer Vista+HDCP computers. The result will be pressure to stay on the upgrade treadmill without the appearance of taking anything away from users. Anyone who complains will be labeled a whiny freeloader.
A little late, but I just noticed some good commments from Mark Cuban about multicast and how it doesn't exist for users today.
Time Warner (through RoadRunner) is a big ISP. They have a huge market for multicast TV programming, which would seem to be much cheaper and easier to deliver over multicast.
If you have RoadRunner, you probably have cable. It's cheaper to deliver TV over cable than over IP multicast over DOCSIS.
Other big ISPs, including DSL/telcos, are in the same position. Why do you think they haven't already jumped on this?
Telcos are starting to get into IPTV, but the equipment is still new and expensive. Presumably they are using IP multicast, although they probably have some way of making sure that only they can use it.
The Internet does not support multicast, because multicast requires routers to carry lots of routing table entries, and those aren't free. So far I haven't seen any good solutions to this problem.
2. I believe there's still a postscript tax for printers that really render postscript. (as opposed to emulation) I know I would like to see that go away. SVG is the way to make Postscript go away.
Really there's no difference between "PostScript" and "PostScript emulation"; in one case you're licensing code from Adobe and in one case you're licensing code from Artifex. And PDF is the replacement for PS.
3. Imagine a desktop/web page that renders itself by percentages. You could effectively write one thing that renders very well on a desktop, PDA, phone, or other mobile devices.
Isn't that called CSS?