Actually the GP is rather wrong in saying it will run linux. If you want to use your GMA500, you're stuck with a specific kernel version, a specific mesa, and a specific x.org, with no upgrade path for now.
The Z series Atoms are nice, the chipsets paired with it are very low power, the PowerVR graphics kicks ass, and that tiny box is really sweet. But if you want linux, you have to stay away from Poulsbo.
At some point I started getting russian spam. Useless since I can't read it, but still annoying since Gmail didn't recognize it as spam. So I came up with this filter:
Matches: from:(.ru)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it
It works for most of it, and the few that didn't come from.ru addresses I'd flag manually as spam. But I haven't seen one pass through in quite a while, so I guess Gmail got better at russian.
And some unrelated anecdotal food for thought: I started getting german spam one week after ordering from amazon.de.
Its no surprise that Arch makes it to the top being a rolling distro, that is, one that doesn't have "releases" like Ubuntu, Debian, etc.
I run Debian testing. It's very much a rolling release, and you're somewhat protected against obvious bugs by the nice policy. Of course, you can get more rolling than that and go full unstable. And throw in some experimental if you're feeling brave.
The nice thing is you can mix-and-match. Most of my packages are testing, some are unstable, and right now i have a touch of experimental. With some APT pinning, you get a rolling release where you can decide per-package how bleeding edge you want to be.
This is my laptop/desktop. For servers I mostly stick to stable, and if i really need a newer package I can pin it from testing, or look for it on backports.org.
Whoever modded the parent as troll is a moron. Offtopic maybe, but not troll. Go ahead and mod me down too.
The parent is right. I've had my paranoid period and tried NoScript; the web was so damn broken, and clicking to allow JS over and over again turned so tiresome that I turned to everything whitelisted by default, and finally uninstalled NoScript after the AdBlock fiasco.
About how bad of a language JavaScript is or isn't: I personally like it, though I'd prefer Lua, or say, Python; but JS is here to stay and it serves its purpose. Except that purpose isn't replacing HTML, or turning HTTP into something it was never meant to be. Back when I was coding JS, we were doing it to improve the user experience, not replace it altogether. Nowadays "web developers" use [insert random JS framework] for everything, but the problem is so, so many use it in braindead ways. You middle click on a thumbnail expecting to open the image in a new tab, but you just get the same page with a nice # added at the end. And then there's the idiots doing <a href="javascript:">, and the utter idiots with an attitude that do onclick="submit_something_via_post" and figure out they know better how the web is supposed to work... These are usually the same idiots that will do broken browser detection based on the User-Agent string, and usually fail miserably if your browser sends along "Gecko", but not "Firefox". Say, something like "Iceweasel". For a nice example of how far this stupidity goes, try browsing VIA's site.
You want to use XHR when clicking on a link? Or submitting a form? That's all fine and dandy, but don't break the web. It's becoming more and more like flash, with the sole difference you can view-source.
If you're building Google Docs or Meebo, all hail JavaScript. But for mostly everything else, lack of graceful degradation with JS disabled is pure idiocy. Not just because there's paranoid people browsing with JS disabled, but because there's blind people using the web, and people with antiquated handhelds, or simply stuck in a console trying to fix nvidia's latest fuck-up. Of course, it would take building the site / web app properly from the bottom up: HTML, server interaction, CSS, JavaScript. But the "developers" these day start with YUI or Dojo: some shiny animation is the end purpose in on itself, not an improvement to conveying information.
By the way: did you try GMail with JS disabled? It works. It probably works in lynx too, since it works in elinks just fine. That's the way JS is supposed to be used.
Interesting, I forgot Pandora was supposed to use it as well. Good luck to them, but reverse engineering 3D features in GPUs is damn difficult as nouveau shows. There's also the beagleboard, which IIRC has a blob available only for 2.6.27, but these devices obviously don't give enough incentive to PowerVR to keep developing their linux drivers.
Too bad it's so damn difficult having open-source GPU drivers. Kudos to Intel and ATI, but Intel's hardware is not there yet, and ATI sold their low-power/embedded designs to Qualcomm. Maybe they'll be nice about it when their Snapdragon devices come out.
I've been waiting for a while to see some development with the PowerVR drivers (wanted to get a Poulsbo netbook).
Soon enough the AlwaysInnovating touchbook should be out, which is built around the TI OMAP3530. That's Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX530 and it's gonna run linux, so we'll see if it's just more binary blobs or there's some real work going on.
It's July the 4th every year.. in July.. on the 4th.
And it's kinda sad that if one needs to write something about Fourth of July, all they can come up is with some musings about how difficult it is to make fireworks, and then it gets labeled as news.
It's your Independence Day ffs. Ah, but you have shiny colored things that go boom in the sky; that's way more interesting than history. And hey, it can make it on slashdot's front page too...
Slow news day? Or is this a new "educate-the-readers-in-things-they-don't-care-about" program?
There is no news in the article... It sounds like something a student would copy off wikipedia, mingle a bit, throw in some metaphores, and turn into a school essay.
Wonderful comment. You'll get your +5 mod anyway, so I'd rather comment on your last "option":
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
Unfortunately that's not the way it goes. There's no you, and us, and patriotism anymore. It's them benefiting from endless copyright vs. us humankind that would benefit from knowledge in the public domain. If the status-quo changes they'll lose their 3rd yacht, and their army of lawyers will need professional reorientation. They have everything to lose and they won't give up easily.
The RIAA and MPAA might be U.S.-based, but they're everywhere; they just go by different names. Haven't you noticed Swedish online service providers being held liable for $3.5 million for copyright violations that never happened? Or the 3-strikes law that was passed by the French legislative body, and they were barely saved by their constitutional court? Or the traffic filtering efforts in the U.K.?
Expect the Author's Guild to follow suit once they figure out how to do it internationally. We have yet to find out what ACTA brings upon us.
So it's not just about your culture, but our culture. If you're waiting for international pressure, sorry to disappoint you: they got to us too. And I somehow doubt the blatant copyright violators like China and revolution-torn Iran will fill that role.
I first saw it on Nokias S60 3rd edition, some 4 years ago; never had the occasion to try it on earlier S60s. It really is an extraordinary usability improvement, especially for keypads.
Note however, the Nokias don't enable the feature when you enter a numeric password (e.g. the PIN), so I don't think they meant it as a usability feature in the sense Nielsen wants, but simply to overcome the frustration of entering masked letters on a numeric keypad.
And it's quite obvious Apple didn't come up with the idea: they didn't patent it. Call it cynicism or my minute of Apple hate, but i prefer to call it pragmatism.
He sums the article up by claiming that his return will be sooner than 12 years based on changes in his electricity usage (like his daughter leaving for college). This is bad math. He would have changed his usage either way, so he can't really count those watts as impacted by his investment in the solar panels.
Or he'll pump the surplus electricity into the grid, and get paid for it. That's ignoring the increasing cost of electricity.
Probably. Anyway the broadcasting fee is insane, but i guess their target is Hulu, Apple store etc., not random Joe posting a movie on their blog. Of course, this does no good to free video sharing websites, which are gonna have to decide what makes more sense: pay for extra-bandwidth, or pay broadcasting fees.
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters? I mean, I understand that if a license limits mpeg-4 encoding to a single government computer running Windows ME that was lost 5 years ago, that the license is a HUGE barrier to entry to use the codec. However, in this case the license seems to be the only single category in which Theora wins. The compression is worse than mpeg-4. The compression takes more space. But look! The license is a little better! WINNER!
You understand quite wrong. After having paid (a small amount) for the encoder, if you decide to post your > 12 minutes clip on the web, you're likely gonna have to pay through your nose come 2011. And everybody that wants to watch it must have paid for the decoder (another small amount).
The current H.264/MPEG-4 AV licensing is rather palatable, as they're trying to gain market share; decoders and encoders sold before 2005 were even spared any licensing fee. But this license expires at the end of 2010. So you see, it's like the drug dealers' business model: first treat is cheap/free. Once you're addicted to it, we're in business.
TFA explains it, and even has a convenient clicky for you:
After 2010, Mpeg-4 fees are increasing to include "internet broadcast fees" which apply when distributing Mpeg-4 content on the internet. This means that if I host my own Mpeg-4 clip on my own site, I owe an additional fee depending on how many times the clip is downloaded (for clips over 12 minutes) -- see mpeg licensing press release.
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation"
It builds on Hitler's advocacy in Mein Kampf that the sick / handicapped should be deemed unfit for procreation:
[The state] must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so.
As such, the Hitler-attributable part of the quote is wildly out of context. But this fictional letter does a great job of pointing out where this "think of the children" is going.
Maybe I don't get it, but this looks like a concerted FUD campaign against Android. I don't know much about the Android internals, but isn't graphics hardware acceleration handled in the DRM part of the Linux kernel? What does this have to do with Android?
Presumably Android would have to implement the rest of DRI (if they don't use the existing Linux infrastructure / didn't do so already), and next their equivalent of a X.org video driver. But what's the big deal?
Also, all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code, a technique he says is too slow for HD video.
"There's no hardware acceleration. It's all software," Rayfield said.
So, huh? Because it's Java it can't use hardware acceleration?
Other major problems include the fact that the Android icons are too large, and apparently it's gonna take one year to make them small... Well, that makes a lotta sense.
It would make more sense if nVidia said "We're already having a hard time with binary blobs for those lousy x86 linux geeks. Now they want to do that for ARM too, and even worse, for something that doesn't use the X.org architecture. I say we better get together again next year."
If NVidia does not want a piece of Android business, it is NVidia's loss.
And AMD/ATI gain.
Modded interesting? Interestingly offtopic?
This is an ARM story. AMD doesn't do ARM, and while ATI does produce embedded graphics chips, I've never heard of them being paired with handheld devices.
For those projects that don't care about IE support, HTML5 canvas/video/audio is a fantastic leap forward for the web. For the rest, business as usual for some time to come I'm afraid.
No, it's not. You have the option to double your coding efforts, and implement your canvas features in VML as well (see for example OpenLayers for nicely abstracted code; it has 3 renderers: canvas, SVG and VML), or use ExCanvas, which does all that for you. It's slower compared to a native implementation, but it works.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, it won't under linux.
Actually the GP is rather wrong in saying it will run linux. If you want to use your GMA500, you're stuck with a specific kernel version, a specific mesa, and a specific x.org, with no upgrade path for now.
The Z series Atoms are nice, the chipsets paired with it are very low power, the PowerVR graphics kicks ass, and that tiny box is really sweet. But if you want linux, you have to stay away from Poulsbo.
At some point I started getting russian spam. Useless since I can't read it, but still annoying since Gmail didn't recognize it as spam. So I came up with this filter:
Matches: from:(.ru)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it
It works for most of it, and the few that didn't come from .ru addresses I'd flag manually as spam. But I haven't seen one pass through in quite a while, so I guess Gmail got better at russian.
And some unrelated anecdotal food for thought: I started getting german spam one week after ordering from amazon.de.
Its no surprise that Arch makes it to the top being a rolling distro, that is, one that doesn't have "releases" like Ubuntu, Debian, etc.
I run Debian testing. It's very much a rolling release, and you're somewhat protected against obvious bugs by the nice policy. Of course, you can get more rolling than that and go full unstable. And throw in some experimental if you're feeling brave.
The nice thing is you can mix-and-match. Most of my packages are testing, some are unstable, and right now i have a touch of experimental. With some APT pinning, you get a rolling release where you can decide per-package how bleeding edge you want to be.
This is my laptop/desktop. For servers I mostly stick to stable, and if i really need a newer package I can pin it from testing, or look for it on backports.org.
Whoever modded the parent as troll is a moron. Offtopic maybe, but not troll. Go ahead and mod me down too.
The parent is right. I've had my paranoid period and tried NoScript; the web was so damn broken, and clicking to allow JS over and over again turned so tiresome that I turned to everything whitelisted by default, and finally uninstalled NoScript after the AdBlock fiasco.
About how bad of a language JavaScript is or isn't: I personally like it, though I'd prefer Lua, or say, Python; but JS is here to stay and it serves its purpose. Except that purpose isn't replacing HTML, or turning HTTP into something it was never meant to be. Back when I was coding JS, we were doing it to improve the user experience, not replace it altogether. Nowadays "web developers" use [insert random JS framework] for everything, but the problem is so, so many use it in braindead ways. You middle click on a thumbnail expecting to open the image in a new tab, but you just get the same page with a nice # added at the end. And then there's the idiots doing <a href="javascript:">, and the utter idiots with an attitude that do onclick="submit_something_via_post" and figure out they know better how the web is supposed to work... These are usually the same idiots that will do broken browser detection based on the User-Agent string, and usually fail miserably if your browser sends along "Gecko", but not "Firefox". Say, something like "Iceweasel". For a nice example of how far this stupidity goes, try browsing VIA's site.
You want to use XHR when clicking on a link? Or submitting a form? That's all fine and dandy, but don't break the web. It's becoming more and more like flash, with the sole difference you can view-source.
If you're building Google Docs or Meebo, all hail JavaScript. But for mostly everything else, lack of graceful degradation with JS disabled is pure idiocy. Not just because there's paranoid people browsing with JS disabled, but because there's blind people using the web, and people with antiquated handhelds, or simply stuck in a console trying to fix nvidia's latest fuck-up. Of course, it would take building the site / web app properly from the bottom up: HTML, server interaction, CSS, JavaScript. But the "developers" these day start with YUI or Dojo: some shiny animation is the end purpose in on itself, not an improvement to conveying information.
By the way: did you try GMail with JS disabled? It works. It probably works in lynx too, since it works in elinks just fine. That's the way JS is supposed to be used.
</rant>
Now I can re-enable TraceMonkey and slashdot will be fast again... sorta.
Interesting, I forgot Pandora was supposed to use it as well. Good luck to them, but reverse engineering 3D features in GPUs is damn difficult as nouveau shows. There's also the beagleboard, which IIRC has a blob available only for 2.6.27, but these devices obviously don't give enough incentive to PowerVR to keep developing their linux drivers.
Too bad it's so damn difficult having open-source GPU drivers. Kudos to Intel and ATI, but Intel's hardware is not there yet, and ATI sold their low-power/embedded designs to Qualcomm. Maybe they'll be nice about it when their Snapdragon devices come out.
I've been waiting for a while to see some development with the PowerVR drivers (wanted to get a Poulsbo netbook).
Soon enough the AlwaysInnovating touchbook should be out, which is built around the TI OMAP3530. That's Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX530 and it's gonna run linux, so we'll see if it's just more binary blobs or there's some real work going on.
Don't worry, moderations are undone when you post in the same thread.
It's July the 4th every year.. in July.. on the 4th.
And it's kinda sad that if one needs to write something about Fourth of July, all they can come up is with some musings about how difficult it is to make fireworks, and then it gets labeled as news.
It's your Independence Day ffs. Ah, but you have shiny colored things that go boom in the sky; that's way more interesting than history. And hey, it can make it on slashdot's front page too...
Slow news day? Or is this a new "educate-the-readers-in-things-they-don't-care-about" program?
There is no news in the article... It sounds like something a student would copy off wikipedia, mingle a bit, throw in some metaphores, and turn into a school essay.
Did you mean idle? It's posted under news...
UDF, plain build. But you must've known that, right?
Someone should bring this to the European Commission's attention...
Wonderful comment. You'll get your +5 mod anyway, so I'd rather comment on your last "option":
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
Unfortunately that's not the way it goes. There's no you, and us, and patriotism anymore. It's them benefiting from endless copyright vs. us humankind that would benefit from knowledge in the public domain. If the status-quo changes they'll lose their 3rd yacht, and their army of lawyers will need professional reorientation. They have everything to lose and they won't give up easily.
The RIAA and MPAA might be U.S.-based, but they're everywhere; they just go by different names. Haven't you noticed Swedish online service providers being held liable for $3.5 million for copyright violations that never happened? Or the 3-strikes law that was passed by the French legislative body, and they were barely saved by their constitutional court? Or the traffic filtering efforts in the U.K.?
Expect the Author's Guild to follow suit once they figure out how to do it internationally. We have yet to find out what ACTA brings upon us.
So it's not just about your culture, but our culture. If you're waiting for international pressure, sorry to disappoint you: they got to us too. And I somehow doubt the blatant copyright violators like China and revolution-torn Iran will fill that role.
I first saw it on Nokias S60 3rd edition, some 4 years ago; never had the occasion to try it on earlier S60s. It really is an extraordinary usability improvement, especially for keypads.
Note however, the Nokias don't enable the feature when you enter a numeric password (e.g. the PIN), so I don't think they meant it as a usability feature in the sense Nielsen wants, but simply to overcome the frustration of entering masked letters on a numeric keypad.
And it's quite obvious Apple didn't come up with the idea: they didn't patent it. Call it cynicism or my minute of Apple hate, but i prefer to call it pragmatism.
Sucks to be in California then I guess, because he'll definitely have surplus during summer months.
Anyway, check this very explicit chart about the tier plan he has for grid usage. His logic makes sense.
He sums the article up by claiming that his return will be sooner than 12 years based on changes in his electricity usage (like his daughter leaving for college). This is bad math. He would have changed his usage either way, so he can't really count those watts as impacted by his investment in the solar panels.
Or he'll pump the surplus electricity into the grid, and get paid for it. That's ignoring the increasing cost of electricity.
Probably.
Anyway the broadcasting fee is insane, but i guess their target is Hulu, Apple store etc., not random Joe posting a movie on their blog.
Of course, this does no good to free video sharing websites, which are gonna have to decide what makes more sense: pay for extra-bandwidth, or pay broadcasting fees.
Could somebody please explain to me why the license matters? I mean, I understand that if a license limits mpeg-4 encoding to a single government computer running Windows ME that was lost 5 years ago, that the license is a HUGE barrier to entry to use the codec. However, in this case the license seems to be the only single category in which Theora wins. The compression is worse than mpeg-4. The compression takes more space. But look! The license is a little better! WINNER!
You understand quite wrong. After having paid (a small amount) for the encoder, if you decide to post your > 12 minutes clip on the web, you're likely gonna have to pay through your nose come 2011. And everybody that wants to watch it must have paid for the decoder (another small amount).
The current H.264/MPEG-4 AV licensing is rather palatable, as they're trying to gain market share; decoders and encoders sold before 2005 were even spared any licensing fee. But this license expires at the end of 2010. So you see, it's like the drug dealers' business model: first treat is cheap/free. Once you're addicted to it, we're in business.
TFA explains it, and even has a convenient clicky for you:
After 2010, Mpeg-4 fees are increasing to include "internet broadcast fees" which apply when distributing Mpeg-4 content on the internet. This means that if I host my own Mpeg-4 clip on my own site, I owe an additional fee depending on how many times the clip is downloaded (for clips over 12 minutes) -- see mpeg licensing press release.
Just WOW. Look at all the shenanigans they dug out in just one day: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/jun/18/mps-expenses-houseofcommons
Great idea and good job Guardian.
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation"
I'll leave you to guess who I'm quoting.
You're quoting Daniel Lapin. This is an excerpt from an essay of his which pretends to be a letter sent from the dead by Hitler to Julius Streicher.
It builds on Hitler's advocacy in Mein Kampf that the sick / handicapped should be deemed unfit for procreation:
[The state] must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so.
As such, the Hitler-attributable part of the quote is wildly out of context. But this fictional letter does a great job of pointing out where this "think of the children" is going.
They have this nifty little SoC called Tegra, announced about 1 year and a half ago, which still has to prove it's not vapourware.
Maybe I don't get it, but this looks like a concerted FUD campaign against Android. I don't know much about the Android internals, but isn't graphics hardware acceleration handled in the DRM part of the Linux kernel? What does this have to do with Android?
Presumably Android would have to implement the rest of DRI (if they don't use the existing Linux infrastructure / didn't do so already), and next their equivalent of a X.org video driver. But what's the big deal?
Also, all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code, a technique he says is too slow for HD video.
"There's no hardware acceleration. It's all software," Rayfield said.
So, huh? Because it's Java it can't use hardware acceleration?
Other major problems include the fact that the Android icons are too large, and apparently it's gonna take one year to make them small... Well, that makes a lotta sense.
It would make more sense if nVidia said "We're already having a hard time with binary blobs for those lousy x86 linux geeks. Now they want to do that for ARM too, and even worse, for something that doesn't use the X.org architecture. I say we better get together again next year."
If NVidia does not want a piece of Android business, it is NVidia's loss.
And AMD/ATI gain.
Modded interesting? Interestingly offtopic?
This is an ARM story. AMD doesn't do ARM, and while ATI does produce embedded graphics chips, I've never heard of them being paired with handheld devices.
For those projects that don't care about IE support, HTML5 canvas/video/audio is a fantastic leap forward for the web. For the rest, business as usual for some time to come I'm afraid.
No, it's not. You have the option to double your coding efforts, and implement your canvas features in VML as well (see for example OpenLayers for nicely abstracted code; it has 3 renderers: canvas, SVG and VML), or use ExCanvas, which does all that for you. It's slower compared to a native implementation, but it works.
Sounds like any type of stylesheet-based editing.
That means office suites, HTML editors, vector graphics editors are all "infringing".