With FOSS, whatever code the government produces could be vetted, improved, forked -- and/or reused on other projects.
It's a nice idea but the reality is governments are paranoid and it's naive to think that contributions wouldn't ultimately have to go through a lengthy and expensive oversight process.
We, the public paid for it, shouldn't it be publicly available?
Another nice idea but I think it's pretty obvious that "We, the public" pay for a lot of things that aren't publicly available.
I'm not opposed to your idea in principle, it's just pretty clear that in practice the government would need a significant shift in the way it does things for those arguments to be particularly compelling and valuable.
Yes because governments have proven themselves so capable of efficiently and cost-effectively completing IT projects in the past, why not give them even more responsibility in that area.
dude. your argument is basically this : "hEartbleed was a serious bug in FOSS. therefore FOSS is bad". So periodically FOSS has a serious bug. okay.
No I think his point is that if the government starts developing and using FOSS then we are going to end up with a horrible solution that costs a fortune and takes forever, have you seen the monumental fuckups and cost blow-outs of government IT projects? You really want to entrust them with the software development aspects as well?
It's one thing to say they should use a distro like Ubuntu in place of Windows or LibreOffice as opposed to MS Office but a sweeping move to the government adopting and contributing to FOSS across the board is an awful idea.
Yeah, so? AAC with Apple's DRM never became anything even close to a defacto standard, in fact it was abolished.
I never claimed that Apple copied MS's EEE exactly, but that they learned from it. They learned the value of locking customers into proprietary alternatives to open standards, and how it could protect revenue streams at the expense of consumer choice.
What does proprietary standards have to do with the EEE strategy? The latter is about taking an open standard and adding value with proprietary extensions so that the open standard by itself is of little value, that isn't something Apple has done and proprietary standards existed long before the "EEE" term was even coined.
The SDK is available but I haven't seen the source for TressFX.
Mantle is the interesting one, we don't actually know if NVIDIA can see the source code of the EA games which support it (and for AAA games source code access is a lot more common than NVIDIA pretends, the big games get onsite devrel which doesn't make a whole lot of sense without source code access). You would think NVIDIA would be using it as an argument if they couldn't...
They probably can see the source of the games that support it just not source for Mantle itself, which is the same as for GameWorks.
Why did you bother to respond to my post when I clearly wasn't talking about anything other than form factor then? Are you trying to rebut my point or discuss something else?
Of course, this also means that other vendor's drivers don't work too well.
Of course, AMD needs to do a GameWorks thing of their own, and to do so they need to know their drivers inside and out and cards inside and out to do it so the code flow through the driver are optimized.
They already do, it's called TressFX and is the reason the hair in Tomb Raider looked so realistic and ran so well on AMD cards but so poorly on nVidia ones.
The difference here is Mantle is shipping alongside other standard API's and AMD has publicly said they'll make it an open API when its ready.
It's already shipping in commercial games and drivers and available through their partner program so I'm not sure what you think their definition of "ready" is, seems pretty ready to me.
GameWorks on the other hand results in games being optimized or even dependent on nVidia specific libraries that will likely never be open.
How is that different from TressFX? If you find shipping a proprietary 3d graphics API alongside other standard APIs to be acceptable then I'm sure you can find shipping a say GameWorks HairWorks code path alongside a TressFX Hair code path to be acceptable.
Not even comparable, mantle is an alternative renderer.
No it isn't, Mantle is a graphics API and for the game developers who are writing for it how do you expect nVidia to support that code path without a spec or reference implementation?
Mantle might be closed but it doesn't keep nVidia from looking at the games source.
Neither does GameWorks, just because you call into GameWorks libraries doesn't mean you need to distribute the code for those libraries. For example they even have samples that you can download the source code for that makes use of the GameWorks libraries.
Apparently so (well the court case is ongoing) but why are you talking about design patents? What's that got to do with the fact that the form factor was obvious? I specifically said form factor, as did the GP to the post. Not design, not design patents but form factor. Is that unclear to you?
And don't pretend Samsung doesn't have thousands of them.
I'm not quite sure why you want to read things that aren't there to argue against a point nobody was making. In any case I was talking about the form factor and it has been proven that the form factor was obvious.
The people who matter (professional game devs) have everything and can give necessary feedback.
Yeah surely tool developers don't matter huh? And the only people who contribute anything to a 3D graphics API would be game developers because nobody else uses 3D graphics APIs right? Give it up, you have no idea about this subject, the more you say the stupider you look.
actually no. AMD will release mantle as a open standard by the end of the year, but currently it isn't finished yet.
Actually yes, they are already working with developers and shipping games so at this stage it is in commercial production but is very much is closed and proprietary not to mention your claim of "by the end of the year" doesn't appear to be substantiated, in fact AMD have been even more vague with: It could be as early as sometime next year or maybe the year after.
releasing standards before they are finished is obviously a bad idea.
What sort of idiocy is that? Publicly releasing the spec for feedback is a good idea, but instead it is being kept closed despite it being in shipping games and drivers.
Their focused on working with devs to get GameWorks shit integrated into the source code.
Just like AMD are doing with Mantle.
Yet nVidia expects us to believe that AMD is not disadvantaged by now being unable to see source code. It's your typical nVidia anti-competitive bullshit.
Obviously that's untrue but it's hard to have sympathy for AMD when they are doing exactly the same thing with their Mantle API.
If you want to talk about black box shit, look at mantle, AMD locked tech, amd claims its open yet you can't download the source any-fucking-where. They claim its closed cause its beta which is pure marketing bullshit. AMD is just as guilty even more so then nvidia for anything.
It's not just the source, you can't even get a binary or an API spec or API documentation anywhere.
So, Apple's DRM on AAC wasn't proprietary and didn't prevent other devices from playing purchased content?
It did but it isn't an example of EEE because it never became a defacto standard, in fact nobody else ever even used it and it was ultimately abolished anyway.
If iThing app distribution is open, where are the non-Apple stores?
It isn't open, why are you implying that anybody is suggesting this? Just a strawman, no "embrace, extend, extinguish" there.
AirPlay isn't a proprietary alternate to DLNA to ensure lock-in?
Again, a strawman, no "embrace, extend, extinguish" there. Creating a proprietary product is not EEE.
Or perhaps you simply don't understand EEE and are taking it too literally
No, it is clearly you who doesn't understand it: the idea is to embrace a technology, extend it in a proprietary way and then get people to use the proprietary version which ultimately becomes the defacto standard.
Obviously, and Android is similar to iOS, but not the same. The Galaxy S2 was similar to the iPhone when viewed from the front, but not the same (and not even really similar from any other angle).
Which would be significant if it was simply the form factor that Apple sued for.
Why? All you said was that designs for the iPhone existed before the LG device was announced and since the LG device was announced before the iPhone it shows that the current form factor for smartphones was not some innovative thing Apple invented but was obvious. I don't know what else you're arguing but I'm only talking about the form factor, just like the original post you replied to.
So if Apple is so committed to being open, why haven't they acquired the patents and opened them?
There is no such thing as "opening patents" unless of course you mean licensing them for free, but that isn't necessary to release the facetime protocol specification anyway.
Apple learned well from Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.
How so? While they have embraced those open technologies they haven't added proprietary extensions and they haven't extinguished them, they still exist and are still open.
Given their track record it's highly unlikely. Apple is open when they take existing open technologies and build on them: Webkit (KHTML), CUPS, BSD, Mach, etc...
But they don't like interoperability with non-Apple devices so they lock those elements down: AppleTalk, Airplay, Airdrop, Facetime, Lightning connector, etc...
Your powers of deduction are mindblowing!... your sarcasm detector is clearly overloaded though, perhaps for people like you he should include a sarcasm disclaimer at the bottom next time. I know the mac fanboys are a rabid bunch but come on, are you really suggesting that isn't sarcastic? Really?
Slashdot Mirror
With FOSS, whatever code the government produces could be vetted, improved, forked -- and/or reused on other projects.
It's a nice idea but the reality is governments are paranoid and it's naive to think that contributions wouldn't ultimately have to go through a lengthy and expensive oversight process.
We, the public paid for it, shouldn't it be publicly available?
Another nice idea but I think it's pretty obvious that "We, the public" pay for a lot of things that aren't publicly available.
I'm not opposed to your idea in principle, it's just pretty clear that in practice the government would need a significant shift in the way it does things for those arguments to be particularly compelling and valuable.
Yes because governments have proven themselves so capable of efficiently and cost-effectively completing IT projects in the past, why not give them even more responsibility in that area.
dude. your argument is basically this : "hEartbleed was a serious bug in FOSS. therefore FOSS is bad". So periodically FOSS has a serious bug. okay.
No I think his point is that if the government starts developing and using FOSS then we are going to end up with a horrible solution that costs a fortune and takes forever, have you seen the monumental fuckups and cost blow-outs of government IT projects? You really want to entrust them with the software development aspects as well?
It's one thing to say they should use a distro like Ubuntu in place of Windows or LibreOffice as opposed to MS Office but a sweeping move to the government adopting and contributing to FOSS across the board is an awful idea.
AAC certainly was/is standardized.
Yeah, so? AAC with Apple's DRM never became anything even close to a defacto standard, in fact it was abolished.
I never claimed that Apple copied MS's EEE exactly, but that they learned from it. They learned the value of locking customers into proprietary alternatives to open standards, and how it could protect revenue streams at the expense of consumer choice.
What does proprietary standards have to do with the EEE strategy? The latter is about taking an open standard and adding value with proprietary extensions so that the open standard by itself is of little value, that isn't something Apple has done and proprietary standards existed long before the "EEE" term was even coined.
TressFX actually is open source though.
The SDK is available but I haven't seen the source for TressFX.
Mantle is the interesting one, we don't actually know if NVIDIA can see the source code of the EA games which support it (and for AAA games source code access is a lot more common than NVIDIA pretends, the big games get onsite devrel which doesn't make a whole lot of sense without source code access). You would think NVIDIA would be using it as an argument if they couldn't ...
They probably can see the source of the games that support it just not source for Mantle itself, which is the same as for GameWorks.
Why did you bother to respond to my post when I clearly wasn't talking about anything other than form factor then? Are you trying to rebut my point or discuss something else?
Of course, this also means that other vendor's drivers don't work too well.
Of course, AMD needs to do a GameWorks thing of their own, and to do so they need to know their drivers inside and out and cards inside and out to do it so the code flow through the driver are optimized.
They already do, it's called TressFX and is the reason the hair in Tomb Raider looked so realistic and ran so well on AMD cards but so poorly on nVidia ones.
The difference here is Mantle is shipping alongside other standard API's and AMD has publicly said they'll make it an open API when its ready.
It's already shipping in commercial games and drivers and available through their partner program so I'm not sure what you think their definition of "ready" is, seems pretty ready to me.
GameWorks on the other hand results in games being optimized or even dependent on nVidia specific libraries that will likely never be open.
How is that different from TressFX? If you find shipping a proprietary 3d graphics API alongside other standard APIs to be acceptable then I'm sure you can find shipping a say GameWorks HairWorks code path alongside a TressFX Hair code path to be acceptable.
Not even comparable, mantle is an alternative renderer.
No it isn't, Mantle is a graphics API and for the game developers who are writing for it how do you expect nVidia to support that code path without a spec or reference implementation?
Mantle might be closed but it doesn't keep nVidia from looking at the games source.
Neither does GameWorks, just because you call into GameWorks libraries doesn't mean you need to distribute the code for those libraries. For example they even have samples that you can download the source code for that makes use of the GameWorks libraries.
Only similar enough to violate the design patent.
Apparently so (well the court case is ongoing) but why are you talking about design patents? What's that got to do with the fact that the form factor was obvious? I specifically said form factor, as did the GP to the post. Not design, not design patents but form factor. Is that unclear to you?
And don't pretend Samsung doesn't have thousands of them.
Why would I pretend that?
Yeah and it specifically called out form factor and nothing else. Why are you trying to make up stuff that isn't there?
I don't believe the post I replied to was talking about the form factor only.
No, you are wrong. They all copied the form-factor of the LG Prada, just like Apple did.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5199901&cid=47090883
I'm not quite sure why you want to read things that aren't there to argue against a point nobody was making. In any case I was talking about the form factor and it has been proven that the form factor was obvious.
The people who matter (professional game devs) have everything and can give necessary feedback.
Yeah surely tool developers don't matter huh? And the only people who contribute anything to a 3D graphics API would be game developers because nobody else uses 3D graphics APIs right? Give it up, you have no idea about this subject, the more you say the stupider you look.
Plebs (like you) don't matter.
Nice try, butthurt much?
actually no. AMD will release mantle as a open standard by the end of the year, but currently it isn't finished yet.
Actually yes, they are already working with developers and shipping games so at this stage it is in commercial production but is very much is closed and proprietary not to mention your claim of "by the end of the year" doesn't appear to be substantiated, in fact AMD have been even more vague with: It could be as early as sometime next year or maybe the year after.
releasing standards before they are finished is obviously a bad idea.
What sort of idiocy is that? Publicly releasing the spec for feedback is a good idea, but instead it is being kept closed despite it being in shipping games and drivers.
Their focused on working with devs to get GameWorks shit integrated into the source code.
Just like AMD are doing with Mantle.
Yet nVidia expects us to believe that AMD is not disadvantaged by now being unable to see source code. It's your typical nVidia anti-competitive bullshit.
Obviously that's untrue but it's hard to have sympathy for AMD when they are doing exactly the same thing with their Mantle API.
If you want to talk about black box shit, look at mantle, AMD locked tech, amd claims its open yet you can't download the source any-fucking-where. They claim its closed cause its beta which is pure marketing bullshit. AMD is just as guilty even more so then nvidia for anything.
It's not just the source, you can't even get a binary or an API spec or API documentation anywhere.
So, Apple's DRM on AAC wasn't proprietary and didn't prevent other devices from playing purchased content?
It did but it isn't an example of EEE because it never became a defacto standard, in fact nobody else ever even used it and it was ultimately abolished anyway.
If iThing app distribution is open, where are the non-Apple stores?
It isn't open, why are you implying that anybody is suggesting this? Just a strawman, no "embrace, extend, extinguish" there.
AirPlay isn't a proprietary alternate to DLNA to ensure lock-in?
Again, a strawman, no "embrace, extend, extinguish" there. Creating a proprietary product is not EEE.
Or perhaps you simply don't understand EEE and are taking it too literally
No, it is clearly you who doesn't understand it: the idea is to embrace a technology, extend it in a proprietary way and then get people to use the proprietary version which ultimately becomes the defacto standard.
Similar is not the same.
Obviously, and Android is similar to iOS, but not the same. The Galaxy S2 was similar to the iPhone when viewed from the front, but not the same (and not even really similar from any other angle).
Which would be significant if it was simply the form factor that Apple sued for.
Why? All you said was that designs for the iPhone existed before the LG device was announced and since the LG device was announced before the iPhone it shows that the current form factor for smartphones was not some innovative thing Apple invented but was obvious. I don't know what else you're arguing but I'm only talking about the form factor, just like the original post you replied to.
Patents last for 20 years. Hence, something patented by Microsoft in 1990 would have expired in 2010.
Yeah I think that's his point. It's been patented, that patent has expired. You think someone can then re-patent it?
So if Apple is so committed to being open, why haven't they acquired the patents and opened them?
There is no such thing as "opening patents" unless of course you mean licensing them for free, but that isn't necessary to release the facetime protocol specification anyway.
Apple learned well from Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.
How so? While they have embraced those open technologies they haven't added proprietary extensions and they haven't extinguished them, they still exist and are still open.
Who says this wont be built on an open standard?
Given their track record it's highly unlikely. Apple is open when they take existing open technologies and build on them:
Webkit (KHTML), CUPS, BSD, Mach, etc...
But they don't like interoperability with non-Apple devices so they lock those elements down:
AppleTalk, Airplay, Airdrop, Facetime, Lightning connector, etc...
What has this company got to do with Google? This smells like a fake set of blogs misusing Google's name, hoping to get this into the echo chamber.
From TFA:
Google acquired VirusTotal back in September 2012, promising VirusTotal will continue to operate independently.
http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/05/26/google-releases-virustotal-uploader-os-x-hopes-malware-submissions-will-beef-mac-security/
You're not even trolling
Your powers of deduction are mindblowing! ... your sarcasm detector is clearly overloaded though, perhaps for people like you he should include a sarcasm disclaimer at the bottom next time. I know the mac fanboys are a rabid bunch but come on, are you really suggesting that isn't sarcastic? Really?