First of all, you listed 2 mobile OSs, 1 chip designer and one desktop OS. A rather weird selection.
Second, we're talking about DX11. Other then ubuntu, none of the things you mention are capable of even remotely the same things. It's like saying that this time we can phase out delivery trucks because of mopeds.
Microsoft survived Vista and major DX9 > DX10 upgrade.
Compared to that mess, this is a storm in a teacup. Pretty much the only feature added is stereoscopy, and both nvidia and AMD already do it in their drivers.
They're DX9 because that's what XBOX360 essentially "sorta kinda" renders with. It makes no sense costs-wise to add PC-only DX11 features into ports beyond bare minimum, if even that.
Early on in DX10 times, it was the exact opposite. Switching to DX10 renderer cost around 10-30% performance over what you would get on DX9.
It wasn't until DX11 and win7 that we started to see games that would actually have proper support that didn't come with a massive performance hit when switching from DX9 to DX11. And even so, DX11 still generally is a net fps loss because of the extra features that put extra load on the hardware. Load that isn't there in DX9.
"I refuse to use my common sense to even the tiniest amounts and will instead engage in fox news-like rush to the lowest denominator while pretending to be upholding the discussion".
I apologize for my mistake in assuming that slashdot visitors were not in that particular group and holding the local readership to a somewhat higher intellectual standard. Your correction has been duly noted.
They go to court against one another. Corporation B has a team of layers who specialize in this very subject on payroll. To them, costs of litigation if victorious (i.e. when they are right or can blundgeon A to loss regardless of being in the right) is a fixed cost.
Garage builder A is forced to hire a layer that will sap a significant part if not more of his budget X to pursue his case. He may or may not run out of money in the middle of the case. Regardless, his RISK on pursuing such a case is EXISTENTIAL, because it represents such a huge chunk of his budget and because loss can be catastrophic.
Huge corporation B can operate the same suit at cost that is negligible in relation to its budget Y. Even a loss is often barely worth mentioning on the balance sheet outside normal "legal costs".
Please do tell us now, how these risks are somehow equivalent in your mind.
Darling, this is slashdot. Understanding of basic math, such as differences between relative costs and absolute costs is considered a norm here. Perhaps you got lost?
Sharp, the other major LCD panel manufacturer is in trouble as well. That leaves Samsung and Japan Display as two remaining major display manufacturers. LCD industry suffers from both lack of competition due to four huge companies owning most of the fabs and insane costs of entering into the business. It also suffers from deep specialization leves needed, with only some of the aforementioned companies having necessary tech to manufacture OLED displays. Some are overinvested in IPS or xVA technologies and these factories aren't easy to modify for another technology (which is one of the main with sharp's LCD business at the moment - their choice of technology was suboptimal from current market's view).
Size of business has absolutely nothing to do with how much resources they can devote to pursuing their conflicts with others?
Really?
So huge corporations can only allocate as much resources to pursuing such conflicts as garage builders, and those armies of lawyers are figments of our imagination?
"If you're a small garage inventor, you're not big enough to be paid for your inventions".
Nice ethics you have. No wonder there are so many "too big to fail" companies now and so many small ones are destroyed just to make sure these big failures stay up.
Because most inventors have other things to do with their time then comb through every new technological application, and because your suggestion would make big time manufacturers stop caring about patents of small guys and just obfuscate their technology to stop identification of patented features for long enough.
Let's not forget, patent laws aren't made to allow big incumbents to rape small inventors. They're made to allow small inventors to get money from their inventions. Just because laws have been perverted doesn't mean that it will help to demolish the original reason for existence of patents and essentially empower the party that is already the biggest abuser of the current legislation - the large incumbent tech companies.
Actually it's likely the exact opposite. Not only do people leave the game after being hacked (or come back from hiatus, see a hacked account and leave for good), but the support costs associated with stolen and hacked accounts constituted a huge amount of support calls and contacts before authenticators. Probably after as well, but as there is not a single account compromise for account with authenticator attached (according to blizzard) their costs must have come crashing down for accounts that have authenticator attached.
Full disclosure: I have two separate accounts on battle.net, one since early 2007 (former WoW currently battle.net account) and one since SC2 release. Neither has authenticator attached, neither has ever been hacked. I've had one guildie actually hacked in WoW during a black temple raid back in TBC for their own stupidity. Literally "sorry guys, I just got hacked right after talking to GM [provides details on being socially engineered in a really silly way]".
It's not very different here in EU either to be frank. While most of the software "patents" are irrelevant and invalid here, the amount of hardware patents that cover both the "phone" and the "smart" part are significant enough to prevent rise of the new garage smart phone builder.
In fact, that is one of the main reasons why nokia originally didn't worry about apple and google. They figured they'd be protected by patent portfolios. FRAND and big budgets behind these companies took care of that hurdle, but small companies lack funds even for FRAND-cost licensing.
I do not run aero at all. I always use the classic theme on both 7 and XP (one that looks like original win95/98 interface). Also, all drivers are up to date as I tend to play latest games, many of which have a tendency of having problems even with latest stable releases of drivers (such as GW2 essentially requiring beta drivers at release).
Sorry, no. On all counts. No "shitware", in fact both machines and both OSs generally have very similar software suites installed as I build them for my own needs from ground up, including software. That means OEM disk installation followed by manual install of all relevant software.
Of course, I don't spend days looking for drivers either. In general, when buying a new machine, I order parts to assemble the machine myself and before I order parts, I make sure that all of them have appropriate drivers. Manufacturers that do not provide drivers for OSs I will be using do not get the sale.
About the only piece of hardware I ever had problems with is my old audigy2 sound card that I still use in the gaming machine. That thing has seen about 3 different machines total, but it keeps on trucking because I have a pretty good 5.1 setup connected to my gaming machine and embedded audio chips that come with modern motherboards sound absolutely horrible on it.
So all that hypothetical stuff you list is nice. But it just doesn't match my experiences. I'm sorry if that bothers you.
No idea about hypotheticals and synthetic benchmarks, but in practice both this gaming machine I'm typing it on (2500k, 4 gigs of ram and 560ti) and my previous computer (core2duo, 4 gigs of ram and radeon 4870) run significantly faster when booted to XP then 7.
Unfortunately XP has no dx11 support, so 7 is the main OS on this one. It runs noticeably slower under 7 then when I boot XP on it and it even runs slower under 7 then my old machine running XP.
Anectodal, but real comparison across two different computers. I'll trust my own senses over hypothethicals and benchmarks.
No we do not, because it doesn't. US is a major exception to the rule that business email is not property of the employer and when it is, his rights are severely limited by privacy legislation.
US is a major exception because it has a very different concept of privacy from most of the Western world.
Finland: Nokia pushed a law to allow them to read emails. After massive public backlash, the law did come in place, with with a fairly nice provision: any company doing this MUST report to the relevant authority that it is engaging in such actions. This report would be public.
Result: not a single report filed. Companies got scared by the massive negative backlash.
The issue isn't about how "clean" architecture is, but how hard it will be to rewrite and/or recompile all your software for ARM. That is, assuming there are actual advantages to ARM.
So far, no one seems to have bothered in spite of a lot of noise about the issue. This strongly suggests that this is in fact just noise, and ARM is either not yet ready, or is generally unsuitable for server applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Err.
First of all, you listed 2 mobile OSs, 1 chip designer and one desktop OS. A rather weird selection.
Second, we're talking about DX11. Other then ubuntu, none of the things you mention are capable of even remotely the same things. It's like saying that this time we can phase out delivery trucks because of mopeds.
Microsoft survived Vista and major DX9 > DX10 upgrade.
Compared to that mess, this is a storm in a teacup. Pretty much the only feature added is stereoscopy, and both nvidia and AMD already do it in their drivers.
With the power of modern machines, they could probably skip most of the "fine tuning" if there was any will to do this.
Rather obvious that there isn't any, and even more obvious as to why. Microsoft needs win8 to succeed badly.
They're DX9 because that's what XBOX360 essentially "sorta kinda" renders with. It makes no sense costs-wise to add PC-only DX11 features into ports beyond bare minimum, if even that.
Early on in DX10 times, it was the exact opposite. Switching to DX10 renderer cost around 10-30% performance over what you would get on DX9.
It wasn't until DX11 and win7 that we started to see games that would actually have proper support that didn't come with a massive performance hit when switching from DX9 to DX11. And even so, DX11 still generally is a net fps loss because of the extra features that put extra load on the hardware. Load that isn't there in DX9.
Vista couldn't do it with major overhaul and upgrade to DX9 in form of DX10 which was Vista exclusive.
DX11.1 improvements are miniscule in terms of actual upgrades to DX11. Win8 is almost as bad in comparison to 7 as Vista was to XP.
I don't really see this working as a reasonable reason for the switch. If it was, we'd have seen the jump back in Vista times.
"I refuse to use my common sense to even the tiniest amounts and will instead engage in fox news-like rush to the lowest denominator while pretending to be upholding the discussion".
I apologize for my mistake in assuming that slashdot visitors were not in that particular group and holding the local readership to a somewhat higher intellectual standard. Your correction has been duly noted.
Math:
Garage builder A. Works on budget X.
Huge corporation B. Works on budget Y.
Y>>X
They go to court against one another. Corporation B has a team of layers who specialize in this very subject on payroll. To them, costs of litigation if victorious (i.e. when they are right or can blundgeon A to loss regardless of being in the right) is a fixed cost.
Garage builder A is forced to hire a layer that will sap a significant part if not more of his budget X to pursue his case. He may or may not run out of money in the middle of the case. Regardless, his RISK on pursuing such a case is EXISTENTIAL, because it represents such a huge chunk of his budget and because loss can be catastrophic.
Huge corporation B can operate the same suit at cost that is negligible in relation to its budget Y. Even a loss is often barely worth mentioning on the balance sheet outside normal "legal costs".
Please do tell us now, how these risks are somehow equivalent in your mind.
What the hell?
Darling, this is slashdot. Understanding of basic math, such as differences between relative costs and absolute costs is considered a norm here. Perhaps you got lost?
Let me correct myself to satisfy this particular pedantry :D.
"Weren't originally made".
Sharp, the other major LCD panel manufacturer is in trouble as well. That leaves Samsung and Japan Display as two remaining major display manufacturers. LCD industry suffers from both lack of competition due to four huge companies owning most of the fabs and insane costs of entering into the business. It also suffers from deep specialization leves needed, with only some of the aforementioned companies having necessary tech to manufacture OLED displays. Some are overinvested in IPS or xVA technologies and these factories aren't easy to modify for another technology (which is one of the main with sharp's LCD business at the moment - their choice of technology was suboptimal from current market's view).
Size of business has absolutely nothing to do with how much resources they can devote to pursuing their conflicts with others?
Really?
So huge corporations can only allocate as much resources to pursuing such conflicts as garage builders, and those armies of lawyers are figments of our imagination?
"If you're a small garage inventor, you're not big enough to be paid for your inventions".
Nice ethics you have. No wonder there are so many "too big to fail" companies now and so many small ones are destroyed just to make sure these big failures stay up.
Because most inventors have other things to do with their time then comb through every new technological application, and because your suggestion would make big time manufacturers stop caring about patents of small guys and just obfuscate their technology to stop identification of patented features for long enough.
Let's not forget, patent laws aren't made to allow big incumbents to rape small inventors. They're made to allow small inventors to get money from their inventions. Just because laws have been perverted doesn't mean that it will help to demolish the original reason for existence of patents and essentially empower the party that is already the biggest abuser of the current legislation - the large incumbent tech companies.
Actually it's likely the exact opposite. Not only do people leave the game after being hacked (or come back from hiatus, see a hacked account and leave for good), but the support costs associated with stolen and hacked accounts constituted a huge amount of support calls and contacts before authenticators. Probably after as well, but as there is not a single account compromise for account with authenticator attached (according to blizzard) their costs must have come crashing down for accounts that have authenticator attached.
Full disclosure: I have two separate accounts on battle.net, one since early 2007 (former WoW currently battle.net account) and one since SC2 release. Neither has authenticator attached, neither has ever been hacked. I've had one guildie actually hacked in WoW during a black temple raid back in TBC for their own stupidity. Literally "sorry guys, I just got hacked right after talking to GM [provides details on being socially engineered in a really silly way]".
No offense, but that doesn't say much about politicians.
It does say a LOT about the people of the nation in question however.
Worst part about coffee? If you stop drinking it after the first 10 or so, your mornings are sleepy hell before you get your dose.
It's not very different here in EU either to be frank. While most of the software "patents" are irrelevant and invalid here, the amount of hardware patents that cover both the "phone" and the "smart" part are significant enough to prevent rise of the new garage smart phone builder.
In fact, that is one of the main reasons why nokia originally didn't worry about apple and google. They figured they'd be protected by patent portfolios. FRAND and big budgets behind these companies took care of that hurdle, but small companies lack funds even for FRAND-cost licensing.
So this is a real problem.
I do not run aero at all. I always use the classic theme on both 7 and XP (one that looks like original win95/98 interface). Also, all drivers are up to date as I tend to play latest games, many of which have a tendency of having problems even with latest stable releases of drivers (such as GW2 essentially requiring beta drivers at release).
Sorry, no. On all counts. No "shitware", in fact both machines and both OSs generally have very similar software suites installed as I build them for my own needs from ground up, including software. That means OEM disk installation followed by manual install of all relevant software.
Of course, I don't spend days looking for drivers either. In general, when buying a new machine, I order parts to assemble the machine myself and before I order parts, I make sure that all of them have appropriate drivers. Manufacturers that do not provide drivers for OSs I will be using do not get the sale.
About the only piece of hardware I ever had problems with is my old audigy2 sound card that I still use in the gaming machine. That thing has seen about 3 different machines total, but it keeps on trucking because I have a pretty good 5.1 setup connected to my gaming machine and embedded audio chips that come with modern motherboards sound absolutely horrible on it.
So all that hypothetical stuff you list is nice. But it just doesn't match my experiences. I'm sorry if that bothers you.
No idea about hypotheticals and synthetic benchmarks, but in practice both this gaming machine I'm typing it on (2500k, 4 gigs of ram and 560ti) and my previous computer (core2duo, 4 gigs of ram and radeon 4870) run significantly faster when booted to XP then 7.
Unfortunately XP has no dx11 support, so 7 is the main OS on this one. It runs noticeably slower under 7 then when I boot XP on it and it even runs slower under 7 then my old machine running XP.
Anectodal, but real comparison across two different computers. I'll trust my own senses over hypothethicals and benchmarks.
"That design..."
I think we both understood the actual meaning of GP.
No we do not, because it doesn't. US is a major exception to the rule that business email is not property of the employer and when it is, his rights are severely limited by privacy legislation.
US is a major exception because it has a very different concept of privacy from most of the Western world.
Finland: Nokia pushed a law to allow them to read emails. After massive public backlash, the law did come in place, with with a fairly nice provision: any company doing this MUST report to the relevant authority that it is engaging in such actions. This report would be public.
Result: not a single report filed. Companies got scared by the massive negative backlash.
The issue isn't about how "clean" architecture is, but how hard it will be to rewrite and/or recompile all your software for ARM. That is, assuming there are actual advantages to ARM.
So far, no one seems to have bothered in spite of a lot of noise about the issue. This strongly suggests that this is in fact just noise, and ARM is either not yet ready, or is generally unsuitable for server applications.