No, but "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a Marx quote which ignores the basic human desire to get as much as possible for as little as possible. Any surplus can be bartered on the black market, so you will want more of everything. This means that somebody is going to be the arbitrator of that and say that no, you don't need more gasoline and that yes, you can deliver more wheat from your farm. And those arbitrators will very quickly become their own class that decide what everyone else needs and shall provide while they scratch each other's back in an orgy of corruption.
Communism isn't just somebody who took Marx' ideas and used them as an ideological cover to take over the government, it is the practical result of trying to implement marxism with real people. Which of course brings out all the idealists that claim it's not the ideology there's something wrong with, it's the people. But I'll take a system that - at least more or less - works in the real world with real people over an idealized system that only works with ideal people. And no, no matter what China calls themselves they're absolutely not marxist or communist today.
Lets see how much documentation Intel releases for the Atom smartphone chips with PowerVR GPUs.
I think we already know the answer to this through Poulsbo. Though in 2013 they're releasing Atom SoCs with Ivy Bridge graphics called Valley View, so hopefully PowerVR are on their way out.
we would all be better off if AMD (not to mention Nvidia) adopted Intel's approach to paying people for open-source work.
They do pay people, but they're not a large part of their total driver team. To put it a bit cruelly Intel doesn't have much to lose by being open source as AMD (through ATI) and nVidia probably know way more about high performance graphics than Intel does. AMD does open source, but they like nVidia both consider their proprietary highly optimized 3D engine their crown jewels. Intel would love a fully optimized OpenGL 4.2 engine when they're working on Mesa that's still on OpenGL 3.0 as far as I know. AMD has one, nVidia has one, Intel doesn't. Gee, I wonder why Intel is the one busy writing one...
As I've understood it the problem in the US is that many companies won't do anything other than confirm title and dates of employment in fear of getting sued over something. The people that have permission to answer are just those buddies who don't represent anybody but themselves, which as you say lead to cherry-picking. Ever job I've ever applied for here in Norway want references because you actually get answers from supervisors, team leaders and other people with titles and responsibilities.
talk to Joe Plumber or Nacho Roofer about DRM and they'll think you're talking about some sort of VD.. nevermind the teenagers (RIAA's ever-so-loyal fanbase) who would look at you like you're stupid and continue to buy anyways.
Well the RIAA have pretty muched dropped all DRM except for streaming services, so why exactly should their fans care. As for loyal fanbase, the group 16-25 is consistently the group that:
1) Listens to most music 2) Buys the most music 3) Pirates the most music
At least the latest statistics I found from Sweden, 91% stream/download music, 86%(!) are on Spotify and 55% do file sharing. And those who do file share are more likely to both be Spotify subscribers and to pay on iTunes or other music stores. I think the short summary is that these people will get their media one way or the other regardless of the law, if the industry delivers a good service they'll use that but if not well there's always P2P. Fact is, except here on slashdot where SOPA and PIPA and ACTA and HADOPI and mass lawsuits is a daily topic, most people don't feel it. Most file sharers have never been sued, never had their connection cut, most never even got a nastygram telling them to stop doing it.
The pirate bay is still running and even if it's down searching for "$foo torrent" will probably get you what you want. Despite the news of a few sites closing here and there millions of people still managed to pirate Game of Thrones - and those figures don't count private trackers, file hosts, private servers or sneakernets. In short, the industry might be all up in arms and say "something must be done", but the opposite is not true. Most people don't feel the industry is managing to get in their way and a boycott would only lead to the death of the industry that so many have predicted. Better to actually reward them for making good content and just turn a deaf ear to their complaining.
They still haven't hit the sweet spot, simply because the ones they are discounting are the smaller drives which most of my customer's OS drives simply wouldn't fit,and neither will mine.
Needs are very different, I know many people at work that'd never need more than Windows + Office + 5GB. Word, Excel, Powerpoint and a few little odds and ends don't add up to much without big media files or VMs. Personally I have SSD+HDD on my desktop and would prefer that on my laptop too, but my biggest problem is 10-20GB games that either have to go on the slow disk or suck up that much space despite less than 1 GB being performance critical. But since nobody seems inclined to offer installer options and I don't want to spend my time micromanaging I'm guessing it'll be solved the brute force way - eventually enough SSD space will be available cheaply enough.
Not just a licensing issue, enabling PAE could cause crashes with poor drivers and they didn't want the poor PR from bluescreens on an edge case for consumers. For servers it was a much more important feature and one that got attention. That said, there are still restrictions on memory. For Home Premium it's 16GB, if you want 4x8 GB or using a LGA2011 board 8x4 or 8x8 GB you need Pro/Ultimate. And that one is really arbitrary. That said a Pro license is not that much more expensive and is good for up to 192 GB. If you can afford the RAM, you can afford that too.
Well that, but apart from that the problem is also that the people you've trained will very often leave for a better job just as they're starting to get educated and experienced because another company is operating with no training budget and hire only people that can contribute to the bottom line straight away, thus leading to higher margins and the ability to pay more. There's many companies that are in fact willing to take that financial hit, but not without any return on investment as the bean counters would say it. Even when there's a shortage the result is often poaching instead of training more - who'd also get poached, it's a little bit a tragedy of the commons, each company do it in their own interest even though the shortage hurts all of them as a whole.
So, they do advocate censorship then. But only for "bad things" and presumably they think that copying movies isn't bad enough. But something else might be. Censorship is binary: you are in favour of it or you are not. You can't have "partial censorship".
And we can have either totalitarianism or anarchy, there's no partial system of government right? I know what you're saying, either the government has to stop flows of 0s and 1s or they don't. But it's a bit like saying either we give the police guns and the right to shoot people or we don't. And we do, just not any random people whenever a police officer likes it - it's a partial "license to kill". At least here in Norway there's an Internet filter and it's for one thing only - kiddie porn. Going out with a policy that says you don't allow any for of censorship whatsoever and that it should be removed is nothing short of political suicide. I'm sure you've got good arguments for why not, you can give them to the lynch mob as they hang you from the nearest tree.
Well not quite, sometimes you have to cheat a little because a simple scale blur things so you want to tweak it a little even if it's a little bit distorted compared to the full size image. I haven't tried it on a 4K screen but at least on a FullHD screen that was still true, the original "icon" was huge like 400x400 or whatever but it still took some pixel tweaking to make it look decent at 16x16, 22x22, 32x32 which I think was the sizes in use at the time. That's why most icon formats allow you to specify a bunch of resolution specific pixmaps and only scale it for other sizes.
Intel is trying to work their way in as a 3rd. player with accelerated, yet integrated, graphics chipsets -- but truthfully? I doubt they'll seriously chase after the high-performance graphics market in any serious way. For them, it's more lucrative to offer decent/usable levels of performance for the typical user and compete on having a lower price.
I think Intel would like to jump as high up that tree as possible, but it's not as easy as just saying it. You can bet they had bigger plans for Larrabee and whatnot than what became reality. Anyway, for at least another 1.5-2.5 years all games will continue to be designed to run well on 2005-2006 era hardware in the Xbox360/PS3 - the number of PC exclusives is getting slimmer and slimmer. The big question is when the 720/PS4 rolls around, if they set a new "low bar" for gaming performance but until then the more Intel can shrink the discrete graphics market the better for Intel.
If a smartphone or a tablet is an appliance, then so is most business PCs where you don't have administrative privileges. A traditional gaming console you could probably say is an appliance, it mainly does one thing but the current multi-devices? Is a rooted Android phone a general purpose computer and an unrooted phone an appliance? To me it sounds ridiculous to say that something that runs thousands of apps for all sorts of different things is anything but a general purpose computer, though possibly in chains.
People have simply outsourced the whole technical side, like running under a regular user account with a limited sudo to install apps from a predefined repository. And the indications are not that the desktop is going away, but rather it's going the same way. It's the death of being the real administrator, there's a "superlevel" above you so you're no longer root. OS X Lion was a start, Mountain Lion is a continuation and I suspect in not so long the iOS Desktop will be the norm and Microsoft will probably follow. The desktop is dead, long live the "desktop"?
I think the short answer is that women are more social than us, and I think it's more nature than nurture. Even at a very young age girls will play more social games with dolls, boys are more interested in action. Fast forward 20 years and you have women that want to work with children and in health care while men want to be engineers and software developers because one is about people and the other about things. Of course that's a gross over-generalization, but you see the same split here in Norway which has a very high degree of equality. I think at some point women wanted to show that they could be just as good engineers and software developers as us and point proven, went back to doing the work they actually prefer. Which is fine by me, I'm sure I could do a fine job as a nurse but I by far prefer working with computers.
A good indication is the jobs that actually have seen a heavy increase in women, like for example doctors. It requires long education and is a very complex field, has fairly high pay and is in general a high status job. It's definitively at least as hard as being an engineer, so it's not that. But being a doctor is a very social job, you deal with people all the time so women choose that. Take whatever job you want, evaluate how important "soft skills" is relative to "hard skills" and you can make a pretty good prediction on the sex distribution. And I'm not so sure we're on the winning end of that, people management and networking is becoming more important not less.
This will be a typical Microsoft hardware device, fails in 1 to 3 months of use, like their mice.
*looks down at mouse he's been using for years now*
Yep, a Microsoft logo. And I think the one before too, also lasted forever. Maybe I'm just exceptionally lucky or you're using them far rougher than me but I've no idea what you're talking about. Of course Microsoft's hardware got nothing to do with their software division, I don't even know if they're genuine Microsoft or just something they slap their logo on for branding.
If you make something, it's up to you to decide how you want to distribute it. If I write a song, it could be the best song ever written, but if I never record it then good luck trying to find it on The Pirate Bay. I have a reasonable expectation that people should respect my wishes when it comes to how the song should be copied, played, or otherwise consumed. Your right to listen to my song ends where my right to protect my work begins.
Your problem is that your demands aren't reasonable or indeed supported by copyright. In general, how it's copied has been your right and how it's played or otherwise consumed is my right, my copy is mine and where/when/how/why I choose to do that is my business. The book model is fine, I buy it at the bookstore and there your interests in it practically cease except making copies and public performance. One of the biggest annoyances with modern media are people like you who insist that despite me handing over money for it, you should still have the right to dictate what happens in my living room. I wouldn't want to accept a business model where Ford sold me a car, but they still controlled where, when and how fast I could drive, how I could get service and where I could fill gas and so I won't support your idea of "artist's rights" either.
Every law is a combination of pros and cons, obviously giving creators incentive to create is a pro. But when you say that to protect that right in the modern society we need mass surveillance laws, three strikes laws, million dolllar fines for sharing two dozen songs, DRM laws restricting the whole playback stack to a closed source blob and all computers with it then the cons start outweighing the pros. Particularly since I'd say practically people already have and make that choice today, I don't know anyone who considers the complexity or risk of getting caught a barrier to using P2P. Those that buy choose to do it to support those who made it and that can continue to be harnessed without copyright. If the foreshadowed doom of the creative industry was real and everyone who could avoid paying would, it'd already have happened.
I think you're missing the point a bit. I do have an iPad and I do have a cover for it. Typing on it is obviously very annoying, it's a completely flat glass surface after all and the keyboard obviously takes up quite a bit of screen real estate. This looks considerably less annoying and comes "free", but you're still not going to type a novel on it unless you're a masochist. Because of course it's still a tablet, you should use it for what it's good for. This just makes it more flexible to serve more like a laptop in a pinch, just like my phone camera isn't a replacement for a real camera - but very handy all the same.
More like you can always make it run faster by running hotter, I'd say all processors are somewhere between ridiculous and ludicrous speed these days. Even my 100 gram phone running off a battery isn't what I'd call slow, of course YMMV. And what I get on a laptop/desktop is staggering compared to how much energy I use doing trivial things like lighting, cooking, dishwasher, washing machine and so on and I don't even generally use electric for heating/cooling. And if you count just the actual computing on the CPU/GPU and ignore the display etc. it's even more extreme.
This is the advantage that RISC has always had over architecture, and why every supercomputer up to date worth speaking of has used RISC over Intel X86.
Well, if you don't feel 87% of the current top500 or half the top 10 aren't worth speaking of then I guess you only see what you want to see. True, the top three are not x86 but they're the bulk of the world's supercomputers.
With all due respect, this seems more similar to barebones shader programming than to the usual issues running OpenGL which is why it's "about a trillion times simpler".
Assembler ~= shader programming ~= Xeon Phi programming OpenGL ~= Java, C#, C++/Qt, C++/Gtk ~= nothing the stack you talk about does
From what I gather this chip essentially gives you SSE on steroids, it's an alternative to CUDA and OpenCL but nothing else a graphics card does. And while currently the Linux capability is just to get the chip up and running, it doesn't actually use the new instructions unless you write it in assembler:
The changes do not include support for Knights Corner vector instructions and related optimization improvements. GCC for Knights Corner is really only for building the kernel and related tools; it is not for building applications. Using GCC to build an application for Knights Corner will most often result in low performance code due its current inability to vectorize for the new Knights Corner vector instructions. Future changes to give full usage of Knights Corner vector instructions would require work on the GCC vectorizer to utilize those instructionsâ(TM) masking capabilities. This is something that requires a broader discussion in the GCC community than simply changing the code generator.
About the only advantage I can see with 48fps is that they can just merge pairs of frames for printing to normal 35mm and for the 1080p@24 BluRay release.
And that's a huge thing, people would hate the 60->24 conversion. Which means you'd probably have to shoot it at 120 FPS to get both a clean 60 and 24 FPS output. Of course 48 doesn't divide into 120 so if this becomes the new cinema standard you'd probably need 240 FPS or make that 1200 FPS if you want all the PAL framerates as well. Personally I wish we'd all go to 60 FPS since we've already got a ton of 60Hz LCDs out there but getting everyone to jump at once is hard...
Actually it costs them more to develop their own binary drivers in house, than it would to open source them and allow third parties (including the kernel devs) to take up some of the slack...
No, it wouldn't and even AMD agrees on this. Between licensed code, patents, DRM and a host of other reasons an OSS driver could not fulfill their customers' requirements on Windows. That is to say OEMs who have obligations to Microsoft who have obligations to the MAFIAA, not you. Not to mention the FPS junkies would probably not enjoy the performance hit because the third party IP would have to be ripped out.
Effectively you can either share closed cross-OS code like the Catalyst/nVidia driver does, or you can share open source code with the rest of the Linux community. Those two options are mutually exclusive, and no the those few bits you get from the community are no replacement for the 90-95% "free" cross-OS work the closed driver gives them. What you say is only true if you could flip the switch from "closed" to "open" and have everything you had before plus some more free work.
In a technical, nerdy sense you of course could do that since code doesn't magically break or become useless by publishing it. But legally that is impossible, they'd get sued to hell and their permissions to play any kind of DRM'd media would go away and with it any rights to be in a "designed for Windows $foo" sticker machine. How bad is that? Well, I'll let Bridgman that handles the open source OSS driver answer that, this isn't an official statement or anything just a forum post but:
If the worst case was as minor as not being able to release any more specs we wouldn't be worrying so much. The kind of risks we are worrying about are much larger, ie things which would either kill or cripple our graphics business.
Worst case is that we lose the ability to sell our products into the Windows market as a result of releasing info which results in our DRM implementation no longer being considered sufficiently robust. Without the Windows market (which is >90 % of our revenues) we would, for all practical purposes, cease to exist as a GPU manufacturer, especially since we would probably lose the Mac market at the same time.
Next worst case is that we find a way to continue shipping into the Windows market but get sued under one or more of the DRM-related agreements we have signed. These all have high dollar-value penalties, again enough to significantly impact our ability to continue operating.
There are a bunch of smaller risks but we spend proportionally less time worrying about them. What makes all this complicated is that we have to consider not just the information we release but the information which is likely to be reverse-engineered and published. Each time we release information we simply raise the bar for where reverse engineering starts, and it's the combination of released plus "likely to be reverse-engineered" info that we need to consider.
If we tripped any of these risks then the impact would not only affect the GPUs we are shipping today but anything we have in the pipe. Best guess is that we would lose the next generation (ie the one after 7xx) and see significant delays in the one after that.
Since we don't want that to happen (right ?) the alternative is to trim back the information we release until it appears safe, going through the review process each time until we find an appropriate level.
That's the consequences of open sourcing the binary driver, could it get much clearer?
"Stable" and "Set in stone" are not synonyms. Stable enough to ship a binary blob on a CD and say "this is our Windows 7 driver" which will work for years after release through 3-4 service packs is fairly stable. Of course it sucks it's not supported for Windows 8, but you know where the breaks are and unlike Linux where you for the most part must upgrade for new software you don't have to upgrade Windows to install most apps. Yes I know there are a few backports but for the most part you get dragged into upgrading.
Basically it is a really complex problem, and of course each new version of the graphics hardware brings in a new setup to deal with.
I think particularly the last part. Unlike CPUs that have to be 99.9% the same to support already compiled binary code, graphics drivers only care about the DirectX/OpenGL layer. Everything about how you accelerate those commands is being rewritten constantly. For example the AMD OSS drivers cover three very different architectures, VLIW5, VLIW4 and GCN. And within each architecture you have different generations with different ways of doing things and instruction sets. The hardware API is changing because they're working closely with the driver team, who are the only ones talking to the hardware - until you try writing an OSS driver. Third party chips like HDMI change both suppliers and versions so the hardware API changes, without code changes practically nothing works on a new card. There's a lot of upkeep.
The other part is that the generic code is woefully behind the times, regardless of the driver code. Mesa still only supports OpenGL 3.0, which was released in July 2008 and that support only came first this year - at that point 5.5 years behind the specification. So if you want to run recent OpenGL code you need closed source drivers because the whole stack is missing, not just the driver code. Basically even if AMD is doing the same bits as AMD does for Windows, nobody's doing the OpenGL equivalent of Microsoft's work on DirectX. Or well obviously some are working on it, but not enough to keep up.
The last part which makes sharing code between the open and closed source driver hard is DRM. AMD simply can't let the open source driver have any code that would make it easy to poke at what the closed source driver is doing like for example patch it to dump a BluRay to disk (despite AACS, BD+ and HDMI all being broken). Same goes for audio and PAP. Even just keeping the DRM bits in a little blob by itself would be painting a big sign saying "reverse engineer this". This means things have to go back and forth with the lawyers all the time, and you need this information because of what I wrote in the beginning.
On the bright side Intel seems to want to use more of their own graphics in coming Atoms - google "Intel Valley View" for more - because PowerVR has been the absolutely worst of the bunch when it comes to Linux support - and pretty terrible at Windows support too from what I gather. And at least according to AMD their OSS support is getting better with each generation, even though it has a long way to go...
There's no idea so good it can't be torpedoed by incompetent management. Facebook could have died a million ways from expanding the wrong way, spamming their customers, monetizing their customers, intrusive ads, turning their interface into something ugly or annoying or buggy, high downtime, simply being too slow to expand and getting leapfrogged or whatever. One bad apple is always replaceable but if you feel the team they've put together isn't up to the task, if you don't have confidence in the decisions they've taken so far how are you going to have confidence in them going forwards? How can you know that they haven't already hired a bunch of people that are going to be sand in the machinery? It's foolish to think you can pop in a new CEO or even CxOs and fix everything.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a Marx quote which ignores the basic human desire to get as much as possible for as little as possible. Any surplus can be bartered on the black market, so you will want more of everything. This means that somebody is going to be the arbitrator of that and say that no, you don't need more gasoline and that yes, you can deliver more wheat from your farm. And those arbitrators will very quickly become their own class that decide what everyone else needs and shall provide while they scratch each other's back in an orgy of corruption.
Communism isn't just somebody who took Marx' ideas and used them as an ideological cover to take over the government, it is the practical result of trying to implement marxism with real people. Which of course brings out all the idealists that claim it's not the ideology there's something wrong with, it's the people. But I'll take a system that - at least more or less - works in the real world with real people over an idealized system that only works with ideal people. And no, no matter what China calls themselves they're absolutely not marxist or communist today.
Lets see how much documentation Intel releases for the Atom smartphone chips with PowerVR GPUs.
I think we already know the answer to this through Poulsbo. Though in 2013 they're releasing Atom SoCs with Ivy Bridge graphics called Valley View, so hopefully PowerVR are on their way out.
we would all be better off if AMD (not to mention Nvidia) adopted Intel's approach to paying people for open-source work.
They do pay people, but they're not a large part of their total driver team. To put it a bit cruelly Intel doesn't have much to lose by being open source as AMD (through ATI) and nVidia probably know way more about high performance graphics than Intel does. AMD does open source, but they like nVidia both consider their proprietary highly optimized 3D engine their crown jewels. Intel would love a fully optimized OpenGL 4.2 engine when they're working on Mesa that's still on OpenGL 3.0 as far as I know. AMD has one, nVidia has one, Intel doesn't. Gee, I wonder why Intel is the one busy writing one...
As I've understood it the problem in the US is that many companies won't do anything other than confirm title and dates of employment in fear of getting sued over something. The people that have permission to answer are just those buddies who don't represent anybody but themselves, which as you say lead to cherry-picking. Ever job I've ever applied for here in Norway want references because you actually get answers from supervisors, team leaders and other people with titles and responsibilities.
talk to Joe Plumber or Nacho Roofer about DRM and they'll think you're talking about some sort of VD.. nevermind the teenagers (RIAA's ever-so-loyal fanbase) who would look at you like you're stupid and continue to buy anyways.
Well the RIAA have pretty muched dropped all DRM except for streaming services, so why exactly should their fans care. As for loyal fanbase, the group 16-25 is consistently the group that:
1) Listens to most music
2) Buys the most music
3) Pirates the most music
At least the latest statistics I found from Sweden, 91% stream/download music, 86%(!) are on Spotify and 55% do file sharing. And those who do file share are more likely to both be Spotify subscribers and to pay on iTunes or other music stores. I think the short summary is that these people will get their media one way or the other regardless of the law, if the industry delivers a good service they'll use that but if not well there's always P2P. Fact is, except here on slashdot where SOPA and PIPA and ACTA and HADOPI and mass lawsuits is a daily topic, most people don't feel it. Most file sharers have never been sued, never had their connection cut, most never even got a nastygram telling them to stop doing it.
The pirate bay is still running and even if it's down searching for "$foo torrent" will probably get you what you want. Despite the news of a few sites closing here and there millions of people still managed to pirate Game of Thrones - and those figures don't count private trackers, file hosts, private servers or sneakernets. In short, the industry might be all up in arms and say "something must be done", but the opposite is not true. Most people don't feel the industry is managing to get in their way and a boycott would only lead to the death of the industry that so many have predicted. Better to actually reward them for making good content and just turn a deaf ear to their complaining.
They still haven't hit the sweet spot, simply because the ones they are discounting are the smaller drives which most of my customer's OS drives simply wouldn't fit,and neither will mine.
Needs are very different, I know many people at work that'd never need more than Windows + Office + 5GB. Word, Excel, Powerpoint and a few little odds and ends don't add up to much without big media files or VMs. Personally I have SSD+HDD on my desktop and would prefer that on my laptop too, but my biggest problem is 10-20GB games that either have to go on the slow disk or suck up that much space despite less than 1 GB being performance critical. But since nobody seems inclined to offer installer options and I don't want to spend my time micromanaging I'm guessing it'll be solved the brute force way - eventually enough SSD space will be available cheaply enough.
Not just a licensing issue, enabling PAE could cause crashes with poor drivers and they didn't want the poor PR from bluescreens on an edge case for consumers. For servers it was a much more important feature and one that got attention. That said, there are still restrictions on memory. For Home Premium it's 16GB, if you want 4x8 GB or using a LGA2011 board 8x4 or 8x8 GB you need Pro/Ultimate. And that one is really arbitrary. That said a Pro license is not that much more expensive and is good for up to 192 GB. If you can afford the RAM, you can afford that too.
Well that, but apart from that the problem is also that the people you've trained will very often leave for a better job just as they're starting to get educated and experienced because another company is operating with no training budget and hire only people that can contribute to the bottom line straight away, thus leading to higher margins and the ability to pay more. There's many companies that are in fact willing to take that financial hit, but not without any return on investment as the bean counters would say it. Even when there's a shortage the result is often poaching instead of training more - who'd also get poached, it's a little bit a tragedy of the commons, each company do it in their own interest even though the shortage hurts all of them as a whole.
So 51+52+8 = 111, it was a multiple choice study and 11% has more than one tablet? That sounds way too high for me.
So, they do advocate censorship then. But only for "bad things" and presumably they think that copying movies isn't bad enough. But something else might be. Censorship is binary: you are in favour of it or you are not. You can't have "partial censorship".
And we can have either totalitarianism or anarchy, there's no partial system of government right? I know what you're saying, either the government has to stop flows of 0s and 1s or they don't. But it's a bit like saying either we give the police guns and the right to shoot people or we don't. And we do, just not any random people whenever a police officer likes it - it's a partial "license to kill". At least here in Norway there's an Internet filter and it's for one thing only - kiddie porn. Going out with a policy that says you don't allow any for of censorship whatsoever and that it should be removed is nothing short of political suicide. I'm sure you've got good arguments for why not, you can give them to the lynch mob as they hang you from the nearest tree.
Well not quite, sometimes you have to cheat a little because a simple scale blur things so you want to tweak it a little even if it's a little bit distorted compared to the full size image. I haven't tried it on a 4K screen but at least on a FullHD screen that was still true, the original "icon" was huge like 400x400 or whatever but it still took some pixel tweaking to make it look decent at 16x16, 22x22, 32x32 which I think was the sizes in use at the time. That's why most icon formats allow you to specify a bunch of resolution specific pixmaps and only scale it for other sizes.
Intel is trying to work their way in as a 3rd. player with accelerated, yet integrated, graphics chipsets -- but truthfully? I doubt they'll seriously chase after the high-performance graphics market in any serious way. For them, it's more lucrative to offer decent/usable levels of performance for the typical user and compete on having a lower price.
I think Intel would like to jump as high up that tree as possible, but it's not as easy as just saying it. You can bet they had bigger plans for Larrabee and whatnot than what became reality. Anyway, for at least another 1.5-2.5 years all games will continue to be designed to run well on 2005-2006 era hardware in the Xbox360/PS3 - the number of PC exclusives is getting slimmer and slimmer. The big question is when the 720/PS4 rolls around, if they set a new "low bar" for gaming performance but until then the more Intel can shrink the discrete graphics market the better for Intel.
If a smartphone or a tablet is an appliance, then so is most business PCs where you don't have administrative privileges. A traditional gaming console you could probably say is an appliance, it mainly does one thing but the current multi-devices? Is a rooted Android phone a general purpose computer and an unrooted phone an appliance? To me it sounds ridiculous to say that something that runs thousands of apps for all sorts of different things is anything but a general purpose computer, though possibly in chains.
People have simply outsourced the whole technical side, like running under a regular user account with a limited sudo to install apps from a predefined repository. And the indications are not that the desktop is going away, but rather it's going the same way. It's the death of being the real administrator, there's a "superlevel" above you so you're no longer root. OS X Lion was a start, Mountain Lion is a continuation and I suspect in not so long the iOS Desktop will be the norm and Microsoft will probably follow. The desktop is dead, long live the "desktop"?
I think the short answer is that women are more social than us, and I think it's more nature than nurture. Even at a very young age girls will play more social games with dolls, boys are more interested in action. Fast forward 20 years and you have women that want to work with children and in health care while men want to be engineers and software developers because one is about people and the other about things. Of course that's a gross over-generalization, but you see the same split here in Norway which has a very high degree of equality. I think at some point women wanted to show that they could be just as good engineers and software developers as us and point proven, went back to doing the work they actually prefer. Which is fine by me, I'm sure I could do a fine job as a nurse but I by far prefer working with computers.
A good indication is the jobs that actually have seen a heavy increase in women, like for example doctors. It requires long education and is a very complex field, has fairly high pay and is in general a high status job. It's definitively at least as hard as being an engineer, so it's not that. But being a doctor is a very social job, you deal with people all the time so women choose that. Take whatever job you want, evaluate how important "soft skills" is relative to "hard skills" and you can make a pretty good prediction on the sex distribution. And I'm not so sure we're on the winning end of that, people management and networking is becoming more important not less.
This will be a typical Microsoft hardware device, fails in 1 to 3 months of use, like their mice.
*looks down at mouse he's been using for years now*
Yep, a Microsoft logo. And I think the one before too, also lasted forever. Maybe I'm just exceptionally lucky or you're using them far rougher than me but I've no idea what you're talking about. Of course Microsoft's hardware got nothing to do with their software division, I don't even know if they're genuine Microsoft or just something they slap their logo on for branding.
If you make something, it's up to you to decide how you want to distribute it. If I write a song, it could be the best song ever written, but if I never record it then good luck trying to find it on The Pirate Bay. I have a reasonable expectation that people should respect my wishes when it comes to how the song should be copied, played, or otherwise consumed. Your right to listen to my song ends where my right to protect my work begins.
Your problem is that your demands aren't reasonable or indeed supported by copyright. In general, how it's copied has been your right and how it's played or otherwise consumed is my right, my copy is mine and where/when/how/why I choose to do that is my business. The book model is fine, I buy it at the bookstore and there your interests in it practically cease except making copies and public performance. One of the biggest annoyances with modern media are people like you who insist that despite me handing over money for it, you should still have the right to dictate what happens in my living room. I wouldn't want to accept a business model where Ford sold me a car, but they still controlled where, when and how fast I could drive, how I could get service and where I could fill gas and so I won't support your idea of "artist's rights" either.
Every law is a combination of pros and cons, obviously giving creators incentive to create is a pro. But when you say that to protect that right in the modern society we need mass surveillance laws, three strikes laws, million dolllar fines for sharing two dozen songs, DRM laws restricting the whole playback stack to a closed source blob and all computers with it then the cons start outweighing the pros. Particularly since I'd say practically people already have and make that choice today, I don't know anyone who considers the complexity or risk of getting caught a barrier to using P2P. Those that buy choose to do it to support those who made it and that can continue to be harnessed without copyright. If the foreshadowed doom of the creative industry was real and everyone who could avoid paying would, it'd already have happened.
I think you're missing the point a bit. I do have an iPad and I do have a cover for it. Typing on it is obviously very annoying, it's a completely flat glass surface after all and the keyboard obviously takes up quite a bit of screen real estate. This looks considerably less annoying and comes "free", but you're still not going to type a novel on it unless you're a masochist. Because of course it's still a tablet, you should use it for what it's good for. This just makes it more flexible to serve more like a laptop in a pinch, just like my phone camera isn't a replacement for a real camera - but very handy all the same.
More like you can always make it run faster by running hotter, I'd say all processors are somewhere between ridiculous and ludicrous speed these days. Even my 100 gram phone running off a battery isn't what I'd call slow, of course YMMV. And what I get on a laptop/desktop is staggering compared to how much energy I use doing trivial things like lighting, cooking, dishwasher, washing machine and so on and I don't even generally use electric for heating/cooling. And if you count just the actual computing on the CPU/GPU and ignore the display etc. it's even more extreme.
This is the advantage that RISC has always had over architecture, and why every supercomputer up to date worth speaking of has used RISC over Intel X86.
Well, if you don't feel 87% of the current top500 or half the top 10 aren't worth speaking of then I guess you only see what you want to see. True, the top three are not x86 but they're the bulk of the world's supercomputers.
With all due respect, this seems more similar to barebones shader programming than to the usual issues running OpenGL which is why it's "about a trillion times simpler".
Assembler ~= shader programming ~= Xeon Phi programming
OpenGL ~= Java, C#, C++/Qt, C++/Gtk ~= nothing the stack you talk about does
From what I gather this chip essentially gives you SSE on steroids, it's an alternative to CUDA and OpenCL but nothing else a graphics card does. And while currently the Linux capability is just to get the chip up and running, it doesn't actually use the new instructions unless you write it in assembler:
The changes do not include support for Knights Corner vector instructions and related optimization improvements. GCC for Knights Corner is really only for building the kernel and related tools; it is not for building applications. Using GCC to build an application for Knights Corner will most often result in low performance code due its current inability to vectorize for the new Knights Corner vector instructions. Future changes to give full usage of Knights Corner vector instructions would require work on the GCC vectorizer to utilize those instructionsâ(TM) masking capabilities. This is something that requires a broader discussion in the GCC community than simply changing the code generator.
About the only advantage I can see with 48fps is that they can just merge pairs of frames for printing to normal 35mm and for the 1080p@24 BluRay release.
And that's a huge thing, people would hate the 60->24 conversion. Which means you'd probably have to shoot it at 120 FPS to get both a clean 60 and 24 FPS output. Of course 48 doesn't divide into 120 so if this becomes the new cinema standard you'd probably need 240 FPS or make that 1200 FPS if you want all the PAL framerates as well. Personally I wish we'd all go to 60 FPS since we've already got a ton of 60Hz LCDs out there but getting everyone to jump at once is hard...
Actually it costs them more to develop their own binary drivers in house, than it would to open source them and allow third parties (including the kernel devs) to take up some of the slack...
No, it wouldn't and even AMD agrees on this. Between licensed code, patents, DRM and a host of other reasons an OSS driver could not fulfill their customers' requirements on Windows. That is to say OEMs who have obligations to Microsoft who have obligations to the MAFIAA, not you. Not to mention the FPS junkies would probably not enjoy the performance hit because the third party IP would have to be ripped out.
Effectively you can either share closed cross-OS code like the Catalyst/nVidia driver does, or you can share open source code with the rest of the Linux community. Those two options are mutually exclusive, and no the those few bits you get from the community are no replacement for the 90-95% "free" cross-OS work the closed driver gives them. What you say is only true if you could flip the switch from "closed" to "open" and have everything you had before plus some more free work.
In a technical, nerdy sense you of course could do that since code doesn't magically break or become useless by publishing it. But legally that is impossible, they'd get sued to hell and their permissions to play any kind of DRM'd media would go away and with it any rights to be in a "designed for Windows $foo" sticker machine. How bad is that? Well, I'll let Bridgman that handles the open source OSS driver answer that, this isn't an official statement or anything just a forum post but:
If the worst case was as minor as not being able to release any more specs we wouldn't be worrying so much. The kind of risks we are worrying about are much larger, ie things which would either kill or cripple our graphics business.
Worst case is that we lose the ability to sell our products into the Windows market as a result of releasing info which results in our DRM implementation no longer being considered sufficiently robust. Without the Windows market (which is >90 % of our revenues) we would, for all practical purposes, cease to exist as a GPU manufacturer, especially since we would probably lose the Mac market at the same time.
Next worst case is that we find a way to continue shipping into the Windows market but get sued under one or more of the DRM-related agreements we have signed. These all have high dollar-value penalties, again enough to significantly impact our ability to continue operating.
There are a bunch of smaller risks but we spend proportionally less time worrying about them. What makes all this complicated is that we have to consider not just the information we release but the information which is likely to be reverse-engineered and published. Each time we release information we simply raise the bar for where reverse engineering starts, and it's the combination of released plus "likely to be reverse-engineered" info that we need to consider.
If we tripped any of these risks then the impact would not only affect the GPUs we are shipping today but anything we have in the pipe. Best guess is that we would lose the next generation (ie the one after 7xx) and see significant delays in the one after that.
Since we don't want that to happen (right ?) the alternative is to trim back the information we release until it appears safe, going through the review process each time until we find an appropriate level.
That's the consequences of open sourcing the binary driver, could it get much clearer?
"Stable" and "Set in stone" are not synonyms. Stable enough to ship a binary blob on a CD and say "this is our Windows 7 driver" which will work for years after release through 3-4 service packs is fairly stable. Of course it sucks it's not supported for Windows 8, but you know where the breaks are and unlike Linux where you for the most part must upgrade for new software you don't have to upgrade Windows to install most apps. Yes I know there are a few backports but for the most part you get dragged into upgrading.
Basically it is a really complex problem, and of course each new version of the graphics hardware brings in a new setup to deal with.
I think particularly the last part. Unlike CPUs that have to be 99.9% the same to support already compiled binary code, graphics drivers only care about the DirectX/OpenGL layer. Everything about how you accelerate those commands is being rewritten constantly. For example the AMD OSS drivers cover three very different architectures, VLIW5, VLIW4 and GCN. And within each architecture you have different generations with different ways of doing things and instruction sets. The hardware API is changing because they're working closely with the driver team, who are the only ones talking to the hardware - until you try writing an OSS driver. Third party chips like HDMI change both suppliers and versions so the hardware API changes, without code changes practically nothing works on a new card. There's a lot of upkeep.
The other part is that the generic code is woefully behind the times, regardless of the driver code. Mesa still only supports OpenGL 3.0, which was released in July 2008 and that support only came first this year - at that point 5.5 years behind the specification. So if you want to run recent OpenGL code you need closed source drivers because the whole stack is missing, not just the driver code. Basically even if AMD is doing the same bits as AMD does for Windows, nobody's doing the OpenGL equivalent of Microsoft's work on DirectX. Or well obviously some are working on it, but not enough to keep up.
The last part which makes sharing code between the open and closed source driver hard is DRM. AMD simply can't let the open source driver have any code that would make it easy to poke at what the closed source driver is doing like for example patch it to dump a BluRay to disk (despite AACS, BD+ and HDMI all being broken). Same goes for audio and PAP. Even just keeping the DRM bits in a little blob by itself would be painting a big sign saying "reverse engineer this". This means things have to go back and forth with the lawyers all the time, and you need this information because of what I wrote in the beginning.
On the bright side Intel seems to want to use more of their own graphics in coming Atoms - google "Intel Valley View" for more - because PowerVR has been the absolutely worst of the bunch when it comes to Linux support - and pretty terrible at Windows support too from what I gather. And at least according to AMD their OSS support is getting better with each generation, even though it has a long way to go...
There's no idea so good it can't be torpedoed by incompetent management. Facebook could have died a million ways from expanding the wrong way, spamming their customers, monetizing their customers, intrusive ads, turning their interface into something ugly or annoying or buggy, high downtime, simply being too slow to expand and getting leapfrogged or whatever. One bad apple is always replaceable but if you feel the team they've put together isn't up to the task, if you don't have confidence in the decisions they've taken so far how are you going to have confidence in them going forwards? How can you know that they haven't already hired a bunch of people that are going to be sand in the machinery? It's foolish to think you can pop in a new CEO or even CxOs and fix everything.