Bah, I doubt OLPC had anything to do with it at all. The thing that launched the whole market in 2008 was because Intel suddenly had a dedicated low-power design in the Atom not just LV/ULV versions that were custom versions/bins of existing designs with large dies. The extremely small die size compared to all the other processors gave Intel a reason to flood the market with cheap computers and still make a very, very solid margin.
New processor designs take 3-4 years from start to completion which is why Intel has 4 years betweem every tock, AMD has said the same about GPU designs. That puts the Atom back in 2004-2005, while whatever the OLPC project did in 2006-2007 which was their main years is completely irrelevant to that. It was an existing project at Intel, of course they didn't mind if the OLPC paved some ground but it was going to happen regardless.
Maybe it got more attention in India but I can promise around here nobody had heard about the OLPC project, nobody has seen an OLPC and yet netbooks and minipcs with Atom were a big hit. Negroponte doesn't exactly have a monopoly on predicting that computers will be smaller, faster and cheaper. And near as I can tell, netbooks ended up running mostly Windows with about zero of any OLPC innovations. Sure he achieved a few things, but this is mostly just wishful thinking.
No, Phoronix (the champion of verified news) has repeated a rumor from an equally unreliable source which was based on a few strings that showed a script had a case for linux - as if that couldn't just mean it was a standard cross platform script, no cleary this is rock solid proof that Steam is coming to Linux. They've also later denied that any such thing is in the works.
Public key crypto is great, but claiming that a digital signature is equivalent to a real signature is asking for trouble. People have convinced CAs to sign certificates that identify them as Bill Gates
And you don't think people fake physical ids or real signatures? That people write when they're in a hurry or from an angle or when they're drunk or just don't put any effort into writing it consistently. Oh I know there's a whole science to it with pressure points and whatnot if you put a forensics team on it, but your average signature check means nothing if they compare it to the back of the card or something like that. A proper security token it likely to offer much better security even though that too has a non-zero failure rate.
Because the cost of having someone fix your computer is comparable to the cost of a new one. And the new one will probably be faster.
Fix? Yes. Wipe? No. Hardware trouble OTOH, if a low-end laptop that's all integrated and custom breaks outside of warranty it's very often not worth fixing anymore.
Microsoft had their own VC-1 codec, but seems to have completely stopped pushing that and just licensed H.264 for everything. Do you think that they did that without a very, very good deal? I doubt Apple was that naive when the licensed it either. Seriously, you seem very patent paranoid but even if I assume all you said was true then open source would be a leaf in a storm. Most Linux users already download x264 and ignore getting a license at all and that wouldn't change, at worst there's a few Ubuntu OEM customers that might possibly suffer.
What you don't get is that H.264 is exactly where they want and have their hands deep in your pockets already. Every H.264 capable camera, set top box, encoder, editing software and so on is money for them. Licenses for commercial use cost a bundle and the cost is passed on to you. To do that I'm pretty sure Microsoft's and Apple's deals are good for the duration of the patents and that you'll always get a "free" software decoder included. And that will, once they've gotten rid of legacy versions like XP and Vista mean that 99% of the market is licensed already.
And when consumers discovers that there are devices that can do more than what their iPhone does - and maybe even better - then they will move. People changes phones almost at the same rate as they change their underwear.
Yes, but dumb phones are also very generic, you use a different one like you'd use a different brand of car. I think people are far more reluctant to change between an iPhone and Blackberry and Android phone that they've learned to do lots of different things on, have a bunch of apps on and so on.
Yes, allowing people to actually pay per minute when they want to, and not be forced to feel like they HAVE to get their money's worth with a flatrate Internet connection, is proven to be better for both the gamer AND the company.
It's more the "the first shot is free" business model, what they make money on are the addicts who typically spend way, way much more than they would in a subscription system while the casuals get a free game. Kinda like going to Las Vegas to not gamble, they even give you "free" chips with the room to get you into the casino...
So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC?
Quite a lot, if you total up my.wine directory. The problems is a catch 22, there's several things I miss to the point where I'd pay for it both when it comes to games and other software but there are no offerings. Of Linux natives I did buy World of Goo on Linux release day, beyond that I haven't found much worth buying to be honest. There hasn't been a mainstream game like "Neverwinter Nights" or "Unreal Tournament" once was released for Linux in years. Not even a sustained megahit like WoW that could easily afford to cover every platform has a native Linux client, it's wine all the way. Steam for Mac gave them a revival but the spillover effect to Linux as the other non-DirectX platform has been pretty much zero. Of course there are people who picked Linux because it's cheapest or are purists and that wouldn't pay much for a closed source anything, but I think many are pragmatic enough to see using a closed source app is not going to "infect" your platform and is no worse than using a Windows or Mac machine - which I'm pretty sure many of us must from time to time.
Well if you do, please understand me correctly... The closer you want to be to the hardware limits the harder it gets and it's not linear it's exponential. Like with today's team maybe you can reach 60%. If you triple it, you might reach 80%. If you triple it again, you might make 90%. Triple it again, you might make 95%. Then there's all the little gotchas you won't know unless you made it which you might never figure out.
To use a car analogy (yay), as long as you got a 600 hp engine it'll be a fairly fast car. But the closer you want to get to a perfect racing car the more you have to tune the engine and transmission and suspenders and aerodynamics all the other systems and it gets increasingly harder for each second you try to shave off the lap time. Some people think you'll just wave the magic open source wand, and the open source driver will be there. For AMD every FPS count in the head-to-head reviews with nVidia, they put an awful lot of work into it.
What they want with the open source driver is something that plays nice with everything else in the open source stack and is always usable, as everyone knows the blobs have their issues with kernel version x server versions and so on. But it won't ever have 100% of the 3D performance of the closed source one unless something radically changes.
The proprietary drivers certainly become more even. ATI had horrible Linux support when AMD bought them and things didn't turn on a dime but they've improved very much. I haven't really used them that much though. I've been trying very hard to use the open drivers since those were the main reason I got it (for performance I mostly boot into Windows and game anyway). How the open source drivers are depend a bit on what generation card you have, I'd say the older the better it's been. Personally I've been on an Evergreen (HD5xxx) card and it's been a fairly bumpy ride but for everyday use it's fine now. However, when I try running games in WINE it's obvious a lot of things still need work...
That makes no sense, MESA doesn't have to support anything. Are not OpenGL extensions designed so the driver can provide higher versions of GL without the API (headers) having to care? (which is the case in Windows) If AMD releases a driver, they can easily release opengl 4 through extensions..
OpenGL is a big Graphics Library - that's what GL stands for. While cards say they support OpenGL 4.1, it doesn't actually mean it's just to map OpenGL calls directly to hardware functions with 100 lines of code and you're done. It means it has the necessary hardware to accelerate the primitives, once you get that far. If you want to support a higher version of OpenGL than mesa, then you have to supply your own OpenGL implementation. Since you don't appear to have any clue what that means, let me tell you that mesa is currently around 1.2 million lines of code. To add full OpenGL 3/4 support you will probably have to write hundreds of thousands more. First then will the hardware at the bottom of that stack accelerate it.
I think you misunderstand how this works. Some 97-98% of the AMD driver effort goes into frglx, with probably 80%+ shared between Windows/Mac/Linux. The remaining 2-3% work on OSS drivers. And these 98% aren't just passive consumers of information, they work tightly with the hardware guys on creating the design and interfaces and programming model and it's probably just as much their work as the hardware designers. And they got access to prerelease hardware, multi-million dollar hardware simulators and so on. They find an issue, they go to the hardware guys and they work around it in the driver, case closed. Everything you see released by AMD is made specifically for the open source effort.
So of course in a parallel universe where there were hundreds of willing OSS driver developers and Bill Gates was funding it, they possibly could. But in this world, with their actual size and other limitations I'd estimate they could probably reach matching performance with frglx for one generation of cards in 50 years. And if you say "but when everybody from the community joins" then well thay are already in and I've counted them too. There's just not that many of them even though the documentation is out - but hell to understand, I tried on some.
AMD is releasing partially usable open-source drivers, but if they lack full support for accelerated video, or 3d gaming, then it's kind of a half-hearted step.
AMD has never claimed they would release open source drivers of any given quality at all really. What they did promise was to give enough specifications so the community could make an open source driver, generally play nice with them and support them and contribute a little manpower themselves towards that. Gradually that has shifted towards a wish to make the open source drivers their "official" legacy drivers for cards they've dropped frglx support on, so that drivers for old hardware keeps up with kernel and xorg changes and remain supported but that is also it. If you want a driver that's all AMDs work it's called frglx, which can share a lot of Win/Mac development and is not ever going to be open sourced, but which is the primary driver they recommend for full 3D performance. After all, you sound like you want exactly the driver they have today except open source. That's a lot of hoops for AMD to jump through just to satisfy some OSS purism.
To be honest, then I'd try something other than Mepis because then they're doing it wrong. Replace "vesa" with "radeon" and it should boot right up, if it doesn't they've horribly mangled kernel/drm/xserver/driver version somehow. That'll be the open source drivers as the time of release, if you want the latest I don't know on mepis. On Ubuntu you'd just add the xorg-edgers ppa and dist-upgrade. Of course, then you're really on the bleeding edge which is not for everyone.
No, OpenGL 2.1 is the highest supported, but this is because Mesa - the open source implementation of OpenGL - doesn't support anything higher. Somebody needs to implement OpenGL 3 and 4 before there can be drivers for it.
The closed source drivers remain closed for many reasons, but I think licensed code is a much bigger part of that than patents. The open source drivers are built separately from scratch and are in general much slower yes. They have estimated - and don't take this as an official AMD statement but guesswork from the people working on it - that the open source driver could reach 60-70% of the closed driver on average using the simple architecture they've chosen. Simply because the closed source driver has a ton of code paths and optimizations for various situations, the OSS team is much, much smaller than the closed source team and can't possibly replicate that anyway.
It's not an oversight, blame DRM. Everything about their video decoding block (called UVD) is heavily coupled with the protected video path they have to provide for BluRays and other protected content. That means you have to have lawyers and tech people going over everything with a fine tooth comb and how much easier it would make it to reverse engineer the missing bits. It doesn't matter if AACS is broken and BluRay rips are everywhere because the contracts are still valid and the terms and penalties are as nasty as they get. AMD has said they will try to get changes to make it more open source friendly in the pipeline but new designs are started 3-4 years before release and it's probably not on their top 10 must do changes.
That said, multi-threaded H.264 decoding has improved very much in software and I have no problems decoding 1080p video with that on my desktop CPU, it probably hurts a bit in power usage but at least you *can* do without. Hardware acceleration is more important for laptops and battery life, AMD is working on it but this is a very hard problem and they need most of the resources getting support for new architectures like the HD6000. This is not like much other software, hardware moves fast and in close sync with the closed source drivers. If the open source developers don't keep up, there won't be any support at all. P.S. DRM is also one of the reasons you can't share more of the "fundamentals" with the closed source driver. That would make it too easy to decompile the Windows/Mac driver to track and grab the protected content in transit. It really is a big hindrance to open source drivers.
They're not unrelated as in "they had nothing to do with it". YouTube undoubtedly, undeniably had ad income from pirated clips, the only question is how geared it is towards piracy. I mean, you can argue the hardware store profited from the sale of a crowbar too. The Betamax case was fairly clear for a piece of hardware they had no knowledge of how people used, namely at "substantial non-infringing uses".
But what about a service? Much tougher, I mean YouTube in theory knows every clip they serve. And sometimes you don't know, but you can put up the thinnest vail possible like a no questions asked pawn shop. The question is when do you pass from "unrelated third party" to "willful blindness". Is the package you're delivering any less drugs just because you didn't ask what's in it? Are the bits your ISP is delivering any less a pirated CD just because they didn't ask what's in it? Is it any less of a bribe if you leave the envelope on the table and leave the room, no questions asked when it goes missing?
It was a compromise and it was a pretty damn good one for the ISPs and hosters. As long as they comply with DMCA notices, they got total immunity against any liability from actions their users took. It was an agreement that established that they could be totally blind to what they were making money on as long as they responded promptly to questionable content. Almost no other business is allowed to be that oblivious to what they're used for.
This is not a service that wants to "share" anything, in fact they try to push you into paying by making the "sharing" part next to impossible for free.
They host big files. Getting one ad impression in before people eat 100 MB of bandwidth doesn't cover the costs, everybody understands that. Well, everybody except you. That's a truth no matter whether the files they're sharing are legal or not, even YouTube streaming 100 MB of video has a much, much higher ads/profile value for advertizers. And even they struggled to manage costs early on.
Rapidshare doesn't target illegal files. They've steered very clear of any behavior on their part to encourage piracy. But they don't need to, because it's what people want anyway. It's like if you made knives and everyone wanted to stab people. You'd try making kitchen knives and tool knives and hunting knives, but they all turn to stabbing knives because it's what people want. If people thought like you, we'd never have tape recorders or VCRs or CD burners or anything like it.
While they are technically hosting the file, they did not originate the content. Kinda like saying a person who picked up a second-hand pair of boots off a dead guy is an accessory to murder.
While I agree with the ruling, the analogy must be one of the worst I've heard. They are the tool actually executing the production of additional copies, they're closer to the knife or the gun than anything else. A better analogy might be factory workers that produce faulty and deadly brakes from a bad design. They may be the ones doing it, but they're not the ones responsible for it.
f stock FOO is $5.50 a share and I want to sell 1000 shares, I place a limit order to sell at $5.50. This means if there is a bid for 7 shares at $5.55, $5.53 or anything $5.50 or greater I will sell at *that* price. But no shares will be sold below $5.50, that portion of my order will remain 'unfulfilled'.
You may sell. There's also variations of "fill or kill" orders that won't complete unless you can sell all 1000 shares above your limit.
Does it? As far as I know, it does nothing new besides offering Mac users a shortcut.
If I was a cynic, this is what I would think the plan is: 1. First you make all users embrace the app store 2. Then you extend apps so they have unique features 3. Then you extinguish non-app software
This is step one. You don't have to end up at step three, but given how successful it's been on the iPhone/iPad I'm sure they will if the market will let them.
More interesting question: When will the first enterprising individual start to offer the GIMP in the McAppStore for $0.99?
AFAIK you'll have to rewrite pretty much everything to use OS X libraries to fit Apple's requirements so I'd say the buck is well earned... assuming they follow the GPL of course.
Back then, they didn't know about it and didn't use water and respirators to mitigate the silica dust. Back then, the life expectancy was 6-8 months. Thusly, the first quarry power tool was dubbed, "The Window Maker".
Apparently back then, they hadn't learned to spell "Widow" properly.
Just from the last two posts I'd like to work for you. Or if I ever got that chance, hire you. Right now Im happy where I am though and in no position to hire anyone.
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Bah, I doubt OLPC had anything to do with it at all. The thing that launched the whole market in 2008 was because Intel suddenly had a dedicated low-power design in the Atom not just LV/ULV versions that were custom versions/bins of existing designs with large dies. The extremely small die size compared to all the other processors gave Intel a reason to flood the market with cheap computers and still make a very, very solid margin.
New processor designs take 3-4 years from start to completion which is why Intel has 4 years betweem every tock, AMD has said the same about GPU designs. That puts the Atom back in 2004-2005, while whatever the OLPC project did in 2006-2007 which was their main years is completely irrelevant to that. It was an existing project at Intel, of course they didn't mind if the OLPC paved some ground but it was going to happen regardless.
Maybe it got more attention in India but I can promise around here nobody had heard about the OLPC project, nobody has seen an OLPC and yet netbooks and minipcs with Atom were a big hit. Negroponte doesn't exactly have a monopoly on predicting that computers will be smaller, faster and cheaper. And near as I can tell, netbooks ended up running mostly Windows with about zero of any OLPC innovations. Sure he achieved a few things, but this is mostly just wishful thinking.
No, Phoronix (the champion of verified news) has repeated a rumor from an equally unreliable source which was based on a few strings that showed a script had a case for linux - as if that couldn't just mean it was a standard cross platform script, no cleary this is rock solid proof that Steam is coming to Linux. They've also later denied that any such thing is in the works.
Public key crypto is great, but claiming that a digital signature is equivalent to a real signature is asking for trouble. People have convinced CAs to sign certificates that identify them as Bill Gates
And you don't think people fake physical ids or real signatures? That people write when they're in a hurry or from an angle or when they're drunk or just don't put any effort into writing it consistently. Oh I know there's a whole science to it with pressure points and whatnot if you put a forensics team on it, but your average signature check means nothing if they compare it to the back of the card or something like that. A proper security token it likely to offer much better security even though that too has a non-zero failure rate.
Because the cost of having someone fix your computer is comparable to the cost of a new one. And the new one will probably be faster.
Fix? Yes. Wipe? No. Hardware trouble OTOH, if a low-end laptop that's all integrated and custom breaks outside of warranty it's very often not worth fixing anymore.
Microsoft had their own VC-1 codec, but seems to have completely stopped pushing that and just licensed H.264 for everything. Do you think that they did that without a very, very good deal? I doubt Apple was that naive when the licensed it either. Seriously, you seem very patent paranoid but even if I assume all you said was true then open source would be a leaf in a storm. Most Linux users already download x264 and ignore getting a license at all and that wouldn't change, at worst there's a few Ubuntu OEM customers that might possibly suffer.
What you don't get is that H.264 is exactly where they want and have their hands deep in your pockets already. Every H.264 capable camera, set top box, encoder, editing software and so on is money for them. Licenses for commercial use cost a bundle and the cost is passed on to you. To do that I'm pretty sure Microsoft's and Apple's deals are good for the duration of the patents and that you'll always get a "free" software decoder included. And that will, once they've gotten rid of legacy versions like XP and Vista mean that 99% of the market is licensed already.
And when consumers discovers that there are devices that can do more than what their iPhone does - and maybe even better - then they will move. People changes phones almost at the same rate as they change their underwear.
Yes, but dumb phones are also very generic, you use a different one like you'd use a different brand of car. I think people are far more reluctant to change between an iPhone and Blackberry and Android phone that they've learned to do lots of different things on, have a bunch of apps on and so on.
Yes, allowing people to actually pay per minute when they want to, and not be forced to feel like they HAVE to get their money's worth with a flatrate Internet connection, is proven to be better for both the gamer AND the company.
It's more the "the first shot is free" business model, what they make money on are the addicts who typically spend way, way much more than they would in a subscription system while the casuals get a free game. Kinda like going to Las Vegas to not gamble, they even give you "free" chips with the room to get you into the casino...
So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC?
Quite a lot, if you total up my .wine directory. The problems is a catch 22, there's several things I miss to the point where I'd pay for it both when it comes to games and other software but there are no offerings. Of Linux natives I did buy World of Goo on Linux release day, beyond that I haven't found much worth buying to be honest. There hasn't been a mainstream game like "Neverwinter Nights" or "Unreal Tournament" once was released for Linux in years. Not even a sustained megahit like WoW that could easily afford to cover every platform has a native Linux client, it's wine all the way. Steam for Mac gave them a revival but the spillover effect to Linux as the other non-DirectX platform has been pretty much zero. Of course there are people who picked Linux because it's cheapest or are purists and that wouldn't pay much for a closed source anything, but I think many are pragmatic enough to see using a closed source app is not going to "infect" your platform and is no worse than using a Windows or Mac machine - which I'm pretty sure many of us must from time to time.
Well if you do, please understand me correctly... The closer you want to be to the hardware limits the harder it gets and it's not linear it's exponential. Like with today's team maybe you can reach 60%. If you triple it, you might reach 80%. If you triple it again, you might make 90%. Triple it again, you might make 95%. Then there's all the little gotchas you won't know unless you made it which you might never figure out.
To use a car analogy (yay), as long as you got a 600 hp engine it'll be a fairly fast car. But the closer you want to get to a perfect racing car the more you have to tune the engine and transmission and suspenders and aerodynamics all the other systems and it gets increasingly harder for each second you try to shave off the lap time. Some people think you'll just wave the magic open source wand, and the open source driver will be there. For AMD every FPS count in the head-to-head reviews with nVidia, they put an awful lot of work into it.
What they want with the open source driver is something that plays nice with everything else in the open source stack and is always usable, as everyone knows the blobs have their issues with kernel version x server versions and so on. But it won't ever have 100% of the 3D performance of the closed source one unless something radically changes.
The proprietary drivers certainly become more even. ATI had horrible Linux support when AMD bought them and things didn't turn on a dime but they've improved very much. I haven't really used them that much though. I've been trying very hard to use the open drivers since those were the main reason I got it (for performance I mostly boot into Windows and game anyway). How the open source drivers are depend a bit on what generation card you have, I'd say the older the better it's been. Personally I've been on an Evergreen (HD5xxx) card and it's been a fairly bumpy ride but for everyday use it's fine now. However, when I try running games in WINE it's obvious a lot of things still need work...
That makes no sense, MESA doesn't have to support anything. Are not OpenGL extensions designed so the driver can provide higher versions of GL without the API (headers) having to care? (which is the case in Windows) If AMD releases a driver, they can easily release opengl 4 through extensions..
OpenGL is a big Graphics Library - that's what GL stands for. While cards say they support OpenGL 4.1, it doesn't actually mean it's just to map OpenGL calls directly to hardware functions with 100 lines of code and you're done. It means it has the necessary hardware to accelerate the primitives, once you get that far. If you want to support a higher version of OpenGL than mesa, then you have to supply your own OpenGL implementation. Since you don't appear to have any clue what that means, let me tell you that mesa is currently around 1.2 million lines of code. To add full OpenGL 3/4 support you will probably have to write hundreds of thousands more. First then will the hardware at the bottom of that stack accelerate it.
I think you misunderstand how this works. Some 97-98% of the AMD driver effort goes into frglx, with probably 80%+ shared between Windows/Mac/Linux. The remaining 2-3% work on OSS drivers. And these 98% aren't just passive consumers of information, they work tightly with the hardware guys on creating the design and interfaces and programming model and it's probably just as much their work as the hardware designers. And they got access to prerelease hardware, multi-million dollar hardware simulators and so on. They find an issue, they go to the hardware guys and they work around it in the driver, case closed. Everything you see released by AMD is made specifically for the open source effort.
So of course in a parallel universe where there were hundreds of willing OSS driver developers and Bill Gates was funding it, they possibly could. But in this world, with their actual size and other limitations I'd estimate they could probably reach matching performance with frglx for one generation of cards in 50 years. And if you say "but when everybody from the community joins" then well thay are already in and I've counted them too. There's just not that many of them even though the documentation is out - but hell to understand, I tried on some.
AMD is releasing partially usable open-source drivers, but if they lack full support for accelerated video, or 3d gaming, then it's kind of a half-hearted step.
AMD has never claimed they would release open source drivers of any given quality at all really. What they did promise was to give enough specifications so the community could make an open source driver, generally play nice with them and support them and contribute a little manpower themselves towards that. Gradually that has shifted towards a wish to make the open source drivers their "official" legacy drivers for cards they've dropped frglx support on, so that drivers for old hardware keeps up with kernel and xorg changes and remain supported but that is also it. If you want a driver that's all AMDs work it's called frglx, which can share a lot of Win/Mac development and is not ever going to be open sourced, but which is the primary driver they recommend for full 3D performance. After all, you sound like you want exactly the driver they have today except open source. That's a lot of hoops for AMD to jump through just to satisfy some OSS purism.
To be honest, then I'd try something other than Mepis because then they're doing it wrong. Replace "vesa" with "radeon" and it should boot right up, if it doesn't they've horribly mangled kernel/drm/xserver/driver version somehow. That'll be the open source drivers as the time of release, if you want the latest I don't know on mepis. On Ubuntu you'd just add the xorg-edgers ppa and dist-upgrade. Of course, then you're really on the bleeding edge which is not for everyone.
No, OpenGL 2.1 is the highest supported, but this is because Mesa - the open source implementation of OpenGL - doesn't support anything higher. Somebody needs to implement OpenGL 3 and 4 before there can be drivers for it.
The closed source drivers remain closed for many reasons, but I think licensed code is a much bigger part of that than patents. The open source drivers are built separately from scratch and are in general much slower yes. They have estimated - and don't take this as an official AMD statement but guesswork from the people working on it - that the open source driver could reach 60-70% of the closed driver on average using the simple architecture they've chosen. Simply because the closed source driver has a ton of code paths and optimizations for various situations, the OSS team is much, much smaller than the closed source team and can't possibly replicate that anyway.
It's not an oversight, blame DRM. Everything about their video decoding block (called UVD) is heavily coupled with the protected video path they have to provide for BluRays and other protected content. That means you have to have lawyers and tech people going over everything with a fine tooth comb and how much easier it would make it to reverse engineer the missing bits. It doesn't matter if AACS is broken and BluRay rips are everywhere because the contracts are still valid and the terms and penalties are as nasty as they get. AMD has said they will try to get changes to make it more open source friendly in the pipeline but new designs are started 3-4 years before release and it's probably not on their top 10 must do changes.
That said, multi-threaded H.264 decoding has improved very much in software and I have no problems decoding 1080p video with that on my desktop CPU, it probably hurts a bit in power usage but at least you *can* do without. Hardware acceleration is more important for laptops and battery life, AMD is working on it but this is a very hard problem and they need most of the resources getting support for new architectures like the HD6000. This is not like much other software, hardware moves fast and in close sync with the closed source drivers. If the open source developers don't keep up, there won't be any support at all. P.S. DRM is also one of the reasons you can't share more of the "fundamentals" with the closed source driver. That would make it too easy to decompile the Windows/Mac driver to track and grab the protected content in transit. It really is a big hindrance to open source drivers.
They're not unrelated as in "they had nothing to do with it". YouTube undoubtedly, undeniably had ad income from pirated clips, the only question is how geared it is towards piracy. I mean, you can argue the hardware store profited from the sale of a crowbar too. The Betamax case was fairly clear for a piece of hardware they had no knowledge of how people used, namely at "substantial non-infringing uses".
But what about a service? Much tougher, I mean YouTube in theory knows every clip they serve. And sometimes you don't know, but you can put up the thinnest vail possible like a no questions asked pawn shop. The question is when do you pass from "unrelated third party" to "willful blindness". Is the package you're delivering any less drugs just because you didn't ask what's in it? Are the bits your ISP is delivering any less a pirated CD just because they didn't ask what's in it? Is it any less of a bribe if you leave the envelope on the table and leave the room, no questions asked when it goes missing?
It was a compromise and it was a pretty damn good one for the ISPs and hosters. As long as they comply with DMCA notices, they got total immunity against any liability from actions their users took. It was an agreement that established that they could be totally blind to what they were making money on as long as they responded promptly to questionable content. Almost no other business is allowed to be that oblivious to what they're used for.
This is not a service that wants to "share" anything, in fact they try to push you into paying by making the "sharing" part next to impossible for free.
They host big files. Getting one ad impression in before people eat 100 MB of bandwidth doesn't cover the costs, everybody understands that. Well, everybody except you. That's a truth no matter whether the files they're sharing are legal or not, even YouTube streaming 100 MB of video has a much, much higher ads/profile value for advertizers. And even they struggled to manage costs early on.
Rapidshare doesn't target illegal files. They've steered very clear of any behavior on their part to encourage piracy. But they don't need to, because it's what people want anyway. It's like if you made knives and everyone wanted to stab people. You'd try making kitchen knives and tool knives and hunting knives, but they all turn to stabbing knives because it's what people want. If people thought like you, we'd never have tape recorders or VCRs or CD burners or anything like it.
While they are technically hosting the file, they did not originate the content. Kinda like saying a person who picked up a second-hand pair of boots off a dead guy is an accessory to murder.
While I agree with the ruling, the analogy must be one of the worst I've heard. They are the tool actually executing the production of additional copies, they're closer to the knife or the gun than anything else. A better analogy might be factory workers that produce faulty and deadly brakes from a bad design. They may be the ones doing it, but they're not the ones responsible for it.
f stock FOO is $5.50 a share and I want to sell 1000 shares, I place a limit order to sell at $5.50. This means if there is a bid for 7 shares at $5.55, $5.53 or anything $5.50 or greater I will sell at *that* price. But no shares will be sold below $5.50, that portion of my order will remain 'unfulfilled'.
You may sell. There's also variations of "fill or kill" orders that won't complete unless you can sell all 1000 shares above your limit.
Does it? As far as I know, it does nothing new besides offering Mac users a shortcut.
If I was a cynic, this is what I would think the plan is:
1. First you make all users embrace the app store
2. Then you extend apps so they have unique features
3. Then you extinguish non-app software
This is step one. You don't have to end up at step three, but given how successful it's been on the iPhone/iPad I'm sure they will if the market will let them.
More interesting question: When will the first enterprising individual start to offer the GIMP in the McAppStore for $0.99?
AFAIK you'll have to rewrite pretty much everything to use OS X libraries to fit Apple's requirements so I'd say the buck is well earned... assuming they follow the GPL of course.
Back then, they didn't know about it and didn't use water and respirators to mitigate the silica dust. Back then, the life expectancy was 6-8 months. Thusly, the first quarry power tool was dubbed, "The Window Maker".
Apparently back then, they hadn't learned to spell "Widow" properly.
Just from the last two posts I'd like to work for you. Or if I ever got that chance, hire you. Right now Im happy where I am though and in no position to hire anyone.