AFAIK, the open-source drivers are progressing at a breakneck pace, and hardware acceleration is very usable on some cards.
You are referring to 3D acceleration, not video acceleration. There is no open source video acceleration for any card, neither UVD-based or shader-based.
Anyone who can't understand the BSD license without a lawyer is just dense. The developers are probably feeling like Dilbert right about now caught up in absurd rules. Practical reality:
a) Contact the developer of said source, he'll probably snicker at you and say it's free anyway, here's your absurd license b) Forget about it and write it yourself c) Go on a long and painful quest against legal policy in a large company
For example, I once wanted to contribute to the Qt library, which should be simple right? Well, normally it's just to sign away pretty much all your rights but that's the choice you make. But not if it's related to the ssl parts which rely on openssl, because they're afraid of the US crypto export restrictions. And even though I'm not in the US, in fact I'm in the country where most Qt development happens, it was still a problem they had to run by legal in order to get an a policy on what documentation would be necessary to certify that I wouldn't being them under those regulations. I don't even recall if I ever got an answer back, but if I did I had long since lost interest in getting it upstream.
From what I understand hardware acceleration is now somewhat usable with the Catalyst drivers (source). But for the open source drivers there is nothing, there's no specs for UVD and even though it should be possible to implement a shader-based acceleration and the docs for that is out, no one has done it yet.
The reason these are useful, even on lower end cards, is that some things run drastically faster on a GPU so even a low end one is better than the CPU. I don't have any good examples specific to compute shaders but an older non-computer shader example would be HD video.
Except that for all intents and purposes, it has nothing to do with the GPU. It could just as well have been on a separate chip, like the Broadcom chip for the new Intel Atoms. It could have been on the CPU too for that matter. Right now there's an awful lot of hype, the question is how much is practical reality. Some things are better solved, in fact generally best solved by dedicated hardware like a HD decoder. How much falls between general purpose and dedicated hardware? Very good question.
For example, using 2-3 GPUs in one box, people doing architectural visualization can get their results in minutes instead of days.
Yeah, and the point was that those people wouldn't be buying this card. Face it, GPGPU isn't a general purpose CPU, we have some companies that are already damn good at making those. This means you either need it or you don't, and if you first do you'll probably want a lot of it. Companies and research institutions certainly will have the money, and even if you are a poor hungry student you can probably afford to invest 2-300$ in your education for a HD5850 which has a ton of shaders compared to this. The only real purpose of this card is to phase in a chip built on a smaller process, that'll be cheaper to produce. All they could have gained in performance they've instead cut in size.
From what I understand the latest fighters have computer failsafes to prevent you from losing control, assuming you have enough altitude. And for those about to comment on that, computers are the only reason you can fly an unstable aircrafts in the first place. If the engine dies, you eject because it can't glide at all.
A standard that requires shelling out $$ for a license to use it isn't 'open', not by most people's definition of 'open'.
It's certainly better than "closed" in that ffmpeg and x264 have excellent en/decoders because they didn't have to reverse engineer it.
There should be no 'might' in that sentence. Patents on h264 is the reason for MPEG-LA's very existence. They hold more patents on it than you can shake a stick at.
Which is exactly why people are worried about Theora and On2. There's a ton of patents on h.264, held by many different major companies in the area. I couldn't find a number for H.264, but the wikipedia page for MPEG2 says that alone is covered by 640 patents. Now take a deep breath and forget all your anger and frustration with how the patent system is and should be, and honestly answer: Do you seriously think On2 has, in the middle of that patent thicket, managed to create a codec that nobody else holds a patent to? All it takes is one bad patent to be upheld, and you might have to change the bitstream and replace every existing en/decoder. Otherwise it would no longer be an "open" standard in your meaning of it.
easy proof (similar idea): look at the inside of an hdmi switch. it has parallel twisted pairs, too. look at the squiggles on the pc board traces. they are 'making up length' with lefty/righty (tech term, lol) loops of copper trace. TIMING MATTERS on parallel digital signals!
Of course it does, because the HDMI signal is 165MHz+ (HDMI 1.0, later added higher modes). It matters for two digital devices to talk to each other, but there's no way a human could recognize picosecond jitter in the decoded video or audio which runs in kilohertz for audio and hertz for video. And if the digital signals were wrong, like the LSB of one sample running over into the MSB of the next sample, you'd know extremely quickly unless you're blind and deaf as it'd all be noise.
In short, your technical knowledge is as lousy as your tech terms, because the situation audiophiles describe will never happen. Either you plug in a digital cable and the decoder will decode it perfectly with a timing accuracy far, far greater than human senss or the decoder will fail and it'll all be shit. It's never "almost right with jitter", not on the KHz scale.
Only sell out if there is enough $$$ in it that you don't have to keep working there. Maybe stay for another 6-12 months
Only a fool buys a company without making sure that's a clause anyway, it's generally assumed that when it ends you might (will?) bail to do something else.
Welcome to boom vs bust. Are you really surprised? I noticed the same with a real estate broker, if you're looking to buy in a bone dry market and is the lone bidder they work for you, not the seller. They make the seller take the deal, get the commission and stay in business a little longer. And while we're into real estate, if that job means your house won't be foreclosed and your kids thrown out of their home I think some might consider that a blessing.
I doubt it's as high as 93%, my impression is that quite a few fall into one of two categories - people who have zero clue on configuring their browser and will use the search box which is there by default or they will have figured out the shortcut and use that. To me creating searches is the difference between an address bar and an awesome bar. "g [whatever]" for google, "wp [whatever]" for wikipedia, a pricewatch-like site, a map/directions site, basically anything that I use quite regularly. I don't need those shortcuts, I type like a wiz and it's the hunt-and-peck typers who should have had shortcuts but never do. To me it's just working a little smarter, not harder.
Hospitals have both a humanitarian value and for the most part the patient is required to have that specific hospital, but for most products that's just not a big deal. Imagine if the big three were allowed to fail, do you think we'd be without cars? Hell no, all the Japanese and Korean and Chinese car stocks would skyrocket because they'd be rid of their hardest competitiors.
I do admit that there's one thing if it's just wages. But there's also many, many other factors like the customer appeal, choice of design, efficiency of production process, delivery process, product quality and so on that means propping up products that barely break even might save some jobs locally but holds the world back.
Look at it the other way, what would happen if hospitals were run very inefficiently? Someone would buy up hospital stock, make them efficient and make a killing. In perfect competition there's hardly no profit, investors want as imperfect conditions as possible - in favor of those they invest in, of course. The question is if you should go beyond that and treat people who can't pay, but it should be fairly obvious you are talking about subsidization or charity here. I suppose not getting a return on your investment could be considered charity, but it's a very fuzzy donation.
Isn't this essentially War Games all over again with robots instead of nukes? Is there any recorded evidence of taking over a significant piece of military firepower by hacking? Even if you could just fake the orders to a nuclear sub, you could do pretty damn much damage already...
No. One does not have to accept an extraordinary scientific claim just because one does not yet have another explanation. There is lots of data on UFOs. For some of this data, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. That doesn't mean that I have to start believing in UFOs. It just means that UFOlogy is a field where the data are all a big pile of doggy doo.
You are attacking a straw man here because obviously if you can't trust the observations you can't trust the evidence. But we're talking about meteorites in a lab and test samples by scientific probes here, not somebody who saw weird lights in the sky. If any scientist can pull up a microscope and confirm the patterns are there, then that is pretty much an established fact that the patterns exist, the only question is how. The same can not at all be said about UFOs, least not the alien craft variety.
I wanted to take ASM in college. I was the only student who showed up for the class and the class was canceled. Since most of the programming classes was Java-centric, no one wanted to get their hands dirty under the hood.
I'm probably going to need an asbestos suit for this post, but to be honest I don't think assembler is a good programming language for humans. My impression is that they absolutely don't want to pollute the instruction set with instructions unless there's a performance benefit to doing so. But what it means in practice is that anyone I've seen writing advanced assembly relies on lots and lots of macros to do essential things, because the combination of instructions is useful but there's no language construct. For example, in general you JMP everywhere which is the low-level equivalent of GOTO and you use that to create the equivalent of FOR and WHILE etc. which is neat to have seen once but gets quite tedious to do over and over.
Most of the real world issues I run into, aren't of the type "yeah with an assembler optimization here we could squeeze another 2% out of it", It's stuff like "wtf why are you putting that inside the loop?" or "why are you doing this processing one by one when a batch update would do this 1000x faster?" If you got a clue on what's happening in C, if you know when memory is allocated/deallocated and that the basic operations you do makes sense, you'll write better code than 90% of the developers out there anyway.
Unfortunately, there's more to corporate life than technical merits. If you go by the popular opinion upgrade, you can say you're following best practice and blame Microsoft. If you upgrade to a non-SP Windows 7 and you run into trouble, whether deserved or not then it'll be your fault. You can try blaming the vendor, but everyone knows the vendor will always push their latest version almost no matter what.
I was in your position when I graduated, there had been a real dip so all the poor jobs figured I'd jump as soon as conditions got better (honestly, not such a bad guess) and the good jobs always found someone with a bit of real-life experience who they didn't have to "train" to be a worker instead of a student. I know it's not a help right now, but trust me once you do have a few years experience that education will pull you out of the ranks and into senior positions. I was interviewing recently for a job and the CFO (100 man company) commented that he had a great deal of respect for my degree, even though it's 7 years since I graduated. And I got the job too, though in my case I'm just looking for a better job in an economy that is recovering much better than the US one.
Well, I can sort of see two use cases here. On many corporate installs the version is intentionally held back, and then you don't want the user to be bugged on every launch about upgrades that he can't and aren't supposed to install. I have had that at times and it's very frustrating. I do understand it sucks for anyone being their own admin though.
Precisely one of the points about Mars and other places outside of Earth. Without reaching to them, life will die out. We're in the phase of first small steps in ensuring it won't.
That's one side, the other is that this is a bit like putting a newborn on a treadmill to teach it to run as fast as possible. Near as we can tell Earth has been quite hospitable for the last 65 million years or so, it'll quite probably last another million. Can you imagine year 1002010 AD? The whole of human history is only 100,000 years old, the earliest writings are 6000 years old and we've only been doing proper science since the Scientific Revolution some 500 years ago. If we can figure out how to not kill each other and not kill the planet, there's plenty of time.
A lot of things are possible if you essentially use brute force, with a big enough chemical rocket we can probably reach Mars but it won't get us to a different solar system. For that we need scientific breakthroughs that you won't get from building a conventional rocket, no matter how great a wonder of engineering it is. Right now, what excites me the most are telescopes and finding exoplanets. We may be far away from the Star Trek warp drive to go there, but seeing them now seems within reach. Not to mention it'd give a clear goal of where we'd like to go...
Slashdot Mirror
Cue the XKCD comic with the butterflies, but I'm too lazy to find it.
AFAIK, the open-source drivers are progressing at a breakneck pace, and hardware acceleration is very usable on some cards.
You are referring to 3D acceleration, not video acceleration. There is no open source video acceleration for any card, neither UVD-based or shader-based.
Anyone who can't understand the BSD license without a lawyer is just dense. The developers are probably feeling like Dilbert right about now caught up in absurd rules. Practical reality:
a) Contact the developer of said source, he'll probably snicker at you and say it's free anyway, here's your absurd license
b) Forget about it and write it yourself
c) Go on a long and painful quest against legal policy in a large company
For example, I once wanted to contribute to the Qt library, which should be simple right? Well, normally it's just to sign away pretty much all your rights but that's the choice you make. But not if it's related to the ssl parts which rely on openssl, because they're afraid of the US crypto export restrictions. And even though I'm not in the US, in fact I'm in the country where most Qt development happens, it was still a problem they had to run by legal in order to get an a policy on what documentation would be necessary to certify that I wouldn't being them under those regulations. I don't even recall if I ever got an answer back, but if I did I had long since lost interest in getting it upstream.
From what I understand hardware acceleration is now somewhat usable with the Catalyst drivers (source). But for the open source drivers there is nothing, there's no specs for UVD and even though it should be possible to implement a shader-based acceleration and the docs for that is out, no one has done it yet.
The reason these are useful, even on lower end cards, is that some things run drastically faster on a GPU so even a low end one is better than the CPU. I don't have any good examples specific to compute shaders but an older non-computer shader example would be HD video.
Except that for all intents and purposes, it has nothing to do with the GPU. It could just as well have been on a separate chip, like the Broadcom chip for the new Intel Atoms. It could have been on the CPU too for that matter. Right now there's an awful lot of hype, the question is how much is practical reality. Some things are better solved, in fact generally best solved by dedicated hardware like a HD decoder. How much falls between general purpose and dedicated hardware? Very good question.
For example, using 2-3 GPUs in one box, people doing architectural visualization can get their results in minutes instead of days.
Yeah, and the point was that those people wouldn't be buying this card. Face it, GPGPU isn't a general purpose CPU, we have some companies that are already damn good at making those. This means you either need it or you don't, and if you first do you'll probably want a lot of it. Companies and research institutions certainly will have the money, and even if you are a poor hungry student you can probably afford to invest 2-300$ in your education for a HD5850 which has a ton of shaders compared to this. The only real purpose of this card is to phase in a chip built on a smaller process, that'll be cheaper to produce. All they could have gained in performance they've instead cut in size.
From what I understand the latest fighters have computer failsafes to prevent you from losing control, assuming you have enough altitude. And for those about to comment on that, computers are the only reason you can fly an unstable aircrafts in the first place. If the engine dies, you eject because it can't glide at all.
Use html and it'll work. I'd say it's possibly a feature to avoid extra dots from a sentence ending which are not part of the URL.
A standard that requires shelling out $$ for a license to use it isn't 'open', not by most people's definition of 'open'.
It's certainly better than "closed" in that ffmpeg and x264 have excellent en/decoders because they didn't have to reverse engineer it.
There should be no 'might' in that sentence. Patents on h264 is the reason for MPEG-LA's very existence. They hold more patents on it than you can shake a stick at.
Which is exactly why people are worried about Theora and On2. There's a ton of patents on h.264, held by many different major companies in the area. I couldn't find a number for H.264, but the wikipedia page for MPEG2 says that alone is covered by 640 patents. Now take a deep breath and forget all your anger and frustration with how the patent system is and should be, and honestly answer: Do you seriously think On2 has, in the middle of that patent thicket, managed to create a codec that nobody else holds a patent to? All it takes is one bad patent to be upheld, and you might have to change the bitstream and replace every existing en/decoder. Otherwise it would no longer be an "open" standard in your meaning of it.
easy proof (similar idea): look at the inside of an hdmi switch. it has parallel twisted pairs, too. look at the squiggles on the pc board traces. they are 'making up length' with lefty/righty (tech term, lol) loops of copper trace. TIMING MATTERS on parallel digital signals!
Of course it does, because the HDMI signal is 165MHz+ (HDMI 1.0, later added higher modes). It matters for two digital devices to talk to each other, but there's no way a human could recognize picosecond jitter in the decoded video or audio which runs in kilohertz for audio and hertz for video. And if the digital signals were wrong, like the LSB of one sample running over into the MSB of the next sample, you'd know extremely quickly unless you're blind and deaf as it'd all be noise.
In short, your technical knowledge is as lousy as your tech terms, because the situation audiophiles describe will never happen. Either you plug in a digital cable and the decoder will decode it perfectly with a timing accuracy far, far greater than human senss or the decoder will fail and it'll all be shit. It's never "almost right with jitter", not on the KHz scale.
Only sell out if there is enough $$$ in it that you don't have to keep working there. Maybe stay for another 6-12 months
Only a fool buys a company without making sure that's a clause anyway, it's generally assumed that when it ends you might (will?) bail to do something else.
Welcome to boom vs bust. Are you really surprised? I noticed the same with a real estate broker, if you're looking to buy in a bone dry market and is the lone bidder they work for you, not the seller. They make the seller take the deal, get the commission and stay in business a little longer. And while we're into real estate, if that job means your house won't be foreclosed and your kids thrown out of their home I think some might consider that a blessing.
Also... four kids in four years? Seems kinda close together...
It doesn't optimize well but it does parallelize.
The world is also full of hypochondriacs
And opportunists. Particularly of the unemployed kind, which I imagine most people claiming to be electrosensitive are.
I doubt it's as high as 93%, my impression is that quite a few fall into one of two categories - people who have zero clue on configuring their browser and will use the search box which is there by default or they will have figured out the shortcut and use that. To me creating searches is the difference between an address bar and an awesome bar. "g [whatever]" for google, "wp [whatever]" for wikipedia, a pricewatch-like site, a map/directions site, basically anything that I use quite regularly. I don't need those shortcuts, I type like a wiz and it's the hunt-and-peck typers who should have had shortcuts but never do. To me it's just working a little smarter, not harder.
Hospitals have both a humanitarian value and for the most part the patient is required to have that specific hospital, but for most products that's just not a big deal. Imagine if the big three were allowed to fail, do you think we'd be without cars? Hell no, all the Japanese and Korean and Chinese car stocks would skyrocket because they'd be rid of their hardest competitiors.
I do admit that there's one thing if it's just wages. But there's also many, many other factors like the customer appeal, choice of design, efficiency of production process, delivery process, product quality and so on that means propping up products that barely break even might save some jobs locally but holds the world back.
Look at it the other way, what would happen if hospitals were run very inefficiently? Someone would buy up hospital stock, make them efficient and make a killing. In perfect competition there's hardly no profit, investors want as imperfect conditions as possible - in favor of those they invest in, of course. The question is if you should go beyond that and treat people who can't pay, but it should be fairly obvious you are talking about subsidization or charity here. I suppose not getting a return on your investment could be considered charity, but it's a very fuzzy donation.
Isn't this essentially War Games all over again with robots instead of nukes? Is there any recorded evidence of taking over a significant piece of military firepower by hacking? Even if you could just fake the orders to a nuclear sub, you could do pretty damn much damage already...
No. One does not have to accept an extraordinary scientific claim just because one does not yet have another explanation. There is lots of data on UFOs. For some of this data, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. That doesn't mean that I have to start believing in UFOs. It just means that UFOlogy is a field where the data are all a big pile of doggy doo.
You are attacking a straw man here because obviously if you can't trust the observations you can't trust the evidence. But we're talking about meteorites in a lab and test samples by scientific probes here, not somebody who saw weird lights in the sky. If any scientist can pull up a microscope and confirm the patterns are there, then that is pretty much an established fact that the patterns exist, the only question is how. The same can not at all be said about UFOs, least not the alien craft variety.
I wanted to take ASM in college. I was the only student who showed up for the class and the class was canceled. Since most of the programming classes was Java-centric, no one wanted to get their hands dirty under the hood.
I'm probably going to need an asbestos suit for this post, but to be honest I don't think assembler is a good programming language for humans. My impression is that they absolutely don't want to pollute the instruction set with instructions unless there's a performance benefit to doing so. But what it means in practice is that anyone I've seen writing advanced assembly relies on lots and lots of macros to do essential things, because the combination of instructions is useful but there's no language construct. For example, in general you JMP everywhere which is the low-level equivalent of GOTO and you use that to create the equivalent of FOR and WHILE etc. which is neat to have seen once but gets quite tedious to do over and over.
Most of the real world issues I run into, aren't of the type "yeah with an assembler optimization here we could squeeze another 2% out of it", It's stuff like "wtf why are you putting that inside the loop?" or "why are you doing this processing one by one when a batch update would do this 1000x faster?" If you got a clue on what's happening in C, if you know when memory is allocated/deallocated and that the basic operations you do makes sense, you'll write better code than 90% of the developers out there anyway.
Unfortunately, there's more to corporate life than technical merits. If you go by the popular opinion upgrade, you can say you're following best practice and blame Microsoft. If you upgrade to a non-SP Windows 7 and you run into trouble, whether deserved or not then it'll be your fault. You can try blaming the vendor, but everyone knows the vendor will always push their latest version almost no matter what.
I was in your position when I graduated, there had been a real dip so all the poor jobs figured I'd jump as soon as conditions got better (honestly, not such a bad guess) and the good jobs always found someone with a bit of real-life experience who they didn't have to "train" to be a worker instead of a student. I know it's not a help right now, but trust me once you do have a few years experience that education will pull you out of the ranks and into senior positions. I was interviewing recently for a job and the CFO (100 man company) commented that he had a great deal of respect for my degree, even though it's 7 years since I graduated. And I got the job too, though in my case I'm just looking for a better job in an economy that is recovering much better than the US one.
TLA WTF IMO, YMMV.
Well, I can sort of see two use cases here. On many corporate installs the version is intentionally held back, and then you don't want the user to be bugged on every launch about upgrades that he can't and aren't supposed to install. I have had that at times and it's very frustrating. I do understand it sucks for anyone being their own admin though.
It might be different if you use an updater client thingie, but my IP never changes so I don't bother.
On linux at least:
sudo apt-get install ddclient
Answer a few simple questions of provider, username, password and domain
That's it. Your computer will now update itself wherever you go, if you change provider, if you bring the pc anywhere else... it's brillient.
Precisely one of the points about Mars and other places outside of Earth. Without reaching to them, life will die out. We're in the phase of first small steps in ensuring it won't.
That's one side, the other is that this is a bit like putting a newborn on a treadmill to teach it to run as fast as possible. Near as we can tell Earth has been quite hospitable for the last 65 million years or so, it'll quite probably last another million. Can you imagine year 1002010 AD? The whole of human history is only 100,000 years old, the earliest writings are 6000 years old and we've only been doing proper science since the Scientific Revolution some 500 years ago. If we can figure out how to not kill each other and not kill the planet, there's plenty of time.
A lot of things are possible if you essentially use brute force, with a big enough chemical rocket we can probably reach Mars but it won't get us to a different solar system. For that we need scientific breakthroughs that you won't get from building a conventional rocket, no matter how great a wonder of engineering it is. Right now, what excites me the most are telescopes and finding exoplanets. We may be far away from the Star Trek warp drive to go there, but seeing them now seems within reach. Not to mention it'd give a clear goal of where we'd like to go...