Posters who date from the Usenet era may remember Alexander Abian, known for "VENUS MUST BE MOVED INTO AN EARTH-LIKE ORBIT" and other kookery. If there's an afterlife, I imagine he's capering and kicking his heels high at the moment.
Buffett himself is doing quite well. But the ordinary people who agree with his views are not any wealthier than the ordinary people who invested in bitcoin.
The ordinary people who are Berkshire shareholders are doing just fine, thanks. I don't know if all of us "agree with his views" but most of us rather appreciate his investing and business performance.
Google isn't innovating here. Overdrive has been around for quite a while and provides a very nice search interface showing which ebooks are available at your selected libraries. Also considerable integration with local libraries appears to be happening.
I've been very happy with Gandi.net for my modest needs over the last decade. No problems, reasonable responses from tech support to the occasional question, cheap, and not based in the United States, which I consider a plus. I mostly use it for email and web forwarding, though.
Becoming a millionaire over the course of a working lifetime isn't too challenging. Stay employed and put 15-20% of your income into broad-market index funds every year without fail. Don't throw it away on booze, drugs, or houses in a housing bubble. That said, a million bucks isn't a lot of money - it is maybe just barely retirement money at the same standard of living you had while employed.
Becoming a multimillionaire over the course of a few years is pretty challenging, and if that's what the survey really means, those people are mostly going to be disappointed.
Re:They still have their open source projects up
on
SGI Arises From the Ashes
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· Score: 4, Informative
Those graphics projects are all dead and rotting. There is no graphics engineering left at SGI. All laid off back in March. The only remaining connection between SGI and OpenGL is that they hold the trademark, but the actual standard now evolves within the Khronos organization, primarily through contributions by ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel.
Nonsense. Companies can issue restricted stock grants, just for example. And expensing is certainly not a Big Win (TM) for "large corporations"; companies like Intel and Cisco will take a major earnings hit from option expensing. Which is why they've been fighting expensing so hard.
What's absurd about it? Driver's license are not in fact required for any of those activities (and in fact the VISA merchant agreement specifically prohibits requiring ID on card-present transactions in most cases). There are alternate forms of ID and age authentication, such as passports, birth certificates, utility bills, and so on.
I don't believe I've shown my DL to anyone more than half a dozen times outside an airport in my adult lifetime, and I've never let them read the magnetic strip, except for the one time I was pulled over by a cop. Which was related to, you know, driving.
See Surgical Eyes for some possible downsides. It is a site run by the small minority of people who do have complications from LASIK and other eye surgeries, so you have to take their viewpoint with a grain of salt - but nonetheless it's good to know what the worst-case scenario might be.
I second that. I once got a newly hired manager who was, a few months later, convicted of stealing trade secrets from his previous employer. He was a real jerk and created a lot of disruption in the few months he was with us. But because he had not been convicted at the time we hired him, we had no idea this might happen - the employment application only asks if you have been convicted of a crime, not whether you are being prosecuted for one.
That employer started doing background checks on new hires after that experience...
Woohoo! Let's get everyone to drive consistantly 10-15 miles (for you yanks) / hour over the limit and maybe they will raise that too!
Well, actually that is sort of the way it works in some parts of the US - if too large a fraction of traffic is documented to be moving above the limit, speeding tickets will not hold up in court.
Releasing OpenInventor as OpenSource is an attempt to regain mindshare in the scene graph API space that they lost when Fahrenheit was dumped back to MS.
Microsoft announced that they will not be productizing XSG (what they ended up calling the Fahrenheit scene graph). There wasn't any lost mindshare to be gained back.
I also still remember quite vividly that they promised for SEVERAL YEARS!!!!! to make the VRML grammer available for unemcumbered use, and never did, and ultimately sold it to a corportion that merely sat on it.
If you're referring to Cosmo3D, what happened was a little more complex. Cosmo Software was spun off and acquired by Platinum, who did publically commit to open sourcing Cosmo3D. However, Platinum was then acquired by CAI (at which point I believe the remaining Cosmo engineers left or were laid off), and CAI didn't follow through.
For the most part it is. I'm curious, what part of OpenGL isn't orthogonal? Last time I read the spec, I didn't see any discretions. Maybe Jon Leech can point out a few?
Well, there are certainly a few warts on OpenGL that in retrospect would have been done differently. Without trying to be inclusive:
Texture borders are not supported on almost all hardware and in retrospect wouldn't have been a great loss.
Texture objects were introduced in OpenGL 1.1 to replace the previous notion of putting textures in display lists. The idea was that display lists could be automatically optimized depending on their contents, but it was difficult for app writers to understand what they needed to put in the lists, and the optimizations weren't done on many systems.
Some additional flags/hints on vertex arrays could prove very useful for geometry acceleration.
I'm sure other people would have different lists. OpenGL is not a perfect API, of course - but we think it's pretty darned good.
I don't know how you could consider it not open source; please read the license.
Being "GPL-compatible" is a red herring. Mesa is now under the X license, and the Sample Implementation we just released is under a license designed to be compatible with the X license, in both cases for the same reason: so that the code can be incorporated into XFree86. XFree86 is, if you will, "GPL-incompatible" and that is a conscious decision by the XFree86 project.
If you have questions about our licensing, please check the FAQ. It goes into a lot more detail.
However, I notice that the terms of the release are defined as "Sample Implementation." What does this mean? Is this a less-than-full release? Do we have all of the source, or just part of it?
"Sample Implementation" means that the code serves as a reference to how the OpenGL, GLX, and GLU APIs are supposed to work. It's also used by our current licensees (and hopefully by open source projects in the future) as a starting point for writing hardware drivers.
The release includes what our commercial licensees have been receiving, except for a handful of optional elements that SGI does not own, such as tuned geometry acceleration for different CPUs. Hopefully the other companies involved will choose to open up those pieces too.
Basically, this is one part - albeit a big part - of the set of things that go into an OpenGL driver.
What will happen to Mesa now? Who will assimilate who?
It's not obvious that anybody will necessarily assimilate anybody. Let me be perfectly clear that we are not doing this to "kill Mesa" or anything idiotic like that. Mesa has a lot of good stuff in it and, unlike the Sample Implementation, there are some open source Mesa hardware drivers available today. On the other hand, the SI does some things that Mesa does not, and almost all closed source hardware drivers are based off the SI - so companies who choose to open source their own drivers in the future will be able to do so now.
There are a lot of ways we may be able to share code and work together, and we've been in touch with Brian Paul about this for quite a while. None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.
Kit writes: VA is working with nVidia on the drivers in much the same way that Precision Insight did the work with neoMagic some time ago.
Actually, SGI and NVIDIA are doing all the OpenGL driver work. VA is working on the XAA driver, not on 3D.
These drivers are not based on DRI. DRI is just one way to access the 3D hardware, and it's not a particularly appropriate way for this type of hardware. But these details are not important to end users - the API and the ABI are what matter to applications, not the driver internals.
We have made no such announcement. As SGI CTO Kurt Akeley says in the article I referenced:
We have established IRIX/MIPS roadmaps, product schedules, and plans that extend out to a minimum of 2006. For us to accurately predict or make absolute statements about the state or direction of the industry further out than that-well, no one can do that. Even so, we have made three fundamental operational and operating systems decisions. They are:
SGI is an IRIX/MIPS and Linux/IA company.
IRIX and MIPS will continue for a long time.
SGI is going to get more serious about IA-32 machines. IA-64 isn't the only architecture of the future.
On the hardware side of the IRIX/MIPS commitment, SGI has extended its MIPS/RISC processor roadmap through the year 2006, and beyond if demand warrants, through development of at least four more MIPS processors and through MIPS processors running at more than 1 GHz.
SGI does not plan to abandon IRIX. This is pure FUD spread by competitors. The future for SGI is IRIX on MIPS, Linux on IA-32 and IA-64, and adding highend and scalability features to Linux so it can do more and more of what our customers do on IRIX today.
Chill. This has no effect on portability of code to BSD. No code will result from this (other than maybe a simple test suite to verify that the libraries and headers are in the right place and export the right symbols). It's just a way to organize libraries and header files on a specific OS. Mesa, for example, is not going to be any less portable to FreeBSD because it puts the libraries in one place as opposed to another when built on Linux.
GLboolean represents a yes/no value. It has to be an addressable quantity since you can pass pointers to arrays of them to some GL calls. The smallest addressable quantity is a byte, so that's a reasonable choice.
This is NOT an announcement of any kind of SGI product launch - or any new OpenSource package or anything exciting like that. Apart from the fact that SGI are hosting the mailing list and web site on one of their computers, it isn't even a particularly SGI-releated thing at all!
Right. This is the same idea as the LSB, but targeted specifically at OpenGL and trying to work on a faster timescale, since 3D acceleration is starting to happen in a big way on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Posters who date from the Usenet era may remember Alexander Abian, known for "VENUS MUST BE MOVED INTO AN EARTH-LIKE ORBIT" and other kookery. If there's an afterlife, I imagine he's capering and kicking his heels high at the moment.
Buffett himself is doing quite well. But the ordinary people who agree with his views are not any wealthier than the ordinary people who invested in bitcoin.
The ordinary people who are Berkshire shareholders are doing just fine, thanks. I don't know if all of us "agree with his views" but most of us rather appreciate his investing and business performance.
Google isn't innovating here. Overdrive has been around for quite a while and provides a very nice search interface showing which ebooks are available at your selected libraries. Also considerable integration with local libraries appears to be happening.
I've been very happy with Gandi.net for my modest needs over the last decade. No problems, reasonable responses from tech support to the occasional question, cheap, and not based in the United States, which I consider a plus. I mostly use it for email and web forwarding, though.
Becoming a millionaire over the course of a working lifetime isn't too challenging. Stay employed and put 15-20% of your income into broad-market index funds every year without fail. Don't throw it away on booze, drugs, or houses in a housing bubble. That said, a million bucks isn't a lot of money - it is maybe just barely retirement money at the same standard of living you had while employed.
Becoming a multimillionaire over the course of a few years is pretty challenging, and if that's what the survey really means, those people are mostly going to be disappointed.
Those graphics projects are all dead and rotting. There is no graphics engineering left at SGI. All laid off back in March. The only remaining connection between SGI and OpenGL is that they hold the trademark, but the actual standard now evolves within the Khronos organization, primarily through contributions by ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel.
Nonsense. Companies can issue restricted stock grants, just for example. And expensing is certainly not a Big Win (TM) for "large corporations"; companies like Intel and Cisco will take a major earnings hit from option expensing. Which is why they've been fighting expensing so hard.
What's absurd about it? Driver's license are not in fact required for any of those activities (and in fact the VISA merchant agreement specifically prohibits requiring ID on card-present transactions in most cases). There are alternate forms of ID and age authentication, such as passports, birth certificates, utility bills, and so on.
I don't believe I've shown my DL to anyone more than half a dozen times outside an airport in my adult lifetime, and I've never let them read the magnetic strip, except for the one time I was pulled over by a cop. Which was related to, you know, driving.
See Surgical Eyes for some possible downsides. It is a site run by the small minority of people who do have complications from LASIK and other eye surgeries, so you have to take their viewpoint with a grain of salt - but nonetheless it's good to know what the worst-case scenario might be.
That's why I have a loyalty card in my wallet with a fake name and address, and always pay cash.
I second that. I once got a newly hired manager who was, a few months later, convicted of stealing trade secrets from his previous employer. He was a real jerk and created a lot of disruption in the few months he was with us. But because he had not been convicted at the time we hired him, we had no idea this might happen - the employment application only asks if you have been convicted of a crime, not whether you are being prosecuted for one.
That employer started doing background checks on new hires after that experience...
Woohoo! Let's get everyone to drive consistantly 10-15 miles (for you yanks) / hour over the limit and maybe they will raise that too!
Well, actually that is sort of the way it works in some parts of the US - if too large a fraction of traffic is documented to be moving above the limit, speeding tickets will not hold up in court.
SGI... Now isn't that funny. ;-)
No, that's not funny. That's ridiculous. As far as SGI is concerned, there is nothing preventing NVIDIA from open sourcing their drivers.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
Microsoft announced that they will not be productizing XSG (what they ended up calling the Fahrenheit scene graph). There wasn't any lost mindshare to be gained back.
I also still remember quite vividly that they promised for SEVERAL YEARS!!!!! to make the VRML grammer available for unemcumbered use, and never did, and ultimately sold it to a corportion that merely sat on it.
If you're referring to Cosmo3D, what happened was a little more complex. Cosmo Software was spun off and acquired by Platinum, who did publically commit to open sourcing Cosmo3D. However, Platinum was then acquired by CAI (at which point I believe the remaining Cosmo engineers left or were laid off), and CAI didn't follow through.
Well, there are certainly a few warts on OpenGL that in retrospect would have been done differently. Without trying to be inclusive:
I'm sure other people would have different lists. OpenGL is not a perfect API, of course - but we think it's pretty darned good.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
I don't know how you could consider it not open source; please read the license.
Being "GPL-compatible" is a red herring. Mesa is now under the X license, and the Sample Implementation we just released is under a license designed to be compatible with the X license, in both cases for the same reason: so that the code can be incorporated into XFree86. XFree86 is, if you will, "GPL-incompatible" and that is a conscious decision by the XFree86 project.
If you have questions about our licensing, please check the FAQ. It goes into a lot more detail.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
"Sample Implementation" means that the code serves as a reference to how the OpenGL, GLX, and GLU APIs are supposed to work. It's also used by our current licensees (and hopefully by open source projects in the future) as a starting point for writing hardware drivers.
The release includes what our commercial licensees have been receiving, except for a handful of optional elements that SGI does not own, such as tuned geometry acceleration for different CPUs. Hopefully the other companies involved will choose to open up those pieces too.
Basically, this is one part - albeit a big part - of the set of things that go into an OpenGL driver.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
It's not obvious that anybody will necessarily assimilate anybody. Let me be perfectly clear that we are not doing this to "kill Mesa" or anything idiotic like that. Mesa has a lot of good stuff in it and, unlike the Sample Implementation, there are some open source Mesa hardware drivers available today. On the other hand, the SI does some things that Mesa does not, and almost all closed source hardware drivers are based off the SI - so companies who choose to open source their own drivers in the future will be able to do so now.
There are a lot of ways we may be able to share code and work together, and we've been in touch with Brian Paul about this for quite a while. None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.
Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI
Actually, SGI and NVIDIA are doing all the OpenGL driver work. VA is working on the XAA driver, not on 3D.
These drivers are not based on DRI. DRI is just one way to access the 3D hardware, and it's not a particularly appropriate way for this type of hardware. But these details are not important to end users - the API and the ABI are what matter to applications, not the driver internals.
Jon Leech
SGI
SGI does not plan to abandon IRIX. This is pure FUD spread by competitors. The future for SGI is IRIX on MIPS, Linux on IA-32 and IA-64, and adding highend and scalability features to Linux so it can do more and more of what our customers do on IRIX today.
Chill. This has no effect on portability of code to BSD. No code will result from this (other than maybe a simple test suite to verify that the libraries and headers are in the right place and export the right symbols). It's just a way to organize libraries and header files on a specific OS. Mesa, for example, is not going to be any less portable to FreeBSD because it puts the libraries in one place as opposed to another when built on Linux.
GLboolean represents a yes/no value. It has to be an addressable quantity since you can pass pointers to arrays of them to some GL calls. The smallest addressable quantity is a byte, so that's a reasonable choice.
Right. This is the same idea as the LSB, but targeted specifically at OpenGL and trying to work on a faster timescale, since 3D acceleration is starting to happen in a big way on Linux.
Yes. SGI's GLU implementation is written in C++.