No, they aren't. Of course they are very good for whoever holds them, but they are by no means necessary to anything. As they are now, they basically enable cartels and racketeers. Without them, enterprise would be a lot freer. Yes, there would be lots of knock-offs, but if your product isn't better nor cheaper than the copies, why should anyone protect your greedy or incompetent ass?
"Lots" in a 7.2 billion is easy. It isn't even close to "most", though. Usually people who invent work for big companies, who don't really have a need for patents anyway. Patents are supposed to give you some time to be the first to exploit your idea, thus avoiding some big corporation from leveraging their massive capital to beat you to the market. What happens is companies either employ the inventors, since they are the ones who have money for R&D, or buy the patents outright and them proceed to abuse them.
Well, both Intel and Linux have come a long way since the Pentium 4 era, so I don't think it's fair to use a 10-year-old chipset as an example to avoid Intel GPUs now. Is also isn't fair comparing a 2002 iGPU to a 2007 iGPU. Of course the 7025 still works and is supported - it's much newer. My 2003 FX card, however, won't render anything GTK3 properly, it's completely abandoned by Nvidia and a very low priority for nouveau developers.
Well, it could be the aim. Right now it isn't feasible. ATI simply knows much more about its products, and a lot sooner, than open source developers. That's where it has to change for comparable performance to be attainable. And I am in full agreement - Intel is doing it right. As a result, ever since Sandy Bridge's launch, Intel's crappy graphics always have the best possible support. They're still a bit on the crappy side, which is to be expected since Intel has only started taking graphics seriously about a year ago, but rapidly improving.
So not supporting OpenGL features which the hardware is capable of and running with abysmal performance is "just fine"? The performance of the open source Radeon drivers is utter crap and something that should actually shame AMD. But they don't give a shit.
The open source driver is not meant to be better than the blob in terms of performance. It's meant to evolve much slower, but to support older cards much longer and to work more closely with open source projects. Fglrx is often slow to react to newer Xorg ABIs, for example, and in such cases radeon is there to pick up the slack. It isn't perfect when running any modern card, but it gives you a desktop, good video playback and all. Gaming is still far behind, but it's very possible to play a lot of older titles.
The alternative, Nvidia, is worse, in my opinion. The blob is good when it's running, but getting it to run (and keep it running, especially if you use their crappy installer) can be quite a bit more troublesome. And nouveau sucks, so you pretty much have to rely on the blob. When they stop supporting your chip, chances are nouveau isn't going to support it either, because they have limited manpower and coding blindly is way harder. Look at the state of NV3x and NV4x with GTK3. Nvidia doesn't work. Neither does nouveau. So I simply can't run it unless I use the soon-to-be-deprecated fallback mode (granted, this wasn't a big deal until Cinnamon was released). So we have two drivers, but I can't render a desktop on a card that can still play Portal 2.
I also forgot it hit the shelves about six months later than its rival devices. All in all, seems like it has a lot of flaws, then. Still good hardware on a very durable device, though. Hopefully Google can at least point Motorola in the right direction.
A Nexus RAZR would be very interesting indeed. The worst thing about Motorola's Android offerings was their crap skin (Motoblur, anyone?). The phones themselves are good (well, the Defy is arguably the best rugged phone, the Atrix was vastly underpowered for what it intended to do but the idea was nifty and the RAZR's only flaw was to be pricier than a comparable Galaxy SII), IMHO.
$485 per week. That's taxed, of course, so what you actually get comes out to something slightly over $1600/mo.
If you live in the middle of nowhere and own your property, that might possibly be comfortable. Maybe. For some definition of comfortable.
Veering off on a tangent, here. That sort of judgement is mind-bogging to me, because it's quite possible to live comfortably here in Brazil with $200 per week, if you own your own place. That's actually the average salary. And no, life is not in any way cheap around here, especially if you're spoiled; look at this article. Now don't get me wrong, I think companies underpay employees around the world, too - even in the US, where people talk about six-figure annual salaries (the only way a non-CEO can earn that, around here, is winning the lottery) -, and that's an easy conclusion when you look at their profits (or their executives' salaries). I also agree that dependants (especially kids and old people) have a super cutesy way of draining a lot of money. I'm only getting at how even middle class people who live in rich countries (and those who are rich in poor countries) can get so disconnected from economic efficiency in their daily lives, so spoiled. Not that it's inherently good or bad, and there's a case to be made for what's possibly the only upside of our post-industrial society with its factories on steroids increasingly pumping more and more worthless crap because it has a better ROR than entering a commodity market (its upside and its cause), that it's there and we might as well put it to some good use. But I can't even imagine myself sanely spending more than $3000 per month, frankly, and seeing people who earn six figures annualy still indebted to banks is honestly horrifying.
Linus didn't take the perfect poilitical road. Nvidia, in their statement, did. The thing is Linus was complaining about some very real problems, while Nvidia's statement was void of any substance on the matter. And I'll take childish profanities over neglect, suspicion and condescension any day.
Oh I get it, all music should be done by singular musicians with little aspiration beyond making their music?
If it were up to me, yes, and I think not only we, but also music would be much better off. That's not what jedidiah suggested, though. Just that it's a very, very low minimum requirement.
It does have a moderately high inflation rate (though not much more than the dollar), but such correction is made separately. So, if inflation in the period was calculated to be 0.09%, you get that plus the 0.5% + referential rate. Unless the bank's overnight rate falls below 8.5% (that's per year), then savings accounts will give you 70% of that rate (plus correction for inflation). This move is quite recent and happened because a savings account really was becoming too attractive. And the money is secured, but only up to about $10k. You can also withdraw whenever you want, instantly. And the bank can leverage your money, but only by financing housing (new houses, by the way, not mortgages).
So it's actually totally different than what happens in the US, I found out. We do have investments that are more akin to savings accounts how you know them, but they are usually compounded daily and fees and income taxes are applied. If you have more than $25000 to invest, though, 0.8% per month was still quite feasible, last time I checked.
Only that's not what they're doing. Dumping support on the community would be amazing. Release specs, open source the drivers and the community will be ecstatic. Porting new or making custom roms would then be trivial. What they do is withhold their crap. The community then makes an herculean effort to support a closed device. The sad thing is, and you can see it clearly on Cyanogen, that they manage to do a way better job then the manufacturer in the first place.
By the way, I have a Optimus Hub and a ZTE Blade. Both are, by far, not flagships, and they are officially supported by CM.
Not hard at all to install and better in every way than any official update - more configurability, less bloat, better defaults, less reliant on hacky apps to correct shit that should work properly in the first place (WiFi keep alive, call slider etc.)..
Other than that, the current Tizen push to have no native software at all, focusing entirely on HTML5 software (which, in the face of Android and iOS support for native development is suicide.)
I don't see other option, though. Once a platform is dominant, it gets a bit harder to end the vicious circle of no programs, therefore no users, therefore no programs... see Windows. RIM and Nokia were kings, Apple came and made a much, much better platform. Then iOS became quite ubiquitous, and Android was a genius move. If any one manufacturer came up with a new platform, it would have to be way, way better than iOS for users and developers to make a leap of faith together, agood enough to beat Apple on the hype game. Very unlikely. But as they all sort of united, then it became a very good idea to code for Android as its huge adoption was foreseeable. Now, to try and beat Android on user base, you could use HTML5 - code once for pretty much every device.
The parent thought you would be able to figure out he meant, quite obviously, 0.8% per month. I do know that people from the US tend to use yearly figures when talking about finance, but could the whole lot of you really not fill in such a simple blank? There are people out here that tend to talk about monthly rates when the money is compouded monthly. How crazy are we, right? Also, 0.8% a year would be pathetically low. Didn't that raise any sort of suspicion? Though it is a bit high for a monthly rate - the last time savings account hit such high here was in 2005. Nowadays 0.6% is much more common.
That's a good comparison, because they have been made for similar uses, showcase equal performance and capabilities, cost about the same and are roughly the same size. If it's only durability you're concerned about, though, a huge brick of gold is a much better choice than either of them.
Here's a random thought: if you take the money you'd use to buy a MacBook ($1200) and deposit it on a savings account (0.8%), you'll be able to afford a new Pi every 2.6 months on interest alone, thus having pretty much infinitely replaceable Pis. It will be exactly one MacBook cheaper than buying a MacBook and if the Pis resist more than a few months, you can cluster them at will.
Well, you can count on a company's track record, to some extend. Apple will often update old iPhones (sans most new features), most others will only update flagship devices once (though the Nexus line is sort of a LTS release and such devices receive more updates), Sony will mess it up and/or remove old features you had, while suing you, your family, your dog and leaving a bag of shit on your doorstep.
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No, they aren't. Of course they are very good for whoever holds them, but they are by no means necessary to anything. As they are now, they basically enable cartels and racketeers. Without them, enterprise would be a lot freer. Yes, there would be lots of knock-offs, but if your product isn't better nor cheaper than the copies, why should anyone protect your greedy or incompetent ass?
"Lots" in a 7.2 billion is easy. It isn't even close to "most", though. Usually people who invent work for big companies, who don't really have a need for patents anyway. Patents are supposed to give you some time to be the first to exploit your idea, thus avoiding some big corporation from leveraging their massive capital to beat you to the market. What happens is companies either employ the inventors, since they are the ones who have money for R&D, or buy the patents outright and them proceed to abuse them.
Because it's a recruiting ad. And we really don't want the average scientist to be as smart as the average consumer.
Well, both Intel and Linux have come a long way since the Pentium 4 era, so I don't think it's fair to use a 10-year-old chipset as an example to avoid Intel GPUs now. Is also isn't fair comparing a 2002 iGPU to a 2007 iGPU. Of course the 7025 still works and is supported - it's much newer. My 2003 FX card, however, won't render anything GTK3 properly, it's completely abandoned by Nvidia and a very low priority for nouveau developers.
Well, it could be the aim. Right now it isn't feasible. ATI simply knows much more about its products, and a lot sooner, than open source developers. That's where it has to change for comparable performance to be attainable. And I am in full agreement - Intel is doing it right. As a result, ever since Sandy Bridge's launch, Intel's crappy graphics always have the best possible support. They're still a bit on the crappy side, which is to be expected since Intel has only started taking graphics seriously about a year ago, but rapidly improving.
So not supporting OpenGL features which the hardware is capable of and running with abysmal performance is "just fine"? The performance of the open source Radeon drivers is utter crap and something that should actually shame AMD. But they don't give a shit.
The open source driver is not meant to be better than the blob in terms of performance. It's meant to evolve much slower, but to support older cards much longer and to work more closely with open source projects. Fglrx is often slow to react to newer Xorg ABIs, for example, and in such cases radeon is there to pick up the slack. It isn't perfect when running any modern card, but it gives you a desktop, good video playback and all. Gaming is still far behind, but it's very possible to play a lot of older titles.
The alternative, Nvidia, is worse, in my opinion. The blob is good when it's running, but getting it to run (and keep it running, especially if you use their crappy installer) can be quite a bit more troublesome. And nouveau sucks, so you pretty much have to rely on the blob. When they stop supporting your chip, chances are nouveau isn't going to support it either, because they have limited manpower and coding blindly is way harder. Look at the state of NV3x and NV4x with GTK3. Nvidia doesn't work. Neither does nouveau. So I simply can't run it unless I use the soon-to-be-deprecated fallback mode (granted, this wasn't a big deal until Cinnamon was released). So we have two drivers, but I can't render a desktop on a card that can still play Portal 2.
I also forgot it hit the shelves about six months later than its rival devices. All in all, seems like it has a lot of flaws, then. Still good hardware on a very durable device, though. Hopefully Google can at least point Motorola in the right direction.
A Nexus RAZR would be very interesting indeed. The worst thing about Motorola's Android offerings was their crap skin (Motoblur, anyone?). The phones themselves are good (well, the Defy is arguably the best rugged phone, the Atrix was vastly underpowered for what it intended to do but the idea was nifty and the RAZR's only flaw was to be pricier than a comparable Galaxy SII), IMHO.
$485 per week. That's taxed, of course, so what you actually get comes out to something slightly over $1600/mo.
If you live in the middle of nowhere and own your property, that might possibly be comfortable. Maybe. For some definition of comfortable.
Veering off on a tangent, here. That sort of judgement is mind-bogging to me, because it's quite possible to live comfortably here in Brazil with $200 per week, if you own your own place. That's actually the average salary. And no, life is not in any way cheap around here, especially if you're spoiled; look at this article. Now don't get me wrong, I think companies underpay employees around the world, too - even in the US, where people talk about six-figure annual salaries (the only way a non-CEO can earn that, around here, is winning the lottery) -, and that's an easy conclusion when you look at their profits (or their executives' salaries). I also agree that dependants (especially kids and old people) have a super cutesy way of draining a lot of money. I'm only getting at how even middle class people who live in rich countries (and those who are rich in poor countries) can get so disconnected from economic efficiency in their daily lives, so spoiled. Not that it's inherently good or bad, and there's a case to be made for what's possibly the only upside of our post-industrial society with its factories on steroids increasingly pumping more and more worthless crap because it has a better ROR than entering a commodity market (its upside and its cause), that it's there and we might as well put it to some good use. But I can't even imagine myself sanely spending more than $3000 per month, frankly, and seeing people who earn six figures annualy still indebted to banks is honestly horrifying.
Linus didn't take the perfect poilitical road. Nvidia, in their statement, did. The thing is Linus was complaining about some very real problems, while Nvidia's statement was void of any substance on the matter. And I'll take childish profanities over neglect, suspicion and condescension any day.
Well... it kind of happened. Only we called it feudalism. And, as far as we can see, it "ended" exactly where we are.
Republicans are killing home fucking!
This is true to all sorts of advertising.
Oh I get it, all music should be done by singular musicians with little aspiration beyond making their music?
If it were up to me, yes, and I think not only we, but also music would be much better off. That's not what jedidiah suggested, though. Just that it's a very, very low minimum requirement.
It does have a moderately high inflation rate (though not much more than the dollar), but such correction is made separately. So, if inflation in the period was calculated to be 0.09%, you get that plus the 0.5% + referential rate. Unless the bank's overnight rate falls below 8.5% (that's per year), then savings accounts will give you 70% of that rate (plus correction for inflation). This move is quite recent and happened because a savings account really was becoming too attractive. And the money is secured, but only up to about $10k. You can also withdraw whenever you want, instantly. And the bank can leverage your money, but only by financing housing (new houses, by the way, not mortgages).
So it's actually totally different than what happens in the US, I found out. We do have investments that are more akin to savings accounts how you know them, but they are usually compounded daily and fees and income taxes are applied. If you have more than $25000 to invest, though, 0.8% per month was still quite feasible, last time I checked.
Only that's not what they're doing. Dumping support on the community would be amazing. Release specs, open source the drivers and the community will be ecstatic. Porting new or making custom roms would then be trivial. What they do is withhold their crap. The community then makes an herculean effort to support a closed device. The sad thing is, and you can see it clearly on Cyanogen, that they manage to do a way better job then the manufacturer in the first place.
By the way, I have a Optimus Hub and a ZTE Blade. Both are, by far, not flagships, and they are officially supported by CM.
They really should. It's plain and simple laziness, since a GHz processor and 512Mb of RAM should handle ICS like a champ. Meanwhile, there's http://www.cyanogenmod.com/devices/samsung-galaxy-s
Not hard at all to install and better in every way than any official update - more configurability, less bloat, better defaults, less reliant on hacky apps to correct shit that should work properly in the first place (WiFi keep alive, call slider etc.)..
Other than that, the current Tizen push to have no native software at all, focusing entirely on HTML5 software (which, in the face of Android and iOS support for native development is suicide.)
I don't see other option, though. Once a platform is dominant, it gets a bit harder to end the vicious circle of no programs, therefore no users, therefore no programs... see Windows. RIM and Nokia were kings, Apple came and made a much, much better platform. Then iOS became quite ubiquitous, and Android was a genius move. If any one manufacturer came up with a new platform, it would have to be way, way better than iOS for users and developers to make a leap of faith together, agood enough to beat Apple on the hype game. Very unlikely. But as they all sort of united, then it became a very good idea to code for Android as its huge adoption was foreseeable. Now, to try and beat Android on user base, you could use HTML5 - code once for pretty much every device.
The parent thought you would be able to figure out he meant, quite obviously, 0.8% per month. I do know that people from the US tend to use yearly figures when talking about finance, but could the whole lot of you really not fill in such a simple blank? There are people out here that tend to talk about monthly rates when the money is compouded monthly. How crazy are we, right? Also, 0.8% a year would be pathetically low. Didn't that raise any sort of suspicion? Though it is a bit high for a monthly rate - the last time savings account hit such high here was in 2005. Nowadays 0.6% is much more common.
That's a good comparison, because they have been made for similar uses, showcase equal performance and capabilities, cost about the same and are roughly the same size. If it's only durability you're concerned about, though, a huge brick of gold is a much better choice than either of them.
Here's a random thought: if you take the money you'd use to buy a MacBook ($1200) and deposit it on a savings account (0.8%), you'll be able to afford a new Pi every 2.6 months on interest alone, thus having pretty much infinitely replaceable Pis. It will be exactly one MacBook cheaper than buying a MacBook and if the Pis resist more than a few months, you can cluster them at will.
Well, you can count on a company's track record, to some extend. Apple will often update old iPhones (sans most new features), most others will only update flagship devices once (though the Nexus line is sort of a LTS release and such devices receive more updates), Sony will mess it up and/or remove old features you had, while suing you, your family, your dog and leaving a bag of shit on your doorstep.
Sure, I'll give that software a try. What's its name, again?
Too bad they can't sell it because of past contractual agreements. The portal making device doesn't run nor is run by WP7.
Indefinite detention is a death sentence, it only takes way longer.
Shagging women? Most men: guilty.
Wanna bet? $100, and we decide the winner with a /. poll...