4 years? Where are you getting that number? The initial commit in Git of the r600g driver was in May 2010. May 2010 to July 2011 is not even close to 5 years.
The r600g driver was reworked based on capabilities present in the r300 driver.
Even if you count r300g (which you shouldn't, since their capabilities are different enough to warrant 2 different drivers), the first commit to r300g was in January 2009. That's 2.5 years, not 4.
For example, the Lightsmart benchmarks come in at around 25%.
That's not the Radeon driver's problem. All Mesa-based drivers have had similarly poor performance in Lightsmark for a long time, which suggests a shared CPU bottleneck.
Actually, another way to look at it is, all Gallium drivers exhibit similarly poor performance in intensive tests/use. But the point is, it's an alternative driver. Great! But it doesn't mean it's better. People buy hardware for performance, specifically, graphics cards. Perhaps the performance will someday surpass that of the proprietary driver. But it's not exactly newsworthy until it is at least equal or surpasses.
It is newsworthy because there are other aspects to graphics drivers besides 3D performance in benchmarks. Specifically, the open driver is more stable than Catalyst and has better 2D performance, and people care about those things too. Improved 3D performance, even if not quite up to the level of Catalyst, addresses the main remaining problem with the open driver. It doesn't necessarily have to have equal or greater performance to reach equal or greater quality for most users.
Even though the FOSS driver stack doesn't use either of those licenses. The entire stack was MIT/X11-licensed last I checked, including the kernel parts.
The Gallium3D driver has been under development for nearly 4 years. Out of the box they where able to get roughly 30-40%, so, after 3 years, it increased roughly 10% per year. So yea, for 100%, itd be about 5 years. It should be noted that it performs in selected tests at that speed, NOT across the board. The more complicated and graphics rich the test, the worse the open source driver does.
4 years? Where are you getting that number? The initial commit in Git of the r600g driver was in May 2010. May 2010 to July 2011 is not even close to 5 years.
For example, the Lightsmart benchmarks come in at around 25%.
That's not the Radeon driver's problem. All Mesa-based drivers have had similarly poor performance in Lightsmark for a long time, which suggests a shared CPU bottleneck.
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off.
Wewt! I can get speed improvements! Now, at their current rate or increase, it will only take 5 years for the driver to be able to perform at the same level as the proprietary driver.
Um, no. The 3D driver in question is the R600 Gallium driver, which only started development a year ago. So at the "current rate of increase", it would take a few more months to reach the same level as the proprietary driver.
Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project. And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
So, a product which is developed for years and has only recently achieved 60% of what the commercial driver can do *isnt* crap.
Correct. A product which has been developed with maybe 5% of the manpower of the commercial driver, has better 2D performance, is more stable, and has 60% of the 3D performance is not crap,.
There's also the worthwhile argument of power management - the open drivers don't have very good power management yet. Especially for Nouveau, where power management on almost every card is still a work in (rapid) progress. And it's complicated too, because you have to read information from the VBIOS, and half the time the VBIOS is broken in some way or another. And there are too many for the developers to test all of them.
The proprietary drivers, on the other hand, have generally working power management for most all cards that they support.
My 4G Android phone says on the status bar at the top of the screen whether it's currently getting 2G, 3G, 4G, or no data service at all. Unless that icon is an LG-specific addition (and I don't see why it would be), I would guess not that many people think that, at least for Android users.
As my first answer, I typed "sanity". So the site offers to help me "find sanity nearby", "explore sanity in 3D", "find patents about sanity", "measure the popularity of sanity on the web" (very low), and my personal favorite, "scour the earth for sanity".
The problem is that Canonical is once again trying to pass off bulky and unfinished crap (Ubuntu Software Center) as a replacement for something stable, full-featured, and useful (Synaptic). The same thing happened with Unity, hence the comparison. After another release or two of Ubuntu, I'll be very surprised if they keep it in the Canonical-supported "main" repository instead of pushing it to universe.
I fail to see the difference between this and using some client-side application, other than the fact that WebGL is a cross-platform spec.
The difference is that even legitimate websites are vulnerable to XSS. Consider all of the recent headlines of the websites of large companies and organizations being cracked. Virtually any site can be cracked and made to run a rogue JavaScript - this actually happened to the OpenGL website itself at one point last year. WebGL makes the threat of XSS even worse than it already is - the driver compiles GLSL to native GPU code, so you don't even have a sandbox.
Not to mention the fact that people, in general, give less thought to clicking on links than they do to running applications on their computer.
I play 3D games on Linux using open drivers. I have an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M using Nouveau. It's a very stable setup that's more than performant enough to play most games at a good framerate.
How is this not the same just changing the naming semantics of the general idea?
I mean can i just patent any idea and substitute a previously defined terms with my own made up one?
Sure you can. Whether the patent will stand in court is another matter.
It takes advantage of our cultural perception of gifts - the perception is that if you buy someone a gift card instead of giving them cash, you must have put more thought into it. Which is complete bullcrap, but that doesn't change things.
A group of security researchers identified a flaw in how some OpenID relying parties implement Attribute Exchange (AX). See below for information on the suggested fix.
The researchers determined that some sites were not confirming that the information passed through AX was signed. That allows an attacker to modify the information. If the site is only using AX to receive low-security information like a users self-asserted gender, then this will probably not be a problem. However if it is being used to receive information that it only trusts the identity provider to assert, then it creates the potential for an attack.
There are no AX attributes that all providers are required to support, nor are there any (as far as I know) available from enough providers to "trust the identity provider" for. Even the basic ones like name and email address can't be relied upon.
Before you log in to a site using OpenID, if you have a decent provider (Google and Launchpad both do this; I don't know about others), it will tell you exactly what information the relying site is asking for, and what it's going to send to the relying party. I have yet to see a relying site that uses AX for anything other than my email address and sometimes my name. And once you register on a site using OpenID, the site will ask you for that information anyway using the AX attributes as default form values if they are available, since AX can't be relied on to provide the information. This "weakness" in OpenID only exists for relying sites that use AX for "information that it only trusts the identity provider to assert", which only exist in theory. Calling this a "serious remote bug" is a joke.
And most importantly, the summary doesn't make clear that even on the theoretical sites where this is an actual problem, your login and valuable personal information cannot be compromised by this vulnerability, because AX is not used for any of that. That is what a "serious remote bug" in OpenID would be.
Now, if Democrats and Republicans are both equally bought and paid for by corporate America, how come only Republicans are trying to gut the EPA, dismantle Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and kill collective bargaining? Those are all core pieces of the corporate agenda. Corporate America doesn't seem to be getting its money's worth from the Democrats.
For one, Republicans are much more openly pro-corporate, which allows them to do much more. Democrats can't get away with openly supporting many of those things without risking the alienation of at least some of their voter base. This doesn't mean that many Democatic politicians wouldn't give more to their campaign donors if they could get away with it.
They're not equally bought and paid for by corporate America, but both Democrats and Republicans are paid for by corporate America.
The claim that Democrats and Republicans are the same is made only by conservatives because it's a response to allegations - made by liberals for obvious reasons - that Republicans are "bought and paid for" by the corporations.
This is so true. The day politicians get their noses out of the school system (especially if No Child Left Behind is ever repealed) would be the day that the school system would begin to have a glimmer of hope.
Because gamers are unreliable. What are they going to do if someone decides in the middle of a game that he's bored and goes to eat some cookies?
And such a game would have to be missing pause functionality for obvious reasons. Risking loss of control of military equipment because some random person wants to answer his cell phone is not a very smart risk.
At the end of your "mission" you're asked whether you'd like to submit your (anonymous) game to the DARPA for them to analyze your tactics and how well they worked out:
As you complete each scenario in the simulation you will be asked if you would like to submit data about your game play to our database for analysis. The data collected doesn't contain any information about you or your computer, or anything else outside of what you did with ACTUV and how well it worked. Good or bad, please agree to submit your data for analysis so that we can see what tactics work (or don't work!).
Who knows... somebody out there might come up with a strategy that nobody ever thought of before.
Don't do it because if you do post a strategy nobody ever though of before, you will get visited by a general the next day and then woosh get beamed up to some spaceship built from alien technology.
Emphasis mine. How can DARPA send someone to meet you if they don't even track who you are?
What, the context of trying to give an answer which would give safety from danger? Isn't that not very godlike? Who's the authority here, Caesar or god?
No, the context in which the word "authoritative" means well-informed instead of exercising control.
Besides, Jesus' entire point was that Caesar and God were both authorities, but with different jurisdictions.
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4 years? Where are you getting that number? The initial commit in Git of the r600g driver was in May 2010. May 2010 to July 2011 is not even close to 5 years.
The r600g driver was reworked based on capabilities present in the r300 driver.
Even if you count r300g (which you shouldn't, since their capabilities are different enough to warrant 2 different drivers), the first commit to r300g was in January 2009. That's 2.5 years, not 4.
For example, the Lightsmart benchmarks come in at around 25%.
That's not the Radeon driver's problem. All Mesa-based drivers have had similarly poor performance in Lightsmark for a long time, which suggests a shared CPU bottleneck.
Actually, another way to look at it is, all Gallium drivers exhibit similarly poor performance in intensive tests/use. But the point is, it's an alternative driver. Great! But it doesn't mean it's better. People buy hardware for performance, specifically, graphics cards. Perhaps the performance will someday surpass that of the proprietary driver. But it's not exactly newsworthy until it is at least equal or surpasses.
It is newsworthy because there are other aspects to graphics drivers besides 3D performance in benchmarks. Specifically, the open driver is more stable than Catalyst and has better 2D performance, and people care about those things too. Improved 3D performance, even if not quite up to the level of Catalyst, addresses the main remaining problem with the open driver. It doesn't necessarily have to have equal or greater performance to reach equal or greater quality for most users.
Even though the FOSS driver stack doesn't use either of those licenses. The entire stack was MIT/X11-licensed last I checked, including the kernel parts.
I think you're being misled. Even R300 cards much older than 2 years are still supported.
The Gallium3D driver has been under development for nearly 4 years. Out of the box they where able to get roughly 30-40%, so, after 3 years, it increased roughly 10% per year. So yea, for 100%, itd be about 5 years. It should be noted that it performs in selected tests at that speed, NOT across the board. The more complicated and graphics rich the test, the worse the open source driver does.
4 years? Where are you getting that number? The initial commit in Git of the r600g driver was in May 2010. May 2010 to July 2011 is not even close to 5 years.
For example, the Lightsmart benchmarks come in at around 25%.
That's not the Radeon driver's problem. All Mesa-based drivers have had similarly poor performance in Lightsmark for a long time, which suggests a shared CPU bottleneck.
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off.
Wewt! I can get speed improvements! Now, at their current rate or increase, it will only take 5 years for the driver to be able to perform at the same level as the proprietary driver.
Um, no. The 3D driver in question is the R600 Gallium driver, which only started development a year ago. So at the "current rate of increase", it would take a few more months to reach the same level as the proprietary driver.
Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project. And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
So, a product which is developed for years and has only recently achieved 60% of what the commercial driver can do *isnt* crap.
Correct. A product which has been developed with maybe 5% of the manpower of the commercial driver, has better 2D performance, is more stable, and has 60% of the 3D performance is not crap,.
There's also the worthwhile argument of power management - the open drivers don't have very good power management yet. Especially for Nouveau, where power management on almost every card is still a work in (rapid) progress. And it's complicated too, because you have to read information from the VBIOS, and half the time the VBIOS is broken in some way or another. And there are too many for the developers to test all of them.
The proprietary drivers, on the other hand, have generally working power management for most all cards that they support.
My 4G Android phone says on the status bar at the top of the screen whether it's currently getting 2G, 3G, 4G, or no data service at all. Unless that icon is an LG-specific addition (and I don't see why it would be), I would guess not that many people think that, at least for Android users.
There is already prior art.
As my first answer, I typed "sanity". So the site offers to help me "find sanity nearby", "explore sanity in 3D", "find patents about sanity", "measure the popularity of sanity on the web" (very low), and my personal favorite, "scour the earth for sanity".
The problem is that Canonical is once again trying to pass off bulky and unfinished crap (Ubuntu Software Center) as a replacement for something stable, full-featured, and useful (Synaptic). The same thing happened with Unity, hence the comparison. After another release or two of Ubuntu, I'll be very surprised if they keep it in the Canonical-supported "main" repository instead of pushing it to universe.
I wish you hadn't been modded down, because you have a valid point.
I fail to see the difference between this and using some client-side application, other than the fact that WebGL is a cross-platform spec.
The difference is that even legitimate websites are vulnerable to XSS. Consider all of the recent headlines of the websites of large companies and organizations being cracked. Virtually any site can be cracked and made to run a rogue JavaScript - this actually happened to the OpenGL website itself at one point last year. WebGL makes the threat of XSS even worse than it already is - the driver compiles GLSL to native GPU code, so you don't even have a sandbox.
Not to mention the fact that people, in general, give less thought to clicking on links than they do to running applications on their computer.
One of the really funny things about defending the way Nintendo does it is that if you buy a new console, you can't even redownload your purchases
Yes, you can. You connect your Nintendo account to your Wii, and when you get a different Wii you connect it to the same Nintendo account.
I play 3D games on Linux using open drivers. I have an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M using Nouveau. It's a very stable setup that's more than performant enough to play most games at a good framerate.
But the likelyhood of seeing it in the next decade is slim partly because of patents and partly because there is no ongoing revenue stream from it.
Yes, it's true, developing new technology is very expensive, and most people / companies don't want to do it unless they can make money on it.
Emphasis mine. It looks like you missed that word in the original post.
How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?
Moses didn't have an ark, so none.
How is this not the same just changing the naming semantics of the general idea? I mean can i just patent any idea and substitute a previously defined terms with my own made up one?
Sure you can. Whether the patent will stand in court is another matter.
It takes advantage of our cultural perception of gifts - the perception is that if you buy someone a gift card instead of giving them cash, you must have put more thought into it. Which is complete bullcrap, but that doesn't change things.
No, the Entertainment Software Association. Think RIAA/MPAA, but for video games.
A group of security researchers identified a flaw in how some OpenID relying parties implement Attribute Exchange (AX). See below for information on the suggested fix. The researchers determined that some sites were not confirming that the information passed through AX was signed. That allows an attacker to modify the information. If the site is only using AX to receive low-security information like a users self-asserted gender, then this will probably not be a problem. However if it is being used to receive information that it only trusts the identity provider to assert, then it creates the potential for an attack.
There are no AX attributes that all providers are required to support, nor are there any (as far as I know) available from enough providers to "trust the identity provider" for. Even the basic ones like name and email address can't be relied upon.
Before you log in to a site using OpenID, if you have a decent provider (Google and Launchpad both do this; I don't know about others), it will tell you exactly what information the relying site is asking for, and what it's going to send to the relying party. I have yet to see a relying site that uses AX for anything other than my email address and sometimes my name. And once you register on a site using OpenID, the site will ask you for that information anyway using the AX attributes as default form values if they are available, since AX can't be relied on to provide the information. This "weakness" in OpenID only exists for relying sites that use AX for "information that it only trusts the identity provider to assert", which only exist in theory. Calling this a "serious remote bug" is a joke.
And most importantly, the summary doesn't make clear that even on the theoretical sites where this is an actual problem, your login and valuable personal information cannot be compromised by this vulnerability, because AX is not used for any of that. That is what a "serious remote bug" in OpenID would be.
Now, if Democrats and Republicans are both equally bought and paid for by corporate America, how come only Republicans are trying to gut the EPA, dismantle Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and kill collective bargaining? Those are all core pieces of the corporate agenda. Corporate America doesn't seem to be getting its money's worth from the Democrats.
For one, Republicans are much more openly pro-corporate, which allows them to do much more. Democrats can't get away with openly supporting many of those things without risking the alienation of at least some of their voter base. This doesn't mean that many Democatic politicians wouldn't give more to their campaign donors if they could get away with it. They're not equally bought and paid for by corporate America, but both Democrats and Republicans are paid for by corporate America.
The claim that Democrats and Republicans are the same is made only by conservatives because it's a response to allegations - made by liberals for obvious reasons - that Republicans are "bought and paid for" by the corporations.
This is so true. The day politicians get their noses out of the school system (especially if No Child Left Behind is ever repealed) would be the day that the school system would begin to have a glimmer of hope.
Because gamers are unreliable. What are they going to do if someone decides in the middle of a game that he's bored and goes to eat some cookies?
And such a game would have to be missing pause functionality for obvious reasons. Risking loss of control of military equipment because some random person wants to answer his cell phone is not a very smart risk.
At the end of your "mission" you're asked whether you'd like to submit your (anonymous) game to the DARPA for them to analyze your tactics and how well they worked out:
As you complete each scenario in the simulation you will be asked if you would like to submit data about your game play to our database for analysis. The data collected doesn't contain any information about you or your computer, or anything else outside of what you did with ACTUV and how well it worked. Good or bad, please agree to submit your data for analysis so that we can see what tactics work (or don't work!).
Who knows... somebody out there might come up with a strategy that nobody ever thought of before.
Don't do it because if you do post a strategy nobody ever though of before, you will get visited by a general the next day and then woosh get beamed up to some spaceship built from alien technology.
Emphasis mine. How can DARPA send someone to meet you if they don't even track who you are?
What, the context of trying to give an answer which would give safety from danger? Isn't that not very godlike? Who's the authority here, Caesar or god?
No, the context in which the word "authoritative" means well-informed instead of exercising control.
Besides, Jesus' entire point was that Caesar and God were both authorities, but with different jurisdictions.