Why replace the existing computer in its entirety when for the cost of a replacement part you can keep the system running almost indefinitely these days?
Indeed. The only desktop machine that I every actually saw die was an eMachine where something on the motherboard gave out (some say cheap caps... just say no to eMachines). The whole thing was so cheaply made that a motherboard change just wasn't work it. Solution: pull out the hard disk and junk it. Otherwise, the only component that dies is the hard disk. Each of my machines typically goes through three hard disks before being retired due to being too far behind the performance curve.
IA32 today is little more than an encoding for a sequence of RISC instructions, and the decoder takes up very little silicon.
Stated without proof. The decoder is per-core, so you can't immediately see the amount of real estate it takes up. To avoid decoding the same instructions multiple times Intel has the complex "loop stream detector" logic. I'm sure that's not the end of it, somebody whose business this is might comment. And besides the real estate this logic consumes (which on ARM would instead be devoted to more cores) this all eats energy. I doubt this in itself accounts for the power efficiency multiple Bruce claims, and I wonder where he got his numbers. But it certainly counts for something.
Anyway, power efficiency is far from Intel's biggest problem with ARM. The real issue is price. Intel just can't afford to sell power efficient processors at the price ARMS cost, that work well enough to compete with its big server and desktop iron. One word: margins.
Sony, on the other hand, is in serious trouble. If anyone's getting out of the console business, they'll be first to go.
Actually, Sony's console business is doing pretty well, making money on both hardware and software especially the latter. Sony's losses are due mainly to getting completely hammered in the tv market. (Koreans set took it upon themselves to drive Japan out of the TV market and by all appearances are now just mopping up.) What Sony can't afford is another disastrous specs war with Microsoft. I expect, next generation neither will be foolish enough to try to cram state of the art hardware into a space that just can't dissipate the heat. Next generation will be about leveraging bespoke game properties like Little Big Planet and Playstation at Home and not trying to take over the world. Basically, Big Console had its last hurrah and the torch is now passed to mobile and indie gaming.
I've never had a problem with using urtext sheet music; by definition, untouched by an editor...
Not bad post, especially considering the nonsense you responded to, however... you're not right about the definition of urtext. Perhaps you have not heard of Wiener Urtext Edition? And by the way, I always play from urtext when I can get it. It is very definitely an edition.
The great weakness with this is that the value of sheet music is in the edition. Just as books benefit from a good editor, so does music. My girlfriend has a music degree, and blah blah blah drivel drivel [appeal to authority]...
Well I have a music degree and I just read through a good chunk of the Goldberg variations and I am pleased with the quality of it. I will print it out and enjoy playing it. As for your Slashdot post, I would respectfully ask you to refrain from further damaging your own credibility with respect to this subject, of which you are by all appearances completely ignorant.
I won't email Eben about this, because I'm not about to use either license in any code...
I will email Eben with a request to update the commentary with respect to GPL v3. I'm not sure why you won't, even though you are willing to comment publicly on the question.
Yes... and that description hasn't changed since MS-PL first made headlines on Slashdot... which was before GPLv3 first made headliens on Slashdot. My guess is that nobody at FSF has bothered to update the MS-PL description since GPLv3 was created.
That's your opinion, or is it legal advice? And are you seriously suggesting that the FSF does not pay careful attention to the accuracy of information it posts on its license information page? Why don't you email Eben Moglen and ask?
I didn't, and I will thank you not to put words in my mouth, troll. Microsoft's reasons for design the MS-PL as it did are transparently obvious, apparently to all but you. Unlike MS-PL, the GPL v3 is a major success, clearly an improvement on v2.
The GPL v3 accomplished the important goal of extending GPL compatibility to the Apache license among others. Losing compatibility with GPL v2 has been at most a minor annoyance while bringing Apache into the fold has proved to be of major importance.
As you say, a Youtube comment means nothing. Let's see what the resolution with Blender is, and let's see just what the patent grant is. The truth could range anywhere from cynical manipulation to awesome gift to humanity. Frankly I've seen too much cynical manipulation to be awfully hopeful about the latter though.
Being a 3D artist this does interest me. I use Modo, Maya, Zbrush, and Mudbox frequently and subd standard is very useful. Does your intended implementation share subdivision order Pixar's spec? Does UV smoothing result in identical UV borders?
Pixar compatibility is not a feature I intend to code myself, however anybody who wants to take it on is welcome. The World Welder meshing API is clean, powerful, efficient and nice to work with. Currently, there is no UV interpolation in the subdivision algorithms at all, that work is upcoming. Any acceptable interpolation must produce identical UV at matching borders, anything else is a bug.
Open-source subdivision technology originating from Pixar sounds like a wonderful thing that could alleviate some of the problems I mentioned. After all it's coming from the source of subdivision technology. Catmull Clark subdivision was created by Ed Catmull of Pixar and Jim Clark, co-founder of Silicon Graphics.
To tell the truth, Catmull-Clark was the first and worst of the crop of modern subdivision algorithms. It has terrible behavior when valence varies, and valence does vary a lot in many practical situations. On the whole, Root3 kicks Catmull-Clark to the far side of the moon in terms of predictable behavior, tolerance of a wide variety of mesh topologies, and unlumpy, uncrinkled results. Root3 actually has a pretty carefully considered mathematical basis whereas Catmull-Clark is more like mathematical goulash, with its blending constants basically pulled out of thin air. Its main redeeming quality is, it has been implemented a lot, a lot of artists have learned to work around its nasty bugs, and as you allude to, you can **sometimes** port meshes between different tools. I don't care about it a whole lot, but anybody who does is welcome to send patches.
I guess my point in mentioning all this is that I hope what you are working on is capable of accommodating these kinds of needs, otherwise I and many other artists may not be able to use it due to workflow additions. Although it's very cool and I'd love to hear more about what you are doing.
Points noted. I will not do this particular work myself but I will place it in a respectable position on the todo list for potential contributors. I'm actually more interested in pushing forward with the kind of modeling that will make you not want to bother with the proprietary tools you mentioned. Do be sure to check out the demo pictures and ask yourself whether Maya can even do some of those things in any reasonable way.
Oh, and let add this: if Pixar is actually genuine they will additionally dual license this code base under LGPL (v3), and I will be impressed. If not... well, each person can interpret that for themselves.
It's a pretty reasonable open source license, actually. It is basically a BSD license, plus a patent grant, plus a mutually assured destruction clause regarding patent suits....
Let's put that claim to rest right now. It's the opposite of reasonable. Instead the Ms-PL is intentionally designed to divide the open source community. See this informed discussion.
Our intent is to encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the "good stuff".
I want to be wrong about this. I really do. But I read this as "our intent is to establish a tie to our proprietary products Renderman and Maya via a license carefully designed by Microsoft to be incompatible with GPL, and thus Blender."
Well, this would be as good a time as any to point out that Maya is not the only game in town. There is Blender of course. And there is my as-yet-unannounced project based on a half edge meshing technology that is way superior to the creaky old infrastructure Maya relies on. There are already some great results in terms of high complexity meshes and excellent real time performance. So far it has been just me pushing on the code, but that should change pretty soon. Go here to find out about World Welder. Check out some demo images here, here and here. Those are all high triangle count, high complexity meshes rendering at smooth interactive frame rates on low end hardware. There are various algorithms in use. The 3D Freetype Unicode fonts are done with Root3 subdivision, arguably superior to Catmull Clark favored by the Maya crowd. Still lots of work to do to implement boundaries, creases, deformable heirarchy and the like, but the base it's built on is solid as a rock. And really compact as well, yes sometimes you can have it all. Anyway, I will be making a more official project announcement in due course but for now, a tarball is online here. I apologize in advance for the documentation quality, but not for the code quality. Please be kind to my server and don't browse all the images, it's just a cable modem with pathetic upload bandwidth. (By the way, sponsorship in the form of web hosting would be much appreciated.)
There remains much work to do, sigh, there always is. But this is already the skeleton of a nice 3D meshing workbench, and it is time to put some meat on the bones. Language is C++11, scripting is Lua, GUIs are GLX and QT, revision control is Mercurial, license is GPLv3. Anybody who wants to join the mailing list is more than welcome, developers and future users alike.
Well, Apple is in some sense ahead of Linux because Mesa + Xorg is still at 3.0 + extensions, having only recently moved from 2.1 + extensions. Granted, you can get OpenGL 4.2 by installing the AMD or nVidia binary drivers. Intel still hasn't moved their (open source) driver from 3.something to 4.something yet. So Apple is actually in the middle of the pack on this on. Mind you, OpenGL 3.x is a highly respectable 3D platform already.
Or to put it another way, it's Windows based. Nobody serious trades on a Windows platform. Don't even think about trying to drive it from Excel and win anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I think instruction sets matter little...
Speaking of burden of proof, ARM is considerably more power efficient than any x86. Rhetoric doesn't change that.
I have to be able to connect to... PCMCIA cards...
PCMCIA cards... really? Last time I used one of those was for ethernet on a laptop that didn't have it. No USB either.
Why replace the existing computer in its entirety when for the cost of a replacement part you can keep the system running almost indefinitely these days?
Indeed. The only desktop machine that I every actually saw die was an eMachine where something on the motherboard gave out (some say cheap caps... just say no to eMachines). The whole thing was so cheaply made that a motherboard change just wasn't work it. Solution: pull out the hard disk and junk it. Otherwise, the only component that dies is the hard disk. Each of my machines typically goes through three hard disks before being retired due to being too far behind the performance curve.
You buy a phone once a year vs a PC once every 3 years. I would expect 3x more smartphone shipments than PCs.
More to the point: we now spend more on each phone than we spend on a new desktop.
IA32 today is little more than an encoding for a sequence of RISC instructions, and the decoder takes up very little silicon.
Stated without proof. The decoder is per-core, so you can't immediately see the amount of real estate it takes up. To avoid decoding the same instructions multiple times Intel has the complex "loop stream detector" logic. I'm sure that's not the end of it, somebody whose business this is might comment. And besides the real estate this logic consumes (which on ARM would instead be devoted to more cores) this all eats energy. I doubt this in itself accounts for the power efficiency multiple Bruce claims, and I wonder where he got his numbers. But it certainly counts for something.
Anyway, power efficiency is far from Intel's biggest problem with ARM. The real issue is price. Intel just can't afford to sell power efficient processors at the price ARMS cost, that work well enough to compete with its big server and desktop iron. One word: margins.
Sony, on the other hand, is in serious trouble. If anyone's getting out of the console business, they'll be first to go.
Actually, Sony's console business is doing pretty well, making money on both hardware and software especially the latter. Sony's losses are due mainly to getting completely hammered in the tv market. (Koreans set took it upon themselves to drive Japan out of the TV market and by all appearances are now just mopping up.) What Sony can't afford is another disastrous specs war with Microsoft. I expect, next generation neither will be foolish enough to try to cram state of the art hardware into a space that just can't dissipate the heat. Next generation will be about leveraging bespoke game properties like Little Big Planet and Playstation at Home and not trying to take over the world. Basically, Big Console had its last hurrah and the torch is now passed to mobile and indie gaming.
Worse than the flag, that's an achievement.
It's lossless, duh. Transcode it.
The files are 24-bit and support for decoding 24-bit Apple lossless in Linux is lacking. Being lossless is nice only if it's in a usable format.
More whining, it's getting old. Transcode it on an Apple computer if you must. Feh, what kind of geek are you.
WRT the print edition quality, most world-class musicians prefer autograph scores.
Eh, no they don't. This is an autograph score.
Unfortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format instead of a widely used, open, non-patent-encumbered format such as FLAC.
It's lossless, duh. Transcode it.
I've never had a problem with using urtext sheet music; by definition, untouched by an editor...
Not bad post, especially considering the nonsense you responded to, however... you're not right about the definition of urtext. Perhaps you have not heard of Wiener Urtext Edition? And by the way, I always play from urtext when I can get it. It is very definitely an edition.
The great weakness with this is that the value of sheet music is in the edition. Just as books benefit from a good editor, so does music. My girlfriend has a music degree, and blah blah blah drivel drivel [appeal to authority]...
Well I have a music degree and I just read through a good chunk of the Goldberg variations and I am pleased with the quality of it. I will print it out and enjoy playing it. As for your Slashdot post, I would respectfully ask you to refrain from further damaging your own credibility with respect to this subject, of which you are by all appearances completely ignorant.
I won't email Eben about this, because I'm not about to use either license in any code...
I will email Eben with a request to update the commentary with respect to GPL v3. I'm not sure why you won't, even though you are willing to comment publicly on the question.
the MS-PL is compatible with GPLv3, just not with GPLv2
It depends who you ask. The FSF states clearly that Ms-PL is incompatible with GPL, period, no version specified.
MS-PL.. a free software license; it has a copyleft that is not strong, but incompatible with the GNU GPL. We urge you not to use the Ms-PL for this reason.
Yes... and that description hasn't changed since MS-PL first made headlines on Slashdot... which was before GPLv3 first made headliens on Slashdot. My guess is that nobody at FSF has bothered to update the MS-PL description since GPLv3 was created.
That's your opinion, or is it legal advice? And are you seriously suggesting that the FSF does not pay careful attention to the accuracy of information it posts on its license information page? Why don't you email Eben Moglen and ask?
Did you just say the ends justify the means?
I didn't, and I will thank you not to put words in my mouth, troll. Microsoft's reasons for design the MS-PL as it did are transparently obvious, apparently to all but you. Unlike MS-PL, the GPL v3 is a major success, clearly an improvement on v2.
the MS-PL is compatible with GPLv3, just not with GPLv2
It depends who you ask. The FSF states clearly that Ms-PL is incompatible with GPL, period, no version specified.
MS-PL.. a free software license; it has a copyleft that is not strong, but incompatible with the GNU GPL. We urge you not to use the Ms-PL for this reason.
The GPL v3 accomplished the important goal of extending GPL compatibility to the Apache license among others. Losing compatibility with GPL v2 has been at most a minor annoyance while bringing Apache into the fold has proved to be of major importance.
As you say, a Youtube comment means nothing. Let's see what the resolution with Blender is, and let's see just what the patent grant is. The truth could range anywhere from cynical manipulation to awesome gift to humanity. Frankly I've seen too much cynical manipulation to be awfully hopeful about the latter though.
Being a 3D artist this does interest me. I use Modo, Maya, Zbrush, and Mudbox frequently and subd standard is very useful. Does your intended implementation share subdivision order Pixar's spec? Does UV smoothing result in identical UV borders?
Pixar compatibility is not a feature I intend to code myself, however anybody who wants to take it on is welcome. The World Welder meshing API is clean, powerful, efficient and nice to work with. Currently, there is no UV interpolation in the subdivision algorithms at all, that work is upcoming. Any acceptable interpolation must produce identical UV at matching borders, anything else is a bug.
Open-source subdivision technology originating from Pixar sounds like a wonderful thing that could alleviate some of the problems I mentioned. After all it's coming from the source of subdivision technology. Catmull Clark subdivision was created by Ed Catmull of Pixar and Jim Clark, co-founder of Silicon Graphics.
To tell the truth, Catmull-Clark was the first and worst of the crop of modern subdivision algorithms. It has terrible behavior when valence varies, and valence does vary a lot in many practical situations. On the whole, Root3 kicks Catmull-Clark to the far side of the moon in terms of predictable behavior, tolerance of a wide variety of mesh topologies, and unlumpy, uncrinkled results. Root3 actually has a pretty carefully considered mathematical basis whereas Catmull-Clark is more like mathematical goulash, with its blending constants basically pulled out of thin air. Its main redeeming quality is, it has been implemented a lot, a lot of artists have learned to work around its nasty bugs, and as you allude to, you can **sometimes** port meshes between different tools. I don't care about it a whole lot, but anybody who does is welcome to send patches.
I guess my point in mentioning all this is that I hope what you are working on is capable of accommodating these kinds of needs, otherwise I and many other artists may not be able to use it due to workflow additions. Although it's very cool and I'd love to hear more about what you are doing.
Points noted. I will not do this particular work myself but I will place it in a respectable position on the todo list for potential contributors. I'm actually more interested in pushing forward with the kind of modeling that will make you not want to bother with the proprietary tools you mentioned. Do be sure to check out the demo pictures and ask yourself whether Maya can even do some of those things in any reasonable way.
Oh, and let add this: if Pixar is actually genuine they will additionally dual license this code base under LGPL (v3), and I will be impressed. If not... well, each person can interpret that for themselves.
It's a pretty reasonable open source license, actually. It is basically a BSD license, plus a patent grant, plus a mutually assured destruction clause regarding patent suits....
Let's put that claim to rest right now. It's the opposite of reasonable. Instead the Ms-PL is intentionally designed to divide the open source community. See this informed discussion.
Our intent is to encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the "good stuff".
I want to be wrong about this. I really do. But I read this as "our intent is to establish a tie to our proprietary products Renderman and Maya via a license carefully designed by Microsoft to be incompatible with GPL, and thus Blender."
Well, this would be as good a time as any to point out that Maya is not the only game in town. There is Blender of course. And there is my as-yet-unannounced project based on a half edge meshing technology that is way superior to the creaky old infrastructure Maya relies on. There are already some great results in terms of high complexity meshes and excellent real time performance. So far it has been just me pushing on the code, but that should change pretty soon. Go here to find out about World Welder. Check out some demo images here, here and here. Those are all high triangle count, high complexity meshes rendering at smooth interactive frame rates on low end hardware. There are various algorithms in use. The 3D Freetype Unicode fonts are done with Root3 subdivision, arguably superior to Catmull Clark favored by the Maya crowd. Still lots of work to do to implement boundaries, creases, deformable heirarchy and the like, but the base it's built on is solid as a rock. And really compact as well, yes sometimes you can have it all. Anyway, I will be making a more official project announcement in due course but for now, a tarball is online here. I apologize in advance for the documentation quality, but not for the code quality. Please be kind to my server and don't browse all the images, it's just a cable modem with pathetic upload bandwidth. (By the way, sponsorship in the form of web hosting would be much appreciated.)
There remains much work to do, sigh, there always is. But this is already the skeleton of a nice 3D meshing workbench, and it is time to put some meat on the bones. Language is C++11, scripting is Lua, GUIs are GLX and QT, revision control is Mercurial, license is GPLv3. Anybody who wants to join the mailing list is more than welcome, developers and future users alike.
Well, Apple is in some sense ahead of Linux because Mesa + Xorg is still at 3.0 + extensions, having only recently moved from 2.1 + extensions. Granted, you can get OpenGL 4.2 by installing the AMD or nVidia binary drivers. Intel still hasn't moved their (open source) driver from 3.something to 4.something yet. So Apple is actually in the middle of the pack on this on. Mind you, OpenGL 3.x is a highly respectable 3D platform already.
Or to put it another way, it's Windows based. Nobody serious trades on a Windows platform. Don't even think about trying to drive it from Excel and win anything.
Ah, OK, it does look interesting, but most probably your definition of "high frequency" and mine differ by an order of magnitude.