The correct answer would probably be that there is already competition in this market. By changing to a Linux os perating system you can maintain your 15 year old computer fully supported. Unfortunately, in many cases that's not true. Device manufacturers only provide full documentation and support to Microsoft and the Linux drivers cannot be guaranteed. This means that while your computer will work and your operating system will be supported, your actual whole system may not be.
Three years ago, the developers of Mesa dropped support for some old graphics cards: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg0Mg Now those cards were badly obsolete and rare even in 2011, but this shows that even the Open Source community will at some point lose interest in supporting old stuff. Today, you can maybe cobble together your own distribution that still contains those old drivers, or pay someone to do it. But for most people this won't be an attractive solution.
Also, even a DH key exchange without any public key authentication at all is still somewhat effective: Yes, it can be MITMed with ease, but such an attack is also very detectable if you have a side channel, which means any untargetted mass-monitoring operations would be swiftly noticed.
Perhaps a stupid question (not a crypto expert here), but if you have a not-easily-MITMed side channel, wouldn't you use that for key exchange? Or at least to verify the keys?
The author should have known that the so-called "criminal justice system" of the United States of America is no longer the same one under the Constitution of the United States of America !
Under the "Patriot Act", under the Bush and Obama Administration, United States of America has essentially become the United Soviet of America.
There is no longer the presumption of innocent until proven guilty.
Well, unless the constitution is actually changed, you still have a chance to defeat such excesses in court. Which takes a lot of time and money, which sucks. But it is still possible.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
In theory, as a contractor you could say "I'm not taking this job unless there is a decent set of requirements". But that will leave you with a very small set of potential employers.
In practice, most people need the money and try to manage somehow.
And then there are the unscrupulous contractors (usually companies, not individuals) who make big promises, knowing that those are not realistic. Or knowing that the requirements are incomplete and fulfilling them will not be sufficient to make a succesful project. I strongly suspect that this is what happened with Toll Collect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect) in Germany. Just for instance.
While I'd still say China is worse, human rights wise, than western countries, asshats like the Australian government are working hard at erasing the difference.
Probably true, but being successful without a diploma still takes some luck.
A good example might be Josh Parnell, the developer of Limit Theory (URL:http://ltheory.com/). The guy seems to be quite brilliant, and I believe he is capable of pulling off his plans for a space game with an unprecedented amount of procedural generation. But he still got lucky in finding enough backers for his Kickstarter.
Another thing we can learn from Josh's example is that it may not be necessary to drop out of college. He wrote that he put his studies at Stanford on hold, with the option of continuing later.
With games that can't be resold they're able to price the initial game lower, and keep the profit flowing in. It removes places like gamestop from the equation(so they hate it, of course). Consider that I can buy many year old initially $60 games from steam for like $10. Because the game is still being sold, there's still incentive to fix/patch/expand the game.
But publishers don't lower the initial game price from the goodness of their hearts. New releases on Steam still cost (typically) 50 Euros, that has not changed compared to pre-Steam times. In short, publishers try to charge as much as the market will tolerate and pocket the extra profit.
Now there are a few people like me, who strongly dislike "services" like Steam and will buy less than before (and that preferably from DRM-free sources like GOG). But it seems that we are too few to make a difference. Unless you count the success of crowd-funded games (Kickstarter) as an aspect of that dislike. Which it may be, but I don't have the data to prove it:-(
If there is a known, safety-relevant flaw in a car, and the manufacturer does NOT do a safety recall, future accidents caused by that flaw might lead to lawsuits of the nasty kind. Since negligence is now easily demonstrated, the courts might grant the victims punitive damages. Ouch.
I guess it will backfire in the form of other carmakers offering cheaper cars that are just as good for the "entry level" features. Because the extra hardware was never installed.
NT4 had only limited DirectX support, so it was not for gamers (although vastly better than 98 in stability). 2K was the first "business" Windows that had all the features of the consumer OS.
[slightly off topic] And I used it happily until 2007 when my then-new PC would not run stable under 2K. In hindsight I suspect the drivers, in particular those from NVidia. My 8600GT officially had only "legacy" drivers for 2K, inofficially you could also run the XP drivers. With either, the machine would crash frequently. So I finally relented and installed XP.
The 45W Kaveris are interesting, as they show a nice improvement in performance/watt - the new "sweet spot" is not in the top models but in the somewhat slower A8-7600 (3.1-3.3 GHz CPU speed).
I wonder how a 4 module (8 core) FX on that basis would perform and at which TDP. For software that scales well with many cores, it might be a good buy.
A good point from the perspective of a game designer, and I support the sentiment.
But most of us are consumers most of the time. Even those of us who work on one or two community software projects will typically use a bunch of software where they are not involved in the making. Which means taking the software as it is, and if its creators went for a design that requires a beefy PC you have one or you don't use that particular software.
For some applications, in particular games, performance still matters. My current PC will run older games just fine, but some newer releases tend to demand a fairly powerful machine.
For example, I might be interested in Star Citizen but Chris Roberts has already announced that he is aiming for maximum eye candy on high end machines. It is unlikely that my current machine will handle that game, even on low settings.
If the applications you run do well on a machine from a decade ago, fine. But that is not the case for everybody.
Besides, Kaveri could just go for four DDR3 memory channels. The Chip supposed can do it, it's just that motherboards available right now can't.
It would also require a new and presumably more expensive socket, and motherboards would always need four DDR3 sockets for provideing the full bandwidth - no more cheap mini boards with only two sockets.
Overall, I'm not sure if it would be much cheaper than GDDR5 on the mainboard.
An 8-core Steamroller would be an improvement too, now that computer games finally start scaling well with multiple cores. I might even be willing to re-purpose a server part for my next desktop, even if it is a tad more expensive.
If AMD does not bother though, the Xeon E3-1230 v3 from Intel looks nice as well, only the mainboards that actually support ECC RAM are a bit expensive.
While I agree with the underlying idea of doing something about the tax avoidance, this rule is probably violating the rules of the EU internal market (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market).
What the EU really needs is IMHO a tax harmonization that stops countries like Ireland from attracting corporate headquarters with extremely low tax rates.
Considering countries outside the EU, the measure described in TFA would make more sense. I'm still not 100% convinced, but it would be at least worth discussing.
although it is more likely to be a new programming approach to an existing project. So instead of a complete "private" computer setup it is more likely to be an unofficial change set that modifies only a few parts of the project. It may even live on the official TFS as a "shelf set";-)
I run a core 2 duo on a motherboard 8 years old, with a gtx460 (it was originally with an 8800GT, which I pensioned off) and I will guarantee you my PC outperforms most PCs sold today, gaming-wise.
The Core2Duo was a good chip for its time, but current Intels outperform it by a wide margin. I'm pretty sure that even current AMDs beat it, despite their Bulldozer mis-design. Likewise, the GTX460 will be beaten by modern cards.
If you are talking about Intel PCs that use only integrated graphics, your claim might be true. But gamers usually understand that they need a discrete GPU;-)
- Memory bandwidth is expensive. You either need wide and expensive bus, or expensive low-capasity graphics DRAM which need soldering, and means you are limited to 4 GiB of memory(with the highest capasity GDDR chips out there), with zero possibility of late upgrading it, or both(and MAYBE get 8 giB of soldered memory). Though there has been rumours that Kaveri might support GDDR5, for configurations with only 4 GiB of soldered memory.
In general (not necessarily relating to Kaveri as-is) 8 giB of fast, soldered memory as in the PS4 would make sense for a PC.
The current APUs are seriously bandwidth starved. In reviews where a Phenom II with a discrete graphics card is pitted against an APU with similar clock speed and number of graphics cores, the Phenom II usually wins (except benchmarks that don't use the GPU much). Overclocking the memory helps the APU some, which is further evidence.
With PS4 style memory that problem could be solved, admittedly at the expense of being able to add more RAM. But looking back on my last three computer purchases, I always ended up doing a complete update instead of adding RAM to the existing PC. Because the CPU and GPU were also obsolete, and with a new CPU came a new mainboard with a different type of RAM.
I'm still building my own desktops, but I would agree that upgrading it is not necessary as often anymore. For various reasons:
1) The innovation speed (and I'm using the word "innovation" loosely) has gone down. From hardware generation N to N+1, the gains are smaller than they used to be five years ago. Less incentive to get that shiny new CPU and graphics card...
2) The hardware requirements of most software have grown only moderately in the last years. Even mediocre hardware can play movies in full HD and most games in passable graphics quality these days. Only hardcore gamers and some professionals need $2000 machines these days.
3) As a subset of 2), Microsoft is finally doing one thing right: the hardware requirements of their OS are no longer growing massively with each release. I'd still call Windows 7 a bit greedy for RAM, but that is cheap enough and the performance is usually (given enough RAM) as good as XP's.
All things summed up, my PCs last longer and are cheaper these days. Good for me, not so good for the industry.
Good point, but I think for US corporations demonstrating good IT security is no longer sufficient. Now that it is common knowledge that the NSA can, and sometimes will, show up with a "national security letter" and demand customer data, nothing short of a change in US law will repair the lost trust.
Because laws under which US companies can legally refuse to cooperate with US intelligence services will be needed to exclude the scenario that said intelligence services simply compel delivery of the data.
I guess the combined industry lobby will eventually be able to get those changes, but in the meantime the economic damage will be unavoidable even for US corporations that are otherwise good at security.
If expensive solutions count, why not a PC version of the PS4 board? 8Gbyte would be enough for an average gaming PC, and with DDR5 the bandwidth would be decent too:-)
I don't think they gave Rockstar the money without setting rules for how the patents are used. So we can assume that the founders at least did not mind Rockstar turning loose the lawyers on the competition.
and if Google apps stop working on Firefox you'll switch to Office365?
Already preferring LibreOffice;-) Yes, it is not online but I consider that an advantage. Keeping your stuff in the cloud just increases the risk of losing it. Cloud vendors sometimes go offline...
Of course you can keep local backups, but if you maintain local storage anyway, why not add a local installation of an office suite?
But the companies behind Rockstar are known. From TFA: "Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others". So any patent retaliation from Google would be against those.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct answer would probably be that there is already competition in this market. By changing to a Linux os perating system you can maintain your 15 year old computer fully supported. Unfortunately, in many cases that's not true. Device manufacturers only provide full documentation and support to Microsoft and the Linux drivers cannot be guaranteed. This means that while your computer will work and your operating system will be supported, your actual whole system may not be.
Three years ago, the developers of Mesa dropped support for some old graphics cards:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg0Mg
Now those cards were badly obsolete and rare even in 2011, but this shows that even the Open Source community will at some point lose interest in supporting old stuff.
Today, you can maybe cobble together your own distribution that still contains those old drivers, or pay someone to do it. But for most people this won't be an attractive solution.
Also, even a DH key exchange without any public key authentication at all is still somewhat effective: Yes, it can be MITMed with ease, but such an attack is also very detectable if you have a side channel, which means any untargetted mass-monitoring operations would be swiftly noticed.
Perhaps a stupid question (not a crypto expert here), but if you have a not-easily-MITMed side channel, wouldn't you use that for key exchange? Or at least to verify the keys?
The author should have known that the so-called "criminal justice system" of the United States of America is no longer the same one under the Constitution of the United States of America !
Under the "Patriot Act", under the Bush and Obama Administration, United States of America has essentially become the United Soviet of America.
There is no longer the presumption of innocent until proven guilty.
Well, unless the constitution is actually changed, you still have a chance to defeat such excesses in court. Which takes a lot of time and money, which sucks. But it is still possible.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
In theory, as a contractor you could say "I'm not taking this job unless there is a decent set of requirements". But that will leave you with a very small set of potential employers.
In practice, most people need the money and try to manage somehow.
And then there are the unscrupulous contractors (usually companies, not individuals) who make big promises, knowing that those are not realistic. Or knowing that the requirements are incomplete and fulfilling them will not be sufficient to make a succesful project.
I strongly suspect that this is what happened with Toll Collect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect) in Germany. Just for instance.
In political terms too.
While I'd still say China is worse, human rights wise, than western countries, asshats like the Australian government are working hard at erasing the difference.
Probably true, but being successful without a diploma still takes some luck.
A good example might be Josh Parnell, the developer of Limit Theory (URL:http://ltheory.com/).
The guy seems to be quite brilliant, and I believe he is capable of pulling off his plans for a space game with an unprecedented amount of procedural generation. But he still got lucky in finding enough backers for his Kickstarter.
Another thing we can learn from Josh's example is that it may not be necessary to drop out of college. He wrote that he put his studies at Stanford on hold, with the option of continuing later.
With games that can't be resold they're able to price the initial game lower, and keep the profit flowing in. It removes places like gamestop from the equation(so they hate it, of course). Consider that I can buy many year old initially $60 games from steam for like $10. Because the game is still being sold, there's still incentive to fix/patch/expand the game.
But publishers don't lower the initial game price from the goodness of their hearts. New releases on Steam still cost (typically) 50 Euros, that has not changed compared to pre-Steam times. In short, publishers try to charge as much as the market will tolerate and pocket the extra profit.
Now there are a few people like me, who strongly dislike "services" like Steam and will buy less than before (and that preferably from DRM-free sources like GOG). But it seems that we are too few to make a difference. :-(
Unless you count the success of crowd-funded games (Kickstarter) as an aspect of that dislike. Which it may be, but I don't have the data to prove it
And don't forget product liability.
If there is a known, safety-relevant flaw in a car, and the manufacturer does NOT do a safety recall, future accidents caused by that flaw might lead to lawsuits of the nasty kind. Since negligence is now easily demonstrated, the courts might grant the victims punitive damages. Ouch.
I guess it will backfire in the form of other carmakers offering cheaper cars that are just as good for the "entry level" features. Because the extra hardware was never installed.
NT4 had only limited DirectX support, so it was not for gamers (although vastly better than 98 in stability). 2K was the first "business" Windows that had all the features of the consumer OS.
[slightly off topic]
And I used it happily until 2007 when my then-new PC would not run stable under 2K. In hindsight I suspect the drivers, in particular those from NVidia. My 8600GT officially had only "legacy" drivers for 2K, inofficially you could also run the XP drivers. With either, the machine would crash frequently. So I finally relented and installed XP.
The 45W Kaveris are interesting, as they show a nice improvement in performance/watt - the new "sweet spot" is not in the top models but in the somewhat slower A8-7600 (3.1-3.3 GHz CPU speed).
I wonder how a 4 module (8 core) FX on that basis would perform and at which TDP. For software that scales well with many cores, it might be a good buy.
A good point from the perspective of a game designer, and I support the sentiment.
But most of us are consumers most of the time. Even those of us who work on one or two community software projects will typically use a bunch of software where they are not involved in the making. Which means taking the software as it is, and if its creators went for a design that requires a beefy PC you have one or you don't use that particular software.
For some applications, in particular games, performance still matters. My current PC will run older games just fine, but some newer releases tend to demand a fairly powerful machine.
For example, I might be interested in Star Citizen but Chris Roberts has already announced that he is aiming for maximum eye candy on high end machines. It is unlikely that my current machine will handle that game, even on low settings.
If the applications you run do well on a machine from a decade ago, fine. But that is not the case for everybody.
Besides, Kaveri could just go for four DDR3 memory channels. The Chip supposed can do it, it's just that motherboards available right now can't.
It would also require a new and presumably more expensive socket, and motherboards would always need four DDR3 sockets for provideing the full bandwidth - no more cheap mini boards with only two sockets.
Overall, I'm not sure if it would be much cheaper than GDDR5 on the mainboard.
An 8-core Steamroller would be an improvement too, now that computer games finally start scaling well with multiple cores. I might even be willing to re-purpose a server part for my next desktop, even if it is a tad more expensive.
If AMD does not bother though, the Xeon E3-1230 v3 from Intel looks nice as well, only the mainboards that actually support ECC RAM are a bit expensive.
While I agree with the underlying idea of doing something about the tax avoidance, this rule is probably violating the rules of the EU internal market (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market).
What the EU really needs is IMHO a tax harmonization that stops countries like Ireland from attracting corporate headquarters with extremely low tax rates.
Considering countries outside the EU, the measure described in TFA would make more sense. I'm still not 100% convinced, but it would be at least worth discussing.
Similar here,
although it is more likely to be a new programming approach to an existing project. So instead of a complete "private" computer setup it is more likely to be an unofficial change set that modifies only a few parts of the project. It may even live on the official TFS as a "shelf set" ;-)
I run a core 2 duo on a motherboard 8 years old, with a gtx460 (it was originally with an 8800GT, which I pensioned off) and I will guarantee you my PC outperforms most PCs sold today, gaming-wise.
The Core2Duo was a good chip for its time, but current Intels outperform it by a wide margin. I'm pretty sure that even current AMDs beat it, despite their Bulldozer mis-design. Likewise, the GTX460 will be beaten by modern cards.
If you are talking about Intel PCs that use only integrated graphics, your claim might be true. But gamers usually understand that they need a discrete GPU ;-)
- Memory bandwidth is expensive. You either need wide and expensive bus, or expensive low-capasity graphics DRAM which need soldering, and means you are limited to 4 GiB of memory(with the highest capasity GDDR chips out there), with zero possibility of late upgrading it, or both(and MAYBE get 8 giB of soldered memory). Though there has been rumours that Kaveri might support GDDR5, for configurations with only 4 GiB of soldered memory.
In general (not necessarily relating to Kaveri as-is) 8 giB of fast, soldered memory as in the PS4 would make sense for a PC.
The current APUs are seriously bandwidth starved. In reviews where a Phenom II with a discrete graphics card is pitted against an APU with similar clock speed and number of graphics cores, the Phenom II usually wins (except benchmarks that don't use the GPU much). Overclocking the memory helps the APU some, which is further evidence.
With PS4 style memory that problem could be solved, admittedly at the expense of being able to add more RAM. But looking back on my last three computer purchases, I always ended up doing a complete update instead of adding RAM to the existing PC. Because the CPU and GPU were also obsolete, and with a new CPU came a new mainboard with a different type of RAM.
I'm still building my own desktops, but I would agree that upgrading it is not necessary as often anymore. For various reasons:
1) The innovation speed (and I'm using the word "innovation" loosely) has gone down. From hardware generation N to N+1, the gains are smaller than they used to be five years ago. Less incentive to get that shiny new CPU and graphics card...
2) The hardware requirements of most software have grown only moderately in the last years. Even mediocre hardware can play movies in full HD and most games in passable graphics quality these days. Only hardcore gamers and some professionals need $2000 machines these days.
3) As a subset of 2), Microsoft is finally doing one thing right: the hardware requirements of their OS are no longer growing massively with each release. I'd still call Windows 7 a bit greedy for RAM, but that is cheap enough and the performance is usually (given enough RAM) as good as XP's.
All things summed up, my PCs last longer and are cheaper these days. Good for me, not so good for the industry.
Good point, but I think for US corporations demonstrating good IT security is no longer sufficient. Now that it is common knowledge that the NSA can, and sometimes will, show up with a "national security letter" and demand customer data, nothing short of a change in US law will repair the lost trust.
Because laws under which US companies can legally refuse to cooperate with US intelligence services will be needed to exclude the scenario that said intelligence services simply compel delivery of the data.
I guess the combined industry lobby will eventually be able to get those changes, but in the meantime the economic damage will be unavoidable even for US corporations that are otherwise good at security.
If expensive solutions count, why not a PC version of the PS4 board? :-)
8Gbyte would be enough for an average gaming PC, and with DDR5 the bandwidth would be decent too
I don't think they gave Rockstar the money without setting rules for how the patents are used. So we can assume that the founders at least did not mind Rockstar turning loose the lawyers on the competition.
and if Google apps stop working on Firefox you'll switch to Office365?
Already preferring LibreOffice ;-)
Yes, it is not online but I consider that an advantage. Keeping your stuff in the cloud just increases the risk of losing it. Cloud vendors sometimes go offline...
Of course you can keep local backups, but if you maintain local storage anyway, why not add a local installation of an office suite?
But the companies behind Rockstar are known. From TFA:
"Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others".
So any patent retaliation from Google would be against those.