We laugh at the Egyptians, but the European Union is pushing to outlaw EU 500 notes and all cash transactions over EU 5000. With fiat currencies debased so much these kinds of controls usually happen in regimes that fear hyperinflation and massive withdrawals from banks once debts are seen as unserviceable.
When cash disappears so does your privacy. The Orwellian State is made possible in a cashless society where Big Brother knows your every move.
Of course, this being sold as "combating terrorism" - yet the European Union is letting potential jihadi terrorists flood in unvetted by the hundreds of thousands. Banning cash looks more like a move by technocrats to control the existing tax slaves.
Thanks for posting. I'm interested in where Vulkan may be useful. Are you working on the desktop, or on mobile? Do you have to spend time writing Vulkan code and different execution paths for each of the GPU architectures you deal with? as a desktop application developer I don't have to do this, and the same OpenGL code runs on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows and Android (I'm using JoGL, because the multi-core CPU is only about 10% utilized on four cores; and shader performance on the GPU is the limitation; call overhead is not significant - but time to market definitely is).
So if you care to elaborate on what kinds of problems you are dealing with I'd be most interested. Thanks.
Some people do make this argument. However, if an 'Application Programming Interface' is so close to a 'driver interface' that application developers find it takes too long to produce efficient and robust applications in a timely manner (time-to-market is THE important commercial metric) then this indicates that the API designers got it wrong. Adding lipstick to the pig simply introduces inefficiencies that Vulkan was supposed to remove.
Then we have the real-world benchmarks that show the promised performance gains are not there for higher-end hardware, and it is only helps at the low end (underpowered mobile devices that are CPU-bound, which means the call-overhead affecting the weak CPU is significant). if you are not gaining anything on the desktop and your development time is longer, plus you are back to worrying about specific efficiencies for specific GPUs (because the driver is so thin it cannot work this out for you) then I would say that the design is not useful for application developers (the desktop developers).
OpenGL was relatively easy to pick up and learn. Vulkan will be a much greater learning curve for developers, and will produce LESS efficient applications until the application developers spend a lot of time tweaking their app (Vulkan's main benefit is it exposes enough driver-level concerns that you can do this if you wish).
Adding a layer on top re-introduces the same overhead that Vulkan was supposed to remove. Game Engines indeed help, but that means the game engine developers are now doing the work that driver writers used to - but it is the driver writers who are intimately familiar with every aspect of the hardware.
Vulkan appeals to some - especially those that love TEH NEW SHINEY instead of actually getting very large and complex applications robust and shipped. For me, as a developer creating a high-end desktop application Vulkan's design is a step backwards. I get excellent performance out of OpenGL, but wish to see more effort into improving that instead of wasted on these wild-goose chases that simply make more work for application developers. Apple is the classic case of putting effort into Metal, which hardly anyone uses as it is not cross-platform, instead of moving their OpenGL implementation (which is already half the speed of ATIs on the same hardware [I have a Mac Pro with dual D700s]) from OpenGL 4.1 to 4.5.
Vulkan is supposed to be an API but it is no replacement for OpenGL. IMHO Khronos has made a mistake with this, not because Vulkan is inherently bad, but because resources are limited and putting them into Vulkan just to help low-end hardware means the same resources cannot be used to make cross-platform OpenGL complete better with closed-platform DirectX. In this sense Vulkan is a misstep.
Precisely. IMHO the guys now running OpenGL have confused its purpose - they are more worried about it being a mobile driver implementation rather than the Application API it was intended to be. This is a failure of design on the part of Khronos, and they have doubled-down on this mistake with Vulkan. They prefer to push complexity to application developers rather than those writing the mobile device drivers (who are paid to implement this stuff).
I have pointed out on Slashdot that Vulkan makes application development longer and more error prone. Also, the real-world examples of Apple's Metal and ATI Mantle show that there is not much improvement for desktop GPUs, and the added complexity mostly helps the performance of mobile GPUs where overhead to the weak CPU is significant.
There is an argument that application developers should use another layer over Vulkan - but this seems ridiculous to me as adding another layer removes the supposed benefits of using Vulkan in the first place.
So I agree with you, and it seems the OpenGL/Khronos specs body has now been captured by those oriented towards mobile devices - hence the progression is towards making it easier for the hardware vendors and pushing more work toward the application developers - for little actual gain except on the low-end hardware. This is very bad design, IMHO.
Actually this is not the case. In OpenGL 4 many of the fixed function pipeline operations for matrix handling etc have gone. You have to do it all yourself with shaders. This raises the bar enormously for users of OpenGL, and is a failure of design, IMHO. Furthermore, this was done so that OpenGL drivers for mobile devices could be simpler, but made it harder for new application developers considering using OpenGL for these devices - as well as desktop developers. Again, this is a design failure and confusing what a driver is from an application API - and OpenGL is supposed to be the latter, even if it incorporates elements of the former.
Correct. Vulkan drivers are easier because they do less and contain fewer optimizations. The optimizations are pushed to the application developer to do. This is both a blessing an a curse:
the blessing is that application developers can gain better performance in some cases, as there is less hardware abstraction and they can gain more control over execution of graphics operations.
the curse is that the driver has fewer optimizations built in, and future drivers can't contain optimizations for games.
This approach is helpful where call overhead is significant, and on less-powerful devices such as mobile devices. On much more powerful desktop GPUs the real-world improvements of such an approach is less clear. In actual implementations with AMD Mantle and Apple's Metal on desktop-class GPUs there are mixed performance gains (sometimes faster than OpenGL, but also sometimes slower). Given the fact that the simplicity of the Vulkan driver pushes complexity to the application (more control, but more unavoidable work for application developers too) then this simpler-driver approach is actually less useful for most of the developers actually writing the applications. Think of the difference between OpenGL and Vulkan as the difference between using a Linux distro and creating a distro out of parts you choose. You can get better performance if you choose all the parts of your custom distro, but it takes a non-negligible amount of effort and is really only beneficial on low-end hardware where every cycle counts, rather than on high-end hardware where you can have cycles to burn in some areas so time-to-market matters much, much more.
Vulkan has its good points - but as a desktop OpenGL developer, it is actually a step backward for the kinds of problems I want to solve (a desktop jet-combat flight simulator to be run on mid- to-high end desktop/workstation class GPUs).
Over on Reddit they started calling her "Chairman Pao" for the censorious regime Ms Pao imposed. She also 'purged' pro-Free Speech moderators. We gotta fight such people, the authoritarians "doing it for our own good" or because it "hurts someones feelings".
Free Speech is the whole ballgame. Lose that and no-one gets to "talk Truth to Power".
The Cultural Marxist Subversion of the Free World has resulted in weaponized zombies who prefer Big State authoritarianism and Central Planning over voluntary exchange for mutual benefit (the 'Free Market' - "capitalism" is the World the Marxists use for the Free Market). The nice thing is reality can only be defied for a short time, and those zombies will reap what they sew. And for all the sane people out there, buckle up, it's going to get rough as the Collectivist-Islamist Axis spins up to full speed.
What's so immoral when only 2% of the population feed the rest and the less you work and earn income the less you pollute?
So you think it is good to be a parasite of the labor of others? have you no shame !? who other than a child could stand to bludge from your fellow humans?
Not at all. Every dollar Apple made from selling an iPhone came out of the pocket of the person buying one. It's not creating wealth it's just transacting it. That is not how wealth is made.
Nonsense. Absolute rubbish. Jobs created a product that people VOLUNTARILY exchanged a token of their labor for. The value of this product VASTLY exceeded the value of the constituent parts - for the same reason the value of a square meter in real estate in downtown Manhattan is worth more than than value of a patch of dirt in your Mom's basement. One of the ways that wealth arises is through perceived utility, and this can be CREATED.
The Slashdot source code is just a bunch of characters, but those characters have a lot more value than the same number of characters produced by lonely teenagers writing awful poetry. When CmdrTaco and Hemos created Slashdot they created massive utility, and thus also created perceived value. Wealth can be created this way. Yes, this created wealth can be exchanged for the labor tokens of people who less industrious and less innovative, but that does not change the fact that perceived wealth was created.
Collectivism neither understands nor acknowledges this fact. Hence Collectivism is doomed to always fail. Always. Collectivism is predicated on the idea that somehow a person will feel compelled to get up at 3 am in the snow to help a cow they don't own give birth when doing so will produce no benefit to the person, and in fact, can be quite counter-productive. However, if the person owns the cow then self-interest is a powerful motivator for them to provide extra care for the cow instead of simply staying snug in bed when they get a UBI whether they help the cow or not.
Unfortunately, the economic illiteracy coupled with Collectivist indoctrination has lead very many in the formerly-Free World to think that the super-abundance we see today will somehow continue even when idiot Collectivists strangle the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg (economic freedom, voluntary exchange, competition, self-interest, private property, rule of law and limitation on State Power).
Until you understand that Wealth is Created, and that you can create wealth too then you will never succeed. You'll always be under the control of those who seek to divide you and keep you an economic slave. But you do have the choice to stop denying economic reality and join the creators of wealth - people who make everyone's lives better, as well as their own. Boom! Boom!
Fair enough. But say you actually wanted to make a difference and defeat that sexism, like I do. Then perhaps you would study the language and ideas of the sexist ideology (Sharia is the real "rape culture"), which arms you do defeat the sexism of that system in terms the sexists can understand. Is that not superior? Is that not advancing female equality rather than simply claiming you care? otherwise, you are simply passive and will not stop the more-determined sexists from achieving their aims.
That is why defeating Islamic/Sharia misogyny is important - which requires some effort to understand their vocabulary and memes. That is what the true anti-sexists are doing, and why I bother to try educate my fellow Slashdotters into some of the ideas of Sharia which are incompatible and anti-thetical to Enlightenment Civilization and our goals of Equality and Liberty.
In what way? at the moment you have asserted nothing more than your feelings. You need to provide evidence why you think the massive demographic decline of the West is not a major factor in why unsustainable welfare state spending is close to collapse.
Is that French fertility from native French or North African imports? I think you might be surprised by the answer. In Germany, for example, by as soon as 2020 non-native Germans will outnumber native German births. Consider what Germany will look like in 20 years.
"UBI" is just a re-branding of Marxist wealth re-distribution. Can you please name one country that such a scheme has not bankrupted in the long-term.
Of course, you probably love UBI because it means the State robs others on your behalf, right? you personally get a lot more than you receive, right? and you have no problem with the State using the threat of violence to take money off the skilled, the savers, the industrious and the innovative, right? do you even comprehend how disgustingly immoral this is?
Nope. The system you describe is called "cronyism" and is only possible with Big Government colluding with Big Finance.
Wealth is indeed created. Consider the iPhone. Steve Jobs CREATED massive wealth for himself and others through his vision. Without him the whole World would be poorer. Now, he took a fraction of the wealth he created for himself but others still benefited. Failure to recognize the crucial role of self-interest in voluntary Free Trade exchanges is why Collectivism can never succeed. I'm sorry you cannot grok this. Perhaps you may be able to once you are able to create wealth yourself.
ps. I've never read Ayn Rand. Your ad hominem instead of arguing on the basis of actual economics has failed. But you must do this since you have no clue as to why and how wealth actually gets generated.
I see this meme all the time. What I don't get is why you want to deflect from a discussion about Islam into a discussion about other superstitions? is this because you agree with the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS (the Islamic Empire/Caliphate)? why else would you do this?
Furthermore you demonstrate a complete lack of perspective with regard to the material. While the Old Testament is vicious the New Testament is a change to a more tolerance theme - hence tolerance is a virtue in Judeo-Christian derived cultures. In Islam the exact opposite happens, the tolerant Meccan Suras are replaced by the Medinan Suras and intolerance becomes the Islamic virtue.
Why you are going out of your way to defend Sharia barbarism is beyond me. Perhaps you are just one of the people 'virtue signalling' how tolerant you are of the Islamic subjugation of women, anti-Semitism, murder of homosexuals, pedopihilia/child marriage, FGM, anti-Free Speec and all the other Sharia nasties you are going out of your way to defend. This makes you a bad person I'm afraid.
Your statement is true but the real fundamental reason for Greece's woes is demographic decline. The Greeks (like most European nations) are simply not having enough children. Since the Welfare State is a Ponzi Scheme which requires pyramid demographics with many young paying in for the expensive care of the old and Greece has inverted pyramid demographics then the welfare state Ponzi scheme was destined to fail - and will do so in all nations practicing deficit-spending vote bribery.
The same consideration is why Angela Merkel is importing lots of young people into Germany. Given a choice between national identity/coherent society and the welfare ponzi scheme Merkel has chosen the latter. As have the Greeks.
The Marxist "Universal Basic Income" merely extends this madness. The root of the problem is the destruction of the family and stable traditional societies that the Cultural Marxists worked for a century to bring about. Because they are in denial that their own social/socialist policies caused the demographic collapse (being in a family to produce offspring is frowned upon, especially by the socialist modern woman) they will try things like this UBI which will cause an even worse situation.
Fix the primacy of the family and you'll achieve demographics that can support a limited welfare state. Do anything else, and all you are doing is digging a bigger whole where more people will suffer for longer.
Thank goodness my country (New Zealand) saw the unsustainability of the socialist welfare state three decades ago and brought our social programs back to levels we could afford. Hopefully Europe also learns that lesson - but at the moment the loons who are defying demographic and economic reality with crazy Marxist schemes like UBI are simply driving Europe off a cliff even faster.
Wealth is created. It is created out of self-interest by the innovative and industrious, and the flow-on effect are jobs and products for the less industrious. To not understand this (Collectivists do not) is to not understand anything about the reality of economics. Wealth is created !
You do understand that there is a difference between Muslims (people) and Islam (the totalitarian ideology), right? It is the same difference between Germans and National Socialism (Naziism). It doesn't matter what any Muslim does or does not do, the only authority in Islam is Mohammed, and he most assuredly wants to kill or enslave you (its up to him, whatever benefits the "emir" according to Sharia).
What I don't get is why anyone would apologize for this evil ideology? Islam is pretty much the same as National Socialism - kill all the Jews, conquer the World, enslave everyone for the benefit of the believers, and blind obedience to the dictator (Hitler/Mohammed). Why would you make apologetics for this - especially since it is all man-made and designed to enslave your fellow human beings.
Unless of course, you believe Islam is true and Mohammed actually existed - which is delusional since the archeological evidence shows that all the Arab temples at the time Mohammed was said to have lived don't point to where Mecca is, but to the Nabatean capital of Petra, and 100% did so from 630 Ad to 725 AD, and mixed percentages for the next hundred years. The whole Islamic story is a later fabrication and adaptation of the Nabatean cult of Dushara (see Koran 53:19-20) which worshipped square blocks called "ka'aba".
Islam is the Scientology of the Dark Ages - created by evil men to control other men and (especially) women. Don't make excises to defend this lie !
The specific prediction of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is that the Lower Tropical Troposphere (LTT) will warm faster than the Earth's surface. We do not see this. In fact, the OPPOSITE is seen. Using the Scientific Method this means that the AGW hypothesis is not only not sustainable using the observed data (that is, reality) but it is falsified.
Bill Nye is refusing to use the Scientific Method. That means he is actually the ANTI-Science Guy. He is trying to bamboozle people with rhetoric and partial information, instead of telling the whole story and using the Scientific Method, which inexorably leads to the conclusion that the IPCC computer simulations do not model the effects of water vapor/clouds correctly (their Transient Climate Sensitivity estimates are a whopping factor of 4 out - worse even than the results I'm used to as a former astrophysicist). This means the warming we see is natural (which should be obvious, since it started 160 years ago when we were still using horses and mostly agrarian).
Ignore the rhetoric. Look at the observational data and compare with the predictions made by the AGW hypothesis. AGW is falsified. If this was normal science then people would have accepted they got the theory wrong, but since science has been hijacked by political "Lysenkosim" then we see persistent propaganda that denies the observed reality (kinda like that old man that wants to pretend to be a 6 year old girl).
Do you want to be one of the people who pretends the naked Emperor has no clothes? is that the smart move? NO ! instead, stop listening to rhetoric from politicized Cultural Marxist Politically Correct flunkies like Bill Nye and look at the OBSERVATIONAL DATA - all of it!
If you disagree then that's cool, please give me your data and we can discuss it. In Science observational data is king. Too back Bill Nye is refusing to acknowledge this (or perhaps he is simply incompetent and doesn't know all the data).
Correct. The only opinions that matter in Islam are those of Allah (the Nabatean god Dushara, if one reads and understands Koran 53:19-20) and Mohammed. No other opinion or "interpretation" matters. It is amazing how supposedly rational Slashdotters "white knight" an obviously barbaric totalitarian theocracy without ever bothering to do any research - all so they can feel sanctimoniously smug about how they are so "tolerant" they will defend a mass-murdering and oppressive evil ideology that harms their fellow citizens. Such people are not morally superior - they are enabling evil which taints them with evil.
There is only one version of Islam, and that is the Islam of Mohammed. Everything that ISIS is doing is based *exactly* on what Mohammed did. Killing non-Muslims is condoned in the Koran and practiced by Mohammed. The quest to conquer the World was commanded by Mohammed (Koran 9:29 and 9:5). Beheadings were practiced by Mohammed. Pedophilia was practiced by Mohammed with Aisa bint Abu Bakr and Hussan and Hussein bin Ali according to the hadith. Sex slavery follows the Koran (Koran 4:3) and the example of Mohammed with Maria the Copt, Safiyya and others. etc etc etc.
This is why Al Azhaar University in Cairo (the highest source of Sunni and Shia jurisprudence) refuses to declare ISIS as un-Islamic, because it cannot! The Islamic State (Caliphate) is following *exactly* what Mohammed did.
Critical in the study of Islam is understanding the Doctrine of Abrogation. If you don't know this then you do not understand Islam at all. Fortunately for the Free World many Muslims are good human beings that don't understand Islam at all. Unfortunately for the Free World the pious Muslims that do understand Islam are very, very bad human beings.
What I don't understand is how so many Slashdotters make strong statements about what they assume Islam to be, without ever studying the life of Mohammed or the actual teachings of Islam (not the propaganda version intended to neutralize the Free World).
Bonus: the best news about Islam is that recent archeological scholarship shows that Islam is completely fictional and man-made (this should be obvious, but in this day and age to many these facts are not). The archeology and Koranic scholarship show that the claims of Islam about its origins CANNOT be true. Thus, since Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology (with some superstition sprinkled on top) and not a "personal faith" it is morally just to oppose the Islamic World (Dar al-Islam) fighting to impose Sharia (Islamic Law) by force on Muslims and all non-Muslims alike. Check out the evidence against Islam based on archeology (sorry, this is presented by a Christian apologist as they're the ones paying attention - we atheists have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to Islam, and even some atheists bend over forwards to make excuses for jihadis !!!):
"An Historical Critique of Islam's Beginnings" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The archeological evidence now shows Islam was created by Caliph (Arab Emperor) Abd al-Malik in order to advance Arab Imperialism. And thanks to the incompetent "leadership" of the Free World this imperialism is advancing rapidly again (for the third and possibly final time as the 57 member Organization of Islamic Cooperation seeks to fulfill their Islamic mandate to conquer the whole World and subjugate all non-Muslims into the Islamic political order).
If you don't understand the meanings of the following words then you are not qualified to talk about Islam: taqiyya/muruna/tawriya/kitman; abrogation (nasik wal mansouk), al jihad al asgher versus al jihad al akhbar; the Sunna; the Sira;Reliance of the Traveller; ijtihad; Al Mahdi; takfir and fitna.
Welcome to 1984. If you don't understand that you have been receiving Disinformation your whole life then you are still in The Matrix.
Please read "Disinformation" - by Lt Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa http://www.amazon.com/Disinfor...
The greatest source of disinformation comes from those who believe the Collective should have supremacy over the Individual - for your own good, of course. These believe that you are not competent to run your own life and make your own decisions - hence they are progressively regulating more and more of your life. In the EU they even regulate the amount of power you can have in your toaster and in your lawn mower (of course, their Agenda 21 is to move you to "sustainable" housing where you have no lawn, and further down the track, no private property - only that which the Collective gives you, which the Collective can also take away).
Most folks think that the Free World won the "Cold War". They never think about where the Collectivists went. The reality is they went nowhere and have been promoted in their careers and bureaucracies. And now we are seeing the "Fabian" style gradual increase in control through regulation. The python is squeezing if you are paying attention. When was the last time you heard citizens say "It's a Free Country" and people accept and act on that premise. No, the citizens are cowed into begging Government for scraps and for permission to do things. They are not Free because their minds are enslaved that they are subjugated to the Collective will (which actually means, the 'elites' who rule the transnational-bodies that determine the will of the global Collective).
It is amazing how angry people get when they hear the truth. They would rather cling to the lie that the prevailing disinformation has fed them. Look at all the riots of people who want to deny the Free Speech rights of others, and who think that "free stuff" (actually, resources the Collective extorts using State force from the innovative and industrious) is a sustainable economic model - or somehow a route to a better life for everyone. Madness! Not only Zuckerberg and his minions are subject to this delusion, but even some otherwise-intelligent Slashdotters are captured by it too.
Slashdot Mirror
We laugh at the Egyptians, but the European Union is pushing to outlaw EU 500 notes and all cash transactions over EU 5000. With fiat currencies debased so much these kinds of controls usually happen in regimes that fear hyperinflation and massive withdrawals from banks once debts are seen as unserviceable.
Citation: from the usually pro-EU/pro-Collectivist Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
When cash disappears so does your privacy. The Orwellian State is made possible in a cashless society where Big Brother knows your every move.
Of course, this being sold as "combating terrorism" - yet the European Union is letting potential jihadi terrorists flood in unvetted by the hundreds of thousands. Banning cash looks more like a move by technocrats to control the existing tax slaves.
Thanks for posting. I'm interested in where Vulkan may be useful. Are you working on the desktop, or on mobile? Do you have to spend time writing Vulkan code and different execution paths for each of the GPU architectures you deal with? as a desktop application developer I don't have to do this, and the same OpenGL code runs on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows and Android (I'm using JoGL, because the multi-core CPU is only about 10% utilized on four cores; and shader performance on the GPU is the limitation; call overhead is not significant - but time to market definitely is).
So if you care to elaborate on what kinds of problems you are dealing with I'd be most interested. Thanks.
Some people do make this argument. However, if an 'Application Programming Interface' is so close to a 'driver interface' that application developers find it takes too long to produce efficient and robust applications in a timely manner (time-to-market is THE important commercial metric) then this indicates that the API designers got it wrong. Adding lipstick to the pig simply introduces inefficiencies that Vulkan was supposed to remove.
Then we have the real-world benchmarks that show the promised performance gains are not there for higher-end hardware, and it is only helps at the low end (underpowered mobile devices that are CPU-bound, which means the call-overhead affecting the weak CPU is significant). if you are not gaining anything on the desktop and your development time is longer, plus you are back to worrying about specific efficiencies for specific GPUs (because the driver is so thin it cannot work this out for you) then I would say that the design is not useful for application developers (the desktop developers).
OpenGL was relatively easy to pick up and learn. Vulkan will be a much greater learning curve for developers, and will produce LESS efficient applications until the application developers spend a lot of time tweaking their app (Vulkan's main benefit is it exposes enough driver-level concerns that you can do this if you wish).
Adding a layer on top re-introduces the same overhead that Vulkan was supposed to remove. Game Engines indeed help, but that means the game engine developers are now doing the work that driver writers used to - but it is the driver writers who are intimately familiar with every aspect of the hardware.
Vulkan appeals to some - especially those that love TEH NEW SHINEY instead of actually getting very large and complex applications robust and shipped. For me, as a developer creating a high-end desktop application Vulkan's design is a step backwards. I get excellent performance out of OpenGL, but wish to see more effort into improving that instead of wasted on these wild-goose chases that simply make more work for application developers. Apple is the classic case of putting effort into Metal, which hardly anyone uses as it is not cross-platform, instead of moving their OpenGL implementation (which is already half the speed of ATIs on the same hardware [I have a Mac Pro with dual D700s]) from OpenGL 4.1 to 4.5.
Vulkan is supposed to be an API but it is no replacement for OpenGL. IMHO Khronos has made a mistake with this, not because Vulkan is inherently bad, but because resources are limited and putting them into Vulkan just to help low-end hardware means the same resources cannot be used to make cross-platform OpenGL complete better with closed-platform DirectX. In this sense Vulkan is a misstep.
Precisely. IMHO the guys now running OpenGL have confused its purpose - they are more worried about it being a mobile driver implementation rather than the Application API it was intended to be. This is a failure of design on the part of Khronos, and they have doubled-down on this mistake with Vulkan. They prefer to push complexity to application developers rather than those writing the mobile device drivers (who are paid to implement this stuff).
I have pointed out on Slashdot that Vulkan makes application development longer and more error prone. Also, the real-world examples of Apple's Metal and ATI Mantle show that there is not much improvement for desktop GPUs, and the added complexity mostly helps the performance of mobile GPUs where overhead to the weak CPU is significant.
There is an argument that application developers should use another layer over Vulkan - but this seems ridiculous to me as adding another layer removes the supposed benefits of using Vulkan in the first place.
So I agree with you, and it seems the OpenGL/Khronos specs body has now been captured by those oriented towards mobile devices - hence the progression is towards making it easier for the hardware vendors and pushing more work toward the application developers - for little actual gain except on the low-end hardware. This is very bad design, IMHO.
Actually this is not the case. In OpenGL 4 many of the fixed function pipeline operations for matrix handling etc have gone. You have to do it all yourself with shaders. This raises the bar enormously for users of OpenGL, and is a failure of design, IMHO. Furthermore, this was done so that OpenGL drivers for mobile devices could be simpler, but made it harder for new application developers considering using OpenGL for these devices - as well as desktop developers. Again, this is a design failure and confusing what a driver is from an application API - and OpenGL is supposed to be the latter, even if it incorporates elements of the former.
Correct. Vulkan drivers are easier because they do less and contain fewer optimizations. The optimizations are pushed to the application developer to do. This is both a blessing an a curse:
the blessing is that application developers can gain better performance in some cases, as there is less hardware abstraction and they can gain more control over execution of graphics operations.
the curse is that the driver has fewer optimizations built in, and future drivers can't contain optimizations for games.
This approach is helpful where call overhead is significant, and on less-powerful devices such as mobile devices. On much more powerful desktop GPUs the real-world improvements of such an approach is less clear. In actual implementations with AMD Mantle and Apple's Metal on desktop-class GPUs there are mixed performance gains (sometimes faster than OpenGL, but also sometimes slower). Given the fact that the simplicity of the Vulkan driver pushes complexity to the application (more control, but more unavoidable work for application developers too) then this simpler-driver approach is actually less useful for most of the developers actually writing the applications. Think of the difference between OpenGL and Vulkan as the difference between using a Linux distro and creating a distro out of parts you choose. You can get better performance if you choose all the parts of your custom distro, but it takes a non-negligible amount of effort and is really only beneficial on low-end hardware where every cycle counts, rather than on high-end hardware where you can have cycles to burn in some areas so time-to-market matters much, much more.
Vulkan has its good points - but as a desktop OpenGL developer, it is actually a step backward for the kinds of problems I want to solve (a desktop jet-combat flight simulator to be run on mid- to-high end desktop/workstation class GPUs).
Why did Reddit see it as necessary to remove her then?
Over on Reddit they started calling her "Chairman Pao" for the censorious regime Ms Pao imposed. She also 'purged' pro-Free Speech moderators. We gotta fight such people, the authoritarians "doing it for our own good" or because it "hurts someones feelings".
Free Speech is the whole ballgame. Lose that and no-one gets to "talk Truth to Power".
The Cultural Marxist Subversion of the Free World has resulted in weaponized zombies who prefer Big State authoritarianism and Central Planning over voluntary exchange for mutual benefit (the 'Free Market' - "capitalism" is the World the Marxists use for the Free Market). The nice thing is reality can only be defied for a short time, and those zombies will reap what they sew. And for all the sane people out there, buckle up, it's going to get rough as the Collectivist-Islamist Axis spins up to full speed.
What's so immoral when only 2% of the population feed the rest and the less you work and earn income the less you pollute?
So you think it is good to be a parasite of the labor of others? have you no shame !? who other than a child could stand to bludge from your fellow humans?
Be specific. Which version of Islam overrides Mohamned's? oh wise and great scholar of your navel.
Why are you on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS, dywolf? you consistently try to run interference for Sharia fascism? why is that so?
Not at all. Every dollar Apple made from selling an iPhone came out of the pocket of the person buying one. It's not creating wealth it's just transacting it. That is not how wealth is made.
Nonsense. Absolute rubbish. Jobs created a product that people VOLUNTARILY exchanged a token of their labor for. The value of this product VASTLY exceeded the value of the constituent parts - for the same reason the value of a square meter in real estate in downtown Manhattan is worth more than than value of a patch of dirt in your Mom's basement. One of the ways that wealth arises is through perceived utility, and this can be CREATED.
The Slashdot source code is just a bunch of characters, but those characters have a lot more value than the same number of characters produced by lonely teenagers writing awful poetry. When CmdrTaco and Hemos created Slashdot they created massive utility, and thus also created perceived value. Wealth can be created this way. Yes, this created wealth can be exchanged for the labor tokens of people who less industrious and less innovative, but that does not change the fact that perceived wealth was created.
Collectivism neither understands nor acknowledges this fact. Hence Collectivism is doomed to always fail. Always. Collectivism is predicated on the idea that somehow a person will feel compelled to get up at 3 am in the snow to help a cow they don't own give birth when doing so will produce no benefit to the person, and in fact, can be quite counter-productive. However, if the person owns the cow then self-interest is a powerful motivator for them to provide extra care for the cow instead of simply staying snug in bed when they get a UBI whether they help the cow or not.
Unfortunately, the economic illiteracy coupled with Collectivist indoctrination has lead very many in the formerly-Free World to think that the super-abundance we see today will somehow continue even when idiot Collectivists strangle the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg (economic freedom, voluntary exchange, competition, self-interest, private property, rule of law and limitation on State Power).
Until you understand that Wealth is Created, and that you can create wealth too then you will never succeed. You'll always be under the control of those who seek to divide you and keep you an economic slave. But you do have the choice to stop denying economic reality and join the creators of wealth - people who make everyone's lives better, as well as their own. Boom! Boom!
Fair enough. But say you actually wanted to make a difference and defeat that sexism, like I do. Then perhaps you would study the language and ideas of the sexist ideology (Sharia is the real "rape culture"), which arms you do defeat the sexism of that system in terms the sexists can understand. Is that not superior? Is that not advancing female equality rather than simply claiming you care? otherwise, you are simply passive and will not stop the more-determined sexists from achieving their aims.
That is why defeating Islamic/Sharia misogyny is important - which requires some effort to understand their vocabulary and memes. That is what the true anti-sexists are doing, and why I bother to try educate my fellow Slashdotters into some of the ideas of Sharia which are incompatible and anti-thetical to Enlightenment Civilization and our goals of Equality and Liberty.
In what way? at the moment you have asserted nothing more than your feelings. You need to provide evidence why you think the massive demographic decline of the West is not a major factor in why unsustainable welfare state spending is close to collapse.
Is that French fertility from native French or North African imports? I think you might be surprised by the answer. In Germany, for example, by as soon as 2020 non-native Germans will outnumber native German births. Consider what Germany will look like in 20 years.
"UBI" is just a re-branding of Marxist wealth re-distribution. Can you please name one country that such a scheme has not bankrupted in the long-term.
Of course, you probably love UBI because it means the State robs others on your behalf, right? you personally get a lot more than you receive, right? and you have no problem with the State using the threat of violence to take money off the skilled, the savers, the industrious and the innovative, right? do you even comprehend how disgustingly immoral this is?
Nope. The system you describe is called "cronyism" and is only possible with Big Government colluding with Big Finance.
Wealth is indeed created. Consider the iPhone. Steve Jobs CREATED massive wealth for himself and others through his vision. Without him the whole World would be poorer. Now, he took a fraction of the wealth he created for himself but others still benefited. Failure to recognize the crucial role of self-interest in voluntary Free Trade exchanges is why Collectivism can never succeed. I'm sorry you cannot grok this. Perhaps you may be able to once you are able to create wealth yourself.
ps. I've never read Ayn Rand. Your ad hominem instead of arguing on the basis of actual economics has failed. But you must do this since you have no clue as to why and how wealth actually gets generated.
I see this meme all the time. What I don't get is why you want to deflect from a discussion about Islam into a discussion about other superstitions? is this because you agree with the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS (the Islamic Empire/Caliphate)? why else would you do this?
Furthermore you demonstrate a complete lack of perspective with regard to the material. While the Old Testament is vicious the New Testament is a change to a more tolerance theme - hence tolerance is a virtue in Judeo-Christian derived cultures. In Islam the exact opposite happens, the tolerant Meccan Suras are replaced by the Medinan Suras and intolerance becomes the Islamic virtue.
Why you are going out of your way to defend Sharia barbarism is beyond me. Perhaps you are just one of the people 'virtue signalling' how tolerant you are of the Islamic subjugation of women, anti-Semitism, murder of homosexuals, pedopihilia/child marriage, FGM, anti-Free Speec and all the other Sharia nasties you are going out of your way to defend. This makes you a bad person I'm afraid.
Your statement is true but the real fundamental reason for Greece's woes is demographic decline. The Greeks (like most European nations) are simply not having enough children. Since the Welfare State is a Ponzi Scheme which requires pyramid demographics with many young paying in for the expensive care of the old and Greece has inverted pyramid demographics then the welfare state Ponzi scheme was destined to fail - and will do so in all nations practicing deficit-spending vote bribery.
The same consideration is why Angela Merkel is importing lots of young people into Germany. Given a choice between national identity/coherent society and the welfare ponzi scheme Merkel has chosen the latter. As have the Greeks.
The Marxist "Universal Basic Income" merely extends this madness. The root of the problem is the destruction of the family and stable traditional societies that the Cultural Marxists worked for a century to bring about. Because they are in denial that their own social/socialist policies caused the demographic collapse (being in a family to produce offspring is frowned upon, especially by the socialist modern woman) they will try things like this UBI which will cause an even worse situation.
Fix the primacy of the family and you'll achieve demographics that can support a limited welfare state. Do anything else, and all you are doing is digging a bigger whole where more people will suffer for longer.
Thank goodness my country (New Zealand) saw the unsustainability of the socialist welfare state three decades ago and brought our social programs back to levels we could afford. Hopefully Europe also learns that lesson - but at the moment the loons who are defying demographic and economic reality with crazy Marxist schemes like UBI are simply driving Europe off a cliff even faster.
Wealth is created. It is created out of self-interest by the innovative and industrious, and the flow-on effect are jobs and products for the less industrious. To not understand this (Collectivists do not) is to not understand anything about the reality of economics. Wealth is created !
You do understand that there is a difference between Muslims (people) and Islam (the totalitarian ideology), right? It is the same difference between Germans and National Socialism (Naziism). It doesn't matter what any Muslim does or does not do, the only authority in Islam is Mohammed, and he most assuredly wants to kill or enslave you (its up to him, whatever benefits the "emir" according to Sharia).
What I don't get is why anyone would apologize for this evil ideology? Islam is pretty much the same as National Socialism - kill all the Jews, conquer the World, enslave everyone for the benefit of the believers, and blind obedience to the dictator (Hitler/Mohammed). Why would you make apologetics for this - especially since it is all man-made and designed to enslave your fellow human beings.
Unless of course, you believe Islam is true and Mohammed actually existed - which is delusional since the archeological evidence shows that all the Arab temples at the time Mohammed was said to have lived don't point to where Mecca is, but to the Nabatean capital of Petra, and 100% did so from 630 Ad to 725 AD, and mixed percentages for the next hundred years. The whole Islamic story is a later fabrication and adaptation of the Nabatean cult of Dushara (see Koran 53:19-20) which worshipped square blocks called "ka'aba".
Islam is the Scientology of the Dark Ages - created by evil men to control other men and (especially) women. Don't make excises to defend this lie !
So you have no issue with ISIS because it would be "fun" ? really?
The specific prediction of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is that the Lower Tropical Troposphere (LTT) will warm faster than the Earth's surface. We do not see this. In fact, the OPPOSITE is seen. Using the Scientific Method this means that the AGW hypothesis is not only not sustainable using the observed data (that is, reality) but it is falsified.
Bill Nye is refusing to use the Scientific Method. That means he is actually the ANTI-Science Guy. He is trying to bamboozle people with rhetoric and partial information, instead of telling the whole story and using the Scientific Method, which inexorably leads to the conclusion that the IPCC computer simulations do not model the effects of water vapor/clouds correctly (their Transient Climate Sensitivity estimates are a whopping factor of 4 out - worse even than the results I'm used to as a former astrophysicist). This means the warming we see is natural (which should be obvious, since it started 160 years ago when we were still using horses and mostly agrarian).
Ignore the rhetoric. Look at the observational data and compare with the predictions made by the AGW hypothesis. AGW is falsified. If this was normal science then people would have accepted they got the theory wrong, but since science has been hijacked by political "Lysenkosim" then we see persistent propaganda that denies the observed reality (kinda like that old man that wants to pretend to be a 6 year old girl).
THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES ! Stop pretending he does. AGW is not supported by the data.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
http://docs.house.gov/meetings...
From https://climateaudit.org/2016/...
Do you want to be one of the people who pretends the naked Emperor has no clothes? is that the smart move? NO ! instead, stop listening to rhetoric from politicized Cultural Marxist Politically Correct flunkies like Bill Nye and look at the OBSERVATIONAL DATA - all of it!
If you disagree then that's cool, please give me your data and we can discuss it. In Science observational data is king. Too back Bill Nye is refusing to acknowledge this (or perhaps he is simply incompetent and doesn't know all the data).
Correct. The only opinions that matter in Islam are those of Allah (the Nabatean god Dushara, if one reads and understands Koran 53:19-20) and Mohammed. No other opinion or "interpretation" matters. It is amazing how supposedly rational Slashdotters "white knight" an obviously barbaric totalitarian theocracy without ever bothering to do any research - all so they can feel sanctimoniously smug about how they are so "tolerant" they will defend a mass-murdering and oppressive evil ideology that harms their fellow citizens. Such people are not morally superior - they are enabling evil which taints them with evil.
FALSE.
There is only one version of Islam, and that is the Islam of Mohammed. Everything that ISIS is doing is based *exactly* on what Mohammed did. Killing non-Muslims is condoned in the Koran and practiced by Mohammed. The quest to conquer the World was commanded by Mohammed (Koran 9:29 and 9:5). Beheadings were practiced by Mohammed. Pedophilia was practiced by Mohammed with Aisa bint Abu Bakr and Hussan and Hussein bin Ali according to the hadith. Sex slavery follows the Koran (Koran 4:3) and the example of Mohammed with Maria the Copt, Safiyya and others. etc etc etc.
This is why Al Azhaar University in Cairo (the highest source of Sunni and Shia jurisprudence) refuses to declare ISIS as un-Islamic, because it cannot! The Islamic State (Caliphate) is following *exactly* what Mohammed did.
Critical in the study of Islam is understanding the Doctrine of Abrogation. If you don't know this then you do not understand Islam at all. Fortunately for the Free World many Muslims are good human beings that don't understand Islam at all. Unfortunately for the Free World the pious Muslims that do understand Islam are very, very bad human beings.
What I don't understand is how so many Slashdotters make strong statements about what they assume Islam to be, without ever studying the life of Mohammed or the actual teachings of Islam (not the propaganda version intended to neutralize the Free World).
Bonus: the best news about Islam is that recent archeological scholarship shows that Islam is completely fictional and man-made (this should be obvious, but in this day and age to many these facts are not). The archeology and Koranic scholarship show that the claims of Islam about its origins CANNOT be true. Thus, since Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology (with some superstition sprinkled on top) and not a "personal faith" it is morally just to oppose the Islamic World (Dar al-Islam) fighting to impose Sharia (Islamic Law) by force on Muslims and all non-Muslims alike. Check out the evidence against Islam based on archeology (sorry, this is presented by a Christian apologist as they're the ones paying attention - we atheists have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to Islam, and even some atheists bend over forwards to make excuses for jihadis !!!):
"An Historical Critique of Islam's Beginnings"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The archeological evidence now shows Islam was created by Caliph (Arab Emperor) Abd al-Malik in order to advance Arab Imperialism. And thanks to the incompetent "leadership" of the Free World this imperialism is advancing rapidly again (for the third and possibly final time as the 57 member Organization of Islamic Cooperation seeks to fulfill their Islamic mandate to conquer the whole World and subjugate all non-Muslims into the Islamic political order).
If you don't understand the meanings of the following words then you are not qualified to talk about Islam: taqiyya/muruna/tawriya/kitman; abrogation (nasik wal mansouk), al jihad al asgher versus al jihad al akhbar; the Sunna; the Sira;Reliance of the Traveller; ijtihad; Al Mahdi; takfir and fitna.
Welcome to 1984. If you don't understand that you have been receiving Disinformation your whole life then you are still in The Matrix.
Please read "Disinformation" - by Lt Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa
http://www.amazon.com/Disinfor...
The greatest source of disinformation comes from those who believe the Collective should have supremacy over the Individual - for your own good, of course. These believe that you are not competent to run your own life and make your own decisions - hence they are progressively regulating more and more of your life. In the EU they even regulate the amount of power you can have in your toaster and in your lawn mower (of course, their Agenda 21 is to move you to "sustainable" housing where you have no lawn, and further down the track, no private property - only that which the Collective gives you, which the Collective can also take away).
Most folks think that the Free World won the "Cold War". They never think about where the Collectivists went. The reality is they went nowhere and have been promoted in their careers and bureaucracies. And now we are seeing the "Fabian" style gradual increase in control through regulation. The python is squeezing if you are paying attention. When was the last time you heard citizens say "It's a Free Country" and people accept and act on that premise. No, the citizens are cowed into begging Government for scraps and for permission to do things. They are not Free because their minds are enslaved that they are subjugated to the Collective will (which actually means, the 'elites' who rule the transnational-bodies that determine the will of the global Collective).
It is amazing how angry people get when they hear the truth. They would rather cling to the lie that the prevailing disinformation has fed them. Look at all the riots of people who want to deny the Free Speech rights of others, and who think that "free stuff" (actually, resources the Collective extorts using State force from the innovative and industrious) is a sustainable economic model - or somehow a route to a better life for everyone. Madness! Not only Zuckerberg and his minions are subject to this delusion, but even some otherwise-intelligent Slashdotters are captured by it too.
Live Free or Die !
This was Hillary Clinton's war to prove her foreign policy bona fides for her presidential run. What a disaster !