This just goes to show what levels of disclosure and topics of discussion will be sacrificed in the name of securing commercial and privatized interest. Business as usual, nothing to see here folks, move along...
Google has been very vocal and very public about this. If they were staying mum to secure their business interests, then they really, really screwed up.
Only in the politics of global business news would holding a press conference that triggered comments from both your own Secretary of State and China's official news outlet and then letting that play out rather than continue to rant, be considered "staying quiet."
They also said "Don't be evil," and had an anti-censorship statement in their FAQ, until they decided to go into the People's Republic of China.
1) and that continues to be their moto (which their employees are reminded of endlessly) and continues to be their reason for working with China to try to open communications. Unlike Yahoo! (who turns over dissidents as a matter of course) Google is so uncooperative that China had to start a major international incident to get dissident information out of them by stealing it.
2) Oh and in this case you're dead wrong about the patent being in any way used for offensive purposes. Google's membership in the Open Invention Network should be well known to the Slashdot crowd, and if you want to know more about how they view patents the licensing information for their Go language is most educational.
Web sites already know where you're coming from. They have your IP address. Every single one of them, unless you're using a proxy.
And interestingly enough it's far easier to rely on a DNS proxy than a Web or mail proxy, as the information is relatively stateless, so yes, there's nothing about this proposal that affects users in any way other than potentially yielding better geolocation results.
I'm trying to think of a legitimate reason for Google to want this pushed through, other than to track their users. I can understand an IP wanting to use the "load balancing" reasoning, but tracking user activity is the ONLY thing Google stands to gain.
Anyone who has worked with DNS infrastructure over the last 20 years knows that this is the largest and most glaring need in the standard and Google is most certainly not the only one who wants it. Anyone who deals with large-scale distributed infrastructure for content delivery is practically begging for it and has been for 10 years at least.
There's is absolutely zero value here in terms of "tracking users" since anyone who goes to your DNS server to ask for you IP address is then going to contact your service port (e.g. HTTP) and you get far more useful tracking information at that time.
Google is proposing that DNS be improved for geolocating content. That's it.
This is a good thing and would drastically improve the technology and remove arbitrary limitations that exist today. What's more you certainly have the option of running your own DNS server and anonymizing your requests if you want, but it's not like Google gets to see your requests anyway. The request will be sent to the DNS server responsible for the site you were actually asking about, so if you're looking up bombmakingparts.example.com, then only you, your immediate recursive DNS provider and example.com will be privy to the exchange of information where today, your recursive DNS provider is the only one who gets to know.... I don't really see how letting the site you're about to contact in on the communication helps or hurts the user except by imrpoving geolocation.
PS: People have brought up the idea that nations that censor the internet will use this to improve censoring. This is wrong. They don't censor based on DNS, they filter traffic, providing man-in-the-middle proxies that you can't opt out of. This won't change their technology at all, and even if they used DNS for such purposes, this wouldn't change how they would do it (which would be to control what your ISP tells you in response to the initial request).
And people had the cheek to insult Google! To hell with that double standards bullshit.
You're new here, I assume.
Google has been a standard punching bag on Slashdot for years. Geeks tend to distrust anything that becomes popular, and Google is very popular. That's really all you need to know about it.
The last guy whose computer I worked on must have had 5 or 6 toolbars in his browser, countless viruses, and he had been phished so many times that his browser had all but stopped working under the load (it loaded up about ten different phishing sites and at least a dozen porn pop-ups at every boot).
Straw man arguments are fun. Let me try...
The last person I saw eating ice cream had a freezer full of bright pink, chemical infused flavors. It was smeared all over his clothes, he weighed 400 pounds and couldn't leave his apartment. You don't want to be like that guy do you? Well, then don't eat ice cream.
The anti-toolbar craze among the techie community started when Yahoo! put out theirs. It was a disaster. Its features were so intrusive that anyone with a clue immediately un-installed it if they'd been unfortunate enough to be an early adopter (I don't recall having done so, but I've installed so much software over the years, I might have back then). After that "toolbar" became synonymous with the loathing we all felt for Yahoo!'s little toy. It didn't help that any number of "toolbars" were part of the standard arsenal of malware.
So, I can see how Google's toolbar can get an unfair start out of the gate, but let me just ask.... have you used it? Have you explored the features it provides and found them wanting or are you just engaging yourself in some toolbar luditism?
\As far as I'm concerned toolbar == spy-ware. Google jumped the shark and joined the ranks of Yahoo, MSN and Happy-smiley-spy-ware-toolbar the day they created one and started shoving it down people's throat.
No techie I know installs any toolbar in IE or Firefox.
Programmer, admin, etc. of 20+ years. I've used Google Toolbar for 2 years. It's a nice tool. I like the highlighting features and the page-rank display. Translate integration is nice. I could get everything that Google's toolbar gives me in a suite of other addons, but I don't need to. I never use the various funky buttons, but i do like the gmail mailto: integration.
The only poor souls that seems to be stuck with them are non-techies, who usually have at least 3-4 toolbars and they "don't know how it happened".
I explicitly download and install it. I don't know who these people you know are, but their browser fail is not my problem.
It's also amazing to watch them browse the web, they almost never use the address bar, it's either the Google or Yahoo toolbar's search box
I almost never use the toolbar's search, and I don't turn on the integrated search feature (where it replaces the basic search widget) because I use many other forms of search (corporate intranet search, amazon, Wikipedia, etc.)
I would be surprised if this was actually a "bug" and not a feature, sounds like a great bug to have for a data mining company.
Why on Earth would they want to do such a thing. They practically drown in data. Pissing off customers in order to get a dribble more (from what I understand the bug showed up in IE8 when you turned off the feedback but had not yet restarted the browser... which is an awfully narrow segment of their user-base).
My love for Google is diminishing faster than the DOW in 2008.
... I don't see why manned missions are somehow better than unmanned ones for fostering innovation, dollar for dollar.
I would have disagreed with that pre-Hubble on the basis that humans get excited about seeing humans breaking into new frontiers, but I have to say that the value of "pretty pictures of space" in terms of motivating the public to explore seems to be massive. In fact, I'd suggest that we create a revenue-neutral space exploration effort that is entirely funded by a Fathom Events-like screening of each new round of exploration images. Make it a big PR event and charge $100 per seat. At a guess, I think you could make as much money on unmanned exploration of mars, the asteroid belt, the gas giants and the outer solar system that we've barely explored at all with just a screening a year.
In fact, you could even get Hollywood involved. I bet you cold hard cash that Cameron would sign on to run the direction component. It's exactly what he loves (which is why Avatar was the first time he'd done a non-documentary in 10 years... he was too busy filming the ocean floor).
I should point out that all of my numbers above are at least 3 years out of date and from memory, but the basic concept is correct: almost all spam, up to a rate above 99% is easily filtered. The remaining <1% has been the problem for 10 years.
The problem is that nearly all spam filtering techniques are "effectively perfect." Spam filtering is, in fact, a solved problem as long as you can tolerate somewhere between 0.01 and 0.1% false negative and an order or two smaller false positive rates. That sounds great, right? Great, use gmail and you're done, because they actually tend to beat those numbers. Problem is that spam volumes are unbelievably large right now. I had to stop hosting my own mail sever, not because I couldn't filter the mail accurately, but because the number of connection requests was killing me! When that much spam comes in, you can filter about 50-75% of it at the door (blocked IP ranges, etc.) Then you can get up around 80-90% of it just by doing simple things like looking for obviously forged envelopes (it turns out that president@whitehouse.gov typically doesn't forge headers from a dialup connection). At that point anything you do that isn't outright stupid gets you to 95-99% and just a decent Bayesian filter combined with a honeypot signature-matching system will push you above 99%.
It's still not enough, and virtually everyone who says they've got a virtually perfect solution is saying that they can do what I just described above, usually with some twist that makes it sound like they're not just re-inventing SpamAssassin, but they're wrong or lying in virtually all cases. The real problem is filtering out which ones aren't a) clueless or b) liars. The best rule of thumb is be as suspicious of anti-spam as you are of spam.
I guess now is as good as any to go through my Gmail and Google Docs and make local backups. I'm sure my info is safe, but I have been through these types of 'upgrades' at work before and every once in a while....well, let's just say backups are never a bad idea.
What makes you think that gmail or gdocs is going to be affected? Your data is almost certainly stored in a database. It's possible that that database is stored on a filesystem (as opposed to a raw device, which I won't be at all surprised to see), but even then you're talking about something that's far less discreet than a bunch of text files lying around on a filesystem.
What's actually kind of amusing is you've never known when or if they've updated that database and yet your life has continued along smoothly.
Nope, I read it over a few times. You're making a very different argument, here, than the one I was responding to (which you also made).
The point I was responding to was, "Carmack may have had a point 12 years ago... Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least."
Now, in response to your new post, I would say that you're probably being overly narrow in your reading of the summary. I read this as a more general statement than "the same exact thing is happening, here." Rather, this is a comparable situation.
Back to TFA: You've confuse cause and effect. The article claims that there is the cause (DirectX marketing) and the effect (disparity in hardware implementations and developer experience with OpenGL vs. DirectX). You're looking at these two as identical properties, which is why you're seeing such inconsistency.
It's common knowledge that OpenGL... has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions.
Vendor extensions are not part of the standard
That's simply incorrect. OpenGL is a living, breathing standard, and just as many features of HTML have been "extensions" for years, to say that they haven't been a standard part of HTML development for a large chunk of that time would be to ignore the practical reality.
OpenGL and DirectX are updated in bursts, but clearly OpenGL is where the leading edge work happens, while Microsoft incorporates only those features which are already widely supported by hardware their platforms have access to. This makes DirectX a poor technology choice unless you're only interested in supporting hardware that is heavily entrenched with Microsoft.
As with nearly any large, social system, international diplomacy has layers of rules and exceptions and more rules and more exceptions, accreted over time.
Chess is a useful analogy. There are standard openings in chess. Everyone who has a working familiarity with the game knows most of them at a glance. There are some other, less standard openings. Then there are crazy things that beginners do. Except, sometimes a grand master will use one of those crazy openings specifically because it's something that his opponents don't have a set response for.
Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least.
Clearly you've mis-read the summary, failed to read TFA or (more likely) both. TFA is a modern and up-to-date account of the standing between OpenGL and DX and why developers should favor OpenGL. The summary was citing the article and further relating it to the older debate had between the gaming industry and Microsoft so long ago.
Please at least read the summary for comprehension before replying. It really does help.
My understanding is that devs should use OpenGL because they want to do a whole bunch more work writing code for each individual graphics card.
Bad trolling.
It's true that there are some things to work around between cards when working with OpenGL (because of the positive feedback loop mentioned in TFA). However, you also have far more work to do with OpenGL to support the dozens of platforms it's available on... Sadly for DX developers, they only have to support two platforms.
The fact that I didn't know most of those titles (many of which I have or have played) had support for OpenGL is a testament to the lack of marketing and the push the OpenGL community needs to make to get people excited about it.
For the most part, these titles rely on underlying toolkits that smooth the management of OpenGL and DX interfaces. World of Warcraft does this, for example in order to ship on MacOS and Windows, so you can see how it would not be a great marketing win for OpenGL.
Still, it's an all too often overlooked fact that emerging gaming markets such a mobile and every console except XBox require something other than DX and in almost all of those cases, that's OpenGL. You pretty much have to start with OpenGL support and then decide if you want to support DX or not.
You're contradicting TFA without any evidence. TFA provided quite a lot of evidence to support its position such as:
It's common knowledge that OpenGL has faster draw calls than DirectX (see NVIDIA presentations like this one if you don't want to take my word for it), and it has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions. OpenGL gives you direct access to all new graphics features on all platforms, while DirectX only provides occasional snapshots of them on their newest versions of Windows. The tesselation technology that Microsoft is heavily promoting for DirectX 11 has been an OpenGL extension for three years. It has even been possible for years before that, using fast instancing and vertex-texture-fetch. I don't know what new technologies will be exposed in the next couple years, I know they will be available first in OpenGL.
So no, I don't think you can just drop such a comment and be taken seriously. You're going to have to back that up.
For normal activities (surfing, vids, nav, etc) 1ghz is overkill. The biggest beneficiary of all that CPU and GPU power is gaming. But without multitouch, gaming will be terribly restricted. So WTF am I supposed to play on this thing -- 3D, HD whack-a-mole?
I don't buy that I need multi-touch to play games. Sure, some UIs might be more intuitive that way, but as long as I can drag and poke, most of what I want from a game is there. What's more, I'd want most games to take advantage of being able to use the touch-screen and D-pad at the same time anyway.
Online music distribution is picking up now that DRM is fading away, and the movie industry wants to up the encryption? Seriously?
This is an artifact of the differences in the two markets. Music is played over and over and acquiring a higher quality version of a song has value. With movies, most viewers will be happy with their first viewing, even if it's not the highest quality. Once they've seen the story they don't need to see it again unless they want to show it to friends or remind themselves of it years later.
As an example, I got in to a free showing of (now, Sir) Patrick Stewart's made for TV Moby Dick many years ago before it aired on TV. I never watched it on TV, and why would I? There was nothing new to be gained. They lost an audience member by showing it to me. Of course, they got a review out of the deal that was probably read by a few thousand people, so that's a good deal, but movie companies don't see an upside in losing a viewer of Avatar or Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps there is on, and I'd love to have that debate in a venue that the studios participated in, but right now they're afraid that their primary money-making engine, the blockbuster weekend which fuels subsequent DVD sales, will be compromised by the easy availability of downloadable screeners and camcorder rips and it's too simplistic to say that they should just follow the music industry model and let it go.
Any game theorist will tell you that any system of sufficient complexity, open to a large user base, which contains "winning conditions" can be manipulated to the benefit of a few of the participants at the expense of the others.
Well, perhaps we shouldn't be making search rankings a "game" in the first place?
I'm stopping there. You didn't read what I wrote. "Any game theorist will tell you..." When someone talks about "games" in the sense of game theory, you either go look up what that means, or you don't engage the discussion. Any other choice simply polutes the conversation.
Does this sign the closing of the Mono project? And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL...
The GPL isn't suitable for libraries due to its requirement that all library consumers be GPL. It's not a fundamentalist stance, and at one point, even RMS agreed with this point (hence his introduction of the LGPL). It was only with the growth of GPLed software that the FSF decided that they no longer liked that idea. As long as they were the little fish in the pond, playing nice with everyone else's licensing terms seemed like a good idea...
Now, I like the GPL. I've used it many times. But to suggest that moving from the GPL to the LGPL (essentially just dropping the "you can't use this with your code if your code isn't GPLed") would make source code more "closed" is absurd. It's, in fact, a more open and permissive license.
We want systems to be open, so that we can freely use them, but we will keep our own system proprietary. Where Google makes Open Source, it does so to disrupt other people's business, so that Google can continue to use open infrastructure. Sure, it's good business sense, but spare us the "we are the good guys" bullshit.
Google, Red Hat and IBM are the world's foremost corporate benefactors of open source software. Their Summer of Code events draw in more new open source developers to existing projects than any other single effort.
And yet, we refer to Google's internal memo encouraging employees to open source their code as "typical proprietary bullshit" and that gets rated as "insightful" on Slashdot.
If there's anything Google's example has taught me, it's that you can't work with the open source community.
Slashdot Mirror
This just goes to show what levels of disclosure and topics of discussion will be sacrificed in the name of securing commercial and privatized interest. Business as usual, nothing to see here folks, move along...
Google has been very vocal and very public about this. If they were staying mum to secure their business interests, then they really, really screwed up.
Only in the politics of global business news would holding a press conference that triggered comments from both your own Secretary of State and China's official news outlet and then letting that play out rather than continue to rant, be considered "staying quiet."
They also said "Don't be evil," and had an anti-censorship statement in their FAQ, until they decided to go into the People's Republic of China.
1) and that continues to be their moto (which their employees are reminded of endlessly) and continues to be their reason for working with China to try to open communications. Unlike Yahoo! (who turns over dissidents as a matter of course) Google is so uncooperative that China had to start a major international incident to get dissident information out of them by stealing it.
2) Oh and in this case you're dead wrong about the patent being in any way used for offensive purposes. Google's membership in the Open Invention Network should be well known to the Slashdot crowd, and if you want to know more about how they view patents the licensing information for their Go language is most educational.
Web sites already know where you're coming from. They have your IP address. Every single one of them, unless you're using a proxy.
And interestingly enough it's far easier to rely on a DNS proxy than a Web or mail proxy, as the information is relatively stateless, so yes, there's nothing about this proposal that affects users in any way other than potentially yielding better geolocation results.
I'm trying to think of a legitimate reason for Google to want this pushed through, other than to track their users. I can understand an IP wanting to use the "load balancing" reasoning, but tracking user activity is the ONLY thing Google stands to gain.
Anyone who has worked with DNS infrastructure over the last 20 years knows that this is the largest and most glaring need in the standard and Google is most certainly not the only one who wants it. Anyone who deals with large-scale distributed infrastructure for content delivery is practically begging for it and has been for 10 years at least.
There's is absolutely zero value here in terms of "tracking users" since anyone who goes to your DNS server to ask for you IP address is then going to contact your service port (e.g. HTTP) and you get far more useful tracking information at that time.
What on Earth have you been smoking?!
Google is proposing that DNS be improved for geolocating content. That's it.
This is a good thing and would drastically improve the technology and remove arbitrary limitations that exist today. What's more you certainly have the option of running your own DNS server and anonymizing your requests if you want, but it's not like Google gets to see your requests anyway. The request will be sent to the DNS server responsible for the site you were actually asking about, so if you're looking up bombmakingparts.example.com, then only you, your immediate recursive DNS provider and example.com will be privy to the exchange of information where today, your recursive DNS provider is the only one who gets to know.... I don't really see how letting the site you're about to contact in on the communication helps or hurts the user except by imrpoving geolocation.
PS: People have brought up the idea that nations that censor the internet will use this to improve censoring. This is wrong. They don't censor based on DNS, they filter traffic, providing man-in-the-middle proxies that you can't opt out of. This won't change their technology at all, and even if they used DNS for such purposes, this wouldn't change how they would do it (which would be to control what your ISP tells you in response to the initial request).
And people had the cheek to insult Google! To hell with that double standards bullshit.
You're new here, I assume.
Google has been a standard punching bag on Slashdot for years. Geeks tend to distrust anything that becomes popular, and Google is very popular. That's really all you need to know about it.
What is wrong with Chrome?
- Invasion of privacy, the queries that fly off to Google with every key stroke
Some form of linkage to back this up would be nice. I really just don't buy it.
- Mandatory Google-updater that stays on your system for a day even after you uninstall everything
I've un-installed it. What did you do wrong?
The last guy whose computer I worked on must have had 5 or 6 toolbars in his browser, countless viruses, and he had been phished so many times that his browser had all but stopped working under the load (it loaded up about ten different phishing sites and at least a dozen porn pop-ups at every boot).
Straw man arguments are fun. Let me try...
The last person I saw eating ice cream had a freezer full of bright pink, chemical infused flavors. It was smeared all over his clothes, he weighed 400 pounds and couldn't leave his apartment. You don't want to be like that guy do you? Well, then don't eat ice cream.
The anti-toolbar craze among the techie community started when Yahoo! put out theirs. It was a disaster. Its features were so intrusive that anyone with a clue immediately un-installed it if they'd been unfortunate enough to be an early adopter (I don't recall having done so, but I've installed so much software over the years, I might have back then). After that "toolbar" became synonymous with the loathing we all felt for Yahoo!'s little toy. It didn't help that any number of "toolbars" were part of the standard arsenal of malware.
So, I can see how Google's toolbar can get an unfair start out of the gate, but let me just ask.... have you used it? Have you explored the features it provides and found them wanting or are you just engaging yourself in some toolbar luditism?
\As far as I'm concerned toolbar == spy-ware. Google jumped the shark and joined the ranks of Yahoo, MSN and Happy-smiley-spy-ware-toolbar the day they created one and started shoving it down people's throat.
No techie I know installs any toolbar in IE or Firefox.
Programmer, admin, etc. of 20+ years. I've used Google Toolbar for 2 years. It's a nice tool. I like the highlighting features and the page-rank display. Translate integration is nice. I could get everything that Google's toolbar gives me in a suite of other addons, but I don't need to. I never use the various funky buttons, but i do like the gmail mailto: integration.
The only poor souls that seems to be stuck with them are non-techies, who usually have at least 3-4 toolbars and they "don't know how it happened".
I explicitly download and install it. I don't know who these people you know are, but their browser fail is not my problem.
It's also amazing to watch them browse the web, they almost never use the address bar, it's either the Google or Yahoo toolbar's search box
I almost never use the toolbar's search, and I don't turn on the integrated search feature (where it replaces the basic search widget) because I use many other forms of search (corporate intranet search, amazon, Wikipedia, etc.)
I would be surprised if this was actually a "bug" and not a feature, sounds like a great bug to have for a data mining company.
Why on Earth would they want to do such a thing. They practically drown in data. Pissing off customers in order to get a dribble more (from what I understand the bug showed up in IE8 when you turned off the feedback but had not yet restarted the browser... which is an awfully narrow segment of their user-base).
My love for Google is diminishing faster than the DOW in 2008.
Yes, I can understand. A company that puts out a toolbar cannot possibly restore your faith in them by continuing to be the largest backer of open source development as well as a massive contributor, backing large humanitarian and charitable efforts and speaking out against government violations of privacy that go far beyond giving you the choice of installing a toolbar.
How could you have been blinded to their abuses.
... I don't see why manned missions are somehow better than unmanned ones for fostering innovation, dollar for dollar.
I would have disagreed with that pre-Hubble on the basis that humans get excited about seeing humans breaking into new frontiers, but I have to say that the value of "pretty pictures of space" in terms of motivating the public to explore seems to be massive. In fact, I'd suggest that we create a revenue-neutral space exploration effort that is entirely funded by a Fathom Events-like screening of each new round of exploration images. Make it a big PR event and charge $100 per seat. At a guess, I think you could make as much money on unmanned exploration of mars, the asteroid belt, the gas giants and the outer solar system that we've barely explored at all with just a screening a year.
In fact, you could even get Hollywood involved. I bet you cold hard cash that Cameron would sign on to run the direction component. It's exactly what he loves (which is why Avatar was the first time he'd done a non-documentary in 10 years... he was too busy filming the ocean floor).
I should point out that all of my numbers above are at least 3 years out of date and from memory, but the basic concept is correct: almost all spam, up to a rate above 99% is easily filtered. The remaining <1% has been the problem for 10 years.
Sure, it will work "perfectly" for about 2 days,
No... it won't.
The problem is that nearly all spam filtering techniques are "effectively perfect." Spam filtering is, in fact, a solved problem as long as you can tolerate somewhere between 0.01 and 0.1% false negative and an order or two smaller false positive rates. That sounds great, right? Great, use gmail and you're done, because they actually tend to beat those numbers. Problem is that spam volumes are unbelievably large right now. I had to stop hosting my own mail sever, not because I couldn't filter the mail accurately, but because the number of connection requests was killing me! When that much spam comes in, you can filter about 50-75% of it at the door (blocked IP ranges, etc.) Then you can get up around 80-90% of it just by doing simple things like looking for obviously forged envelopes (it turns out that president@whitehouse.gov typically doesn't forge headers from a dialup connection). At that point anything you do that isn't outright stupid gets you to 95-99% and just a decent Bayesian filter combined with a honeypot signature-matching system will push you above 99%.
It's still not enough, and virtually everyone who says they've got a virtually perfect solution is saying that they can do what I just described above, usually with some twist that makes it sound like they're not just re-inventing SpamAssassin, but they're wrong or lying in virtually all cases. The real problem is filtering out which ones aren't a) clueless or b) liars. The best rule of thumb is be as suspicious of anti-spam as you are of spam.
I guess now is as good as any to go through my Gmail and Google Docs and make local backups. I'm sure my info is safe, but I have been through these types of 'upgrades' at work before and every once in a while....well, let's just say backups are never a bad idea.
What makes you think that gmail or gdocs is going to be affected? Your data is almost certainly stored in a database. It's possible that that database is stored on a filesystem (as opposed to a raw device, which I won't be at all surprised to see), but even then you're talking about something that's far less discreet than a bunch of text files lying around on a filesystem.
What's actually kind of amusing is you've never known when or if they've updated that database and yet your life has continued along smoothly.
Er, I think you need to check the summary again.
Nope, I read it over a few times. You're making a very different argument, here, than the one I was responding to (which you also made).
The point I was responding to was, "Carmack may have had a point 12 years ago ... Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least."
Now, in response to your new post, I would say that you're probably being overly narrow in your reading of the summary. I read this as a more general statement than "the same exact thing is happening, here." Rather, this is a comparable situation.
Back to TFA: You've confuse cause and effect. The article claims that there is the cause (DirectX marketing) and the effect (disparity in hardware implementations and developer experience with OpenGL vs. DirectX). You're looking at these two as identical properties, which is why you're seeing such inconsistency.
Emphasis added:
Vendor extensions are not part of the standard
That's simply incorrect. OpenGL is a living, breathing standard, and just as many features of HTML have been "extensions" for years, to say that they haven't been a standard part of HTML development for a large chunk of that time would be to ignore the practical reality.
OpenGL and DirectX are updated in bursts, but clearly OpenGL is where the leading edge work happens, while Microsoft incorporates only those features which are already widely supported by hardware their platforms have access to. This makes DirectX a poor technology choice unless you're only interested in supporting hardware that is heavily entrenched with Microsoft.
Look at the gaming market without preconceptions for a second. With the mobile gaming market in China alone projected to be in the double-digit billions in short order and with Apple making what appear to be moves to position the iMac as a gaming platform, the continued viability of developing games that only play ball with Windows-friendly hardware is bleak at best.
International diplomacy is a game with rules.
You're a funny guy.
And a correct one.
As with nearly any large, social system, international diplomacy has layers of rules and exceptions and more rules and more exceptions, accreted over time.
Chess is a useful analogy. There are standard openings in chess. Everyone who has a working familiarity with the game knows most of them at a glance. There are some other, less standard openings. Then there are crazy things that beginners do. Except, sometimes a grand master will use one of those crazy openings specifically because it's something that his opponents don't have a set response for.
Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least.
Clearly you've mis-read the summary, failed to read TFA or (more likely) both. TFA is a modern and up-to-date account of the standing between OpenGL and DX and why developers should favor OpenGL. The summary was citing the article and further relating it to the older debate had between the gaming industry and Microsoft so long ago.
Please at least read the summary for comprehension before replying. It really does help.
My understanding is that devs should use OpenGL because they want to do a whole bunch more work writing code for each individual graphics card.
Bad trolling.
It's true that there are some things to work around between cards when working with OpenGL (because of the positive feedback loop mentioned in TFA). However, you also have far more work to do with OpenGL to support the dozens of platforms it's available on... Sadly for DX developers, they only have to support two platforms.
You mentioned Quake 3 (which is just a little over a decade old) that got me thinking, what software DOES run OpenGL?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs
The fact that I didn't know most of those titles (many of which I have or have played) had support for OpenGL is a testament to the lack of marketing and the push the OpenGL community needs to make to get people excited about it.
For the most part, these titles rely on underlying toolkits that smooth the management of OpenGL and DX interfaces. World of Warcraft does this, for example in order to ship on MacOS and Windows, so you can see how it would not be a great marketing win for OpenGL.
Still, it's an all too often overlooked fact that emerging gaming markets such a mobile and every console except XBox require something other than DX and in almost all of those cases, that's OpenGL. You pretty much have to start with OpenGL support and then decide if you want to support DX or not.
OpenGL is clearly behind DirectX ...
You're contradicting TFA without any evidence. TFA provided quite a lot of evidence to support its position such as:
It's common knowledge that OpenGL has faster draw calls than DirectX (see NVIDIA presentations like this one if you don't want to take my word for it), and it has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions. OpenGL gives you direct access to all new graphics features on all platforms, while DirectX only provides occasional snapshots of them on their newest versions of Windows. The tesselation technology that Microsoft is heavily promoting for DirectX 11 has been an OpenGL extension for three years. It has even been possible for years before that, using fast instancing and vertex-texture-fetch. I don't know what new technologies will be exposed in the next couple years, I know they will be available first in OpenGL.
So no, I don't think you can just drop such a comment and be taken seriously. You're going to have to back that up.
For normal activities (surfing, vids, nav, etc) 1ghz is overkill. The biggest beneficiary of all that CPU and GPU power is gaming. But without multitouch, gaming will be terribly restricted. So WTF am I supposed to play on this thing -- 3D, HD whack-a-mole?
I don't buy that I need multi-touch to play games. Sure, some UIs might be more intuitive that way, but as long as I can drag and poke, most of what I want from a game is there. What's more, I'd want most games to take advantage of being able to use the touch-screen and D-pad at the same time anyway.
Online music distribution is picking up now that DRM is fading away, and the movie industry wants to up the encryption? Seriously?
This is an artifact of the differences in the two markets. Music is played over and over and acquiring a higher quality version of a song has value. With movies, most viewers will be happy with their first viewing, even if it's not the highest quality. Once they've seen the story they don't need to see it again unless they want to show it to friends or remind themselves of it years later.
As an example, I got in to a free showing of (now, Sir) Patrick Stewart's made for TV Moby Dick many years ago before it aired on TV. I never watched it on TV, and why would I? There was nothing new to be gained. They lost an audience member by showing it to me. Of course, they got a review out of the deal that was probably read by a few thousand people, so that's a good deal, but movie companies don't see an upside in losing a viewer of Avatar or Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps there is on, and I'd love to have that debate in a venue that the studios participated in, but right now they're afraid that their primary money-making engine, the blockbuster weekend which fuels subsequent DVD sales, will be compromised by the easy availability of downloadable screeners and camcorder rips and it's too simplistic to say that they should just follow the music industry model and let it go.
Any game theorist will tell you that any system of sufficient complexity, open to a large user base, which contains "winning conditions" can be manipulated to the benefit of a few of the participants at the expense of the others.
Well, perhaps we shouldn't be making search rankings a "game" in the first place?
I'm stopping there. You didn't read what I wrote. "Any game theorist will tell you..." When someone talks about "games" in the sense of game theory, you either go look up what that means, or you don't engage the discussion. Any other choice simply polutes the conversation.
Does this sign the closing of the Mono project? And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL...
The GPL isn't suitable for libraries due to its requirement that all library consumers be GPL. It's not a fundamentalist stance, and at one point, even RMS agreed with this point (hence his introduction of the LGPL). It was only with the growth of GPLed software that the FSF decided that they no longer liked that idea. As long as they were the little fish in the pond, playing nice with everyone else's licensing terms seemed like a good idea...
Now, I like the GPL. I've used it many times. But to suggest that moving from the GPL to the LGPL (essentially just dropping the "you can't use this with your code if your code isn't GPLed") would make source code more "closed" is absurd. It's, in fact, a more open and permissive license.
We want systems to be open, so that we can freely use them, but we will keep our own system proprietary. Where Google makes Open Source, it does so to disrupt other people's business, so that Google can continue to use open infrastructure. Sure, it's good business sense, but spare us the "we are the good guys" bullshit.
Google, Red Hat and IBM are the world's foremost corporate benefactors of open source software. Their Summer of Code events draw in more new open source developers to existing projects than any other single effort.
And yet, we refer to Google's internal memo encouraging employees to open source their code as "typical proprietary bullshit" and that gets rated as "insightful" on Slashdot.
If there's anything Google's example has taught me, it's that you can't work with the open source community.