It's not difficult to make windows move smoothly and to have cool effects. It IS difficult to efficiently integrate all this stuff into a 20-year-old window system while remaining compatible with many thousands of programs written for it and hundreds of different video chipsets. Apple doesn't have this problem because they could afford to scrap their old OS and redo everything from scratch. Neither Microsoft nor Linux can afford this luxury.
R&D is only useful if it produces results for the company. They aren't doing it for charity, they want to make money. Given that they are currently losing money, they probably ought to cut back on R&D expenses. How much money did they make from the optical mouse, anyway? The only division which made money was the printer one. Doesn't look like they need too much R&D.
How about just moving a window around? You get nice, smooth motion, without seeing stuff being redrawn and such. Compared to OSX, both Linux and Windows are in the stone ages.
The Russians do that - and their safety record is no better than NASA's.
Well, NASA has a $15 billion/year budget. Russia spends about $250 million per year on the space program. When your budget is 60x smaller, it's hard to expect the same reliability.
Please STFU. I doubt you've ever made a single website or written a single line of javascript code. Otherwise, you would know that "standards-compliant" just means that it doesn't work correctly in any browser, since no browsers are 100% standards-compliant.
but a driver is an interface between hardware and software.
It's a lot more than that. In modern days, a video card driver is responsible for translating hardware-independent API calls to hardware instructions. Things like the OpenGL API are implemented in the driver. There is a lot of work involved in making a video driver, and it's a fairly large piece of software. The NVIDIA binary driver package for Linux takes up 11MB when compressed. This is a large piece of software that is very expensive to develop and maintain.
Why is it significant for NVIDIA to hide something that can only be used if you purchase NVIDIA products?
The only reason it can be used exclusively with NVIDIA hardware is because it's closed source. If NVIDIA made it open source, any one of their competitors could adapt it for their video cards and avoid spending millions of dollars developing their own driver. Furthermore, it would reveal quite a few hardware details and make the chipset itself easier to reverse engineer. I'd say these are two very good reasons for NVIDIA to keep their drivers proprietary.
But once the pro driver has been written, it's a sunk cost and ATI/nVidia could afford to bundle that driver with every card they make.
First, it's not a sunk cost, but rather a continuing expense. Second, it's a different driver -- it generally optimizes quality over speed and undergoes extensive compatiblity testing. Third, my point was that you don't want to release your driver as open source because your competitors will take advantage of your generosity and force you out of the market. Finally, companies exist to make a profit and will do whatever benefits them. Doing otherwise would be unfair to their shareholders.
Re:last time we had financial problems on slashdot
on
SGI Faces Bankruptcy
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· Score: 1
Their workstations are pretty much a dead weight. They don't really do anything you can't get from Dell, and they're x86 in any case.
On the other hand, their Altix line is really awesome. It's basically the world's biggest Linux box, and it's definitely a unique product. Unlike a cluster, it's ONE COMPUTER with one memory space. Really cool. The question is, is there a market for it? I would think so, but SGI seems to be suffering from bad management and a lack of focus. They might recover if they somehow manage to get cash and good management, but I think it's highly unlikely. They've been sinking since 1996 or so.
They are both assets. If you think drivers are so easy to write, why don't you try writing one? Here's a hint: the main difference between a professional card that sells for $2000 and a gaming card with the same chipset (which sells for $200) is the drivers.
NVIDIA has a very good and very fast OpenGL implementation, not to mention lots of optimizations and tricks. The driver is as much of an asset as the hardware; it's certainly just as important for performance. If you've ever used ATI's version of OpenGL (which is half-assed at best), you'll realize how much of an asset the driver really is.
Like forcing you to print out a form and fax it long distance to a number that doesnt always pick up or is often unreachable at all?
Don't put up with that shit. Don't fill out any forms. Write them a letter to cancel, and send it to their main address or fax it. Keep a copy. If they don't cancel the service, contact your credit card company and ask for a chargeback, and show them the letter. Usually, it's enough to just threaten this to get them to cancel; chargebacks are expensive for them. If not, the credit card company will figure it all out.
If NVidia wanted to release open-source drivers, they would have done that already. The thing is, it's about as likely as Microsoft releasing Windows under the GPL. Why would they give away one of their major assets?
The only reason they have 2GB of email is because of Google. All of their services are ad-infested and crappy. The search engine sucks. I can't think of a single reason one would use Yahoo other than inertia.
There is nothing wrong with creating copycat products if they can do something better or cheaper. There are entire companies out there that thrive on making cheaper and better knockoffs of existing products.
This one definitely offers more features. Linux has no decent softphone programs, and SIP support allows lots of third-party services (say, like Skypeout except from multiple companies with better prices). Too bad SIP is a piece of crap with the same major problems as H323 (if you disagree with me, try to configure it to work through a NAT router).
Why the hell would you even want fiber to the doorstep? You realize how much it costs to terminate the stuff? You can get a much better price/performance ratio from SHDSL if you really need quite a bit of bandwidth (it'd still be excessive for home use). Otherwise, just go with regular DSL, it's good for at least 3 MBits.
Let me clarify my position: I am not saying that slapping a brand name on a box makes a PC good. What I am saying is that PCs for serious applications need to be made by a serious company. Obviously, you will have crappy companies that slap together crap to make money. That's the category almost all small shops fall into.
Any serious manufacturer should be ISO9001 certified, should have an engineering department, a product qualification department, and so on. They should be able to tell you, for example, in which temperature and humidity range the computer will run reliably. They should have a list of known-compatible hardware and software, and a database of known issues. They should have extensive procedures for making sure their computers are reliable.
This is the main reason companies often buy "overpriced" computers from Sun instead of Dell or some random local guy. Of course, I'm sure most people on Slashdot have never had to maintain a certain level of reliability. Of course, this may change with the advent of things like VoIP -- at least people still expect reliability from their phone provider.
Uh, are you speaking from experience (I doubt it).
I've dealt with my fair share of flaky drivers and incompatible hardware. I've seen videocards fry motherboards and power supplies. I've seen soundcards that would crackle and pop because of PCI incompatibilities. I've seen network cards that would prevent a machine from turning on when inserted into a particular PCI slot. I've seen systems that would crash every couple of days because of driver interactions. Some hardware combinations are just flaky.
Sure, I've built all of my own machines for like the last 9 years, often just adding one or two parts at a time and I have found that not to be true.
Most people would never notice hardware flakiness. They would just assume it's an operating system fluke, reboot, and forget about it. The situation changes quite a bit when you have a mission-critical system and a pissed-off customer.
Ok, how about a disk failure, actually make that two of them, in the space of less than 2 months.
Cheap hard drives have a high failure rate. It's a well-known fact. If you have a few hundred computers, you'll be replacing a couple of them every week. Nobody would ever use them for anything important, at least not without redundancy.
something that could easily be changed to have the optimum speed be anywhere
Optimum speed has little to do with gear ratios and everything to do with air resistance. You can't make a car go more efficiently at 70mph than at 50mph by changing gear ratios. There is a huge increase in air resistance associated with that speed increase, and there is nothing you can do to remove it.
No, it's because of aerodynamics. As speed increases, air resistance increases nonlinearly. Even if your engine runs most efficiently going 80mph/130kph, the air resistance will kill your fuel efficiency.
If you want to have every problem imaginable, go with a white-box builder. Hardware these days usually has very poor compatibility, produces lots of heat, and has other issues. A shop that slaps together PCs with no regard for quality assurance, engineering, and compatibility testing will sink your business in no time, and most local shops are exactly like that.
Unlike Sun or Dell or any other large commercial maker, a small shop won't have a compatibility testing lab where machines are subjected to hundreds of tests to verify performance. They are generally happy if the box gets to the POST screen. When compounded with the fact that Linux is rather picky about hardware (due to varying driver quality), you really don't want to buy an untested, unproven solution from some garage-based PC builder.
Actually, companies routinely do this. Hell, they will happily get rid of 95% of their customer base if they don't make much money from it. Ever hear of a product or service being discontinued or replaced? A store being closed? It happens all the time, and customers are ditched basically when it is no longer profitable to have them.
If you don't make enough money from your commercial software business to afford a one-time expense of $2000 (the light version includes everything you need in a toolkit), you have no business writing commercial software. I mean, that's only about two weeks of one developer's salary. You'll spend about 5 times that in lost productivity if you use VC++ alone. The $3000 version includes XML, databases, networking, and a ton of other stuff which is definitely worth it if you need it. Not to mention you get full source code.
Or, you can avoid SkypeOut's piss-poor quality and use Asterisk and a termination provider (and pay a lot less). 2 cents a minute in or out is a lot cheaper than landline. Of course, 2 cell phones with free mobile-to-mobile will be at least $50 a month, and the carrier will probably catch on and disconnect you.
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It's not difficult to make windows move smoothly and to have cool effects. It IS difficult to efficiently integrate all this stuff into a 20-year-old window system while remaining compatible with many thousands of programs written for it and hundreds of different video chipsets. Apple doesn't have this problem because they could afford to scrap their old OS and redo everything from scratch. Neither Microsoft nor Linux can afford this luxury.
R&D is only useful if it produces results for the company. They aren't doing it for charity, they want to make money. Given that they are currently losing money, they probably ought to cut back on R&D expenses. How much money did they make from the optical mouse, anyway? The only division which made money was the printer one. Doesn't look like they need too much R&D.
How about just moving a window around? You get nice, smooth motion, without seeing stuff being redrawn and such. Compared to OSX, both Linux and Windows are in the stone ages.
The Russians do that - and their safety record is no better than NASA's.
Well, NASA has a $15 billion/year budget. Russia spends about $250 million per year on the space program. When your budget is 60x smaller, it's hard to expect the same reliability.
Please STFU. I doubt you've ever made a single website or written a single line of javascript code. Otherwise, you would know that "standards-compliant" just means that it doesn't work correctly in any browser, since no browsers are 100% standards-compliant.
Yeah, it will be real easy to see each one of those 200 million 90 nanometer transistors and figure out exactly what they all do.
Also known as "security". Gotta love them euphemisms.
but a driver is an interface between hardware and software.
It's a lot more than that. In modern days, a video card driver is responsible for translating hardware-independent API calls to hardware instructions. Things like the OpenGL API are implemented in the driver. There is a lot of work involved in making a video driver, and it's a fairly large piece of software. The NVIDIA binary driver package for Linux takes up 11MB when compressed. This is a large piece of software that is very expensive to develop and maintain.
Why is it significant for NVIDIA to hide something that can only be used if you purchase NVIDIA products?
The only reason it can be used exclusively with NVIDIA hardware is because it's closed source. If NVIDIA made it open source, any one of their competitors could adapt it for their video cards and avoid spending millions of dollars developing their own driver. Furthermore, it would reveal quite a few hardware details and make the chipset itself easier to reverse engineer. I'd say these are two very good reasons for NVIDIA to keep their drivers proprietary.
But once the pro driver has been written, it's a sunk cost and ATI/nVidia could afford to bundle that driver with every card they make.
First, it's not a sunk cost, but rather a continuing expense. Second, it's a different driver -- it generally optimizes quality over speed and undergoes extensive compatiblity testing. Third, my point was that you don't want to release your driver as open source because your competitors will take advantage of your generosity and force you out of the market. Finally, companies exist to make a profit and will do whatever benefits them. Doing otherwise would be unfair to their shareholders.
Their workstations are pretty much a dead weight. They don't really do anything you can't get from Dell, and they're x86 in any case.
On the other hand, their Altix line is really awesome. It's basically the world's biggest Linux box, and it's definitely a unique product. Unlike a cluster, it's ONE COMPUTER with one memory space. Really cool. The question is, is there a market for it? I would think so, but SGI seems to be suffering from bad management and a lack of focus. They might recover if they somehow manage to get cash and good management, but I think it's highly unlikely. They've been sinking since 1996 or so.
They are both assets. If you think drivers are so easy to write, why don't you try writing one? Here's a hint: the main difference between a professional card that sells for $2000 and a gaming card with the same chipset (which sells for $200) is the drivers.
NVIDIA has a very good and very fast OpenGL implementation, not to mention lots of optimizations and tricks. The driver is as much of an asset as the hardware; it's certainly just as important for performance. If you've ever used ATI's version of OpenGL (which is half-assed at best), you'll realize how much of an asset the driver really is.
Like forcing you to print out a form and fax it long distance to a number that doesnt always pick up or is often unreachable at all?
Don't put up with that shit. Don't fill out any forms. Write them a letter to cancel, and send it to their main address or fax it. Keep a copy. If they don't cancel the service, contact your credit card company and ask for a chargeback, and show them the letter. Usually, it's enough to just threaten this to get them to cancel; chargebacks are expensive for them. If not, the credit card company will figure it all out.
If NVidia wanted to release open-source drivers, they would have done that already. The thing is, it's about as likely as Microsoft releasing Windows under the GPL. Why would they give away one of their major assets?
I think you are confusing SGI with Sun. SGI actually contributed quite a bit to Linux, second maybe to IBM.
The only reason they have 2GB of email is because of Google. All of their services are ad-infested and crappy. The search engine sucks. I can't think of a single reason one would use Yahoo other than inertia.
There is nothing wrong with creating copycat products if they can do something better or cheaper. There are entire companies out there that thrive on making cheaper and better knockoffs of existing products.
This one definitely offers more features. Linux has no decent softphone programs, and SIP support allows lots of third-party services (say, like Skypeout except from multiple companies with better prices). Too bad SIP is a piece of crap with the same major problems as H323 (if you disagree with me, try to configure it to work through a NAT router).
Why the hell would you even want fiber to the doorstep? You realize how much it costs to terminate the stuff? You can get a much better price/performance ratio from SHDSL if you really need quite a bit of bandwidth (it'd still be excessive for home use). Otherwise, just go with regular DSL, it's good for at least 3 MBits.
Let me clarify my position: I am not saying that slapping a brand name on a box makes a PC good. What I am saying is that PCs for serious applications need to be made by a serious company. Obviously, you will have crappy companies that slap together crap to make money. That's the category almost all small shops fall into.
Any serious manufacturer should be ISO9001 certified, should have an engineering department, a product qualification department, and so on. They should be able to tell you, for example, in which temperature and humidity range the computer will run reliably. They should have a list of known-compatible hardware and software, and a database of known issues. They should have extensive procedures for making sure their computers are reliable.
This is the main reason companies often buy "overpriced" computers from Sun instead of Dell or some random local guy. Of course, I'm sure most people on Slashdot have never had to maintain a certain level of reliability. Of course, this may change with the advent of things like VoIP -- at least people still expect reliability from their phone provider.
Uh, are you speaking from experience (I doubt it).
I've dealt with my fair share of flaky drivers and incompatible hardware. I've seen videocards fry motherboards and power supplies. I've seen soundcards that would crackle and pop because of PCI incompatibilities. I've seen network cards that would prevent a machine from turning on when inserted into a particular PCI slot. I've seen systems that would crash every couple of days because of driver interactions. Some hardware combinations are just flaky.
Sure, I've built all of my own machines for like the last 9 years, often just adding one or two parts at a time and I have found that not to be true.
Most people would never notice hardware flakiness. They would just assume it's an operating system fluke, reboot, and forget about it. The situation changes quite a bit when you have a mission-critical system and a pissed-off customer.
Ok, how about a disk failure, actually make that two of them, in the space of less than 2 months.
Cheap hard drives have a high failure rate. It's a well-known fact. If you have a few hundred computers, you'll be replacing a couple of them every week. Nobody would ever use them for anything important, at least not without redundancy.
something that could easily be changed to have the optimum speed be anywhere
Optimum speed has little to do with gear ratios and everything to do with air resistance. You can't make a car go more efficiently at 70mph than at 50mph by changing gear ratios. There is a huge increase in air resistance associated with that speed increase, and there is nothing you can do to remove it.
Because of the speed limit being about that.
No, it's because of aerodynamics. As speed increases, air resistance increases nonlinearly. Even if your engine runs most efficiently going 80mph/130kph, the air resistance will kill your fuel efficiency.
If you want to have every problem imaginable, go with a white-box builder. Hardware these days usually has very poor compatibility, produces lots of heat, and has other issues. A shop that slaps together PCs with no regard for quality assurance, engineering, and compatibility testing will sink your business in no time, and most local shops are exactly like that.
Unlike Sun or Dell or any other large commercial maker, a small shop won't have a compatibility testing lab where machines are subjected to hundreds of tests to verify performance. They are generally happy if the box gets to the POST screen. When compounded with the fact that Linux is rather picky about hardware (due to varying driver quality), you really don't want to buy an untested, unproven solution from some garage-based PC builder.
Actually, companies routinely do this. Hell, they will happily get rid of 95% of their customer base if they don't make much money from it. Ever hear of a product or service being discontinued or replaced? A store being closed? It happens all the time, and customers are ditched basically when it is no longer profitable to have them.
If you don't make enough money from your commercial software business to afford a one-time expense of $2000 (the light version includes everything you need in a toolkit), you have no business writing commercial software. I mean, that's only about two weeks of one developer's salary. You'll spend about 5 times that in lost productivity if you use VC++ alone. The $3000 version includes XML, databases, networking, and a ton of other stuff which is definitely worth it if you need it. Not to mention you get full source code.
Or, you can avoid SkypeOut's piss-poor quality and use Asterisk and a termination provider (and pay a lot less). 2 cents a minute in or out is a lot cheaper than landline. Of course, 2 cell phones with free mobile-to-mobile will be at least $50 a month, and the carrier will probably catch on and disconnect you.