Or there is the lucky few of us that work from home, and don't need to regularly visit the public petri dish known as an "office", which is only slightly behind schools and airports in their ability to communicate airborne diseases.
The point is that you don't know what is in their documentation, and before they release it to someone that isn't under NDA, they'd have to review it. It's not like they can just go publish a Wiki page and call it a day - real companies have real legal obligations.
I'm right there with you. For the first time since becoming "of age" during the PowerBook G4 "Titanium" era I've purchased a notebook that doesn't have an Apple logo on it - the Dell XPS 9560. It's a better MacBook Pro than the MacBook Pro, other than it takes a bit of effort to get modern Linux running properly on it with good battery life - but that's mostly Nvidia's fault.
But now I have a notebook with 32GB of RAM, a 4k screen, a real GPU (Nvidia 1050), a 1TB SSD, 4-core / 8-thread performance, Thunderbolt-3, and 8+ hours of battery life for cheaper than Apple can manage their lowest-spec 15" MBP for. If I *really* have to use OS X, I can use VMware / VirtualBox or swap out the wireless card for $30 to a Broadcom and it's ready to "Hackintosh" (both violate EULA, but neither have technical challenges preventing it).
So far, Ubuntu 17 has been fine with the proprietary driver and a couple grub ACPI hacks.
Don't worry, the class action suit will fail because the class won't have standing.
As I understand it (IIANAL), the federal government can choose to sue to enforce their contract with Verizon, but you cannot (even though it is transitively a contract between Verizon and the People who entrust the FCC with regulatory authority).
You forgot "If the customer buys the phone on an installment plan, it's still Verizon's phone until paid off"
This way Verizon can put the savings on its theft insurance policy into improving its network.
AAAAHHHH ha ha HA HA ha ha ha. Heh. Quite the optimist, aren't you? No, they'll put that savings into further bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying efforts against carrier locks and net neutrality long before they put it into something useful, like network capacity.
Phone is locked to Verizon at factory. Verizon blacklists IMEI of stolen phones, once theft happens. Stolen phone cannot be used to talk to any other cellular network, and cannot talk to Verizon due to blacklisting. Ergo, stolen phone is useless.
Thus, theft is reduced because stealing useless phones is itself useless unless you want to scrap them for spare parts. That wasn't a hard logical stream to follow.
Further, carrier locking also does present certain anticompetitive and anti-consumer benefits for Verizon, which is just icing on the reduced-insurance-premium cake. And, because Verizon will just pocket the extra money not spent on insurance (or use it to offset expenses to bribe^H^H^H^H^H lobby the FCC), the end user can expect absolutely no value from this move at all; in fact, it will make international travel more of a hassle than it needs to be as you go through whatever byzantine red tape procedure that Verizon requires for them to unlock it.
Let's tone down the FUD a bit. I's not something you can't sell. It's just something that has less of a prospective resale market. You can still resell it to anyone also using Verizon - it's just a carrier lock, no different than any other carrier lock.
Carrier locks are still bullshit and annoying, but really only a problem if you travel internationally, or want to sell the phone to someone on a different carrier.
Everything except take on the cost, time, and effort to create / review the documentation he is requesting to make sure there aren't any company-proprietary trade secrets being revealed, or any other licensed technology from component suppliers or partners being revealed putting Razer into legal jeopardy.
The primary vendor-specific rendering library being 3Dfx Glide. It was also the basic motivation behind Microsoft creating Direct3D - it showed there was a market for selling PCs specifically for gaming, but ceded control of that market to a particular hardware manufacturer to didn't show a lot of interest in doing things "the Microsoft way" and actually started creating drivers and firmware for Mac, which was definitely a no-no in the late 90s.
Microsoft helped to strangle 3Dfx, and we're probably all better for it because of the fragmented landscape that was gaming in the late 90s and early 2000s. And, the most significant technologies that 3Dfx developed live on at Nvidia, who had no interest in maintaining a proprietary rendering library as well as supporting an ever-increasing number of software developers that were reliant upon it.
To their credit, 3Dfx did open source Glide right before drowning in a sea of red ink, so it's possible to emulate it and keep Glide-rendered games useable even today.
OpenGL didn't give a shit about games "back in the day" because OpenGL was focusing on accurate rendering, rather than "good enough, but fast". If you ran AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, Softimage, etc. you needed OpenGL and you needed a card that was focused on OpenGL rendering as fast as possible. In other words, you needed a FireGL card of some kind, or once it existed you needed something with an Nvidia Quadro. And more than that, you installed a driver version that was optimized / certified for your primary application you ran.
This meant two things: 1. games ran like absolute crap if they ran at all; and 2. it was a major pain in the ass.
At the same time, Direct3D and 3Dfx Glide focused less on detail rendering, and more on rendering speed which is what games want. Microsoft created Direct3D because 3Dfx wouldn't open the Glide API to hardware that didn't have a 3Dfx chip on it. 3Dfx's many competitors flocked to the API and I guess we know how that worked out for 3Dfx as a company - their balance sheet plummeted into the red right about the same time they declared their intention to compete with all of their customers, while their competition caught up or exceeded 3Dfx's performance with less complex solutions (all-in-one chips rather than the Voodoo2 add-in board with pass-through VGA nonsense, or the less performant "Voodoo Banshee" all-in-one). 3Dfx's balance sheet plummeted into the red, their "assets" were purchased by Nvidia, Glide died a quick death, and Direct3D was left to rule the gaming landscape.
The only time OpenGL was used for games during this time period was because that was the only 3D rendering library available - you were either running an operating system that only had OpenGL (linux, mac, Windows NT, etc.), or you were running a "3D accelerator" that couldn't do anything else (no Direct3D or Glide drivers).
When they still had a real "Pro" Mac Pro that had PCI-E slots in it, there was a small but effective community that kept figuring out how to make Nvidia cards work in it - custom firmware flashes, driver edits, etc. They did the same for ATI, but the efforts of Nvidia always got more attention due to the professional community wanting to use CUDA acceleration on a Mac (how dare they!).
The last Mac Pro that shipped with a useable PCI-E slot shipped in 2012. Now the only options are "use what Apple deems acceptable, use a Thunderbolt external GPU setup, Hackintosh some random PC hardware, or abandon OS X altogether".
Way to support your Pro customers, Apple. Well done.
Yes, logitech devices likely work in bog-standard HID mode under Linux. However, if you want to use all the features of some of their devices, it requires other software to to be loaded on the system, which doesn't exist for Linux. For example, if you buy one of those mice with a ridiculous amount of buttons on them, how do you define what all those buttons do without the application that allows it?
Right now, the answer is "find a machine with Windows or OS X (or dual boot), plug it in, set your device up, save settings to your device (if it supports that - not all do) and then go back to your Linux machine" which isn't much of a solution. And, if the device doesn't have on-board memory to save the macros and settings, you're just screwed - your $100 mouse is no better than a $30 mouse, so why bother. And what if you want to change one of those settings after you arrive in Linux? Do the whole thing again.
And what if the process of "putting the bloody firmware into the bloody device" involves decrypting, or otherwise authenticating with some form of secret that is kept close?
You expect them to just give this secret away, openly, allowing the teardown of their firmware by competitors (in this example) ?
Hint: there may be more in their decision than simply saying "no." There might even be a reason.
Come on now, msmash - you've got a nice bully pulpit here. Get in contact with Razer and ask them to put together a cost analysis of what it would take, get the number, and then Kickstarter it. If there's enough interest in it, then it becomes cost-neutral for them to do it (or even profitable due to increased sales they wouldn't have otherwise gotten because of lacking support), and there's literally no reason to oppose it any more.
Don't just bleat about it being a tiny cost of other people's money and shit all over someone else with completely valid concerns - that's what the uninformed do. Get up and do something about it if it's important enough to you to "find it sickening and short sighted" and implore someone to rethink.
This is a manager sickness - they don't see the difference between "operations" and "engineering".
The operations people should be fighting those fires. The engineers should be creating long term solutions that prevent the fires to begin with. If your engineers are working a fire hose all day, nobody ever shuts off the fuel source and all you get is fires.
I work on a team that maintains a financial application that talks to banks via ACH. I can't believe some of the restrictions they put on it, such as enforcing a single connection at a time, so we have to serially transfer 70+ files for various funds one at a time, waiting for an acknowledgement before the next one can start, and their systems take fucking forever to ack the thing.
That job takes like 3+ hours to run, when it could take 20 minutes total if they allowed parallel connections, even with using IP-whitelisted password-protected certificate authenticated SFTP.
Does that mean msmash is due for indictment for posting this story? How many people never heard of "Popcorn Time" before this article, and now have the seed planted for illegal activity?
The Apple watch has a screen resolution of 272x340, and many people find it to be useful. This is about 65% of that on the first try, but you don't have to look the 12 inches or so down to your wrist - it's just there in your eyes.
This would be very useful for any form of notification service - yes, your text messages, but also turn-by-turn navigation, news updates, email subjects, emergency services warnings, weather updates, etc.; things that people are buying smart watches for today (less the athletic reasons - wearing eyeglasses that are projecting something onto your retina while running probably won't work out too good)
Not bad for the very first version of the technology ever. But I guess nothing should ship until it's full holographic 8k resolution 144+ Hz? Go massively unrealistic or go home?
Slashdot Mirror
Or they could cover their god damn mouth / nose when they sneeze in public places, and wash their hands with soap.
I can't believe people still can't grasp these simple concepts.
Or there is the lucky few of us that work from home, and don't need to regularly visit the public petri dish known as an "office", which is only slightly behind schools and airports in their ability to communicate airborne diseases.
The point is that you don't know what is in their documentation, and before they release it to someone that isn't under NDA, they'd have to review it. It's not like they can just go publish a Wiki page and call it a day - real companies have real legal obligations.
I'm right there with you. For the first time since becoming "of age" during the PowerBook G4 "Titanium" era I've purchased a notebook that doesn't have an Apple logo on it - the Dell XPS 9560. It's a better MacBook Pro than the MacBook Pro, other than it takes a bit of effort to get modern Linux running properly on it with good battery life - but that's mostly Nvidia's fault.
But now I have a notebook with 32GB of RAM, a 4k screen, a real GPU (Nvidia 1050), a 1TB SSD, 4-core / 8-thread performance, Thunderbolt-3, and 8+ hours of battery life for cheaper than Apple can manage their lowest-spec 15" MBP for. If I *really* have to use OS X, I can use VMware / VirtualBox or swap out the wireless card for $30 to a Broadcom and it's ready to "Hackintosh" (both violate EULA, but neither have technical challenges preventing it).
So far, Ubuntu 17 has been fine with the proprietary driver and a couple grub ACPI hacks.
And if those documents have information that Razer cannot make public under contract with component suppliers? Or include trade secrets?
Don't worry, the class action suit will fail because the class won't have standing.
As I understand it (IIANAL), the federal government can choose to sue to enforce their contract with Verizon, but you cannot (even though it is transitively a contract between Verizon and the People who entrust the FCC with regulatory authority).
Yes, this is very broken and corrupt.
You forgot "If the customer buys the phone on an installment plan, it's still Verizon's phone until paid off"
This way Verizon can put the savings on its theft insurance policy into improving its network.
AAAAHHHH ha ha HA HA ha ha ha. Heh. Quite the optimist, aren't you? No, they'll put that savings into further bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying efforts against carrier locks and net neutrality long before they put it into something useful, like network capacity.
Probably the second. After all, the FCC Chairman is a Verizon hand-puppet... I mean "ex-Verizon lobbyist".
Consider:
Phone is locked to Verizon at factory.
Verizon blacklists IMEI of stolen phones, once theft happens.
Stolen phone cannot be used to talk to any other cellular network, and cannot talk to Verizon due to blacklisting. Ergo, stolen phone is useless.
Thus, theft is reduced because stealing useless phones is itself useless unless you want to scrap them for spare parts. That wasn't a hard logical stream to follow.
Further, carrier locking also does present certain anticompetitive and anti-consumer benefits for Verizon, which is just icing on the reduced-insurance-premium cake. And, because Verizon will just pocket the extra money not spent on insurance (or use it to offset expenses to bribe^H^H^H^H^H lobby the FCC), the end user can expect absolutely no value from this move at all; in fact, it will make international travel more of a hassle than it needs to be as you go through whatever byzantine red tape procedure that Verizon requires for them to unlock it.
Let's tone down the FUD a bit. I's not something you can't sell. It's just something that has less of a prospective resale market. You can still resell it to anyone also using Verizon - it's just a carrier lock, no different than any other carrier lock.
Carrier locks are still bullshit and annoying, but really only a problem if you travel internationally, or want to sell the phone to someone on a different carrier.
All of these alphabetized dessert names sound amazingly stupid when referred to in a sentence anyway.
Everything except take on the cost, time, and effort to create / review the documentation he is requesting to make sure there aren't any company-proprietary trade secrets being revealed, or any other licensed technology from component suppliers or partners being revealed putting Razer into legal jeopardy.
Oh yeah, that.
You can't possibly be that naive...
The primary vendor-specific rendering library being 3Dfx Glide. It was also the basic motivation behind Microsoft creating Direct3D - it showed there was a market for selling PCs specifically for gaming, but ceded control of that market to a particular hardware manufacturer to didn't show a lot of interest in doing things "the Microsoft way" and actually started creating drivers and firmware for Mac, which was definitely a no-no in the late 90s.
Microsoft helped to strangle 3Dfx, and we're probably all better for it because of the fragmented landscape that was gaming in the late 90s and early 2000s. And, the most significant technologies that 3Dfx developed live on at Nvidia, who had no interest in maintaining a proprietary rendering library as well as supporting an ever-increasing number of software developers that were reliant upon it.
To their credit, 3Dfx did open source Glide right before drowning in a sea of red ink, so it's possible to emulate it and keep Glide-rendered games useable even today.
This.
OpenGL didn't give a shit about games "back in the day" because OpenGL was focusing on accurate rendering, rather than "good enough, but fast". If you ran AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, Softimage, etc. you needed OpenGL and you needed a card that was focused on OpenGL rendering as fast as possible. In other words, you needed a FireGL card of some kind, or once it existed you needed something with an Nvidia Quadro. And more than that, you installed a driver version that was optimized / certified for your primary application you ran.
This meant two things: 1. games ran like absolute crap if they ran at all; and 2. it was a major pain in the ass.
At the same time, Direct3D and 3Dfx Glide focused less on detail rendering, and more on rendering speed which is what games want. Microsoft created Direct3D because 3Dfx wouldn't open the Glide API to hardware that didn't have a 3Dfx chip on it. 3Dfx's many competitors flocked to the API and I guess we know how that worked out for 3Dfx as a company - their balance sheet plummeted into the red right about the same time they declared their intention to compete with all of their customers, while their competition caught up or exceeded 3Dfx's performance with less complex solutions (all-in-one chips rather than the Voodoo2 add-in board with pass-through VGA nonsense, or the less performant "Voodoo Banshee" all-in-one). 3Dfx's balance sheet plummeted into the red, their "assets" were purchased by Nvidia, Glide died a quick death, and Direct3D was left to rule the gaming landscape.
The only time OpenGL was used for games during this time period was because that was the only 3D rendering library available - you were either running an operating system that only had OpenGL (linux, mac, Windows NT, etc.), or you were running a "3D accelerator" that couldn't do anything else (no Direct3D or Glide drivers).
When they still had a real "Pro" Mac Pro that had PCI-E slots in it, there was a small but effective community that kept figuring out how to make Nvidia cards work in it - custom firmware flashes, driver edits, etc. They did the same for ATI, but the efforts of Nvidia always got more attention due to the professional community wanting to use CUDA acceleration on a Mac (how dare they!).
The last Mac Pro that shipped with a useable PCI-E slot shipped in 2012. Now the only options are "use what Apple deems acceptable, use a Thunderbolt external GPU setup, Hackintosh some random PC hardware, or abandon OS X altogether".
Way to support your Pro customers, Apple. Well done.
Yes, logitech devices likely work in bog-standard HID mode under Linux. However, if you want to use all the features of some of their devices, it requires other software to to be loaded on the system, which doesn't exist for Linux. For example, if you buy one of those mice with a ridiculous amount of buttons on them, how do you define what all those buttons do without the application that allows it?
Right now, the answer is "find a machine with Windows or OS X (or dual boot), plug it in, set your device up, save settings to your device (if it supports that - not all do) and then go back to your Linux machine" which isn't much of a solution. And, if the device doesn't have on-board memory to save the macros and settings, you're just screwed - your $100 mouse is no better than a $30 mouse, so why bother. And what if you want to change one of those settings after you arrive in Linux? Do the whole thing again.
That's the problem here.
And what if the process of "putting the bloody firmware into the bloody device" involves decrypting, or otherwise authenticating with some form of secret that is kept close?
You expect them to just give this secret away, openly, allowing the teardown of their firmware by competitors (in this example) ?
Hint: there may be more in their decision than simply saying "no." There might even be a reason.
Then make a proposal to Razer.
Come on now, msmash - you've got a nice bully pulpit here. Get in contact with Razer and ask them to put together a cost analysis of what it would take, get the number, and then Kickstarter it. If there's enough interest in it, then it becomes cost-neutral for them to do it (or even profitable due to increased sales they wouldn't have otherwise gotten because of lacking support), and there's literally no reason to oppose it any more.
Don't just bleat about it being a tiny cost of other people's money and shit all over someone else with completely valid concerns - that's what the uninformed do. Get up and do something about it if it's important enough to you to "find it sickening and short sighted" and implore someone to rethink.
I implore you to do the same.
Nah, he just has a Technical Writer assigned to his team, and their time doesn't count. Everybody knows that.
Yeah, because detailing specifications about how hardware interacts is exactly the same expertise and effort as blowing someone off.
False equivalence.
This is a manager sickness - they don't see the difference between "operations" and "engineering".
The operations people should be fighting those fires. The engineers should be creating long term solutions that prevent the fires to begin with. If your engineers are working a fire hose all day, nobody ever shuts off the fuel source and all you get is fires.
I work on a team that maintains a financial application that talks to banks via ACH. I can't believe some of the restrictions they put on it, such as enforcing a single connection at a time, so we have to serially transfer 70+ files for various funds one at a time, waiting for an acknowledgement before the next one can start, and their systems take fucking forever to ack the thing.
That job takes like 3+ hours to run, when it could take 20 minutes total if they allowed parallel connections, even with using IP-whitelisted password-protected certificate authenticated SFTP.
Does that mean msmash is due for indictment for posting this story? How many people never heard of "Popcorn Time" before this article, and now have the seed planted for illegal activity?
Conspiracy charges, here we come!
The Apple watch has a screen resolution of 272x340, and many people find it to be useful. This is about 65% of that on the first try, but you don't have to look the 12 inches or so down to your wrist - it's just there in your eyes.
This would be very useful for any form of notification service - yes, your text messages, but also turn-by-turn navigation, news updates, email subjects, emergency services warnings, weather updates, etc.; things that people are buying smart watches for today (less the athletic reasons - wearing eyeglasses that are projecting something onto your retina while running probably won't work out too good)
Not bad for the very first version of the technology ever. But I guess nothing should ship until it's full holographic 8k resolution 144+ Hz? Go massively unrealistic or go home?
Apple actually nodded to reality and produced an Android app for Apple Music too.