Having just flamed you further up I now feel silly... sorry...
Anyway I agree, if you want to play windows games windows is probably the best option. In fact I keep it around just for that.
the last thing that broke under wine was a small VB application (from the look of it, I'm not 100% sure) for calculating the propertiesd of beer you'll get out of a homebrew setup. You tell it what grains you're going to put into the mix, which hops, how long it's going to be boiled, various other things, and it tells you how strong the beer will be, what colour and how bitter. Why a simple form-based app like that would choke on the latest version, where steam doesn't I have no idea.
I wish more anti-GNU-tards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to live with a compromise when working with an entirely open source stack yields great benefits, particularly if there's little (only really gaming) they gain from compromising. It's just how some folks like it.
The hard-line FOSS type of thinking is not for everyone. It has benefits and drawbacks. If games are more important to you than access to source code then you go for your compromise system.
Calling people retarded because they have different priorities to you is pretty dumb. When they try and force you to do things that way then feel free to complain, until then I suggest you stick with Windows, sure it's a bit of a compromise, but your games will run just fine!
I have started noticing this recently, it's quite annoying.
I guess it's a difficult proposition, trying to keep things working that already are, but adding in tweaks for known not-working programs almost always seems to break something else.
Some steam stuff works, some doesn't. I've been playing PvZ quite happily, but that's not exactly graphics intensive. The last actual 3D game I played under wine was Portal.
Oh sure, there is good process and bad process, couldn't agree more. I guess I'm just a little jaded, having worked for a huge corporate for some time now.
I've no qualms about code reviews, in fact they're vital. As is documentation, and a variety of other things. However there is such a thing as too much. You can have a thousand processes, all of which sound reasonable when described individually, it's just that when put together they do the opposite of create a machine that puts out a quality product in a timely fashion, they create a by-the-numbers product at a snails pace. I've seen it too often now to ignore!
"You will spend your time designing processes, forcing it down the throat of the affected departments against the best resistance they can muster"
And they/we will spend our time trying to figure out how to get round them or flat-out ignore them so we can still get some work done.
OR we will follow everything you say and watch as the company chokes itself with process after process after process and all thought of productive work disappears.
CUDA and OpenCL are a niche, but one that's increasing in importance for scientific computing. We're already seeing nVidia components in the top 10 supercomputers list.
However I doubt very much they're going anywhere in the next five years. The capabilities of the GPU are on the cusp of being exploited in ordinary (i.e. not super) computing and can only grow.
They're attacking the high end market with Tesla/Fermi, the mainstream and mobile sectors are well catered to with cutting edge GPUs, ION addresses netbooks, and Tegra is just starting to come into play in smaller systems. They face competition in all these areas (except perhaps Fermi/Tesla) so it's not plain sailing, but they're also the technology leader even where they're not the market leader.
I'm no fanboy, I've had GFX cards from all sorts of different vendors over the years. I think not only would the computing world be worse off without nVidia, I think they're going to stay relevant for a long time yet.
Until someone comes up with the next quantum leap in GPU/Vector technology.
OpenCL on nVidia seems broken too. At least under linux.
I can get pure OpenCL stuff working, but the moment I try to use the CL/GL Interop stuff it just stops working, this despite all the right capabilities on the card.
Makes it less useful for me as I wanted to use CL to draw GL textures. Maybe I should try CUDA instead, they're supposed to be similar.
Innovation and patents in software are totally separate. You can get patents for things which are obvious, nebulous or even already patented by others. No innovation required.
Conversely, you can make a carbon copy of a lot of things without necessarily stepping on the patents involved.
TBH I couldn't tell you whether it'll continue to be supported for all that long. There have been a couple of firmware updates I've applied in the (almost) year I've had it.
In terms of lifespan, you may well be right, it may well be that the dedicated media machines get longer support. Especially in the case of something that is open enough to hack and get a community going. Myself I'm tempted to get something like the the D2Plug so I can just load debian or some other linux on to it and then use whatever software I like.
Meh, as the other poster said, Samsung have been doing this in their TV firmware for a while, pretty sure others are doing it too.
My TV can play more codecs than my PS3, though not as many as a boxee or WDTV. It can stream over UPnP, but not samba. It can play from USB drives. It can also work as a DVR if you plug a drive in and let it format the drive. It's not perfect - you can't pause UPnP streamed video for some reason, more codec support would also be nice - but it's getting there.
It also has an mini-app interface to allow you to use youtube, facebook etc etc.... Basically it's not far off doing what these boxes do already. Another couple of years and there will be no need to attach anything to the tv for it to perform all the functions of the streaming boxes.
I'm not involved in wikipedia, other than having done a few minor edits on a few things, so I'm defending it because I'm part of some shadowy cabal of 'editors'. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the people in the shadowy cabal of editors that I have interacted with at all have been giant pricks...
But, we now have a free to access repository of a vast wealth of information, much of it well supplied with references, that makes a fantastic entry point into pretty much any subject you can think of. It's a great resource that anyone that can get on the net can use to better their understanding of things.
Of course there are inaccuracies, bad decisions get made, and arseholes can get into positions giving more responsibility than they are able to handle sensibly, but show me any human endeavour that doesn't suffer from that.
I suppose that's why people caught on drugs don't always get charged with anything - if they don't still have the substance about their person then there's no proof they were ever in possession.
Oh sure, why I added the exception - "(except where it concerns actions perpetrated by their own citizens, with consequences to be faced when they return to their native soil)"
But I'm not sure that's a useful principle beyond heinous crimes. For instance - what about a tourist visiting amsterdam, who smokes up a little when there, and returns home?
Well, that one's tricky. I certainly wouldn't want to have stopped that particular action, the scumbag should have been put out of his misery some time ago.
OTOH it's not clear what the legal basis of the action was, and fuzzy, handwaving arguments about being at war don't cut it for me either.
The idea that someone committing an act in one country, with effects within that country, can then be sued in another... it's patently ridiculous.
However we are clearly getting into a situation where the world is seriously interconnected (a good thing!) but legal codes and presumed jurisdictions overlap in all sorts of ways.
We either need an international legal code to sort this stuff out, or for countries to stop claiming jurisdiction outside of their own boundaries (except where it concerns actions perpetrated by their own citizens, with consequences to be faced when they return to their native soil)
Well, inflation control I think can be accounted for by the fact that bitcoin production is strictly limited. It approaches a total of 21 million bitcoins in the next few decades. About a third to a half of this amount is already in circulation.
This is why I say that it's a huge deflation risk, if it goes anywhere. This is because the number or people actually using it as a currency right now is miniscule. Bump the number of users up a couple of magnitudes over the next couple of years and even though the currency could still technically work (due to being divisible to quite a few decimal places), the value of 1 bitcoin goes through the roof because there are only 10 million or so in circulation. This, of course, is a nice dividend to anyone that got in early, when the (controlled by consensus) creation rate was far, far higher.
Yeah, interesting idea, unfortunately I don't think it can work as a currency, even if they got enough people involved.
And the fact that the first people that came up with the scheme stand to make a huge profit if it does work... that leaves a bad taste.
Anyone in the US that votes Rep olr Dem is voting to keep the drug war going.
Anyone in the UK voting labour or conservative (maybe liberal too) is doing the same.
Same situation in Australia and other countries.
I can think of no more important issue. Other people either put a much lower priority on it, or don't vote for what they actually want, having identified with some aspect of a major party or against another.
I find it hard to believe it's superior to anything, ever.
It's slow, heavyweight and awkward, at everything it does. As a client it's far, far too thick. It pains me to say it but the modern world of browser-based applications, Lotus Notes is a dinosaur. And not a cool one like a raptor.
It's true, at some point in the past there were two less months.
Personally I'd like to add one more to our current lot, because then we could have 28 day months all year round, and the lunar cycle would match up with the new calendar.
I hear a lot of good things about Jack, I've never used it though because my audio needs are -
music player movies flashplayer stuff on the net occasional editing of audio in Audacity Skype
So low-latency doesn't really show up on my radar, other than the network latency in Skype. The only reason I have pulse installed don the one system I have it on, is that Adobe's flash was NOT playing nicely with others with ALSA.
I don't really have a problem with the stuff that Lennart does, just the attitude. "So what if it breaks everything, we're forging new ground! Of course we're going to include it as default in the next fedora!"
Slashdot Mirror
Having just flamed you further up I now feel silly... sorry...
Anyway I agree, if you want to play windows games windows is probably the best option. In fact I keep it around just for that.
the last thing that broke under wine was a small VB application (from the look of it, I'm not 100% sure) for calculating the propertiesd of beer you'll get out of a homebrew setup. You tell it what grains you're going to put into the mix, which hops, how long it's going to be boiled, various other things, and it tells you how strong the beer will be, what colour and how bitter. Why a simple form-based app like that would choke on the latest version, where steam doesn't I have no idea.
I wish more anti-GNU-tards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to live with a compromise when working with an entirely open source stack yields great benefits, particularly if there's little (only really gaming) they gain from compromising. It's just how some folks like it.
The hard-line FOSS type of thinking is not for everyone. It has benefits and drawbacks. If games are more important to you than access to source code then you go for your compromise system.
Calling people retarded because they have different priorities to you is pretty dumb. When they try and force you to do things that way then feel free to complain, until then I suggest you stick with Windows, sure it's a bit of a compromise, but your games will run just fine!
I have started noticing this recently, it's quite annoying.
I guess it's a difficult proposition, trying to keep things working that already are, but adding in tweaks for known not-working programs almost always seems to break something else.
Some steam stuff works, some doesn't. I've been playing PvZ quite happily, but that's not exactly graphics intensive. The last actual 3D game I played under wine was Portal.
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Oh sure, there is good process and bad process, couldn't agree more. I guess I'm just a little jaded, having worked for a huge corporate for some time now.
I've no qualms about code reviews, in fact they're vital. As is documentation, and a variety of other things. However there is such a thing as too much. You can have a thousand processes, all of which sound reasonable when described individually, it's just that when put together they do the opposite of create a machine that puts out a quality product in a timely fashion, they create a by-the-numbers product at a snails pace. I've seen it too often now to ignore!
"You will spend your time designing processes, forcing it down the throat of the affected departments against the best resistance they can muster"
And they/we will spend our time trying to figure out how to get round them or flat-out ignore them so we can still get some work done.
OR we will follow everything you say and watch as the company chokes itself with process after process after process and all thought of productive work disappears.
CUDA and OpenCL are a niche, but one that's increasing in importance for scientific computing. We're already seeing nVidia components in the top 10 supercomputers list.
However I doubt very much they're going anywhere in the next five years. The capabilities of the GPU are on the cusp of being exploited in ordinary (i.e. not super) computing and can only grow.
They're attacking the high end market with Tesla/Fermi, the mainstream and mobile sectors are well catered to with cutting edge GPUs, ION addresses netbooks, and Tegra is just starting to come into play in smaller systems. They face competition in all these areas (except perhaps Fermi/Tesla) so it's not plain sailing, but they're also the technology leader even where they're not the market leader.
I'm no fanboy, I've had GFX cards from all sorts of different vendors over the years. I think not only would the computing world be worse off without nVidia, I think they're going to stay relevant for a long time yet.
Until someone comes up with the next quantum leap in GPU/Vector technology.
OpenCL on nVidia seems broken too. At least under linux.
I can get pure OpenCL stuff working, but the moment I try to use the CL/GL Interop stuff it just stops working, this despite all the right capabilities on the card.
Makes it less useful for me as I wanted to use CL to draw GL textures. Maybe I should try CUDA instead, they're supposed to be similar.
Innovation and patents in software are totally separate. You can get patents for things which are obvious, nebulous or even already patented by others. No innovation required.
Conversely, you can make a carbon copy of a lot of things without necessarily stepping on the patents involved.
TBH I couldn't tell you whether it'll continue to be supported for all that long. There have been a couple of firmware updates I've applied in the (almost) year I've had it.
In terms of lifespan, you may well be right, it may well be that the dedicated media machines get longer support. Especially in the case of something that is open enough to hack and get a community going. Myself I'm tempted to get something like the the D2Plug so I can just load debian or some other linux on to it and then use whatever software I like.
And now I don't know what my name is or where I live any more!
Meh, as the other poster said, Samsung have been doing this in their TV firmware for a while, pretty sure others are doing it too.
My TV can play more codecs than my PS3, though not as many as a boxee or WDTV. It can stream over UPnP, but not samba. It can play from USB drives. It can also work as a DVR if you plug a drive in and let it format the drive. It's not perfect - you can't pause UPnP streamed video for some reason, more codec support would also be nice - but it's getting there.
It also has an mini-app interface to allow you to use youtube, facebook etc etc.... Basically it's not far off doing what these boxes do already. Another couple of years and there will be no need to attach anything to the tv for it to perform all the functions of the streaming boxes.
How has it not done that in your mind?
I'm not involved in wikipedia, other than having done a few minor edits on a few things, so I'm defending it because I'm part of some shadowy cabal of 'editors'. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the people in the shadowy cabal of editors that I have interacted with at all have been giant pricks...
But, we now have a free to access repository of a vast wealth of information, much of it well supplied with references, that makes a fantastic entry point into pretty much any subject you can think of. It's a great resource that anyone that can get on the net can use to better their understanding of things.
Of course there are inaccuracies, bad decisions get made, and arseholes can get into positions giving more responsibility than they are able to handle sensibly, but show me any human endeavour that doesn't suffer from that.
Ah, but with scanning gesture interfaces like Kinect, it's only a matter of time before we have the BLINK control!
I suppose that's why people caught on drugs don't always get charged with anything - if they don't still have the substance about their person then there's no proof they were ever in possession.
Oh sure, why I added the exception - "(except where it concerns actions perpetrated by their own citizens, with consequences to be faced when they return to their native soil)"
But I'm not sure that's a useful principle beyond heinous crimes. For instance - what about a tourist visiting amsterdam, who smokes up a little when there, and returns home?
Well, that one's tricky. I certainly wouldn't want to have stopped that particular action, the scumbag should have been put out of his misery some time ago.
OTOH it's not clear what the legal basis of the action was, and fuzzy, handwaving arguments about being at war don't cut it for me either.
meh. Maybe I don't care, after all.
The idea that someone committing an act in one country, with effects within that country, can then be sued in another... it's patently ridiculous.
However we are clearly getting into a situation where the world is seriously interconnected (a good thing!) but legal codes and presumed jurisdictions overlap in all sorts of ways.
We either need an international legal code to sort this stuff out, or for countries to stop claiming jurisdiction outside of their own boundaries (except where it concerns actions perpetrated by their own citizens, with consequences to be faced when they return to their native soil)
Well, inflation control I think can be accounted for by the fact that bitcoin production is strictly limited. It approaches a total of 21 million bitcoins in the next few decades. About a third to a half of this amount is already in circulation.
This is why I say that it's a huge deflation risk, if it goes anywhere. This is because the number or people actually using it as a currency right now is miniscule. Bump the number of users up a couple of magnitudes over the next couple of years and even though the currency could still technically work (due to being divisible to quite a few decimal places), the value of 1 bitcoin goes through the roof because there are only 10 million or so in circulation. This, of course, is a nice dividend to anyone that got in early, when the (controlled by consensus) creation rate was far, far higher.
Yeah, interesting idea, unfortunately I don't think it can work as a currency, even if they got enough people involved.
And the fact that the first people that came up with the scheme stand to make a huge profit if it does work... that leaves a bad taste.
Anyone in the US that votes Rep olr Dem is voting to keep the drug war going.
Anyone in the UK voting labour or conservative (maybe liberal too) is doing the same.
Same situation in Australia and other countries.
I can think of no more important issue. Other people either put a much lower priority on it, or don't vote for what they actually want, having identified with some aspect of a major party or against another.
Democracy in the west is broken.
Investing for the future. If bitcoin ever really takes off the deflation will be massive.
I find it hard to believe it's superior to anything, ever.
It's slow, heavyweight and awkward, at everything it does. As a client it's far, far too thick. It pains me to say it but the modern world of browser-based applications, Lotus Notes is a dinosaur. And not a cool one like a raptor.
It's true, at some point in the past there were two less months.
Personally I'd like to add one more to our current lot, because then we could have 28 day months all year round, and the lunar cycle would match up with the new calendar.
I hear a lot of good things about Jack, I've never used it though because my audio needs are -
music player
movies
flashplayer stuff on the net
occasional editing of audio in Audacity
Skype
So low-latency doesn't really show up on my radar, other than the network latency in Skype. The only reason I have pulse installed don the one system I have it on, is that Adobe's flash was NOT playing nicely with others with ALSA.
I don't really have a problem with the stuff that Lennart does, just the attitude. "So what if it breaks everything, we're forging new ground! Of course we're going to include it as default in the next fedora!"
I'm with virgin. Pre-paid. $19 gets you 1GB (with the usual "$50 value!" of phone usage thrown in.
That's pretty much all I need for a month.