As someone who does a lot of handheld gaming (need something to do on those long business trips...) I'm in complete agreement with TFA for once. They're spot on in summing up the 3DS's current shortfalls.
The 3DS really made two cardinal sins that are going to be difficult for Nintendo to correct for. The first was that Nintendo jumped on the 3D bandwagon at a great financial and technical cost. That autostereoscopic screen is really expensive to manufacture, and it's the single biggest power hog on the 3DS (it needs a very strong backlight). As a result it's also the primary reason for the 3DS's terribly unportable battery life of 3-5 hours.
The second sin was of course the control scheme. Actually, having one circle pad wasn't the problem; the problem was that Nintendo then went and designed their flagship 3DS title (Kid Icarus) around a convoluted control scheme that all but requires a stand in order to allow the user to use the one circle pad, the stylus, and the buttons at the same time. Consequently everyone who picks up Kid Icarus quickly comes to the same realization: this would be so much easier with two circle pads.
If Nintendo had gone in a different direction with Kid Icarus so that it worked well with the 3DS in your hands, no one would be the wiser. Instead by releasing a game with poor controls they've drawn attention to their own control deficiencies. Ultimately as a 2011 product they probably should have just done two circle pads in the first place, but really no one would have noticed or cared if their first party games had worked well with the one pad. Essentially they created the problem where there previously wasn't one.
Furthermore the 3DS XL can't really solve any of these problems, all it can do is exchange them for new ones. The larger battery improves the battery life for example, but now the console is oversized and unpocketable, and the pixel density becomes very poor. Nor does it do anything about the control problems, if not making them a bit worse since a Circle Pad Pro hasn't been announced for the XL. The only problem the 3DS XL really solves is the same problem the DSi XL solved: it allows Nintendo to go after the niche market of people who find the pocketable form factor too small to use (primarily the older generations with their poor eyesight and muscle control).
If Nintendo really wanted to fix the 3DS they could, but it would be painful and I can't blame them for not wanting to do it. They'd have to release a 2DS with a traditional (non-autostereoscopic) screen and a second circle pad. The former would solve the battery life issue, and the latter would solve the control issue. The problem with this being that besides the reputation hit they would take, it would also mean that current 3DS owners would be forced to buy the Circle Pad Pro, which would not go over well with what's effectively a budget market.
In the meantime the 3DS and 3DS XL are sitting on top of a dysfunctional mobile gaming market. Cell phone games suck because of control issues and the limited development resources that $0.99 can buy, the old DS is getting very long in the tooth, and the Vita - though the most traditional and sane of the current generation handhelds - is expensive and unpocketably large. No one seems to be capable of offering what the market has traditionally wanted: a cheap, pocketable device with good controls and the battery life to last through a transcontinental flight.
It needs to be repeated so it sinks in, Linux needs a reliable ABI so ATI and others can just slap a Linux driver onto the CD that comes with the card and call it a day.
Agreed.
I much prefer the philosophy of having everything open sourced right down to the drivers, but we've been doing this dance with modern GPUs (read: pixel shaders) for what, more than a decade now? GPU driver development is just too damn complex to have good drivers developed in a reasonable amount of time by outsiders - you're writing an OS for a quirky processor that runs inside of another OS - which means drivers need to be created by the hardware manufacturer. And neither company is ever going to open source the "good stuff" that we need for higher performance since so much of their competitive advantage is in the software/driver stack in the first place. Which is why we get these half-assed AMD FOSS drivers that are more lip service than serviceable, while NVIDIA doesn't even pretend and just keeps hammering on binary blobs.
In short, the open source driver philosophy just doesn't work here; it has failed in the real world. Rather than beating this tired horse for another 10 years we need to just suck it up, implement a stable driver API/ABI, and make it practical to have binary blob video drivers while spending every waking moment extolling the virtues of FOSS drivers.
Looking at the long game, at some point these GPUs will evolve the point where they have stable ISAs and at which point writing drivers will radically change for the better. But until then the message is clear: the binary blob is here to stay. So if we want to improve the deplorable state of Linux graphics we need to stop fighting binary drivers with tooth and nail, and embrace it so that we can get good graphics now while setting ourselves up to dump the binary blob back to the curb in the future.
The article is merely an example of shitty web journalism.
Aye, BSN is a technology tabloid. They publish crap because people enjoy reading it, not because they believe in journalistic integrity or even the truth.
Anyhow, the article completely fails the capture the fact that NVIDIA's desktop graphics products are significantly invested in x86. Porting the whole thing over to MIPS (and then keeping MIPS in sync) just for China would be a massive undertaking.
On the contrary. Have you seen the size of NVIDIA's (and AMD's) drivers lately? Even after scraping out the bloat they're huge - they're on the scale of Windows 95/98, and all of that is code.
At this point they are an OS; they're performing code compilation, thread scheduling, power management, memory management, providing APIs, etc. Video drivers have become a sub-OS to manage the GPU in a fashion very similar to what Linux does with the CPU, which is just insane if you think about it. But it's also why both NVIDIA and AMD are so sheepish about open sourcing their existing drivers.
HBO has actually responded to the Take My Money HBO campaign in a way, albeit via Twitter.
Love the love for HBO. Keep it up. For now, @RyanLawler @TechCrunch has it right: http://itsh.bo/JLtSFE #takemymoneyHBO
The TechCrunch article in question basically goes over the math based on the fact that the average person is willing to pay $12/month, and comes to the conclusion that it's not enough to replace the revenue they would lose, on top of the higher costs of having to directly serve up content.
The Atlantic also has a good article up covering the revenue and business realities, and is a good companion piece to the TechCrunch article.
TL;DR: HBO responded saying that cord cutters wouldn't pay enough
You'd be insane too if you were a genius that had to put up with the common man. Nothing in this world is more frustrating than people who insist on standing in your way because they think they know better, all the while lacking the mental capacity to understand why they need to sit down and shut up.
What makes this interesting is that one can so easily see the future of RIM so far out. All things considered they're doing well - they're still making a respectable profit and phone sales are near their peak. Yet at the same time they're almost entirely coasting by on momentum, as they haven't released a blockbuster product in quite some time. RIM may be fine now, but they have next to nothing to keep their customers over the long term, and that's their problem.
Mother nature, unfortunately. Men can father kids at virtually any time, but as a woman if we don't have the first kid by the time we're 30 we're behind the genetic curve. After 30 it gets much harder to have kids, and by 35 it's an invitation for birth defects.
Of course if you don't want kids you don't have to settle down quite so soon, but for health purposes you should make a decision fairly early. Otherwise it's IVF and praying that your kid comes out okay.
This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former.
Regulators should have never allowed the Hitachi acquisition to happen. The HDD industry was already over consolidated.
Hitachi wanted out. There was going to be three HD manufacturers regardless. The difference was whether the company was sold for some value to another HD manufacturer, or effectively dismantled and sold piecemeal for pennies. This wasn't the case of a large HD manufacturer purposely trying to buy out another to reduce competition, it was low margins picking off the weakest of the bunch.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying men should settle down for sex, I'm saying sex is why men settle down. They have sex with a regular partner and over time develop long term bonds with that person, and that's why they settle down. But if men don't need sex, then they have very little reason to interact with women and eventually settle down.
Using sex to get what you want is not what I meant, and I completely agree with you that it's the wrong way to operate in a relationship.
Agreed. It's not the end of the world by any means, but as is often the case there's some truth in the middle, particularly for porn.
Futurama's Don't Date Robots gag wasn't entirely wrong. At the risk of reducing my gender to an object here, the impetus for men to enter into stable monogamist relationships with women is the companionship of and sex with a woman. Over time stronger long term emotional bonds develop, but in the short term the hook is what we can do to satisfy the seemingly bottomless well of male lust.
Porn changes that. I would like to think sex with a good woman is still better than doing it as a solo activity, but at the same time I know I can't compete with porn from a variety perspective (I can't be blonde, brunette, 18, a MILF, and asian all at the same time). And to be clear I do like a good (or dirty?) porno now and then myself - it's something I enjoy sharing with my fiancee - but it's something we can do together that strengthens our bond. I know he's also wanking it on the side (what man doesn't?) but at no point do I feel like he's avoiding the opportunity to have sex with me, in spite of the ups and downs of a relationship. But can a guy still have some kind sexual gratification without actually interacting with a woman? With the incredible amount of porn available these days (and increasingly complex toys), absolutely. And that's the issue.
At least from my perspective it's something that has already changed relationship dynamics. I've been fortune to meet a wonderful man that is my fiancee, but for many of my friends they have not been so lucky. We are all at an age where we should be settling down and forming those long term commitments, and while my friends are ready, the men they should be forming those commitments with are not. It's not that the men aren't there financially or even emotionally, but from the perspective of someone entering into one of those relationship, so many of the men simply don't see the need for a woman. They go do things together as guys while rarely interacting with the girls, and apparently that's all they ever need. And I absolutely think porn plays a part in that because their sexual needs are being met elsewhere.
Is porn bad? No, clearly not. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and I believe we've reached that point. As things stand we're going to end up with a lot of awkward middle-agers in a couple of decades, who will have never formed a long term relationship either because they shortchanged the original impetus to do so (men), or because there were no partners for them (women).
TL;DR: Porn not all bad, but too much porn means men never settle down with women because they don't need sex.
The Oatmeal also demonstrates why most people have no problem stealing things: it's easy when you can rationalize away the problem.
HBO is only interested in selling the show to you if you subscribe to their service. They don't want to just sell you the episodes at a fraction of the price of a monthly subscription. This is HBO's show, it is HBO's right to make that decision.
The right thing to do is to not watch it. Not pirate it and then try to justify it. HBO did not want to sell it to you on your terms, therefore you have no right to watch the show. And it's not committing piracy that tells HBO that you're unhappy, it's not watching the show that tells HBO you're unhappy. If you steal the show that just tells HBO you're too cheap to pay and that they should do more to stop pirates.
The measurement of a moral person is that they can do the right thing even in difficult situations. The Oatmeal only demonstrates that people can't do the right thing unless it's convenient to do so.
Thankfully they fixed that starting with Vista. The universal installer means that the distinction between versions and OEM/retail is gone, or in the case of Win7 can be after deleting ei.cfg
If you want consumers to be able to install software, then OEMs can too. It's that simple.
It's a bit more complex than that, but fundamentally you're right. The big problem right now is that the Windows 7 license agreement allows OEMs to get away with this. Windows 8 is going to significantly change that landscape by restricting what OEMs can do on both a technical and legal basis. But that won't stop them from installing some kinds of crapware, which ultimately as you note is impossible to block so long as the consumer can install software.
The only real technical solution is a walled garden (where the OEMs are serfs in the garden alongside the user) which is a bad idea for other innumerable reasons.
You literally cannot enumerate all the possible things that might distract a driver. What about eating a hamburger? hat about the animated billboards along the road? What about having your girlfriend flirt with you? Women putting on their makeup? Guys shaving? Trying to make a law to cover each and every possibility is just stupid.
But if you don't enumerate everything then you're left with trying to prove distracted driving. Which means the defendant is going to argue that they were in fact not distracted, and that usually becomes a mess of arguments and expert witnesses. The only way to quickly prove that someone is distracted is after an accident, which by then is too late. Enumerating specific things is much easier to prove - either you were or were not on your cell phone.
and this would make it difficult to implement a competitive browser
If that was the case, IE10 Metro would be a dog, but that has not been the case for the Consumer Preview. WinRT is a very performant API, however if you've been writing programs in an unmanaged language then you're going to have to change, and this is something Mozilla doesn't want to do if they don't have to.
That's my point though. Fixed function encoders won't be able to match x264 because of a lack of flexibility. They can't be optimized for specific niches, they need to be generalist in order to be decent at everything since the hardware can't be changed.
All 3 hardware encode paths - Intel QuickSync, AMD AVIVO, and NVIDIA's CUDA video encoder - are largely black boxes. Programs such as MediaEspresso are basically passing off a video stream to the device along with some parameters and hoping the encoder doesn't screw things up too badly. Each one is going to be optimized differently, be it for speed, more aggressive deblocking, etc. These are decisions built into the encoder and cannot be completely controlled by the application calling the hardware. And you have further complexities such as the fact that only Intel's QuickSync has a hardware CABAC encoder, while AMD and NV do it in software (and poorly since it doesn't parallelize well).
Or to put this another way, everyone has their own idea on what the best way is to encode H.264 video and what kind of speed/quality tradeoff is appropriate, and that's why everything looks different.
For example, it is not using the main GPU pipeline and shader hardware to do the transcoding
No, but it is using it for post-processing such as deinterlacing, noise reduction, etc. The shader pipeline is still involved whenever you need to decode something, be it for QuickSync or for just playing back a video on a PC.*
*Consequently this is why Intel can't quite match AMD or NV in video playback quality; they lack the shader performance to do as much resource intensive processing
Let's be clear here: the x264 guys will never be happy. QuickSync, AMD's Video Codec Engine, and NVIDIA's NVENC all use fixed function blocks. They trade flexibility for speed; it's how you get a hardware H.264 encoder down to 2mm2. There are no buttons to press or knobs to tweak and there never will be, because most of the stuff the x264 guys want to adjust is permanently laid down in hardware. The kind of flexibility they demand can only be done in software on a CPU.
What was the the Chinese military contractor doing with the VMWare source code anyway?
VMWare routinely shares its source code with major customers, particularly those that need it to add support for new hardware. There's no reason to believe that there aren't companies in China who need it for those purposes too.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who does a lot of handheld gaming (need something to do on those long business trips...) I'm in complete agreement with TFA for once. They're spot on in summing up the 3DS's current shortfalls.
The 3DS really made two cardinal sins that are going to be difficult for Nintendo to correct for. The first was that Nintendo jumped on the 3D bandwagon at a great financial and technical cost. That autostereoscopic screen is really expensive to manufacture, and it's the single biggest power hog on the 3DS (it needs a very strong backlight). As a result it's also the primary reason for the 3DS's terribly unportable battery life of 3-5 hours.
The second sin was of course the control scheme. Actually, having one circle pad wasn't the problem; the problem was that Nintendo then went and designed their flagship 3DS title (Kid Icarus) around a convoluted control scheme that all but requires a stand in order to allow the user to use the one circle pad, the stylus, and the buttons at the same time. Consequently everyone who picks up Kid Icarus quickly comes to the same realization: this would be so much easier with two circle pads.
If Nintendo had gone in a different direction with Kid Icarus so that it worked well with the 3DS in your hands, no one would be the wiser. Instead by releasing a game with poor controls they've drawn attention to their own control deficiencies. Ultimately as a 2011 product they probably should have just done two circle pads in the first place, but really no one would have noticed or cared if their first party games had worked well with the one pad. Essentially they created the problem where there previously wasn't one.
Furthermore the 3DS XL can't really solve any of these problems, all it can do is exchange them for new ones. The larger battery improves the battery life for example, but now the console is oversized and unpocketable, and the pixel density becomes very poor. Nor does it do anything about the control problems, if not making them a bit worse since a Circle Pad Pro hasn't been announced for the XL. The only problem the 3DS XL really solves is the same problem the DSi XL solved: it allows Nintendo to go after the niche market of people who find the pocketable form factor too small to use (primarily the older generations with their poor eyesight and muscle control).
If Nintendo really wanted to fix the 3DS they could, but it would be painful and I can't blame them for not wanting to do it. They'd have to release a 2DS with a traditional (non-autostereoscopic) screen and a second circle pad. The former would solve the battery life issue, and the latter would solve the control issue. The problem with this being that besides the reputation hit they would take, it would also mean that current 3DS owners would be forced to buy the Circle Pad Pro, which would not go over well with what's effectively a budget market.
In the meantime the 3DS and 3DS XL are sitting on top of a dysfunctional mobile gaming market. Cell phone games suck because of control issues and the limited development resources that $0.99 can buy, the old DS is getting very long in the tooth, and the Vita - though the most traditional and sane of the current generation handhelds - is expensive and unpocketably large. No one seems to be capable of offering what the market has traditionally wanted: a cheap, pocketable device with good controls and the battery life to last through a transcontinental flight.
Agreed.
I much prefer the philosophy of having everything open sourced right down to the drivers, but we've been doing this dance with modern GPUs (read: pixel shaders) for what, more than a decade now? GPU driver development is just too damn complex to have good drivers developed in a reasonable amount of time by outsiders - you're writing an OS for a quirky processor that runs inside of another OS - which means drivers need to be created by the hardware manufacturer. And neither company is ever going to open source the "good stuff" that we need for higher performance since so much of their competitive advantage is in the software/driver stack in the first place. Which is why we get these half-assed AMD FOSS drivers that are more lip service than serviceable, while NVIDIA doesn't even pretend and just keeps hammering on binary blobs.
In short, the open source driver philosophy just doesn't work here; it has failed in the real world. Rather than beating this tired horse for another 10 years we need to just suck it up, implement a stable driver API/ABI, and make it practical to have binary blob video drivers while spending every waking moment extolling the virtues of FOSS drivers.
Looking at the long game, at some point these GPUs will evolve the point where they have stable ISAs and at which point writing drivers will radically change for the better. But until then the message is clear: the binary blob is here to stay. So if we want to improve the deplorable state of Linux graphics we need to stop fighting binary drivers with tooth and nail, and embrace it so that we can get good graphics now while setting ourselves up to dump the binary blob back to the curb in the future.
Aye, BSN is a technology tabloid. They publish crap because people enjoy reading it, not because they believe in journalistic integrity or even the truth.
Anyhow, the article completely fails the capture the fact that NVIDIA's desktop graphics products are significantly invested in x86. Porting the whole thing over to MIPS (and then keeping MIPS in sync) just for China would be a massive undertaking.
On the contrary. Have you seen the size of NVIDIA's (and AMD's) drivers lately? Even after scraping out the bloat they're huge - they're on the scale of Windows 95/98, and all of that is code.
At this point they are an OS; they're performing code compilation, thread scheduling, power management, memory management, providing APIs, etc. Video drivers have become a sub-OS to manage the GPU in a fashion very similar to what Linux does with the CPU, which is just insane if you think about it. But it's also why both NVIDIA and AMD are so sheepish about open sourcing their existing drivers.
HBO has actually responded to the Take My Money HBO campaign in a way, albeit via Twitter.
The TechCrunch article in question basically goes over the math based on the fact that the average person is willing to pay $12/month, and comes to the conclusion that it's not enough to replace the revenue they would lose, on top of the higher costs of having to directly serve up content.
The Atlantic also has a good article up covering the revenue and business realities, and is a good companion piece to the TechCrunch article.
TL;DR: HBO responded saying that cord cutters wouldn't pay enough
You'd be insane too if you were a genius that had to put up with the common man. Nothing in this world is more frustrating than people who insist on standing in your way because they think they know better, all the while lacking the mental capacity to understand why they need to sit down and shut up.
You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation, we want to find a way to become the exploiters.
-Rom. Star Trek Deep Space Nine, "Bar Association"
What makes this interesting is that one can so easily see the future of RIM so far out. All things considered they're doing well - they're still making a respectable profit and phone sales are near their peak. Yet at the same time they're almost entirely coasting by on momentum, as they haven't released a blockbuster product in quite some time. RIM may be fine now, but they have next to nothing to keep their customers over the long term, and that's their problem.
Mother nature, unfortunately. Men can father kids at virtually any time, but as a woman if we don't have the first kid by the time we're 30 we're behind the genetic curve. After 30 it gets much harder to have kids, and by 35 it's an invitation for birth defects.
Of course if you don't want kids you don't have to settle down quite so soon, but for health purposes you should make a decision fairly early. Otherwise it's IVF and praying that your kid comes out okay.
This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former.
Hitachi wanted out. There was going to be three HD manufacturers regardless. The difference was whether the company was sold for some value to another HD manufacturer, or effectively dismantled and sold piecemeal for pennies. This wasn't the case of a large HD manufacturer purposely trying to buy out another to reduce competition, it was low margins picking off the weakest of the bunch.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying men should settle down for sex, I'm saying sex is why men settle down. They have sex with a regular partner and over time develop long term bonds with that person, and that's why they settle down. But if men don't need sex, then they have very little reason to interact with women and eventually settle down.
Using sex to get what you want is not what I meant, and I completely agree with you that it's the wrong way to operate in a relationship.
Agreed. It's not the end of the world by any means, but as is often the case there's some truth in the middle, particularly for porn.
Futurama's Don't Date Robots gag wasn't entirely wrong. At the risk of reducing my gender to an object here, the impetus for men to enter into stable monogamist relationships with women is the companionship of and sex with a woman. Over time stronger long term emotional bonds develop, but in the short term the hook is what we can do to satisfy the seemingly bottomless well of male lust.
Porn changes that. I would like to think sex with a good woman is still better than doing it as a solo activity, but at the same time I know I can't compete with porn from a variety perspective (I can't be blonde, brunette, 18, a MILF, and asian all at the same time). And to be clear I do like a good (or dirty?) porno now and then myself - it's something I enjoy sharing with my fiancee - but it's something we can do together that strengthens our bond. I know he's also wanking it on the side (what man doesn't?) but at no point do I feel like he's avoiding the opportunity to have sex with me, in spite of the ups and downs of a relationship. But can a guy still have some kind sexual gratification without actually interacting with a woman? With the incredible amount of porn available these days (and increasingly complex toys), absolutely. And that's the issue.
At least from my perspective it's something that has already changed relationship dynamics. I've been fortune to meet a wonderful man that is my fiancee, but for many of my friends they have not been so lucky. We are all at an age where we should be settling down and forming those long term commitments, and while my friends are ready, the men they should be forming those commitments with are not. It's not that the men aren't there financially or even emotionally, but from the perspective of someone entering into one of those relationship, so many of the men simply don't see the need for a woman. They go do things together as guys while rarely interacting with the girls, and apparently that's all they ever need. And I absolutely think porn plays a part in that because their sexual needs are being met elsewhere.
Is porn bad? No, clearly not. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and I believe we've reached that point. As things stand we're going to end up with a lot of awkward middle-agers in a couple of decades, who will have never formed a long term relationship either because they shortchanged the original impetus to do so (men), or because there were no partners for them (women).
TL;DR: Porn not all bad, but too much porn means men never settle down with women because they don't need sex.
WD20EARS has been discontinued, which is why it's so expensive. Its replacement is the next generation WD20EARX.
When no one subscribes to the network but the DVD sets are flying off of the shelves, they'll know.
The Oatmeal also demonstrates why most people have no problem stealing things: it's easy when you can rationalize away the problem.
HBO is only interested in selling the show to you if you subscribe to their service. They don't want to just sell you the episodes at a fraction of the price of a monthly subscription. This is HBO's show, it is HBO's right to make that decision.
The right thing to do is to not watch it. Not pirate it and then try to justify it. HBO did not want to sell it to you on your terms, therefore you have no right to watch the show. And it's not committing piracy that tells HBO that you're unhappy, it's not watching the show that tells HBO you're unhappy. If you steal the show that just tells HBO you're too cheap to pay and that they should do more to stop pirates.
The measurement of a moral person is that they can do the right thing even in difficult situations. The Oatmeal only demonstrates that people can't do the right thing unless it's convenient to do so.
Thankfully they fixed that starting with Vista. The universal installer means that the distinction between versions and OEM/retail is gone, or in the case of Win7 can be after deleting ei.cfg
It's a bit more complex than that, but fundamentally you're right. The big problem right now is that the Windows 7 license agreement allows OEMs to get away with this. Windows 8 is going to significantly change that landscape by restricting what OEMs can do on both a technical and legal basis. But that won't stop them from installing some kinds of crapware, which ultimately as you note is impossible to block so long as the consumer can install software.
The only real technical solution is a walled garden (where the OEMs are serfs in the garden alongside the user) which is a bad idea for other innumerable reasons.
But if you don't enumerate everything then you're left with trying to prove distracted driving. Which means the defendant is going to argue that they were in fact not distracted, and that usually becomes a mess of arguments and expert witnesses. The only way to quickly prove that someone is distracted is after an accident, which by then is too late. Enumerating specific things is much easier to prove - either you were or were not on your cell phone.
If that was the case, IE10 Metro would be a dog, but that has not been the case for the Consumer Preview. WinRT is a very performant API, however if you've been writing programs in an unmanaged language then you're going to have to change, and this is something Mozilla doesn't want to do if they don't have to.
That's my point though. Fixed function encoders won't be able to match x264 because of a lack of flexibility. They can't be optimized for specific niches, they need to be generalist in order to be decent at everything since the hardware can't be changed.
Because they're not using the same encode paths.
All 3 hardware encode paths - Intel QuickSync, AMD AVIVO, and NVIDIA's CUDA video encoder - are largely black boxes. Programs such as MediaEspresso are basically passing off a video stream to the device along with some parameters and hoping the encoder doesn't screw things up too badly. Each one is going to be optimized differently, be it for speed, more aggressive deblocking, etc. These are decisions built into the encoder and cannot be completely controlled by the application calling the hardware. And you have further complexities such as the fact that only Intel's QuickSync has a hardware CABAC encoder, while AMD and NV do it in software (and poorly since it doesn't parallelize well).
Or to put this another way, everyone has their own idea on what the best way is to encode H.264 video and what kind of speed/quality tradeoff is appropriate, and that's why everything looks different.
No, but it is using it for post-processing such as deinterlacing, noise reduction, etc. The shader pipeline is still involved whenever you need to decode something, be it for QuickSync or for just playing back a video on a PC.*
*Consequently this is why Intel can't quite match AMD or NV in video playback quality; they lack the shader performance to do as much resource intensive processing
Let's be clear here: the x264 guys will never be happy. QuickSync, AMD's Video Codec Engine, and NVIDIA's NVENC all use fixed function blocks. They trade flexibility for speed; it's how you get a hardware H.264 encoder down to 2mm2. There are no buttons to press or knobs to tweak and there never will be, because most of the stuff the x264 guys want to adjust is permanently laid down in hardware. The kind of flexibility they demand can only be done in software on a CPU.
VMWare routinely shares its source code with major customers, particularly those that need it to add support for new hardware. There's no reason to believe that there aren't companies in China who need it for those purposes too.