People like Gates talk like ensuring that more humans live longer is somehow self-evidently a good thing in its own right, That isn't at all self-evident to me. I'm all for trying to stop suffering, but we all have to die sometime. Its not like the human species is at risk, or that humans are even difficult to make. In fact many countries already have the opposite problem. Stuff like putting people on Mars and bringing internet to everywhere not only enriches everyones daily lives (for example NASA's Apollo project spurred off all sorts of new technologies), those things are achieving something no-one has done before, so when met they advance the whole of human civilisation. That seems to be a far more significant goal and achievement to me.
However if you were a large and/or commercial developer you probably would prefer to develop your own wrapper library rather than use such a project, as then you could have full control of it.
Even if DirectX did those things, the proper way for Linux would be: input: xf86-input-joystick or one of the many other input libraries. audio: alsa or one of the many other audio libriares. asset loading: libxml maybe? no idea. saved games: just dump it as a file to the file system like most games already do. networking: just use sockets like everyone else does.
Firstly, claiming that this is running natively is hardly accurate. Its running under WINE. Yeah I know Wine Is Not an Emulator blah blah, but running anything under WINE is a very hit-or-miss experience, certainly not what you would assume when someone says its running natively.
What we REALLY need is for developers to switch from using any Microsoft-proprietary APIs at all. Technology such as this enables other developers to continue to backslide on change and continue down a bad Microsoft road as a (bad) way to get things onto Linux. That isn't the solution that anybody wants (except Microsoft because they know trying to run through copied Microsoft APIs shoots Linux in the foot so performance comparisons etc. cant even be a fair fight to begin with). The only right way (and the only thing that should e called "Native" ) is to switch to using native (i.e. non-microsoft) APIs such as OpenGL. That is the only good approach. everything else will always be a compromised mess.
He's asking about how he can protect his exisitng equipment that represents a significant invenstment, not what he coulda/shoulda done before he made it.
Where I'm expecting the performance difference is from the extra overhead of the app having to compose everything into HTML5 and serialise it just to pass it to the browser, which then has to parse it back out to something it can render.
The primary use of a browser is to facilitate displaying something stored/composed on some other internet node. Because it assumes comms it expects everything over a socket wrapped in HTML5, which it then has to unpack again in order to render. This is both redundant and significant overhead when the source is already local.
Compare that to other OS's where the app does its rendering directly to the GPU probably via shared memory. No need for intermediate creation of HTML5, possible compression of it, marhsalling and transmitting over a socket layer via a protocol (TCP) that isn't efficient for a guranteed lossless environment, then another process or 2 has to unmarshall it, possibly uncompress and unparse the HTML5, then recompose it into another form suitable for rendering.
On a desktop the extra work/power required to make the performance impact of all these extra layers seamless to the user may not be an issue, but I think it will always be an issue on smaller devices, especially battery-powered ones, where every wasted cycle directly impacts battery life.
I cant help but think that running everything through a browser interface would have to make the user experience feel relatively laggy and maybe unnecessarily quirky/badly integrated when compared to Android or other smart phones where the app you're interacting with is running natively and doesnt have artificial limitations imposed by needing to go through HTML 5 for everything. I fully expect 3D HW gaming and maybe multimedia will most clearly demonstrate the Achilles heel of Firefox's approach.
Most games are based on a game engine that comes from a 3rd party developer (eg Unreal), which is actually what determines what APIs it will run on, not really the game itself. Most effort by the game developer is not actually code any more, its more like configuration of the game engine, including art and asset generation). Games are often years in the making so its not easy to just switch to a different engine, however that also means there wont be many DX. 11.2 games out for a long while either. You can bet that this decision will mean some games developers will make sure their next game is built on an engine that is not limited to Direct X, but you can also bet that many will clelessly carry on wearing the blinkers and will just keep going down the same DirectX road, partly because that's where all their experience is.
>> we pay TMobile $10/mo for unlimited long distance
umm nope that service is not unlimited it just allows you to use your minutes against international calls made from the US. I guess if you also pay for an an unlimited local plan that may be it.
Wow.. you're still using fax? scan and email dude. Do you have a VHS at home an an 8 track in your car?:-)
No thats not it. It has nothing to do with the feature you're talking about. I already have "screen unknown callers" turned off and still get this. It specifically says it is to make sure you're not an automated machine.
I do use Google Voice on my Samsung S3 however it has its faults. Here's a list of downs and ups:
1) With GV, The outgoing call log becomes useless as Instead of showing the number you actually dialled, it lists the automatically assigned arbitrary proxy numbers Google Voice uses. These numbers are all over the US (even when placing local calls) so you can't even figure out which state you were calling, let alone which number.
2) I'm a Brit living in the US and am particualarly bugged by this one: Even though you can make and receive calls internationally, GV won't let you text internationally, so that means you have to use your service's texting so now the text recipient gets to see your real phone number (which negates the main benefit of GV). It also means the Voice app can't be your primary/only text message reader, as it is designed to be.
3) making calls via GV is occasionally spotty: Sometimes you cant get a connection via GV even when you can natively. Also sometimes calls dont connect properly (e.g. one side can hear but not speak to the other)
4) If you answer an incoming call too quickly, (i.e. within 1 or 2 rings ) you get this stupid intermediate voice telling you to type 1 on the keypad to confirm you're not an automated answering machine or something. Its the most retarded and frustratingly annoying thing I've ever had to deal with, especially as the Android phone app doesn't bring up a keypad when you answer a call, so now you have to jump through 2 more button presses.
Its not like its really stopping automated systems wither as they could easily fake that out by either not answering immediately or just also sending a '1' button press when they do.
5) The notification bar in android tells you when you get an incoming message, but even with voice installed, touching the notification opens the crappy native reader, not the voice one.
6) BY FAR THE WORST THING is that there is NO WAY to speak to or get any support from Google for any of its services including GV even the charged ones. They have a forum, but Google NEVER respond to anyone on there. A solution to most of my points, especially 4) has been requested many times on the forums by thousands of people, but Google apparently dont even read their own forum.
Now the good points:
3) International calling via GV is WAY cheaper per minute than T-Mobile even with their extra $5/month add-on for cheaper international service.
4) I really like being able to (usually) hide my actual phone number and just give out my GV one. This means I can easily change my actual phone number at any time. Just because of their crappy implementation, its not 100% foolproof though, as detailed above, sometimes giving out your actual number is still unavoidable.
I'm Interested to know where you're getting your stats from, as I'm getting spam from agents about contracts in London that pay quite well compared to the rates I'm seeing in the US.
of course the real amount will be different because you have to factor in the difference in local taxes, cost of living etc.
There's nothing obvious about it at all. As someone else posted here, a standard marketing approach to sell shit sandwiches is to first announce it as a "shit and snot sandwich", then say "we listened and removed the snot"
wrong. Big companies only take notice of actual figures. As there is no way for them to calculate the number of sales they are losing specifically because of the DRM, they will incorrectly assume its 0, because that also supports their business plan.
>> We have listened and we have heard loud and clear from your feedback that you want the best of both worlds."
Here let me fix that for ya...
"It was and still is our intention that customers were meant to discover how badly we're screwing them only AFTER we got their money and they are so locked in to our infrastructure they cant back out.
As we only care about sales, we now have to temporarily remove some income generating "features" until later, when we can again roll them out. This time we will do it over several firmware updates so people cant object in a united way.
As the Xbox is primarily meant to be the core of the home media environment, use of its core features already requires an internet connection so automatic upgrading will be unavoidable.
Only a few of the most difficult customers (probably all pirates a.k.a. Linux users) will actually do what we suggested was possible and never connect the Xbox to the internet, so we will also ensure all premium games will include artificial limitations to require updated firmware that, completely coincidentally contains the removed for launch "features".
Sorry but gaming in the cloud is a sucky idea. In order to stream it the graphics have been very compressed so the picture quality is noticeably worse, also there is way too much extra latency compared to playing the same game running locally.
Yet another article proving that the only things the US really leads the world in is massively overrating their own country while maintaining total blind ignorance of anything outside it.
Apple, Facebook etc. are already playing ball with the government, so you can safely bet they wouldn't release this info if the US government hadn't OK'd it first. That alone means the numbers are probably suspect and that the gov. actually wants Apple and everybody else to release this kind of info. The reason? They think the 10,000 number will actually encourage most people as 10k is a drop in the ocean as a precentage of people that live in the US.
The fact that the US gov feel the need to respond (via Apple, FB etc) at all is the most telling, it indicates even they know they are conducting highly immoral behaviour. I'd also say illegal except they rewrite and interpret the law to whatever is most convenient for them at the moment, so such a statement is meaningless.
But if something is wrong, its wrong. Period. That means it shouldn't be done to even 1 person let alone 10,000. There is no lower acceptable limit on such behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
People like Gates talk like ensuring that more humans live longer is somehow self-evidently a good thing in its own right, That isn't at all self-evident to me.
I'm all for trying to stop suffering, but we all have to die sometime. Its not like the human species is at risk, or that humans are even difficult to make. In fact many countries already have the opposite problem.
Stuff like putting people on Mars and bringing internet to everywhere not only enriches everyones daily lives (for example NASA's Apollo project spurred off all sorts of new technologies), those things are achieving something no-one has done before, so when met they advance the whole of human civilisation. That seems to be a far more significant goal and achievement to me.
There are actually several different projects that do what you're asking.
Perhaps the most well-known one is SDL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer
However if you were a large and/or commercial developer you probably would prefer to develop your own wrapper library rather than use such a project, as then you could have full control of it.
>> Or are you recommending making games exclusive to Linux instead of exclusive to Windows?
If you're planning to releasing a game on Linux, then yes there should be a version that uses Linux's APIs not Microsoft's.
Even if DirectX did those things, the proper way for Linux would be:
input: xf86-input-joystick or one of the many other input libraries.
audio: alsa or one of the many other audio libriares.
asset loading: libxml maybe? no idea.
saved games: just dump it as a file to the file system like most games already do.
networking: just use sockets like everyone else does.
So am I right in my understanding that this only benefits users with ATI GPUs?
Firstly, claiming that this is running natively is hardly accurate. Its running under WINE. Yeah I know Wine Is Not an Emulator blah blah, but running anything under WINE is a very hit-or-miss experience, certainly not what you would assume when someone says its running natively.
What we REALLY need is for developers to switch from using any Microsoft-proprietary APIs at all. Technology such as this enables other developers to continue to backslide on change and continue down a bad Microsoft road as a (bad) way to get things onto Linux. That isn't the solution that anybody wants (except Microsoft because they know trying to run through copied Microsoft APIs shoots Linux in the foot so performance comparisons etc. cant even be a fair fight to begin with).
The only right way (and the only thing that should e called "Native" ) is to switch to using native (i.e. non-microsoft) APIs such as OpenGL. That is the only good approach. everything else will always be a compromised mess.
>> About the only thing the company has done right is the Xbox
Um nope. The fiasco with the DRM issue and the new Xbox launch was VERY cringeworthy.
>> The Western Antarctic land ice is on land which is deeper than sea level.
Umm.. isn't it impossible to have land that isn't deeper than sea level?
He's asking about how he can protect his exisitng equipment that represents a significant invenstment, not what he coulda/shoulda done before he made it.
Interesting, but thats not what I'm saying.
Where I'm expecting the performance difference is from the extra overhead of the app having to compose everything into HTML5 and serialise it just to pass it to the browser, which then has to parse it back out to something it can render.
The primary use of a browser is to facilitate displaying something stored/composed on some other internet node. Because it assumes comms it expects everything over a socket wrapped in HTML5, which it then has to unpack again in order to render. This is both redundant and significant overhead when the source is already local.
Compare that to other OS's where the app does its rendering directly to the GPU probably via shared memory. No need for intermediate creation of HTML5, possible compression of it, marhsalling and transmitting over a socket layer via a protocol (TCP) that isn't efficient for a guranteed lossless environment, then another process or 2 has to unmarshall it, possibly uncompress and unparse the HTML5, then recompose it into another form suitable for rendering.
On a desktop the extra work/power required to make the performance impact of all these extra layers seamless to the user may not be an issue, but I think it will always be an issue on smaller devices, especially battery-powered ones, where every wasted cycle directly impacts battery life.
I cant help but think that running everything through a browser interface would have to make the user experience feel relatively laggy and maybe unnecessarily quirky/badly integrated when compared to Android or other smart phones where the app you're interacting with is running natively and doesnt have artificial limitations imposed by needing to go through HTML 5 for everything.
I fully expect 3D HW gaming and maybe multimedia will most clearly demonstrate the Achilles heel of Firefox's approach.
Most games are based on a game engine that comes from a 3rd party developer (eg Unreal), which is actually what determines what APIs it will run on, not really the game itself.
Most effort by the game developer is not actually code any more, its more like configuration of the game engine, including art and asset generation).
Games are often years in the making so its not easy to just switch to a different engine, however that also means there wont be many DX. 11.2 games out for a long while either.
You can bet that this decision will mean some games developers will make sure their next game is built on an engine that is not limited to Direct X, but you can also bet that many will clelessly carry on wearing the blinkers and will just keep going down the same DirectX road, partly because that's where all their experience is.
>> we pay TMobile $10/mo for unlimited long distance
umm nope that service is not unlimited it just allows you to use your minutes against international calls made from the US. I guess if you also pay for an an unlimited local plan that may be it.
Wow.. you're still using fax? scan and email dude. :-)
Do you have a VHS at home an an 8 track in your car?
No thats not it. It has nothing to do with the feature you're talking about. I already have "screen unknown callers" turned off and still get this. It specifically says it is to make sure you're not an automated machine.
I do use Google Voice on my Samsung S3 however it has its faults. Here's a list of downs and ups:
1) With GV, The outgoing call log becomes useless as Instead of showing the number you actually dialled, it lists the automatically assigned arbitrary proxy numbers Google Voice uses. These numbers are all over the US (even when placing local calls) so you can't even figure out which state you were calling, let alone which number.
2) I'm a Brit living in the US and am particualarly bugged by this one: Even though you can make and receive calls internationally, GV won't let you text internationally, so that means you have to use your service's texting so now the text recipient gets to see your real phone number (which negates the main benefit of GV). It also means the Voice app can't be your primary/only text message reader, as it is designed to be.
3) making calls via GV is occasionally spotty: Sometimes you cant get a connection via GV even when you can natively. Also sometimes calls dont connect properly (e.g. one side can hear but not speak to the other)
4) If you answer an incoming call too quickly, (i.e. within 1 or 2 rings ) you get this stupid intermediate voice telling you to type 1 on the keypad to confirm you're not an automated answering machine or something. Its the most retarded and frustratingly annoying thing I've ever had to deal with, especially as the Android phone app doesn't bring up a keypad when you answer a call, so now you have to jump through 2 more button presses.
Its not like its really stopping automated systems wither as they could easily fake that out by either not answering immediately or just also sending a '1' button press when they do.
5) The notification bar in android tells you when you get an incoming message, but even with voice installed, touching the notification opens the crappy native reader, not the voice one.
6) BY FAR THE WORST THING is that there is NO WAY to speak to or get any support from Google for any of its services including GV even the charged ones. They have a forum, but Google NEVER respond to anyone on there. A solution to most of my points, especially 4) has been requested many times on the forums by thousands of people, but Google apparently dont even read their own forum.
Now the good points:
3) International calling via GV is WAY cheaper per minute than T-Mobile even with their extra $5/month add-on for cheaper international service.
4) I really like being able to (usually) hide my actual phone number and just give out my GV one. This means I can easily change my actual phone number at any time. Just because of their crappy implementation, its not 100% foolproof though, as detailed above, sometimes giving out your actual number is still unavoidable.
>> Because he's the world's greatest orator.
Nah, that was GW Bush
I'm Interested to know where you're getting your stats from, as I'm getting spam from agents about contracts in London that pay quite well compared to the rates I'm seeing in the US.
of course the real amount will be different because you have to factor in the difference in local taxes, cost of living etc.
There's nothing obvious about it at all.
As someone else posted here, a standard marketing approach to sell shit sandwiches is to first announce it as a "shit and snot sandwich", then say "we listened and removed the snot"
wrong.
Big companies only take notice of actual figures. As there is no way for them to calculate the number of sales they are losing specifically because of the DRM, they will incorrectly assume its 0, because that also supports their business plan.
>> We have listened and we have heard loud and clear from your feedback that you want the best of both worlds."
Here let me fix that for ya...
"It was and still is our intention that customers were meant to discover how badly we're screwing them only AFTER we got their money and they are so locked in to our infrastructure they cant back out.
As we only care about sales, we now have to temporarily remove some income generating "features" until later, when we can again roll them out. This time we will do it over several firmware updates so people cant object in a united way.
As the Xbox is primarily meant to be the core of the home media environment, use of its core features already requires an internet connection so automatic upgrading will be unavoidable.
Only a few of the most difficult customers (probably all pirates a.k.a. Linux users) will actually do what we suggested was possible and never connect the Xbox to the internet, so we will also ensure all premium games will include artificial limitations to require updated firmware that, completely coincidentally contains the removed for launch "features".
In 2 months it will be like it never happened.
assuming you already have a reasonable PC, none of your suggestions result in an experience that is as good as running locally.
If it ain't broke, why 'fix' it? especially by replacing the thing that already works with something that gives a overall worse result.
Sorry but gaming in the cloud is a sucky idea. In order to stream it the graphics have been very compressed so the picture quality is noticeably worse, also there is way too much extra latency compared to playing the same game running locally.
Nuff said.
Yet another article proving that the only things the US really leads the world in is massively overrating their own country while maintaining total blind ignorance of anything outside it.
Apple, Facebook etc. are already playing ball with the government, so you can safely bet they wouldn't release this info if the US government hadn't OK'd it first. That alone means the numbers are probably suspect and that the gov. actually wants Apple and everybody else to release this kind of info. The reason? They think the 10,000 number will actually encourage most people as 10k is a drop in the ocean as a precentage of people that live in the US.
The fact that the US gov feel the need to respond (via Apple, FB etc) at all is the most telling, it indicates even they know they are conducting highly immoral behaviour. I'd also say illegal except they rewrite and interpret the law to whatever is most convenient for them at the moment, so such a statement is meaningless.
But if something is wrong, its wrong. Period. That means it shouldn't be done to even 1 person let alone 10,000. There is no lower acceptable limit on such behaviour.