Wrong, you can do a lot of work on the card and store the results in memory, the final readback of the production ready image is a relatively small requirement. Besided the bus spec is not asymmetric just the typical implementations. Sure most people use PCI reads but you should be able to DMA read with plenty of bandwidth.
So now you're saying that it's OK to copyright look & feel of applications like iPhoto? It's amazing just how your opinions change when it suits you. If Linspire can add this by doing their own development good for them. iPhoto is a trivial applications and people should be allowed to implement features like this as they see fit.
Let's remember that Drudge's big breakthrough came when he revealed the Monica Lewinski scandal. This was a verified story that Newsweek spiked after months of rigorous investigation by Michael Isikoff. Far from getting a pass on accuracy, Drudge was right about a story that mainstream media outlets were censoring for political reasons. It's all very well for these dinosaurs to accuse Drudge of a lack of accuracy, but the irony is that with his breaking news he's been correct and the vast majority of his other articles link to mainstream stories. Drudge is more of a news aggregator than anything else where the stories link to an eclectic mix of media outlets. Claiming he doesn't match their standards for rigor is a bit of a joke considering some of the unconfirmed nonsense that gets published by media outlets. These are the same media outlets who showed us the Iraqi Minister of Information day in and day out without so much as a comment about the veracity of his claims until the M1s rolled into the city. That's not unbiased or even handed reporting, these organizations had reporters advancing on Baghdad and new darned well the claims were false but never explicitly pointed it out.
SGI did make beefed up PCs for a while, they tried several times. They gave up on it several times though. Now they make Itanium based servers running Linux. The reporter is probably just vaguely remembering earlier SGI announcements, forgivable really when a company has thrashed around as much as SGI has.
They didn't sell MIPS to any entity. The spun it off as an independent company and gave the SGI stock holders MIPS shares in proportion to their SGI stock holdings. Basically they gave MIPS to SGI stock holders as an independent company.
Rubbish, O2 had stunning memory bandwidth and a unified memory architecture where the graphics hardware was intergrated with a very fast memory controller. It had memory bandwidth out the wazoo.
O2 was also inexpensive compared to earlier offerings. The main weakness was that it was delayed in design (as usual) and when it arrived although initially it blew PCs away in many respects 3D cards on PCs caught up to it pretty quickly or were on par with it at launch. After that the design cycles of 6 months at companies like NVIDIA is not something SGI could even hope to compete with. It would typically take them 2 years to turn around a design like O2 and they'd need to recoup their design costs on relatively low volumes over ever compressed periods.
Some of SGIs best selling high end graphics offerings were designed long after GLINT. Yep they missed the emerging PC market but infact they were the first company to make a 3D card for PCs years before anyone else. It bombed and they gave up, the rest is history.
Well said, this is frikin' stupid but these claims never seem to go away, nor does the gullability of poorly trained arts major journalists who are dumb enough to cover it.
The hydroelectric power comes from The Sun, not gravity, the Sun evaporates water that precipitates it at higher elevation and flows down due to gravity. The point is there is energy going into the system. With just gravity or just fixed magnets there isn't. It is a patently foolish claim. A crackpot claim.
Electric motors use fixed magnets, however the energy comes from electromagnets and their varying field powered by electricity. There is energy from coming into the system as electricity.
Now if the headline had said something sensible like "newer more efficient motor invented" that would make some sense but the sensational aspect of claims of more power from nonsense like fixed magnets and accompanied hand waving need to be treated with skepticism.
If these fixed magnets are doing anything effective there is energy coming from some source or merely working to somehow mitigate the energy lost due to friction etc.
Outsourcing is different from offshoring. Offshoring is specifically moving jobs overseas, those people may still be employees of your company. Outsourcing is contracting a function to another company, however the company you outsource to might be across the street, it needn't be an overseas company.
A lot of what he said isn't much of a surprise, however definitive statements about clusters not being supercomputers and being unmanaged loose collections of machines are a bit overblown. Management software exist for clusters and they are rather easy to program for with available popular and industrial strength libraries.
Moreover many HPC applications actually scale quite well on clusters of Linux systems. Affordable interconnect infrastructure is increasing in bandwidth and reducing in latency, further broadening the scope of the problems these clusters can tackle. In addition each node can now comfortably have 2 or four processors giving even better bandwidth between CPUs sharing a node. With 64 bit processors and operating systems now available the final barriers to very impressive easy to use HPC Linux clusters have been removed which is exactly why Cray now sees them as a threat. Now is probably the worst time to talk of how a cluster is not a supercomputer. Clusters form a class of supercomputer that can now handle most supercomputer tasks. True there are classes of problems that the dedicated supercomputer systems CRAY sells will excell at, however clusters are useful workhorses in the supercomputer world and hold their own.
Todays supercomputer problems are tomorrows computer problems and Cray must continue to find new classes of problems to solve as they always have, rather than attacking competing technologies, people will use clusters where the clusters meet their needs.
Give away software save on you taxes. The key is to ensure that the software you give away doesn't impact your top line with the products you sell.... Hmm... windows 98 & 2K on refurbished systems, no danger there.
OpenGL|ES is a * very stripped down* OpenGL for mobile and embeded applications, with a few additions for fixed point support. It in no way shape or form represents OpenGL 2.0 or any itteration of mainstream OpenGL which is still going strong.
It's long been understood that most of the 2.0 functionality was in 1.5 or earlier and the need for 2.0 has gone away except to deprecate older stuff, and many people don't want that to happen.
So yes OpenGL 2.0 is pretty much gone, but not because it's features are dead, just the concept of a 2.0 release is gone. OpenGL 1.5 is here and the next version will be 1.6, the next version of OpenGL|ES will be 1.1, they are different specifications.
Dude this is a fact, it's a test bed for RH and this is the official position of RH. It's THEIR positioning to scare the corporates away. I mean RH was buggy enough but I could tolerate even the occasional grossly obvious installation bug that one day of testing would have uncovered. I ain't touching Fedorra with a barge pole.
Spin it all you like, I'll stick to assessing the situation based on what Red Hat et.al. say about their positioning and what they say is "experimental".
The original article post seems to confuse different forms of OpenGL. OpenGL|ES is the embeded stripped down OpenGL for mobile & embeded systems. OpenGL 2.0 is just a proposal from 3DLabs and may never get off the drawing board. Most of the significant changes that OpenGL 2.0 introduced have been implemented and released either as extensions or as part of OpenGL 1.5, so it's just not clear if or when OpenGL 2.0 will actually arrive, there's a lot of resistance because 2.0 intended to throw some stuff out and many developing, selling & using OpenGL implementations think that it's a REALLY bad idea to do that. With OpenGL|ES there is already a version 1.0 and you can actually get this in several forms from implementations that run on phones to wrappers around OpenGL that you can use on the desktop to emulate OpenGL|ES. OpenGL|ES is in the process of developing version 1.1 right now.
IT's not crap, they completely withdrew support for their affordable version because it cut into sales of their corporate edition because they couldn't build in enough differentiation. I was using Linux on my desktop at home ALREADY and no thanks Red Hat I'll decline that generous offer to be an alpha tester and also decline on paying annual subscription of hundreds of dollars for packaging software RH never wrote. Fedora is completely unsupported and has more bugs and experimentation than any stable distro should. If you use that as a yardstick then Linux will never be viable on anyone's desktop.
Moreover my comment w.r.t. their claims of Linux Desktop viability are factual, it was the CEO of Red Hat that only a few months ago claimed that Linux was years away from being a viable desktop platform and he didn't emphasize any distinctions in his claim. You're just interpreting his comments after the fact. The only reason he did that was to excuse his own strategy of bailing on the hundreds of thousands of RH users who were running his distro.
Maybe it's time for Red Hat to evaluate their current stance on Desktop Linux. Last I heard they were saying it was years away after ditching support for their affordable version.
They have given people back the freedom to use the music thay have purchased as they see fit. This is *FAIR USE* it is the music industry that are vandals and thives, implementing a concerted campaign to steal our rights to use the products we purchase while pretending that they are being harmed by unrelated online theft. Do you really thing your cracked DRM'd copy matters a damn when anyone can rip the CD? Give me a break, copyability is not the issue at all. The evidence does not support the industries position and the facts make them look positively ridiculous. *ANYONE* can go rip any tune today from any CDROM, one uncracked mp3 later and you've got the equavalent of what they're so scared of. We have rights that are being undermined and the industry's protections including those enshrined in law are extremely artificial and strengthening with every law passed and court case prosecuted.
It is not vandalism to protect consumers against unreasonable proprietary restrictions, particularly those that tie us to vendor specific platforms or even force multiple purchases of the same art. These developers are heroes and the activities of those corporations they fight against should be branded criminal but unfortunately are not. If congress did their job to uphold our constitution and rights instead of fostering corrupt lackeys like Orrin Hatch then this would not be a problem and user's rights would be physically guaranteed. Instead we have idiots like the senator from Disney continually trying to sell us all down the river for a few campaign dollars. When one individual stands up to help the situation fools like you call them a vandals, you should show more respect to people fighting and coding for freedoms and your rights to the information you have purchased.
Yup it looks like it's diffraction based and the apperture being immersed in liquid reduces the circle of confusion caused by diffraction. So we finally have an explanation. Not only is the article vague, but it is also about as inaccurate as it could be with the few 'facts' it contains. It's analogies are completely missleading.
The article mantions lensing all the time. The interface between oil and air is cited, but let's move on.
Thanks for your excellent explanation. I finally understand I think. So the focus is diffraction limited and by placing the focusing apperture in liquid they reduce the diffraction limited circle of confusion on the target. Excellent, thanks, now why didn't they just say that?!
OK, if you look at my first post, I mention the singleinterface for refraction, I understand the operation of a conventional lens. The question is still why. I'm looking for an authourative why. See... here's the problem. If lithography limits were the lens quality they'd make larger better lenses. I've always been led to believe that the limits were wavelength related. So, I'm still looking for an explanation because if it's the double lens interface then it'd be easily and I suspect they wouldn't be chasing shorter and shorter wavelengths if a single refractive interface was the issue.
Whaddaya mean you're not sure what I mean when I say it's refraction....?
What I mean is obvious and I know what refraction is I don't need a description of it, it's the fundamental way lenses work, I also know what diffraction is and the difference between refraction and diffraction. In imaging there's a trade of between refraction and diffraction where the area of confusion becomes diffraction limited especially for smaller appertures.
Thanks for the rest of your post, however the lack of any mention of a gravity formed spinning lens makes me skeptical that this is what they do but the article is hopelessly light on detail.
I think I'm more inclined to the view now that they exploit the different refractive index between the lens material and water.
However this still concerns me because I was under the impression that these systems were not limited by the quality of the lens but by fundamental factors like the deffraction at the wavelengths used.
Can anyone out their give us a description of what these guys actually do? And why it's better for the same wavelength of light?
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, you can do a lot of work on the card and store the results in memory, the final readback of the production ready image is a relatively small requirement. Besided the bus spec is not asymmetric just the typical implementations. Sure most people use PCI reads but you should be able to DMA read with plenty of bandwidth.
So now you're saying that it's OK to copyright look & feel of applications like iPhoto? It's amazing just how your opinions change when it suits you. If Linspire can add this by doing their own development good for them. iPhoto is a trivial applications and people should be allowed to implement features like this as they see fit.
Let's remember that Drudge's big breakthrough came when he revealed the Monica Lewinski scandal. This was a verified story that Newsweek
spiked after months of rigorous investigation by Michael Isikoff. Far from getting a pass on accuracy, Drudge was right about a story that mainstream media outlets were censoring for political reasons. It's all very well for these dinosaurs to accuse Drudge of a lack of accuracy, but the irony is that with his breaking news he's been correct and the vast majority of his other articles link to mainstream stories. Drudge is more of a news aggregator than anything else where the stories link to an eclectic mix of media outlets. Claiming he doesn't match their standards for rigor is a bit of a joke considering some of the unconfirmed nonsense that gets published by media outlets. These are the same media outlets who showed us the Iraqi Minister of Information day in and day out without so much as a comment about the veracity of his claims until the M1s rolled into the city. That's not unbiased or even handed reporting, these organizations had reporters advancing on Baghdad and new darned well the claims were false but never explicitly pointed it out.
Graphics Patents... Gone, (sold to Microsoft).
SGI did make beefed up PCs for a while, they tried several times. They gave up on it several times though. Now they make Itanium based servers running Linux. The reporter is probably just vaguely remembering earlier SGI announcements, forgivable really when a company has thrashed around as much as SGI has.
They didn't sell MIPS to any entity. The spun it off as an independent company and gave the SGI stock holders MIPS shares in proportion to their SGI stock holdings. Basically they gave MIPS to SGI stock holders as an independent company.
Rubbish, O2 had stunning memory bandwidth and a unified memory architecture where the graphics hardware was intergrated with a very fast memory controller. It had memory bandwidth out the wazoo.
O2 was also inexpensive compared to earlier offerings. The main weakness was that it was delayed in design (as usual) and when it arrived although initially it blew PCs away in many respects 3D cards on PCs caught up to it pretty quickly or were on par with it at launch. After that the design cycles of 6 months at companies like NVIDIA is not something SGI could even hope to compete with. It would typically take them 2 years to turn around a design like O2 and they'd need to recoup their design costs on relatively low volumes over ever compressed periods.
Some of SGIs best selling high end graphics offerings were designed long after GLINT. Yep they missed the emerging PC market but infact they were the first company to make a 3D card for PCs years before anyone else. It bombed and they gave up, the rest is history.
Yea, it's a bit like saying; "...but if you can accept that the laws of physics don't apply....". Bloody stupidity. Just another moron journalist.
OK this proves it. Taco, go get an education and stop posting this crap. You have just demonstrated beyond all doubt what an out & out moron you are.
Well said, this is frikin' stupid but these claims never seem to go away, nor does the gullability of poorly trained arts major journalists who are dumb enough to cover it.
The hydroelectric power comes from The Sun, not gravity, the Sun evaporates water that precipitates it at higher elevation and flows down due to gravity. The point is there is energy going into the system. With just gravity or just fixed magnets there isn't. It is a patently foolish claim. A crackpot claim.
Electric motors use fixed magnets, however the energy comes from electromagnets and their varying field powered by electricity. There is energy from coming into the system as electricity.
Now if the headline had said something sensible like "newer more efficient motor invented" that would make some sense but the sensational aspect of claims of more power from nonsense like fixed magnets and accompanied hand waving need to be treated with skepticism.
If these fixed magnets are doing anything effective there is energy coming from some source or merely working to somehow mitigate the energy lost due to friction etc.
Outsourcing is different from offshoring. Offshoring is specifically moving jobs overseas, those people may still be employees of your company. Outsourcing is contracting a function to another company, however the company you outsource to might be across the street, it needn't be an overseas company.
A lot of what he said isn't much of a surprise, however definitive statements about clusters not being supercomputers and being unmanaged loose collections of machines are a bit overblown. Management software exist for clusters and they are rather easy to program for with available popular and industrial strength libraries.
Moreover many HPC applications actually scale quite well on clusters of Linux systems. Affordable interconnect infrastructure is increasing in bandwidth and reducing in latency, further broadening the scope of the problems these clusters can tackle. In addition each node can now comfortably have 2 or four processors giving even better bandwidth between CPUs sharing a node. With 64 bit processors and operating systems now available the final barriers to very impressive easy to use HPC Linux clusters have been removed which is exactly why Cray now sees them as a threat. Now is probably the worst time to talk of how a cluster is not a supercomputer. Clusters form a class of supercomputer that can now handle most supercomputer tasks. True there are classes of problems that the dedicated supercomputer systems CRAY sells will excell at, however clusters are useful workhorses in the supercomputer world and hold their own.
Todays supercomputer problems are tomorrows computer problems and Cray must continue to find new classes of problems to solve as they always have, rather than attacking competing technologies, people will use clusters where the clusters meet their needs.
Give away software save on you taxes. The key is to ensure that the software you give away doesn't impact your top line with the products you sell.... Hmm... windows 98 & 2K on refurbished systems, no danger there.
No! Your last remark is wrong.
OpenGL|ES is ****NOT**** OpenGL.
OpenGL|ES is a * very stripped down* OpenGL for mobile and embeded applications, with a few additions for fixed point support. It in no way shape or form represents OpenGL 2.0 or any itteration of mainstream OpenGL which is still going strong.
It's long been understood that most of the 2.0 functionality was in 1.5 or earlier and the need for 2.0 has gone away except to deprecate older stuff, and many people don't want that to happen.
So yes OpenGL 2.0 is pretty much gone, but not because it's features are dead, just the concept of a 2.0 release is gone. OpenGL 1.5 is here and the next version will be 1.6, the next version of OpenGL|ES will be 1.1, they are different specifications.
Dude this is a fact, it's a test bed for RH and this is the official position of RH. It's THEIR positioning to scare the corporates away. I mean RH was buggy enough but I could tolerate even the occasional grossly obvious installation bug that one day of testing would have uncovered. I ain't touching Fedorra with a barge pole.
Spin it all you like, I'll stick to assessing the situation based on what Red Hat et.al. say about their positioning and what they say is "experimental".
The original article post seems to confuse different forms of OpenGL. OpenGL|ES is the embeded stripped down OpenGL for mobile & embeded systems. OpenGL 2.0 is just a proposal from 3DLabs and may never get off the drawing board. Most of the significant changes that OpenGL 2.0 introduced have been implemented and released either as extensions or as part of OpenGL 1.5, so it's just not clear if or when OpenGL 2.0 will actually arrive, there's a lot of resistance because 2.0 intended to throw some stuff out and many developing, selling & using OpenGL implementations think that it's a REALLY bad idea to do that. With OpenGL|ES there is already a version 1.0 and you can actually get this in several forms from implementations that run on phones to wrappers around OpenGL that you can use on the desktop to emulate OpenGL|ES. OpenGL|ES is in the process of developing version 1.1 right now.
IT's not crap, they completely withdrew support for their affordable version because it cut into sales of their corporate edition because they couldn't build in enough differentiation. I was using Linux on my desktop at home ALREADY and no thanks Red Hat I'll decline that generous offer to be an alpha tester and also decline on paying annual subscription of hundreds of dollars for packaging software RH never wrote. Fedora is completely unsupported and has more bugs and experimentation than any stable distro should. If you use that as a yardstick then Linux will never be viable on anyone's desktop.
Moreover my comment w.r.t. their claims of Linux Desktop viability are factual, it was the CEO of Red Hat that only a few months ago claimed that Linux was years away from being a viable desktop platform and he didn't emphasize any distinctions in his claim. You're just interpreting his comments after the fact. The only reason he did that was to excuse his own strategy of bailing on the hundreds of thousands of RH users who were running his distro.
Maybe it's time for Red Hat to evaluate their current stance on Desktop Linux. Last I heard they were saying it was years away after ditching support for their affordable version.
They have given people back the freedom to use the music thay have purchased as they see fit. This is *FAIR USE* it is the music industry that are vandals and thives, implementing a concerted campaign to steal our rights to use the products we purchase while pretending that they are being harmed by unrelated online theft. Do you really thing your cracked DRM'd copy matters a damn when anyone can rip the CD? Give me a break, copyability is not the issue at all. The evidence does not support the industries position and the facts make them look positively ridiculous. *ANYONE* can go rip any tune today from any CDROM, one uncracked mp3 later and you've got the equavalent of what they're so scared of. We have rights that are being undermined and the industry's protections including those enshrined in law are extremely artificial and strengthening with every law passed and court case prosecuted.
It is not vandalism to protect consumers against unreasonable proprietary restrictions, particularly those that tie us to vendor specific platforms or even force multiple purchases of the same art. These developers are heroes and the activities of those corporations they fight against should be branded criminal but unfortunately are not. If congress did their job to uphold our constitution and rights instead of fostering corrupt lackeys like Orrin Hatch then this would not be a problem and user's rights would be physically guaranteed. Instead we have idiots like the senator from Disney continually trying to sell us all down the river for a few campaign dollars. When one individual stands up to help the situation fools like you call them a vandals, you should show more respect to people fighting and coding for freedoms and your rights to the information you have purchased.
They should be fired AND prosecuted for fraud.
Yup it looks like it's diffraction based and the apperture being immersed in liquid reduces the circle of confusion caused by diffraction. So we finally have an explanation. Not only is the article vague, but it is also about as inaccurate as it could be with the few 'facts' it contains. It's analogies are completely missleading.
The article mantions lensing all the time. The interface between oil and air is cited, but let's move on.
Thanks for your excellent explanation. I finally understand I think. So the focus is diffraction limited and by placing the focusing apperture in liquid they reduce the diffraction limited circle of confusion on the target. Excellent, thanks, now why didn't they just say that?!
OK, if you look at my first post, I mention the singleinterface for refraction, I understand the operation of a conventional lens. The question is still why. I'm looking for an authourative why. See... here's the problem. If lithography limits were the lens quality they'd make larger better lenses. I've always been led to believe that the limits were wavelength related. So, I'm still looking for an explanation because if it's the double lens interface then it'd be easily and I suspect they wouldn't be chasing shorter and shorter wavelengths if a single refractive interface was the issue.
Whaddaya mean you're not sure what I mean when I say it's refraction....?
What I mean is obvious and I know what refraction is I don't need a description of it, it's the fundamental way lenses work, I also know what diffraction is and the difference between refraction and diffraction. In imaging there's a trade of between refraction and diffraction where the area of confusion becomes diffraction limited especially for smaller appertures.
Thanks for the rest of your post, however the lack of any mention of a gravity formed spinning lens makes me skeptical that this is what they do but the article is hopelessly light on detail.
I think I'm more inclined to the view now that they exploit the different refractive index between the lens material and water.
However this still concerns me because I was under the impression that these systems were not limited by the quality of the lens but by fundamental factors like the deffraction at the wavelengths used.
Can anyone out their give us a description of what these guys actually do? And why it's better for the same wavelength of light?