While I agree that the standard library is mostly useless (for instance C++11 specifically supports threads but none of the standard containers supports the volatile qualifier (I'm sure someone will comment on this too, and I'll have to demonstrate, again, why volatile is still required for multithreaded development)), some of your points result from a lack of understanding of the language.
*Value templates.
As you should have already noticed, raw arrays in C and C++ take integrals as part of their type definition. Thus, without support for integral template arguments, it would not be possible to generically represent them. Beyond this, integral template arguments are also useful for functional metaprogramming in order to, in conjunction with variadic templates, allow the creation of extremely intuitive templates classes and functions. See for example std::array (raw arrays as generic containers with backward compatibility), std::function (generic and abstract support for both function pointers and functors, and the only way to specify a type for a lambda / closure), and the templates constructor for std::thread (accepts a function, a functor, a lambda / closure, and its arguments based on the type of the function passed as the first argument) in C++11. Users are not required to fully understand how templates work in order to take advantage of libraries written with them. You don't need to understand how std::function is implemented in order to use it, just accept that it Just Works.
*Diamond inheritance (just make it illegal)
Making diamond inheritance explicitly illegal would force users to understand how the classes that they are inheriting are implemented, an anti-pattern requirement that does not exist now thanks to virtual inheritance, and if you are suggesting removing multiple inheritance altogether, then I disagree on the basis that it is extremely useful in cases of aggregation (protected / private inheritance).
*Kill either structs or classes. We don 't need both, with one being syntactic sugar to change the default visibility on the other
We need structs for backward compatibility with C. We need classes to distinguish intent and force people to be explicit about encapsulation if they actually intend to have anything visible to the outside to non-friends, not to mention that just removing classes from the language at this point would be completely unfeasible as it would break a lot of code.
You can easily find out which files are being opened on any Unix variant by watching for an open system call. All other file descriptors are irrelevant, and this is akin of trapping registry access; permissions are granted by the filesystem, so no problem here either.
There is absolutely no advantage to the registry, but there are several disadvantages: it's harder to access and repair than a filesystem, you can't fix broken configurations with a text editor, and the process of backing up or deleting settings can be complex.
Go fuck yourself, Optimus is nothing at all like 2D/3D cards of yore. It's two separate cards that both do 2D and 3D. One is just much faster at 3D but uses more power.
That's essentially what the Voodoo Rush and Voodoo 2 cards were -- separate add-on cards. Optimus itself is not video hardware, as I mentioned.
The issue is with the *Nvidia GPU* with Optiumus on Linux. You can't get the GPU to initialize where there is no screen; there is no screen because it's hooked up to the intel GPU.
Precisely what used to happen in the old days, except that now you need software to access the dedicated card's frame buffer instead of controlling which card sends data to the display. You didn't have a "screen" with a Voodoo Rush or Voodoo 2 either; what happened was that when you used OpenGL for anything, the driver would automatically stop routing video from the main card and initialize the 3D accelerator card.
There are plenty of drivers for pci and usb devices in the linux kernel that work on other architectures pretty much by accident, try building a sparc or alpha linux box and throwing some random pci cards in.
How many of those drivers have dynamic recompilation code in them (or even a compiler, for that matter)?
And let's not forget that until a few years ago, there were nvidia drivers for macos on powerpc.
Paid for, written, and maintained by Apple in a country where they can sue for damages should the NDA be breached.
Telling people which versions of Linux they can use the video cards with is equivalent to telling Windows users they all have to use Vista if they want to use NVidia hardware.
Fortunately, Vista drivers work perfectly fine on Windows 7, making that a non-issue and demonstrating that Linux itself IS the actual problem. Thanks for the Windows reference!
Yes, it's their own fault that they're hindering the progress of the community.
How are they hindering progress in any way? Are they stopping you from switching to the competition? Are they stopping you from starting your own video card business? Where's the hindrance?
What would be the purpose assuming that they want you to use the official drivers? If they see a huge need (i.e.: money) to port the driver to another platform, they're the most qualified people to do it.
Nvidia's distinguishing technology and products are not its driver software or the interface between software and hardware. They sell video cards, remember?
With a boatload of engineering in their drivers. By abstracting hardware access through their drivers they also prevent people from building on top of existing hardware and then complaining when NVIDIA changes everything. That's called encapsulation.
NVIDIA's universal driver is a much cleaner and neater solution than anything else on Linux, and makes a lot more sense from an engineering point of view. They load a module into the kernel which purpose is to interact with the proprietary driver, and the proprietary driver does the rest of the magic. Their implementation couldn't be any more self-contained than that, plus as a consumer you benefit from a driver that is thoroughly tested even in niche platforms because it's universal. The lack of elegance is on the Linux side.
How about you start supporting the fucking GPUs you are selling people, like this Nvidia Optimus shit!?
Optimus / synergy is not a GPU; it's a power management implementation that relies on discrete video hardware for 2D and dedicated video hardware for 3D. Essentially it's almost the same deal as the old dedicated 3D cards from 3dfx in the 90s, except this time the switch is seamless, you can run windowed applications, and software can decide which chip to use on a per-application basis because instead of outputting directly to the screen, the dedicated hardware's frame buffer is available for the discrete hardware to read and display.
AMD has a similar implementation called Dynamic Switchable Graphics (the MacBook Pro that I'm using right now uses it to switch between the Intel 3000 integrated graphics processor and the dedicated AMD HD6770 Mobility) which as far as I know is not supported on Linux either, and for some reason nobody seems to be concerned about that... Why?
LOL Wut? The PCs have been pretty much ahead of the curve compared to Apple on everything but shiny. Frankly intel is pushing Ultrabooks not because Apple made the air, but because the average laptop goes for $400 and they know their new core chips can't be sold on machines with THAT low of a margin which is why they are trying to push a market where they can sell i5s and i7s.
Frankly Apple has NEVER been ahead of the curve, they are a brand, like Prada and Nike. You look at even the machines Apple releases on their refresh and you can get machines that very same day that have MOAR power, MOAR memory, MOAR speed, and cost less. the ONLY thing that sells Apple is the brand, because it'll never be hip to carry a Dell or an HP, that's all.
For someone accusing another poster of fanboyinsm, don't you think you're oversimplifying things a little too much? Have you actually used a Mac? Yes, you can get the same specs for less, but can you get the same specs with the same kind of build quality, battery life, driver support (on both OS X and Windows), display quality, and overall integration with an entire ecosystem for less on anything else?
Not saying their machines aren't pretty, or that OSX doesn't look nice, but that is simply not what gets people to line around the block to buy the new iPhone or iPad on release day when there is not a thing wrong with the iPhone or iPad they have. What gets them to camp like tickets to a rock concert is the fact that its simply not cool to carry last year's iPad anymore than it is to wear last year'd designer fashions. Its status, like Gucci or Prada or Armani, which is fine if you are into that but its not because they are ahead of anything, its because its fashion. Oh and before anybody brings up retina don't bother, you've been able to buy ultra HD screens for years its simply not been something people bought. People buy it now not because they suddenly give a crap about ultra HD on such a small screen, its because that ultra HD comes with an Apple logo. hell i'm shocked they haven't gotten into footwear, they could make $40 sneakers in china and slap the logo on and make $250+ a pair, talk about easy money.
My Nokai 3310 was fine, too, until I tossed it away. Does that mean I should have never bought another phone? Regarding retina, can you please name another brand with them on laptops? Can you name another brand with a 326DPI display on their phones? If it's been available before then I'm sure you can!
They don't control the entire distribution chain all the way from manufacturers to retailers, either, letting local distributors and retailers essentially eat their lunch, and this is not to mention outsourcing recruitment.
I couldn't care less about the audio. Mono audio is perfectly fine for me. So long as the speakers' frequency range is good and bass is boosted, I'm perfectly fine with anything. In games I need stereo so that I can at least tell where sound is coming from, but in movies? Fuck that!
Yes this will be a bigger slice of the market in the future, it's already huge when you factor in all mobile devices, yet it still does no detract that the rather large semi/hardcore gaming market will continue to drive desktop sales in the future - have you ever held a high end or even mid market graphics card in your hand?
Plenty. I had the first 3dfx Voodoo (I played the original Tomb Raider accelerated on MS-DOS), a SLI setup of 3dfx Voodoo2 12Mb, a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP, an ATi RADEON 9800 Pro (this one lasted very long as I lost interest in gaming shortly after), a GeForce 7800GT, a GeForce 8800GTS 640MB, a SLI setup of 2 GeForce 8800GTS 512MB, and a GeForce GTX580 (lost interest in gaming here again). My experience is that it's not the hardcore gamers that seek these things but rather the enthusiasts who wish to experience games like they experience movies. Hardcore gamers tend to reduce display settings to bare minimums as they are only concerned about playability and responsiveness, and a game overusing your CPU in order to drive a powerful set of GPUs to display pretty graphics tends to get in the way of that.
Regarding mainstream cards, I have a RADEON 670 1Gb on this 15" MacBook Pro along with a Sandy Bridge quad-core 2.4Ghz core i7, and it works quite well in games. At the recommended (high) settings, Skyrim never drops from 60fps (vsync locked), and I'm yet to experience slowdowns in World of Warcraft, too. Laptops are more than capable these days, and failing that, there are always game consoles.
Yes some gamers use laptops, and some games can even be played on the iPad - if you include apps and casual games in that market - but most gamers still, and will continue to do so, prefer a system that can deliver much more power.
Most gamers have already shifted to the console side.
Not only that - connecting up external devices just to make a laptop function like a desktop is really down to preference. I personally just can't be bothered with the hassle.
And that's why they invented docking stations. The Thunderbolt Display is one of them. There are only two cables to connect to your Mac (one being the power cord and another the Thunderbolt cable); everything else is either connected to the display itself (like it would be to a desktop PC) or bluetooth; everything you need goes through that Thunderbolt cable, including video and audio, and the display has another Thunderbolt port that allows you to either plug in another display or external Thunderbolt gear, such as all the stuff that I mentioned in my previous post. Cost-asside, there is absolutely no inconvenience with this kind of setup.
I was not referring to an iPhone or iPad; that would be just stupid. I still question the usefulness of the iPad despite the fact of having already bought 2. Laptops, however, are a completely different story, as nothing stops you from connecting them to desktop peripherals and using them as such. I do that myself, my main computer is a 15" late-2011 high-end MacBook Pro that does everything I need. I use it for both development and games without issues; I can connect it to any desktop monitor, keyboard, and mouse and emulate the desktop experience perfectly if I need to; I can connect it to a Thunderbolt display, Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Apple Wireless Trackpad and emulate the 27" iMac experience, and when I'm on the move I have the advantage of being able to carry my main computer with me wherever I go. If it gets stolen I can simply buy another and restore a recent backup from Time Capsule. This is the future of computing.
I can see other use cases, of course. There are people who unlike me don't need as many resources; they don't need a gaming video card; they don't need a quad core i7; they don't need a backlit keyboard or optical drive; they just need a computer with a browser, an E-mail client, and some productivity tools such as a word processor, a spreadsheet, and presentation tools. Those people are the perfect target for the MacBook Air or any similar product, and they too can emulate the desktop experience by simply connecting their computers to desktop peripherals. Both versions of the Microsoft Surface have something for those people.
Excluding the aforementioned groups of people (which are the overwhelming majority), the only people left are the content creatures, those who need a lot of resources for rendering, sound processing, or video editing. These people have special needs, of course, and these are the only people to whom the desktop PC as it is still make sense; however with technologies such as Thunderbolt, even these cases tend to disappear. For example, there is simply nothing in the market right now with a display more suited for content production than the new MacBook Pros, and those come with SSD drives up to 768Gb, 16Gb of RAM, and 2 thunderbolt ports to connect all kinds of crazy stuff ranging from external PCI-E hardware cases to external RAID controllers to monitors to anything you can imagine. Before you know it, even content production platforms such as the Mac Pro will be a thing of the past... You could argue that the Mac Pro still has a high-end CPU, and that's true, however multimedia content production tends to benefit a lot more from vector computing, and Thunderbolt already allows you to connect a bunch of GPGPUs to a MacBook Pro...
If Microsoft prices that tablet right I can see them succeeding with the Facebook / Office crowd who just want a netbook that they can also use as a multimedia tablet.
The premise in this thread is that Microsoft may happily make a loss on the hardware to get more marketshare (they did so with the Xbox) so they'd be losing money with minimal benefit if people were buying it to run Linux.
They didn't do so on the Xbox, and neither did SONY. What they do is to make you pay extra for the consumables over time rather than the console up-front. That's the traditional razor-blade model that's also followed by printer manufacturers. On a tablet, however, they can't afford to do this. Even if they set up an app store similar to Apple's, the infrastructure and human resources required to support it aren't free. Apple themselves profit very little from their 30% app store tax.
I see absolutely no future in desktop computing for anything other than content creation (the land of the Mac Pro and other platforms alike). The desktop general-purpose computer as you know it is bound to die a slow death; it is being made irrelevant by increasingly more powerful laptops, all-in-ones (though I don't see much of future in these either when you can just connect a MacBook Pro to a Thunderbolt Display and achieve the same results), and game consoles.
I bought two 8800GTs the day they came out, sometime late 2007. Within a week, NVIDIA had a beta driver to support it, and the only issue with that driver was that it made the cooling fans spin at full throttle, everything else worked perfectly. Hard to imagine that nearly 5 years later you are having problems with those cards on stable drivers.
That's a Linux problem, not an NVIDIA problem. The notion that drivers should get updated every time the kernel is updated is completely stupid. If you have that particular problem and it bothers you, blame Linus, not NVIDIA.
Yeah baby, creating standard essential technologies is what patent trolling is all about.../. should've been taken down when it still mattered.
Read my post again. You will eventually realized that I never claimed that Nokia was a patent troll, only highlighted the similarities between what's happening and true patent trolling.
And here I was thinking that usage of the plural form was related to gender neutrality... While companies are collections of people, or collective personas, you still refer to individual collections as singular entities.
I have an iPhone 4S, it has decent specs, decent software, Siri, and is fully integrated with the rest of my Apple ecosystem (a 3rd generation iPad and a 15" high-end late-2011 MacBook Pro). Why would I waste money on an overpriced product with specs from 2009 that doesn't offer me anything like this? I could understand wasting that kind of money on an N9, and I have seriously considered purchasing one, but that's because it has the unique property of being a true Linux phone for my nerd side (and not the butchered crap from Google). For serious stuff, however, the Apple ecosystem is the closest thing I can think of to my definition of perfection, thus I would never consider anything other than an iPhone as my main phone.
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While I agree that the standard library is mostly useless (for instance C++11 specifically supports threads but none of the standard containers supports the volatile qualifier (I'm sure someone will comment on this too, and I'll have to demonstrate, again, why volatile is still required for multithreaded development)), some of your points result from a lack of understanding of the language.
As you should have already noticed, raw arrays in C and C++ take integrals as part of their type definition. Thus, without support for integral template arguments, it would not be possible to generically represent them. Beyond this, integral template arguments are also useful for functional metaprogramming in order to, in conjunction with variadic templates, allow the creation of extremely intuitive templates classes and functions. See for example std::array (raw arrays as generic containers with backward compatibility), std::function (generic and abstract support for both function pointers and functors, and the only way to specify a type for a lambda / closure), and the templates constructor for std::thread (accepts a function, a functor, a lambda / closure, and its arguments based on the type of the function passed as the first argument) in C++11. Users are not required to fully understand how templates work in order to take advantage of libraries written with them. You don't need to understand how std::function is implemented in order to use it, just accept that it Just Works.
Making diamond inheritance explicitly illegal would force users to understand how the classes that they are inheriting are implemented, an anti-pattern requirement that does not exist now thanks to virtual inheritance, and if you are suggesting removing multiple inheritance altogether, then I disagree on the basis that it is extremely useful in cases of aggregation (protected / private inheritance).
We need structs for backward compatibility with C. We need classes to distinguish intent and force people to be explicit about encapsulation if they actually intend to have anything visible to the outside to non-friends, not to mention that just removing classes from the language at this point would be completely unfeasible as it would break a lot of code.
You can easily find out which files are being opened on any Unix variant by watching for an open system call. All other file descriptors are irrelevant, and this is akin of trapping registry access; permissions are granted by the filesystem, so no problem here either.
There is absolutely no advantage to the registry, but there are several disadvantages: it's harder to access and repair than a filesystem, you can't fix broken configurations with a text editor, and the process of backing up or deleting settings can be complex.
That's essentially what the Voodoo Rush and Voodoo 2 cards were -- separate add-on cards. Optimus itself is not video hardware, as I mentioned.
Precisely what used to happen in the old days, except that now you need software to access the dedicated card's frame buffer instead of controlling which card sends data to the display. You didn't have a "screen" with a Voodoo Rush or Voodoo 2 either; what happened was that when you used OpenGL for anything, the driver would automatically stop routing video from the main card and initialize the 3D accelerator card.
How many of those drivers have dynamic recompilation code in them (or even a compiler, for that matter)?
Paid for, written, and maintained by Apple in a country where they can sue for damages should the NDA be breached.
Fortunately, Vista drivers work perfectly fine on Windows 7, making that a non-issue and demonstrating that Linux itself IS the actual problem. Thanks for the Windows reference!
How are they hindering progress in any way? Are they stopping you from switching to the competition? Are they stopping you from starting your own video card business? Where's the hindrance?
What would be the purpose assuming that they want you to use the official drivers? If they see a huge need (i.e.: money) to port the driver to another platform, they're the most qualified people to do it.
With a boatload of engineering in their drivers. By abstracting hardware access through their drivers they also prevent people from building on top of existing hardware and then complaining when NVIDIA changes everything. That's called encapsulation.
So, will you buy the even less supported Dynamic Switchable Graphics solution from AMD or are you giving up on dedicated 3D acceleration for good?
NVIDIA's universal driver is a much cleaner and neater solution than anything else on Linux, and makes a lot more sense from an engineering point of view. They load a module into the kernel which purpose is to interact with the proprietary driver, and the proprietary driver does the rest of the magic. Their implementation couldn't be any more self-contained than that, plus as a consumer you benefit from a driver that is thoroughly tested even in niche platforms because it's universal. The lack of elegance is on the Linux side.
Optimus / synergy is not a GPU; it's a power management implementation that relies on discrete video hardware for 2D and dedicated video hardware for 3D. Essentially it's almost the same deal as the old dedicated 3D cards from 3dfx in the 90s, except this time the switch is seamless, you can run windowed applications, and software can decide which chip to use on a per-application basis because instead of outputting directly to the screen, the dedicated hardware's frame buffer is available for the discrete hardware to read and display.
AMD has a similar implementation called Dynamic Switchable Graphics (the MacBook Pro that I'm using right now uses it to switch between the Intel 3000 integrated graphics processor and the dedicated AMD HD6770 Mobility) which as far as I know is not supported on Linux either, and for some reason nobody seems to be concerned about that... Why?
Yes, Intel never even made countless references to the MacBook Air or even the iPad when addressing their Ultrabook design...
For someone accusing another poster of fanboyinsm, don't you think you're oversimplifying things a little too much? Have you actually used a Mac? Yes, you can get the same specs for less, but can you get the same specs with the same kind of build quality, battery life, driver support (on both OS X and Windows), display quality, and overall integration with an entire ecosystem for less on anything else?
My Nokai 3310 was fine, too, until I tossed it away. Does that mean I should have never bought another phone? Regarding retina, can you please name another brand with them on laptops? Can you name another brand with a 326DPI display on their phones? If it's been available before then I'm sure you can!
They don't control the entire distribution chain all the way from manufacturers to retailers, either, letting local distributors and retailers essentially eat their lunch, and this is not to mention outsourcing recruitment.
I couldn't care less about the audio. Mono audio is perfectly fine for me. So long as the speakers' frequency range is good and bass is boosted, I'm perfectly fine with anything. In games I need stereo so that I can at least tell where sound is coming from, but in movies? Fuck that!
Plenty. I had the first 3dfx Voodoo (I played the original Tomb Raider accelerated on MS-DOS), a SLI setup of 3dfx Voodoo2 12Mb, a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP, an ATi RADEON 9800 Pro (this one lasted very long as I lost interest in gaming shortly after), a GeForce 7800GT, a GeForce 8800GTS 640MB, a SLI setup of 2 GeForce 8800GTS 512MB, and a GeForce GTX580 (lost interest in gaming here again). My experience is that it's not the hardcore gamers that seek these things but rather the enthusiasts who wish to experience games like they experience movies. Hardcore gamers tend to reduce display settings to bare minimums as they are only concerned about playability and responsiveness, and a game overusing your CPU in order to drive a powerful set of GPUs to display pretty graphics tends to get in the way of that.
Regarding mainstream cards, I have a RADEON 670 1Gb on this 15" MacBook Pro along with a Sandy Bridge quad-core 2.4Ghz core i7, and it works quite well in games. At the recommended (high) settings, Skyrim never drops from 60fps (vsync locked), and I'm yet to experience slowdowns in World of Warcraft, too. Laptops are more than capable these days, and failing that, there are always game consoles.
Most gamers have already shifted to the console side.
And that's why they invented docking stations. The Thunderbolt Display is one of them. There are only two cables to connect to your Mac (one being the power cord and another the Thunderbolt cable); everything else is either connected to the display itself (like it would be to a desktop PC) or bluetooth; everything you need goes through that Thunderbolt cable, including video and audio, and the display has another Thunderbolt port that allows you to either plug in another display or external Thunderbolt gear, such as all the stuff that I mentioned in my previous post. Cost-asside, there is absolutely no inconvenience with this kind of setup.
I was not referring to an iPhone or iPad; that would be just stupid. I still question the usefulness of the iPad despite the fact of having already bought 2. Laptops, however, are a completely different story, as nothing stops you from connecting them to desktop peripherals and using them as such. I do that myself, my main computer is a 15" late-2011 high-end MacBook Pro that does everything I need. I use it for both development and games without issues; I can connect it to any desktop monitor, keyboard, and mouse and emulate the desktop experience perfectly if I need to; I can connect it to a Thunderbolt display, Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Apple Wireless Trackpad and emulate the 27" iMac experience, and when I'm on the move I have the advantage of being able to carry my main computer with me wherever I go. If it gets stolen I can simply buy another and restore a recent backup from Time Capsule. This is the future of computing.
I can see other use cases, of course. There are people who unlike me don't need as many resources; they don't need a gaming video card; they don't need a quad core i7; they don't need a backlit keyboard or optical drive; they just need a computer with a browser, an E-mail client, and some productivity tools such as a word processor, a spreadsheet, and presentation tools. Those people are the perfect target for the MacBook Air or any similar product, and they too can emulate the desktop experience by simply connecting their computers to desktop peripherals. Both versions of the Microsoft Surface have something for those people.
Excluding the aforementioned groups of people (which are the overwhelming majority), the only people left are the content creatures, those who need a lot of resources for rendering, sound processing, or video editing. These people have special needs, of course, and these are the only people to whom the desktop PC as it is still make sense; however with technologies such as Thunderbolt, even these cases tend to disappear. For example, there is simply nothing in the market right now with a display more suited for content production than the new MacBook Pros, and those come with SSD drives up to 768Gb, 16Gb of RAM, and 2 thunderbolt ports to connect all kinds of crazy stuff ranging from external PCI-E hardware cases to external RAID controllers to monitors to anything you can imagine. Before you know it, even content production platforms such as the Mac Pro will be a thing of the past... You could argue that the Mac Pro still has a high-end CPU, and that's true, however multimedia content production tends to benefit a lot more from vector computing, and Thunderbolt already allows you to connect a bunch of GPGPUs to a MacBook Pro...
If Microsoft prices that tablet right I can see them succeeding with the Facebook / Office crowd who just want a netbook that they can also use as a multimedia tablet.
They didn't do so on the Xbox, and neither did SONY. What they do is to make you pay extra for the consumables over time rather than the console up-front. That's the traditional razor-blade model that's also followed by printer manufacturers. On a tablet, however, they can't afford to do this. Even if they set up an app store similar to Apple's, the infrastructure and human resources required to support it aren't free. Apple themselves profit very little from their 30% app store tax.
I see absolutely no future in desktop computing for anything other than content creation (the land of the Mac Pro and other platforms alike). The desktop general-purpose computer as you know it is bound to die a slow death; it is being made irrelevant by increasingly more powerful laptops, all-in-ones (though I don't see much of future in these either when you can just connect a MacBook Pro to a Thunderbolt Display and achieve the same results), and game consoles.
Such an extradition would be in violation to the first amendment to the bill of rights, so go kill yourself for posting bullshit.
I bought two 8800GTs the day they came out, sometime late 2007. Within a week, NVIDIA had a beta driver to support it, and the only issue with that driver was that it made the cooling fans spin at full throttle, everything else worked perfectly. Hard to imagine that nearly 5 years later you are having problems with those cards on stable drivers.
That's a Linux problem, not an NVIDIA problem. The notion that drivers should get updated every time the kernel is updated is completely stupid. If you have that particular problem and it bothers you, blame Linus, not NVIDIA.
Read my post again. You will eventually realized that I never claimed that Nokia was a patent troll, only highlighted the similarities between what's happening and true patent trolling.
Yeah, but it could allow you to capitalize on the royalties and settlements like a true patent troll. Rumor has it that Nokia earned more from its patent settlement with Apple than from selling Windows phones, just like Microsoft earns more collecting royalties from Android vendors than from actual Windows Phone 7 licensing.
And here I was thinking that usage of the plural form was related to gender neutrality... While companies are collections of people, or collective personas, you still refer to individual collections as singular entities.
I have an iPhone 4S, it has decent specs, decent software, Siri, and is fully integrated with the rest of my Apple ecosystem (a 3rd generation iPad and a 15" high-end late-2011 MacBook Pro). Why would I waste money on an overpriced product with specs from 2009 that doesn't offer me anything like this? I could understand wasting that kind of money on an N9, and I have seriously considered purchasing one, but that's because it has the unique property of being a true Linux phone for my nerd side (and not the butchered crap from Google). For serious stuff, however, the Apple ecosystem is the closest thing I can think of to my definition of perfection, thus I would never consider anything other than an iPhone as my main phone.