I doubt very much that it's either of these. Remember, we only need specs for an interface, it doesn't have to be schematics for the whole card. Well if you had the register specs you could get a bunch of Chinese VHDL hackers to make a compatible card. Actually I suspect that most hardware has an 'obvious' implementation from the register spec, and that obvious implementation is rather good. And example would be ARM processors.
Ok x86 implementations these days are seriously non obvious. But I'd bet that graphics cards are more like an ARM than an x86. And that is why they don't want to release the spec.
No, the real reason very likely has to do with the geForce/Quadro scam. Specifically, the fact that you can take a geForce (typically, what, $200?) and soft-mod it into a Quadro (at least $500, and most are $1k and up). Well that's another reason. They're also probably worried that someone would sue them for patent infringement if the released specs allowed ATI to find something.
I think that from NVidia's point of view the benefit of good Linux drivers from open specs is outweighed by the risk of releasing them.
Thank you for reporting a dangerous terrorist to DHS. Unfortunately we are not allowed to torture US citizens at this point due to recent court cases and Presidential order [REDACTED]. Please waterboard yourself and post any information you find out out using the form at the site. By waterboarding yourself you consent to being waterboarded under Presidential orders [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. God Bless America,
autoresponder@dhs.gov
Please note that if you received this document in pdf form, attempting to read classified information by highlighting sections marked [REDACTED] and pasting them into a text editor is high treason under Presidential order [REDACTED] and is punishable by [REDACTED] or if after June 1st 2007 is treason under Presidential order [REDACTED] and is punishable by [REDACTED]. If you are not a US citizen, you may additionally by guilty of [REDACTED].
Maybe in the central US we get a different class of immigrants than those Britain deals with -- but the folks I meet here are smart, hard-working, well-educated, practical people more interested in good lives for themselves and their families than ideology from back home. That's because US immigration policy is more rational. You can get into the US if you have a job offer. UK immigration is a mess. It's very hard to get in legally if you have a job offer. If you enter illegally you're unlikely to get caught. If do get caught you can 'claim asylum'. But asylum seekers can't legally work. So you end up with lots of illegals and lots of unemployed asylum seekers living on benefits. Sweden is even worse - asylum seekers can easily spend their whole lives on benefits and benefits are much more generous.
So the net result is that in the UK and Sweden you have lots of people who are essentially disconnected from society. In that sort of environment it's not surprising that some of them fall for the lie that Britain would be better under Shariah law.
Some UK muslims were actually captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban and they told the British soldiers who caught them that they would go back to the UK and claim benefits.
But people that are willing to use violence to replace liberal democracy with a far harsher system are 'cultural enemies'. Back in World War II British citizens who even made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis were executed for treason. Certainly I think people who are willing to use or even threaten to use force to overthrow democracy are traitors.
But I'd change the immigration system too to try to attract more pro Western immigrants.
I dunno. It seems to me that NVidia is good for games. I got a Asus G1S about a year ago and it rocks.
But the mass market doesn't want laptops like this. They want something which lets them run MS Office at work or a web browser and and an email client at home. In machines like that discrete graphics doesn't really add much performance and it kills battery life. It also adds a few bucks to the build cost. So companies like NVidia don't really have anything which that market needs.
Because they consider the register spec for the card a trade secret. They don't want ATI/AMD to get hold of it. Actually it's worse than that. If they published a spec then Chinese companies would probably clone their cards.
Back in the old days of Usenet, Kibo could troll Finns about "Not having refrigerators in Soviet Finland" and people would get the joke. What has gone wrong.
Might want to put that all-important ~ at the end of your post next time. So some zealous-o-mod doesn't hit you with an off-topic, just because they think you're being serious and disagree with you. Yep, for a site where people moan about sheeple and Joe Sixpack the reading comprehension level is rather unimpressive.
i.e. each chip has its own key which the user cant get to, which is verified by a certificate chain (ala SSL).
if the software can't verify the chain, it will refuse.
so attacking the TPM chip isn't how you attack it.
you attack is by simply getting the software to verify with a trojaned certificate. We can do that today w/ web browsers by inserting our own "top level" certificate. You think it be difficult w/ games? What would happen if we waterboarded the TPM module? Or found the guy that runs the certificate authority and kidnapped his dog until he signed the FSF key as root? Or you could grab someone from one of the companies and beat them with rubber hoses or towels until they signed the trojan.
in a related event, god said: thou shalt not steal.
Yes, the sheepel should just not buy any game, music or video that infringes upon their rights of free use.
If Joe sixpack would go and ask three questions. 1. can I make a backup copy 2. Can I shift formats so I can play it on a different device and 3. Can I sell it to some one else who can use it just the same as I did when I own it?
If they would just not buy anything that broke those rules. Locked down media would not be an issue. Corporations would not be pushing "by you purchasing this, you give up your fair use rights". Instead they would have to deal with fair use as they always have. On a level playing field with their customers.
To bad the more they see ways to remove pesky "fair use" rights and the more laws they make against circumvention of digital protection. They have to deal with the other end. Bandwith becoming cheaper, and it is easier to distribute and use a "broken" copy of a digtial product than it is to use the original.
In a very cheap laptop a la OLPC you'd better off with Intel integrated graphics.
In fact I think even that is overkill - you could add a framebuffer, hardware cursor and a blitter to the core chipset and steal some system RAM for the actual video memory. Negligable die area and low power consumption.
The Cell would suck in a PC. There's an underpowered, in order PowerPC core and a bunch of SPEs. But SPEs are for signal processing, not general computation. They only have 256K of memory, smaller than the cache inside a desktop CPU. They don't have access to main memory or an MMU. Even if you added an MMU and paged from main mem to the SPEs it still wouldn't help. The bus would be saturated by page misses and the SPEs would spend all their time waiting.
Even in a games console it's probably hard to keep all the SPEs usefully employed.
You cretin. It's people like you that the term 'loony left' were invented for (and I say that as a proud reader of the Guardian). You are giving the left a bad name by taking political correctness too far.
Look, the humour is like this scene from Shaun of the Dead. It's the situation and Ed's delivery that make it funny, and has bugger all to do with making fun of black people. In fact, the aim is to make fun of white people trying to emulate 'black culture.'
Stallman saying 'HURD up to ma Niggaz' is funny on three levels:
because of who is saying it (a fat white bloke);
the reference to the attempts by Microsoft to come up with 'hip' raps and be 'down with the kids' and the idea that Stallman might try to emulate that;
it's a shit pun, that purposefully sounds like something a marketing deparment would come up with;
Wow, some of you Americans just don't get subtle humour. Kudos to those who do however.;)
/me prepares to be modded off-topic (I never understood that one).
Shaun of the Dead is racist, sexist and heteronormic though. Plus there are no major minority or disabled characters. Unless you count the zombies as a disabled minority. But if you do that then you can finally see how offensive the film really is.
Essentially it's two white men battling trying to defend their culture against the 'inferior' culture of a disabled minority. But it's notable the 'inferior' culture seems much more representative of modern britain. There are clearly female zombies, gay zombies and zombies of colour. Perhaps that is what is so threatening to the two 'heroes' of the film. Perhaps the gay zombies remind them of the homosexual undertones to their own 'friendship'.
Why aren't millions of people in the West DYING from so-called 'AIDS', since all REAL STD infection rates have been rising every year for the past thirty years? Why aren't teenagers dropping dead from 'HIV' in their millions, since millions of them are infected with REAL STDs?
Cue Slashdotters' brains imploding because they can't even begin to question the bullshit of the establishment position. How embarrassing. That's like just what the Illuminati and the aliens want you to believe, man.
How can the Linux ntfs utility gain access to the Vista partition if it was encrypted... remember we haven't booted Vista yet? I haven't tried encrypting the ntfs, but I just love how windows handles file ownership in ntfs.
When reinstalling windows I found out that I couldn't access my old documents, so I did a quick google search and you just disable simple file sharing in folder options, then right click the folder, go to a tab named "security" and give yourself ownership of the folder. The funniest part is windows saying "By doing this, you will have full unrestricted access to this folder, are you sure you want to?" File permissions only provide security if you can be sure that only trusted people become administrators. To do more than that you need to encryt the files.
Actually, my post was on the commentary about 'rights', a much wider scope than filesharing. The point of it was that the word 'rights' has been stripped of any agreeable meaning, presumably by two different mindsets: the 'God-given rights' mindset and the 'what rights you can get from society' mindset (which is broken into 2 strong camps, right to enforced equality vs. right to be discriminatory with your personal property).
My comment was an attempt to point out that the banter about 'rights' that had started up wasn't going to go anywhere. I'm an atheist but I actually sympathize with the God given rights side of the argument. It seems the like the US Constitution guarantees negative rights, like the right not to be censored or tortured by the government.
If you base your conception of rights on this, you end up with a small government and lots of freedom. But if you base your idea of 'what the government has a duty to give you' then you end up with hellish totalitarianism. People campaigining for 'what you can get from society' might end up pushing things in this direction. Which would be ironic, since that's the exact opposite of what they want.
Actually I do understand your post, at least I think. I think you're saying that just because something is possible - like accelerating a mass at someone's head or copying a file - it doesn't mean we have a right to do it. But I was making a joke about how pro file sharing posts are usually modded up and anti file sharing posts are modded down irrespective or the quality of the arguments. It's not really clear to "Didn't RTFA" types if your post is a subtle argument against the the idea that we have a 'right' to copy files just because technology makes it easy at this point or a really bad argument for that idea. I actually don't think the post works either way. So I wouldn't have modded you down or up.
Personally I'm ambivalent about file sharing. I don't really believe that just because it's easy to get music without paying that we have a right to do so. File sharing is temptation because you get stuff easily and for free and it's easy to see why it is so popular. I don't feel comfortable doing it, since it seems like it is stealing, but I don't really like the prospect of an internet locked down to stop filesharing. Really it annoys me more that people get moderated up for terrible posts stating that file sharing is some sort of inalienable right just because it's so tempting because it's sad to see smart people congratulate each other for making bogus, self serving justifications for their selfish behaviour.
If you made an argument for or against that I thought was original and pithy I'd mod you up though, even if I disagreed with it to some extent. Which is almost certain given my ambivalence.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the Ringworld series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teela_Brown
Ok x86 implementations these days are seriously non obvious. But I'd bet that graphics cards are more like an ARM than an x86. And that is why they don't want to release the spec. No, the real reason very likely has to do with the geForce/Quadro scam. Specifically, the fact that you can take a geForce (typically, what, $200?) and soft-mod it into a Quadro (at least $500, and most are $1k and up). Well that's another reason. They're also probably worried that someone would sue them for patent infringement if the released specs allowed ATI to find something.
I think that from NVidia's point of view the benefit of good Linux drivers from open specs is outweighed by the risk of releasing them.
Dear Mr Neoform,
Thank you for reporting a dangerous terrorist to DHS. Unfortunately we are not allowed to torture US citizens at this point due to recent court cases and Presidential order [REDACTED]. Please waterboard yourself and post any information you find out out using the form at the site. By waterboarding yourself you consent to being waterboarded under Presidential orders [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED].
God Bless America,
autoresponder@dhs.gov
Please note that if you received this document in pdf form, attempting to read classified information by highlighting sections marked [REDACTED] and pasting them into a text editor is high treason under Presidential order [REDACTED] and is punishable by [REDACTED] or if after June 1st 2007 is treason under Presidential order [REDACTED] and is punishable by [REDACTED]. If you are not a US citizen, you may additionally by guilty of [REDACTED].
Maybe in the central US we get a different class of immigrants than those Britain deals with -- but the folks I meet here are smart, hard-working, well-educated, practical people more interested in good lives for themselves and their families than ideology from back home. That's because US immigration policy is more rational. You can get into the US if you have a job offer. UK immigration is a mess. It's very hard to get in legally if you have a job offer. If you enter illegally you're unlikely to get caught. If do get caught you can 'claim asylum'. But asylum seekers can't legally work. So you end up with lots of illegals and lots of unemployed asylum seekers living on benefits. Sweden is even worse - asylum seekers can easily spend their whole lives on benefits and benefits are much more generous.
So the net result is that in the UK and Sweden you have lots of people who are essentially disconnected from society. In that sort of environment it's not surprising that some of them fall for the lie that Britain would be better under Shariah law.
Some UK muslims were actually captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban and they told the British soldiers who caught them that they would go back to the UK and claim benefits.
But people that are willing to use violence to replace liberal democracy with a far harsher system are 'cultural enemies'. Back in World War II British citizens who even made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis were executed for treason. Certainly I think people who are willing to use or even threaten to use force to overthrow democracy are traitors.
But I'd change the immigration system too to try to attract more pro Western immigrants.
I dunno. It seems to me that NVidia is good for games. I got a Asus G1S about a year ago and it rocks.
But the mass market doesn't want laptops like this. They want something which lets them run MS Office at work or a web browser and and an email client at home. In machines like that discrete graphics doesn't really add much performance and it kills battery life. It also adds a few bucks to the build cost. So companies like NVidia don't really have anything which that market needs.
Because they consider the register spec for the card a trade secret. They don't want ATI/AMD to get hold of it. Actually it's worse than that. If they published a spec then Chinese companies would probably clone their cards.
I was trying to make a joke about this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization
Back in the old days of Usenet, Kibo could troll Finns about "Not having refrigerators in Soviet Finland" and people would get the joke. What has gone wrong.
Might want to put that all-important ~ at the end of your post next time. So some zealous-o-mod doesn't hit you with an off-topic, just because they think you're being serious and disagree with you. Yep, for a site where people moan about sheeple and Joe Sixpack the reading comprehension level is rather unimpressive.
Yeah but I think Putin supports the RIAA too.
Maybe they can get a refund for all the Windows only software they bought too.
Robo-translated spidernest young male servants more intellectally challenging are.
It's like a non cryptic crossword.
tpm works the same way SSL works.
namely there's a PKI.
i.e. each chip has its own key which the user cant get to, which is verified by a certificate chain (ala SSL).
if the software can't verify the chain, it will refuse.
so attacking the TPM chip isn't how you attack it.
you attack is by simply getting the software to verify with a trojaned certificate. We can do that today w/ web browsers by inserting our own "top level" certificate. You think it be difficult w/ games? What would happen if we waterboarded the TPM module? Or found the guy that runs the certificate authority and kidnapped his dog until he signed the FSF key as root? Or you could grab someone from one of the companies and beat them with rubber hoses or towels until they signed the trojan.
Yes, the sheepel should just not buy any game, music or video that infringes upon their rights of free use.
If Joe sixpack would go and ask three questions. 1. can I make a backup copy 2. Can I shift formats so I can play it on a different device and 3. Can I sell it to some one else who can use it just the same as I did when I own it?
If they would just not buy anything that broke those rules. Locked down media would not be an issue. Corporations would not be pushing "by you purchasing this, you give up your fair use rights". Instead they would have to deal with fair use as they always have. On a level playing field with their customers.
To bad the more they see ways to remove pesky "fair use" rights and the more laws they make against circumvention of digital protection. They have to deal with the other end. Bandwith becoming cheaper, and it is easier to distribute and use a "broken" copy of a digtial product than it is to use the original.
It's spelled "Sheeple", Mr Sixpack.In a very cheap laptop a la OLPC you'd better off with Intel integrated graphics.
In fact I think even that is overkill - you could add a framebuffer, hardware cursor and a blitter to the core chipset and steal some system RAM for the actual video memory. Negligable die area and low power consumption.
Via Isaiah isn't fast enough for games. And NVidia target gamers. So no, unless Via are about to announce an uber x86 implementation.
The Cell would suck in a PC. There's an underpowered, in order PowerPC core and a bunch of SPEs. But SPEs are for signal processing, not general computation. They only have 256K of memory, smaller than the cache inside a desktop CPU. They don't have access to main memory or an MMU. Even if you added an MMU and paged from main mem to the SPEs it still wouldn't help. The bus would be saturated by page misses and the SPEs would spend all their time waiting.
Even in a games console it's probably hard to keep all the SPEs usefully employed.
You cretin. It's people like you that the term 'loony left' were invented for (and I say that as a proud reader of the Guardian). You are giving the left a bad name by taking political correctness too far.
Look, the humour is like this scene from Shaun of the Dead. It's the situation and Ed's delivery that make it funny, and has bugger all to do with making fun of black people. In fact, the aim is to make fun of white people trying to emulate 'black culture.'
Stallman saying 'HURD up to ma Niggaz' is funny on three levels:
Wow, some of you Americans just don't get subtle humour. Kudos to those who do however. ;)
/me prepares to be modded off-topic (I never understood that one).
Shaun of the Dead is racist, sexist and heteronormic though. Plus there are no major minority or disabled characters. Unless you count the zombies as a disabled minority. But if you do that then you can finally see how offensive the film really is.Essentially it's two white men battling trying to defend their culture against the 'inferior' culture of a disabled minority. But it's notable the 'inferior' culture seems much more representative of modern britain. There are clearly female zombies, gay zombies and zombies of colour. Perhaps that is what is so threatening to the two 'heroes' of the film. Perhaps the gay zombies remind them of the homosexual undertones to their own 'friendship'.
I'm the CEO of NVidia and I spend all day reading slashdot. Despite that I hadn't noticed that Linux was popular until I read your post.
I'll tell the driver developers to start fixing the drivers now.
Thanks for the heads up
Jen-Hsun Huang
CEO, NVidia Inc
Ok then. Post both here.
HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
Read "Science Sold Out". Go to Virusmyth.com.
NewAidsReview.com
etc.etc.
Indicator disease + 'HIV' = 'AIDS'
Indicator disease - 'HIV' = Indicator disease
Circular argument.
Why aren't millions of people in the West DYING from so-called 'AIDS', since all REAL STD infection rates have been rising every year for the past thirty years? Why aren't teenagers dropping dead from 'HIV' in their millions, since millions of them are infected with REAL STDs?
Cue Slashdotters' brains imploding because they can't even begin to question the bullshit of the establishment position. How embarrassing. That's like just what the Illuminati and the aliens want you to believe, man.
When reinstalling windows I found out that I couldn't access my old documents, so I did a quick google search and you just disable simple file sharing in folder options, then right click the folder, go to a tab named "security" and give yourself ownership of the folder. The funniest part is windows saying "By doing this, you will have full unrestricted access to this folder, are you sure you want to?" File permissions only provide security if you can be sure that only trusted people become administrators. To do more than that you need to encryt the files.
So if I post your social security and Visa number on the web, that would be OK with you.
My comment was an attempt to point out that the banter about 'rights' that had started up wasn't going to go anywhere. I'm an atheist but I actually sympathize with the God given rights side of the argument. It seems the like the US Constitution guarantees negative rights, like the right not to be censored or tortured by the government.
If you base your conception of rights on this, you end up with a small government and lots of freedom. But if you base your idea of 'what the government has a duty to give you' then you end up with hellish totalitarianism. People campaigining for 'what you can get from society' might end up pushing things in this direction. Which would be ironic, since that's the exact opposite of what they want.
Actually I do understand your post, at least I think. I think you're saying that just because something is possible - like accelerating a mass at someone's head or copying a file - it doesn't mean we have a right to do it. But I was making a joke about how pro file sharing posts are usually modded up and anti file sharing posts are modded down irrespective or the quality of the arguments. It's not really clear to "Didn't RTFA" types if your post is a subtle argument against the the idea that we have a 'right' to copy files just because technology makes it easy at this point or a really bad argument for that idea. I actually don't think the post works either way. So I wouldn't have modded you down or up.
Personally I'm ambivalent about file sharing. I don't really believe that just because it's easy to get music without paying that we have a right to do so. File sharing is temptation because you get stuff easily and for free and it's easy to see why it is so popular. I don't feel comfortable doing it, since it seems like it is stealing, but I don't really like the prospect of an internet locked down to stop filesharing. Really it annoys me more that people get moderated up for terrible posts stating that file sharing is some sort of inalienable right just because it's so tempting because it's sad to see smart people congratulate each other for making bogus, self serving justifications for their selfish behaviour.
If you made an argument for or against that I thought was original and pithy I'd mod you up though, even if I disagreed with it to some extent. Which is almost certain given my ambivalence.