"Hard Times" are unquestionably ahead. Will it mean the extinction of the human race? I seriously doubt it. We're simply too good at adapting and adjusting to the changes. But we really do need to keep on top of things. It will mean relocating where we grow our food crops or even adapting existing crops to new climates. It will mean relocating animal species or watch thousands of species go extinct. It will mean spending a lot of money for survival and the development of new technologies. In short, it will mean a lot of human suffering because there is little to no profit in saving human lives because most humans don't have enough money to survive.
No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.
When I get an attachment I can't open, I respond with something like this.
I'm sorry, but I can't open the Word document you sent as I don't use Word. Would you mind saving the file in RTF format (under the File menu, choose "Save as.." and select "Rich Text" in the drop-down box) and sending me that as an attachment. In the future, it would be easiest if you would send me documents in that way because, as I said, I and others who don't use Word can't read them in the default format.
This has the advantages of a) explaining what I want to a secretary or supplier who doesn't realize that you can save documents in different file formats, instead of confusing them with some political badgering about monopolies, bytes, GNU/Linux and Kenya, b) not reinforcing the stereotype that Linux users are rabid, socially dysfunctional pricks and c) not being a jerk to someone who doesn't know any better.
Published on May 27, 2011 Written by Michael Larabel Page 6 of 6
There's really no change compared to our previous round of open-source Radeon DRM + Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver testing... Most users interested in playing any sort of semi-intense OpenGL game will certainly be best off with the Catalyst driver for the near future.
If taking a geometric mean of all the frame-rates for each of the tests, from the OpenBenchmarking.org result file, it clearly shows the Catalyst driver is still many times faster overall.
If then condensing the results from the four Radeon HD 4000/5000 series graphics cards, the AMD Catalyst 11.4 Linux driver is about 7.76x faster than the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code as of yesterday..
It's the sort of promotional co-branding synergy that's been facilitated when the newly merged 20th Paramount Columbia Universal Disney Brothers bought out God in a hostile takeover.
In other news, the penalty for copyright infringement is eternal torment in hell by Marcellus Wallace. He'll get medieval on yo' cheap ass fo' EVAH. The texts of all major religions have been updated retroactively to make copyright infringement the most serious sin.
A hanging driver or non-responsive hardware is different than a crashing driver. If code crashes while in kernel mode, bad things happen.
That's true. Actually Windows has a strange history with display drivers. Initially NT based OSs (NT 3.1 and NT 3.5) were supposed to run almost all of the display driver in user mode with a small kernel mode component called a video miniport that could access hardware.
Of course that was too slow in practice so everyone mapped the hardware registers into user mode memory. E.g.
The display driver has direct access to I/O-mapped and memory-mapped video registers. This access allows a display driver to achieve high performance. For example, the driver might need to access video hardware registers to send line-drawing commands at high throughput.
Similarly, for graphics cards, such as the S3, many of the innermost loops in the graphics engine code require reads and writes of several video controller ports (for example, text output in graphics mode, bit block transfers, and line drawing). Rather than requiring the display driver to send an IOCTL to the miniport driver for each request, the display driver is permitted to access the video hardware directly.
But user mode that can access DMA registers can bring down the system.
NT 4.0 moved everything to kernel mode for performance with the memorably bogus justification that "if you crash the display driver the system is useless anyway". Then again if everyone just mapped both the framebuffer and the hardware registers to user mode memory anyway, the kernel mode part wasn't really doing anything.
XP was the same but added time outs for threads stuck in the driver. Vista moved most of the code back to user mode with a small KMD.
The architecture is clever than the NT 3.x video miniport though - see here
It all sounds quite sensible the way they describe it - most of the code is in user mode. It packs commands into packets and calls kernel mode code whose sole purpose is to add the packets into a DMA list. Graphics hardware then DMAs the commands and executes them. In the later versions of WDDM the display memory is virtualised. So theoretically you can stop buggy user mode code using the DMA engine to clobber memory it shouldn't be able to access.
Mind you I'm pretty sure that architectural changes like this are the reason for Vista's reputation for being a resource hog. OTOH Windows 7 seems OK, and it still has much the same architecture.
I think NVidia should do an x64 chip. The patents on x86 have mostly expired now. AMD have said they will license the x64 extension to anyone - they've already done it to Transmeta and Via.
An Atom class x64 chip would mean they could do a combined CPU/GPU.
The other option would be to buy Via who've already got an x86 licence. Or even just team up with them to put NVidia GPUs on the same die as Via CPUs. Which would be interesting combination actually. You could scale the performance from Intel Atom to AMD Bobcat. It should be possible to get HD video acceleration pretty easily, and that's something Intel Atom based systems seem to struggle with.
In fact it's a shame Intel won't play nice with NVidia - Like Via Intel make some excellent CPUs but horrid GPUs. NVidia make excellent GPUs but lack an x86/x64 design. Which is kind of an issue in the netbook market. I can see tablets being ARM but legacy x86 applications will run like ass on an Arm via emulation, and that is where all the money is.
You don't necessarily need user mode drivers to recover from crashes. I've seen XP recover from a hang in driver - actually due to a badly seated connector in a laptop - by switching to the stock VGA driver and popping up a dialog box.
Very impressive actually - XP must have a watchdog timer and the ability to switch back to the non accelerated Microsoft VGA driver when the accelerated and vendor provided driver gets stuck waiting for the hardware. What's interesting is that the resolution and bit depth of the display changes. So the GDI must be able to recover from this on the fly.
On Windiows - auto switching from IGP to defdicated graphics is done by at least the NVidia "Optimus" drivers.
Yeah because the freedom to download a CAM rip of a sequel to a reboot of a recast of a movie based on a crap 1960's TV series for free and rather than paying a few bucks to see it in a cinema is totally the same as the freedom to call for people's rights under the countries constitution to be respected
So people being sued for downloading bad copies of worse movies in the US is totally the same as Liu Xiaobo being arrested for asking the Chinese government to respect things like Article 35 of the Chinese constitution
I dunno, but if I were with the Falun Gong/Mongolians/some other oppressed minority in China I'm not sure I'd be entirely happy that someone is calling for a genocide of Chinese people in my name. Because that would be the sort of thing the Chinese government would find useful to justify what repression they have. So if you posted this in an attempt to help the Falun Gong/Mongolians et you're seriously misguided.
Of course if you posted this to get your proverbial fifty cents from the CCP, then good job. Top marks for creativity in fact.
If you think governments have an extreme tendency to put their own interests above that of the public should they really have the power to censor criticism of themselves?
I.e. they ban Playboy so they can claim to be blocking porn to protect the innocent Chinese people from lascivious foreigners. Pretty much everything else on the list is there because the government wants to stop Chinese people discussing things like Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen.
Funny how Americans here will often claim that the US government claims to be doing things for one reason but is really doing them for a completely different (and completely self serving) one but assume that people running an extremely ruthless one party state with strict censorship will act rationally in the best interests of the majority of their people.
How about Porter's law - "All discussions of censorship in some grim totalitarian state must have a first post by an overweight American seeding a dozen torrents using his employer or college's bandwidth claiming that the US is worse because a tiny minority of people pirating a terrible Hollywood movie to save themselves 0.000000001% of their disposable income once got sued".
Yeah, you poor things you. I bet the vending machine is out of Cheetos too. Which is exactly the same as The Great Leap Forward. After all, both caused hunger.
I am not disappointed that you will not give the talks - That is your legitimate right. When we had the same goals we set it and now we do not. That might happen and even though it is not pleasant it is not totally unacceptable.
However, personally I start to doubt your truthfulness about freedom. Boycotting the Israeli Universities since you get funds from Palestinians means that you accepted the Palestinians proprietary license. Neither you nor them want to help their neighbor. That is the meaning of what you are doing.
Oh boy, you should really re-consider the meaning of freedom given the agreements you make.
You chose the "Free beer" giving up the "Free of speech" and that disappoints me very much since it has to do with the genuinity implementation of your own presented ideas.
In Scotland, section 51 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 abolished the common law criminal offences of sedition and 'leasing-making'. The latter offence, also known as 'lease making' was considered an offence of lese majeste or making remarks critical of the Monarch of the United Kingdom. It had not been prosecuted since 1715
But you're right that the Thai king is not the problem here - strict enforcement of lese majeste laws are being pushed by dodgy politicians for their own purposes.
If you get a GoPhone SIM card you can buy 100MB data for $19.99. And if you add $100 credit the SIM will stay valid for a year. So long as you go to the US once every twelve months the number will stay valid.
When I was in the US I got a GoPhone pay as you go SIM card and 100MB data for $20. Which is a terrible deal by the standards of most places but it did the job if I needed net access. AT&T seemed like a good option as I was travelling a lot.
Actually if you get one of those coupon magazines (e.g. http://www.roomsaver.com/ or http://www.travelcouponguide.com/) you can easily get a discount on an already cheap hotel (e.g. Best Western) which has wifi and do your emailing there. The coupons work during the week when the hotels are empty but the hotel has an option to refuse them if they are busy during the weekend. It's best to call ahead before you check in. Incidentally expensive hotels - the sort your company will check you into - will often charge an outrageous amount for Wifi if you walk in off the street in addition to an already outrageous non discounted (aka Rack) room rate.
Incidentally if you go to the UK get a Tesco Mobile Pay As You go Card. They have a £2 (i.e US$3) per week unlimited data option. You sign up by SMS - they charge you the £2 and subscribe you. It will auto renew each week and charge you another £2 but you can opt out at any time, in which case it will run to the end of the week and then not renew.
So you get unlimited data for about US$14 per month. You can pick up the SIM card from any Tesco store. Tesco is a ubiquitous supermarket, so it's not hard to find one anywhere in the UK.
It's not always HSDPA - you'll drop down to GPRS if you're not near a base station. Still it is unlimited (well subject to an ill defined fair use policy). I.e. it's a much better deal than the AT&T one in the US. Tesco is an MVNO using the O2 network, so the coverage isn't too bad. In fact I've travelled around the UK quite a bit and apart from dropping down to GPRS it seems like it works almost everywhere.
You can scan the Doritos barcode with your phone camera and a smiley face will show if it's a good idea to buy them. If it would cause your health premiums to rise due to high sodium consumption a picture of Wayne Night will appear shaking his finger and a sample of "unh-unh-uh, you didn't say the magic word" will play over and over again.
Actually it would be funnier it Nedryed you at the checkout and you had to take the Doritos back, humiliated while the other people in the line glared at you.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Apple have a look and feel patent on the furniture they use?
I bet you drive a big car too, huh?
Good to see these Microsoft stories still bring out the old school crazies, ranting like it's the 1999..
Sell those LNUX shares before it's too late!
"Hard Times" are unquestionably ahead. Will it mean the extinction of the human race? I seriously doubt it. We're simply too good at adapting and adjusting to the changes. But we really do need to keep on top of things. It will mean relocating where we grow our food crops or even adapting existing crops to new climates. It will mean relocating animal species or watch thousands of species go extinct. It will mean spending a lot of money for survival and the development of new technologies. In short, it will mean a lot of human suffering because there is little to no profit in saving human lives because most humans don't have enough money to survive.
Maybe we're just levelling up as a species.
No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.
--
-- Linux user #520758
You remind me a bit of this
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-01-11-002-20-OP-0038
When I get an attachment I can't open, I respond with something like this.
I'm sorry, but I can't open the Word document you sent as I don't use Word. Would you mind saving the file in RTF format (under the File menu, choose "Save as.." and select "Rich Text" in the drop-down box) and sending me that as an attachment. In the future, it would be easiest if you would send me documents in that way because, as I said, I and others who don't use Word can't read them in the default format.
This has the advantages of a) explaining what I want to a secretary or supplier who doesn't realize that you can save documents in different file formats, instead of confusing them with some political badgering about monopolies, bytes, GNU/Linux and Kenya, b) not reinforcing the stereotype that Linux users are rabid, socially dysfunctional pricks and c) not being a jerk to someone who doesn't know any better.
And how's that working out for them?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_gardenshed_drm&num=6
Published on May 27, 2011
Written by Michael Larabel
Page 6 of 6
There's really no change compared to our previous round of open-source Radeon DRM + Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver testing... Most users interested in playing any sort of semi-intense OpenGL game will certainly be best off with the Catalyst driver for the near future.
If taking a geometric mean of all the frame-rates for each of the tests, from the OpenBenchmarking.org result file, it clearly shows the Catalyst driver is still many times faster overall.
If then condensing the results from the four Radeon HD 4000/5000 series graphics cards, the AMD Catalyst 11.4 Linux driver is about 7.76x faster than the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code as of yesterday..
Not so good it seems.
It's the sort of promotional co-branding synergy that's been facilitated when the newly merged 20th Paramount Columbia Universal Disney Brothers bought out God in a hostile takeover.
In other news, the penalty for copyright infringement is eternal torment in hell by Marcellus Wallace. He'll get medieval on yo' cheap ass fo' EVAH. The texts of all major religions have been updated retroactively to make copyright infringement the most serious sin.
A hanging driver or non-responsive hardware is different than a crashing driver. If code crashes while in kernel mode, bad things happen.
That's true. Actually Windows has a strange history with display drivers. Initially NT based OSs (NT 3.1 and NT 3.5) were supposed to run almost all of the display driver in user mode with a small kernel mode component called a video miniport that could access hardware.
Of course that was too slow in practice so everyone mapped the hardware registers into user mode memory. E.g.
http://www.osronline.com/ddkx/graphics/vidintro_5d7r.htm
The display driver has direct access to I/O-mapped and memory-mapped video registers. This access allows a display driver to achieve high performance. For example, the driver might need to access video hardware registers to send line-drawing commands at high throughput.
Similarly, for graphics cards, such as the S3, many of the innermost loops in the graphics engine code require reads and writes of several video controller ports (for example, text output in graphics mode, bit block transfers, and line drawing). Rather than requiring the display driver to send an IOCTL to the miniport driver for each request, the display driver is permitted to access the video hardware directly.
But user mode that can access DMA registers can bring down the system.
NT 4.0 moved everything to kernel mode for performance with the memorably bogus justification that "if you crash the display driver the system is useless anyway". Then again if everyone just mapped both the framebuffer and the hardware registers to user mode memory anyway, the kernel mode part wasn't really doing anything.
XP was the same but added time outs for threads stuck in the driver. Vista moved most of the code back to user mode with a small KMD.
The architecture is clever than the NT 3.x video miniport though - see here
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/pri103_wh06.ppt
It all sounds quite sensible the way they describe it - most of the code is in user mode. It packs commands into packets and calls kernel mode code whose sole purpose is to add the packets into a DMA list. Graphics hardware then DMAs the commands and executes them. In the later versions of WDDM the display memory is virtualised. So theoretically you can stop buggy user mode code using the DMA engine to clobber memory it shouldn't be able to access.
Mind you I'm pretty sure that architectural changes like this are the reason for Vista's reputation for being a resource hog. OTOH Windows 7 seems OK, and it still has much the same architecture.
I think NVidia should do an x64 chip. The patents on x86 have mostly expired now. AMD have said they will license the x64 extension to anyone - they've already done it to Transmeta and Via.
An Atom class x64 chip would mean they could do a combined CPU/GPU.
The other option would be to buy Via who've already got an x86 licence. Or even just team up with them to put NVidia GPUs on the same die as Via CPUs. Which would be interesting combination actually. You could scale the performance from Intel Atom to AMD Bobcat. It should be possible to get HD video acceleration pretty easily, and that's something Intel Atom based systems seem to struggle with.
In fact it's a shame Intel won't play nice with NVidia - Like Via Intel make some excellent CPUs but horrid GPUs. NVidia make excellent GPUs but lack an x86/x64 design. Which is kind of an issue in the netbook market. I can see tablets being ARM but legacy x86 applications will run like ass on an Arm via emulation, and that is where all the money is.
You don't necessarily need user mode drivers to recover from crashes. I've seen XP recover from a hang in driver - actually due to a badly seated connector in a laptop - by switching to the stock VGA driver and popping up a dialog box.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd349392(v=ws.10).aspx
Very impressive actually - XP must have a watchdog timer and the ability to switch back to the non accelerated Microsoft VGA driver when the accelerated and vendor provided driver gets stuck waiting for the hardware. What's interesting is that the resolution and bit depth of the display changes. So the GDI must be able to recover from this on the fly.
On Windiows - auto switching from IGP to defdicated graphics is done by at least the NVidia "Optimus" drivers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10449383-1.html
It's not impossible he got the reference and still didn't find it funny
Linux 3.1 was a certain ring to it.
Yeah because the freedom to download a CAM rip of a sequel to a reboot of a recast of a movie based on a crap 1960's TV series for free and rather than paying a few bucks to see it in a cinema is totally the same as the freedom to call for people's rights under the countries constitution to be respected
So people being sued for downloading bad copies of worse movies in the US is totally the same as Liu Xiaobo being arrested for asking the Chinese government to respect things like Article 35 of the Chinese constitution
I dunno, but if I were with the Falun Gong/Mongolians/some other oppressed minority in China I'm not sure I'd be entirely happy that someone is calling for a genocide of Chinese people in my name. Because that would be the sort of thing the Chinese government would find useful to justify what repression they have. So if you posted this in an attempt to help the Falun Gong/Mongolians et you're seriously misguided.
Of course if you posted this to get your proverbial fifty cents from the CCP, then good job. Top marks for creativity in fact.
If you think governments have an extreme tendency to put their own interests above that of the public should they really have the power to censor criticism of themselves?
Actually if you look at the list porn is not a very high percentage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blacklisted_keywords_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China
I.e. they ban Playboy so they can claim to be blocking porn to protect the innocent Chinese people from lascivious foreigners. Pretty much everything else on the list is there because the government wants to stop Chinese people discussing things like Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen.
Funny how Americans here will often claim that the US government claims to be doing things for one reason but is really doing them for a completely different (and completely self serving) one but assume that people running an extremely ruthless one party state with strict censorship will act rationally in the best interests of the majority of their people.
China censors with the fear of a national uprise, something that might endanger the government.
FTFY
Someone needs to update Godwin's Law.
How about Porter's law - "All discussions of censorship in some grim totalitarian state must have a first post by an overweight American seeding a dozen torrents using his employer or college's bandwidth claiming that the US is worse because a tiny minority of people pirating a terrible Hollywood movie to save themselves 0.000000001% of their disposable income once got sued".
Yeah, you poor things you. I bet the vending machine is out of Cheetos too. Which is exactly the same as The Great Leap Forward. After all, both caused hunger.
I like this comment
Oh, snap!
completely ignoring the fact that they've got pretty much the same system in England.
Well except for the fact that a quick look at a UK tabloid shows you that the UK does not enforce lese majeste laws.
In fact Wikipedia reckons that the remnants of a Lese Majeste was abolished in 2010 but not actually enforced since 1715.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lese_majeste#United_Kingdom
But you're right that the Thai king is not the problem here - strict enforcement of lese majeste laws are being pushed by dodgy politicians for their own purposes.
If you get a GoPhone SIM card you can buy 100MB data for $19.99. And if you add $100 credit the SIM will stay valid for a year. So long as you go to the US once every twelve months the number will stay valid.
The only difference being the ones locked for non-free corporate controlled countries.
Don't bait the septics!
When I was in the US I got a GoPhone pay as you go SIM card and 100MB data for $20. Which is a terrible deal by the standards of most places but it did the job if I needed net access. AT&T seemed like a good option as I was travelling a lot.
http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-plans/prepaid-feature-packages.jsp
Actually if you get one of those coupon magazines (e.g. http://www.roomsaver.com/ or http://www.travelcouponguide.com/) you can easily get a discount on an already cheap hotel (e.g. Best Western) which has wifi and do your emailing there. The coupons work during the week when the hotels are empty but the hotel has an option to refuse them if they are busy during the weekend. It's best to call ahead before you check in. Incidentally expensive hotels - the sort your company will check you into - will often charge an outrageous amount for Wifi if you walk in off the street in addition to an already outrageous non discounted (aka Rack) room rate.
Incidentally if you go to the UK get a Tesco Mobile Pay As You go Card. They have a £2 (i.e US$3) per week unlimited data option. You sign up by SMS - they charge you the £2 and subscribe you. It will auto renew each week and charge you another £2 but you can opt out at any time, in which case it will run to the end of the week and then not renew.
http://phone-shop.tesco.com/tesco-mobile/help-and-support/bundles.aspx
So you get unlimited data for about US$14 per month. You can pick up the SIM card from any Tesco store. Tesco is a ubiquitous supermarket, so it's not hard to find one anywhere in the UK.
It's not always HSDPA - you'll drop down to GPRS if you're not near a base station. Still it is unlimited (well subject to an ill defined fair use policy). I.e. it's a much better deal than the AT&T one in the US. Tesco is an MVNO using the O2 network, so the coverage isn't too bad. In fact I've travelled around the UK quite a bit and apart from dropping down to GPRS it seems like it works almost everywhere.
1) Repeat joke from summary.
2) Get modded up.
3) Funny mods don't count as karma.
You can scan the Doritos barcode with your phone camera and a smiley face will show if it's a good idea to buy them. If it would cause your health premiums to rise due to high sodium consumption a picture of Wayne Night will appear shaking his finger and a sample of "unh-unh-uh, you didn't say the magic word" will play over and over again.
Actually it would be funnier it Nedryed you at the checkout and you had to take the Doritos back, humiliated while the other people in the line glared at you.