Today's videocards have their own CPU (aka GPU), capable of crunching all sorts of numbers in a parallel fashion. Thus, a lot of useful things can be done faster, or at least as fast on the GPU, than the main CPU - at the very least you are letting the main CPU do something else meanwhile. That's what the article points out.
In general, 3D cards get to do more and more "conventional" 2D graphics tasks nowadays, Apple's Quartz being one of the examples.
The multi-billion dollar companies are only spending money on it because it has a prospect of being profitable. And that profitability comes not from the ideals that Stallman thought of, but from the "accidental" usefulness of OSS being reviewed by thousands of peers for free.
Well, I think a lot of the art we today consider as timeless classics was regarded as pulp at first.
Plus, who says that some games are not "educated" or "artistically significant"? I consider Grand Theft Auto to be a pretty significant masterpiece of satire and humour.
SVG has support for JavaScript, which in turn comes with quite a bit of functionality. Say, things like XMLHttpRequest. Or modifying the SVG contents dynamically. Plus, it's a tried, tested and true language that has quite a mindshare of its own, as well as several interpreter implementations.
All in all, SVG has quite a bit going for it, save for committee-induced idiosyncrasies. I personally am looking forward to native support of SVG in Mozilla - then all hell will break loose with XUL apps directly integrating vector graphics and whatnot.
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Today's videocards have their own CPU (aka GPU), capable of crunching all sorts of numbers in a parallel fashion. Thus, a lot of useful things can be done faster, or at least as fast on the GPU, than the main CPU - at the very least you are letting the main CPU do something else meanwhile. That's what the article points out.
In general, 3D cards get to do more and more "conventional" 2D graphics tasks nowadays, Apple's Quartz being one of the examples.
The multi-billion dollar companies are only spending money on it because it has a prospect of being profitable. And that profitability comes not from the ideals that Stallman thought of, but from the "accidental" usefulness of OSS being reviewed by thousands of peers for free.
Well, I think a lot of the art we today consider as timeless classics was regarded as pulp at first. Plus, who says that some games are not "educated" or "artistically significant"? I consider Grand Theft Auto to be a pretty significant masterpiece of satire and humour.
SVG has support for JavaScript, which in turn comes with quite a bit of functionality. Say, things like XMLHttpRequest. Or modifying the SVG contents dynamically. Plus, it's a tried, tested and true language that has quite a mindshare of its own, as well as several interpreter implementations.
All in all, SVG has quite a bit going for it, save for committee-induced idiosyncrasies. I personally am looking forward to native support of SVG in Mozilla - then all hell will break loose with XUL apps directly integrating vector graphics and whatnot.
- ...but Mr Burns...
- *click* Hop in.
Heh, prevent the users from hogging all the ... JPGs ... to themselves.
Solaris, HPUX, BSD, Tru64 and OS X barely get a mention ... because I can barely keep the damn worms off my Tru64 box...