I was under the impression that the Quadro cards also had different firmware than the GeForce cards. You need to flash the firmware, and use different drivers. But I have seen cheap GeForce cards get made into more expensive Quadro-equivalents through hacking.
Creative's X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.
If they put a GPL engine into IE, they would have to GPL IE, and that isn't happening.
Microsoft might look into their own OSS-based browser for a dedicated market (smartphones anyone?) to compete with Safari on the iPhone and the webkit browser on Android.
IE won't go away, nor will IE go OSS. Microsoft will be in both pools at once.
The early Athlon XP series ran hot, but the Athlon 64's never seemed to run as hot at as the P4 line. I've been buying AMD procs since the K6 days, and the early Athlon XP procs were the only ones I have known to run hot. None of my AMD based laptops have burned my lap the way Intel laptops tend to.
And AMD was faster than Intel for most of the P4 run. AMD arguably had better processors back in the K6 and K7 days at times as well.
These days both the X2 and Core Duo lines step down voltage and speed when not fully utilized, so both run reasonably cool, and both will overclock well even on stock air cooling.
My $35 processor runs cool with one fan, and it isn't particularly loud. Yet the performance is better than a $150 processor. Given that I built the rig when I was really hurting for money, I have no regrets about buying AMD.
And yet for many users they must manually edit and configure xorg.conf to get anything to work, and sometimes they never get it to work.
There are tons of API calls that haven't been used in years, but no one wants to cut cruft or deprecate.
Xorg is painfully slow, and we're still working around ancient legacy code rather than designing for modern systems.
As for all that auto-configuring, honestly you can credit Ubuntu with plenty of that. Try a major distro like Ubuntu or openSUSE and you'll see the installer configure most of the hardware. Now try Gentoo which doesn't autoconfigure X and see how X performs with your hardware.
X could be shoved into the kernel and work only for the following reasons.
The kernel is extremely modular and you could just not compile it in for an embedded device, or headless device.
Secondly, you could still boot to run levels, so if there was a problem with X, you could just drop to a lower level and still fix it.
In Windows, a graphical problem means Windows is hosed, and there isn't much you can do to fix it.
If X moved to the kernel, I imagine X would be greatly improved because more devs would review it, rewrite it, and fix it. Right now X is largely ignored and that is a big part of the problem.
That being said, I prefer the approach here of Fedora forking X.
All the really big players keep them in a separate repository. The "biggest" distro that I know that includes them normally would be Gentoo as you mentioned, and Sabayon, a Gentoo off-shoot.
Shuttleworth said he is going to pay devs to work on major upstream projects. He should focus on this. For one, it would affect both KDE and Gnome users, and it would solve a major problem with Linux. If he really wants Linux to compete with OS X in terms of interface, he should focus on the X Server first.
That being said, I hope Novell chips in some dev support, and that the KDE, Gnome, QT and GTK+ devs all chime on what they'd like to see changed.
The Air Force hasn't banned the use of Twitter. They noted that terrorists have been using Twitter. Honestly, terrorist groups have been using cheap forms of communication on the internet, where as the United States DOD spends bank on internal communication systems. It seemingly didn't even occur to the DOD until recently to take the fight against Al Qaeda to the internet.
Actually I use shields in the very beginning to grab all the big wonders, which in turn make my cities grow faster, and boost my science. I always outpace every other civ when it comes to science.
Actually the Gentoo docs tell you to compile for the more generic architectures, and not the real specific CPU for reasons like that. Then again, I always compiled for the specific CPU.
I miss me some Frys. I loved that store. However I live in Nebraska these days, so I use NewEgg. You can still order a 386 motherboard on NewEgg (I kid you not).
Intel didn't change sockets? How many sockets have they launched in the past six years? AMD has launched 3 main sockets in that time (754, 939 and AM2). Anyone remember Intel ditching Socket 423 after less than a year?
And AMD would release one proc on different sockets so you could still upgrade with your old mobo. For instance, when they came out with Socket 939, they were still releasing new procs under Socket 754. Even though they have Socket AM2/AM2+, you can still get Socket 939 procs.
AM2 came out in early 2006, and when I build my next rig in the spring, I'll still likely be building an AM2 rig. That being said, I'll probably go with a new motherboard for a faster bus, and faster memory support.
I could keep my existing mobo which will support quad-core AM2+ processors with a BIOS update, but to get the full potential, I need a new motherboard for the bus speed and memory improvements.
Intel is in the same boat. Chipsets and cores change often enough that you need to replace everything to get the best possible results.
Your logic was that you didn't want to change sockets and replace your entire system (AMD provided you that option to stay on the same socket) so you replaced your whole system and changed sockets to go to Intel.
You didn't read my post. I never said AMD was faster now. I said that AMD *WAS FASTER* at one point, and these days all AMD has is the low price point.
For instance, the last time I built a computer for me (a little over a year ago) AMD offered a dual core processor for $35. The Intel equivalent that it was compared to in benchmarks cost $150. In the price-performance comparison, AMD came out way ahead at the low price point. At the very high end, AMD didn't have anything that could produce Intel's performance.
Not to mention that scientific computing is vastly different from general processing.
For a scientist, you sure don't seem to understand what I wrote. Go back and reread it.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the first time I actually enjoyed a "first" post. I guess there is a "first" time for everything.
I was under the impression that the Quadro cards also had different firmware than the GeForce cards. You need to flash the firmware, and use different drivers. But I have seen cheap GeForce cards get made into more expensive Quadro-equivalents through hacking.
Read the article, not the summary.
Creative's X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.
They're not selling a product here, so much as a concept, but why is this on Slashdot's front page again?
Mind you, I'm excited about Android, but what here is newsworthy?
If they put a GPL engine into IE, they would have to GPL IE, and that isn't happening.
Microsoft might look into their own OSS-based browser for a dedicated market (smartphones anyone?) to compete with Safari on the iPhone and the webkit browser on Android.
IE won't go away, nor will IE go OSS. Microsoft will be in both pools at once.
"While Ubuntu goes a long way to improving the user experience with Linux"
PulseAudio in 8.04?
I ran into this when I first upgraded the firmware a few weeks ago. I was upset at first, click through it, and forgot about it honestly.
The early Athlon XP series ran hot, but the Athlon 64's never seemed to run as hot at as the P4 line. I've been buying AMD procs since the K6 days, and the early Athlon XP procs were the only ones I have known to run hot. None of my AMD based laptops have burned my lap the way Intel laptops tend to.
And AMD was faster than Intel for most of the P4 run. AMD arguably had better processors back in the K6 and K7 days at times as well.
These days both the X2 and Core Duo lines step down voltage and speed when not fully utilized, so both run reasonably cool, and both will overclock well even on stock air cooling.
My $35 processor runs cool with one fan, and it isn't particularly loud. Yet the performance is better than a $150 processor. Given that I built the rig when I was really hurting for money, I have no regrets about buying AMD.
As a fellow pedant, I promise not to make that mistake again.
And yet for many users they must manually edit and configure xorg.conf to get anything to work, and sometimes they never get it to work.
There are tons of API calls that haven't been used in years, but no one wants to cut cruft or deprecate.
Xorg is painfully slow, and we're still working around ancient legacy code rather than designing for modern systems.
As for all that auto-configuring, honestly you can credit Ubuntu with plenty of that. Try a major distro like Ubuntu or openSUSE and you'll see the installer configure most of the hardware. Now try Gentoo which doesn't autoconfigure X and see how X performs with your hardware.
Not that I'm aware of. Even the server 2008 kernel (which allows you to boot into a console) has the graphics in the kernel.
X could be shoved into the kernel and work only for the following reasons.
The kernel is extremely modular and you could just not compile it in for an embedded device, or headless device.
Secondly, you could still boot to run levels, so if there was a problem with X, you could just drop to a lower level and still fix it.
In Windows, a graphical problem means Windows is hosed, and there isn't much you can do to fix it.
If X moved to the kernel, I imagine X would be greatly improved because more devs would review it, rewrite it, and fix it. Right now X is largely ignored and that is a big part of the problem.
That being said, I prefer the approach here of Fedora forking X.
All the really big players keep them in a separate repository. The "biggest" distro that I know that includes them normally would be Gentoo as you mentioned, and Sabayon, a Gentoo off-shoot.
I couldn't agree more.
Shuttleworth said he is going to pay devs to work on major upstream projects. He should focus on this. For one, it would affect both KDE and Gnome users, and it would solve a major problem with Linux. If he really wants Linux to compete with OS X in terms of interface, he should focus on the X Server first.
That being said, I hope Novell chips in some dev support, and that the KDE, Gnome, QT and GTK+ devs all chime on what they'd like to see changed.
The Air Force hasn't banned the use of Twitter. They noted that terrorists have been using Twitter. Honestly, terrorist groups have been using cheap forms of communication on the internet, where as the United States DOD spends bank on internal communication systems. It seemingly didn't even occur to the DOD until recently to take the fight against Al Qaeda to the internet.
Intel has been hit with antitrust charges in several countries. I assumed a Slashdot reader would be familiar.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070726-eu-slaps-intel-with-formal-antitrust-charges.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_12670_13242,00.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/142443/intel_and_antitrust_a_brief_history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_v._Intel
"This is because the Korea Fair Trade Commission has issued a fine of US$25.4 million against Intel."
Several vendors have come forward to corroborate AMD's story, and issue statements against Intel for these cases.
I could keep going, but that should suffice.
Actually I use shields in the very beginning to grab all the big wonders, which in turn make my cities grow faster, and boost my science. I always outpace every other civ when it comes to science.
Actually the Gentoo docs tell you to compile for the more generic architectures, and not the real specific CPU for reasons like that. Then again, I always compiled for the specific CPU.
I miss me some Frys. I loved that store. However I live in Nebraska these days, so I use NewEgg. You can still order a 386 motherboard on NewEgg (I kid you not).
Intel didn't change sockets? How many sockets have they launched in the past six years? AMD has launched 3 main sockets in that time (754, 939 and AM2). Anyone remember Intel ditching Socket 423 after less than a year?
And AMD would release one proc on different sockets so you could still upgrade with your old mobo. For instance, when they came out with Socket 939, they were still releasing new procs under Socket 754. Even though they have Socket AM2/AM2+, you can still get Socket 939 procs.
AM2 came out in early 2006, and when I build my next rig in the spring, I'll still likely be building an AM2 rig. That being said, I'll probably go with a new motherboard for a faster bus, and faster memory support.
I could keep my existing mobo which will support quad-core AM2+ processors with a BIOS update, but to get the full potential, I need a new motherboard for the bus speed and memory improvements.
Intel is in the same boat. Chipsets and cores change often enough that you need to replace everything to get the best possible results.
Your logic was that you didn't want to change sockets and replace your entire system (AMD provided you that option to stay on the same socket) so you replaced your whole system and changed sockets to go to Intel.
How does that make sense?
Well Super Mario Bros did condition me to jump on people's heads, and Civ has conditioned me to maximize shield production. Clearly they are all evil.
No the Air Force listed Twitter as a tool that terrorists use.
There is a distinction. But thanks for playing.
Apparently moderators can't detect sarcasm.
Microsoft devs who focus on .NET are known as pogrammers. Microsoft is right and the rest of the world is wrong. Better get on the bus.
You didn't read my post. I never said AMD was faster now. I said that AMD *WAS FASTER* at one point, and these days all AMD has is the low price point.
For instance, the last time I built a computer for me (a little over a year ago) AMD offered a dual core processor for $35. The Intel equivalent that it was compared to in benchmarks cost $150. In the price-performance comparison, AMD came out way ahead at the low price point. At the very high end, AMD didn't have anything that could produce Intel's performance.
Not to mention that scientific computing is vastly different from general processing.
For a scientist, you sure don't seem to understand what I wrote. Go back and reread it.