while ATI on linux (at least in desktop cards) is pretty crappy, (workstation card support is MUCH much better, as ATI expects people runing a workstation board to say run a variant of linux or irix) it's not _that_ bad. at least the graphic overlay and 2-d acceleration work so that DivX XviD etc works (at least on most older cards) the newest latest and greatest 'gaming cards' are a different beast, and currently have no linux driver. at all.
but if you've got $800 to blow on a graphic card, WTF are you bitching about:) you're running that card in Windows dude. Linux has like Tux Racer and that one Tank game. go out and Buy a copy of VMware, so you can download your pr0n torrents without the same limitations as 'windows' Witht hat dual core system you can probably run vmware and most games at the same time without a major perfomance hit (especially if VMware has it's own HD/channel etc)
Personally I like how they used the stock guts of a CD-ROM drive as the 'optical' processor.:) other than the sucky at photoshoping, they've gone out and creatively 'hacked' together a nice piece of vaporware, either for laughs, or to part gullible VCs of there money... if it's the latter i suspect someone is going to be living in paradise under an assumed identity heh.
what exactly would S3 lose by opening up its drivers?
Several lawsuits, as technology used in writing those drivers is patented, and they've likely cross-licensed the patents to even be able to write a modern 3-d driver.
now you could strip all the patented code, and fix it into a working driver, and provide source for it, but ATI already has been doing that for years, yet all I see from the/. community is a bunch of Nvidia fanboy ravings of how good the closed source Nvidia drivers are.
So I hope this answers your question, as to why they cannot do what you seem to think would be so easy. And hey, even if patents were a non issue, the drivers would still be a 'trade' secret, giving that away to your competetors for free means that they will always know how to make there product perform better than yours.
just to be the devil's advocate... Call me back when 'science' can be scientifically proven. it can't be. because the whole thing about science is trying to observe something and draw conclusions about it, while remaining open to other peoples conclusions about it. Science isn't about 'proving' anything. it's about observing the univers and saying "hey i think this is how things work, feel free to call me an idiot though if i'm wrong" oh and i'm gonna cite what is considered 'scientific' evidence. it's just the expert testimony of someone who has 'witnessed, observed, and drawn conclustions based on that' So hey, i've got an angel guardian me, that means technically speaking i am 'scientific proof' of the existance of god, because i've observed God and in particular my guardian angel. The reason why i know i have an angel is because she gives me rainbows sometimes as gifts, and oh i've observed her save my life more times than i care to count. sure there are 'scientific explainations' for rainbows, but even the most experienced meterooligist will teel you that despite every observation made, weather is too complex to be predictable, that means you either need theory (which can't be proven any more than the existance of a god/angels) that states that after a certain level of complexity enters a system events will become mathematically impossible to precisely predict.. chaos theory they call it, and it's from the measured observation of 3 celelstial bodies in motion, that rather than ther motion be precisely predictable, there will be a predictable amount of randomness to there movements.
So there you go. Now it's true, that religious people tend to not want you messing with there religious beliefs. It's also true that ID's only 'scientific proof' is the testimony of people who have witnessed god.. and it's true that there are numerous possible explainations other than ID.
Should ID be taught in schools? hell yeah, should it be 'preached' as the only truth ala darwinism has been? i don't think so, kids would learn more from discourse over the merits of Id vs the merits of darwin/evolution/chaos theory than they would being taught that one is 'absolute truth.' so what if all the religious faithful have is 'eyesitness testimony' that's all Science is, to begin with. measured observation, "today when i walked across the street, a car swerved towards me, then was hit by cross traffic and i stood there unharmed, and in the rainbow of oil and transmission fuild i saw my angel smiling at me" is as much a 'measured observation' of god as noticing where around the sun the planet jupiter is. the problem is of course that you're out of hand discarding my observation with out even proving that i'm wrong. normally in science one would have to prove that i'm not making valid observations. and your lack of willingness to scientifically disprove ever single person who has ever 'been touched by an angel' proves your lack of commitment to disproving ID, and the existance of god.
the system has been in place for 2 years, and this is the first time it's 'saved' a life. i don't know if the thing gives of many false positives, but i'd wager that it doesn't that it's primarily looking for people who it is sure are drowning.
also a 'few' seconds could quite possibly ring guite a few false positives.. with a simple diving belt i can sit at the bottom of a pool for 2 minutes*, almost motionless holding my breath. if i were 'trying' to set off a false positive i could easily remain completely motionless for a more than enough seconds to trigger the system.
then again this is a public pool, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to bring a diving belt into one;) once you swollow water you will not float, period. people 'floating at the top' who are potentially drowning are generally 'children' with floatation devices, anyone else who is drowning will swollow water, and promptly sink to the bottom.
if you're floating at the top of a pool you almost by definition have died of something other than drowning...
*= 2 minutes is easy to train your lungs to hold, especially motionless. olympic swimmers can 'take a deep breath' and remain motionless for much, much longer.
If you don't scan the hard drive or the registry sure;) if all you're doing is scanning the memory and IE's toolbar folders, and all 'downloaded files' before they're installed, then yeah it only takes '10 seconds' if it finds an adware that infects ie, then it can remove it from the registry/hd by searching for it then rather than the other way around. sure, you don't have as complete or through an examination, but most adware infects ie, so it leaves enough of a trace behind for a 'quick' scan to find out what spyware it is.
for a browser integrated anti-spyware it's just right, for a 'stand alone' anti-spyware it falls far short of what is needed for compherehensive spyware protection.
If a human can decipher it, a Bot can decipher it Better. If you make a captcha that a human can read, then a bot can read it, usually with about a 2-4x greater accuracy -- that alone leads to say 'banning' users who 'exceed' expected pass/fail ratios on capachas... which leads to bots that are programmed to 'make mistakes'.
Not a solution sorry. even if you allow 'only human' players online what's to say that human player won't have a second computer calculating the odds? What about overall security? what if a hacker has taken over a crucial part of the internet infrastructure leading to that 'poker' server? what if they're anylizing the packets (encryped, or not) remember there are only 52 possible values for that encrypted data, and if the 'hacker' is also a 'player' he can 'evaluate' the encrypted packets coming to him vs the cards that came... and can now have an advantage over a win bot, because the hacker knows Every card Every poker player has. it's not just a 'mathematical probability' of what other players might have, but rather a mathematical porbability of what card the players will get next.
so, the only way to 'beat' poker bots is to hack, and gain access to the flow of packet data, and KNOW exactly what each player has in there hands at all times. now, there is no way for a bot to do all that, but of course, hacking is a federal crime, with penalties worse than dealing drugs.. so frankly it's not worth it, unless you're a juvenile and are guarnteed to be released at age 16;) ahh, it would be great to be a 12 yr old evil genius... imagine ordering your first porche at age 14;) just by 'beating' poker bots by hacking;)
Actually 'geeks' had nothing to do with either of those... those were pioneered by the high paid research nerds. you know tenured college professors, research scientists etc. geeks are underachiever nerds;) and usually the nerds are the pioneers and the geeks are the testbed, and then the posers come along, and then finally the uneducated masses catch up. in general someone who thinks nerds and geeks are the same doesn't qualify as either. it's like saying a kitten and a tiger are the same, because they're both feline.
but at least they've stopped making shoddy hardware.
Exactly, and nvidia I don't know what quality a RAM manufacturer or a Motherboard vendor who consisttantly manages to release at least 3 boards a Year they 'silently' pull off the market because they couldn't fix the 'bugs' in bios revision 1.xx
Sure the 'drivers' are better, sure they engineer the chips good... but I'm building systems for people and i can't afford to pay $10 grand a year to a 'tier 1' motherboard manfacturer for the right to RMA there defective junk video card hardware...
Sure I have to reasearch which cards etc to use anyways, but I really really appreciate the RMA process that ATI has, as well as there upgrade/competitive upgrade programs. It makes my life as a small system builder a hell of a lot easier. That's something Nvidia doesn't do.
When I'm building a custom graphic workstation for someone who needs to do 3-d rendering/graphic work, then yeah it comes down to which 'workstation' board is best suited for the job.
Competition is good though, Nvidia changed the industry drastically, they made it so that everyone who wanted to sell crappy graphic hardware was selling nvidia rebranded chips, and made sure that no-none except ATI could survive and compete against them. Why did ATI survive? because they Make life So much easier for some people that even if there products have a little flakier drivers you know that you're not going to be left high and dry by the company if you actually get a bad bit of silicon, that managed to 'pass' inital QC checks etc.
I don't think you realize how hard it is for a small OEM to survive and compete let's say you decided to go with Nvidia cards, and lets assume you researched design and found a company with a solid design... but in order to compete with the 'big' names on prices buying that card from 'new egg' etc was too expensive, so you 'saved' $10 a card buying from some dubious internet vendor you found on froogle/pricewatch etc... but of those cards lets say 1 in ten was 'failing' on you, and the 'manufacturer' of said card has a no-RMA poilicy and the site you bought from insists the cards were not covered because you had 'opened' them, and it was past the 30 days that US law requires they would have to accept the defictive hardware back:p
Now what if those cards cost $200 a pop, and you needed to buy them because that's what your customers wanted in terms of 'gaming' perfomance in there systems? now what? genius... if they're 'real' ATI cards, all I do is RMA them via ATI's channels, no problem, I don't need to pay any special fees to do any of this... if they're Nvidia I'm out $200... all for trying to be price competitive with the likes of dell and gateway etc...
Nvidia has better drivers, especially on linux. with the exception of the ATI FireGL cards most ati cards have crappy linux drivers, because Linux has crappy gaming support (emulate windows?, tux racer? Open GL games that have a linux binary...)
Linux works pretty well as a workstation, or a server, but it's only a 'basic' desktop, and a 'basic' level of game support (although there are many many very fun games for Free for linux, most of them aren't exactly 3-d intensive) So yeah, ATI has very minimalistic drivers for the 'gaming' cards under linux. they made a call because competing with nvidia is a damn had thing to do and they need to focus on what makes them better able to compete with nvidia. Support the FireGL cards better under linux, because there are really decent 3-d rendering and 3D-CAD programs for linux that need the 3-d hosepower and driver support. and don't support the 'desktop gaming' cards so much.
Nvidia lets other companies spend the money and engineering resource (or as the case is, not spend the money) on providing good small OEM builder support etc, so of course they have plenty of time to build drivers that don't have any 'real' value in this day and age... like linux drivers that work for gaming cards on an OS that has the worst possible gaming support framework of any modern OS.
and if you want a graphic card with a Manufacturer's Warrenty you want to get an ATI. Seriously for certain card models ATI cards aren't that badly supported (even under linux) sure, most ati cards work better under windows than under linux (with a few exceptions) but if you're buying a gaming system and worrying about linux you're either A. dual booting or B. running some type of virtual machine set up, or C. planning on migrating down to 'linux' when you retire the system. and if you're building a 'workstation' you're going to be looking at the FireGL cards, and nvidia has nothing that compares to FireGL and the linux drivers for ATI products are Specifically written for the FireGL product lines..
so you be happy with your Nvidia card which has some dubious warrenty from some company who may or may not have a 'real' setup for providing warrenty service, and requires you to return the card to a retailer, who pays a $xx,xxx a year fee for the right to RMA defective products to the manufacturer. i think i'll stick with ATI, and if i need an ATI card to work under linux I'll be sure to grab up a FireGL card...
telefax machines are a closely guarded corporate secret?;)
i think not. that BTW is how they share the lists, or at least how they did when the documentry 'breaking vegas' was being researched and filmed.. someday it will all be over the internet i'm sure...
If pictures of naked people are to be taxed, then I purpose that only those who are violating their churches' basically-held principles in viewing the pictures be forced to pay the tax./I
If Someone were to overpay said tax, I guess you'd call that a sintax error.
But for $50 it comes with an AV scanner, which sadly only scans for windows viruses. Still, if you're setting up a desktop for someone who wants to do -email on this 'intarweb' thing it's going to be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
while ATI on linux (at least in desktop cards) is pretty crappy, (workstation card support is MUCH much better, as ATI expects people runing a workstation board to say run a variant of linux or irix) it's not _that_ bad. at least the graphic overlay and 2-d acceleration work so that DivX XviD etc works (at least on most older cards) the newest latest and greatest 'gaming cards' are a different beast, and currently have no linux driver. at all.
:) you're running that card in Windows dude. Linux has like Tux Racer and that one Tank game. go out and Buy a copy of VMware, so you can download your pr0n torrents without the same limitations as 'windows' Witht hat dual core system you can probably run vmware and most games at the same time without a major perfomance hit (especially if VMware has it's own HD/channel etc)
but if you've got $800 to blow on a graphic card, WTF are you bitching about
Personally I like how they used the stock guts of a CD-ROM drive as the 'optical' processor. :) other than the sucky at photoshoping, they've gone out and creatively 'hacked' together a nice piece of vaporware, either for laughs, or to part gullible VCs of there money... if it's the latter i suspect someone is going to be living in paradise under an assumed identity heh.
what exactly would S3 lose by opening up its drivers?
/. community is a bunch of Nvidia fanboy ravings of how good the closed source Nvidia drivers are.
Several lawsuits, as technology used in writing those drivers is patented, and they've likely cross-licensed the patents to even be able to write a modern 3-d driver.
now you could strip all the patented code, and fix it into a working driver, and provide source for it, but ATI already has been doing that for years, yet all I see from the
So I hope this answers your question, as to why they cannot do what you seem to think would be so easy. And hey, even if patents were a non issue, the drivers would still be a 'trade' secret, giving that away to your competetors for free means that they will always know how to make there product perform better than yours.
just to be the devil's advocate... Call me back when 'science' can be scientifically proven. it can't be. because the whole thing about science is trying to observe something and draw conclusions about it, while remaining open to other peoples conclusions about it. Science isn't about 'proving' anything. it's about observing the univers and saying "hey i think this is how things work, feel free to call me an idiot though if i'm wrong"
. pdf/$file/sciman00.pdf
oh and i'm gonna cite what is considered 'scientific' evidence. it's just the expert testimony of someone who has 'witnessed, observed, and drawn conclustions based on that' So hey, i've got an angel guardian me, that means technically speaking i am 'scientific proof' of the existance of god, because i've observed God and in particular my guardian angel. The reason why i know i have an angel is because she gives me rainbows sometimes as gifts, and oh i've observed her save my life more times than i care to count. sure there are 'scientific explainations' for rainbows, but even the most experienced meterooligist will teel you that despite every observation made, weather is too complex to be predictable, that means you either need theory (which can't be proven any more than the existance of a god/angels) that states that after a certain level of complexity enters a system events will become mathematically impossible to precisely predict.. chaos theory they call it, and it's from the measured observation of 3 celelstial bodies in motion, that rather than ther motion be precisely predictable, there will be a predictable amount of randomness to there movements.
So there you go. Now it's true, that religious people tend to not want you messing with there religious beliefs. It's also true that ID's only 'scientific proof' is the testimony of people who have witnessed god.. and it's true that there are numerous possible explainations other than ID.
Should ID be taught in schools? hell yeah, should it be 'preached' as the only truth ala darwinism has been? i don't think so, kids would learn more from discourse over the merits of Id vs the merits of darwin/evolution/chaos theory than they would being taught that one is 'absolute truth.' so what if all the religious faithful have is 'eyesitness testimony' that's all Science is, to begin with. measured observation, "today when i walked across the street, a car swerved towards me, then was hit by cross traffic and i stood there unharmed, and in the rainbow of oil and transmission fuild i saw my angel smiling at me" is as much a 'measured observation' of god as noticing where around the sun the planet jupiter is. the problem is of course that you're out of hand discarding my observation with out even proving that i'm wrong. normally in science one would have to prove that i'm not making valid observations. and your lack of willingness to scientifically disprove ever single person who has ever 'been touched by an angel' proves your lack of commitment to disproving ID, and the existance of god.
http://www.fjc.gov/public/pdf.nsf/lookup/sciman00
the system has been in place for 2 years, and this is the first time it's 'saved' a life. i don't know if the thing gives of many false positives, but i'd wager that it doesn't that it's primarily looking for people who it is sure are drowning.
;) once you swollow water you will not float, period. people 'floating at the top' who are potentially drowning are generally 'children' with floatation devices, anyone else who is drowning will swollow water, and promptly sink to the bottom.
also a 'few' seconds could quite possibly ring guite a few false positives.. with a simple diving belt i can sit at the bottom of a pool for 2 minutes*, almost motionless holding my breath. if i were 'trying' to set off a false positive i could easily remain completely motionless for a more than enough seconds to trigger the system.
then again this is a public pool, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to bring a diving belt into one
if you're floating at the top of a pool you almost by definition have died of something other than drowning...
*= 2 minutes is easy to train your lungs to hold, especially motionless. olympic swimmers can 'take a deep breath' and remain motionless for much, much longer.
If you don't scan the hard drive or the registry sure ;) if all you're doing is scanning the memory and IE's toolbar folders, and all 'downloaded files' before they're installed, then yeah it only takes '10 seconds' if it finds an adware that infects ie, then it can remove it from the registry/hd by searching for it then rather than the other way around. sure, you don't have as complete or through an examination, but most adware infects ie, so it leaves enough of a trace behind for a 'quick' scan to find out what spyware it is.
for a browser integrated anti-spyware it's just right, for a 'stand alone' anti-spyware it falls far short of what is needed for compherehensive spyware protection.
Captcha are worthless. http://slashdot.org/~the_mad_poster/journal/107733
;) ahh, it would be great to be a 12 yr old evil genius... imagine ordering your first porche at age 14 ;) just by 'beating' poker bots by hacking ;)
If a human can decipher it, a Bot can decipher it Better. If you make a captcha that a human can read, then a bot can read it, usually with about a 2-4x greater accuracy -- that alone leads to say 'banning' users who 'exceed' expected pass/fail ratios on capachas... which leads to bots that are programmed to 'make mistakes'.
Not a solution sorry. even if you allow 'only human' players online what's to say that human player won't have a second computer calculating the odds? What about overall security? what if a hacker has taken over a crucial part of the internet infrastructure leading to that 'poker' server? what if they're anylizing the packets (encryped, or not) remember there are only 52 possible values for that encrypted data, and if the 'hacker' is also a 'player' he can 'evaluate' the encrypted packets coming to him vs the cards that came... and can now have an advantage over a win bot, because the hacker knows Every card Every poker player has. it's not just a 'mathematical probability' of what other players might have, but rather a mathematical porbability of what card the players will get next.
so, the only way to 'beat' poker bots is to hack, and gain access to the flow of packet data, and KNOW exactly what each player has in there hands at all times. now, there is no way for a bot to do all that, but of course, hacking is a federal crime, with penalties worse than dealing drugs..
so frankly it's not worth it, unless you're a juvenile and are guarnteed to be released at age 16
Actually 'geeks' had nothing to do with either of those... those were pioneered by the high paid research nerds. you know tenured college professors, research scientists etc. geeks are underachiever nerds ;) and usually the nerds are the pioneers and the geeks are the testbed, and then the posers come along, and then finally the uneducated masses catch up. in general someone who thinks nerds and geeks are the same doesn't qualify as either. it's like saying a kitten and a tiger are the same, because they're both feline.
the meek^H^H^Hispelling masses shall inherit the net.
but at least they've stopped making shoddy hardware.
:p
Exactly, and nvidia I don't know what quality a RAM manufacturer or a Motherboard vendor who consisttantly manages to release at least 3 boards a Year they 'silently' pull off the market because they couldn't fix the 'bugs' in bios revision 1.xx
Sure the 'drivers' are better, sure they engineer the chips good... but I'm building systems for people and i can't afford to pay $10 grand a year to a 'tier 1' motherboard manfacturer for the right to RMA there defective junk video card hardware...
Sure I have to reasearch which cards etc to use anyways, but I really really appreciate the RMA process that ATI has, as well as there upgrade/competitive upgrade programs. It makes my life as a small system builder a hell of a lot easier. That's something Nvidia doesn't do.
When I'm building a custom graphic workstation for someone who needs to do 3-d rendering/graphic work, then yeah it comes down to which 'workstation' board is best suited for the job.
Competition is good though, Nvidia changed the industry drastically, they made it so that everyone who wanted to sell crappy graphic hardware was selling nvidia rebranded chips, and made sure that no-none except ATI could survive and compete against them. Why did ATI survive? because they Make life So much easier for some people that even if there products have a little flakier drivers you know that you're not going to be left high and dry by the company if you actually get a bad bit of silicon, that managed to 'pass' inital QC checks etc.
I don't think you realize how hard it is for a small OEM to survive and compete let's say you decided to go with Nvidia cards, and lets assume you researched design and found a company with a solid design... but in order to compete with the 'big' names on prices buying that card from 'new egg' etc was too expensive, so you 'saved' $10 a card buying from some dubious internet vendor you found on froogle/pricewatch etc... but of those cards lets say 1 in ten was 'failing' on you, and the 'manufacturer' of said card has a no-RMA poilicy and the site you bought from insists the cards were not covered because you had 'opened' them, and it was past the 30 days that US law requires they would have to accept the defictive hardware back
Now what if those cards cost $200 a pop, and you needed to buy them because that's what your customers wanted in terms of 'gaming' perfomance in there systems? now what? genius... if they're 'real' ATI cards, all I do is RMA them via ATI's channels, no problem, I don't need to pay any special fees to do any of this... if they're Nvidia I'm out $200... all for trying to be price competitive with the likes of dell and gateway etc...
Nvidia has better drivers, especially on linux. with the exception of the ATI FireGL cards most ati cards have crappy linux drivers, because Linux has crappy gaming support (emulate windows?, tux racer? Open GL games that have a linux binary...)
Linux works pretty well as a workstation, or a server, but it's only a 'basic' desktop, and a 'basic' level of game support (although there are many many very fun games for Free for linux, most of them aren't exactly 3-d intensive) So yeah, ATI has very minimalistic drivers for the 'gaming' cards under linux. they made a call because competing with nvidia is a damn had thing to do and they need to focus on what makes them better able to compete with nvidia. Support the FireGL cards better under linux, because there are really decent 3-d rendering and 3D-CAD programs for linux that need the 3-d hosepower and driver support. and don't support the 'desktop gaming' cards so much.
Nvidia lets other companies spend the money and engineering resource (or as the case is, not spend the money) on providing good small OEM builder support etc, so of course they have plenty of time to build drivers that don't have any 'real' value in this day and age... like linux drivers that work for gaming cards on an OS that has the worst possible gaming support framework of any modern OS.
If you want Linux compatibility, you want nVidia.
and if you want a graphic card with a Manufacturer's Warrenty you want to get an ATI. Seriously for certain card models ATI cards aren't that badly supported (even under linux) sure, most ati cards work better under windows than under linux (with a few exceptions) but if you're buying a gaming system and worrying about linux you're either A. dual booting or B. running some type of virtual machine set up, or C. planning on migrating down to 'linux' when you retire the system. and if you're building a 'workstation' you're going to be looking at the FireGL cards, and nvidia has nothing that compares to FireGL and the linux drivers for ATI products are Specifically written for the FireGL product lines..
so you be happy with your Nvidia card which has some dubious warrenty from some company who may or may not have a 'real' setup for providing warrenty service, and requires you to return the card to a retailer, who pays a $xx,xxx a year fee for the right to RMA defective products to the manufacturer. i think i'll stick with ATI, and if i need an ATI card to work under linux I'll be sure to grab up a FireGL card...
telefax machines are a closely guarded corporate secret? ;)
i think not. that BTW is how they share the lists, or at least how they did when the documentry 'breaking vegas' was being researched and filmed.. someday it will all be over the internet i'm sure...
If pictures of naked people are to be taxed, then I purpose that only those who are violating their churches' basically-held principles in viewing the pictures be forced to pay the tax./I
If Someone were to overpay said tax, I guess you'd call that a sintax error.
Tell him to download FreeBSD, because you know, it's dead.
Well, I'd never expect it from Sweet innoncent Amazon.com I mean they only patented 1-click shopping, got awarded the patent and sued everyone.
But for $50 it comes with an AV scanner, which sadly only scans for windows viruses. Still, if you're setting up a desktop for someone who wants to do -email on this 'intarweb' thing it's going to be useful.