Utilizing power of the modern GPUs is certainly impressive, however there is a serious limitation at this time.
While SSE vectoring unit could process a 8 double precision 64-/80-bit numbers at a time, GPU could process vectors of hundreds of numbers, but limited to the single 32-bit prescision.
Most of the established CPU demanding scientific applications will need douuble prescision. Only few problems are very well suited for lower prescision.
Having a large patent portfolio only helps to deal with other large companies that *do produce* something. Then both companies mutually agree that it is not in their interest not to destroy each other. Think of the United States and Soviet Uninon during the cold war.
However, if you get sued by some one that don't produce anything then all your own patents are useless, unless you can prove that you have already patented what is being contested, and your patent preceedes theirs.
Well, something may be working, but there are bugs in Crystal Reports that become more annoying as time goes by.
For example we embedded Crystal Reports into one of the applications as an easy way for our product customers to get the data in a nice printable form. A number of our customers had created their own custom reports. While working on the new version of our app we discovered a few bugs in CR that prevent us to do things more flexibly, specifically automate creation of report styles as data complexity and its amount grew. Crystal Decisions couldn't fix those issues in version 8 and just advised us to move on to a new version of their product.
Now we need to make decision:
1) Invest money and lots of time to upgrade to a new version of embedded Crystal Reports
2) Give our customers awkward instructions to update their report styles manually
3) Dump Crystal Reports and use something else, preferably open source
If you go for open source then you could at least do a quick bug fix yourself, so this option is very tempting. Unfortunately I am not aware of any open source reporting packages that are not Java and could offer as much functionality as Crystal Reports do. That includes advanced groupings based on a rich library of math and string functions fyi.
The problem is that you don't know in advance when http://hpiers.obspm.fr/International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) is going to introduce another leap second. They monitor Earht roration and could do it with only 6 month notice.
The latest leap second was anounced this summer and we had to spend few weeks to add it to our data files and test the app before the release. If we had a release a month earlier we would not have included it and it would result in a small, but unacceptable errors unless users upgrade our software.
It basically means that there is no way to build an embedded software and leave it running disconnected from anything and maintain high time accuracy at the same time. You either have to create a system for automatic updates of code and data, or rely on human operator to make changes. Both methods introduce unnesessary risks and inconviniences.
Slashdot Mirror
While SSE vectoring unit could process a 8 double precision 64-/80-bit numbers at a time, GPU could process vectors of hundreds of numbers, but limited to the single 32-bit prescision.
Most of the established CPU demanding scientific applications will need douuble prescision. Only few problems are very well suited for lower prescision.
The main question will be: Who is the voter?
However, if you get sued by some one that don't produce anything then all your own patents are useless, unless you can prove that you have already patented what is being contested, and your patent preceedes theirs.
You mean free as in cheese
For example we embedded Crystal Reports into one of the applications as an easy way for our product customers to get the data in a nice printable form. A number of our customers had created their own custom reports. While working on the new version of our app we discovered a few bugs in CR that prevent us to do things more flexibly, specifically automate creation of report styles as data complexity and its amount grew. Crystal Decisions couldn't fix those issues in version 8 and just advised us to move on to a new version of their product.
Now we need to make decision:
If you go for open source then you could at least do a quick bug fix yourself, so this option is very tempting. Unfortunately I am not aware of any open source reporting packages that are not Java and could offer as much functionality as Crystal Reports do. That includes advanced groupings based on a rich library of math and string functions fyi.
The problem is that you don't know in advance when http://hpiers.obspm.fr/International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) is going to introduce another leap second. They monitor Earht roration and could do it with only 6 month notice. The latest leap second was anounced this summer and we had to spend few weeks to add it to our data files and test the app before the release. If we had a release a month earlier we would not have included it and it would result in a small, but unacceptable errors unless users upgrade our software. It basically means that there is no way to build an embedded software and leave it running disconnected from anything and maintain high time accuracy at the same time. You either have to create a system for automatic updates of code and data, or rely on human operator to make changes. Both methods introduce unnesessary risks and inconviniences.