Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Sep 2007 20:24 UTC, submitted by hechacker1
"This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place. The 2D specifications will be released very soon and the 3D ones will follow shortly."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Shouldn't be any problems with the free software world now, as long as they don't drag their feet with the 3D specs.
Well, there lies the problem. The R300 was meant to receive the 'full specifications' and every time the developers asked for more assistance and explanation, all they got in return from AMD was 'you've got it all, piss off and stop whining'.
For me, I'm not going to believe it till I see a real working product that is either equal or better than the closed source one. If I am going to spend NZ$3K on a laptop, I want to be damn sure it'll actually be fully supported rather than 'kinda supported and really buggy'.
Also, I certainly don't want to see a tonne of Linux'isms within the driver that'll make porting it to *BSD's and other UNIX's more difficult than it needs to be. Open source application developers are already thinking the world revolves around Linux, lets hope that the driver developers have more common-sense than that.
Edited 2007-09-11 02:40
Member since:2007-07-13
Kaiwai,
I've also been looking at laptops (available in New Zealand) that are great for software development for around NZ$3k (~US$2100). Check out the HP 8510w if you haven't already. For the longest time this line of models (starting with the nw84x0 series) only had ATI graphics, which sucked on Linux, until now! Good on AMD/ATI! Due to the sucky support of ATI on Linux I was looking around at alternatives to this line of laptop for my next machine. But ATI's announcement means they're back in the running.
By the way, the 8510w is not now restricted to ATI only, you can now choose either NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M or ATI FireL V5600. You can't lose.
Apologies everyone else for the first bit being only weakly related to the thread about the ATI spec release (disclaimer: I don't work for HP or AMD/ATI, just wanna see that fellow coders are made aware of good kit). But I feel that this news from AMD might make a difference to people's purchasing decisions (provided AMD actually deliver).
Now back to your usual programme ...
Edited 2007-09-11 03:19
Member since:2007-04-06
Also, I certainly don't want to see a tonne of Linux'isms within the driver that'll make porting it to *BSD's and other UNIX's more difficult than it needs to be. Open source application developers are already thinking the world revolves around Linux, lets hope that the driver developers have more common-sense than that.
Linuxism is bad but *nixism is good ? lets go one step further and say *nixism is bad also and *ism is the good "ism" here yes ? no ? if no why ?
Member since:2005-12-13
They have been making these sort of statements for years. Why is this any different? Why could they not release the specs at the X Summit? It would have been great PR and eliminated some of the scepticism.
The OSS train has already left the station and ATI is still buying the ticket. Even if they do release the specs, Intel and NVidia are still years ahead of them in development and distribution.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 20:46 UTC
"And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 17:32 UTC
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.More News »
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Member since:
2005-08-11
Shouldn't be any problems with the free software world now, as long as they don't drag their feet with the 3D specs.