AMD started delivering on their word of providing GPU specifications to the open-source community without a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and now with the 2007 X Developer Summit having come to a close, we asked several key members of the X.Org community on how they judge AMD's recent move. They were also asked if they believe NVIDIA will follow suit in helping the open-source community. Those that responded were David Airlie, Daniel Stone, Jerome Glisse, Stephane Marchesin, and Oliver McFadden. Mark Shuttleworth had also previously commented on AMD's efforts.
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Member since:2006-03-12
"Being a life long ATI customer (and oh how that pains me to admit), I can say that there Windows drivers and media software are Beta quality at best. I've had nothing but grief with ATI under both Windows and Linux. Each driver update seems to break something different in the media software. Each media software update gets more flaky. And what driver update requires that you uninstall the previous driver, sand your computer back down to the generic VGA then install the new update. ATI's drivers are not an update in either installation process or functionality. "
I know you are talking specifically about ati binary blobs. You have a R300 card this topic is only *indirectly* related to your card. The R300 already has an open source driver. That would have solved your update pain. Although the open-source ones although *stable* are slower for gaming because they are not feature complete, even some events in the compositing Desktop are unusable. I strongly advise that you check-out 6.7.193 which I suspect will be the delayed stable release of the open-source ati driver, as it is a lot more feature complete, without the hassle of the binary drivers.
Why I say indirectly related is because the specification for the R300 are marked to be released *later*. I have little knowledge of the new binary drivers. I didn't use the old ones.
Member since:2007-09-06
"
I strongly advise that you check-out 6.7.193 which I suspect will be the delayed stable release of the open-source ati driver, as it is a lot more feature complete, without the hassle of the binary drivers.
"
I've heard the 9600 chips are known to have issues; wish I'd read that before my last GPU upgrade. I will watch the ATI developments with interest though as I do still like the hardware if only out of habbit. I hadn't even considered an nVidia until I read a detailed writeup on teh 8800 architecture. There, skining arrays alone blew my mind.
I'm just as happy to go Hauppage/ATI if the hardware proves the decision since brand loyalty is rarely a good basis for technical comparisons. In all honest, has ATI an achitectural equivalent of the nVidia 8800 designs yet?
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Member since:
2007-09-06
Hmmm...a sweeping generalization I think!
Being a life long ATI customer (and oh how that pains me to admit), I can say that there Windows drivers and media software are Beta quality at best. I've had nothing but grief with ATI under both Windows and Linux. Each driver update seems to break something different in the media software. Each media software update gets more flaky. And what driver update requires that you uninstall the previous driver, sand your computer back down to the generic VGA then install the new update. ATI's drivers are not an update in either installation process or functionality.
My Radeon All In Wonder 9600 may as well be a door wedge at this point. If the drivers improve by releasing full specs then I'll happily return to buying there products but at this point my new machine is looking like Hauppage and nVidia to cover the same functions with true cross platform support. They have until my bank account says I get to start buying parts.