Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 15th Sep 2007 20:16 UTC, submitted by Michael
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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RE[4]: Re: Nvidia - ATI's Windows drivers are no better
by jabbotts on Mon 17th Sep 2007 14:02
in reply to "RE[3]: Re: Nvidia - ATI's Windows drivers are no better"
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?
RE[5]: Re: Nvidia - ATI's Windows drivers are no better
by cyclops on Mon 17th Sep 2007 14:39
in reply to "RE[4]: Re: Nvidia - ATI's Windows drivers are no better"
Member since:2006-03-12
I'm afraid if your talking about cutting edge graphics card technology. I'm the last one to talk to. Cutting edge graphics is an area that is both cripplingly expensive, with little application support on *any* platform.
To be fair I'd rather put my money into the CPU rather than a GPU, esp considering the price of quad-core at the moment. To be fair hardware itself is in a bit of a flux right now.
I say that but some killer application might come along to change that.
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:
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.