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Comment Re:ugh (Score 1) 104

...except that half of the devices are mobile, which probably means mainly Android. I think as people migrate to latest Windows with their Windows Defender builtin, it's going to be tricky to hold on the PC market

(Yeah, not that AVs help a lot, of course, unless you are doing something crazy like downloading cracks. But perception is everything.)

Comment Make DRM a double-edged sword (Score 4, Insightful) 380

If DRM prevents copying things, it makes them more like physical objects, and that means the providers shouldn't be able to prevent resale of items, because the argument that "you can't prove you no longer have it" becomes moot - it was DRM'd, right? If the ownership transfers, you no longer have access.

If the item is not DRM'd, the argument above becomes somewhat valid and preventing resale would make sense.

You can use it as a chance to make consumers happy and incentivize not doing DRM.

Comment Closed source... (Score 2) 51

So it's how long, about 8 years, since AMD announced it's going open source with its GPU drivers?

They did say it's going to take a while to fully shelve Catalyst, and I could understood if the new open source drivers didn't fully support 5+ years old GPUs due to various transition periods etc. But really?!

Comment Software has bugs (Score 4, Informative) 52

I thought you were linking to some sort of security-related bugs. But these are just plain bugs. And the codebase involved in rendering web pages is huge, because it's not an easy thing to do (try it; I maintained a text-mode browser for a couple of years). And huge codebases have many bugs, because the effort to keep them without minor bugs is just not worth it to anyone unless it is flying airplanes or directly responsible for hauling over hundreds of millions of dollars.

Welcome to the real world - we just don't know how to write software without bugs without it being too onerous, expensive and boring (and the code running slow). And there's no short term prospect of learning it either. The only thing we can do is fix the major ones and security-wise, design the whole thing so that most bugs don't matter.

Comment Supercomputing (Score 3, Insightful) 42

Where AMD seems really missing out is supercomputing. If you are building a computing cluster, you always go with NVidia, because of CUDA's overwhelming presence in the ecosystem. (Cracking might be an exception.) For example, all the major deep learning frameworks work just with CUDA. Why doesn't AMD care? It must be losing a lot of sales on this.

If AMD paid three guys fulltime to add OpenCL backends to the most popular open source libraries and built a CuDNN equivalent, the world would be a better place for everyone, but most clearly for AMD.

Comment Of course this is security (Score 2) 144

That's so silly - physical access to the machine doesn't mean anything per se!

What if you can't take the machine apart inconspicuously because the case is sealed. What if you have only 3 minutes before someone else comes by? Security is not black and zero at all.

One can easily even use an AVR that'll replay the keypress sequence over USB (posing as a keyboard) on a button press. This is something completely different than taking the machine apart to clear CMOS or whatever.

BTW, can you have UEFI trusted boot with GRUB, or do you need coreboot? (Yes, there are people other than Microsoft using it, e.g. when selling appliances - think vote machines or gambling terminals.)

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