What do all these have in common? Right, a separate transaction authorization outside the browser. How hard is that?
Many Windows machines can't render WebGL content because the OpenGL drivers aren't installed, even though the computer has powerful graphics hardware, Bridge wrote. Computers running OS X or Linux are fine, however, since those operating systems use OpenGL as the primary 3D API, Bridge wrote.
"ANGLE will allow Windows users to run WebGL content without having to find and install new drivers for their system," Bridge wrote.
Because ANGLE aims to use most of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, it may help developers working on mobile and embedded devices, Bridge wrote.
"ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop,"
So WebGL works fine on real operating systems that already have OpenGL, and because Microsoft suffered from its not-invented-here syndrome, Windows computers typically can not do WebGL because they have no OpenGL stack. That't the driver TFA is talking about.
I've spent most of my career on embedded projects, and I'm still doing real programming, from bit banging an I2C or Dallas onewire bus, writing a custom assembly routine to provide a uC-OS-II task switch on an ethernet chip interrupt, or interfacing with some higher level Tcl stuff. To get the whole thing working mix in some shell, awk, python xslt, stir well, and get space qualified software. Oh and when all that starts to get boring, throw in some FPGA programming for a completely new way of doing things.
I love my jobs!
Really, I think embedded software is often more interesting than most web-, gui- or server apps. The disadvantage is that you pretty much need an electronics degree (which I do), to be able to do it effectively.
Last but not least, it often pays pretty good, and the quality requirements are high, which means that there is time allocated to make something good. Google for 'Declic' on linuxjournal.com if you want to see what I'm talking about.
"It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side." -- Frank Zappa