You should look at the latest OpenGL ES specification. This is OpenGL optimized for mobile devices and gets rid of most of the old API bits while still supporting vertex, fragment and compute shaders. Anything else is just implemented using shaders.

But mantle gives you access to the hardware registers (those descriptors) while avoiding the overhead of updating the OpenGL state, then determining what has changed and hasn't, then writing those values out to hardware.

I'd say the fundamental problem is that the specifications themselves are a patchwork of code changes written in a natural language.
The original specification is written before the original driver code is modified, or derived from an existing driver for one hardware system, and then recoded for a new driver for another hardware system. With other device drivers (networking), each extension specification is actually specified in a high-level language which can be processed straight into device driver code.

Direct3D has the advantage that the hardware must match the software specification, while OpenGL is more extension applied over extension on different hardware. Since each vendor has different hardware and supported extensions, the implementation of one extension may or may not affect other extensions. For example, you could support FBO (framebuffer objects) using textures as a destination. But then if you implement compressed textures, then those textures can't be used with FBO's, and so additional code has to be added to prevent that use. Usually the reason that you can't use a particular combination of extensions is simply because the hardware logic hasn't been implemented yet.

HP already became a "box integrator" back in the 1990's when Microsoft went on their "UNIX is legacy, Windows NT is the future" rampage. HP caved in, dumped HP-UX, started packaging Windows workstations, and ended up competing against Dell and other companies.

They were in two minds about open source. On the one hand it kept Microsoft at bay, on the other hand, open source projects had cut into their revenue in the past. In the days of "UNIX prices", companies could charge for printed copies of system manuals, development kits, compilers, user and CPU core licenses

That's what some universities actually do. They have a custom built dual-boot OS partition image (Linux + Windows) will all the standard applications that have been licensed and required for lab use (Mathematica, Microsoft Word, Firefox, Opera). This image gets stomped onto the drive of every idle system every night. So even if some spyware installs itself overnight, it gets overwritten.

With some critters, that is exactly what happens. The jellyfish doesn't have a brain but it does have some muscles and a series of simple "eyes" that detect dark and light. That's enough to allow it to remain in the shadow of floating objects.

They extract the water locally, and add all the other chemicals required (anti-bacterials, lubricants, anti-foaming agents). They extract the water from the nearest underground source since the typical fracking operation requires three to four millions gallons of water. It would defeat the purpose of fracking if they had to burn fuel to transport water to extract fuel.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

Both things happen. First the kids crank out the code and "refactoring" and partying. But they then get bought out by a corporation that needs to enter that market. More money comes pouring in, the kids leave as millionaires and go on to do other things. Customer support improves, the code starts to be cleaned up, bugs fixed, and documentation written. Then the corporations start trying to fill out the other roles like project managers, architects. But then as the corporation takes over, over time, there are more and more meetings, forms to be filled out, and more productivity applications have to be used with each project.

I worked for a start-up that got bought out by a larger company. The larger company started melding the two together by taking on new people and moving them into the structure they wanted.

The people I know have become software consultants, set up their own company with a friend, or become "architects" at large institutions, do freelance work like writing. As the people at the top of the power pyramid are constantly retiring, leaving to new pastures, shedding their mortal coils so that creates a certain amount of "pull" within the organisation (to quote the Peter Principle). So if you find something you enjoy, it's better to set up your own company and work as a contractor or freelancer.

And move into an "architect" role as soon as the new project manager decides that they should follow the Agile/Scrum model. My experience is that no development role lasts for more than a couple of years or even a year. Then the odds are that you'll get moved into something different, and that it's usually away from what first attracted you to the company.

I would guess writing their own memory manager was for "speed", and "security". No one could then hack the encryptors/decryptors by replacing malloc/free functions with their own functions in order to gain access to the data.

I did some digitizing using a TV card (around $120) and and a cheap $50 VCR. The recorded visual and sound quality was as good as the tape itself. But then you need to weigh up the costs of a large capacity disk drive, the TV card, VCR and cables. Those cheap VCR don't last long even with modern cassettes. The motors usually end up burning out. No different from those low cost USB cassette players. The torque required to just loosen up the tape is equivalent to holding a pen firmly in one hand and trying to turn it with the other. They just can't handle it.

In the past, some researchers were able to link British surnames to DNA. And it is quite simple to link surnames to general geographic areas. So this just sounds like a rehash of this technique.

You get symlinks in Linux too, so it's not exactly a Microsoft thing. Mostly used to patch between different applications or versions of applications that expect things in different places. Though the last time I did a security check of my Linux system, there were around 1000+ dangling symlinks.

Having those extensions as some sort of magic hidden field in the file name is frustrating as trying to rename them manually just leads to files with double extensions and yet still considered something completely different. It comes from the original FAT tradition of having 8:3 characters.