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(1) I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of modern framebuffer management. I know our game engine has several thousand lines of code just to manage page flipping in all the various combinations (different hardware, SLI cards, etc), and that is even with DirectX drivers doing most of the heavy lifting.

(2) Why are the first few comments so negative? First you criticize all the graphics vendors becuase they won't open up their code, then when VIA goes and *does* open up their code, the first reactions are so critical? What the hell? Just take it for what it is: a gesture of openness and an opportunity for the community to pick up VIA's code and maybe make some interesting things out of it?

Alphager writes "The relatively unknown Standish group has released a study claiming that Free Open Source Software is raising havoc in the IT industry and allready cost more than 60 billion US$."
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=844462

An anonymous reader writes "CNet is running a Mac fanboy's idea of a nightmare feature entitled 'Mock OS X: Five ways to make your PC more like a Mac'. While the idea of turning my PC into a Mac-like machine does get my juices flowing, I'm not sure the user experience would be exactly the same but I'm going to spend this afternoon trying it out anyway. "To borrow a metaphor from Spartacus, some people like oysters and some people like snails. Except what if there was a way to make your snail do some of the cool things oysters can do, like make pearls? And what if you could make your PC do some of the cool stuff that Macs do so well?"" Seems to me that this would be a lot easier if step one was install linux...

A beautiful mind writes "It has been long claimed by users that Firefox leaks memory, and on the other hand the developers claimed the number of leaks are minimal. It turns out both groups were right. Stuart Parmenter, one of the authors of the RAMBack extension started investigating and found out that the issue is memory fragmentation. He discovered that while loading about:blank uses 12,589,696 bytes of memory in the test he performed (image), after exercising Firefox with different websites and then clearing the caches with the help of the RAMBack extension the picture is wholly different: "Our heap is now 29,999,872 bytes! 16,118,072 of that is used (up 4,634,208 bytes from before... which caches am I forgetting to clear?). The rest, a whopping 13,881,800 bytes, is in free blocks!""
http://www.pavlov.net/blog/archives/2007/11/memory_fragment.html

Anne Honime writes "The European first degree court has backed the European Commission today, reports The register. Microsoft has been fined 497 M for anti-competetive pratice, and this fine will be definitive unless Microsoft form an appeal within 2 months, with a catch : they will be restricted to appeal on legal grounds as factuals one are now considered established. Further reported by elreg, Microsoft has entered a spinning spree. Beware of the chairs !"

Reaction to failed appeal

Microsoft may have lost in court, but it quickly tried to win the war of media reaction via organisations like CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Association and ACT (the Association for Competitive Technology) which both intervened in court on its side.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/17/reaction_microsoft_verdict/

Microsoft has lost its appeal against a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine imposed by the European Commission in a long-running competition dispute. The European Court of First Instance upheld the ruling that Microsoft had abused its dominant market position.

chris_sawtell writes "The Guardian is reporting that: "The European commission today hailed a key ruling by the court of first instance, Europe's second-highest court, that upheld its March 2004 decision to fine Microsoft a record 497m (£345m) $US690m for abusing its dominance of the software market and force it to share critical information with rival companies.

"After securing a comprehensive victory in its nine-year battle with Microsoft, Brussels is now free to pursue other high-profile cases against hi-tech companies such as Intel and has emerged as the world's leading antitrust authority. The company founded by Bill Gates will have to alter its business model as it faces stiff competition on new markets from the likes of Google and Apple."
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2170908,00.html

Tom writes "The court has spoken in Microsoft's case against the EU anti-trust commission, and the result is even more damaging to the monopoly company than analysts expected.
The court upholds all major decisions of the commission, including the record half a billion Euro fines. Most importantly, it smacks down MS entire defense line of "we can't make interoperability possible because we need to protect our copyrights and patents"."
http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&num=79929082T19040201&doc=T&ouvert=T&seance=ARRET

realwx writes "Astronomers are surprised by a recent discovery of a space hole that is nearly a billion light years across. "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. Rudnick's colleague Liliya R. Williams also had not anticipated this finding. "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe," said Williams, also of the University of Minnesota.""

jibjibjib writes "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec dignissim metus non orci. Proin malesuada. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Suspendisse sollicitudin elit non leo. Aliquam nisl massa, blandit sit amet, venenatis adipiscing, consectetuer in, turpis. Donec lacus odio, pellentesque at, interdum eu, pharetra non, metus. Donec rutrum arcu quis ligula. Fusce fermentum. Proin dapibus vulputate sem. Praesent egestas lacinia turpis. Cras tellus ante, dictum sit amet, semper id, adipiscing id, ante. Proin urna. Cras a justo. Phasellus posuere adipiscing tellus. Donec nonummy sollicitudin dui. Nullam at mauris. Nam consectetuer eros ac lacus."

Spherical challenge

Exclusive Apple and Google have abandoned their individual mobile phone projects for a joint venture, The Register has learned.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/01/apple_google_mobile/

Sibko writes "17 year old Zach Wigal, a Saline High School student, spent 9 months organizing a Halo 2 LAN tournament that was to be held on March 20th, spending $650 of his own money to help launch the event. He had talked to school officials, printed fliers to help advertise, and had parents and teachers agree to be chaperones. Everything was fine, until his father called the local police to inquire about the availability of a uniformed officer. This raised concerns with departmental community coordinator Ritchie Coleman who serves on the Southeast Michigan Chapter of the Parents TV Council.

"I'm not saying boycott the game, I just think that kids 17 and under playing an M-rated game for money is not something appropriate for the high school,'' Phillips said.

Due to the police involvement just four days prior to the event, it had to be shut down."

SlashRating©
10
slashdottit! tm

ddelmonte writes with a link to a brietbart story on the top ten April Fools Day hoaxes, as determined by the San Diego-based Museum of Hoaxes. Two great British examples: "In 1957, a BBC television show announced that thanks to a mild winter and the virtual elimination of the spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. Footage of Swiss farmers pulling strands of spaghetti from trees prompted a barrage of calls from people wanting to know how to grow their own spaghetti at home. In 1977, British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement for the 10th anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semicolon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of the two main islands, named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse."

jerthebear writes "How much money could you make from a technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

Link to story"