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Comment: Re:Wake up (Score 1) 133

by TheStonepedo (#39997871) Attached to: Geekbench Confirms Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro and iMac

A backlit keyboard and an aluminum case are not "Pro" features.
When Apple discontinued the plastic "Macbook" line and kept the aluminum "Macbook Pro" line it could have branded the 13" model "Macbook" and the larger models with performance upgrades "Macbook Pro".
Giving the 13" "Macbook Pro" performance similar to the now-discontinued base model and charging "Pro" prices for cosmetic features was somewhere between greedy and dishonest.

The Military

Why Drones Could Be the Future of Missile Defense 167

Posted by Soulskill
from the cheaper-than-licensing-star-wars dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With North Korea's failed missile launch Friday, it is clear many nations around the globe are attempting to acquire missiles that can carry larger payloads and go further. Such moves have made the United States and its allies very nervous. Missile defense has been debated since the 1980's with such debate back once again the headlines. Most missile defense platforms have technical issues and are very expensive. One idea: use drones instead. '... a high-speed (~3.5 to 5.0 km/s), two-stage, hit-to-kill interceptor missile, launched from a Predator-type UAV can defeat many of these ballistic missile threats in their boost phase.' Could a Drone really take down a North Korea missile? 'A physics-based simulator can estimate the capabilities of a high-altitude, long endurance UAV-launched boost-phase interceptor (HALE BPI) launched from an altitude of approximately 60,000 feet. Enabled by the revolution in UAVs, this proposed boost-phase interceptor, based on off-the-shelf technology, can be deployed in operationally feasible stations on the periphery of North Korea.'"

Comment: Re:OpenGL (Score 3, Insightful) 75

by Daniel Phillips (#39697991) Attached to: AMD Launches Partnership With CAD Developer PTC

A significant percentage of Linux users are freedom-only. They are out.

What significant portion is that? I seriously doubt you can find anybody who has never run a proprietary binary on their Linux system. RMS perhaps, but that Is about it (and I would not have it any other way). While it is entirely correct for major Linux distributions to completely ignore or quarantine every bit of binary or non-free, nobody ever said that Linux should be a bad place to run binary distributions. Just ask the Opera folks about that.

A significant percentage are the older unix-admin turned Linux user. Most of them fall outside the gaming generation.

Then I wonder where all those Unix admins are when you try to hire them. I do believe you vastly overestimate the proportion of the Linux community that consists of sysadmins. The Linux developer community, yes, but the Linux user community is orders of magnitude bigger than the Linux developer community.

A significant percentage are the experimental programmer types who are unlikely to have a stable system to target.

I wish. Then we would be even further ahead technology wise. But I seriously doubt you will find any facts to support your claim.

Sorry, I'll have to call your post 100% FUD.

Comment: Re:Blatent slashvertisement, really? (Score 1) 75

by Daniel Phillips (#39697657) Attached to: AMD Launches Partnership With CAD Developer PTC

Wow, talk about a blatant slashvertisement. As the summary states, it's not at all unusual for CAD/CAM software to ally with hardware so what exactly is the news for nerds here??

Speak for yourself. For me, this is interesting news that I want to know and would not have otherwise heard about.

Comment: Re:OpenGL (Score 5, Insightful) 75

by Daniel Phillips (#39697649) Attached to: AMD Launches Partnership With CAD Developer PTC

CAD IS THE REASON LINUX GAMING DOES NOT EXIST.

Absolute nonsense. CAD is the engine that kept OpenGL going through the years of vicious attacks by Microsoft. Even though Microsoft achieved near absolute victory in the gaming space and played an instrumental role in bringing SGI to its knees, it failed to kill OpenGL entirely, in large part because of the entrenched high end CAD market. While most CAD vendors did port their systems from Unix to Windows in the late 90's, they had little interest in porting to Direct3D. Microsoft was therefore prevented from undermining OpenGL on Windows by their usual techniques such as playing games with the driver APIs. During this period, Linux took over Hollywood's render farms from Unix, and that was another base of support for OpenGL, but it might not have been sufficient if Microsoft had ever succeeded in dislodging the tenacious grip of OpenGL on Windows-based CAD. And then there was John Carmack's famous refusal to switch to Direct3D, but that came close to the brink. Not any more.

In my opinion, the greatest threat to OpenGL ever was the noisy faction of game developers pushing for a complete break with compatibility for OpenGL 3.0 (I doubt very much that John Carmack was ever one of those, despite his well founded criticisms). In retrospect it was proved that OpenGL could achieve parity with Direct3D and more, without breaking compatibility. And now OpenGL basically owns the entire gaming universe except for the steadily shrinking part over which Microsoft is able to exercise monopoly control.

Well, and Linux gaming does exist, just not at the level where we can throw away our consoles quite yet. But that day is coming.

One can fairly ask, why is the Linux game market, with millions of potential customers, not already well served by the likes of EA and Activision? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you do either. It very definitely has nothing to do with the influence of CAD vendors on OpenGL. I tend to suspect the hidden hand of Microsoft, however I do not have firm evidence of that. And furthermore I don't care, because it is the very failure of the big publishers to serve the Linux market that has accelerated the rise of a vibrant and rapidly growing community of free and open content developers on Linux. I sincerely hope the big publishers continue to keep their heads up their proverbial colons forever, because it does our community nothing but good in the long run.

So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face. -- Yogi Berra

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