Isn't nVidia's Cg very close to metal as well? Also, you seem to be implying that making an GPL driver for Mantle should be easy since it will just send the compiled code directly to the card. Could Linux finally be able to get "release day" open source drivers for AMD cards?

I remember Mythbusters doing something similar with a multi thousand dollar computer secruity system.

Based on the article, it seems like they first ported Q3A from OpenGL ES1 to OpenGL ES2, and then they used the closed source shader compiler to do most of the work (OpenGL ES2 forces most of the code to be in the form of shaders). It seems like they really didn't make much of an actual driver and just off-loaded most of the work to the shaders (I could be wrong though).

Does anybody know where the website is to download the CAD/CAM files? Also, do they offer the Lumina 800 so it can work on my MeeGo N9?

As opposed to Android (which requires you to save your state when your app is backgrounded), you don't need to write any code to make your app a "multi-tasking" app. Also, you can do things like view 2+ apps that are running at the same time.

Just a FYI: this is not like the other "Ubuntu on Android" solutions that exist. Android is actually wiped out of this tablet and replaced with Mer (formally MeeGo) with KDE Plasma running on top. You also get "real" multi-tasking with this distro.

Apple makes great software; its just that they make the worst Windows software you could ever use. iLife is half the reason why I was using a Mac for so many years. General rule of thumb for all Apple software:
If it ends in .exe, it will be slow, bloated, and unintuitive
If it ends in .app, it will be fast, slick, and makes sense

Even if MS made the best phone OS ever created, it would still be hard to get many developers interested. The "mindshare" of developers is all in Android and iOS. Even 2 years ago, if you were at a mobile developer's conference, nobody would care about what you had to say unless it had something to do with Android or iOS. That is one of the reasons why nobody cared about MeeGo or WebOS even though they were both open source.

For one company I used to work for, they would have us make our own questions. If we needed our password to be reset, we had to call IT department and answer the questions we made. If the IT rep believes that the questions are "bad", they would force the employee to make a trip to the IT department and show their badge to prove who they are.

Except writing Qt application on Symbian^3 was like stabbing yourself with a needle every second. Nokia never bothered to fix QWidget on the Symbian platform and just told developers to wait until QML's Qt Components were ready. And, of course, Qt Components for Symbian^3 wasn't stable until after Nokia already announced the transition to Windows Phone.

Maemo did a good job of implementing QWidget (including kinetic scrolling), but they threw all that out in MeeGo when they decided to drop native support for QWidget and have everybody just use QML instead.

And don't get me started on how Intel confused everybody with their version of MeeGo.

The article seems to be light in the details of his exploit: particularly if it is specific to iOS or to the actual NFC spec. There are lots of other companies that have vested interest in NFC so it would be interesting to see his presentation when it comes around.

This theme seems to already be present in the Consumer Preview that was released a few weeks ago. The only difference is that the RTM is going to use this theme by default. Did I miss something here?

I was wondering, hypothetically, if somebody where to take the source code of Debian 1.3.1 and compile it with the latest version of GCC and somehow made it compile; I wonder how much faster it will compared to the binary that was released back then. I mean, has compiler technology improved much in the last 14 years when it comes to slow machines like the i386?

its called "Friday".

Correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure the first Doom was written in C.