Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 245
You've probably been mislead: This is the current feature matrix.
Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 245
Um, no. The 3D driver in question is the R600 Gallium driver
The Gallium3D driver has been under development for nearly 4 years.
The Documentation for the R6XX has been released in December 2008 and the R6XX/R7XX programming guide in May 2009. It may be that the core Gallium 3D driver is in development for four years, but given the availability of the documentation, the R600 was developed for at most two and a half years. Actually, first support for the HD6000 series of graphics cards was added in January 2011.
Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 245
The current status is here:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/GL3.txt
When all is supported, the version of mesa will jump to 8.0. this month 7.11 will be released, and the next release is to be expected in January/2012.
Comment Re:Why change? (Score 1) 245
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
You can still run a GForce2 on 11.04, so I do not see this as a problem, but a "potential" problem. Some people call that FUD.
Actually, I have a Geforce2 Go in a very old laptop (from 2001, Pentium III based), and suspend or hibernate never worked with the blob, and it never will, because the blob is only updated to support new interfaces. In its time, when I went to travel, I usually used the nv driver to be able to suspend and hibernate properly. Nowadays I can use nouveau, but that driver doesn't support 3D (at least not yet).
Nvidia was first to the party.
Not really, the early Matrox cards (like the Mystique, G200/G400) had nearly complete FOSS support, only dual head with video out needed a proprietary library in the beginning, I think it was because of Macrovision. Later, with the framebuffer device one could actually use the second screen without this blob. That was arond 1998 when NVIDIA promised FOSS drivers and dumped some obfuscated code on the utha-glx project. Then they started to give out blobs, and they where buggy - at least when you wanted SMP support. 2002 someone sponsored the development of FOSS drivers for the ATI R200 series cards, I think the base for the good R300 support also stems from that time. It was only around that time, when the NVIDIA drivers finally became stable on SMP.
Of course it is also true that there are no FOSS drivers for newer Matrox cards and the closed ATI drivers sucked big time until AMD stepped in. When they announced their FOSS strategy in 2008, I was just putting a new computer together and so I decided to get an ATI-AMD card to support the cause. I use the blob, and one could really see it improving significantly since.
When NO ONE was supporting Linux, they had a solid driver, with real support. It was even current! Now we have this new player at the party who ignored FOSS for almost all of it's history.
It is true that there was a time, when NVIDIA was the only reliable option when you wanted decent 3D on Linux, but AMD was always supportive of FOSS and Linux, and when they bought ATI, they proved it by starting to make their blob usable, and also by supporting the development of free drivers.
Comment Re:A better question (Score 5, Informative) 158
A music-industry speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Stockholm waxed enthusiastic about child porn, because it serves as the perfect excuse for network censorship, and once you've got a child-porn filter, you can censor anything:
"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites". The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?". The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others... "One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand," Johan Schlüter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.
Source: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/28/music-industry-spoke.html
Comment Re:Fuck Microsoft Research (Score 1) 361
How we can expect small startups to survive in this environment is totally beyond me.
You can't and that's the whole point of it - to make it difficult for newcomers.
Comment Re:Fuck Microsoft Research (Score 1) 361
..., but as it stands today software is patentable.
Not where I come from.
Comment Re:HOW? (Score 1) 290
It's just like these things never happen ...
Comment Re:Next step, eavesdropping in the audio path (Score 1) 218
I'd prefer the use of a phrase book ;)
Comment Re:This is why the loser should pay court costs (Score 1) 190
I can imagine people hiring the cheapest lawyer possible because, hey, even if I lose, I'm only paying a couple grand. And what about people who choose to represent themselves?
What you forget that this is only about the court costs and not about the penalty. If you lose you will still have to pay whatever penalty the court decides.
Comment Nokia revenge (Score 1) 358
Must be the Nokia syndrome creeping over to Redmond: start some new technology, and then dump it
just trolling
Comment Re:Nice but... (Score 1) 385
As a long time C++ guy (Borland C++ days), I look at some of these features and think "so what?" (Lambda functions, please.) [...] the STL and made my life much easier - after I got the hang of the way the STL implemented things such as "iterators" and the gotchas associated with them.
When you use iterators, then you probably use algorithms like transform or for_each. for these, lambdas are a perfect supplement.
Comment Re:Of Course Drone Attacks Are Hostile (Score 1) 892
I'd mod you up if I had points and the post wouldn't be already at 5. Just a little remark though:
..., but it was the 9/11 dead, and only those 3000-ish, that motivated the US to war.
Used as a pretext for war, yes, but motivated? I doubt it, because the plans were already laid out before. There is some nice commented link collection.
Comment Re:Bad strategic moves by Oracle (Score 2) 149
Windows was the only game in town on PCs (aside of DOS,)
Well, there was GEM first shown in 1983.
... - but I certainly saw Windows far before that, since I was setting up Windows for Workgroups in 198*.
Interesting, since Windows for Workgroups was released in 1992.
Submission + - Weather Satellites Lose Funding (npr.org)
ianare writes: Federal budget cuts are threatening to leave the U.S. without some critical satellites, and that could mean less accurate warnings about events like tornadoes and blizzards. In particular, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are concerned about satellites that orbit over the earth's poles rather than remaining over a fixed spot along the equator.
