OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed.
No it isn't.
Also it's not that hard to run an implementation of OpenGL ES on the desktop today
Still hard, though.
What OpenGL needs is a library for fixed function and immediate mode layered on top of OpenGL ES. The emulator would make porting OpenGL->OpenGL ES easier without being an albatross around the neck of the API (and of the OpenGL driver writers who'd be free to concentrate on with their OpenGL ES implementations).
This is what OpenGL basically is these days. The trouble is that nobody's free to dump legacy code and go with pure OpenGL ES on the desktop, they're forced to go through all the layers. These people will prefer Direct3D instead (it's a much cleaner, more direct API).
OpenGL ES 2.0 might be suitable for running a desktop framework, but it probably isn't suitable for the apps running on top of it. It's too cut to the bone e.g. it only supports triangles, lines and points as primitives, lacks geometry and tesselation shaders and has various other restrictions which might be necessary in a phone but should not be when running against a PC GPU.
Guess what? That's what the graphics cards do. No consumer graphics card does quads, strips, fans, big dots or wide lines in hardware. The driver has to re-work them on the fly.
OpenGL ES also needs a separate, standard library for doing immediate mode rendering, matrix math, etc. Newbies can't be expected to do all that stuff for themselves. Direct3D has Direct3DX, OpenGL ES has nothing (I suspect this is one more reason why they're trying to keep OpenGL ES off the desktop when what they should really be doing is creating that library and getting people to use it...)
Maybe I just wanted a big screen, decent camera, mp3 player and Angry Birds for less than the price of an iPhone
(actually my phone company gave me my Samsung Galaxy for free...)
....wholly inadequate for modern GPU architectures.
The GPU architectures are designed around the APIs so it's not like existing GPUs would work a lot better if driven differently.
I think the abstraction works quite well for most cases.
Is it worth re-architecting for the handful of cases where it doesn't? It seems unlikely.
There might be a case to be made for delayed rendering and more frame-buffer composition, but even they'd still use the "single-threaded CPU cores building out a single, final command buffer" paradigm.
Yep. DirectX 11 is quite well finished (and it only took them eleven iterations to get things figured out...!), but I doubt Microsoft will let Apple or Linux license it anytime soon.
All the growing platforms use OpenGL.
No, they Use OpenGL ES.
Even Windows can use OpenGL
...just not OpenGL ES.
OpenGL is the future of hardware accelerated graphics.
It might be. If they finish OpenGL ES (make it support missing desktop graphics card features), then actually allow people to use it on the desktop.
Unfortunately most of today's graphics cards will never have a working OpenGL ES driver so we're looking at five or ten years before it's worth trying to use OpenGL ES on the desktop, if ever. It's too little, and far too late.
What a mess of extensions that thing devolved into...
Why they didn't want OpenGL ES on the desktop is beyond me - it was the chance to start over cleanly, they should have pushed it as hard as possible but nooooo....too little, too late.
where should he get apps instead?
I wasn't aware that "apps" were mandatory. I guess I must be doing it wrong (again...)
I don't really think of them as a "PC" though. I'm sure most other people don't either.
(Yes, I know what the literal meaning of the acronym "PC" is...)
Or just don't install every single app that promises you free bikini-clad-screencursors.
"Bill Shocker downloads in the background"
Not really true. You have to install an infected app to get it started.
The idea of making malware to forcibly call these numbers to the profit of the number owner is not new.
It used to happen back in the days when we had modems in our PCs.
Keeping in this veign:
What if the public exerted a selection pressure towards harmonizing the results between networks?
It won't make any difference. People choose networks which confirm their own personal bias, not because they want to find out the truth.
Many people are unenthusiastic about their work.
