SiegeTank - Slashdot User

Comment Re:It's not easy (Score 2) 182

by SiegeTank on Tuesday January 04, 2011 @09:50AM (#34753156) Attached to: The Challenge In Delivering Open Source GPU Drivers

Exactly, this file from the kernel docs explains the practical reasoning of not having a stable ABI in detail - http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v2.6.36/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt

Not only is stability and being able to integrate the drivers better within the kernel a key part of having the source for the drivers. If some poor person gets stuck using a piece of once 'in' hardware that the manufacturer has long since abandoned supporting - the issues can still be fixed. Or will have been fixed before the hardware became obsolete.

It also allows people who can code to help stabilise the drivers. Which essentially means the user has a better impression of the hardware. So the manufacture can benefit significantly from the source for that driver being available.

The reasons are practical - not only for stability but for longevity of support well after the manufacturer has long stopped caring. Having a stable ABI did nothing for Windows XP when the driver ran riot and took down the entire system in an all too common video driver BSOD.

Comment Re:"Celebrity"? (Score 1) 233

by SiegeTank on Sunday December 26, 2010 @02:51AM (#34668914) Attached to: Apple Forces Steve Jobs Action Figure Off eBay

Different types of monopoly rights:

Physical rights
Personality rights
Copy rights
Trade mark rights
Patent/implementation rights
...
Planetary rights
Spatial rights
the list could go on because...

All abstract. All to address specific variances with the goal towards establishing abstract rights.

"Midori" Concepts Materialize In .NET 106

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 05, 2010 @03:38PM from the creeping-in dept.

dp619 writes "Concepts outlined in Microsoft's internal 'Midori' OS documents are materializing in .NET, according to an SD Times report. Midori is a new operating system project that is designed for distributed concurrency. Microsoft has assigned some of its all-star programmers to the project, while recruiting others. It is also working on other projects to replace Windows that make the OS act more like a hypervisor."

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @03:57AM from the clean-room-white-coats dept.

hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."

Can the US Stop the Illegal Export of Its Technology? 351

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @08:13PM from the not-a-chance dept.

coondoggie writes "Maybe people are more desperate or maybe there's just too much opportunity to make a quick buck but whatever the excuse, attempts to illegally export technology from the US has gone through the roof. The Department of Justice this week said it has placed criminal charges or convictions against more than 255 defendants in the past two fiscal years — 145 in 2008 and 110 in 2007. That 255 number represents more than a six-fold increase from fiscal year 2005, when the DOJ said about 40 individuals or companies were convicted of over 100 criminal violations of export control laws."

Study Shows Social Networking At Work Is Good 94

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @07:08PM from the play-more-mob-wars dept.

Ostracus writes "Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests. Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said."

RIAA Litigation May Be Unconstitutional 281

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @06:05PM from the what-about-ritchie-chaz-and-margot? dept.

dtjohnson writes "A Harvard law school professor has submitted arguments on behalf of Joel Tenenbaum in RIAA v. Tenenbaum in which Professor Charles Nesson claims that the underlying law that the RIAA uses is actually a criminal, rather than civil, statute and is therefore unconstitutional. According to this article, 'Nesson charges that the federal law is essentially a criminal statute in that it seeks to punish violators with minimum statutory penalties far in excess of actual damages. The market value of a song is 99 cents on iTunes; of seven songs, $6.93. Yet the statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per song, escalating to as much as $150,000 per song for infringement "committed willfully."' If the law is a criminal statute, Neeson then claims that it violates the 5th and 8th amendments and is therefore unconstitutional. Litigation will take a while but this may be the end for RIAA litigation, at least until they can persuade Congress to pass a new law."

Discuss the US Presidential Election & the Economy 2369

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @09:43AM from the stuff-that-matters dept.

A number of folks have been submitting topics that indicate that they want to have a serious discussion on the issues surrounding this election. Since we're under a week now, I've decided to run a series of discussion stories to give you guys a place to discuss the issue. So here's the first one: The Economy. It's the biggest topic these days, eclipsing even war as the most important issue to most Americans. But how will that affect your choice next week? And why?

Study Debunks Gamer Stereotypes 117

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 24, 2008 @12:01AM from the five-more-minutes-ok-mom? dept.

Ars Technica reports on a recent study by Ipsos MediaCT which evaluated gamers with respect to a large variety of social parameters. Among their findings: "55 percent of gamers polled were married, 48 percent have kids, and new gamers — those who have started playing videogames in the past two years — are 32 years old on average." Also, "In terms of hard dollars, the average gaming household income ($79,000) is notably higher than that of nongaming households ($54,000), but the value of the gamer as a marketing target can be seen in a variety of ways. 39 percent of gamers said that friends and family rely upon them to stay up-to-date about the latest technology." The press release for the study is available at IGN.

Blizzcon 2008 Wrap-Up 173

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @12:45PM from the tldr dept.

This year's Blizzcon saw 15,000 gamers descend from 27 different countries to take part in two days of discussions, tournaments, and sneak peaks at upcoming releases. Several big announcements were scattered among a raft of new details about Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 and Wrath of the Lich King. The new information went a long way toward drumming up interest for what already appear to be worthy successors to old favorites. Read on for more.

No Naked Black Holes 317

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 06, 2008 @12:17AM from the also-no-hair dept.

Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."

Intel Releases USB 3.0 Controller Interface Spec 374

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday August 14, 2008 @10:16AM from the lookit-all-them-wires dept.

hardsky submitted thrilling news about everyone's favorite interconnect cable by saying "USB 3.0 is set to deliver data-transfer speeds of up to 5Gb/s, initially over tweaked connectors and wiring and, later, over optical links."

Microsoft Blesses LGPL, Joins Apache Foundation 425

Posted by timothy on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:09PM from the could-be-the-largest-free-software-vendor dept.

Penguinisto writes "According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client. While I sincerely doubt they'll release Vista under a GPL license anytime soon, this is certainly an unexpected series of moves on their part, and could possibly lead to more OSS (as opposed to 'Shared Source') interactivity between what is arguably Linux' greatest adversary and the Open Source community." (We mentioned the announced support for the Apache Foundation earlier today, as well.)

Floating Cities On Venus 501

Posted by Soulskill on Monday July 21, 2008 @11:58PM from the brain-candy dept.

Geoffrey.landis writes "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"

Comment Re:Disagreement about this trend (Score 1) 638

by SiegeTank on Wednesday July 02, 2008 @07:51PM (#24038105) Attached to: Intel Says to Prepare For "Thousands of Cores"

Solution:

- More cores
- Lower clock speed for each core
- Ability to turn off unused core
- Power savings from all the last two points
- Distributed architecture for assigning work to cores (chips designed to offload the work in different ways on the motherboard)

That last part is the tricky bit, this is what people looking into multi-core technology and programming are really trying to solve - it's a distribution problem.

Vast savings of power are available if this can be done in a way that doesn't affect the way software is written in a big way. Cranking the speed of the chips just will not work without some new factor to overcome the thermal problems involved.

And no, we can't just all use dry-ice or liquid nitrogen :P

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