devx

Yeah, with 64-bit ARM chips and 4GB+ RAM devices coming out soon, it's time for Google to prepare an ARMv8-based SDK at least. They wouldn't need to support earlier hardware, since they're not that powerful anyway.

I really, really hope Google buys the elliptic curve cryptography patents from Blackberry, and makes them public domain. ECC is the future of cryptography on the web, and we need them to be public domain. We may be able to work around them, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

I initially thought it would be better to go with Nvidia to provide some kind of "competitive advantage" over the AMD-based consoles, but that's going to be hard to do when PC's tend to be unsubsidized, and when the same level of hardware is actually weaker because of the DirectX/OpenGL overlays.

Then, after I saw AMD announcing the Mantle API, I realized, it would be a perfect match for the Steam Machines, to get some of that console-level performance for more or less the same price. John Carmack agrees that Valve+Mantle would be a deadly combination:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one-pla...

Mantle is the future of gaming machines. It will not create lock-in, because both Nvidia and Intel will scramble to create something similar, or even compatible with AMD's API (which will be open soon), and what this will lead to eventually is a reset of standardized overlays for GPU hardware, that will support AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and probably even ARM GPU's, but with much lower overhead than DirectX and OpenGL.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understanding-amds-mantle...

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/09/30/amds-mantle-biggest-chang...

What fragmentation problem? PC games have graphics that scale. Problem solved.

At least as good as Adsense for me, but payments outside of US are horrifically slow. It can take even up to 4 months to receive the checks. It's like Amazon has never updated their affiliate program since they started it a decade ago.

It doesn't. That's just their excuse. If it did, they'd start removing Windows driver features, too, since they can't be found on the Linux driver, and therefore there's no feature parity.

Why are these latest NSA stories getting flagged so much?

I don't like that PG has relaxed the flagging so much. You can probably flag even tens of stories a day now without having your flagging removed.

Energy will be soon, too (within a few decades), once solar panels are wide-spread, much more efficient, and very cheap, and once we'll solve fusion.

Once we can make "replicators" like in Star Trek, food will probably become free, too, but that's probably going to take another 100 years until nanotechnology is mature and cheap enough.

Wired's Chris Anderson wrote a great book called "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" and is relevant to this "post-scarcity" future.

He has a speech here and the book is on Amazon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8l64NpaCnE

It's bad enough that governments are starting to restrict the Internet all over the world [1], almost in unison, why should the last bastions of freedom on the Internet fall so easily, too?

I see the corruption of W3C (because that's what it is) by corporations almost as bad as the corruption of NIST and the security standards by the NSA.

And for what exactly? The apparent "convenience" of not having a 3rd party plugin, but instead a "native" plugin in the operating system, that will only work on certain operating systems and browsers? HTML and DRM are incompatible in principle, and will be incompatible in practice, too. It won't give you any convenience, and will potentially make things worse in many other ways.

And all of this because we're starting to buy into the idea that the content companies are right and piracy is hurting their sales? I guess repeating a lie long enough, does make it true in the end - even though it probably isn't [2].

So once again, why are you letting our Internet freedom slip away without even a fight?

[1] - http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2...

[2] - http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-isnt-hurting-the-entertainmen...

Kind of both:

1) Firefox won't play DRM'ed content by default

2) Firefox could be the browser that allows you to go around all DRM'ed content through 3rd party plugins (they probably won't be able to condone the activity themselves).

The sad thing is the content guys will start yelling from the rooftops afterwards that "Mozilla is facilitating piracy and content theft" or something like that, even though they would keep the browser just like before - the "open web" we all wanted.

But because everyone else will have sold their soul to the content corporations, that sort of censorship will become the status quo, and now Mozilla will be the enemy.

Instead of "open web" being the status quo, I fear that "DRM'ed web" will become the status quo.

Are you saying Firefox lost users because they refused to support h.264? That's bull. If they did lose users it was for completely different reasons. I remember being very disappointed with them for choosing h.264 in the end, but even more disappointed with Google for not making VP8 the default codec in Youtube, to have Mozilla's back (with fallback to Flash).

So what if MPAA goes to Mozilla next and tells them to adopt whatever auto-DMCA/censorship schemes they come up with next. Is Mozilla supposed to just accept it because "all the others are doing it"? I sure hope they wouldn't.

Upvoted because of the story, but I like NPR less and less these days. So far they've been mainly pro-government than pro-Snowden.

The problem is MPAA & friends will already see this as an "entitlement" and say those other browsers are "facilitating piracy", while the major ones from Google, Microsoft and Apple aren't. Something like that will sound very good to government and authorities.

I really think allowing this to happen in the first place is just like opening the Pandora box. You give these guys an inch, they never stop demanding for more censorship.

I for one can't wait for this reveal:

http://rt.com/usa/nsa-assassination-leaks-greenwald-514/

I don't know. It might've been worth a shot to send it in PDF format the second time, after he asked to deliver it digitally, just as a sign of protest. Didn't Twitter refuse to comply with a judge's order once, too?

Going 7 pages into it: "Wait...which line was I at again?!"

He's only received $50,000 so far, which seems pretty low to me for such an important case like this. If you can't/won't participate in protests against the mass surveillance and privacy abuses of the government, then at least consider supporting those that fight for our 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment, and human right to privacy, like Ladar Levinson does:

https://rally.org/lavabit

And against patents:

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/07/my-suggestion-on-patent-l...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/mark-cubans-awesome-justifi...

Making DRM a web standard is bad enough on its own, but what worries is that these content companies will now think they can directly influence the web standards, and start having bigger expectations of what they can ask from W3C.

It worries me that this is just the beginning, and just like they relentlessly keep asking Google for more and more concessions in their search engine to "stop piracy", without ever being satisfied, they'll do the same to W3C and all browser vendors in the future.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision to stop supporting Mir. Might've set them back just enough so they won't be ready to ship it on time for 13.10.

This will actually make Flash go away faster, since now more devices and browsers can start ignoring supporting Flash.

What about this:

> Other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include Android’s input stack[11] and Google’s Protocol Buffers.[12] An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for "the ARM world and Android graphics stack"

I think Canonical wanted to be able to easily port Ubuntu to Android devices in the future. Will that be possible with Wayland, too? I think that's a pretty important aspect, because Android is the new "Windows", and there will be a ton of Android devices in the future, and just like Linux adapted to working on Windows machines, they will need to adapt to work on Android devices very well, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)

You might want to wait for Rust to be ready, because this way you can build an OS that truly made for the future (very optimized for multi-core).

If you don't want to appeal to the general market, but more for a specialized market (like in enterprise or whatever), then you should probably optimize it for AMD's Mantle API, too, and take full advantage of the performance for both the CPU and GPU that you get from that. Also don't even bother with 32-bit.

I don't know much about Wayland, but I know Mir is trying to be very efficient performance and battery life-wise even for smartphones, since it will be based on OpenGL ES 2.0. Can Wayland do the same?

It just means they will automate the spying more. Clapper already said he intends to use 90 percent fewer system admins.

I wouldn't take this as meaning there's going to be significantly less spying or anything like that.

And I think that's the main problem with it. People think that it's actually a true replacement for a password, even though it's not.

Makes sense. Just like in a PGP web of trust, where that key is your unique identity, so will these fingerprints be. But it's a lot riskier to use them as your passwords (either against the NSA or other dedicated hackers).

I've been waiting for something like this to happen in books. Should be great for people who read at least one book per month.

I think it's a very misleading tactic, because then many customers buy based on those benchmarks.

Ironically, I believe these smartphone OEM's are a lot less bad than PC OEM's/chip makers. I hate how Intel, Nvidia and AMD all "win benchmarks" or show numbers much higher than the practical limit of those chips.

All of them seem to have a "base clock speed", and then a "turbo speed" that goes even up to twice as high. What do you think gets shown in the benchmarks? The base clock speed, that you'll be using most of the time? Of course not. It's the "turbo" burst speed that will be calculated by the benchmarks.

This ends up being very misleading because for example I bought a laptop with an Nvidia GPU that was supposedly 3x faster than the integrated Intel one. But after about 30 minutes of playing a game, it will invariably get throttled to about half of that speed, and then it will only be 50 percent faster than the integrated one.

Intel is even worse than this, because they're becoming more desperate about the ARM competition, they start to become increasingly more misleading to make the appearance that they're "closing the gap" with ARM much faster than they really are.

Before I start, I want to say that I use a Core i7 in my laptop, but I just hate shameless misleading of consumers, whether it's from Intel, Nvidia, AMD or Samsung.

There are 3 "misleading strategies" that Intel has used lately:

1) Turbo-boost, of course. Their new Atom chips are actually 1.3-1.5 Ghz, but they market them as 2-2.4 Ghz chips, a speed that also helps them do very well in CPU benchmarks (they're still about 2x behind any other ARM GPU, but I think they'll start using turbo speed for the Atom GPU's in the next generation, too, again to make it "seem" like they caught up - except not really).

2) Launching the most powerful version they have first, even if it's not going to be used in most of the devices the consumers want, but this way the press is all over it, and then the consumers remember that "brand" that was very powerful, even if it's not what they're getting in their device.

Example: Haswell's Iris Pro. It was the first to be sent to sites and benchmark, and it showed much bigger GPU performance than before in laptops. The only problem? It's probably never going to be in a laptop. It was meant for PC's mostly, and again as a "halo product", to make people think that "Haswell is very powerful". In fact most laptops have only seen about 20 percent increase in GPU performance with Haswell, compared to IVB.

Second example: They launched Bay Trail first, the "tablet version", to make people think "how powerful Atom is" and that it's "good for smartphones", and then they will release Merrified for smartphones, half a year later (which would already put them behind competition), and probably even weaker than Bay Trail performance wise. But most consumers will just remember that Bay Trail was great in benchmarks (see 1, also), even that's not what they're getting.

3) They're starting to push the "SDP" measuring, so tech websites can start writing about and promoting their chips as "5W chips" or whatever, and hope that even if they're now using the SDP name after the power consumption number, they will eventually forget to mention it ("Intel's 5W chips", etc).

SDP is nothing but an absolute shameless scam from Intel. They want to have their cake and eat it, too: a) declare super high performance with the burst speed that it's not practical at all for too long, and b) declare super low-power with SDP, even if the chips themselves can get a lot hotter than Intel is implying with SDP, especially if they start using the Turbo-Boost speed.

These guys explain it a lot better than I could:

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/25/intel-keeps-up-the-unethi...

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explai...

If I can't use my laptop at the advertised clock speeds for more than 10-30 minutes continuously, then it's nothing but a scam, meant to fool consumers into thinking their chips are either a lot more powerful or a lot more efficient than they really are.