pyalot2

The overwhelming consensus led to a diabetes type 2 and obesity epidemic. Curious that when this consensus was absent, it wasn't nearly that much of a problem, but only started to become a huge giant problem once consensus was reached. Coincidence? Totally.

Isn't it more like you give me money, and for that privilege you shall now have to pay me more money for as long as I have your money?

HAHA. Nice going newsweek, this idea, it's been around for over 50 years, and it's always just around the corner according to rags like you, and like practical nuclear fusion, it's always 50 years in the future for anybody who's got a clue.

But just in case we actually can teach computers to understand us, "solving programming" will be one of the least exciting things that'll happen at that time. Other things may include, but may also not be limited to: extinction of the human species, technological singularities, deconstruction of earth and moon to build a matrichoka brain, and so forth.

GLSL isn't anything as hard to parse as C. Besides, the bytecode discussion is a complete red herring. It's been done since ages for the web too, if it's slow to compile, it's either sheer incompetence on the part of the driver writer, or the reason isn't the parsing.

You're aware that the PS4 is basically a PC running FreeBSD and an AMD GPU right?

OpenGL is the only thing you get on iOS. There is no Direct3D on iOS. Likewise, it's the only thing you get on PS4, Steambox, OSX etc.

But that's not my issue, I acknowledge freely that OpenGL drivers are bad. I just don't quite see how that's a failing of OpenGL, rather than the vendors who actually implement the drivers.

This post is factually wrong, and misguided. Here's why:

#Preamble: Except on Windows you cannot run Direct3D anywhere else. Unless you plan not to publish on Android, iOS, OSX, Linux, Steambox, PS4 etc. you will have to target OpenGL, no matter how much you dislike it.

#1: Yes the lowest common denominator issue is annoying. However, in some cases you can make use of varying features by implementing different renderpaths, and in other cases it doesn't matter much. But factually wrong is that there would be something like a "restricted subset of GL4". Such a thing does not exist. You either have GL4 core with all its features, or you don't. Perhaps author means that GL4 isn't available everywhere, and they have to fall back to GL3?

#2: Yes driver quality for OpenGL is bad. It is getting better though, and I'd suggest rather than complaining about OpenGL, how about you complain about Microsoft, Dell, HP, Nvidia, AMD etc.?

#compiler in the driver: Factually this conclusion is completely backwards. First of all the syntactic compile overhead isn't what makes compilation slow necessairly. GCC can compile dozens of megabytes of C source code in a very short time (<10ms). Drivers may not implement their lexers etc. quite well, but that's not the failing of the specification. Secondly, Direct3D is also moving away from its intermediary bytecode compile target, and is favoring delivery of HLSL source code more.

#Threading: As author mentions himself, DX11 didn't manage to solve this issue. In fact, the issue isn't with OpenGL at all. It's in the nature of GPUs and how drivers talk to them. Again author seems to be railing against the wrong machine.

#Sampler state: Again factually wrong information. This extension http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/sampler_objects.txt allows to decouple texture state from sampler state. This has been elevated to core functionality in GL4. The unit issue has not been resolved however, but nvidia did propose a DSA extension, which so far wasn't taken up by any other vendor. Suffice to say, most hardware does not support DSA, and underneath, it's all texture units, even in Direct3D, so railing against texture units is a complete red herring.

#Many ways to do the same thing: Again many factual errors. Most of the "many ways" that author is railing against are legacy functions, that are not available in core profile. It's considered extremely bad taste to run a compatibility (to earlier versions) profile and mix&mash various strata of APIs together. That'd be a bit like using Direct3D 8 and 11 functionality in the same program. Author seems to basically fail in setting up his GL context cleanly, or doesn't even know what "core profile" means.

#Remainder: Lots of handwaving about various vaguely defined things and objecting to condjmp in the driver, again, author seems to be railing against the wrong machine.

Conclusion: Around 90% of the article is garbage. But sure, OpenGL isn't perfect, and it's got its warts, like everything, and it should be improved. But how about you get the facts right next time?

You've got to be kidding me...

The folly of premined cryptocurrencies is a well explored and established fact in the realm of altcoins. Somehow ripple thought they where immune.

Yes, but you've got to find your niche.

Clearly there's some unsolved problem there. Somebody come up with some proof of data algorithm and associated blockchain...

Filed in the northern district of texas, of course, where every other IP troll goes to file suits. Really all you need to know about the merits.

SOX is an immense drag on any US business, and on any business doing business with a US business.

I've seen this firsthand at two companies (Systor and Accenture). Adherence to SOX creates insane bureaucracies and makes an organization utterly inflexible. It introduces a pleathora of glass ceilings and most employees spend their time ticking off checkboxes on compliance forms, rather than performing actual work. On top of that, it also erodes moral/ethical behavior, because at all levels of management, it creates the impression that as long as you're in compliance, everything else goes.

SOX is the reason why companies like Valve will likely never go public. It's also the reason why so many small companies who go public, fall on hard times. A previously successful, flexible culture suddenly finds itself siloed into the SOX (aka sucks) work structure where all flexibility and cross-departmental/hierarchical communication ceases. Where SOX creates the perfect breeding ground for disassociated upper management to replace the founders and passionate people on top.

Does the US want to get rid of its tourism? Because that's how it'll get rid of tourism.

I find it offensive as well. But people are entitled to their free speech, so jabbering on about it is pretty much pointless. But if you like decency enforced by fiat, you could always move to Russia or NK...

I'm pretty sure it's meant hyperbolic. But we've all had this , it doesn't end with a phone call either.

If somebody who wants something from you can't summarize in a few written sentences what they want from you, it's exceedingly likely no amount of writing or talking is gonna remedy that. If you engage clients like that, you'll end up being very, very sorry.

You're equating bread and pasta that the food industry puts on supermarket shelves, with the bread and pasta people used to make themselves from flour they got directly from the local mill for grains they got from a local farmer. Not the same thing at all.

That's not the problem with pasta and bread. The problem is what the food industry does to flour and kernels, and that it's become a fools errand to even attempt to buy pasta or bread that's not stuff full of processed carbohydrates.

Simply put, bad is: Anything ready made, pasta, bread, and anything not visibly grown or sliced in one piece.

Good is: Everything that's noticably not been processed in any way. And if you want to stay off carbs, stay away from potatoes, rice, corn, etc.

The earlier analyses where also doing writing style comparisons. So if I say, come up with an almost identical way to test newtons laws of motion, but with a slight variation, it'd be news that to discover that a = (v2-v1)/(t2-t1)?

It's not news (it's been years that this connection has been made). Nick denied ages ago to be Satoshi a long time ago. Failure to use google isn't journalism.

1) Old news

2) Nick already denied being satoshi years ago

3) Really old news

4) Failure to use google isn't journalism

You don't hate PHP because it doesn't have sexy peripheral utilities like other contemporary language hipsters do. You hate it because it's a badly designed language/runtime/standard library. And it's not getting any better although it had had ample time to do that.

Proof that the system is broken and needs to be abolished.

The reason it's not called vertex program is because the pipeline is defined in terms of stages (vertex -> tessellation control -> tessellation evaluation -> geometry -> rasterizer -> fragment). Together they are a program. When talking about this structure the choice that OpenGL made is:

"A shader program consists of a vertex shader (VS), tessellation control shader (TS control), tessellation evaluation shader (TS eval), geometry shader (GS) and fragment shader (FS)."

You could instead say this, but it would be confusing:

A shader program consists of a vertex program, tessellation control program, tessellation evaluation program, geometry program and fragment program.

And it would even get more confusing if you drop the first shader:

"A program consists of a vertex program, tessellation control program, tessellation evaluation program, geometry program and fragment program."

So for the sake of it being easy to talk about, a (shader) program is the whole thing, whenever somebody talks about a "program" it's the whole assemblage. And when somebody talks about a shader, it means one of the programs tied to a stage.

The most important thing is to run the webgl conformance test (online https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-confo... github https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL) every day on a variety of machines with different configurations (I assume you have an automated test farm).

Another measure that's also very useful is to run the webgl performance regression test suite every day to see if performance got worse or better with the changes.

Unfortunately there isn't a comprehensive GLSL syntax test suite, but GLSL has been much of a sore point in IE where some syntax that's valid GLSL would work except in IE (such as uniforms separated by a comma).

I've submitted some tickets to IE (and added more conformance tests to cover them) for some of the gaps (gl.SAMPLES, gl.STENCIL_BITS, gl.SUBPIXEL_BITS).

A thing that's also a sore point is IEs lack of support for very common extensions such as OES_texture_float_linear, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc, WEBGL_depth_texture, OES_standard_derivatives, OES_vertex_array_object, ANGLE_instanced_arrays, OES_element_index_uint, WEBGL_lose_context. You can get an overview of the state of support on http://webglstats.com/

A note on floating point texture extensions. If you implement one extension (for instance OES_texture_float) you should really implement the companion extensions as well for texture_float_linear and color_buffer_float. Only the triplet of extensions provides comprehensive overview of support.

Personally I'd like to see these run in IE of course: http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/15/soft-shadow-mapping/ http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/04/high-performance-js-... http://codeflow.org/webgl/deferred-irradiance-volumes/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/trails/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/barycentric-wireframe/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/ssao/

I think the demos above are fairly good usecases for gaps that you might have, because they exercise a lot of functionality, they're not bound to some specific framework (like three.js) but they are WebGL conformant.

Note that this site lists WebGL as "IE11+". That's false. IE11 has a flavor of webgl that's experimental (prefixed or not) that's reported as version WebGL 0.92 (this is basically an invalid specification conformant string, it's either 1.0 or something not done).

Huge gaps and bugs remain in Microsofts WebGL implementation which make it nearly impossible to use except for specific select usecases that Microsoft optimized for.

It took google and mozilla about 4 years to get a good WebGL implementation (and they're still not done). It'll take Microsoft years to come to bring their implementation on par with the rest of the WebGL world.

Can we lay it off with the aprils fools already?

I needs to be mentioned that common antibacterial applications are not free of controversy.

One objection is that once you wipe a susceptible bacterial population from a surface, the resistant remainder now has the environment to themselves.

In other words, such straps could be a breeding ground for tougher, more harmful and highly resistant bacteria.

Leonardo Da Vinci would disagree. In a letter to his brother he answered him to the news of the birth of his nephew, that he had created himself a great distraction.