Category: New Technology

OpenGL celebrates its 20th birthday equipped with two new versions.

Enlarge / The SGI Important thing Engine revision 2 bumped the quantity of processors on the Geometry Engine about 12.This is what graphics power looked like in the olden enough time.

Dave Fischer, via Zynga

The Khronos Group appears to be released two new sorts of its 3D graphics APIs.The mobile-oriented OpenGL ES specification has been made a major upgrade these people to version 3.0, and these desktop OpenGL specification has already established a minor update to bring it to version 4.3.

After some years of stagnation and an abandoned actively radically change the way OpenGL worked—during which time Microsoft’s Direct3D API cosmopolitan in leaps and bounds—the Khronos Group this developing new iterations for those OpenGL standard at normal clip.While Direct3D has still been recently first to standardize certain new features, the OpenGL designers in order to quickly picking them downwards and integrating them.

OpenGL ES has gone up to prominence primarily on the back of the iPhone and Leveling bot.Both iOS and Bot use OpenGL ES in whose 3D API, and the giant growth in smartphone gaming has made OpenGL ES a critical API to the developers.

OpenGL ES 2.0 was first introduced in 2007, with hardware striking the market in 2009-10.It was roughly relying then-current OpenGL 2.x, stripping out OpenGL features that were needed only for counter clockwise compatibility, and using a simpler set of data patterns and texture formats.

The newest OpenGL ES 3.0 gives them various features from OpenGL 3.x and 4.x.Shaders, the small pieces of code helpful to program GPUs, have been made more capable, with overall support for 32-bit integer and have floating point data.OpenGL ES 3.0 GPUs will support more complicated textures—for example, textures with arbitrary izes and shapes (instead of requiring how big each edge to be a power of two), so textures with floating indicate values.

The Khronos Set has added new compressed texture formats to OpenGL ES 3.0.Delivering algorithms devised by Ericsson, and available royalty free for most of us to implement, ETC2 and EAC provide a standard way to lightweight textures for OpenGL ES makers.

This fills a selected gap in OpenGL ES.Texture compression is particularly important on mobile hard disk drives, as it reduces the sort of memory and bandwidth must store textures.Direct3D hardware tends to possess a compression algorithm called S3TC, but there are many proprietary, and to use S3TC you need to pay royalties to HTC.

OpenGL forbids some great benefits of non-free algorithms, so it can not use S3TC.Instead, each GPU vendor has tended to get started on its own proprietary assimilation algorithms.This makes things difficult for developers, as they cannot anticipate any particular feature set and have to distribute multiple a variety of their textures, one for every algorithm.

The Khronos Group works on a new levels algorithm, ASTC, that is not any mandatory part of OpenGL ES 3.0, but might become compulsory in the future.

OpenGL ES 3.0 has also got some new drawing solutions, such as the ease of perform instanced rendering:one object (made up of some lines or triangles) they can be drawn multiple times for any single command.

Even from the new features, OpenGL ES 3.0 is still somewhat behind Direct3D 10 and its OpenGL 3.2 (and newer) in many instances capabilities.In particular, OpenGL ES 3.0 should include support for geometry shaders.The aforementioned shaders can generate foreign lines and triangles, and are used for tasks such as tessellation:taking a classic shape, and adding new lines this to smooth out curves that will create it look better.

Mobile components supporting OpenGL ES 3.0 should opened in 2013.

OpenGL 4.3 is definitely a much smaller update.A lot of the changes are to purpose parity with OpenGL ES 3.0 to guarantee it remains a trustworthy superset of OpenGL ES.

The largish new feature in GL 4.3 is currently support for compute shaders.Compute shaders allow graphics-oriented system to integrate GPU-based computation to their rendering engines.In earlier days of GPU-based working out, developers had to make-believe their data was either pixel data, processed as per pixel shaders, or edge and triangle data, refined using vertex shaders not only that but geometry shaders.These shaders were executed from a particular order; essentially, data goes linked to the vertex shaders into the end results geometry shaders, and then (after how the GPU does some processing) within the pixel shaders.

While this will work, it is awkward for each developers.They have to wrangle their programs to ensure they are look as if we were looking at operating on graphics resistant, and the involvement with all the current graphics pipeline means that it’s awkward to use the GPU simultaneously to think on graphics and manage general purpose computation.

Compute shaders locale this very issue.Compute shaders operate on general buffers of info, and operate separately linked to the graphics pipeline—while they can inject data to your graphics pipeline, they do not need to.This makes it simpler to use the GPU at the same time for non-graphical tasks, like in physics or AI duplication, and for advanced graphical processing act like raytracing.

In conjunction with these two new API features, the Khronos Group has started development of a software library to allow development of programs using its OpenCL computation API sleeker.Similar libraries already there to help OpenGL and Direct3D (called FLOOD and DXUT, respectively).The OpenCL library continues to be called CLU.

OpenGL is 20 years of age this year.Silicon Art published OpenGL 1.0 in many instances January 1992.The Silicone Graphics RealityEngine, released of a 1992, was spread through three to six term boards.The Geometry Powerplant board housed eight Intel i860XP CPUs at 50MHz every single day.Rasterization and texture space for storage were performed by point to consider, two, or four Raster Space for storage boards, and display output was dealt with by a Display Generator wood.

This powerhouse an in depth process 1 million triangles consistent with second and render 240 million pixels per second.Its total number-crunching power was about 0.64 billion flying operations per second.

Twenty stages later, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 allows for 1, 800 million triangles as per second, 14, 400 mil pixels per second, and have absolutely processing power totaling 3, 090 billion floating point operations consistent with second—between 60 and 4, 830 times faster as opposed to pioneering RealityEngine.

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AT& T will kill 2G network by 2017 to clear spectrum for 3G and get 4G.

AT& T today said it plans to switch off each and every bit of its 2G wireless network by January 1, 2017, a move that needs migrating customers to modern devices and building out 3G and 4G websites.That means some people do have to upgrade their phones, for that reason AT& T said the selection used today for 2G services continues to be reallocated to its 3G and 4G networks.

About 12 per cent of AT& T’s post paid customers (that is, a lot of them you who don’t pre-pay for service) are currently using 2G phones, AT& T said in proper Securities and Exchange Commission filing the fact that discussed its plans.More than one-third of postpaid mobile phone subscribers use 4G pc’s (on HSPA+ or LTE networks), after the rest are on 3G.Even those phones some cases have to rely from the older GSM and FINISH UP 2G networks in tied in or remote areas, he would.But the network upgrades should hopefully be good for everyone except individuals who really, really want to keep their ancient phones.

“Throughout the fact that multi-year upgrade process, we will work proactively with our customers to manage the various aspects of moving to 3G this 4G devices, which can help minimize customer churn, in .AT& T said of their SEC filing.

AT& T said it is facing “significant selection and capacity constraints” in certain markets, which could affect wonderful of wireless voice this data services unless the federal Communications Commission can “make alternative or existing spectrum available to the wireless industry to meet our subscribers.” AT& T said yesterday it’s increasingly spectrum licenses during a purchase of NextWave Wifi, but today’s SEC filing shows switching off 2G services is an important part of its plan to develop aside enough spectrum your 3G and 4G social networking websites.

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HP .P .releases more Open webOS language, including System Manager and is also also core apps.

HP has released the foundation of the code of the webOS platform’s well known application stack.The company also opened the policy of Luna, the webOS Advertising Manager.The code is offered for download from the new GitHub project hosting power source.The latest code drop was announced this week in a blog traffic tickets.Alongside details about recently available code, HP also discussed the roadmap of the Open webOS project.

Now that the source code associated with relevant components has been produced available as open marketer, HP is working along with beta release of outside webOS platform.Unfortunately, Open webOS won’t reassurance existing webOS devices choose the Pre and Touchpad brought on by large number of proprietary software components we require.

“For Open webOS we are aiming for support everywhere in the future hardware platforms the place where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel in areas open source replacements properly proprietary components are in-built, ” HP said within the blog post.”Existing devices become supported because of individuals many proprietary components, of predominantly graphics, networking, and decrease drivers for a simple kernel.”

Existing TouchPad users can, however, take advantage of that webOS Community Edition, a source fork of HP’s mobile platform based webOS 3.0.5.The oxygen Edition will allow TouchPad users keeping in mind improving the software experience due to their device.

Luna, the product Manager, is a particularly significant a lot of latest code drop.It settings managing key parts of the platform user experience, choose the card view and launcher.It also hosts the WebKit framework which to render Enyo remedies.

The current generation associated with those webOS is largely built the open source Qt increase toolkit, using the QtWebKit WEB-PAGE CODING rendering engine.This allows Open webOS to benefit from Qt’s inherent portability; Qt’s Lighthouse system allow it to be exceptionally easy one on new hardware systems.As HP explains within the latest Open webOS blog post, the Open webOS service has been overhauled download the the latest version from Qt.This will let some performance and strength advantages.

Although HP doesn’t just want to build its own piece of equipment for Open webOS in the near future, the company is still actively paying for the platform.The latest Open webOS manual reveals that HP is wishing for new developers to get considerably more team that is in front of the platform.

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Adobe loosens Source Sans Pro, a fascinating open source font.

Adobe has open sourced a fascinating font family called Creator Sans Pro.The font is now available in OTF and allows TTF formats.The company is also releasing the base source material this means font can easily be modified and were up by third parties.Adobe is releasing the actual fonts under the the SIL Open Font Driver’s licence, an OSI-approved license in which the broadly allows modification to create redistribution.

Source Sans Pro is planned by Adobe typeface amber Paul D.Hunt.He announced her the font today during an entry that was arrange on Adobe’s Typblography piece of writing.In the blog admittance, he explains that the appearance was partly inspired who have a visual simplicity of the Gothic fonts created by influential designer Morris Fuller Benton during the early 20th century.

Adobe aims to make use of the new font in its open source applications.Hunt’s blog entry says where a preliminary version is available in a user interface font in Brackets, an open source code editor for Website development that Adobe is building with HTML5 moreover WebKit.Feedback from beforehand users encouraged further more attention, such as adding a certain tail to the lowercase “l” compliment better distinguish it by means of uppercase “I” character.

In addition to making the fonts and source material available for download, Adobe is also to get it back available through font web hosting companies, including Typekit (which Adobe taken care of last year), and Search engines Web Fonts.Hunt’s blog post mentioned earlier that further improvements are on the horizon.Support for Cyrillic and for Greek are planned.Adobe is also performing a fixed-width version that is certainly certainly suitable for use in just a terminal environment or few editor.

Professional-quality fonts which can be freely redistributed under open terms are very valued by the open source community.Such fonts can be widely adopted and found in many projects.Some recent examples of open fonts that are to be used by professional typeface decorators include Google’s Roboto font and Canonical’s Ubuntu well.

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Milliseconds:“ Metro” out, “ Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of every trademark dispute.

Microsoft has been utilizing the “Metro” name to stuck to the basic new geometric, typography-heavy look-and-feel that has central to Windows 8—and is spreading near the company’s entire range of products—ever because it first showed off Windowpane Phone.

But sources are suggesting to us that this is due an abrupt end following the company’s Legal and Corporate Affairs team over the air a memo banning the word “Metro.” LCA’s memo considered as says that Microsoft is in truth threatened with legal feature for infringing on “Metro” trademarks sustained by German retailer Metro AG.

From you should on, the new terminology that Microsoft is is “Windows 8-style UI” when talking about Windows 8 regarding, and “New User Interface” when conversing about the company’s all the product line-up.

Asked rrn your comment, a Microsoft spokesman told us:

We have used ‘Metro style’ to grow code name during this task development cycle across all of our product lines.As we course of action launch and transition from industry dialog for one’s broad consumer dialog we can use our commercial phones.

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LEGAL ACTION wins judgment in Itanium court costs against Oracle.

Hewlett-Packard has scored a victory in court that could give its Itanium-based servers some lease on life. A California judge possesses ruled that Oracle’s prefer to drop support for the Itanium processor later on versions of its database products would be a breach of contract, that Oracle needs to have by its agreement to to develop products thus to Itanium “until such situations as HP discontinues the sales of its Itanium-based servers, ” and that ”Oracle might need to port its products them to HP’s Itanium-based servers at no cost to HP.”

The this is just, brought by HP within the wake of Oracle’s inspiration in March of 2011 to go Itanium support in all future application, hinged on the interpretation inside phrase in an agreement signed while using the two companies in these products wake of Oracle’s choosing of former HP VENDOR Mark Hurd as Co-President. The agreement, which settled a lawsuit filed by HP to dam Hurd from taking the position due to his knowledge of HP’s foreign remuneration secrets—and the unfair advantage he could provide to Oracle and is also also Sun hardware unit—stated that “Oracle remain to offer its product places on HP platforms, and HP may continue to support Oracle products…on its hardware in a way consistent with (the) partnership while existed prior to Oracle’s hiring of Hurd.”

Nokia reportedly does not sell Qt as more developers are retrenched.

Nokia is shutting consume its Qt offices gold coast australia, laying off the team that instigated developing key parts of these open source development toolkit, including the QML cp layout system.

Nokia developer Lorn Potter was several Qt team in Australia and posted a text about the layoffs of the classic Qt community mailing index list.He intends to continue while you’re watching toolkit himself, but they’ve currently seeking new employment opportunities.

Former Nokia software manufacture Atlant Schmidt posted a follow-up message across the mailing list thread on the grounds that information he obtained a good unnamed source suggests or even Nokia is actively aiming to sell its Qt draining, effectively ending the company’s ownership just one of the toolkit.

Qt offers a sophisticated C++ framework just cross-platform mobile and desktop content management.It was originally included in Norwegian software company Trolltech, which has been acquired by Nokia of your 2008.Nokia transitioned Qt completely to another open governance model and are covered by made the project more inclusive and offered in independent contributors.Nokia also relicensed the open source version of the toolkit, moving it from the GPL to the more permissive LGPL.

But recent changes in Nokia’s platform strategy are now serious questions about the company’s long-term dedication to Qt.Nokia originally intended to put Qt in the centre of its third-party programmer landscape, using it to provide a unified set of APIs might work across the company’s Symbian too MeeGo devices.

Nokia’s decision to forgo MeeGo and Symbian for adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 left claws with little need of any mobile C++ development makeup foundation.Despite the major enhancements made on strategy, Nokia still continued to enjoy resources in the Qt notebook computer or computer stack.

Qt enthusiasts widely thought that Nokia still intended to provide the toolkit in a great number of capacity, possibly on a next-generation Linux platform (codenamed Meltemi) for low-cost handsets focused at developing markets.That A linux systemunix platform effort was almost gutted in Nokia’s endure round of aggressive layoffs, raising new questions through what Nokia intends connected to Qt.

It’s feasible that the rumor of a tremendously imminent Qt sell-off is valid.Michael Larabel of Phoronix wanted morning that statements from quotation that means sources corroborate the lessons that Schmidt revealed on the mailing list.According that you intend to Phoronix, Nokia is waiting until looking for a official release of Qt 5.0 before it produces its move.

Qt 5.0 represents an important overhaul of the tool set.It will make JavaScript an original class citizen and establish QML because standard mechanism for starting off Qt user interfaces.Qt 5.0 was originally supposed to be released in June, but the final edition was pushed back into August with supporting further polishing.It could see its official release by the end of the month.

It’s worth noting that the transition to an free governance model will be Qt from collapsing in the event that Nokia withdraws its help with.There are a beneficial deal other companies that are actively placing Qt development, including MOBILES, which is using Qt website traffic standard development toolkit to next-generation Blackberry platform.

There are also more than a few major Qt adopters, starting from Dreamworks to Adobe, that are curious about ensuring that the toolkit is properly maintained.Digia purchased the Qt individual licensing and support residential , business from Nokia last year which may be committed to the toolkit.Digia could possibly be are entitled to acquiring all of those other Qt assets.

Qt includes a large following in the open source ecosystem.The community behind a few selected KDE project recently issued your firm stand out that outlines its opinion of the future of rrnside the Qt development toolkit.The group says that it will continue to use and contribute to Qt as it has manage and that it will collaborate to stakeholders to protect a nearby toolkit’s future.

The KDE community uses Qt to obtain a popular desktop environment for Linux and a cross-platform suite of counter top.The KDE project relies heavily on the capabilities of Qt, although the fate of the tool set has obvious implications for KDE as project.The group’s set up, which was published on such basis as openSUSE community manager last but not least KDE volunteer Jos Poortvliet, sheds light en route the KDE community views truth and how it won’t just respond.

As the latest statement explains, Nokia is bound by a legal contract that Trolltech signed throughout the KDE Free Qt Foundation which stipulates that foundation has the legal right to release the Qt key code under the the permissive BSD license in the event that development under the up-to-date licensing terms ceases.The agreement remains valid get the job done assets are sold for other parties.

There is no question that Qt will remain actively developed on some level it is also Nokia chooses to do in the assets.There are numerous risks, however.Without Nokia’s keep control on and investment, the toolkit can become fragmented (if a key stakeholder like RIM wants to fork the toolkit, for example) or development could relaxed.The Qt community events weathered the turbulence of these Nokia’s shifting strategy well, but the changes which have been coming could pose fashionable challenges.

Listing movies by Nokia_Fan

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KDE 4.9 arrives with incremental improvements, KDE devs be expecting Qt 5.

The developers behind your own KDE project announced today the state release of version 4.9, an update which brings improvements to KDE’s Screen Workspaces, the KDE swear stack, and the base KDE platform.The release is dedicated to Claire Lotion, a KDE contributor who recently went.

KDE’s Dolphin file manager has already established several major improvements on the topic of 4.9, including support for displaying file metadata comparable to image resolutions.It’s and from now on possible to group make sort files by meta-data properties.Other new features that might be added to the page manager include inline insider report renaming and an swapped out “places” sidebar.Dolphin’s version gaming system integration (which already harmonizes with git, CVS, and SVN) has been expanded to support Mercurial.

KDE’s Okular produces gained improved annotation selections, finally making it possible to save and print PDF annotations.The Kontact overall performance suite, which includes a previous address book, calendar, and contact client, was improved with a brand new import wizard that allows you users to migrate that there existing data from Thunderbird as well as Evolution.This feature will be welcomed by some supplementary Thunderbird users on Linux who seek a well-maintained alternative when wake of Mozilla’s decision to relieve on Thunderbird development.

Another noteworthy alteration of KDE 4.9 is the introduction of support for the MPRIS2 show API.MPRIS2 is a cross-desktop standard that specifies a frequent D-Bus API for controlling media players and also relevant information about actively-playing media.The standard is you’re supported in KDE’s Juk a good player and Dragon video player.It’s already supported in an array popular open source soloists, including Banshee, Rhythmbox, and very Clementine.

Applications that retain the MPRIS2 standard can be controlled through desktop media interfaces just like the music menu in Ubuntu’s Unity shell or maybe the GNOME Shell media celebrity indicator extension.In fashion 4.9 of a competent KDE desktop, there is known as a new Plasma data engine so that you support the music game player control protocol.

In conjunction with MPRIS2 compatibility, Juk also gained several capabilities, such as support a lot more than Last.fm scrobbling.And very, it can now plant album cover art actually is embedded in MP4 only to AAC files.

The KDE developers have begun while you’re watching next-generation KDE platform load, which is being that is called Frameworks 5.It will be based Qt 5, the next method of the open source success toolkit.As we wrote earlier of late in our report about Nokia’s intends to sell off the toolkit, Qt 5 is expected to be released later this month.

One of this major goals of the Frameworks 5 effort is to simplify the KDE dependency stack and build the individual libraries receive granular.This will potentially assist cross-platform application developers desinged to use Qt to adopt (and information to) external libraries and frameworks manufactured by the KDE community.

The KDE 4.9 source code obtainable for download from a project’s website.Instructions for compiling the source code come in the KDE TechBase.To understand more about the new version, you can refer to the official release announcement.

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Firefox continues to gain as Internet Ie, Chrome slide.

Our online world Marketshare

Firefox is continue to fighting back.After dipping below 20 percent share with May, it looked choose browser was sure to stop its silver medal rankings to Chrome.June saw a surprise turnaround, and that contains continued into July.

AT& T buys spectrum hand and hand satellite, hopes FCC gives you them use it.

AT& T today said hello plans to buy NextWave Wireless and the spectrum licenses, which are virtually that used by cord radio services.The selection range isn’t licensed for android Internet use today, evaluate AT& T has an consent with Sirius XM which—pending FCC approval—would assuage concerns about interference and provides the spectrum to get used in AT& T’s 4G-LTE net link connection.

AT& T famously lost its bid acquire T-Mobile despite having opposition from the Justice Department and Federal Colleagues Commission.With rival Verizon prepaid getting closer to fortifying its spectrum holdings, AT& T does not have to standing idly by, but adding spectrum has increases against other regulatory devils.In announcing the getting NextWave Wireless, AT& T noted that NextWave holds licenses inside the Advanced Wireless Service band (which is eligible for mobile Internet use) as well as the Wireless Communication Services shoulder straps (which is not).

But AT& T and Sirius XM last week settled differences over call time 2.3GHz WCS wedding rings, which is shared living in WCS and satellite radio.As a result, AT& T and Sirius submitted some pot proposal to the FCC made to allow mobile broadband be used while limiting interference that comes with satellite.That proposal is under review the time FCC.

AT& T said it most likely would not pay $50 million for NextWave the other $550 million rewarded NextWave’s outstanding debt.AT& T is trying to find approval for the acquisition among Justice Department and FCC towards the end of this year, but deploying WCS spectrum to raise AT& T’s 4G-LTE capacity enables another three years, the company said.

A long-term procedure to our growing demand the actual wireless services was recently furnished by President Obama’s technical advisory committee, which suggested sharing 1, 000MHz of federal spectrum with industrial industries.But any such radical change might take years.For at this time, US carriers are trying to grab just about all spectrum they can collect (with some exceptions).

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