By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's fanciest-way-to-play-tetris department:
Stoobalou writes with an interview in Thinq with a few folks from ARM on their plans for the future of embedded graphics. From the article:
"'If you're looking at the visual experience that we can deliver on a mobile, in terms of the capabilities of the devices that are on the market today, increasingly it is visually outstanding — but we need to do more maths, because we have an increasing screen resolution and we have increasing content complexity, and we have to do it all in pretty low power. So, if we look at where we were a few years ago, if you take the benchmarks of a VGA display and typical low-res content — all of a sudden, by the time you get to a 4K screen and some of the complexity of tesselated stuff you see in DX11 today, you're talking about a 500x increase in performance.' ... 'We're still maintaining that 1W power envelope within your mobile device, yet being expected to deliver 500 times the performance,' Hickman added. That's a major undertaking, but one which the next generation of Mali processors will work towards.'All of the graphics development in the embedded world is nice, but it is disheartening to see
the lack of source code for all of the new mobile GPUs.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's greenspun's-tenth-browser department:
An anonymous reader writes
"Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments."Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's
rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its
Emacs-like
extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
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By samzenpus from
Slashdot's don't-post-angry department:
Hugh Pickens writes
"The WSJ reports that following three nights of rioting and looting in London, Blackberry's messaging network and social networking sites are being blamed by police, politicians and media organizations for helping rioters in London spread word about the next hot spot . It's an 'encrypted, very secure, safe, fast, cheap, free, easy way for disaffected urban youth to spread messages for the next targets,' says Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch Europe and digital advisor to the Mayor of London. But Ian Maude, an analyst at Enders Analysis, said it's unfair to lay the blame on technology. 'Certainly, it's a lot easier for people to communicate with each other in real time via some of these services but that's a fact of life. They're not good or evil in themselves, its the purposes for which people use them.' The Metropolitan Police, known as Scotland Yard, say they are monitoring social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM), the maker of Blackberry smartphones, says it has 'engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.'" An anonymous reader points out that the rioters aren't the only ones using technology. London police have begun
posting pictures on Flikr of people they'd like to interview following the riots over the last few days.
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By samzenpus from
Slashdot's risa-in-the-desert department:
MikeChino writes
"King Abdullah of Jordan (who was once an extra in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager) has given the green light to a $1.5 billion Star Trek theme park that will boldly take Jordan where no Gulf state has gone before. While the theme park will not be powered by dilithium crystals, it will utilize green technology in order to lower its carbon footprint — all of its electricity will be generated by renewable sources." Just a few weeks ago Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Ahyan
carved his name in the desert so it could be seen from space. It looks like Sci-fi has finally made it to the Middle East. I can't wait for them to discover
Firefly.
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