I'm also curious. From what I could read in the repository's references, I think that the problem is that the GPU is bad at rasterizing small triangles. Apparently each triangle in the fixed function pipeline generates a batch of pixels to render (16 in one of the slides I saw), so if the triangle covers only one or two pixels, all others in the batch are wasted. I speculate that the idea is to then detect these small triangles and draw them quickly using less pixel shaders (still on the GPU, but without using the graphics specific fixed functions), but I'm honestly not sure I understand what's happening.
Does anyone know if there are DRM-free alternatives to Netflix, Hulu, etc.? It doesn't have to be free (as in beer). Either a platform with content from smaller studios that aren't enforcing DRM on their content, or a studio that produces DRM-free content?
I don't want to be pedantic, and I do agree that the scenario isn't centralization in a sense that it strongly threatens the network, but I thing there's a point here worth clarifying. Pools don't need their own physical miners to have power over the block generation process. AFAIK, the connected miners are "dumb clients", delegating their block generation capability to the pool in order to share rewards and therefore reduce income variability.
In short: the pool still defines the blocks that the connected miners will mine. They centralize all the collective power of all connected miners.
To be fair, Ada Lovelace was probably the first to think about using it for something other than pure computation. I may be wrong, but I believe there's nothing special about the representation being binary. You just map "logic" to digits (one or more). The base (or a generic set) you obtain the digits from doesn't matter.
Lovelace was probably the first to think
about using it for something other than
pure computation.
This is deeply misleading.
For example the idea to have automata make music, and more generally for automata to be creative, predates Lovelace, Music making automata were a staple of the renaissance. For example the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, when visiting the "Kunstkammer" of Rudolf II in 1598, was amazed at an automaton representing a drummer who could "beat his drum with greater self-assurance than a live one" [1]. Incidentally, Kepler corresponded with Wilhelm Schickard on the latter's "arithmeticum organum", the first ever proper mechanical calculator (could do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Automating creativity was very much an idea with much currency in the renaissance. Indeed some of the key advances in mechanical automata, which later evolved into computers, where driven by the desire to automate creativity [2]. The "conceptual leap" that some people lazily ascribe to Lovelace, wasn't hers!
Using numbers to represent syntax (what you lazily attribute to Lovelace too) is much older and can be found for example in Leibniz's 1666 "Dissertatio de arte combinatoria", where one finds a detailed exposition of a method to associate numbers with linguistic notions. I have no idea if Leibniz was the first to do this. Leibniz also built some early calculators/computers, and is thus a cornerstone of the tradition that lead to the emergence of computers. This tradition was known in Babbage's time, and most likely to Babbage.
[1] W. Zhao, Rendering the Illusion of Life: Art, Science and Politics in Automata from the Central European Princely Collections.
[2] D. Summers Stay, Machinamenta: The thousand year quest to build a creative machine.
I don't think that is what is meant by "be the first to" here.
I'm no expert in english, but in my native language the analog expression could mean "if somebody would think of X, she surely would".
