There's supposed to be native Optimus support in the latest drivers. Ubuntu is aiming to support it for 13.10 (and backport to LTS), see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/HybridGraphics
Let's hope it works out. There are still some showstopper bugs like suspend not working and touchpad locking up.
Bumblebee was always a stopgap and a kludge - and a lot of credit is due for the enterprising bumblebee hackers.
"in the modern world, rapid deflation doesn’t happen, and in fact slight positive inflation often persists in the face of an obviously depressed economy"
It was not well known (before this came out last month) that putting an unlocked Android phone in the freezer lets you pull off a practical cold boot attack for the flash crypto keys.
Generally you start with Python and 1) get the code correct (hardest part) and then 2) port the performance critical parts to C/C++. So even they ended up with 0% in Python, it wouldn't "look bad". You got the benefit in part 1.
(And as others have said, 17% of LOC in Python might still mean majority of the functionality in Python).
You have it the wrong way around. People who cordon themselves off and only leave HTTP working aren't on the Internet.
They don't want non-web apps to work. Those networks deliberately rule out networked games, uTP, VoIP, IPsec, WebRTC, etc.
If you want to worry about people teetering on the edge of the Internet, you should worry about people behind NAT and its prevalence to the point of people confusing NAT boxes and routers...
(Re your last sentence, it's not a UDP replacement, see other comments.)
So like others have pointed out, this is not aiming to replace UDP any more than HTTP is aiming to replace TCP. So it's more like a feature rich TCP replacement, a transport protocol that happens to sit on top of UDP (which is what you have to do unless you want to write a OS driver).
As for impact, depends entirely what applications they plan to deploy it on. WebSockets, peer-to-peer WebRTC and media streaming could benefit from real-time friendly properties (fixing head-of-line blocking and enabling selectively unreliable packets). Hard to see anything significant for traditional web content delivery.
There are many things that you might want from a post-TCP transport protocol. Look at some of the SCTP features for a taste. It has stream multiplexing over the single connection, multipath and dynamic address changes, datagram mode, per-message reliable/unreliable option, to name a few.
SCTP seems to have bombed partly because they were "doing it right", ie getting their own IP protocol number and trying to get it deployed inside OS IP stacks instead of of sitting at application level on top of UDP.
The FEC feature in QUIC sounds a little unorthodox unless it's for multicasting or some control plane function, since at this protocol layer it's considered prudent to be sensitive to congestion when coping with packet loss...
People go completely irrational about avoiding writes to SSD's, I've seen researchers at an EE dept spending evenings tuning their Windows installations and going as far as stuffing frequently used stuff onto a RAM disk.
I guess the early off brand SSD's randomly eating your data didn't help the popular perception (even though that wasn't because of flash wear). But still...
> It will probably take another 30 years before you can actually think like a human and perform optimizations like this.
ITYM "It will probably take another 30 years before I use a language that tells you what the required semantics of the code are, meanwhile I'll use my requirements interpretation privileges to relax the semantics in a few places"
They've been able to port various Windows-centric products to other platforms before (to Mac and Solaris at least). Exchange, Office, Internet Explorer etc.
I agree they won't make a huge profit from it directly but I bet it's a good counter-argument to "let's standardise on OpenOffice since otherwise we are subject to MS vendor lock-in". A couple of big government or corporate deals should cover the costs.
If you read the linked Washington Times article, the "monitoring centers" sound like separatete bells-and-whistles products that are not the same as the mandated LI mechanisms.
Lots of other vendors market these government espionage tools to autocratic regimes too. Eg Bluecoat, Cisco etc.
At any rate it feels bad that we have to appeal to these human rights abusing autocracies, it's not any better to have these mechanisms built into the western networks.
Does this also apply to end-users of Ruby apps that are just an apt-get away? I don't really want to learn all that stuff (and remember to redo it on all installs) just to use some tool that happens to be written in Ruby.
In practice Itanium only competed with the existing 64-bit architectures from the Unix vendors. Many of whom got suckered into dropping their own stuff and moving onto Itanium, and got wiped out because of the very late & underperforming Itanium chips (frequently called "Itanic")...
Let's hope it works out. There are still some showstopper bugs like suspend not working and touchpad locking up.
Bumblebee was always a stopgap and a kludge - and a lot of credit is due for the enterprising bumblebee hackers.