When these discussions come up, focus drifts towards the "all apps should be browser apps" contention. That's silly, but it's true that more and more apps can benefit from networked components. Would I want to run photoshop in my browser? Hell no, not for a few tech generations. But, would I like photoshop to automagically backup my assets and edit history onto some highly-available, redundantly stored file server? Defintely.
IANAL, but I get the impression that antitrust suits are supposed to stop businesses from being anti-competitive, not from out-competing their opponents.
If the issue at the heart of this case is that PageRank may be unfairly directing traffic to Google services rather than competing services, couldn't the investigators just sign an NDA and examine PageRank?
Antitrust law is fundamentally flawed and was created to fix government granted privilege in the train system. Antitrust law is ill defined and basically puts anyone who is successful at the mercy of washington. An activity can be legal at 50%, 75%, 80% market share and then boom at 81%, or any percentage, they deem you a monopoly and that activity which was formally legal is now illegal. It is unjust and and makes a mockery of the judicial system.
It's amazing that these chips aren't sacrificing precision for performance, operating on Bezier curves.
While we're on the subject of realtime raytracing, does anyone have insight about the polygons vs voxels debate for normal (i.e. desktop apps, games) programmers?
The last time I heard anything about this, the bottleneck on the voxel side was problems with surface texturing. That was some time ago though, and I'm not sure what progress has been made on that front.
