Quoting: Purple Library GuyGates does genuinely give away a huge amount of money to charity. But, to be specific, Gates has established a huge charitable fund, which he controls, which doesn't pay taxes because it's a charity. So the process of giving to charity doesn't really reduce the amount of money that he has under his control. I don't know whether he actually gives away more money than he would have paid in taxes.
This charitable fund of course has investments. Some specific areas of heavy investment include pharmaceutical companies and private education. Gates then structures the fund's charitable donations in ways that seek to shape the ways that countries approach relevant issues. So for instance, in terms of public health, Gates donations steer a country's public health emphasis towards buying expensive patented drugs (creating profits for pharmaceutical companies) and away from, say, buying mosquito netting, which might be more cost effective in saving lives. Similarly, in the United States, the Gates foundation lobbies consistently for the privatization of education, which in my opinion is a Bad Thing, so as to increase the profits of the private education companies it has investments in (perhaps Gates himself also has an ideological belief in private education, with which I would disagree). Stuff like that. So I feel Gates' charitable donations are more problematic than one might think at first glance. He wields his charity somewhat the way the IMF wields its loans.

Do you have any references for this?

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What's wrong with microsoft? Two words: vendor lock-in. Look it up, there's even an internal quote from microsoft in the vendor lock-in Wikipedia page saying the only reason they were still in business is vendor lock-in. That's also how they killed oh so many good things for their own survival.

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If you look at stackoverflow surveys, you can easily gather that there are a good deal of developers that prefer Linux, but have to use windows for work. Developers alone being at home and on their favorite os can probably explain this completely.

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Or they could have just used ANGLE to get gles up to 3.1 over Vulkan.

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You would think Feral can now get many games that are ported to Stadia and release them on desktop fairly quickly. I wonder what's stopping them from doing that.

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Quoting: edmondo

Quoting: ShabbyXAlso, just had my first night outside. Don't know if I'm willing to go through that much stress again :-S

Oh yeeesss... the first night outside was very intense... total panic... where is my flashlight... where should I run... they are everywhere... and they want me! :D

So these comments at least are reassuring that the rest won't be so bad!

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Just started playing this, and I thought the kick became super strong because of level up!

Also, just had my first night outside. Don't know if I'm willing to go through that much stress again :-S

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> If this is still correct and it has been a long time since you updated,

It would be great if this said how long a long time is.

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Quoting: subEdit: The base spec is currently > 2100 pages of rather dense content. Ewwww.

A lot of it is things you don't need to start with Vulkan! Renderpass subpasses, multi gpu, the many image formats etc. Like I said, start from the beginning, learn the basics (how to create a device and query its properties for example, then you will find yourself past 10% of the spec already.

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Quoting: subI wanted to learn OpenGL and didn't manage for years.
Simply couldn't find the time.
Now, I do have some time that I would like to invest in learning a graphics API,
but OpenGL seems to be quite obsolete by now.
Then again, Vulkan as a first graphics API without prior knowledge of GPU architectures,
sounds a bit too challenging.

What do you think is the best approach?
Thanks for any input! :)

I was in a similar situation as you 4 years ago when Vulkan came out. I just read the spec (make sure to get the one without extensions) and I can honestly say most of it is pretty simple. Synchronization is not so hard either, if you know them from operating systems. Vulkan is just verbose, otherwise there is really nothing too complicated there. Sure your first code won't be performant, and probably has subtle bugs, but it's easy to start.

I started with compute, as graphics has much more to configure, and it's pretty simple. Once comfortable with using buffers and images, graphics is not that big a step either.

Note that this was right after Vulkan was released, and there weren't any examples around. I approached it step by step, let's make a device, that was easy, now let's create a buffer, cool, now add a compute shader that increments every index, done and voila, a Vulkan program.

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