Another Week's Worth Of AMDVLK Improvements Published, More Sparse Texture Work

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Another Week's Worth Of AMDVLK Improvements Published, More Sparse Texture Work

The AMD developers maintaining the PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) and XGL components comprising the official AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver have made public their latest code commits from the past week...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDVLK-1-June-2018-Git

[eydee]

Wow, another stolen abbreviation. Open source people know how to live dangerously, even at AMD. PAL is an analogue TV standard used mostly in Europe, and has been for decades. AMD can't just steal it, they should rather put the effort into making video cards again.

[GruenSein]

Wow, another stolen abbreviation. Open source people know how to live dangerously, even at AMD. PAL is an analogue TV standard used mostly in Europe, and has been for decades. AMD can't just steal it, they should rather put the effort into making video cards again.

Not sure if serious...

[bridgman]

I'm more curious what the first "stolen abbreviation" was, and how one steals an abbreviation in the first place (BTW I think it's actually an initialism, not an abbreviation).

As far as I know PAL in the television world still means Phase Alternating Line, although that standard (along with NTSC and SECAM) is disappearing fast as countries transition from analog to digital.

You still see digitally encoded media labelled as "NTSC" or PAL" but in fact neither NTSC nor PAL standards are involved. NTSC was designed to be compatible with a pre-existing 525-line 60Hz standard, and PAL was designed to be compatible with the pre-existing 625-line 50Hz standard in Europe, but these days the "NTSC/PAL" designation really just means "525/60 vs 625/50", and both of those standards pre-date NTSC and PAL.

[GabrielMajeri]

Wow, another stolen abbreviation. Open source people know how to live dangerously, even at AMD. PAL is an analogue TV standard used mostly in Europe, and has been for decades. AMD can't just steal it, they should rather put the effort into making video cards again.

The term "Platform / Hardware Abstraction Layer", and it's associated acronym PAL/HAL is pretty common and has been used for ages in many projects. Linux had a HAL. In the C# standard library implementation, Microsoft has been using PAL since the early 2000s. So it's anything but a stolen abbreviation.

[wizard69]

What ignorance, PAL is an abreviation for many things such as Programmable Array of Logic. Maybe looking up the word context might help.

On the flip side the video driver people use way to many abbreviations with out pause to define them. This leads to terrible and sometimes worthless communications. For people not wired into the specific development language you are at a loss.