[Nottingham] Connect 3D Radeon 7000 AGP and Five Button Mouse info

[Martin Garton]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 12:19 +0100, Michael Simms wrote:

> Pressuring people doesnt work. Just who do these people think they are.
> They are a sub 1% of the market. Im sorry but a major company only gets
> 'pressured' by people that have the power to make things harder for
> them. We aren't those people. Not in any way that counts, in the wallet.
> Sure we can give them some bad press, oh no, the Linux users are feeling
> snubbed - who cares! Joe on the street wont shed a tear for us, we arent
> that important. We dont have the buying power to pressure anything,

Each of us has just the same buying power as each windows user or user
of any other os for that matter.  Saying our buying power is useless
just because we are a minority is the same flawed logic that says there
is no point in voting for anything but the main two political parties.

> Whats going to be more beneficial. A kernel thats oh so nice and open,
> and bugger all works on it, or a kernel thats actually some use?

False dichotomy.

> Dont get me wrong, it would be nice if nvidia opened their drivers, but
> who has actually been harmed by them being closed?

Well no but I have been hurt by the closed ati drivers.  I had random
crashes with no way to debug without the source (okay, I may not have
had the knowledge anyway, but I have successfully debugged other drivers
before).

I could only avoid random crashes by not using their driver, which is
what I did.  Now everything works and it stable, and all the 3d games I
have work fine.

> The state of open source 3D drivers is abysmal, even those where
> we have specs.

Perhaps for doom3 and quake4, yes, but quake3 & rtcw are very quick on
my radeon9200 using the open source drivers.


> 1) a car with a nice open front so you can go oooohhh ahhh at the engine 
> inside that is more complex than you could ever hope to fix
> 
> 2) a car with a welded down front that goes twice as fast, or maybe uses
> half the amount of fuel as car 1.
> 
> In EITHER case, you arent going to be fixing it unless you are trained to
> do so.

I think you are missing one of the basic important features of open
source. _YOU_ don't have to be able to fix it. Only _ONE_ of the
millions with access to the source does.  Then you can get the fix from
them.  The car analogy breaks down unless somehow when I fix my car it
fixes everyone else who has the same type of car (or at least suddenly
makes it trivial for them to apply a mechanical patch)

> I like X. Choice is fine but not always a good thing. Look at Gnome and
> KDE. We have half the group that is willing to do that kind of work
> duplicating the work of the other half. If we only had one or the other,
> we would be twice as far along now.

I disagree.  You would be right if we knew up front the best way to
implement everything, but the reality is that we are only human and as
such very often we see gnome implementing something in one way and kde
doing it differently.  In the end the users decide which they prefer and
the other camp either continues to disagree or adopts the approach
themselves.  Having two competing alternatives provides the
bio-diversity necessary for continuing evolution.  The ensuing cross
pollination of ideas drives things forward.

<remainder snipped>

I bit my tongue for the rest to avoid boring all the other LUGers to
death!

I would add though, that although there is clear disagreement on this
driver issue among various LUG members, I do find it mostly okay that
games themselves are not open source and I appreciate and admire the
work that Michael does for bringing more games to linux.

-- 
Martin.