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

[Robert Hart]

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.

Just because less than 1% of desktop computers run Linux doesn't mean
that Linux users control less than 1% of the PC market. I personally
have probably advised a dozen or more people on their computer
purchases, and I can think of other Linux users who buy PCs in bulk as
part of their job.

Secondly, graphics cards are a very competitive section of the market,
so even a 1% swing in the market will make a big difference in the long
run. 
 
> Who do you think
> you'll be persuading to move to Linux if its 20% of the speed of a
> comparable windows machine.
 
People don't use Linux because it can do what they did with windows just
as fast, they use it because they can do things that they couldn't do
with Windows. That makes a +Inf% improvement by my math.

> 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.

but at least with 1) you can take it to any mechanic or garage, and if
necessary go to a scrap yard and acquire spare parts from any similar
model, whereas with 2) you probably have to take it back to the place
you bought the darn thing just to get the oil changed. Which is going to
cost you more in the long run?

> 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. 

Yeah right. You know as well as I do that software development really
doesn't scale all that well. Doubling the number of programmers on a
project will not get it done twice as fast. 

In fact, I would suspect that having some visible competition and source
of new ideas is a much better way of making progress. Yes, some
resources are wasted (e.g. debugging, translating, packaging), but other
resources are better utilised (e.g. creativity, innovation, radicalism)
and it's perhaps these that we need the most of.

> How many DIFFERENT ways
> are there to do the same damned thing in Linux. You can burn a CD in 5
> different apps, you have at least 5 major window managers, and 2 dozen
> ways to view images. 

As a counter example, take media playing software. There was a time when
winamp was the de facto way of listening to music on a PC, and even
today many media players are simply a clone of it. However, in reality
it didn't fit with the way many people listen to music, and it never
provided you a way to easily manage your music collection. The wide
selection of music players we have today is simply a reflection of the
fact that there are many different ideas floating around, and it is very
healthy.

> It is their right to do that. And if they do many people will go from Linux
> back to windows. I may be one of them if they cause enough fallout that
> it puts me out of business because none of the games my company makes
> work well enough to run any more. Yay for the moralistic viewpoint. Its now
> less usable for the things that many people want to use it for. Is that
> REALLY a good thing? There are always shades of grey in any situation.

I can see this is a sore point for you, but it could equally go the
other way. Open source could well be the best route in the long run to
decent graphics support on Linux, if this happens (before you go out of
business ;-) ) then you could well find yourself at the top of
multimillion pound Linux gaming industry.

> Open source drivers, cant include the patented code that is in them, less use
> in the first place. Dont argue that 'well patents are evil' - we KNOW they
> are - it doesnt make it any less of a fact of life.

You keep harping on about patents. There's nothing intrinsic about
patenting that makes it any different for open source than it does for
closed source. Somebody who holds a patent can pick whatever terms they
wish, and recently we've begun to see some of the big players through
the weight of their patent portfolios behind free software rather than
against it.

> No a driver is not part of the operating system it is an interface between
> the operating system and a piece of hardware. 

Do you really thing that? Most people would count everything that comes
on the OS installation CD as part of the OS. That includes, the kernel,
all drivers for any kind of software, a desktop environment, including a
web browser, music player, minesweeper, and so on. 

Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you, I'm just really surprised you
think like this. Surely as a developer of code that relies so much on
these drivers you must wish they were open source. How many times have
you hit a bug and wished you could step into the driver code/GL
implementation to see what's going on? how many times has that been for
a bug that was actually in the closed source driver, that you (or one of
your developers) could have fixed, or at least diagnosed fully and
reported upstream?

Rob



-- 
Robert Hart <enxrah at nottingham.ac.uk>
University of Nottingham


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