On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 05:03:42PM +0300, Beni Cherniavsky wrote: > The Neuros device I mentioned made the mistake of using an > undocumented (needs NDA) DSP to accellerate video, so I probably won't > buy it either. (They promised to choose better in their next design, > realizing openness is their most importatnt edge now.)
Before I say anything, I want to comment that our unit has been under development since Summer of 2003. Most of the plans discussed below were formulated in early 2004. That's the point of our unit. Except for some proprietary code which runs in a separate processor, everything is GPL'ed. If you need to use the functions of the other processor, there will be GPL'ed Linux drivers and fully publicly documented API's. With a 1gHz PIII equivalent processor, we felt we really did not need undocumented video acceleration chips. The proof of concept units have a 667 mHz processor which decodes MP1/2/4 video fine, MP3's, and played quite nicely DOS, MAME, native Linux and Windows games. We even planned to allow hardware experimentation. We originally called it hardware hacking, but one "suit" said that it sounded too much like people using it to break into computers. There was to be a header connector for access to the system bus and if we had enough demand a special back cover with room for home made daughter boards. The developer's kit would include a toolkit and documentation on a CD-ROM (same thing as the download version, but without the need to download several hundred megs or more). We also had a warranty option of replacing a damaged (for any reason) unit with one with the same DRM key for half of the list price. You just had to send back enough of it to identify it. I personally had planned to give away development kits to ideas I liked. The only restrictions were an NDA on new things until they were released, and giving us right of first refusal on any commercial sale. If you bought one and downloaded the development kit, there were no restrictions. I had assumed that if we did sold these units, people would be tempted to modify them and improve the hardware and software, so why make it difficult? The average user would not care, and in comparison to the number of units sold to people who would not modify them, it would insignificant, but that's where next years product comes from. At one time we had planned to make three models one with a low power processor from National Semiconductor (now AMD), one from VIA and one from Transmeta. it won't happen now, VIA turned out to be unfriendly to open source and people who were not the ONE they approved of. Transmeta, has bit the dust. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
