>* If I have a choice between two pieces of hardware that both have
>really good performance, and roughly the same price, but one has open
>specifications, and one does not, I'm going to go with the one that
>has open specifications. That's why.
Do we expect the specs to be both open and complete?
>* Companies (no matter how long it has taken them) that decide to open
>up their hardware specifications (to the full extent of legal
>allowance) should be commended. Sun did this for for their newest
>SPARC processors.
Yes, but the openess of the SPARC CPUs is a bit of a red herring; the
CPU layout is of little use if you want to develop code for it; only
if you want to develop a silicon solution.
>* When you have a system that you want to know absolutely every part
>of it, a black box is an artificial barrier. I miss the days of my old
>Apple when the schematics came with the system or were freely and
>publicly available. The days when a soldering iron and some rosin core
>was a geek's best friend are greatly missed by me.
Right but those days will never return because the components have
all been shrunk.
>> ATI on the other hand has had crap. Superblitz graphics accelerators which
>> had crap for drivers,
so much so even Windows users complained how crappy it was.
For the foreseeable future you will have:
- Excellent nVidia performance and support
- ATI documentation but not likely more than 2D drivers.
By the time that there is acceptable 3D performance in opensource,
I guess it's time to replace your hardware again anyway.
Also, where do we expect to get the expertise from for writing
3D drivers in the opensource community and how soon will this happen?
Do any open source 3D drivers of comparable performance even exist?
>Sorry, but people that have a strong background in 3D hardware
>disagree with you. Read some of the articles on www.beyond3d.com.
>You'll discover that ATi's hardware is often superior in design to
>nVidia's from a technical standpoint. However, their drivers have
>often disappointed.
Well, you know, I take "reliable excellent performance" over
"potentially superior but I can't really tell because it
crashes all the time" any day.
Casper
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