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Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 30, 2007 05:23 PM
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later dept.
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later dept.
mrneutron2004 writes "A French physician and ardent Linux supporter is the one man you can all thank for adding support for 352 webcams in Linux. The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows, but efforts like this make you wonder. One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do. And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."
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Hey Scuttlemonkey (Score:5, Funny)
Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
s/can/wants to/g
There. Fixed that for you.
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Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Title? 253
Article text/Slashdot summary? 352
Article photo caption? 235
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For once (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)
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Dear Michel Xhaard (Score:5, Insightful)
But not, apparently... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But not, apparently... (Score:5, Informative)
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I hate this.. (Score:5, Informative)
Donation Link?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd donate a few bucks.
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Not 352 seperate drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not 352 seperate drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Schwab
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Re:253 or 352? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently he really enjoyed the project, because he went and did basically the same thing a few hundred times more. Good for him.
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Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
What if its been sat in a drawer for years 'cos it worked "sometimes" and you didn't find a real use because of the stability?
What if it was second hand?
Some people cannot afford to waste money buying extra kit and won't look the gift horse in the mouth.
We have become such a wasteful generation.
If something doesn't quite work right, we throw it away.
Cameras are technically simple and most will work in a similar manner (theres only so many ways you can send the same data across a wire). My bet is this guy has created a core driver and is using variants on the devices, this allows all those useless cameras before to now be usable. There must be millions of similar working devices around the world.
Why bitch at him for helping?
People now won't have to suffer with crap 'cos they can be made to work well (apparently).
props to him.
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Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Informative)
No, you misunderstand. The person who gave up on W2K is the reporter, not the guy who created the drivers. The guy who wrote the drivers did it because he bought webcams for his daughters and they didn't have drivers.
As for you comment, it's not the camera that has the problem; it's the drivers, and that's what he fixed for Linux. In your analogy, it's more like buying a used car with a heavy discount because it has a dirty air filter. If you know that the car is perfectly fine with a new air filter, why not buy it? A famous man once said, "A dirty air filter does not a bad car make." (Okay, I admit it, it was me, just then, and I guess I'm not that famous.)
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Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
In Linux, this is possible. You actually have chances of getting somebody knowledgeable to tell you that the hardware itself sucks (there used to be comments about how much realtek hardware sucks somewhere in the kernel source), or that the driver isn't properly written. Linux also makes it easy to make it possible for people to tell you so: somebody can tell you to run "lspci -v" and "dmesg" and paste it into your mail, which is easy even if you have no clue what all that stuff is.
Windows on the other hand, gets more and more obscure with each passing day. Starting from XP it reboots instead of letting you see the BSOD, so without considerable effort you can't even find what went wrong. You go to make tea, come back, and the box mysteriosly rebooted meanwhile. Windows installations are also often infested with spyware, which makes it a lot harder to figure out what exactly is going wrong, as something going wrong in bizarre ways is depressingly common.
There's also that consumers are simply not informed. Most people don't spend time googling around to try to find out whether the webcam they're about to buy is any good. If they find reviews, often they will be by somebody who tried it for 15 minutes, which will miss any longer term issues. About the only way of a bad one getting abandoned by consumers is that it's such incredible crap that even people with no experience at all see it's horrible and return it.
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Re:Object oriented? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:how many? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:how many? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:WOW!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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