skaroo writes "Phoronix is reporting that future AMD GPUs will be more open-source friendly. After AMD started releasing their GPG specifications to the open-source community, questions arose whether there would be information covering the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) found on the Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards. The UVD information is needed in order for hardware-accelerated video playback, but it likely cannot be opened due to DRM. However, an AMD representative said that moving to a modular UVD design is a requirement for future GPUs and that they will be more open-source friendly. They will also be opening the video acceleration information for their earlier graphics cards."
...when chip manufacturers gave away the full specifications. I even received by snail-mail thick books, 500 pages or so, with the specs from companies like Texas instruments and Motorola. Some manufacturers even sent free samples of the chips themselves.
The big picture is that runaway Capitalism is where they have gone wrong. Consumer freedom is now irrelevant. What good is the free market when you can't buy what you want - namely, to keep this on topic, where can we get a powerful video card with the full specs for making open source drivers? Good luck building your own fab. Apparently only a trillionaire can afford such simple freedoms.
This is clearly an example where capitalism fails miserably.
(Uh oh, here come the angry "Capitalism is God, how dare you
I don't have mod points but I'll agree with you here. With one caveat. The "free market" (can't exist btw, it's just a idealized concept) IS working how it's supposed to. There isn't really a demand for an open platform GPU and thus the market doesn't provide one. If there were enough people wanting one that a company could make money selling them then you could buy it. Capitalism does tend to screw the little guys who have niche or obscure needs, unless you can pay to get things custom designed and produced.
But it looks like AMD is finally going to start servicing that section of the market, I'm still skeptical but we'll see how things turn out.
Capitalism is working, only slowly. Open APIs and open source drivers weren't a selling point, so they weren't available. Now with the slowly rising popularity of Linux, and the realization that Linux users are generally more influential in the purchase of hardware than the average buyer, the APIs and drivers will open up.
It's important that we, as a community, reward the good guys (with more purchases) and to let the sales people know why we choose them over their competitors.
That being said, I'm a little ambivalent about the whole AMD/ATI video mess. They've been talking this up for the last year, but have the 3d specs for the hardware been released? Is there a stable opensource driver for Linux even close to the performance of the WinXP/Vista drivers (I don't know).
There is a fairly stable closed source ATI driver from the AMD website that supports AIGLX (required for Compiz).
As for ATI open source drivers refer to this list [ubuntu.com]. Copy and pasted for convenience:
Unsupported X1300 / R515 based cards. X1600 / R530 based cards. X1800 / R520 based cards. X1900 / R580 based cards.
2D acceleration only Xpress 200M Northbridge integrated GPUs
Good 3D acceleration support 9500 / R300 based cards. 9600 / rv350 or rv360 based cards. 9700 / R300 based cards. 9800 / R350 or R360 based cards. X300 / rv370 based cards. X600 / rv380 based cards. X700 / rv410 based cards. X800 / R420 or R423 or R430 or R480 based cards. X850 / R480 or R481 based cards. X1050 / rv370 based cards.
Full 3D acceleration support 7000 / rv100 based cards. 7200 / R100 based cards. 7500 / rv200 based cards. 8X00 / R200 based cards. 9000 / rv250 based cards. 9100 / R200 based cards. 9200 / rv280 based cards.
Well, recently, it seemed pretty obvious to me -- Intel always has good, open video drivers. But, the performance on Intel video cards sucks compared to nVidia or ATI. ATI is more open, but their Linux drivers suck, and have pretty much always sucked, for new hardware. You could get a free driver for old hardware, but not everything would be supported.
nVidia is completely closed, but their Linux drivers generally work. You pretty much never have to worry, when upgrading your kernel, whether you're going to b
The "free market" (can't exist btw, it's just a idealized concept) IS working how it's supposed to.
Actually, the classic "free market", as an idealized concept, requires commodities that can be produced by multiple people/companies, with little or no barrier to entry, knowledgeable buyers, and the flexibility to switch products at will as supply, demand, and prices dictate.
The current situation with graphics cards fails those prerequisites on all counts.
The problem is that those big companies don't care. The free market idea assumes that if there is enough need, someone will supply something to fill it.
I hate this "big company" rhetoric. Let me ask you a question, how did these big companies become big companies? If there is enough need it will happen, no matter what the current providers want to happen, due to the creation of new companies and new players. Notice how Intel has now made moves into the graphical arena, and note that their are still gra
I think the problem is not too much capitalism, it is too little. Adam Smith's free markets have been replaced by an international neo-conservative monarchy and nobility.
Among certain industries, free markets have been replaced by cartels. These cartels then send out waves of lobbyists and campaign contributions to get governments to further weight the system against the consumer.
If you look at how the airplane developed, the market was hampered by cartels, patents and so on. However, in the two world wars, the war effort was considered more important than entrenched interests within the early aviation industry. All these cartels and patents were swept aside in favour of truly free markers, and they could finally build decent planes, and build them in quantity.
Society is slowly but surely going to realise that computers are more important for the development of the economy and society as a whole than for the narrow interests of the technology industry, and then radically free markets will be introduced once again.
Look at the Microsoft vs EU decision and the OLPC project, both of these in their different ways are interesting early signs.
Ah, but in the world wars, the bill was footed by the taxpayers. Only the influx from government money was able to push forward the necessary research under these conditions.
If you change the rules to treat all products as commodities, then only commodities will get built. If you abandon patents, companies will try to protect their knowledge keeping more trade secrets. Products will become less open. If you legislate that possiblity away(*), then research and advanced development will simply stall, becau
Ah, but in the world wars, the bill was footed by the taxpayers. Only the influx from government money was able to push forward the necessary research under these conditions.
I think it is important to separate the supply side from the demand side. Ditching all the patents and agreements and so on was a supply-side change. The government needing lots of planes for the war is on the demand side.
So yes the money is part of it, but I think the longer lasting effect was on liberating the supply, it did need the
I think the problem is not too much capitalism, it is too little. Adam Smith's free markets have been replaced by an international neo-conservative monarchy and nobility.
I'm not sure I agree. I think there's plenty of capitalism, but I also think that capitalism is a lot like freedom - if you take it forgranted, you'll eventually get screwed. Participation in an capitalistic society is an active process, not a passive one. The passivity is born from laziness. Change only really seems to happen when somethin
We don't have free market capitalism in the western world. Most markets are tightly controlled and made mostly worthless - hence all our technological development hasn't made most of us rich. What happens to us these days doesn't happen in free markets thus the markets are not free.
Markets start free, they just become non-free through layers of government intervention and large firms colluding. Certain agricultural products are more or less free markets, as well as light bulbs, screws, etc.
The resistances in the system are not physical properties of nature but man made structures. The problems are never that the speed of light is too slow or gravity is too strong. The problem is that those who think they are against government intervention, often are the first to argue for patents, trademarks, trade barriers, special protections, and so on.
Free markets are the optimal solution for the majority of the population, both as consumers and employees. Cartels only benefit the minority.
If governments became truly accountable to voters, such that the voters could clearly get actual representatives, rather than a choice of two identical people who will ignore the voters for the next four-five years, then I don't see why the interference cannot be removed in most industries if the will was there.
``If governments became truly accountable to voters,...''...and voters actually had a clue,...
I mean, seriously. You can't know everything about everything. And when it comes to economics, I'm willing to bet most voters believe things that are the absolute opposite of what experts believe. I think many of the barriers we have in our markets are there exactly because voters want them to be.
If large firms colluding means I can do less than them except as provided by real economies of scale then it is not free because I am not equally free.
You can't have one person ruling the roost and everybody else subservient and then think they have freedom. Crikey, you must be pro slavery - a free country is one in which people are free to wholly own other people?
> Isn't the point of a free market that they are free to do anything they want?
No it is not. Being free does not mean you can remove the freedoms of others. Having free speech does not mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre if there is no fire. Freedom of speech also requires some enforcement to keep it free, speech is not free if you get sacked or killed for speaking,
So what do we mean by 'free'? Well markets are free when the prices, quantity and quality (i.e. features) of products are determin
>The big picture is that runaway Capitalism is where they have gone wrong.
Capitalism is about free competition. CRM, the cited problem here, is about regulation. Regulation is not the same as free competition.
Some people have a tendency to think that when exploitation and capitalizing on other people is going on, then automatically capitalism is to blame. It is of course not that simple. Exploitation and capitalizing on others happen under capitalism, but also under a lot of other systems.
>The big picture is that runaway Capitalism is where they have gone wrong.
Capitalism is about free competition. DRM, the cited problem here, is about regulation. Regulation is not the same as free competition.
Some people have a tendency to think that when exploitation and capitalizing on other people is going on, then automatically capitalism is to blame. It is of course not that simple. Exploitation and capitalizing on others happen under capitalism, but also under a lot of other systems.
Socialism (communism, really) is based on the idea that people are not content with leisure but instead a) have an inner drive to create and b) understand that doing chores because they have to be done is better than doing chores because your boss tells you to. It's naive, but if you look at certain segments of the population, it is understandable how one could get that idea, particularly because in capitalism the people who exhibit these traits tend to miss out on the rewards compared to people who are in
Socialism (communism, really) is based on the idea that people are not content with leisure but instead a) have an inner drive to create and b) understand that doing chores because they have to be done is better than doing chores because your boss tells you to.
More to the point, socialism, fascism, and communism are based on the idea that central planning works. I am sure there are many more -isms which fit this bill.
It is easy to extend this to politics in general. People who want to be politicians think
All politicians think some degree of control over society is required. It's not an idea unique to communism, socialism, or fascism. Also, every successful nation engages in 'central planning' to some degree (ever hear of the ECB and the FED). In respect to your specific point about 'central planning', one can clearly argue that it does work as:
(a) China has raised the standard of living for 100's of millions of people in a few decades by a percentage much larger than what the west has achieved this century.
I suppose you mean in theory as opposed to practice, just as many remarks on capitalism are confused between theory and practice. However, since all modern and historical governments which have called themselves communists did have central planning, I stand by my definition.
Reminds me of friends who brag about being communists, "but not Stalinists".
What I'm saying is, if you list socialism and communism, you can't ignore what separates them. Otherwise, what's the point of listing both? Socialism and communism aren't synonymous political and economical systems just because people call socialist states "communist" to lure or scare others. If you had just written "communism, like fascism, is based on the idea that central planning works," I would have simply ascribed that to the usual imprecise use of the word communism. By listing both, you insinuate th
I agree with the general message of your post, but I have to nitpick.
``As demand grows, you'll see more vendors opening up specs. It's their right to do so or not, and your right to vote with your wallet.''
Your right to vote with your wallet is only useful if you _can_ vote with your wallet. If nobody will sell you hardware with available specs for a price that you can afford, what will you do?
``The only place OSS is making a dent is server space. Why do you need an advanced GPU on your server?''
A number of points can be made here. First of all, open source is making inroads in other places than server space, too. I don't have exact figures (nobody does), but I see KDE, GNOME, and fvwm desktops often enough. Wal-Mart and Dell are selling PCs with Linux pre-installed. Many routers and like devices use Linux and Busybox. All development work I've been involved in used open source, usually exclusively or almost exclusively. Open source web browsers hold a sizable chunk of the market.
Another point is that there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It doesn't make a lot of sense to open specs for the hardware if this will only benefit you a little. So you don't do that if only few people are asking. It doesn't help a lot to ask for specs if you aren't going to get them anyway. So few people ask. There also isn't a lot of software in th open source world that would see a great benefit from working 3D. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to start developing that software if 3D doesn't work anyway.
This is the pit the world's been in, but it's slowly changing. Nvidia has made available good 3D drivers, allowing 3D software to be developed. Now there are Neverwinter Nights, Compiz, Blender, etc. Apparently, Intel has seen value in supporting open source, and there are good open source drivers for Intel graphics cards. And the number of people using open source software appears to be growing. Certainly, awareness of open source is greater than it was, say, 10 years ago. Day by day, the landscape is changing.
You still get full specs [microchip.com] from many companies. Free samples [microchip.com] are still around. Though it sadly doesn't seem to be popular with PC components.
...when chip manufacturers gave away the full specifications. I even received by snail-mail thick books, 500 pages or so, with the specs from companies like Texas instruments and Motorola. Some manufacturers even sent free samples of the chips themselves.
That still happens. All chip manufacturers still give away full specs for chips that are traded at the open market.
The thing is: your mind is also fooling you. While simple stuff like small CPUs and other cheap integrated circuits always had documentat
Wrong to who? The minority hobbiest? The people who really need the specs have their boss pay for them as well as agree to all the needed NDAs. They're not the ones complaining.
Um, yes they are. Name me ONE 3rd party X-server vendor that supports current ATI graphics products.
Since we're living in the past. I also remember when chips were a lot less complex and came in ECL, TTL, and BiCMOS.*
IIRC, the most complex chip for which the manufacturer sent me the full data book and a free sample was the Motorola 68020, this was around 1988. Of course, at that time very few people had CD-ROM drives, so it made sense to use paper books for that.
Wrong to who? The minority hobbiest? The people who really need the specs have their boss pay for them as well as agree to all the needed NDAs. T
Hopefully they will also be more commercial-source friendly as well. I've "resorted" to buying XiG [xig.com]'s product in the past, because Xorg wasn't working quite right for me... but I (and many others with driver problems [phoronix.com]) simply don't have that option unless AMD passes the info to commercial vendors such as these as well. Yes, I know FOSS is all that, but when you need things to Just Work, sometimes it's easier to pay the money.
I just upgraded my system. I'm not a big graphics user but I bought an ATI HD 2600 Pro over an Nvidia card because AMD seem to be really supportive of Open Source at the moment. Driver support will catch up with me soon enough and I expect ATI cards to end up the best supported cards under Linux, until Nvidia starts following.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Nvidia cards are supported just fine under Linux. Just because they aren't supported how you like, doesn't mean they aren't supported. Not that I wouldn't like it if they opened up their specifications, though.
You know, I remember an NVIDIA engineer complaining to me about how they'd had to do a bunch of really fucked up stuff to get the G80 GPUs to support HD playback on Vista. I'm pretty sure Intel's latest stuff has to deal with the same bullshit too. So really, the title of your post should read "Don't buy post-Vista GPUs". That kinda puts a damper on the whole 3D graphics thing, doesn't it?
Better advice would be, "Don't run your new GPU on an OS that forces it to enable the stupid DRM logic that the engineers really didn't want to build into it in the first place." Yeah, that's much better.
I was speaking to a X driver developer on IRC a few weeks back, and in the course of discussion, he claimed AMD hadn't yet released specs for the 3D engine of *any* of their GPU's yet. Is this true?
I don't believe AMD/ATI. their video cards have always had really bad unix support.
nvidia is no better, really. their 8-series still has zero accel linux video (HD) support. even their XP (!) drivers don't fully support their own chips and this is almost a year after the 8's came out.
when I can use full mpeg and avc playback in linux, I'll believe AMD/ATI. but until that day, its all lies and false promises.
I don't think you're being fair on AMD. It wasn't too long ago that they announced that they would be releasing documentation for some of their GPUs, and people (understandably) didn't believe them. But then they actually did it a couple of weeks later! [phoronix.com]
As they came good on their last promise, I'm willing to believe them on this one.
In the end it doesn't really matter whether we believe them or not, though. What matters is whether they end up doing it, and no one should rush to buy their GPUs until they have
nVidia got a) open source 2D driver b) closed source 3D driver The hardware is good, the driver is good and the installation of proprietary drivers is extremely easy in my favorite distro. If you want to get back on my computer (I bought one ATI card, flaky POS) then I want open source 3D specs. No secret registries or features that makes it half-assed compared to closed source. That is, *after* you've released the specs for the most recent cards and OSS developers have had some time to work on it. There's no
..it's the only conclusion I can reach. ATi drivers are going to be Linux-friendly, the courts and colleges are actively pushing back against the RIAA and MPAA, both of which are starting to change their business model, and Duke Nukem Forever is actually going to be done at some point.
This sounds like kids complaining about dessert when they haven't even started the main course. While it would be nice to have hardware-accelerated video playback, video plays just fine on most Linux/BSD systems today. Linux/BSD needs accelerated 3D graphics much more. It's not easy to write a really good OpenGL driver for an advanced video card like that (actually, it's several video cards, which makes it even harder to write and test). Maybe AMD will change their minds in the couple of years it takes the
I see you haven't tried playing HD content without hardware acceleration. I've got some video clips that can't be played on a reasonable-spec laptop (1.8G Core Duo, 2G RAM) unless I'm using the proprietary ATI driver - and even then, the only way to get nice-looking picture is to render to opengl interface.
They are talking about ensuring that in 1 to 2 years time, video acceleration will be architected to be open-source accessible without compromising DRM (if they continue to implement that).
Contrast this to nVidia which for the GeForce 8 series they've decided to stop supporting XvMC in their closed-source driver.
From my perspective, currently if you are buying a new video card, your system is probably already able to keep up with 1920x1080 playback using only the CPU. In a year to two years time, I can't imagine the generation of systems not being able to cope. XvMC only helps for MPEG-2, wasn't updated to be usable for more advanced codecs. I've seen at least discussion toward changing that, but I think the community is in largely a 'what's the point?' sort of mentality.
As much as I'm all for this strategy, if it costs them a significant amount in terms of production cost someway, it may not be worth the benefit, which is relegated mostly to a token gesture now. The 3D acceleration and, by association, the proccesing capabilities of the GPU are far more interesting. It sounds like they face no insurmountable obstacles in releasing those specs (though they have taken their sweet time about it since their announcement a few months ago).
And as far as raw performance goes, Intel GPU's are a bit 2nd division. Granted that they have opened up their specs. However this has tipped the hand of ATI(AMD) and Nvidia to do the same with theirs. After all, how many top notch graphics cards are there on the market that use Intel GPU's?
Here, AMD seem to be saying that we are looking at ways to change parts of the GPU so that bits that we can't get permission to release(patents DRM etc etc) are no longer used. To me, that is good news. That statement has nowt to do with Intel or Nvidia. This is an ongoing process and will not happen overnight. Remember that Sun took a long time to open up the Solaris source code due to licensing issues. IMHO, this is just the same process.
I remember a time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Where have they gone wrong?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Consumer freedom is now irrelevant. What good is the free market when you can't buy what you want - namely, to keep this on topic, where can we get a powerful video card with the full specs for making open source drivers? Good luck building your own fab. Apparently only a trillionaire can afford such simple freedoms.
This is clearly an example where capitalism fails miserably.
(Uh oh, here come the angry "Capitalism is God, how dare you
Re:I remember a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it looks like AMD is finally going to start servicing that section of the market, I'm still skeptical but we'll see how things turn out.
Parent
Re:I remember a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important that we, as a community, reward the good guys (with more purchases) and to let the sales people know why we choose them over their competitors.
That being said, I'm a little ambivalent about the whole AMD/ATI video mess. They've been talking this up for the last year, but have the 3d specs for the hardware been released? Is there a stable opensource driver for Linux even close to the performance of the WinXP/Vista drivers (I don't know).
Parent
Re:I remember a time... (Score:5, Informative)
There is a fairly stable closed source ATI driver from the AMD website that supports AIGLX (required for Compiz).
As for ATI open source drivers refer to this list [ubuntu.com]. Copy and pasted for convenience:
Unsupported
X1300 / R515 based cards.
X1600 / R530 based cards.
X1800 / R520 based cards.
X1900 / R580 based cards.
2D acceleration only
Xpress 200M Northbridge integrated GPUs
Good 3D acceleration support
9500 / R300 based cards.
9600 / rv350 or rv360 based cards.
9700 / R300 based cards.
9800 / R350 or R360 based cards.
X300 / rv370 based cards.
X600 / rv380 based cards.
X700 / rv410 based cards.
X800 / R420 or R423 or R430 or R480 based cards.
X850 / R480 or R481 based cards.
X1050 / rv370 based cards.
Full 3D acceleration support
7000 / rv100 based cards.
7200 / R100 based cards.
7500 / rv200 based cards.
8X00 / R200 based cards.
9000 / rv250 based cards.
9100 / R200 based cards.
9200 / rv280 based cards.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
ATI is more open, but their Linux drivers suck, and have pretty much always sucked, for new hardware. You could get a free driver for old hardware, but not everything would be supported.
nVidia is completely closed, but their Linux drivers generally work. You pretty much never have to worry, when upgrading your kernel, whether you're going to b
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the classic "free market", as an idealized concept, requires commodities that can be produced by multiple people/companies, with little or no barrier to entry, knowledgeable buyers, and the flexibility to switch products at will as supply, demand, and prices dictate.
The current situation with graphics cards fails those prerequisites on all counts.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate this "big company" rhetoric. Let me ask you a question, how did these big companies become big companies? If there is enough need it will happen, no matter what the current providers want to happen, due to the creation of new companies and new players. Notice how Intel has now made moves into the graphical arena, and note that their are still gra
Re:I remember a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Among certain industries, free markets have been replaced by cartels. These cartels then send out waves of lobbyists and campaign contributions to get governments to further weight the system against the consumer.
If you look at how the airplane developed, the market was hampered by cartels, patents and so on. However, in the two world wars, the war effort was considered more important than entrenched interests within the early aviation industry. All these cartels and patents were swept aside in favour of truly free markers, and they could finally build decent planes, and build them in quantity.
Society is slowly but surely going to realise that computers are more important for the development of the economy and society as a whole than for the narrow interests of the technology industry, and then radically free markets will be introduced once again.
Look at the Microsoft vs EU decision and the OLPC project, both of these in their different ways are interesting early signs.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you change the rules to treat all products as commodities, then only commodities will get built. If you abandon patents, companies will try to protect their knowledge keeping more trade secrets. Products will become less open. If you legislate that possiblity away(*), then research and advanced development will simply stall, becau
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it is important to separate the supply side from the demand side. Ditching all the patents and agreements and so on was a supply-side change. The government needing lots of planes for the war is on the demand side.
So yes the money is part of it, but I think the longer lasting effect was on liberating the supply, it did need the
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure I agree. I think there's plenty of capitalism, but I also think that capitalism is a lot like freedom - if you take it forgranted, you'll eventually get screwed. Participation in an capitalistic society is an active process, not a passive one. The passivity is born from laziness. Change only really seems to happen when somethin
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Why not?
Re:I remember a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
The resistances in the system are not physical properties of nature but man made structures. The problems are never that the speed of light is too slow or gravity is too strong. The problem is that those who think they are against government intervention, often are the first to argue for patents, trademarks, trade barriers, special protections, and so on.
Free markets are the optimal solution for the majority of the population, both as consumers and employees. Cartels only benefit the minority.
If governments became truly accountable to voters, such that the voters could clearly get actual representatives, rather than a choice of two identical people who will ignore the voters for the next four-five years, then I don't see why the interference cannot be removed in most industries if the will was there.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, seriously. You can't know everything about everything. And when it comes to economics, I'm willing to bet most voters believe things that are the absolute opposite of what experts believe. I think many of the barriers we have in our markets are there exactly because voters want them to be.
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You can't have one person ruling the roost and everybody else subservient and then think they have freedom. Crikey, you must be pro slavery - a free country is one in which people are free to wholly own other people?
Re: (Score:2)
No it is not. Being free does not mean you can remove the freedoms of others. Having free speech does not mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre if there is no fire. Freedom of speech also requires some enforcement to keep it free, speech is not free if you get sacked or killed for speaking,
So what do we mean by 'free'? Well markets are free when the prices, quantity and quality (i.e. features) of products are determin
Not capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism is about free competition. CRM, the cited problem here, is about regulation. Regulation is not the same as free competition.
Some people have a tendency to think that when exploitation and capitalizing on other people is going on, then automatically capitalism is to blame. It is of course not that simple. Exploitation and capitalizing on others happen under capitalism, but also under a lot of other systems.
This time it is
Not capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism is about free competition. DRM, the cited problem here, is about regulation. Regulation is not the same as free competition.
Some people have a tendency to think that when exploitation and capitalizing on other people is going on, then automatically capitalism is to blame. It is of course not that simple. Exploitation and capitalizing on others happen under capitalism, but also under a lot of other systems.
This time it is
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
More to the point, socialism, fascism, and communism are based on the idea that central planning works. I am sure there are many more -isms which fit this bill.
It is easy to extend this to politics in general. People who want to be politicians think
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In respect to your specific point about 'central planning', one can clearly argue that it does work as:
(a) China has raised the standard of living for 100's of millions of people in a few decades by a percentage much larger than what the west has achieved this century.
Re:I remember a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminds me of friends who brag about being communists, "but not Stalinists".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I remember a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
``As demand grows, you'll see more vendors opening up specs. It's their right to do so or not, and your right to vote with your wallet.''
Your right to vote with your wallet is only useful if you _can_ vote with your wallet. If nobody will sell you hardware with available specs for a price that you can afford, what will you do?
``The only place OSS is making a dent is server space. Why do you need an advanced GPU on your server?''
A number of points can be made here. First of all, open source is making inroads in other places than server space, too. I don't have exact figures (nobody does), but I see KDE, GNOME, and fvwm desktops often enough. Wal-Mart and Dell are selling PCs with Linux pre-installed. Many routers and like devices use Linux and Busybox. All development work I've been involved in used open source, usually exclusively or almost exclusively. Open source web browsers hold a sizable chunk of the market.
Another point is that there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It doesn't make a lot of sense to open specs for the hardware if this will only benefit you a little. So you don't do that if only few people are asking. It doesn't help a lot to ask for specs if you aren't going to get them anyway. So few people ask. There also isn't a lot of software in th open source world that would see a great benefit from working 3D. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to start developing that software if 3D doesn't work anyway.
This is the pit the world's been in, but it's slowly changing. Nvidia has made available good 3D drivers, allowing 3D software to be developed. Now there are Neverwinter Nights, Compiz, Blender, etc. Apparently, Intel has seen value in supporting open source, and there are good open source drivers for Intel graphics cards. And the number of people using open source software appears to be growing. Certainly, awareness of open source is greater than it was, say, 10 years ago. Day by day, the landscape is changing.
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That still happens. All chip manufacturers still give away full specs for chips that are traded at the open market.
The thing is: your mind is also fooling you. While simple stuff like small CPUs and other cheap integrated circuits always had documentat
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IIRC, the most complex chip for which the manufacturer sent me the full data book and a free sample was the Motorola 68020, this was around 1988. Of course, at that time very few people had CD-ROM drives, so it made sense to use paper books for that.
Hopefully... (Score:2)
Worked for me. (Score:2)
I just upgraded my system. I'm not a big graphics user but I bought an ATI HD 2600 Pro over an Nvidia card because AMD seem to be really supportive of Open Source at the moment. Driver support will catch up with me soon enough and I expect ATI cards to end up the best supported cards under Linux, until Nvidia starts following.
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Don't buy AMD. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Correction: Don't buy Vista. (Score:5, Interesting)
Better advice would be, "Don't run your new GPU on an OS that forces it to enable the stupid DRM logic that the engineers really didn't want to build into it in the first place." Yeah, that's much better.
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AMD haven't released all the specs yet? (Score:2)
I was speaking to a X driver developer on IRC a few weeks back, and in the course of discussion, he claimed AMD hadn't yet released specs for the 3D engine of *any* of their GPU's yet. Is this true?
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liars (Score:2)
nvidia is no better, really. their 8-series still has zero accel linux video (HD) support. even their XP (!) drivers don't fully support their own chips and this is almost a year after the 8's came out.
when I can use full mpeg and avc playback in linux, I'll believe AMD/ATI. but until that day, its all lies and false promises.
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As they came good on their last promise, I'm willing to believe them on this one.
In the end it doesn't really matter whether we believe them or not, though. What matters is whether they end up doing it, and no one should rush to buy their GPUs until they have
Promises, promises... (Score:2)
a) open source 2D driver
b) closed source 3D driver
The hardware is good, the driver is good and the installation of proprietary drivers is extremely easy in my favorite distro. If you want to get back on my computer (I bought one ATI card, flaky POS) then I want open source 3D specs. No secret registries or features that makes it half-assed compared to closed source. That is, *after* you've released the specs for the most recent cards and OSS developers have had some time to work on it. There's no
The End Times are Near (Score:5, Funny)
Hold me, I'm scared.
This sounds ridiculous to me (Score:2)
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I've got some video clips that can't be played on a reasonable-spec laptop (1.8G Core Duo, 2G RAM) unless I'm using the proprietary ATI driver - and even then, the only way to get nice-looking picture is to render to opengl interface.
Specifically... (Score:3, Insightful)
Contrast this to nVidia which for the GeForce 8 series they've decided to stop supporting XvMC in their closed-source driver.
From my perspective, currently if you are buying a new video card, your system is probably already able to keep up with 1920x1080 playback using only the CPU. In a year to two years time, I can't imagine the generation of systems not being able to cope. XvMC only helps for MPEG-2, wasn't updated to be usable for more advanced codecs. I've seen at least discussion toward changing that, but I think the community is in largely a 'what's the point?' sort of mentality.
As much as I'm all for this strategy, if it costs them a significant amount in terms of production cost someway, it may not be worth the benefit, which is relegated mostly to a token gesture now. The 3D acceleration and, by association, the proccesing capabilities of the GPU are far more interesting. It sounds like they face no insurmountable obstacles in releasing those specs (though they have taken their sweet time about it since their announcement a few months ago).
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The Artiicle is abot GPU's not CPU's (Score:5, Informative)
And as far as raw performance goes, Intel GPU's are a bit 2nd division. Granted that they have opened up their specs. However this has tipped the hand of ATI(AMD) and Nvidia to do the same with theirs.
After all, how many top notch graphics cards are there on the market that use Intel GPU's?
Here, AMD seem to be saying that we are looking at ways to change parts of the GPU so that bits that we can't get permission to release(patents DRM etc etc) are no longer used. To me, that is good news. That statement has nowt to do with Intel or Nvidia.
This is an ongoing process and will not happen overnight. Remember that Sun took a long time to open up the Solaris source code due to licensing issues. IMHO, this is just the same process.
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