____/ High Plains Thumper on Sunday 16 September 2007 00:22 : \____
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> High Plains Thumper on Saturday:
>>
>>>>>>> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=821&num=1
>
>>> This is indeed good news. Last time I used ATI for Linux
>>> gaming was with the Rage II card, which at the time was a
>>> decent chipset. After that I went to nVidia. Now, I have
>>> the Radeon 9550 with 256 MB on it, but haven't done too much
>>> with it with respect to gaming. Looks like I'll be back in
>>> business soon. :-)
>>
>> Yes, all those cards are used to curse are suddenly blessed
>> (and the "good" NVidia cards are suddenly proprietary
>> "garbage"). Since drivers are fetched over the Web, your
>> hardware turns from zero to hero overnight.
>>
>> I knew about this in advance. AMD was very excited about it
>> and their image is likely to improve now, among those who are
>> approached for technical recommendations.
>>
>> NVidia will follow suit. They pretty much have to. Intel and
>> AMD are already on the "open" side. NVidia is now perceived as
>> one that remains the sole player in the "evil" team.
>
> I have to agree. With ATI going open may be the catalyst nVidia
> needs to follow suit. I am sensing proprietary moulds are being
> broken. This will take gaming potential to new heights. :-)
NVidia has faced a great deal of scrutiny recently because of /major/ flaws in
their drivers -- flaws that actually exposed the entire kernel (multiple
platform). Their blob is poison inside your PC because the quality of the code
is low (that's what they say about code worth hiding, not taking pride in).
Prepare for people to ask them for the source code next time a security
researcher raises a red flag. They need more eyeballs. Developers who create
other software/driver for their hardware will easily be able to spot problems
and the feedback is _free_. Be aware that over 70,000 people downloaded AMD's
specs just 11 hours after they had been published. That's (potentially) a lot
or peer review. They should set up some mailing lists and extend the 'family'
to include unpaid programmers that want to help (a side effect of working on
their own project).
I was involved in WordPress for a 2-3 years and as a /user/ and tweaker of this
software (running 3 blogs of mine) I was able to comment on the code and offer
improvements. Hundreds or thousands of people do the same thing. Others build
plugins. That's what made it such a powerful project that drives over a
million Web sites. The scale of the developer community is immense. It was all
made possible thanks to open source (GPL) and what started as a tweak to B2
(Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, whom I met because he lives in Stockport).
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Have you hugged your penguin today?
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
|
|
