Slashdot Mirror
Can Open Source Save Hardware?
Culexus writes "Tom's Hardware has a interesting story about Open Source saving the hardware industry. Pretty good read all in all. Hopefully chip makers and vendors won't have to bend to the iron might of Microsoft any longer." Some good comments on how early-adopters and enthusiasts are being marginalized by the industry, too.
See, for example, www.opencores.org.
Open Hardware Project
Enjoy. Most of it's still rather raw, and most of it's based off m68k, so don't expect to run "real" linux on it (uClinux is often the objective though).
Yeah, Tom's is pretty good for hardware reviews, but my impression is that when they do "editorials" it isn't good. Saying nothing real. The other ones I've read were so forgettable, I can't remember what they were about.
I'll tell you what pisses off the vast majority of hardware companies:
If a significant number of them act as their customers would like, they will only be able to compete on hardware.
What hardware vendors *should* do is open up the specs to their hardware. If they are especially competitive, fund the development of open source drivers.
The fact is that hardware with well defined and open specs works brilliantly in linux and the BSDs. Thats because the drivers are generally better written, usually because the drivers can share infrastructure and code from drivers from similar hardware, and these drivers are often written by the same people.
Hardware vendors who do not open their specs or write drivers for Linux are writing themselves out of the future.
If a driver is accepted into the mainline kernel, and has an appreciable userbase, its very unlikely that there will be a lot of tech support issues - IF the hardware isn't flaky.
And thats what they hate. A huge amount of vendors make *really* bad hardware. If it becomes known that a bit of hardware works well in linux, more people buy it. As Linux market share increases, *this* PR ( the hardware is actually *good* and *works*) will take over from the MS crap ( the hardware company has some agreement with MS that says *nothing* about the quality of the hardware).
I know which kind of PR I take more seriously.
Don't link to Tom's Hardware anymore Slashdot. This past week they threatened to sue AMDMB.com for defamatory comments.
D =243
http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleI
I had to call them on 6 separate occasions because of changed hardware, two of which were apparent "maintenance" downtimes during which they could not verify my installation. I had to call back on the following business day and not use my PC until then. Irritating, but not a real deal breaker. I may have just had bad luck.
/boot && cp /boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage.backup && cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/bzImage && umount /boot && reboot). Hit enter, go make a sandwich, eat it and - Poof! You're set. That may have been a valid argument 3 or 4 years ago, but not really today.
And the kernel comment is silly. Even if you're not using a distro's modular kernel (which would already have the necessary modules for you to use new hardware and most major distros have auto hardware detection), recompiling on nifty new hardware only takes 5 - 10 minutes and requires zero user interaction beyond the command line step ( make clean bzImage modules modules_install && mount
I think part of the problem vendors face is that the Linux device driver API/ABI is constantly changing, between major releases and even with "stable" kernel series. I know Linus does not want to bloat his kernel with backwards compatibility support, but why can't the kernel developers define a stable, well-defined device driver API/ABI? If a vendor wants super-performance, they could side step the standard device driver API and directly access other kernel functions. Linus seems to favor all out performance over "bloated" abstraction and information hiding.
cpeterso
In other words, what really bugs Tom's Hardware is that nobody cares about Tom's Hardware any more.
Yeah, and guess why- every time you went and looked at Tom's Hardware, the information and reviews were months old, or worse. I was continually frustrated, while shopping for PC components, at how out-of-date THG was- so I simply stopped bothering to look at their site.
THG should have stuck to what they were most useful for- a place to learn about PC technology. Not a lets-run-some-benchmark-scripts-with-different-vid eo-cards. THG has turned into what I call "two guys in a dorm room who have a hardware review site". Unfortunately, that market is a dime-a-dozen; every stupid moron who knows how to use Front Page has one.
Open source can, and has, done a lot for server-side hardware. But it just doesn't sell enough iron on the desktop to matter. Look what happened to VA Linux.
Open source sells plenty of iron- it's just that there's no point in going with some boutique rackmount company with absurd sales policies(see below), when you've got better support, better hardware, better access to parts, etc from IBM, Gateway, HP, Compaq...all of whom have supported Linux on a lot of their hardware for years.
VA filled a niche that disappeared the second the Big Boys supported Linux; none of the big corporations really knew who VA was, and nobody cared; they just called their IBM/HP/Gateway/Compaq rep and ordered up systems from them. What made it worse was that VA didn't have stock on 'accessory' items, and you couldn't get parts. For example, this is an almost word-for-word phone conversation between VA and myself, trying to get carriers for adding new drives to our one VA Linux DB server(we needed the drives within 2 days.)
Operator:"Thank you for calling VA blah blah"
Me:"Sales please."
Sales:"VA sales, this is ____, how can I help you?"
Me: "I need two SCSI drive carriers for my VA ____."
Sales:"Ah, you'll need to talk to someone in our parts department, they handle those requests. Let me transfer you."
Parts:"VA Parts, how can I help you?"
Me: "Yes, Hi, I need two SCSI drive carriers for my VA ____."
Parts:"Okay, hmm, one sec..[click click click click]...I'm sorry sir, they're not available."
Me:"Oh, backordered? When will they be in?"
Parts:"We have them in stock. I'm not authorized to sell you this part."
(very long pause while I censor myself)
Me:"Okkkkaaaaaay. Do you have any 36GB 10,000 RPM drives?"
Parts:"Yes."
Me:"How much?"
Parts:"$800 each"
Me(I actually laughed):"I can get those drives from any of a dozen vendors for half that. Alright, fine. How soon can you have them shipped to me?"
Parts:"We don't have any in stock. Maybe two weeks."
So you know what we did? We swore never to buy another VA Linux system, ordered two drives from a vendor who had them there by 10am the next morning, and jury-rigged them in the drive slots. VA sunk themselves with stupid bullshit that kept customers from meeting critical deadlines. Many IT departments work on a "we needed this two days ago" schedule, not a "we might need this in two weeks" schedule. There are those that recognize this, and those that try to force you into buying product they don't even have in stock, by not selling you parts like empty drive carriers- and consequently go out of business when suddenly they're the dinky little hole-in-the-wall company nobody cares about in a market full of Big Boys. We bought over two dozen rackmount servers within a year of that incident, and they came from Gateway- not VA.
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, what is it that people change out regularly these days?
VIDEO CARD
I can assure you that you can swap video cards all day long without a problem. Heck, I've upgraded most of my machine, short of replacing the motherboard, without any complaints from the product activation.
Same in Canada. You have to phone in. The best part, my friend changed his soundcard and the rep wouldn't believe him. She was like "No, I can't do that, you already activated it last month. You can only use it on one computer".
And yes, it did this with only ONE piece of hardware.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Well, except that XP can't handle having the motherboard changed out from under it
Yes, it can. I work in a corporate environment, and I've had to change out motherboards in a number of computers running XP before, so I know it's possible.
The thing you usually have to watch out for is IDE controller drivers; if the new motherboard has a different controller than the old one (and it almost certainly will), XP will bluescreen on startup, because it tries to load IDE drivers as part of the system boot-up process. It's possible to prevent this, though; before you switch motherboards, go into the Device Manager and change your IDE controller driver to the generic Microsoft one. It should work on any controller, so you should then be able to swap out the motherboard with a new one, then install the controller drivers for its specific chipset.
If you somehow bork that up (as I managed to do when recently upgrading my own computer), it's possible to use an XP install CD to boot into the recovery console and manually disable any boot-time IDE drivers, which forces XP to load the standard ones.
As a sidenote, I've been using the corporate edition of XP since the first public betas, and I've never had to do any product activation.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Let's see... MS all but killed three RISC platforms -- MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC -- whose vendors had spent huge amounts of money promoting. MS stole wind from their own flavors of Unix, they promoted specific models for MS WNT which never sold well for there was no version of MS Office Pro and VS Basic for it.
No, PnP was always a pain. What would have benefitted hardware vendors was wider adoption of EISA, earlier adoption of PCI and its fastest flavours, and a stable OS. MS had nothing to do with the first two and prevents the third to this day.
I fail to see why. Old Unix had each its own hardware platform with different interfaces, while GNU/Linux runs in only a few platforms -- Alpha's dying as is PA-RISC, Clipper died, there is no more DEC TurboBus or Sun SBus, everything is IDE, SCSI, PCI, AGP, USB and FireWire. Creating drivers for GNU/Linux makes them portable, and it is easy in the first place, while old Unix had a different driver model for each platform and none were easy. The Haloween documents proved that even all MS effort to facilitate drivers develpment GNU/Linux drivers are still easier, and they cover nearly all the market instead of bein confined to one platform only as MS WNT currently is.
First, this is wrong. IBM, HP, Red Hat, SuSE and other do give support. Technical documentation and source code are much cheaper and better than what is available for any other platform, with the possible exception of BSD, incidentally another free software OS. Second, why the community isn't enough? The rules are clear: submit your driver to Linus, if it is good enough it will get all the criticising it needs to get finished. I wonder what more is needed in support for hardware vendors...
You obviously haven't the foggiest about GNU/Linux. There is precisely one stable, up-to-date version of the kernel available at each time. At this moment it is 2.4; all the variants of it are exactly equal AFA drivers are concerned. There is no reason whatsoever for a hardware vendor to support 2.5; 2.2 is still used but its drivers are much more similar to 2.4's than are those of MS WXP, WME and WCE.
You mean trade secrets, because IP has no meaning apart from the aggregation of trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights and patents; obviously the last three are protected no matter what is published. As for trade secrets, I wonder why one would want its feeble protection instead of the much more substantial protections afforded by copyrights and patents. And even then your argument is bogus, because both the Linux kernel and the X Window System accept binary drivers, evil as they are.
Obviously you ignore the evilness of binary drivers: without source code it is impossible to audit and debug them thoroughtfully, and this is one of the causes for MS W32 unstability.
No it doesn't. In
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
It's called tying. And it's illegal.
There are court cases to back it up.
You can take the os, remove it from the original box, and install it on another box. Legally.
Regardless of what the eula says.
And regardless of what you believe.
Now go get your fuckin' shinebox!