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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.
This should make hardware cheaper, from major manufacturers at least.
Dell, HP, and Gateway all are in pretty deep with Microsoft, to produce Windows PCs. So if the hardware companies don't have to contract with Microsoft anymore, theoretically, the prices should go down, if not the price of Windows XP Professional ($143).
Is this wrong? Or will the big guys continue to rip-off the consumer?
(Note situation in Europe after changing to the euro)
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I'm running KDE 3.1 on a $100 machine (monitor excluded) and with the fanciest effects disabled, nothing feels slower than it should be. But on the other hand, I'm convinced it should be possible to have these peripherals do more and to it more efficiently than they do. A modular OS written in optimized assembly is what I want!
Back to user-friendlyness, I'd say that after installation and configuration KDE and probably GNOME too are ready for mom and dad.
I've just read the article 3 times and I have to ask; what part of it deals with open source? It's a TH article for christ sakes....are you slashdot editors just reading tag lines now?
Look guys, not everything MS does is an attack on open source. OS might be a threat, but it's hardly their only threat.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
What point was this article making? There's all this shiny hardware coming out, and nothing that needs it?
Apparently, the evil Open Source / Linux people aren't writing inefficient enough software! We really need to write another 1,000 useless effects into our window managers, so that £5,000 machine has something to do!
It would be nice if the article had a few ideas of what the power could be used for. Otherwise, it's as pointless as those "Desktop metaphor is dead!" articles that fail to suggest an alternative.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
an article on hardware and no mention whatsoever of Apple/Macintosh? The iMac kick started the USB peripheral market. It's likely that the PPC 970 will validate 64bit desktop computing. The G5 Macs will help push SATA into the mainstream and the iLook will push a variety of hardware into mainstream computing because mac users will laugh at PC users who don't have these features and whatever else PC users fight about they refuse to be laughed at by macheads.
Here's another thing that will save the hardware industry, the home server. But that won't be the open source community saving the hardware industry but the construction industry rolling in $10k servers into new construction home mortgages and making sure that the line stays current for the next couple of decades.
- gEDA (gSchem, and friends)
- TrageSym for assistance with making your symbols and toutorial
- PCB (I hear decent version are actually getting decent, amazing)
People: There's lots of them, see my link to openhardware above, soemone linked to opencores, etc. There's a community for this.Boards can be had fairly cheap (say $40 each) even in rather small quantity. Or for small projects you could always etch your own.
The only issue is chips. ASICs and such, well, aren't cheap in small quantity. However, FPGAs, once you get past the initial investment int he hardware, can be usable in small projects. This stuff is certainly out of my league though.
I agree. I kept flipping through those annoying THW pages waiting for some kind of logical link to the conclusion. I was waiting for him to at least say: "If Linux catches on big time, XFree86 takes so much memory that we will all need huge machines." That might be wrong, but it would have been some kind of point to the whole thing.
As hardware becomes a commodity, places like THW become less and less relevant. Maybe this article is just a sign o' the times.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
couldn't agree more - I've been running the evil OS since 3.11 and have been rolling my own boxes since pentiums didn't come with a verson #. Due to that fact I have a steady stream of hardware that gets passed down along my various machines like a shirt in a family with 10 kids.
I still haven't installed XP even though I have a (legit) corporate licence because I know at some point (tinfoil hat time for some but I really believe it) no matter what version I use I'll need to "activate it." No thanks. After sampling a lot of linux distros I'm a Mandrake 9.1 convert and run it on every box in my home network (cept I have windows 98SE on my laptop) BECAUSE of product activation.
In some sick way I'm glad MS came up with the idea so I could find a compelling reason to make the linux plunge.
Its not the point of how much inconvience, its why.
For Linux or Win98, its hunting down how to get something to work. I need new drivers/new code/new libraries. I might even need to get new drivers for WinXp. I can justify it.
For Windows Activation, I need to do something because MS doesn't trust me with something I bought from them? Yes its simple, but its the "unnesscary steps" which is the point.
How does needing to go to MS to get a new install code add to my functionality of my computer? Zero.
(And I'm ignoring the "they can stop supporting WinXP Activation at any point in the future" argument)
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Linux needs to do more than improve to gain converts from Windows. Linux needs to offer something that looks really nifty to the average user, not just replicate Windows functionality. The Linux is cheaper argument doesn't work for the average home user either, as they don't generally see the cost of Windows (they either still have the OEM install or they pirate).
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
Now, if the Open Source movement sees its installed base of desktop users reach a critical mass, it can enable a new generation of game designers, who will be shut out of the existing game industry because there is nothing else for them there.
noble sentiment but, sadly, naive. open source will not help game designers. (to say nothing about leading the next hardware revolution!)
games are extraordinarily expensive to make, but the cost isn't driven up by software. modern games require a team of specialists to build or adapt the basic engine, a very talented team of artists to produce the graphic and sound assets, perhaps a team of level designers and scripters, and of course people responsible for high-level gameplay design - to say nothing of production, marketing, and other people on the business side of the fence. all these people bring their expertise into play, and that ends up being really expensive.
can open source help with this? no, not really.
suppose we live in the best possible world, where all of the software used in game production is open-sourced - all game engines, all physics and AI engines, all modeling tools, all graphics software, everything. even in that world, games would retain high production costs - because the cost of making games is not in the tools, but in using the tools to produce content. what's worse, our world isn't too far from that ideal world - many tools are already open-sourced or otherwise available (quake engine is free, torque is available for minimal costs, some modeling tools are free, etc). you could create a game today using only free tools. but revolutionary new games by garage designers are still nowhere to be found. again, this is not surprising. the cost of making new games is not in the tools, it's in the many man-years it takes to produce a polished game using those tools.
the days of shareware garage games aren't over - people will always enjoy simple games, as the success of snood and cell phone games demonstrates - but they have been permanently demoted to a secondary role in the industry. gamers want well-designed, highly-polished games, and are willing to pay for them. this is not a domain that open-source can assist or compete in.
My other car is a cons.
Sure - If you're in America! Over here in the UK, M$ will NOT allow a re-activation via the net - you HAVE to phone up a jerk and wait in phone queues for 10 mins to get your number - and the best thing? They're closed all weekend, so u either upgrade your PC during your coffe break at work, or wait till monday to see if your hardware is ok.... real convenient! Yes - I use M$ - No, i don't like PA, or a lot of other features, but I have no other option, all the machines I use are M$, and over here in the UK, you'll be suprised at how many people haven't even heard of Linux....
In 2003, if they aren't experts in Linux, they aren't experts in computing.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
This article makes the assumption that Microsoft is currently or has in the past somehow inhibited hardware vendors.
:-)
You want to know what's really funny? Without Microsoft, and their "bloated" applications there wouldn't have been a mass market for the 80386, with its features such as protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. Sure, you can do those on a 286 if you really have to, but it's not easy. Without the 386, there would be no Linux, since Linus could never have afforded a "professional" workstation (if he had been able to, he'd never have written Linux, remember).
Microsoft is the best friend the hardware industry ever had, but Red Hat isn't far behind
To be fair, the computer world in general has bennifited tremendously from open source. Don't get me wrong: I love linux, gcc, bash, etc. NetBSD has been a huge win for appliance vendors looking for instant-OS.
Software that makes obsolete hardware useful again is directly against the interests of the hardware industry. Plenty of people (including me) have got an old P133 running a free OS for just those miscellaneous network tasks, like DNS, firewall and the like. You think the hardware industry wouldn't prefer we all bought modern machines rather than reusing what they doubtless class as "junk"?
My experience with every hardware vendor that I've worked with is that Linux and open source is their #1 pain in the butt.
You're right, but it's not the old reason.
Zero user interface? Huh?
Assuming you don't have a piece of hardware installed into your kernel, you're almost certainly going to have to do a make [config || menuconfig || xconfig] unless you've got something automated like an nVidia kernel driver installation.
Have you navigated this thing? Yes, *I* know what most of the configuration items are for, and yes *you* may know what most of the configuration items are, but I'm willing to bet that grandma has no idea what a Realtek RTL-8139 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter is or, for that matter, how it differs from a Realtek RTL-8139 C+ and why might want to use one driver vs. another considering that the C+ is currently marked EXPERIMENTAL. In fact, she probably has no idea that the Ethernet adapter that's in her computer is even built into the motherboard. Or even that she HAS an Ethernet adapter, all she knows is that the little box the cable company gave her for Internet access plugs into the thingie in the back that looks like a big phone jack.
And, amazingly, people wonder why some people say that Linux isn't ready for grandma.
My journal has hot
THG has always been fairly clueless about Linux.
AFAIC, they've mostly been fairly clueless. I quit reading their site more than a year ago.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Linus doesn't want to be hindered by not being able to change the API/ABI for drivers when something better comes along. They've changed the framework EACH AND EVERY TIME that a new release has come out. Not enough each time to merit a new major number, but enough to need to re-write the drivers a little bit. Because he and the other kernel developers had a better idea than the last time for dealing with the driver infrastructure. If the vendors want closed source drivers, they need to keep up. Hell, if NVidia can, the others can- or they can open the technical data, it's not as if someone's going to steal their IP through those interfaces ANYHOW.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas