On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 02:32:39PM +0200, Timo Schoeler wrote:
> 
> i didn't write that it's of use for 3d accellerators. it's the blob 
> thing that's the topic, regardless of whether it powers an USB coffee 
> cup heater or a sixteen channel VR screen replacing a good, old sgi Onyx2.
> 

There are two notable hardware device types that use blobs:

1) Wireless networking
2) 3d accelerators

To some extent it is being tried with wired networking but the
competition in that space makes it harder to dominate the market.

> 
> who introduced gaming? you did. it's not about the application nor the 
> device the driver's being written for.
> 

Sorry you are incorrect.  The application drives the demand for the
facilities the hardware provides.  The entertainment industry
(including computer gaming) is currently growing quite strongly.  This
growth is driving the development of faster/better hardware and
driving the cost of that hardware down.

> it's a *political thing*. if you choose to use an open source OS it's 
> more than superlame when then developers start to accept binary drivers. 
> it's contrary to the OSs' 'karma', 'mission' or whatever you want to 
> call it.
> 

That looks like an awfully emotion laden statement there.  Basically,
what you are doing is making any potential demand for a vendors
product invisible to them.  You say "oh, I _would_ buy your product
but you need to spend money on releasing documents first" (yes it does
cost money to do this).  Talk is cheap.  If you buy the product and
use the blob then you are a visible component of the vendors market
share - they can see that they have had X downloads of the driver for
OS foo, it could (maybe) be possible to apply some leverage to the
vendor to say "look, we use your products, you make money from us, you
could make more if you let us develop our own drivers".  It may or may
not work, I have seen that go both ways.

> (btw: last time i had time to do computer gaming (!) was at least a 
> decade ago. i'd rather buy a PS3, X360 or something else (PowerPC 
> driven, yummy!) than using a PeeCee with all it's horrible architectural 
> stuff for gaming.)
> 

There is a delicious irony there that you seem to be advocating that
it's not good enough to accept close binaries for drivers yet you are
willing to buy an even more closed architecture to the extent that the
vendor is actively and aggressively attempting to keep the
architecture closed.

> 
> that's giving up. that's murdering everything else but i386 and maybe 
> some other archs backed up by their vendors (IBM/Power.org PowerPC, 
> Sun/Fujitsu et al. SPARC, HP PA-RISC, MIPS, ARM) in a propritary way.
> 

Again, that is emotive.  Do what you like, I have been actually
running linux (due to driver requirements) to do my gaming.  I have
seen vast improvements in both vendor driver support and native game
support.  This is just an example how demand can drive improvements
even for blob vendors.

> 
> http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics&PHPSESSID=bdce7acebd3cb92bebc3e7a6dbe4dd29
> 

Nice but hardly at the same level as a recent ATI or nVidia offering,
not useful to me.

-- 
Brett Lymn