Video Cards

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 09:12 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm looking for a machine with a new video card. I haven't had much luck with 
> a few of the older Radeon based cards, and I love the nVidia cards, however, 
> the machine I am purchasing only has an ATI Radeon X600SE.
> 
> I'm not going to play games, and this is a Linux only box, however, I would 
> like to play with AIGLX and all the new fancy eye candy.
> 
> How do you like the performance of the newish ATI cards and how well do they 
> work? The ones I've used recently just seemed really flaky, especially 
> compared to the nVidia cards and my personal favorite the Intel i915 based 
> cards.
> 
> Any information you can offer will be greatly appreciated. I'm not going to 
> impress anyone with the gaming ability of this machine, but the eye candy 
> will convince upper management that Linux will be better suited in the future 
> than XP... lol 
> It's funny how the eye candy wins things out like this...
----
I think that it's an ugly trap to get sucked into.

To obtain performance, you undoubtedly have to use the proprietary
binary code from those vendors instead of using the open source drivers.

It seems to me that the clinching the deal between open source versus
proprietary is simply that - the source of the programs themselves.

The 'eye candy' as you put it, doesn't have anything to do with the
important issues such as...

- Software Licensing...the need to obtain and maintain licensing records
with proprietary systems with complicated End User License Agreements,
complicated licensing requirements (see Microsoft's License 6) versus
the simplicity of GPL copyleft.

- Software sourcing...open source versus single point requirement. Open
source doesn't wait for single source to acknowledge problem and deliver
solution.

- Data storage formats...open document formats versus proprietary,
undocumented formats (see http://oasis-open.org) - Even the common
Microsoft formats of XLS/DOC/PPT are going the way of the dinosaur and
are being replaced by a new and hopelessly overly impenetrable XML
format which not surprisingly, gives Microsoft more control over your
data. Suggest that you obtain the schema definitions for both Open
Office formats and Microsoft Office formats.

- Future...if you research the installation/maintenance costs for Vista
and related Office applications, you will undoubtedly find a lot of
resistance to the high cost, high system demands for Microsoft's next
step.

One of the most interesting things about Microsoft is their ability to
pivot on their own standards and simply discard them. I just read a
fairly good analysis of their new 'Zune' player in
tidbits...http://db.tidbits.com/issue/855 which discusses how their Zune
doesn't use their 'PlaysForSure' technology. I can't think of a clearer
statement by Microsoft saying...buy our DRM strategies and you will find
yourself abandoned as soon as we come up with our next great product.

Craig