greed (was)

[Brandon Van Every]

Paul Boddie wrote:
>
> I believe Microsoft's job is to strongarm various vendors not to
> support other operating systems.

Sure.  Duh.  And it's hard to tag them legally on it.

> Consequently, the myth that "there's
> no demand for anything else" persists amongst the chipset producers.
> That situation is changing slowly, and when people complain that
> Linux, for example, doesn't support "proprietary device X", they fail
> to appreciate that it's a minor miracle that it does support
> "proprietary devices Y and Z" with little or no support from the
> vendor.

But why *should* the consumer be appreciative?  Really, why?  The bottom
line is the Linux guys can't keep up with all the vast choices of the PC HW
industry.  Do I cry any tears for OS/2 2.0?  No, their HW support was lousy.
That's the whole reason I switched to Linux in the first place, back in
1993.  And I gave up Linux in 1996 when I saw that 3D graphics was going
nowhere.  Things have changed since then, but NVIDIA is still the only game
in town.

> Hopefully, we'll see more openness from chipset producers and more
> willingness from systems vendors in the future, possibly resulting
> from more engagement from Linux (and other OS) companies.

Linux has become more interesting in the 3D modeling/animation space now
that Maya and others run on it.  But it's totally dull as a consumer/games
platform.  It always will be, so long as DirectX remains proprietary to
Microsoft.  Nobody's got any chance of cloning DirectX, Microsoft
gratuitously changes it all the time.  And you're not going to get any help
from the console vendors, they all want their games to run on their
consoles.

Do the games in OpenGL you say?  Sure, some will.  But most won't, they
can't be assed.  DirectX is now ahead of OpenGL in terms of features
offered, so it's pretty clear where the game industry trajectory is going to
go.

--
Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.