greed (was)

[Paul Boddie]

"Brandon Van Every" <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message news:<WBV%9.7645$ek4.752500 at newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...
> 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.

Yes, but this point is crucial to my point below.

> > Consequently, the myth that "there's no demand for anything else" persists
> > amongst the chipset producers.

[...]

> But why *should* the consumer be appreciative?  Really, why?

Well, I recently got myself an Epson scanner and it worked more or
less out of the box under Linux, partly thanks to some "out of the
box" thinking by Epson, but mostly thanks to the people who develop
the software that makes it work. Some scanners aren't as well
supported because the manufacturers concerned are more backward (and
more paranoid), yet driver implementations still exist without any
cooperation from those manufacturers.

The point is that a fair amount can still be achieved even if the
hardware vendors are behaving in a backward fashion, and with some
cooperation the results can be astonishing. It's easy to chant "Linux
isn't ready for the desktop" while hardware companies are playing hard
to get, even though it is ready in many cases. Now imagine what would
happen if the hardware companies were openly sanctioning Linux
software - this is arguably the last major obstacle to Linux taking a
lot more of Microsoft's market share.

> The bottom line is the Linux guys can't keep up with all the vast choices of
> the PC HW industry.

Yes. Read the above comments to be familiar with the most pertinent
reasons for this. It often has very little to do with "skill" or
"elite" status.

[...]

> 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.

Well, I don't have any firm opinions on graphics APIs, although I
always believe that open standards or implementations should be
preferred whenever possible. I wonder if DirectX is the API that
PlayStation games use, however.

Paul

P.S. This is blatantly off-topic now, so if you want to switch the
group to a more appropriate one, do so and I'll follow things from
there.