On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 01:32:21PM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > But the accelerator is not open source. Had it been, you'd hear a > totally different line of reasoning from me.
Not only that, but it's X86 only. That kind of makes it less than worthwhile, after all do you really need an X86 emulator that only runs on X86 processors? Emails to the author inquiring about the possibilty of using it on other architechtures went unanswered. Even when they included the posibillity of future money. > I've been at the "we'll sell it now and relicense it open > source if enough people buy" game with Transgaming. My motto is "never > wait, never assume they will follow through". I'll be glad to be > pleasently surprised. I'll even contribute my money AFTER the fact, if > it's useful for me. That's the rub. There rarely is a follow through. One of the problems with transgaming's efforts is that they really only improved WINE for very high end hardware and mostly for 3d acceleration. This has a lot of appeal to a "hard core" gamer. Finding one that has spent over $1000 on a computer, and $100 a game who won't pay the $125 for a legal copy of Windows/XP and just run the games on it is very difficult. Almost all of them will not consider windows an operating system choice, it's just part of the a computer consisting of several expensive parts needed to run the games they want. Regular people who want to play games on their computers would have, IMHO been a better target. Let's face it, based on the previous discussions of a few days ago, MOST people are not going to use Linux. The person who prefers Linux and does not want Windows on his machine would IMHO have been a better target for marketing their software, but he is less likely to have a top of the line processor and a $300 video card. He's also less likely to buy those $100 games, he's more likley to visit the 99 NIS bins at Office Depot and computer stores and look at the 150-200 NIS range games. Not that he's cheap, but that's what runs on his hardware. My (former) company was going to fund WINE development for our device which would eventualy end up in the public domain, BUT it was a small part of a HARDWARE device. If we sold 10,000,000 (the projected market) and $.10 of each one was earmarked for WINE, that would have made a big difference in WINE, but each customer would never notice, and possibly never know or care that they had supported it. We had looked at Transgaming, but no one was going to put a $300 video card in a $150 retail device. Our combined processor/video chip budget was around $25 which is more like what you will see as the on-the-motherboard video in a cheap computer. Gaming support in general and for 3d in specific FOR THAT HARDWARE is lacking in WINE. > Ok, let's contrast them. Bitkeeper was about storing your most vital > information in a proprietary format that wanted strange terms to get (at > least if you didn't want to put out money). Including an http transaction to their servers everytime you did something. Personaly, I would not want a third party to even know the names of the modules I was working on. I used to work for a large financial services company. We were not allowed to discuss the type and number of computers we had outside of the company, because a competitor could then use the information to figure out what we were working on. It might have been nice for them to keep track of the people paying them and verifying their honesty, but it then expects them to be 100% honest and secure, two things I've learned the hard way to never depend upon. > On the other hand, VMWare emulates 100% standard hardware. My software > is not adapted to it in any way (the reason I'm using VMWare and not > Xen), and there is no trace in the standard usage of my usage of it. In > other words - it's a convinence tool with no lock-in. Yes, but at some point the cost, overhead, and quirks make it cheaper and easier to just have a Windows machine. It depends upon how much and how often you need it. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (077)-424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Support the growing boycott of Google by radio users and hobbyists. It's starting to work, Yahoo has surpassed Google. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
