Daniel Phillips wrote:
On Monday 11 April 2005 07:20, Rene Herman wrote:
You are blindly assuming here that the "enthusiast market" and the "ASIC market" are something very different.
They are.
No they are not. You are projecting yourself much too widely -- they are only different after you've defined "enthusiast" as "hardware tinkerer". I am not the latter but am the former, proving that's not a sensible thing to do.
Stop right there. It is entirely because of tinkerers like me that we have open source projects at all, so that enthusiasts like you can have the benefits.
The concept you are still failing to grasp is the difference between software and hardware tinkerers. I fully expect that to be because you are both but many people are not. I am not, meaning that at the very least I can assure you there _is_ a difference.
Equating "enthusiast market" with "FPGA market" as you did makes no sense given that difference. The FPGA market is a sub-market of the enthusiast market with all the sofware tinkerers another, only partly intersecting, sub-market. I won't go so far as to pull numbers out of the air but since there are simply many more software tinkerers than there are hardware tinkerers I'd say this latter sub-market is actually significantly bigger.
There's many sorts of enthusiasts: we seem to be of different types for example.
That is true. Since you are the sort of enthusiast who just wants to wait until a cheap asic version arrives, why are you arguing with me, who is the sort of enthusiast who will help make your cheap ASIC a reality?
You are positioning me here as a profiteer which is a very childish thing to do. I notice your email address ends in redhat.com meaning tinkering with linux is your job. It is not mine.
The reason I am arguing with you is that I do not want this project to die the same death the vast majority of open source projects does and in my opinion, making an FPGA board an objective of the project as you are advocating would drag it into the kind of hobbyist territory where this is much more likely to happen. You are obviously free to disagree with that assesment.
But the system administrator who is deploying 20 Linux boxes in his mid-sized company is not going to buy 20 FPGA boards for them. What he is likely to buy are 20 cool running, not too expensive, video cards that are the best, most troublefree, kind for running Linux.
Another market which I expect (or hope, I guess I should say) is much bigger than all the enthusiast and other markets combined is embedded, and this is again ASIC.
As such, I completely agree with TechSource's current direction, and I do not agree with you wanting more emphasis on the FPGA. To me, the FPGA board needs to remain a bonus, not an objective.
Let's agree to differ, ok?
Let us indeed. If you still feel the need to reply, please refrain from the pettyness. We are just disagreeing.
Rene. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
