Simon Wong was once rumoured to have said:
> On Tue, 2002-01-08 at 09:50, Andre Pang wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 09:46:10AM +1100, Simon Wong wrote:
> >
> > > You could have saved some money if it's a Lucent based Winmodem as they
> > > work well with the linmodem drivers developed by the people at
> > > http://www.linmodems.org/
> >
> > Please don't go around promoting OS-dependent hardware :). They
>
> Since he already had one, and it could work, he could have saved himself
> some money. Why pay more than you have to?
>
> I would like to put pressure on h/w manufacturers to support open
> sourcing drivers for their hardware.
>
> Since so many laptop manufacturers supply winmodems, and they are cheap,
> they seem to be a good product.
Popular != Good.
WinModems are cheap, which is why manufacturers keep on using them.
The reality is they're dreadful pieces of hardware - they soak up
precious CPU cycles in order to handle the call. Give me real PCMCIA
or external modem any day.
> It is support from manufacturers or open sourcing of their drivers that
> needs to be encouraged.
>
> For my laptop it is convenient to have a very small built in dual
> winmodem/NIC which keeps my PCMCIA slots free (what for I don't know
> though ;-)
You have 2 sockets. Get a propper card (none of this RealPort crap)
and you'll still have your second socket free.
> > may work well _now_ for you, but but those drivers are a PITA to
>
> Yes, a lot of work seems to have gone into developing the drivers.
>
> > maintain, keep up-to-date, and you have sometimes have to wait
> > for quite a while to get them working with the newer kernels.
>
> The source code of the ltmodem driver has worked with both 2.2 and 2.4
> kernels for me.
>
> > They also work via source code wrappers around manufacturers'
> > binary modules, which can cause more problems in the future.
>
> I don't believe that this is the case with the ltmodem driver.
Uh, its exactly the case with the ltmodem driver. Nobody has
sucessfully implemented a completely open source winmodem driver yet
which of dialing out.
> > Plus, they only work with Lucent WinModems, which are by no means
>
> Not sure but my experience is with Lucent. However, the source docs do
> say there have been problems with some winmodems as you say.
Well, ltmodem is purely for the lucent based winmodems. Conexant are
another big manufacturer of winmodems, and their offerings have no
linux support.
Personally, I'm sick of this "less is more" crap that hardware
manufacturers are getting into. The fact we're doing more in software
on the host chewing up cycles that really should be done on the device
itself is the false economy of today's hardware.
First we had winprinters - Laser printers without a rendering system
built in so the image has to be rendered on the host system burning up
RAM and CPU cycles there. And of course they're windows locked
because there are no other drivers, and they're particularly painful
to reverse engineer. [Ignore PLUG's rantings on the matter - they're
wrong - ghostscript can rasterise, but it doesn't speak the native
tounge of any modern winprinters - the last one I was aware of it
working with is the SparcPrinter which is the same concept applied by
Sun considerably earlier]
Now they've lobotomised our modems too. What'll be next?
Fortunately sound cards have become more intelligent with their age -
cards like the SB Live, which can do audio mixing in hardware with
CD-Quality audio, as well as driving a full soft-wavetable MIDI
system, are far greater than original cards offered - 8bit@22Khz Mono
cards which used the Yamaha OPL2 synth.
I fear the day when the manufacturers deem it time to lobotimise our
sound cards again ("We can do all this spartial and mixing stuff in
software! Computers are so fast nowadays!") and our Ethernet Cards
too ("Who needs hardware packet filters! Consumers have hundreds of
cycles to burn!").
The annoying thing will be that the good hardware will still be about,
but it'll become professional or server class, and cost 2+ times that
of the "Consumer" hardware. [Yes, ethernet cards are almost already in
this boat].
C.
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