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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!newshost.nla.gov.au!act.news.telstra.net!vic.news.telstra.net!news.mira.net.au!news.vbc.net!news.cais.net!news.jsums.edu!gatech!news.mathworks.com!news.kei.com!wang!uunet!in2.uu.net!nwnews.wa.com!news1.halcyon.com!coho!tzs From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Why to not buy Matrox Millennium Date: 29 Mar 1996 08:58:11 GMT Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services Lines: 44 Message-ID: <4jg8n3$fom@news1.halcyon.com> References: <4j21ph$crr@slappy.cs.utexas.edu> <4j6msk$ho@darkstar.my.lan> <4jdbhv$eji@solaria.cc.gatech.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.apps:13828 comp.os.linux.development.system:20253 comp.os.linux.x:27954 comp.os.linux.hardware:34756 comp.os.linux.setup:47861 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:356 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:2858 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:2637 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:16242 Byron A Jeff <byron@cc.gatech.edu> wrote: >Hardware generally cannot be reverse engineered from the specifications >of the interface to the hardware. > >Imagine a black box that converts a stream of numbers into another >stream of numbers: > > >1,2,3,4 -> Black Box -> -3, 78, 3.145926, 0 > >Tell me what's in the box? This is what we're supposed to be able to do >given the interface specifications right? > >I don't think so... But to clone the functionality, I don't need to know what's in the black box. With Diamond, the hardware differences between their cards and competitors cards was small--they used the same graphics chips, but Diamond had different support chips. In effect, the differences were confined to a small black box. Given just the interface to that black box, someone probably could easily come up with a functionally equivalent black box, so at least Diamond had a remotely plausible reason for wanting to keep the interface secret. In other words, the only thing stopping a cloner is the knowledge of what interface they have to implement. On the other hand, Matrox uses their own graphics chip. The black box is massively bigger than the Diamond black box. Just knowing the interface won't save a cloner very much time, so their reasons for wanting to keep the interface secret are a lot weaker than Diamond's was. In other words, the big task a cloner faces with Matrox is designing and building a sophisticated graphics chip. Even if they were given the interface, they still have a lot of work ahead of them, and the time saved by not having to also reverse engineer the interface will probably not be that significant over the life of the project. What Matrox should at least seriously consider doing is release everything that is *NOT* related to 3-D graphics. If they did that, the perception of many people could be changed from "this card works in DOS/Windows, but does not work with XFree86 so is useless with Linux or FreeBSD for me" to "this card works in DOS/Windows and also with XFree86. It also has some additional features that are only available in DOS/Windows or with a commercial X server". That'a a much less negative way to be perceived. --Tim Smith