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Re: [Plug] US Robotics Modems etc, and a question..
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On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Chris Fearnley wrote:
>
> In my view the big disadvantage with winmodems is that they all have
> different incompatible chipsets. And many of them are undocumented.
> These are the reasons that Linux support for them will continue to
> lag. But the fundamental idea of using the CPU to simplify the
> hardware sounds like a smart idea to me. It means I don't need a
> soldering iron to reprogram my modem!
I can only speak for myself. I look for hardware support for as much as
possible. Anytime you're using the CPU to control it, you're loosing
performance that software applications could be using. This goes for
raid controlers as well as 3D cards. Putting more overhead on the CPU
to make the hardware work seems backwards to me. I want hardware that
free's up even more CPU time. I'm speaking primarily as an enduser in
this light. A 3D card that can do its own geometry processing,
antialiasing and hardware tessalation(sp?) is more apealing to
me than doing all of that in software on a CPU thats already juggling
2 dozen tasks.
I realize this is "only" a modem we're talking about, but I dont see
what the advantage is. As for the soldering iron.... well you can
flash some "real" modems just like you can flash some motherboards.
I just dont see the advantage, and I personally feel its not the
"right" way to do it. It seems like you take a performance hit, but
dont gain much of anything to ballance it out.
What would happen if someone reverse engineered the windows drivers and
wrote a linux version?
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