On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 02:26:46AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 08:43:37AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 07:50:02PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > > > > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to > > > > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open > > > > design. > > > > > > Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend > > > ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that > > > you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day. > > > > > > There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design > > > the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing > > > companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable > > > chips with zero royalty costs. > > > > Manufacturing an ASIC involves NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs > > of hundreds of thousands to millions per revision. A manufacturing > > company is going to need to see a pretty good market before they > > invest that in an open design. > > Manufacturing an operating system involves NRE costs of hundreds of > thousands to millions per revision. > > Oh, wait. Actually, that's just *one* way of doing it. And yet you're > quoting Redmond propaganda as if it were the only truth. Do you have any actual hardware design experience to draw on here, or are you just blabbering? I'm telling you again -- regardless of whether these numbers are realistic -- you cannot draw directly on your software experience to come to a resonable conclusion about hardware of this sort. So, right back at you: name one other way you have known someone to do this, with context, or provide some documentation refuting these numbers, and you'll have some credibility. Pen off replies like this, and you're just some guy trying to cover up his own lack of knowledge with insults (and wow, what a surprise is coming from you). And no, I can't confirm or refute the numbers, which is why *I* didn't comment on whether they were realistic. You might want to try that sometime. KEN -- Kenneth J. Pronovici <pronovic@debian.org>
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