26 Apr
2013
26 Apr
'13
6:35 a.m.
On Apr 26, 2013, at 12:24 AM, Mouse wrote:
Well, that's up to you. I understand your principles, and I'm
certainly glad you stick with them even when it comes to personal
inconvenience. They don't always line up 100% with mine, and I
don't have much of a personal problem with running proprietary,
closed software. Obviously, I'd PREFER it to be open, but for
most cases, I'm not going to REQUIRE it. Those are my principles
and not yours (not that I think you misunderstand, but I don't
want anyone thinking that I think you're full of shit, because I
don't).
I suspect that has a lot less to do with the dearth of good FPGA
devs out there than you seem to think. I think it has to do with
the fact that a lot of people seem to think that FPGA firmware is
software and should be programmed by software people.
FPGAs (and
programmable logic in general) are a lot of fun despite
the somewhat steep learning curve.
Well...can be. Personally, having to use an undocumented binary blob
of a compiler - which, oh, by the way, almost certainly doesn't run on
either the OS or the CPU architecture I want to run it on, even if I
were willing to run it - kills the `fun' aspect dead. If you find it fun despite such things? More power to
you. I'll stick
to using my `fun' time for things that don't ick me out.
Me too. I don't use my "fun" time writing iPhone games anymore,
partly for similar reasons.
It's
really hard to find GOOD FPGA programmers out there
Given the "use this closed proprietary compiler to generate an opaque
blob which you throw at undocumented hardware" nature of FPGA dev, I'm
not surprised. I suspect I'd be decent, possibly good, at FPGA
programming. But until
either someone is willing to pay me to find out or the hardware gets
documented, that will remain unknown.
I doubt I'm _entirely_ alone in that.
You're not, but it's not an entirely common thing. I think it's
ridiculous that the vendors won't open up their bitstream formats
so that people can do interesting things with their devices (for
example, there are some REALLY COOL AI things you could do if you
could dynamically program bits of it on the fly, but until someone
opens up their bitstream format, that ain't happening). I blame
the lawyers, mostly; I seriously doubt there's anything going on
in the bitstream format that would give Altera's competitors a
competitive edge in the marketplace if they studied it, but I've
found it really difficult to convince IP lawyers of things like
that.
- Dave