Re: Getting physical addresses of mmap'd pages from userspace

[Bill Gatliff <bgat@billgatliff.com>]

Tom Cooksey wrote:

> <RANT>
> What I don't understand is that I'm trying to do some pretty interesting & cool
> stuff with their processors (of course I would say that!), which will probably
> help them sell more units. Why then do they make it so difficult to work with
> them? It feels like they're shooting themselves in the foot. Madness.
> </RANT>

Not to perpetuate this further, but I can't resist...  :)

That's because their product won't stand on its own; it needs vendor lock-in to
be successful.  There really isn't any other explanation for such behavior.

Think like a biologist.  If an organism does something, then the upside must be
better then the downside of NOT doing that something, or the organism wouldn't
waste scarce time and energy doing it--- no matter how ridiculous that something
might be.  Unusual markings, mating calls, mullet haircuts...

One would think that in the world of high-technology, there would be a huge
upside to making products easy to use, which would naturally require free
availability of documentation and code (among other things).  But vendors seem
to work contrary to that objective, which must mean that there's an even bigger
upside to NOT making a product easy to use.

Put another way, their revenue stream depends on making your life as painful as
possible, so that you won't want to risk repeating that pain by switching to a
competitor's product.  It's a "shock collar ^K^K^K electrically-enhanced
training aid", so to speak, and we're the dogs.  And not the
chihuahua-in-Paris-Hilton's-purse kind of dogs, either.

Here's more evidence to support my point: what exactly is the cost to release
documentation without an NDA?  About US$0, which is considerably less than the
expense of executing an NDA.  So why have the NDA?  Because that expense must be
an "investment" in something that nets a larger return to the vendor of the
documents in question.  What might that be?  Hmmm....


Just my US$0.02.  You can keep the change.  :)


b.g.
-- 
Bill Gatliff
bgat@billgatliff.com