I could give a few guesses as to why WC has an interest in 8500 support - I spent a couple years with a meteorologist in college:
* meteorological calculations use _A LOT_ of CPU power - Linux probably saves them gobs of money e.g. beowuf, mosix, chromium * Linux is becoming more popular in meteorology due to its wide availability, performance, and hardware platform choice - the very same reasons it's getting popular in Hollywood * almost all meteorology visualization applications use OpenGL for rendering * WC does an awful lot of visualization - you know - all those weather maps you know & love * it is more difficult to get support out of the community when using binary drivers such as FireGL and NVidia * universities, where most research in meteorology is taking place, don't have the $$$ for SGI and Sun workstations to run the modeling applications required for their work ... getting all the components together for Linux workstations to do the work on would save tons and prevent having to port applications to NT Regarding binary drivers, it's probably more difficult for a company like the Weather Channel to use the FireGL drivers on an 8500 and get away with it than it is for Joe Schmoe user. ATI most certainly would prefer them to shell out the cash for an 8700 than a cheaper 8500LE. I haven't read the FireGL driver license, though ... I like to think that occasionally a company will come along and want to give back to the open source community for all they have gained. Let's take it at that and get things rolling! -Al On Sat, 2002-06-08 at 20:28, David D. Hagood wrote: > Jens Owen wrote: > > > "The Weather Channel is funding TG to develop an open source 3D DRI > > driver for the ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. The driver will be > > released to the XFree86 Project around Q4 of 2002, to be distributed to > > the public in future versions of the XFree86 X Server." > > > This is of course most excellent, but why does the Weather Channel want > to fund this? Are they using Linux for their video work? > > > > > _______________________________________________________________ > > Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference > August 25-28 in Las Vegas - >http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm?source=osdntextlink > > _______________________________________________ > Dri-devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel ******************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the Priority Health Information Services Department at (616) 942-0954. ******************************************************************** _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas - http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm?source=osdntextlink _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
