15 Dec
2005
15 Dec
'05
11:44 p.m.
On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 13:01 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 09:01 -0600, Josh Lawrence
wrote:
Lee, if you'll tell me what video card has an open, accelerated 3D
driver that will handle 3D fly-throughs and editing of sonar and lidar
data surfaces containing billions of points (that's billion with a b)
I'll gladly get my office to switch. Until then it doesn't really
matter to me whether it's ethical or not because I have a job to do.
Look on the bright side though, I at least have most of my office using
Linux for processing our data ;-) If it were just a personal issue I
might use something with an open driver but so far I haven't seen one
that's really capable of competing with the NVIDIA driver.
This discussion is very helpful to me, I was
unaware that proprietary
drivers such as ATI's would cause such problems with a RT kernel. It
was a video card that I had leftover from my Windows days, and since I
don't have any $ to buy a new one, I'll just have to keep it for
awhile.
Well my point was that proprietary drivers are wrong, period, from both
a technical and ethical standpoint - it was not specific to the RT
kernel. It's not about whether they are buggy or not. When Linux users
buy hardware that requires propriertary drivers you are impeding the
progress of Linux and all free software. It would be understandable if
there was no 3D hardware available with open drivers but that's not the
case.
Really this is all a depressing reminder that as far
as Linux has come
over the years people are STILL buying hardware to run Windows on it.
They would rather have a 5% better framerate in some game than support
free software. Is the highest purpose of Linux really just to run
proprietary games and VST plugins using Wine? If so then I'm wasting my
time.
You're definitely not wasting your time! I appreciate your input on
most issues that show up on these lists. I will skip quite a few posts
if the subject doesn't interest me but I usually read yours (and a
number of others) 'cause you usually have the straight poop ;-)
--
Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html
"As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be
glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and
this we should do freely and generously."
Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of
Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744