On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Fred Heitkamp wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Tim Roberts wrote:
> >
> > > On 18 Jul 2003 20:16:35 -0500, William Suetholz wrote:
> > >
> > > In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true.
> >
> > For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business
> > case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old
> > workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film
> > studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the
> > margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that
> > it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this
> > potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have
> > any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the
> > NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line.
>
> If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then
> only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big
> film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They
> probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running
> Windows.
Digital context creation (DCC) for most movies is done on Linux
workstations running in-house software or commercial software
such as Maya, SoftImage, Shake, Houdini. Final rendering
is done on server farms which are largely Linux. Post
production is still done primarily on big SGI machines.
That will move over to Linux when PCs go 64 bit, provided the
professional X desktop environment isn't fucked up by bells and
whistles by then.
It's not clear if Longhorn is going to be very DCC/CAD friendly
so that may prompt some minor defections from Windows to Linux.
It may be that Microsoft will alienate the professional market in
order to better cater to the consumer market. Unfortunately, I
detect a similar willingness in the Linux community.
Mark.
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