On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 10:52:22AM -0700, Andrew P. Lentvorski wrote: > On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, [iso-8859-1] Jos� Fonseca wrote: > > > My interest in the XFree86 development is infact rather specific: the > > RandR extension will be a crucial brick for a proper 3D support on lower > > end cards such as Mach64 which have little onboard memory. > > My question to you is: why do you want to spend your time on this when you > can buy a *much* higher end card than a Mach for <$40 US? Your time is > worth than that, even if you are a student. One word for you: "laptop"!
> One of the primary time-wasters in open-source is that developers spend a > lot of time on support for hardware which is obsolete. When obsolete > hardware was much cheaper than brand new hardware, this support for was > important. Now, however, that difference is pretty minimal. Buy a new > card and save yourself lots of pain. The way I choose to spend my free time is matter that concerns me alone. Not only the work I've been doing has been very useful for me (this laptop has a year, it's my main working computer, I don't to expect to swap before 2-3 years, and I enjoy to play UT and other games on it), but I have been having a great time learning about the fascinating world of 3D graphics and low-level driver programming. You have no idea how common the Mach64 is in laptops. And after the Mach64 I'll probably pick another "obsolete" card to work on, like the Savage chips (which are also common on laptops, but the reason I'm interested is because I have one and the card long has been abandoned by the vendors, so it will give me a great satisfaction to fullfill the dream of having decent driver it) or a Riva TNT2 (which I just bought very cheap from a friend of mine - just for kicks, mainly to port the existing Utah-GLX driver, but I'm sure that the BSD guys will apreciate my work too). As you can see this experience has been very rewarding so far, and not the opposite. Jos� Fonseca _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
