[rescue] Onyx, sparcbook, and PPro machines

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 11:14:54PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > The deal with the gimp, and the libraries it depends on, is that there are
> > $bigCompanies with a vested interest in making it work on Irix. 
> 
> Wow.  I didn't know companies still poured money into IRIX.  Things had
> been looking pretty grim recently.  Ah, well, all the more reason for me
> to stick with GTK+ as my toolkit of choice, then.  Windows support, -and-
> it works under IRIX.  The only other toolkit for C that can claim that, I
> think, is GLUT, and that doesn't really count. :)

A number of companies are trying to move to linux.  But, if you demand the
absolute best in graphics output, 8-bit color processing is inadequate, and
I would imagine that just like it is nice to work in 8bit true color when 
doing 8bit true color output (as opposed to 8bit palleted, aka 256 colors), 
that likewise it is nice to work in 16bit color when doing 16bit output,
and noone yet supports 16bit color on linux.

I just don't know what visual effects companies are thinking when trying to
force everything to linux.  Sure, switch the render farm, server farm, etc.
Even switch cell animation, and what you can of modelling and mocap.  But,
why sacrifice quality?

PDI seems to be the only company that is actually trying to dump irix for
linux completely.  Everyone else seems to be going much more slowly, and if
they don't want to loose there edge, they have to keep developing new tools
for all machines, not just the new ones.  Besides, code for irix is easy to
port if you stay away from the dmsdk.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd