The ten days who are shaking the world

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

There was the Windows refund day who made MS appear as someone who
doesn't respect its own license.

And IBM who is emebracing LINUX.  Yes, Big Blue.  The company who
seemed the epithome of respectability.

But long term perhaps the most important is that Silicon Graphics has
donated GLX to XFree.  For the unitiated X is reasonably efficient at
managing classic objects of Windowing like rectangles but for games
and specially 3D games there is no high level protocol for
transmitting between the application and X.  That meant the
application transmitted the pixels one by one and that meant an
enormous overhead and in addition it was nearly impossible for the X
server to use the 3D acceleartion provided by the cards.  This made
games on X agonizingly slow even on 300 or 400 Mhz processors and
vetoed state of the art games out of Linux (SVGAlib is not a viable
alternative due to limited number of supported cards and the fact it
is a security risk).

With GLX the application can transmit OpenGL requests to the X server
and that means an enpormous increase on speed so we will able to get
real games for Linux.  And games are key for the mass market.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org