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The confusion here appears to be between Weta Digital and Weta Workshop.

Weta Digital is the _digital_ effects house, with all the computer support that entails, however, it is actually the younger of the two companies.

Weta Workshop is a _physical_ effects shop and has always been into hardware and robotics/animatronics.

As another poster mentioned, Braindead (Dead Alive in the US) and Meet the Feebles predate the Digital side of the business and more recent films, like Black Sheep, are more animatronic than CGI.

To Bring things back to topic, here's the page on Workshop's site: Ollie The Tuatara

"If you have listened to Linus and his lieutenants (Andrew Morton etc.), they say they are not focused on the desktop"

I can't actually recall reading anything Torvalds said regarding their focus. Do you have a link to what they actually said regarding the Desktop.

"They are focused on the high-end. Which makes sense to me - Microsoft dominates the desktop, the high-end is up for grabs right now"

The Desktop gets more visibility which is why when the average PHB decides to buy a server he chooses what he's already familar with, Windows. Ignoring the desktop would be a massive error.

"Linux has improved a lot for the high-end, but still needs work done. I just was speaking with someone from Oracle recently who told me how in an environment with a lot of Linuxes connected to a lot of SANs, the 2.4 kernel was complete junk. He did say things were getting better with the 2.6"

Has this been refered to on the kernel mailing list linux.kernel. Do other users of Oracle have this problem. You don't provide a lot of technical details. Is there a reference you can provide for such issues. Running a database is relativly trivial compared to calculating nuclear reactions or doing the graphics on 'Lord of the Ring' and would require very high-end equipment. What I don't understand how CERN and Weta Digital were able to get any work on the 'still needs work done' Linux OS.

"Hey here's another example - what if I want a fricking kernel dump when my system crashes? What, I can't dump it to disk like Solaris and every other enterprise UNIX does?"

You do seem to be unfortunate in your choice of OS. I don't know what use a kernel dump is unless you're actually compiling the kernel ;) . Something I've never been called on to do. Doesn't Linux have the Kdump utility that dumps its data to disk.

"I have to send it over the network (which comes to a host of problems which I won't go into here)? Yes, yes, I know about the problems of doing this for a variety of hardware, but this is the sort of thing I'm talking about"

Yet more problems. I don't understand, I thought the kernel dump was a standard file saved locally and what's the difficulty in sending it over the network.

You paint a complete horror story of maintaining a Linux network. If I was reading this and had no first hand experience of using Linux I would run straight back to the nice safe OS that comes with training wheels attached. Kernel dump!! ... :)

was What do Linus and his lieutenants say? (Score:5, AstroT~1)

The proliferation of windows-first/only plugins is pretty obviously a sign of the small scale of studios using Maya on windows. If Autodesk were to drop the Linux version of Maya we'll probably be seeing a lot of the big studios, if not all of them, dropping Maya.

And WETA do own that URL, but haven't bothered to do any forwarding yet.

Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to offer the world's largest selection of products online. for details.

AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld devices.

DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.

Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.

Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.

Salon.com - Online magazine covering news, politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web awards.

Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.

A

AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.

Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software

Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.

American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.

Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.

arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.

astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.

Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.

AutoSupplyUK.com - Used Japanese import auto store.

B BDO - Austrian tax consultancy

Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer

Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.

bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.

BlackSpider - Managed services provider focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.

Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.

C

cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.

Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.

I live in New Zealand, and have followed this story with interest for some time. I thought it might have been done in ferro concrete following tradition I guess the Teamsters local priced themselves off the market.

Sure it's only a filmset, but at least it's not one of Peter Jackson's cgi efforts.

I must say, out of the responses I got, I like yours the best. ;) I completely forgot about the XGrid stuff - imagine a small office setup as workstations for a group of people by day; by night, a small office renderfarm. =D Not gonna compete with Weta but still could be fun.

But I guess that's what I like about computers - not that I'm smart enough to figure it out myself and do it, but the possibilities are there.

Well my brother who works for Weta Workshop is in Thailand where some of the damage has been done, we haven't heard from him yet. But there is a geek connection.

Please...

This may be an old news, but the details of that machine is here. That's some stuff to drool over. Some excerpts:

... provide a combination of 4TB of online storage and more than 20TB of nearline storage as a global storage repository ...

... create and manage up to 100TB of data ...

And now this machine is up for a rent. Here's the company website.

The science community will always suck up FLOPs. A handy rule of thumb is that a single simulation or data reduction should take less than one working day. Any more and the develop-test-debug cycle becomes too painful. You can bet that today's grad students are running 10-hour processes just as I was 10 years ago, but they can do things in that time that would have required access to Big Iron (and the attendant big budgets) back in the 90s.

Companies like WETA Digital (warning: FLASH heavy) and Google do some pretty neat things with that power, too.

Linux is primarily used on headless RENDER FARMS

I can think of a few that would beg to differ:

1, 2, and 3.

Of course, given your statements; this info is pretty much useless to you as demonstrated by your statements.

1. Suns and SGI stations were used in 1997. They got old. They were replaced with Intel/Linux and saved a slew of money in the process.

2. They love linux because they can hack it up as much as they want. It does what they want and nothing else.

3. Microsoft tax anyone? Why pay it if you don't have to?

-B

Well, I can assure you that Chris Barton is a real person -- a journalist for the New Zealand Herald technical and business pages, (not a "technical writer" as written here) i.e. He is a real person who needs to get real work done irrespective of what operating system he's running. He's a journo, not a techo by trade. That's what's news. More and more, musicians, artists, novelists and soccer moms are flocking to Linux in NZ because of what Chris Barton writes in the newspaper. Particularly his promoting our INSTALLFEST which is what the original article was about.

Now Chris has also written numerous good articles about WETA DIGITAL , the people who brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen, running linux clusters (at least two generations of them), as well as numerous other commerical linux deployments throughout New Zealand and the rest of Australasia. I was actually quite surprised that he wasn't running Linux on his desktop already, but, then, a lot of us are literally forced to use Windows at work by brain-dead MSCE-infected ITdiots who advise Upper Management. The more of a groundswell towards Linux adoption they see, the better.

Hook up the B&W A.I. to Weta's Massive engine for an ORChestrated fight

Weta digital used a bunch of linux boxes as well as irix (and some other OSs too I believe) in producing the cgi stuff for LoTR (Weta Digital is Peter Jacksons digital effects company). check here for their website