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Lord Of The Rings Being Rendered Under Linux
Along with an adventuring band of others, tmatysik writes: "Came across this article in the New Zealand Herald the other day. Seems that Weta Digital is now moving over to Linux for the rendering work on Lord of the Rings. Two quotes from the article especially caught my eye: [1)]
'We were able to get the SGI 1200 servers for about $15,000 each or $7500 a processor, and they run more than twice as fast as the [$40000] Octanes for pure rendering.' [and 2)]
'Just by putting in a Linux processor, the price to do a frame is up to a tenth of the cost as on an SGI workstation [running SGI's Irix operating system] so the things we can attempt are more complex.'" Update: 08/27 09:35 PM by CT : Rebecca from WetaFX sent us pictures of the team, and the mighty stack that shall render lord of the rings.
A lot of comments here equate LoTR with the MPAA. While the film is being produced for and funded by a MPAA member, I think it bears pointing out that the LoTR people have negotiated a fair amount of freedom from MPAA influence, and that the production companies involved (WetaFX for example) are not subsidiaries of MPAA companies (even if most of their more recent income has come from MPAA members).
:-))
(And just to rub it in, the MPAA's region coding system is an illegal trade barrier in New Zealand
Unfortunately, if LoTR is as cool as it looks so far, the MPAA will reap the financial reward. On the bright side, it might convince them to break the mould again rather pump out more purile cringe-comedy films and the other garbage they won't leave alone.
Another pain for the boycott idea - how to support people like the LOTR teams while not supporting the MPAA. Sigh.
(OT, yes I know...... sorry!)
You should try Free Pascal (freepascal.org). I've done quite a bit with it, it's 32-bit, compatible with DOS (via extender) and Linux......
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Thanks for the info! I'm relatively new to /. and am still learning (sometimes the hard way) what constitutes "helpful" information versus 'redundant" and the like. I expect I'll keep making mistakes, but I *do* try and learn from them!
Remember, Amiga isn't just a software package, it's hardware. Old, slow hardware.
Linux, OTOH, is portable software. It can be ported to every new machine, and take advantage of the new speed to be competitive with other new OSs.
It's entirely possible for it to still be in fairly common use twenty years from now.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
If Microsoft would like to make available a stripped down version that would run on my system, at a price that a student can afford (remember that what to you might be the cost of a music CD means the difference between eating and starving for the next week to me), I would gladly try it out.
It is not a matter of whether I am interested in taking the time to "bother trying it out" or not, the simple fact is that I don't even have the option of trying it out.
It is not my "narrow-minded FUD ethic", but a simple matter of economics.
I think it's great that linux has found a way into the effects arena. It's power and price simple cannot be ignored
Where linux is still really lacking though is on the actual workstations. At these effects houses, nobody but the admins even touch the linux boxes. People sitting at their irix/nt boxes just order up some processing power on their render queue, and wait for the linux machines to chew through it.
I will be really impressed the day when linux is used for the actual production and artistic work. That day is definitely coming, but it isn't here as of yet.
It's a long time since the Pacific Peso was worth that much. The New Zealand dollar is around the US$0.43 mark and GBP0.29. Great for me, since I live in .nz and earn in USD and GBP 8).
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Fair comment, but [while I don't go shopping for this type of equipment myself] the prices on those SGI 1200's looked a steal to me.
:-)
Buy something at half the price - buy twice as many - more than make up for the speed loss. I think that Titanic was rendered on x86's. Go figure.
Though.. for a farm... yeah. You fire out tons of little linux boxes for the price of a single sparc...
Why the fuck did this guy get +3 funny when #52 got flamebait? #52 was funnier and posted first. This fucking comment is redundant not +3 funny. Get your head out of your asses moderators.
That was a shameless plug for your own Slashdot-like website. Did it work? Have your hits gone up? Is Slashdot a viable free-advertising place? In any case, I went. I don't know if I'll return to your site, but I went. At least now I know about it.
Peter Jackson has already done that sort of thing.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Cracks of Doom become Blue Screen of Doom, Frodo gets hypnotized by eerie blue light and forgets about One Ring
Halfway through the first (and second, third, and fourth) trial runs, box pops up with message "Program MegaSuperDuperRenderer has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" followed by intense programmer swearing
For some odd reason, no matter what they do, Sauron and his nazgul show an eerie resemblance to Steve Jobs (and gollum looks just a little bit like Linus...)
No one can figure out why the stars move towards them all the time, making everyone sick
By the time the movie is made, Microsoft has become Micro and Soft, and both of them want credit
When the world ends, we'll be burnin' one
-- Dave Matthews Band
Why is it that everyone who doesn't think Linux is the son of Zeus always gets labelled a Troll? Hey, if they rendered on PalmOS, you wouldn't print this. Linux this, linux that, who cares it's just another OS. OS's aren't everything, algorithms/software/innovation is. There is no innovation in this at all. Next Slashdot headline: Someone's mother uses Linux to check email. Hmmm, wow. Linux news! Front page!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ahh I remeber it now... The arguments on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy:
:)
"The Amiga is slow, old and obsolete. It's dead, time to move on."
"Oh yeah! They use the Amiga to render the scenes in Babylon 5. Yeah! And I heard they used an Amiga 2000 to prop the doors open when rendering Jurassic Park!"
Years from now in comp.os.linux.advocacy when people point out how pointless Linux is in the modern world, the advocates will now be able to say "Oh yeah! Well they used Linux machines to render Lord of the Rings!"
Kind of touching, really.
It's interesting that Linux is being used, but that's not what makes it cheap. What makes it cheap is the Intel hardware. Even if they had used SCO Unix, it would have been far cheaper than that equivalent SGI platform.
And just to be controversial [:)], I'll say that you really have to give the credit to both Microsoft and Intel. They are really the ones who brought affordable computing to the masses, and through that economy of scale we have the incredibly cheap power that we have. [God knows Apple didn't bring cheap computers to the masses, despite their "computer for the rest of us" claims. Their tagline should have been "the computer for the arrogant elite"]
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
\subject
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
At best the frames are 4000x4000x4 (i.e. 32bpp) or 61 MB a piece. This would give them about the same spatial resolution as a 35mm negative, and a comparable color depth. More likely they are 2Kx2K or 3Kx3K.
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
One of the big reasons is that the rendering software is expensive, and it's priced 'per processor', so you really want to have the processors be as fast as they can be. Right now, that means Intel architecture (here at Hammerhead we use Athlons); and Linux is by far the nicest way to use the IA32 machines.
Interestingly, the only company I can think of that doesn't use primarily IA32 boxes for rendering is Pixar (who write and sell RenderMan, the most popular rendering package). They use mainly Sparcs. One reason, I suppose, is that they don't have to pay for RenderMan :) The other is that on a speed/cubic-foot (as opposed to speed/dollar) metric; I'm told that the Sparcs are a little better. I don't believe that, though.
I interviewed people at every effects house a couple of months ago for an slashdot article I never finished :( and every single one was building Linux render farms.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It has been a long time since we were reliant on small links. There are numerous satellite links, and of course the old fibre links across the Pacific. I don't know if the Southern Cross cable is fully operation yet, but if it is then various networks and ISPs will have a whole bunch of bandwidth.
Still, given that what I've just said will be taken as overreaction, I'll just shut up now
Sorry, I just can't take misinformation that involves me being lumped in with Australia!
That just isn't true. Australia use the European standards (E1/3) as opposed to the American standards (T1/3). E1's are superior to T1's. Sorry.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Hate to break it to you guys, but when you're doing "real work" like rendering (or anything else), the OS is 100% totally and completely IRRELIVANT.
You find the hardware with the best floating point, and best memory bandwidth. Then you try and get the rest of things as cheap as possible, which means Linux or BSD.
Maybe this was about saving money and had nothing at all to do with the OS, that doesn't mattter anyway?
*hears the sound of bubbles bursting*
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
most stable windows yet? that's like referring to a new missle as 'the safest nuke yet'
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
I really like IRIX (sigh). Nice environment, but limited by MIPS processors. Hope SGI plans to port over some of their nicer IRIX tools. I now run both, but still enjoy the very well tuned IRIX desktop. Go faster GNOME!
Blogging because I can...
Hmm, couldn't you intercept the output and splice in a frame of oh, say, a flaccid penis?
Point the first: 3DS was originally a DOS app, I believe.
Point the second: Cheap and generic can imply *not* prone to failure. A mass-market vendor that's shipped and supported a quadrillion units of a given PC configuration can be pretty confident that it's encountered and fixed all the problems with that configuration, and is therefore selling a solid PC. Saying that no-one can build a PC like SGI is just silly.
Before you "do the math" on what Weta paid per processor, you'll need a currency conversion table. When they say $15,000 per processor, they mean fifteen grand NEW ZEALAND which is about seven grand US. No kidding. Still, we do CFD on a 16-processor cluster (WAY more cpu-intensive than movie making! Sorry!) and we paid about fifteen grand NZ for the whole darn thing. I'd say they still paid at least 10 times more than they had to, just for the security of getting support (?!?Ha ha ha) from SGI (now aint that just the drizzilin' squits..).
I work at / attend a university with a large structural biology facility (and a number of excellent crystallographers). I'm actually learning bioinformatics, but there's a lot of crossover largely because of the shared need for high-power computing resources. Our lab is based largely on Linux, with a mix of Linux and NT on the desktop; we only have a couple of SGIs because for what we're doing (genomic sequence alignment, Perl, C, web development) Linux is obviously a more cost-effective solution (and we mostly support the systems ourselves).
:) I'm hoping SGI will port their X server and window manager to Linux- It simply blows away anything comparable. I personally use Linux and VMware, but a lot of people aren't willing to put up with the inherent instability, clumsiness, and pure ugliness of X on Linux, and for this reason and the convenience of Office we now have Unix programmers using NT desktops.
The structural biologists still use SGIs (and a few Alphas) for anything important, though. The combination of available software, long lifespan, and, yes, overall power makes the workstations very attractive despite Linux, but I also get the feeling that it's just something people are comfortable with. NT remains confined to a few boxes used for word processing, thank god. SGI also can apparently be very generous with people developing Unix software, which helps prevent mass migration to Intel-based systems.
I'd rather use Irix, myself- though I learned Unix primarily on Linux, I was blown away by the elegance and stability of workstations that must be pushing five years old now (there's still an Indigo for special imaging use; there are some 9-year-old Suns lying around too). AND THEY WORK. I've made Linux scream in pain, on a VA Linux workstation, no less, though it's nothing compared to what I've done to NT.
I really don't see much pressure to change systems on a large scale. With us, certainly, SGI has priced itself out of business; but we'll keep using Unix of some sort for a long time. The sysadmins here are all Unix/VMS types, and when your PHBs are themselves longtime Unix users/programmers there's simply no reason to switch. But you won't find many people doing their dissertations or reasearch papers in TeX any more- in that arena, MS has most certainly won.
Well, I read in the Economist that NZ's primary link to the outside world was a waxed piece of twine, and the Aus. government was even demanding that NZ pay for dixie cup replacement on their end... for bigger data needs they mentioned a bi-weekly boatload of DLT tapes makes the trip.
2 1337 4 u!
I think it would also have to be called Lord_Of_The@nospam.dontemailme.Rings
[remove the nospam.dontemailme to read the title]
> An SGI RealityMonster
> could still blow whatever sorry Linux
> configuration they had away.
An SGI RealityMonster would be a waste of money
since this application doesn't require graphics.
Of course, they might (!) need graphics for some
other part of the movie making process, in which
case they could kill two birds with one stone.
However, the fact that they can get away with
a low power solution such as the SGI 1200s means
that they don't need all the connection fabric of
a Reality Monster, so that would probably be a
waster of money too.
Max.
> Perhaps SGI isn't supporting Linux even, I
> cannot remember, however
SGI does support linux...
Max.
The last SGI system listed (SGI 2200 2X 400 MHz R12K) is for a single processor system - notice the "1" in the column labeled "CPU". The results for that system are 319/343, which beat the fastest Intel results of 304/314 for the Intel VC820 (1 GHz Pentium III).
That's a really interesing mental image I got just now. Thanks. ;)
Only a corporation could be capable of such a contortion...
Be nice to your friends. If it weren't for them, you'd be a complete stranger.
"Linux renders ships onscreen, NT renders ships useless"
:)
(I run BeOS, Win2K, and BSD, so no flames
If more people would seriously consider using linux for their work, they might be surprised at what they could do - and how much money they could save. I'm glad that the people making LoTR decided to use Linux because now we will most likely get better effects. Now I just hope that other companies would look at Linux seriously... It would spread linux much more, AND the companies would be saving money so they could produce better/cheaper products.
Big Idea made the same decision not too long ago.
/. about rendering and Linux vs. SGI. It is great that there is now a story dedicated to it.
I never bothered to figure out what the cost/performance ratio was between the two platforms. I just knew that Linux was a lot cheaper.
The thing that suprises me is that they only have 16 boxes... and that this is newsworthy. We have 42 (with almost exactly the same config) and plan on ordering more in the near future.
One other difference is that they are using RenderMan and we are using Maya's renderer, which has recently been ported to Linux. For the type of work that we do, Maya is more than enough for us. Also, we hardly have any frame times of an hour... if we do, I yell and scream to get it cut down. The difference is that we are only rendering to 724x486. The use a higher resolution for the big screen, we only have to wory about NTSC for now.
The prices quoted in the article seem to be inflated a bit too. Unless they are quoted in the NZ dollar and that is about a 2-1 with the American. Octanes should be about $20k in the States. Linux boxes similarly configured, from VA, which we use, instead of SGI, are in the $5-6k range.
The performance boost that we have got from adding the Linux boxes is amazing. We went from being able to render on 50 MIPS CPU's 14 hours a day to rendering on an aditional 84 Intel CPU's 24 hours a day. The comparison in render speed is about 1-1, slightly infavor of the MIPS chip.
When it is all said and done, a move like this should be a no brainer to any studio. Rendering needs horsepower and system memory, both of which are cheaper in the Intel world. SysAdmins need Unix for ease of administrating and lack of down time... every studio I know considers the render system to be H.A. (high availablity). When things go down, projects get delayed... and that is a big no no in the production world (think of all the billboards you see with release dates on them... months in advance). Linux is a great choice for this.
The only drawback is that the SGI boxes have the ccNuma interface, which is great for single frame renders.
I know that I have posted many times on
FWIW: Our next two videos are the first to use our Linux render farm. Esther is at least 3/4 rendered on Linux boxes and Penguins will be mostly, if not all, rendered on Linux boxes.
-Tim Toll
Render Architect
Big Idea Productions
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
A lot of people have touted IRIX as being so vastly superior in performance to Linux under these circumstances. It's good to see that Linux has caught up quite a bit. Granted, I'm sure that Irix still has a bit of an edge, since it's well customized for the task, but the race is close enough that Linux is more cost-effective. I've always been a bit leery myself of the concept of one operating system powering everything from PDAs to render farms, but I'm thrilled to see a Free Software product that can scale in both directions so phenomenally.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I've always wondered about that foot in the mouth thing. When you think about it, the MPAA having their foot in their mouths is a doubly amzing feat, since their heads are allready so far up their asses. How does one get ones foot in ones mouth when said individuals head is up their ass? I've always wondered about that.
They'd have to take their head out of their ass before they could take their foot out of their mouth...
;)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
. Linux can be configured to do everything but take out your garbage.
LOL. There is a garbage collector in Java, which runs under Linux.
Animal Logic, mate? ;)
The same thing could be said about SGI/Irix workstations or anything else that can run both the modeller/animator user apps and the automated network renderer.
And since they have that much power I'm guessing that they need it to keep on schedule. But it would be useful to be able to add the workstations to the renderfarm-pool.
Using desktop machines for render farm is very good. And yes, currently, the desktop machines have to be NT to get the GUI software. At where I work we are using both Linux renderfarms and NT desktop machines for running batch processing with no problems. Most rendering software is available for both. We use tcsh on the NT machines so the batch processing looks the same.
The New Zealand Herald site, IIRC, runs with ColdFusion on some sort of UNIX.
From what I've heard, ColdFusion on UNIX doesn't cope terribly well with high loads; the NZ herald site has had problems with this before, even without being slashdotted.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Probably the reporter, although the Herald doesn't seem to 'dumb-down' things too much. Not that I read it that much :)
/dev/largeprinter story :)
Either that or it's a cat press-release | ~/bin/reporter >
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
...158th post again?!
We have movies such as The Matrix, Babe and Thin Red Line to our name.
The best thing about using NT is, the same machines which are used for animating and modelling in the day can be used for rendering in the night. This to me makes more sense than buying a machine for one specific role.
whine ();
}"
May I suggest.
while (!world->perfect) {
act ();
}
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
That will quite possibly be the most classic linux-LoTR joke ever told..not that there will ever be another one :)
--- What
...unless Natalie Portman is playing one of the trolls who gets petrified, and who insists that the best way of cooking the dwarves is by pouring hot grits down their pants.
Also, Frodo would have to be escorted to the Cracks of Doom by a whole team lead by Beowulf (IOW, a Beowulf cluster).
Finally, this would have to be distinguished from the novels and the cartoons, not as the "live action movie", but as the "post-Columbine version".
I'm not sure if a penis-bird would have to be somehow involved, but it would help.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Frodo: Well, we made it to Mount Doom, the seat of Sauron's power.
Samwise: Yes.
Both look pensively at Mount Doom.
Samwise: What does 'Microsoft' mean?
The "real work" is always done by some other program. That doesn't mean that the OS is irrelevant.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Is it just me is that about the most technical article ever from a regular (read: non-industry) newspaper? Sure it's in the Technology section but still, they even referred to fibre channel SANs correctly. I wonder if this author is that knowledgable or if the NZ Herald is upping the ante on intelligent reporting all the way around?
Any regular readers of the NZ Herald care to comment?
with a million dollars? Good lord. They could
have made a UP2000 cluster with hundreds of machines doing the same job a whole hell
of alot faster. Better yet they could do the
same job as the SGI big iron could at a much
cheaper price. It shows that you use what you're used too...
--
www.alphalinux.org
www.alphalinux.org
... a.k.a South Park meets Winnie The Pooh
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
After all, whine() has a much greater ease of use than act(), so the latter is relegated to a much smaller niche market of do-it-yourselfer types.
Now, one may complain that whine() has a "monopoly" on the software market, but even that complaining goes to show how prevalent, and popular the whine() method has become.
Other popular options are pray(), ignore(), and pretend_to_be_jaded_thinking_it_will_make_you_seem _hip_and_sophisticated_ in_a_coffee_shop_self_styled_pseudo_intellectual_s ort_of_way();
But, when it's all said and done, amongst the vast majority of the terminally dumbed-down populace, whine() wins the day.
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
}
The first thing I read/came to my mind, when I saw the post was:
.sig, all my cool ones I "stole" from slashdot
"The Lord of the bugs, the story of Bill G." Rendered with Linux, cause Wintendo couldn't handle the load...
Yours
Michael
--
Can't use any
Uuuh, I'm a student dude. $170US is more than I have to live on per fortnight - rent, power, food, textbooks, the lot.
I am what you would probably call a Linux evangelist, but in this case I have to point out that rendering is a CPU bound process, and probably the only OS charasteristic that could significantly affect the performance of such jobs is stability or in other words *uptime*.
I also have to say (even though I am an SGI stock holder) that lowend SGI servers are kind of expensive, and probably the best price/performance ratio under Linux is on Alpha or Athlon boxes. And if you use 1U or 2U rack units you can fit *a lot* of CPU power just in a single rack. VA's boxes are not that bad either.
__________________________________
Stop privacy invasion!
Hello, this is Frudu Baagins, and I pronounce Elbeereth as Elbeereth.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Linux Helps Bring Titanic to Life
- |Daryll
Answer: They're talking about New Zealand dollars NOT US dollars. From memory, 1US$ ~= 2NZ$, 1GBP (british pound) ~= 3NZ$ and 1NZ$ ~= 1DM (german mark)
HH
The Cold Fusion setup the Herald uses has been known to go down under the load of day-today browsing from New Zealand, never mind the weight of /.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
A Linux processor? I was under the impression that Linux was an operating system, not a hardware brand...
Linux may not be a brand, but VA Linux is a brand. VA Linux Systems owns OSDN owns Slashdot owns you.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
South Park meets Winnie The Pooh
Have you been playing Who's Cuter again?
Adopt a normal bird.<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, the MIPS processor only runs at 400 Mhz, but the PIII's don't approach the all-around FP speeds of the R12K until the Intel reaches about 1 Ghz. Its a good illustrator of the Mhz lie. On integer benchmarks, the MIPS isn't quite as far ahead, but the 400 Mhz R12K is similar to a 733 PIII.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Now all we need is to get some big special effects house to release an open source distributed rendering tool ala SETI@home. How cool would it be to say that you used your linux box at home or at work to help render the LotR movies, or the next Star Wars? Very cool, that's how cool.
Three Tux's for the Elven Kings under the sky.
:)
Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone.
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of New Zealand where the shadows lie.
One Tux to rule them all, One Tux to find them,
One Tux to bring them all and in the cluster bind them.
In the Land of New Zealand where the shadows lie.
Sorry, I couldn't resist
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Lord of the Rings Being Rendered With Linux. Well, that it: the ultimate geek story. No point in hanging around trying to come up with something else. Let's all pack up and go home.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
After all, it is more secure, just what you need to deal with Cracks of Doom...
No? I'll get my coat...
-- Bah weep grah nah weep nini bong
linux has been used before for CGI rendering- a lot was brought up about Digital Domain turning to Linux (on DEC alphas) as a cheaper solution to do a lot of the water rendering effects in Titanic
DVDs in New Zealand will be region coded, just like any other region of the world (although there is one 'whole world' region code that is very rarely used.)
Some Chinese manufacturers are now selling DVD players with 'hidden' region hacks in their firmware - of course the codes to unlock these hacks are magically made known via the Internet. So there are probably ways of getting a region-free DVD player in NZ, quite apart from the whole PC and software hack approach.
They claim that the SGI 1200 is faster than the Octanes. If thats the case then why spend $15,000 on a standard Intel server with alot of RAM. If they could see pass the pretty box the SGI 1200 comes in they could get a comparable box for $4000-6000 instead. Waayyy cheaper... Anyways... I also want to see some physical evidence of the claim that the SGI 1200 is twice as fast...I've seen the octanes when they are working, and NO intel processor even comes close to what thoose Octanes can do... And then even claim it to be twice as fast...This can only be due to one thing... The fact that the oftware they use don't run on anything but Intel processors....
For those interested, there was a BOF meeting at SIGGRAPH 2000 dealing with Linux and 3D. The notes by Brian Paul are already available: SIGGRAPH 2000 Linux / OpenGL / 3D Birds of a Feather Meeting
"Oh my god, you Slashdotted New Zealand!"
/. yet haven't noticed the slightest decrease in bandwidth, so we'll have to assume the /. effect is restricted to the server in question, and instead reminisce over the days when id software made a spectacular attempt at crashing the net with their Quake release.
While a nice idea, I'm in New Zealand and I've been logged on browsing since before the story broke on
After all, it is more secure, just what you need to deal with Cracks of Doom...
Why would I want cracks of Doom? It's already had the source released. Better would be cracks of Quake III, I think.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Moderators: when the guy SHOUTS 'IRRELIVANT' he is doing it to piss people off. This is ill-informed flamebait.
A render farm *does* require these things of it's OS:
-
Reliability. if you spend half your time crashing, rebooting, and redoing work that has been lost, you need twice as much hardware, at twice the cost, to get the same amount of work done.
-
Low memory footprint. Rendering is very memory intensive. The less space that is wasted by the OS, the faster you go.
-
Runs on the hardware that you have decided it approprite to your requirements.
-
A nice, friendly, productive operating environment. Remember, many of these animators will be happiest telling the render machines what to do in a UNIX environment, coming from an IRIX background.
-
An OS that keeps out of your way. Eg how much time does your OS spend sitting in the scheduler?
Sorry if I get a bit flamey, but this post is just *SO* overrated.Just because Microsoft continues to perpetuate that steaming turd known now as WinME upon an unsuspecting public does not mean that their advanced OS (Win2k) is automatically crap.
If you'd actually bother trying it out, you might find that it really is a great improvement... but that would go against your narrow-minded FUD ethic.
One Tux to bring them all and in the cluster bind them.
In the Land of New Zealand where the shadows lie. ^M^M^M^M^M^M^M server die.
The power of
The only reason to use an SGI is for real-time visualization applications and scientific computing (because so many applications were written and optimized for the SGI and they scale incredibly). I wonder what the cost per frame would be on a 256+ processor Origin cluster; they could probably get much better price/performance than a Beowulf cluster of Linux machines because of the amount of inter-process communication needed for rendering.
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This just in!
DVD-CCA has is suing the makers of "Lord of the Rings" movie for using Linux. One of the lawyers for the organization says that "Anyone who uses that illegal and immoral open source software diserves to get sued". Moments later the lawyer was seen setting old ladies on fire and pushing them into oncoming traffic while chanting satanic messages.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Keep getting timeout errors, but pings show the server to still be there and responding. (Then again, it's about oh-dark-30 over there right now, so maybe that has something to do with it.)
I also tried www.google.com but I could not find this article there, either.
Frodo: "Aww, crap! Not another Nazgul!"
Samwise: "Umm... Hey, Fro, that doesn't look much like a Nazgul to me!"
Gollum: "Then what the hell issss it?"
Samwise: (squinting) "Uh, I think it's a... it's a penguin!"
Frodo: "WTF!!?!?! There are no frickin penguins in Middle Earth!"
Gollum: "It'sss thosssse damn foolsss in ssspecial effectsss! They've ssscrewed up our precioussss movie, they did, they did!"
Frodo: "Hey, penguin! Get the hell out of here! We're trying to make a movie, dammit!"
Gollum: "Curssse thossse Open Ssssource bassstardssss! Thisss really pisssesss me off!"
Samwise: (Squints again) "Oh, never mind... it looks like it is a Nazgul after all! My bad!"
Frodo: (Smacks Samwise) "Dumbass!! Hobbits never, ever say 'My bad!'"
(Looks over at Gollum) "And what are you looking at, you shriveley little gimp?"
Gollum: "That'sss it! Ssscrew you guyssss; I'm going home!"
THE END
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
}
Maybe 50% or more of DVD players sold in the UK have region hacks as well. Mine does.
Pfft, CGI is for losers. They should be using Jim Henson's Muppets for LotR!
Actually, what he was saying was that NZ only has a couple of T1 links to Australia. Acknowledging that they're seperate countries.
It's a joke anyway, lighten up ;)
Besides being completely off-topic to the topic at hand (can I say that)
I have seen this thing written 50 times differently for 50 situations. C'mon at least use something original.
It reminds me of that X-FIlES episode where they are blaming Satanists for things ("The Hand that Wounds" was the English translation of the show) Scully points out that their story has been used by different groups throughout the ages - adding in Jews, Masons etc etc..........
Anyway's
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
"Linux is not bleeding edge stuff", which I guess means that Linux must be mainstream, and also:
"We can't afford for the system to go down" - Why didn't they use Windows 2000 then - it's the "most stable windows yet".
Oh, and I submitted this several days ago, but no-one was interested then.
2000-08-22 09:28:12 Lord of the Rings to save money using GNU/Linux (articles,movies) (rejected)