Slashdot Mirror
DreamWorks Switches to Linux
tal-home writes "Newsforge has a story about the decision Dreamworks made to port ALL of their front-end servers and workstations to Linux.
Their new movie, called 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' which will hit the theaters in late May, was created in a 100% Linux enviroment, unlike older movies like Shrek and Lord of the Rings that used IRIX servers as a rendering farm. It's a good time to mention that this move by DreamWorks also includes porting the artists workstations to Linux, in addition to the servers.
Redhat and HP helped out in the switch." Word has it that Adobe may be pursuing unix versions of it's toolset as DreamWorks isn't the only shop switching.
I have a friend who refuses to go to Linux full time until he can get Photoshop and Premiere on the platform.
I've even tried to get him to try Mac OS X, but to no avail.
The opposite of progress is congress
Who is really sad to see SGI being slowly (Ior no so slowly) being outmoded by Linux and other OS markets.
maybe
i thought all of these shops already were switched over to linux? all I ever here about on the news about CG in movies is how many linux machines it took to render...
what WERE they using? win98 with premier 3?
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
This is great news if it means having quality graphics software available under linux. The Gimp just doesn't provide a compelling alternative for serious professional shops. Adobe ports to linux would be a Good Thing and then some.
Anyone know if Adobe is considering contributing something under an open-source license?
Closed-source apps under an open-source OS don't interest me too much.
With Final Cut Pro, Maya, and the Adobe lineup now shipping, it seems like OS X would be a platform of choice...
I'll be happy when Dreamworks licenses all of its musical artists over to the EFF's Open Audio License!
Oh wait, after looking at Dreamworks list of artists, maybe not...
I want to know, why on earth would Dreamworks want to switch to Linux. Yeah, it's a free (beer and speech) OS and all, but what are the other upsides to using it? They're going to have to switch to non proven software, and just because something runs on IRIX doesn't mean it will run on Linux. Plus, most of the software used in IRIX and other Unices for rendering video and SFX is proprietary and just as expensive or even more expensive than Windows or Mac equivalent. Of course, it is a major step for the Linux community, because where there is a demand for good software, there will also be an increase in production to fit that demand. So from where I see it, this will either be a successfull move in bolstering the Linux community, or it may just end up seriously hurting Dreamworks. I mean, if they had good results from what they were doing before (with the exception of SW-Ep1 of course) and can continue to afford it, why switch to something that is obviously going to be inferior?
available by phone at toll free 800-544-3746 or local 818-882-2878. Call them and find out the details, and tell them your support!
Adobe has had an IRIX version of Photoshop since the dim dim ages. It's not a question of porting to Unix. It's a question of porting to Linux.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Their new movie, called 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron'
A bit O/T I guess, but I had to note that I've unfortunately seen the preview for this film a number of times, and when you're dying for thew preview to end, it doesn't exactly speak well of the film. Whatta piece of wasteful pop pablum.
We're talking completely empty prepackaged Britney Spears - style crap here.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
and Linux becomes illegal (you can't have efective copy prevention with source code), what will the movie studios (the same who pushed the SSSCA in the first place) use then?
The article summary is wrong. IRIX was used for frontend modelling. But Shrek WAS rendered finally on Linux -- indeed Shrek was distinctive as it was the first major full-length film to be totally rendered on Linux.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
...Matrix II, a far more significant movie than Spirit, switched from Irix to Windows 2000.
After the Dmitry and DMCA flop by Adobe, I will never purchase an Adobe product and I swear to gawd I will save my friends and co-workers from thinking about purchasing an Adobe product. So, if Adobe is finally convinced it can make a few more bucks by porting its apps to Linux, perhaps Adobe needs to correct its public relations fiasco and not with a mere press release, but something more sublime; maybe a contribution to EFF? Until such an event, no way, no how, Adobe --- not on this Linux box. I will not just forget Adobe's mistake and I hope others will not.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
that is one cool story. it really is about the
spirit of computing that i like about
open source.
As countless other companies such as SGI have already discovered, Adobe is choosing the wrong operating system. Linux is dying. If Adobe wants to advance the state of the art, they should port all their software to FreeBSD.
I'm sure quite a bit of work was done to clean things up and make Linux more manageable...
Did/Are/Will they contribute back?
(no.)
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
HP/UX...
Almost had me for a second!
Well.
Unfortunately there's too many patents in the field. It is impossible to create a software which doesn't violate at least some of them. For example color management is highly protected area. From this background it's pretty simple why there isn't any commercially viable open source options available...
Ville
A few years back, it was announced that the SFX done for The Matrix were done using FreeBSD. So obviously a free OS is capable of quality.
This is pretty funny, after all of the comments I've seen in the past about how PC hardware couldn't touch snooty expensive boxes from SGI named after gases. Well, I guess this proves them all wrong. LOL.
Jimmy Fallen is not Adam Sandler. Jimmy Fallen is funny.
They talk about 2D Tools, and 2D animation, and a little bit about 3D animation...
Is this going to be a traditional 2D animated film, or a Toy Story style feat?
I'd sell my soul for photoshop in linux. OK, well maybe not my soul. My conscience, maybe.
GIMP is great, but it's no photoshop.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
From this article at CIO.com:
"At the film company DreamWorks, Ed Leonard has ported the entire graphics animation department to Linux; Shrek was created on a "renderfarm" (a powerful, refrigerator-size rack of servers) that had 800 processors running Linux. Leonard took the money he saved by not having maintenance contracts and used it to buy far more inexpensive Linux PCs. He says the money he has saved will allow DreamWorks to replace desktops and the renderfarm every two years instead of every five."
Am I missing something here?
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
This is great news and shows the curtain is really starting to close on Redmond.
:)
9 32 , 0.asp
I just read that Doug Miller is now in charge of a UNIX migration hit-team at Microsoft. They don't mention alternative OS's unless they absolutely HAVE to. Hehe.
It's a ZiffDavis story no less....
http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=1884&a=25
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
We're pro-MPAA today? I thought that was Tuesdays.
more users who won't contribute a single thing to the open source movement yay!
Reasons for the switch (from the article):
1. Reliability
2. Scalability
3. Capable of high performance on the deskto
4. Cost-effective to maintain
5. Uses commodity, Intel-based hardware
The transition to Linux required that PDI/DreamWorks port all of its own tools from SGI. Few of the high-end commercial graphics tools supported Linux out of the box. Together, HP and PDI/DreamWorks worked to convince Alias|Wavefront and others that they needed to port their applications to Linux. Ultimately, HP and PDI/DreamWorks were successful, and DreamWorks has fully integrated Linux versions of all of its major tools including Maya and Wacom's Cintiq interactive pen display.
The future isn't what it used to be.
It's fan-freaking-tastic.
[Check out the paper here]
IANAL, and I don't want to be one either, but could you explain me something here? I tough that patents were preventing you from doing patented things and to re-sell them. And that I was free to implement any of those patent for myself. If it is not the case, it's a serious treat to any hobbyist! But well, it is my understanding that we can. If it is the case, nothing prevents people from doing application has a hobby, working in team (all the world in this case) and try to "experiment", as long as they don't sell the application. I understand that GPL is free as in speech, not necessarily as in beer, but if it would infringe on some patents, it would sill be possible to develop an application "free as in beer" and be legal. Isn't it? And for what I know, the Gimp is free as in beer... So it could potentialy be as complete as Photoshop, using some of it's patent and still be legal. Could you clarify this for me? But anyway, we live in a pretty messed up world so it could be legal on paper but not in practice...
I'd rather be sailing...
The entire push to make Linux a corporate desktop system is still too fragmented and too much like a battle of wills. On one side, people lament that there's no Photoshop or Premiere or MS Office, or insert-needed-app-here. On the other, people complain that the open source equivalents are good enough and just use those and stop whining.
You're both right, now shut the hell up and do what you can to make it all come together. Until people -feel- that open source equivalents to the commercial software are better, they won't settle for them unless they're forced to by ideology or economy. What will it take to make people feel the open source projects are better or even equal? I can't answer that, but watch the press. When the pundits start changing tune, then you'll be on the right track. For now, encourage and embrace the commercial applications. They'll do nothing but increase open source market and mind shares in the long run.
If you can code, do what you can for the project of your choice. If not, and there are some of us out here that can't, just keep an open mind and take the long view. Be patient, and maybe give the can-do's a kick in the pants once in a while.
*kick*
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Didn't some people from Dreamworks buddy up to Bill and testify that they needed an OS monopoly so they had the consistancy they needed to make movies?
I guess times change. Funny how people will look at things differently if they can save a few bucks. Not that Dreamworks would have gone with Windoze, but now they're firmly in the camp of the "enemy."
Here is a clickable Link Its an Ok read, a bit more text to avoid lameness filter
Help fight continental drift.
They use Linux, yet they support the practices MPAA, RIAA, etc. Fuck you, you fucking hypocrites.
"fter the Dmitry and DMCA flop by Adobe, I will never purchase an Adobe product and I swear to gawd I will save my friends and co-workers from thinking about purchasing an Adobe product..."
I sympathize with your view, but the reason that Adobe is so popular is because it makes a totally kick as series of products. If I lose Photoshop or After Effects, I don't have a whole lot of good choices to replace them with, especially for the money. You wouldn't be 'saving me' from Adobe, you'd be hurting me if you convinced me to switch.
I really don't like what they did with Dmitry, but I need a solution to express my disgruntlement with them that doesn't involve crippling my productivity.
I have the same issue with Blizzard. I've been asked to boycott Blizzard over using the DMCA to shut down BnetD. The problem I have with that is a healthy game industry = better job market for me. Blizzard consistently makes kick ass games. Not buying Blizzard 3 would do more to work against me than help prevent them from further DMCA abuse. On top of that, I think Warcarft III will be lots of fun, and I'd hate to miss out on that too.
So what do we do? I'm open to suggestions as to how to let these companies know what they're doing is unacceptable without creating ripples in the good work that they're doing. One idea is to make their email address available so people can write in their complaints. Another would be to have Slashdot carry a banner encouraging people to read about what happened and, again, give them an email address they can send complaints to.
Personally, I think this would be far more effective than saying "I won't buy your product even tho I need it."
"Derp de derp."
P-p-p-p-lease listen to me before moding me down! Gives readers the Roger Rabbit pouty look
It was interesting to note they had a problem with it for desktop use (including problems with XFree86). This has been one of the issues plaguing Linux now and hurting its foray into the desktop or workstation market: there are polishing features that need to be done.
Now, the good news is XFree86 did fix things up. Did the XFree86 team even know Dreamworks were having problems it? I mean, when there's a big opportunity for Linux, we really need to get the teams involved. It makes skitish users feel better, and more importantly, it gets the "hacker" culture a better idea of what the user culture needs. No contempt or animosity. Just people helping people.
Another thing is the polish. Fixing those annoying little bugs, or getting that useful feature in that no one has time to do. IBM and their billion dollars could help here, but there does need to be more support for the Open Source polishers out there (like the Linux janitors). Have you submitted a patch lately? :-)
So, hopefully, Linus and his informal team can clear up the bottleneck for patches and we can make Linux ready for primetime. Right now, I consider the current releases of Linux on the desktop to be about the same quality as Windows 3.1, and that took over the world! So let's report those annoying features! Let's leave the cool feature aside for a day and fix an annoying, but persistent bug. Then we go back to even cooler features!
Currently, the biggest challenge for Linux is making the installation painless. The problem is not that Linux developers don't want to--its just as I'm sure they can tell you, getting the hardware and drivers they need is really difficult. I'm not sure how we, as a community, can help that. Maybe mass-buy a new graphics card if the company produces a Linux driver off the bat?
Just some, hopefully, constructive and positive thoughts.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
How many h4x0rs are gonna go see this 7337 movie reguardless of its content?...
I predict that with these few switches to Linux and the scattered developer support (well known, trusted by other companies, companies) Linux will slowly (at first) take over some desktop and business applications then quickly - very quickly - take over much of the business world. Think of it as slowly tipping a big bucket of water... it starts as a trickle, but soon it becomes a flood.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Six months ago, Adobe was evil incarnate here on Slashdot. Today there's an unsubstantiated rumor that they might port their proprietary DMCA-protected crap to Linux and suddenly they're an Angelic mom-and-pop operation that can do no wrong.
When this lame movie comes out on DVDCCA region-encoded SSSCA copy-protected discs you'll all be like kids in a toy store, and the hell with Dmitry Sklyarov or Ed Felten or Eric Corley and what they suffered through because of companies like Adobe.
You people are the best supporters Eisner and Hollings could ever ask for.
I'm a little surprised they also switched the workstations to Linux as well. In the short term I can imagine that being a real headache, but in the long term...I dunno.. that could be a really good thing.
.AVI, and then track my mouse movements over the movie. While it played back, I moved the mouse around the items of interest and saved that information into a text file. Then I converted the text file into a Lightwave motion file and loaded it into the eyes.
When you do 3D animation (or digital art of any kind, really...) you don't just have one or two programs that do all the work. You have to constantly come up with new and creative solutions to animation problems. When this happens, the artists really get close to their machines. I'll give you an example: I'm a Lightwave animator running on Windows 2000. Lightwave's scene files are text based, which means I can modify a scene without necessarily having to do it through Lightwave itself.
I had a problem once where I wanted to animate realistic eye movement. Doing it by hand would be incredibly time consuming (Not to mention repetitive...) So I came up with an inventive solution. I parented the camera in Lightwave to the 'neck' of the person, and rendered a wide-angle avi from that person's perspective. Then I wrote a quick VB-App that used MS's Media Player ActiveX control to play back the
The effect was surprising! Within 6 hours or so of programming, I had written a primitive mo-cap (Mouse capture?) program that would be useful for a lot of things, not just eye movement. All this was possible because I understood VB, Windows 2000, and Lightwave. This happened to be so valuable that I bought a Windows 2000 laptop so I could experiment more with this technique in my free time.
The reason I'm surprised at the workstations switch (I should say 'initially surprised...') is that familiarity with your computer/OS is key to coming up with inventive solutions to problems. Since Linux is fairly new to the animation scene (on the creation side, not the rendering side...), it's hard to imagine those entering the animators job market would already be experienced with that OS. They'd have to re-learn how to use their computers. That may or may not be a problem, but it's a concern I have.
My point of view on this topic is starting to change after I started to write this post. It is starting to make more sense now. It is a lot easier to get my hands on a personal copy of Linux than it is to get Windows 2000 or OSX. At that point, the brand of processor becomes the least of my concerns, just the speed of it. It'll take some getting used to, but when all the dust settles, I think Dream Works will be in for a nice boost in productivity.
What I did with VB sounds like it'd be far easier on Linux. I can imagine 3D Animators eventually having more and more programming/scripting capabilities at their disposal. With these skills comes a more robust solution for any problems that arise. Hmm... maybe I should build a Linux box now.
"Derp de derp."
I think you are more or less correct. You can write an application that violates patents, you just can't try to sell it.
Unfortunately, having patent infringement problems really affects widespread adoption of your software. Nobody wants to risk distributing it, for fear of the patent holder. The Debian Project, for example, won't go near patent-infringing works, unless it's something stupid like the XOR or the File/Save-As patent. Why? Partly for their own liability, but mostly because of the Debian Social Contract. Quoting from point #4 in the Social Contract:
In other words, Debian avoids patent-restricted software so that people who want to use Debian for commercial purposes - reselling official CDs, selling unofficial CDs, or making / selling derivative works - can do so without having to pore through the license texts of thousands of packages. They want you to just assume that when you download an official Debian package, you are free to use it however you wish, and free to redistribute it with or without modifications, possibly subject to some restrictions as noted in the DFSG.
Remember, even free software is bought and sold - just ask SuSE or Red Hat. And it's not likely that Red Hat can just negotiate a patent license for their customers when needed - their CD sets have too little profit margin as it is.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
a patent can prevent you from using an invention. So it doesnt matter if you are charging for it or not if you are using it you infringe.
Of course if you are just a hobbyist you are probably not causing damages, so noone will bother suiing.
I would bring my Win2k laptop or Powerbook to work.
You gotta love it. An embarrassment of riches, one might say.
Nice, it is a Word document. Well I'll just assume that it is full of shit and save the trouble of trying to read it.
Wow... what an amazing story.
Lightwave... what a pile of crap. in the few minutes after I read your overlong post, I've made about the same thing in MELscript.
stop using bad software.
So how much money did they save by switching to an all Linux-based solution? That is the kind of info that Linux advocates need to be spreading if they want it to get out to a corporate level.
Berto
Not to quibble or anything, but Shrek was rendered on a Linux farm, a Red Hat Linux farm. The success and quality of that movie is the reason that large firms like Kodak have started looking into porting thier now SGI image and digital film apps to Linux.
About all the Adobe links here, GIMP!!! Manipulate your images with Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I've switched several formerly psychoticly addicted Photoshop people over to it and they are exceedingly happy. Given, it doesn't have ALL the features of Photoshop, but it's really close and most of the graphic artists that I've worked with use the features that are available in both GIMP and Photo, Photo only features; not so much.
-Runz
Look at it this way: Patents are to protect the inventor (so that he may market his unique idea, and hopefully profit off it in some way.) Inventing something is an investment in time (except for some of the hair-brained the patent office seems to grant every so often) and it seems only fair that the inventor could hope to reap benefits from that investment.
If anyone could freely replicate this idea, then sell it, his market would be diminished. If Joe OSS programmer replicated and gave this idea away for free, the origional inventor's market would be nonexistant.
Ok, so I'm not a patent attourney (nor do I ever wish to be), but that's how I see the spirit behind the idea of patents. Now, being a hobbyist, there is no reason that you couldn't replicate some invention, and keep that information to yourself. If you go and give that information away for free, you are influencing the economy and market for that product, and are violationg a patent, as well as being immoral (depending on you subscription to life here, I guess), and just being a creep. IANL, YMMV, etc. etc. Just my $0.02.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Because the Athlon floating point code smokes Intel Xeon at the same price point.
Dude!
Its just n'apostrophe. Its not like you couldnt understand what he meant. Like I could see you're frustration if it was confusing as to whose toolset it was, but come on. Its not like your missing out on something from his decision to throw one in. Because for real, they're are a lot of other mistake's he could have made their.
:)
And this is just further proof, right??
jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
psychotically addicted? Hmph, as anyone who's ever spoken to REAL graphics artists will know, the GIMP is a piece of trash. As a graphics artist I find its feature set sorely lacking. Addicted as they may have been they probably only used photoshop in a limited capacity if they found switching so easy.
You seem to think that photoshop only has a few features which the gimp does not. Photoshop has so many more features that its rediculous to even compare them in the same category.
Can GIMP do ant-aliasing as well? NO
Can GIMP handle Vector shapes? NO
Can GIMP handle the new advanced brush textures in PS7? NO
Can GIMP handle print graphics (CMYK)? NO
Can GIMP smoothly interoperate with other powerfull graphics apps? NO
Can GIMP automagically generate SANE reading HTML for quick web prototyping (don't diss the WYSIWYG in photoshop till you see it, it's not even close to front page)? NO
The list goes on and on. The GIMP is good at what it was meant to do, be a simple tool for editing RGB images, but to compare it to photoshop is incorrect. Even the GIMP (who have done a great job) acknoledges that.
Photos.
FreeBSD is another option you might see coming, considering how it was used in The Matrix .
with all the big shops all moving to 100% linux or Linux+a commercial unix. no wonder MS has their panties in a bunch over the GPL. If it was a MS shop think of the killing in licencing and lost productivity due to reboots and solitare.
Its good to see more shops moving to linux and esp big ones. Getting attention and really showing that linux is up to the task.
How come you are still single?
Good time to look for a 2nd hand Octane or O2. The market should be flooded will all those studios switching to Linux. $400 should do it easy, it is just tricky getting a box that isn't scratched, or abused, or had the compression connectors mucked with by idiots.
Here's an interesting question: does anyone know what kind of computer hardware is Disney using at their feature animation department in Burbank, CA nowadays? I believe that Disney's Computer Aided Production System (CAPS) for compositing digital and hand-drawn animation elements into a single film is based on SGI hardware, though I think if Disney could port the CAPS tools to Linux and run them on x86-based Athlon XP or Pentium 4 machines with one to two gigabytes of RAM per machine on a rendering farm level could save Disney a boatload of money.
"And when we can," he says, "we try to feed our kernel and video changes back into the community." What? You try? Were gonna end up in the same boat as all the dead commercial Unices if people don't feed back their changes. I mean damn, they have to under the GPL, right? :(
Clearly this guy didn't do his research, as others have pointed out Shrek was rendered on Linux, and Weta used a render farm of SGI 1200 Intel Linux boxes for "Lord of the Rings".
2 001/011 56783.html
See here:
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/linux/
Weta used mostly SGI Octanes for 3D and compositing workstations so whats new about dreamworks is that they are switching all the artists workstations to Linux because already for several years now most big VFX houses have been using SGI and NT workstations and Linux render farms.
All of the main news bits in the article---the DW/HP partnership, the move to Linux, Spirit,--- were announced by Carly Fiorina during her keynote address at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York in January.
Furthermore, at that address they handed out complimentary copies of Shrek with a Tux sticker slapped on the cover saying "Rendered with Linux" so why is anyone saying it was rendered with IRIX???
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
with all of the pressure coming down from the top of the computing power food-chain. Perhaps its time to write a version of MSWindows for linux?
w00t!
even more people will laugh at they take advantage of the saps who make a free operating system while others make billions off of it. I hope you understand that if linux was the same price as SGI solutions cost they would still be using SGI. I hope its satisfying to do work and have someone else get rich using it.
"Lightwave... what a pile of crap. in the few minutes after I read your overlong post, I've made about the same thing in MELscript."
:) I never claimed that VB was the only way to do what I did. I was just saying it was cool that I was able to do it.
Lol, that is the most absurd logic I've ever heard. Instead of offending me, you made me laugh! Thanks, I needed that.
Maya's a good tool, but you have to dump over $10,000 per seat into it if you want to beat Lightwave. Lightwave's renderer alone beats the pants off of Maya's. You have to spend like $5,000 to get Renderman if you want decent renderings out of Maya. I guess you should do a little more research on the product you're bashing.
"Derp de derp."
It's nice to say "oh we're all linux here", but I don't think that particular achievement of PDI/Dreamworks is something worth striving for. When you are a vfx house which is not also producing the films it's impossible to base decisions around the OS you want to run.
Linux has been around at Digital Domain for a long time. Within the last year it's shown up on the desktop, and some people, meaning artists, prefer it. All in house code runs on irix, linux (alpha, intel), and NT. We got rid of NT alpha about a year ago. And we are moving NT to Win2K.
-n
"Those who wouldn't give up their productivity to preserve their freedoms deserve neither freedom nor productivity."
That's a fair statement, except it doesn't get you anywhere. If I gave up using Adobe Products, how would Adobe know? I already paid for it. They wouldn't notice until an upgrade or two later that they're not selling as well. Even then, how would they connect that my not buying their product to something they did?
That's why I said "I need a better solution than boycotting." (I should have clarified that some more, I apologize.)
Now, if somebody said "Everybody who uses Adobe Products but hates what they did with Dimitry, take a day off of work and attend a protest.", then I think we'd get our message across. I'd be willing to drop Adobe for a day to make a huge vocal stink.
See what I'm saying now?
"Derp de derp."
Fuck shit fart said the nice man, with a limp dick up his poopshoot. Do you want me to ejaculate on your face? I could fuck you up that tight squirming ass of yours for hours, until your rectum ruptures.
Let's see how low that karma can go! Karma is -4.
And I will point out, Dreamworks had nothing to do with it.
Ever heard of a company called WETA? New Zealand company? Peter Jackson's effects business? I bet they would be offended to hear Dreamworks had anything to do with LOTR
Well, I ABSOLUTLY approve the idea that WAS behind patents, it's just thta it had taked ridiculous way more or so recently. I have no problem that a guy who has a VERY brilliant idea can benefit from time, cause patents are only representing time more or less, to market is idea. But when it came to software, I have major objection. I am myself a programmer and I would never EVER get a patent on a piece of software. I own a copyright on this piece of code, being GPL'ed or not. So basically I have the responsability of my own success. The problem is that mega-corp can take my idea, if it's really good, inject a few millions in the project and kill me (my project). But if legislations werre adequates, it would not happen and thus, there would be no need for "patent on software". On the other hand, my actual idea could enlighten someone else who could achieve a goal more or less the same as me and we would then have competitions occuring, encouraging innovaton and it would be to the best product to succeed. I remember having read some page of a book, don't know the real english title, but translate it would be "WHy bus always arrives by two", it is about maths. At one place in the book, they explain that if 2 company (exemple) co-exist. Then one company decides to make a publicity to increase it's sell. Well, it would ALSO increase it's competitor sells. I think that the same go's for "open" ideas and technologies. If their is no big gorilla to crush everyone out of the ring, everyone would benefit from the innovations of everyone else and vice-versa. Well, I think... I'm no market analyst :-) But I guess my vision of the world is a bit to optimistic to happen!
I'd rather be sailing...
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for Photoshop on Linux because not a lot has happened in the UI front since this comment was written.
Well, I think many of these guys were already used to Irix workstations, so a change to linux is a logical step.
will their movie be GPL'd so people can d/l a copy
I'm sorry, but fuck you. There is no "its" - and anyone who argues otherwise is stupid. In the English language an apostrophe is used to denote ownership - possession. It is also used in contractions. So the progressive form or "it" would be it's and the contraction of "it is" or "it has" would be it's. I only use "it's" - and that's what you should do.
I mean damn, it just makes sense.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
Hmm... Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong studio. It was either Final Fantasy or Shrek (Could have sworn it was Shrek...) where they used both PC's and Macs to do the development work, but Linux was used to do the rendering. At night, they used the Mac and PC workstations to do rendering also.
I might have my facts a little mixed up.
"Derp de derp."
thi
A beowulf cluster of Dreamworks rendering farms!
/. go back and forth.
how's that. Old or not, it's still pretty amusing watching
Why oh why is Dreamworks settling for RedHat on its workstations and front-end servers (and renderers?) when all of those platforms require speed?
I really hope that they were able to obtain non-i386 binaries (not generic RedHat RPMs) for their platforms (ie, optimal gcc compiler flags). If the programs they use are not open source, hopefully the authors will provide extremely specific binaries for every platform on which they intend their programs to run.
If this is not the case, they are losing major performance to what could have been.
Can we all say Gentoo?
So does Dreamworks' port of Maya to Linux/IA32 mean that we'll see a personal edition for Linux soon??
That's exactly why visual effects houses and animation studios are using Linux. All of these companies have been using IRIX for years and relying on the ease of scripting their production pipelines together from whichever tools happen to work for the job today.
It's not just about a pretty picture on the computer monitor. It's all about generating 129600+ 2K-wide tiff images, and then scripting the conversion of those tiff images to cineon format so they can be printed on a film recorder. UNIX is simply provides the best toolchain for the job.
Nice. Yes, power animators will have to learn to script in whatever language is available. Way back when LW was only on Amiga, it had AREXX for a scripting language and the power that gave you was mind-numbing compared to not scripting at all. (All the LW Modeler macros were originally ARexx scripts. There was an entire segment of the industry based off selling those scripts.)
:-)
BTW, LW 7.5 is supposed to be announced today in New York. Also, NewTek has been saying there will be a "Linux announcement" "soon" since sometime last year. Today would be nice.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
my $0.02
"BTW, LW 7.5 is supposed to be announced today in New York. Also, NewTek has been saying there will be a "Linux announcement" "soon" since sometime last year. Today would be nice. :-)"
Wow, that's the first I heard of that. If LW were made for Linux I'd be ready to build a Linux box just to try it!
"Derp de derp."
With DreamWorks moving everything over to Linux, Pixar will soon do the same.
Every time that there is a win for Linux, Sun Solaris loses. Soon, the market for Unix will merely be a market for Linux.
Alias|Wavefront just recently slashed prices significantly, actually. The $10,000 per seat is no more (still not cheap, though)!
However, i have to say that i had a similar reaction as the parent of your post. That's a cool hack, but creating an object in-scene that the eyes follow that you can place and key is really rather easy in Maya.
You raise good points though. I wouldn't inflict the Maya renderer on anyone, whereas the Lightwave renderer is quite nice in my experience. Furthermore, as of LW6.5, Maya seems to have better subdivisions, though i like Lightwave's tools and interface better.
Overall, though, i have to say that Maya is one of the most impressively scriptable and versitile tools i've ever used. Terrible interface, but if you want to do something, you *can*, without exiting the program.
ben.c
One of the many reasons why IMHO Apple is the "mini-me" to Microsoft when it comes to industry ethics. Die-hard Mac fans can't see past their glittery desktop icons to realize this, unfortunately.
Yes, this is a bit redundant, but Shrek was indeed rendered with Linux.
Here is a link to an ZDNET article from May 17, 2001 about some of the technical and financial issues that inspired DreamWorks to move to Tux.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/its.html
whoops dont you look stupid
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
The author clearly doesn't understand the relationship between Dreamworks Animation and Dreamworks/PDI.
Dreamworks Animation has thus far released "tradigital" (digitized traditional) animated movies "Prince of Egypt" and "Road to El Dorado", both of which used IRIX as the focus of their pipelines, and who will be releasing "Sprit: Stallion of the Cimmaron" Memorial Day weekend, which was split between IRIX and Linux. Two key workstation applications were developed for use on Spirit, and rendering mostly stayed on IRIX.
PDI/Dreamworks is a full CG production house which has been in the special effects and commerical spots business for years (Seen those alien Intel ads recently? That was PDI.), and has recently made "ANTZ" and "Shrek". ANTZ was all IRIX, Shrek was split between IRIX and Linux, with IRIX still the most popular on the workstation and Linux was used heavily for rendering.
HP provided lots of assistance with OpenGL workstation compliance on Linux - which undoubtedly contributed to them getting the 3-year deal mentioned in the article. Dreamworks also presently has a support contract with RedHat (as RedHat cited recently in their quarterly report). Dreamworks Animation and PDI/Dreamworks have been requesting Linux versions of various graphics applications and tools since Linux was decided upon several years back.
These statements are my own and not those of my employer.
Don't forget, Perl is very popular in movie studios.
Grrr... seeing this makes me happy and very pissed at the same time.
I used to work for a certain graphics table manufacturer which actively refuses to provide any sort of support for Linux. When I worked for them, myself and one other guy actively lobbied and worked on getting Linux supported. The short version is that we were shot down and the company managed to get rid of both of us.
The kicker is that Dreamworks (at least when I worked there) was a huge Wacom customer. Now they can still use the tablets (thank you open source driver) but can't get any official support. Neato.
Let's /. the phone system :-)
Uh No. Actually Dreamworks along with Pixar and ILM have modified the gimp to perform at a state that makes adobe sweat like a fat hog. What you think Gimp was not good enough for Monsters, Inc. well think again. Companies like these should not only think to switch to linux but also contribute and support opensource applications not just linuxOS and show credit to the opensource teams that provide us with these interchangeable applications. If huge corporate companies can pay big $ to low level positions. Why can't they show appreciation and donate $ to opensource instead of just a thanks. Steve Jobs its good to know that your company will switch to linux but its better to know that FSF, Linus, OSDN, and others opensource got paid for their time and hard work. Opensource has not won the war but sure made the enemy think harder to make its next move.
Movies are all about the big pic. I hope that the moral of the story isn't "open os" as much as it is "open data". I'd hate to see the consumer become liberated from the grips of the OS vendor only to become enslaved to the app vendor.
... people would learn how to distinguish between "porting" and "migrating", so that they do not appear as complete fools when posting a topic.
You migrate a (physical) server or workstation. Applications get ported. It appears as if this article is talking about both; this isn't apparently obvious upon first reading the introduction.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You could always try it on OS X, I'm not a 3D guy myself but know people who use LW and OS X. It isn't too shabby even on one of the new G4 iMac's. Apparently there will be some nice Altivec speedups in 7.5 too so the dual 1Ghz boxes should scream. ONe area that has been lacking is OpenGL support in OS X (no shader support etc) but these should be changing soon, watch out for developments at WWDC 2002. :)
So you get the power and flexibility of nix + top-of-the-rang 3D app + some sexy hardware, can't go wrong IMHO
Did you make any money from this? Did anybody make money from this? I know I didn't make any money and I don't see how anyone else could have. Maybe this will lower movie ticket prices. That's about the only benefit I can see. I hope all you Open Source zealots are happy working for free because that's where you're coding to. Soon no one will EVER pay for software because there's a free alternative. I don't know about you, but GPL'ing my code isn't going to buy me a Porsche.
GPL business plan:
Phase 1) GPL all your code.
Phase 2) ???
Phase 3) Profit!
--Pingu
Isn't the full name of Dreamworks "SKG Dreamworks" where S = Speilberg, K = Katzenberg (formerly of Disney) and G = Gates? So unless they kicked the goy out, this has got to be pretty embarrassing for Microsoft too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"You could always try it on OS X..."
Want to hear something interesting? LW 7.5 (and 7 I think..) has a license that explicitly lets you change between Mac and PC. I have a USB dongle with LW 7, so If I had a Mac around I could install LW on it. (I need the Mac disk, though...)
I am sooooo happy with Newtek about this. I will be buying a new laptop within the next year, and I'm really having a tough time deciding between a PC Laptop and a Mac laptop. Now that I can run LW on either platform, I really don't have a whole lot of reason to not get a Mac. Now I can spend more time worrying about the color of the casing... *G*
"Derp de derp."
There was a Linux Journal article last August which discussed Dreamwork's transition to GNU/Linux. To answer your question about productivity, one animator claimed she was moving twice as fast as before the switch. I expect this is mostly because of updated hardware, and not some GNU/Linux-Zen thing.
You can find the article here.
-Paul Komarek
Switching off expensive IRIX boxes to do rendering sounds fine, you're not getting much usage there out of the SGI I/O bandwidth. What's surprising is that they're attempting to move to PC workstations... man, SGI old buddy, I hate to say it but your days are numbered. (Was a terrific company back in the 90's - sniff).
The "G" stands for Geffen, as in David Geffen of Geffen records.
And in an alternative universe, it's "Dreamworks KFC." :-)
It looks like most of the movie industry is still heavily invested in SGI, especially for managing huge amounts of data: Disney, Digital Dream, Industrial Light & Magic, Pixar, Star Wars, South Park, Mummy, Matrix, Academy Awards, Sony Imageworks, Final Fantasy, More Academy Awards, More Pixar, Weta (LOTR), Shrek
I am surprised that Lightwave hasn't come to Linux yet. It has been my experience that Lightwave animators are the people that come to animation from the computer side of things and not the artistic side of things. Mostly though, Lightwave has been on Amiga, WinNT, MacOS, MacOS X, Sun OS, and SGI. The transition to linux I would think would be very easy since the x86 code is there and the unix style ports are there. Linux is also kind of the new SGI.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
For touching up images for movies, does this problem exist? Then it just comes down to raw usability and functionality.
FWIW, I found the GIMP to be easier to learn than Photoshop.
Add: ...ever.
Nonexistent Pantone Matching System support and no prospect of it
Shrek and Final Fantasy were modeled on SGI systems and rendered on SGI/Intel Linux systems:
x .h tml0 01/ju ly/final_fantasy.html
http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/aug/shrek/inde
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2
Well, what do you EXPECT him to use for a thesis? You think the college professors will accept it in anything BUT Microsoft form? Enough said.
and uses alot more ram than linux does. in maya, this matters. so does the 1.5 gig limit, especiall with high poly + wrap deform.
that said the machines are nice. os X is slow (young). linux on g4 towers would be great if not for the ram limit and the lack of 3d support.
Of course, I am pretty sure DW are not running 2.4.9-x kernel, either. Whichever kernel it is, it's been hacked by Alan Cox and sorts. It must be fast as hell if DreamWorks rolled it out on ALL their machines.
I know you were being sarcastic but thanks to slashdoters emailing and calling there representatives it died. However I am sure its not the last attempt the MPAA will try to kill the IT industry. So some of you can relax for now.
http://saveie6.com/
Maybe if youre looking at building a linux box you should order a trial copy of Maya, as it runs on linux and windows.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If Adobe really does port their products to Linux then I will surely dump my windows. The only thing I am waiting for now is a good CAD programme to get ported to Linux. Microstation my favourite has alreday been ported to linux but its only a student version.
Generally this is good news for guys like me, who are forced to use Windows. I remember getting really pissed of after reading the EULA in windows XP that I decided to stick with W2K and of course my Red Hat.
It looks like Corel jumped the gun on their Linux support and Adobe might have a little better timing. Adobe porting to Linux reminds me of what Corel tried to do, and failed. I think the timing is better now and the Linux community has better backing now (at least in the news). Adobe might have the bucks to wait for their Linux line to mature while it gains acceptance (would your Windows/Mac shop run Adobe Photoshop 1.0 for Linux or wait for 2.0?)
Adobe seems to be a little better at selling things anyway, plus their products have a far loyal following than Corel.
Geez, imagine if Photoshop was ported to Linux. How many Photoshop workstations are there in the world? Probably tons. Of course, I'm getting all excited over rumors at this point, but I think it's only a matter of time.
PDI/DreamWorks is quick to point out that, in the words of one DreamWorks representative, "We are not Linux zealots. DreamWorks just wants to tell the story." For the company, Linux and an Open Source platform provided the best way for them to accomplish their aims.
A solid business case for Linux. We need more of that.
DreamWorks didn't do Lord of the Rings! It was a Newline picture, and WETA did the effects.
mbbac
Unless "Perl" is an entertainment industry code-word for cocaine, you're full of shit.
It should be a fairly easy transition considering that they are moving from IRIX. For the most part, any custom stuff they developed should port without that much trouble. I'm a software engineer, and within the past few months I switched my main development machine from an aging SGI O2 to a spiffy Linux machine (dual athlon 1800mp, 2 75GB hardrives, 2GB RAM, DVD+RW, 20" viewsonic flat panel). The benefit of newer hardware at a lower price can easily make up for the slight inconvenience of switching. Of course, this would be a lot harder transition if Windows was involved because porting then would require quite a bit of effort.
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.
Don't believe they ever plan to switch the workstations to Linux. Maybe the renderfarms. Maybe the marketing people plan to switch the workstations to Linux but don't plan to implement the plan.
It's Dreamwork SKG, which makes this kinda interesting, seeing as SKG stands for Spielberg, Katzenburg, Gates. So linux is an evil scourge, unless you're talking about Billy's movie studio, then it's okay....
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
it's mostly the interface that is slow. It needs optimizations and hardware acceleration.
The fact that you need more RAM on OS X isn't the VM's fault, OS X just likes to throw a lot in memory. The VM can only swap to deal with this if you don't have enough RAM.
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with commercial, or free-of-charge packages that are not open-sourced, running on an open source platform.
My ideal would not be to try and provide a completely open-sourced and free solution for every possible requirement, although it would help make Linux a more viable platform.
What we should do is encourage any development on the Linux platform, either commercial or open-sourced apps. Availability of good software will encourage more users to switch to Linux, even if they have to pay for the apps. As long as Linux is around as a ("commercially") viable platform, we will have the freedom to produce any software we want, and release it under any type of license we see fit. If Linux dies for lack of users, we will be stuck with Microsoft, leaving us and the rest of the world not only without a choice of OS, but potentially and quite possibly also without the freedom to use and develop on that OS as we see fit
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
and other content creation programs will likely not be made by the open source community. why? because the tools are not used extensively by everybody, they are specialized. look at blender. consumer level apps on the other hand could easily be replaced, and should be. i would love not paying tens of thousands of dollars for licenses, but worrying about that is really short sighted. but, won't steve be pissed if the industry passes him again for linux this time!
GIMP has been in use for film production and Dreamworks has been making contributions, the development branch is GIMP16, a.k.a. Hollywood GIMP.
According to this article:
"Having the source available is critical, as emphasized by Ed Leonard from PDI/DreamWorks and their "expansion" of the GIMP, or how they and BMC Software were able to reduce their operating costs by standardizing on Linux as the operating system for server and rendering farms."
In the document "GIMP and Film Production":
"Because the source code is available, GIMP can be customized to fit the needs of production. Experimental versions which support 16-bits per channel have been built and proven useful in production for over a year (see Appendix B)."
The same reason is given in Appendix B.1 "Why Rhythm & Hues uses GIMP". Also: "Other big advantages of having source code for GIMP include being able to install and use multiple file display look up tables for viewing film images on monitors. TDs can view images with a variety of these tables depending on the type of job, or film stock."
For the reasons above, some of the GIMP problems can be adressed, such as "Alpha channel access and editing", "Color Channel visibility and editing", "Memory usage", "Speed", "Resolution independence".
Nifty hack but...
Why didn't you just parent the eye objects to a null and move the null to where-ever the object of interest were in the scene?
Apple's relationship with Adobe is incredibly close. Also, Adobe has 0 competition on either Windows or Mac OS X . GIMP is not competiton. Adobe canned the beta of FrameMaker. Mac OS X is UNIX. 95% of the code is open source.
Apple will do everything in its power to convince Adobe not to release there stuff for Linux. Animation may be a high profile business for Adobe, but Apple's business is much much larger.
It would not suprise me to hear that Pixar is migrating to Mac OS X. One shop does it and I bet other shops will too. Adobe knows that if it holds out long enough people will migrate to Mac OS X just have all there machines on one OS. Remember, Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney don't give a crap about Linux or "Free software." They give a crap about getting therre job done in the most cost effective efficent manner.
They will go to Mac OS X , and with it comes Photoshop.
The suits, the admin types, the finance, HR, etc., etc.
are still on windows. Linux is a joke on the desktop.
Switching your entire company to linux on the desktop
would make them even more unproductive than they are on windows.
Have a look at zeitgeist on google if you'd like to see
what completely dominates on the desktop.
Linux is a niche player and will remain so for a long time.
Stability from the kernel to the desktop has to occur first.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
You are referring to nouns. The rules for possessive pronouns are different. The words like its, his, her, theirs, yours, mine, etc do not have apostrophes but do indicate possession.
The possessive form of 'it' is not 'it's.'
"I mean damn, it just makes sense."
The english language does not make sense. It is a totally screwed up POS with mny strange rules, exceptions and exceptions to exceptions. If you had studied many other languages, you would know this.
Interestingly enough, when I was at Iowa State (graduated Dec. 1994), I think they were still using TeX for thesis papers. It was some time in the mid to late 1990's that they switched to MS Word. It's sad.
Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.
I don't know what you mean ... 'his' is possessive and presumably 'his's' would be a contraction for 'his is.' The english language is a screwed up POS and unless you dig deeply into grammar rules, there are many confusing things like this that make you scratch your head. I know I did. But I was lucky and learned early because one of my parents is a language teacher.
the first company to dedicate resources to porting their high-end SGI IRIX 3D software to linux was from: Side Effects. HOUDINI's the software they used to do gandalf's fireworks, the river stallions, and the effects in 'what dreams may come' and 'the matrix' -- on LINUX!
john.
but do you have a source for this?
I'd love to see something concrete to throw back in the faces of the Naomi Kleins of the world.
D
- They're going to drop the price from $9,995 to $999.
- ... but it will run only on Macs
...
- ... but you shouldn't be too upset, since you could buy a top of the line Mac for $3,000 and a $999 copy of Shake and still be way ahead of the game.
Apple, like Adobe, has generally been outstanding in supporting the software it buys - reducing prices substantially, making continuous improvements, and so on. Very cool.D
They have a really nice ad campaign that I see on sites like creativepro.com - it's the only popup ad I can say I like. It comes up as a cute little game you can play with their particle system - they have the name of the company, and if you mouse over a letter it explodes. If you leave it alone it will gradually reform back into the original letter.
:-(.
It made me click and find out the program's $4,995. Ouch. I bought After Effects by buying an old shrinkwrapped $399 version on eBay and then getting a $299 upgrade, therefore saving me almost 50% over the $1,500 price. (I got the high-end production bundle which has all the cool goodies). Alas, that's about as much as I can justify paying for a program, although I might figure out a similar way to get Maya someday.
Point being, dabblers like me can't afford the alternatives just yet
In all seriousness, the real problem with Adobe is that, in every way but this DCMA nonsense, it's a fantastic company, with great products. True, it's a near-monopoly, but that's because the products are the best that exist, at least in their price points.
So what they have done is built up an immense degree of good will, and in the end for most customers, I think the Dimitri case has damaged but not destroyed that good will.
It's like my boss. He, I and a contractor who had created a horrible product for us under Windows were sitting in the office. The contractor said "Windows is a master at settled, safe mediocrity", implying that converting to Linux would damage this fortunate circumstance. My boss said that he didn't believe mediocrity had a place in his company. As a result, the campaign I had to convert our online order entry system to Linux proceeded, and now our entire company's front office functions are running happily on Linux.
Since then, he's done some unfair things to me. But on the whole my job is pretty darn good. So do I sacrifice my job on principle, or do I stay in what is, after all, a pretty good, high-paying position?
In the end, I compromise. And I compromise on Adobe too. The day I stop buying Adobe products will be the day they decline substantially in quality.
D
"Why didn't you just parent the eye objects to a null and move the null to where-ever the object of interest were in the scene? "
a.) Eyes do a LOT of movement, really fast. Manually keyframing that would have been a bitch.
b.) Doing whatyou suggest would involve moving the null in 3 Dimensional space (x, y, z) but with this technique I simplified it down to (x,y)
c.) The way I did it made it more like moving a puppet, so I got more motion out of it.
"Derp de derp."
Yeah, imagine a bank of knobs that were controlled through midi that helped you move objects and things. That's what I use to affect my music, I don't see how that would be any different than 1D movement in any direction. I usually tie those things into volume or frequency or maybe cut-off, with virtually assignable knobs the possibilities are endless.
Now I am not a graphics designer, but I have dabbled a little bit. Just a little bit. FOR THE MONEY, I don't know if you can do much better than The Gimp . Like I said, I am sure if you are a professional designer, Photoshop is THE way to go. However, after hearing great things about the Gimp, I downloaded it. Free. Not much easier on your wallet than that. From what I have found, it is quite powerful. I am not a Photoshop user, but I was and continue to be quite impressed. Maybe it isn't up to your standards, but it fully meets mine. Oh, did I mention it was free? :-) And they even have a Windows port. Find Grokking the Gimp online, or pick it up in a bookstore for a great manual.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Does no one else remember that Bill owns a large part of Dreamworks? Another case of talking out the side of his mouth. If his product is so great, why isn't a company he personally has stake in using his products to work with? Cost of maintenance maybe? Using Linux they can upgrade every two years instead of five. Using Windows they MUST upgrade every two years instead of five.
I'll go up there as a volunteer! Chance of a lifetime. Who wouldn't? Now, spending years making a spacecraft, my wife would want some pay!
I think Open Source is generally best used for either fundamental programming, or very targeting programming. Linux and a scientific calculation are examples of the extremes. Plug-ins, games, and more specialized software lend themselves more to closed source. However, if you are competing with MS, you probably won't make much of a profit anyway. Why not make it open source?
True, writing good software is hard, because there's more to a good program than simply good coding. That's something the open-source community IMO is lacking: it's a bunch of programming freaks who can write complicated things such as kernels, but e.g. don't know what makes a good user-interface. A good interface is more than just fancy hover-buttons and such (the hoverbutton itself was introduced to reduce clutter from all the 3D edges on toolbars).
This is not an insult, this simply something that I've noticed. When was the last time a changelog for an opensource project indicated something like "re-organized the configuration dialog to be more userfriendly" or "added an hourglass animation to indicate that the program is busy". Those kinds of things will undoubtedly make 70% of the people here think 'hah! run back to Windows if that's what you want', instead of considering exactly why Linux and its software is not as popular as expected. This goes for many other aspects, not just the interface.
The Gimp is intended to be a copy or replacement for Photoshop, but it only has most of the functionality, not all the other things that make Photoshop good.
Your every day hacker uses the console, because it's powerful and allows them to do whatever they want. Yet they fail to realize that those people who don't want the console are not 'wussies' or 'stupid', they are simply people who wish to use the basic functions of the computer through basic actions.
When the open source community manages to attract people who know more than just how to write code, the quality of programs should go up immensely.
At least in version 5.5 you could record live mouse movements by pressing play and then using somekind of ctrl/alt/shift combination and move away.
Haven't done that in a long time so i'm not sure. If i were at home i would check if it is in 7.* from the manual.
Linux is faster, cheaper, and if you're writing the bulk of your own software (CGI houses fall into this category) in anything but Objective C, better than MacOS X.
Just because it looks pretty doesn't automatically mean it works well.
I use MacOS X. Every day on my G4 Powerbook. And the reason i am typing this on the linux box sitting under my desk is that Linux is a hell of a lot more responsive and easier to work with than OS X, which just doesn't perform well.
YMMV, but i find using OS X is ugly. really ugly. I won't go into a point-by-point bitch session about everything i dislike about OS X, since lack of speed is the one overriding problem i have.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Lightwave you mean? Hmm... I'm a little surprised I never discovered that, heh.
:)
Aura can definitely do that. Aura captures mouse movements and sends the motion data to LW.
I just thought it was cool that I used unusual means to get a problem solved.
"Derp de derp."
Precisely my point - 'its' is possesive as well - I was always taught that you don't put an apostrophe in 'his' (belonging to him), and neither do you in 'its' (belonging to it).
'It's' (with apostrophe) should only be used as a contraction of 'it is'.
Perhaps the rules are different in the US though, I don't know.
I really hope that they were able to obtain non-i386 binaries (not generic RedHat RPMs) for their platforms (ie, optimal gcc compiler flags). If the programs they use are not open source, hopefully the authors will provide extremely specific binaries for every platform on which they intend their programs to run.
The techies at Dreamworks are really, really smart and are used to working with high-end goodies. That they're using RedHat means it's doing the job that they need it to do. If things need to be tweaked or hacked to bring them up to speed, rest assured that there are people there who have done it or have had someone get it done for them.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I thought that the disks were hybrid's now? As for color, you won't have a lot of choice for the sort of machine you would want to run LW, ie a TiPb. I know it was a joke but hey ;) The iBooks are nice, but only have G3's (750cx) and poor GPU's (RageMobility128) which just can't cope too well with complex 3d. TiPb has a G4 and a RadeonMobility which are much more up to the job.
There are ppl who Quadrupple Boot!
-- Why accept limitations to creativity? --
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
"it just doesn't cut it OUTside Photoshop"..
Have you looked at "PhotoGenics" (available for several platforms, including PDAs)
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Hello, LoTR Troll.
I have a suprise to you, and I'm sure you'd be very pleased to hear it. I've spoken with Gandalf, and described you. He was very excited and he told me that he agrees to have sex with you!
Aren't you excited?
Just be careful - having sex all night long is fine, but make sure to return to your cave at dawn - otherwise I won't be able to set you up with more creatures.
Thank you.
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss