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LOTR Special Effects at OSCON
gnat writes "The IT Director for Weta Digital, Peter Jackson's company doing the digital effects for the Lord of the Rings movies, is keynoting at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. They use a ton of Linux and Perl."
FWIW I believe Hemos and I are speaking too, but I'm much more interested in
seeing this LotR thing.
I'm taking applications now to form The Campaign for Real Movie History. Who's in?
Carousel is a lie!
FWIW I believe Hemos and I are speaking too
FWIW is an abbrevation for "For What It's Worth" - just a little code-talk word that geeks use to communicate with each other. I looked it up on AOL. Hope this helps out all the normal people reading.
Get that module to CPAN stat! I want it! ;)
But I didn't realise they weren't speaking.
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
I always thought that Gandolf looked a bit like Richard Stallman.
Maybe it was just the beard.
Lord of the Token Ring
All your LOTR Graphics are belong to OSCON. Enough said.
The zenith of movie special effects was reached several years ago by Dan Piponi and his crew. What's happened in the interim? Well, Titanic won the Oscar for special effects. That's got to tell you something about the sad state of affairs in movies today.
I have been pwned because my
Even the 65% off that students get leaves the student with a hefty price-tag, I know that during my student days every pound (went to uni in the UK) was valuable and there was no way I could justify spending over $300 to get into a conference just for the privilige of speaking to others who have also had to fork out (I find the people I meet at conferences are often much more interesting than those speaking at them).
Hmm... ignorant or just a troll? LotR is based closely on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, that's why the abrupt ending - go directly to the next movie, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Actually, IIRC, even Titanic used a lot of Linux boxes in special effects...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The UID isn't quite high enough to really fool people but it's close enough given the +1 posting karmic bonus, which shows a sense of patience and forbearance. However, the AOL reference almost spoiled it as too obvious, and the post could have been longer. A link to a page at http://*.aol.com/* which explains "netiquette" would have been especially helpful in mitigating the obvious AOL reference and certainly would have set you apart from the -1 riff-raff. Using quotes or other HTML 0.9 markup to denote the quoted material would have also increased your overall score slightly as well. In the end, the clincher was the replies you received, which are part and parcel to any good troll.
I give it a 7.3 out of 10 post-Siegel & Canter points. Well done, sir!
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I just wanted to be annoying and point out the fact that this is old news. that is all!
I came across this the other day and thought it was really funny, make sure you read it in order though.
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
Finally! Peter Jackson, Hemos & CmdrTaco all in one room.
Which is the best way to destroy a troll? Sunlight or (Score:-1, Troll)?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
In the back of O'Reilly books tear out those postcards. Write your name in big letters on the back then laminate. This is the secret to getting in for free.
Then it hit me, they must be using this to replay dvd versions of production tests under linux :)
Why should it be cheaper? They spent about as much on it as three movies, it's over 3 hours long, and it's not as if the theaters are easier to clean up after. And (nearly) everyone went in knowing the plot, it's holes, shortcomings, and excessive rambling.
Is this the same linux that isn't worth a Quicktime player? I thought that was just for those bottom-feeding free-as-in-beer types who never spend any money. Please pardon my seething sarcasm. Maybe more coffee will help. Sigh.
At Weta, they use a variety of different boxen.. Linux (mostly), but also Mac, Irix, and a bunch of other stuff...
and after personally talking with one of the IT dept managers at Weta, I found they use a lot of perl for the same thing that most of us use perl for... writing cgi scripts which drive their intranet.. because intranets are cross-platform.
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
Did you by any chance happen to read the Tolkein trilogy? If you had, you would know that the trilogy doesn't end at the first book.
...duh...]
[ listen closely -- you'll hear millions of slashdotters saying
So the movie pretty much follows the first book of the trilogy.
I suggest you read the books. But start at The Hobbit. It makes a wonderful prequel to the series.
The Hobbit (prequel to LOTR)
The Fellowhip of the Rings (LOTR I)
The Two Towers (LOTR II)
The Return of the King (LOTR III)
Silmarillon (History, trivia of Tolkein's midworld. As fun as reading an encyclopedia upsidedown and backwards word by word, in my opinion, but if you *really* want to learn to read Elfin runecharacters, and know the history...)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You believe you're speaking? You're not even sure if you're speaking or not? Damn, I'd hate to have to sit in on that speech if you do end up speaking.
"Yea, and, ummmm... (come on, think technology you idiot) So, this one time Hemos and I met Asia Carrera. That was cool."
mbbac
From what I remember, they were used to render the ocean and water.
Somehow the image of the handheld device and consumer electronics celebrities lecturing on workstations and computation farms doesn't seem to fit.
They measure them by weight? I always thought they were measured by lines of code.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Perl is trying to do too much with regular expressions. Why not just take the thing one notch up and allow for LL(kN) grammars?
That's the approach ANTLR (htp://www.antlr.org) uses for its lexical analizers.
Too complex? Just look at the examples in Wall's article and decide by yourselves.
Juanco
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-- Juanco