South Park Turns to Xserve for Storage Upgrade

Lam1969 writes "Computerworld reports that South Park producers are turning away from digital linear tape and direct-attached disk storage to a linear tape open setup complimented by Xserve RAID disk arrays. The show's creators never thought South Park would last nine seasons, so a storage hardware upgrade was necessary. J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling. From the article: 'While South Park may appear technologically amateurish with its character cutouts, over the past nine seasons the cartoon series has added a great deal of storage-consuming detail, including backgrounds and crowd shots that can take up to 100MB of memory each.'"

Comments

Why?

[TheUnknownOne]

Why is this news? who care what Southpark chose for storage?

Re:Why?

[Eightyford]

" Why is this news? who care what Southpark chose for storage?"

My guess? No one does.

Re:Why?

[Catbeller]

So, why are you bothering to comment? You're just cluttering things up.

It's like those kids on "Ain't It Cool News" constantly bitching about how lame the articles are, how much of a sellout Harry Knowles is, and how everyone there should get out of their basements. Without the slightest sense of irony.

Why not just post on an article you do care about?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is news because it mentions Apple and one of their products!

Re:Why?

[Weh]

yeah really, southpark hasn't been funny for a while now, really looks like the creators are running out of inspiration or are losing touch with the real world because of their new found wealth?

For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who are ignorant and don't see why someone would use Apple hardware over good commodity stuff, what's the advantage in going with Xserve stuff?

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the total experience of using well built software and hardware. Something Windows and Loonix server room Trevs and idiot managers don't read about on moronic IT news sites.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[fimbulvetr]

You mean well built hardware like the g4 cube? Or maybe the scratchable ipod? The infamous (Both Desktop and Portable) LCDs? I wonder how often the logic board fails? What about the Imac power button issue?

The truth is, Apple is not infallable, and it's zealotry to claim as much.

Personally, I would have stuck with a nice IBM EXP, Dell StorEdge, or better yet: SATA drives and a nice, proven, reliable Netapp.

The fact that it's news because apple got it's first commericial Xserve sale in it's life is absurd, but common place on good ol' apple dot.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[commodoresloat]

it kills kenny faster and more efficiently.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Tibor the Hun]

well, one nice thing about XServes is they can run spotlight on all your data. so if you're looking for something like, say "Barbara Streisend" or "Chupacabra" that you haven't accessed in 3 years it can pull it up immediately. Comodity stuff doesn't have anything that compares to spotlight preinstalled.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[deReuter]

I think it is rather interesting of you to mention apple hardware over other platforms, but the interesting part of the article is this statment following.

"J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says he chose Apple hardware based on a 'gut' feeling"

Gut feeling huh, that is an interesting way of making a tecnology choice!!!!!!

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Karma Farmer]

For those of us who are ignorant and don't see why someone would use Apple hardware over good commodity stuff, what's the advantage in going with Xserve stuff?

Well, the Xserve stuff is cheaper.

Or, did you mean "commodity" as in "I got my 13 year old cousin to build something from parts he bought online?" Yeah, people who put any value on their data and time don't simply don't do that.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[node 3]

For those of us who are ignorant and don't see why someone would use Apple hardware over good commodity stuff, what's the advantage in going with Xserve stuff?

You plug it in and it works.

It's sort of like the underpants gnomes, except there is no step 3.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[falcon5768]

say what you want but only the iBook logic board failure had over a 2% failure rate which everyone knows in consumer electronics is AMAZING. The thing is Apple is more high profile than Dell HP or any of the other PC manufacturers so their issues make front page news while I can name whole shipments of Dell desktops we sent back for failures, litterally whole labs. I have only had one or two Apple systems fail.

People love to knock Apple cause their problems are front page news, but the truth is they have a much better failure to working ratio than all of the other manufacturers.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Mr. Underbridge]

say what you want but only the iBook logic board failure had over a 2% failure rate which everyone knows in consumer electronics is AMAZING. The thing is Apple is more high profile than Dell HP or any of the other PC manufacturers so their issues make front page news while I can name whole shipments of Dell desktops we sent back for failures, litterally whole labs. I have only had one or two Apple systems fail.

Are you insane? A 2% failure rate for a specific part is catastrophic. No amount of kool-aid changes the fact that the logic board problem was a disaster. Even Apple ultimately admitted the problem.

People love to knock Apple cause their problems are front page news, but the truth is they have a much better failure to working ratio than all of the other manufacturers.

Back that up?

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb ass. It's not like your claims of him being incorrect are presented with any kind of "back up". Why don't you prove that 2% is "catastrophic". Seriously, what a hypocrite.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, did you mean "commodity" as in "I got my 13 year old cousin to build something from parts he bought online?" Yeah, people who put any value on their data and time don't simply don't do that.

I hope you're not suggesting buying from Apple is any different. Same drives as you can buy online, same controllers, same interfaces, it's somehow different and better if it Apple do the same thing and package it in a pretty box?

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[poopdeville]

You're missing something: A warranty and support contract.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

This is Slashdot, where people think Linux on a Xbox is a solution for something.

Many here will never understand why people buy stuff from actual companies, and things they just pull out of a box and turn on and go on with their life at that.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumbass. Xserve RAID has no such thing. It's nothing but a big fucking disk array. It doesn't run OS X or any other OS for that matter. This is about Xserve RAID. RAID. Guess it would be too much to ask for you to read the summary, let alone the article, huh? The title was ridiculously idiotic, as now over half the posts are assuming it has something to do with OS X. They couldn't fit the word RAID in there??

Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Sub-par is default here.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

In one box, for $1.85/GB, you get:

• 7 TB
• 14 independent ATA channels
• 14 hot swappable drives
• 2 independent RAID controllers, both with ethernet (network management, notification) and serial ports (UPS hookup)
• 2 redundant, hot swappable cooling modules
• 2 redundant, hot swappable power supplies
• RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1
• Multiple RAID sets, LUN masking
• Automatic rebuilding of swapped drives (with RAID levels using parity)
• Compatibility with Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Linux, Netware, and of course OS X
• Automatic email alerts of drives going bad
• Java management software runs anywhere

I wouldn't exactly say you get all this with "commodity" hardware (to me that means stuff a bunch of tower cases to the gills with controllers and drives), but comparable solutions from other storage companies exist. Prices tend to be pretty similar. Xserve RAID is a pretty good deal, unlike the rest of Apple's product line.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet I can build the same thing myself within a week by ordering from selected stores online, and do it for less than half the price, more like 88c/GB

And given Apple's well-known reliability problems, I could probably do it with less downtime through the life of the system.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Achromatic1978]

So you're saying more than 1 in 50 of a model being DOA is acceptable. Wait, not acceptable, "AMAZING" that it's not, what, say 1 in 10? But due to profile, no one pays attention to even worse DOA stats from such small companies as Dell, HP, IBM?

Hint: It wasn't Apple's profile - it was Apple's initial denial, their subsequent refusal to replace, subsequent threats of (and follow throughs) of class action, and the fact that they'd quite regularly replace said defective logic boards with yet more defective logic boards.

That isn't "AMAZING". That's a cluster fuck of the highest order. I'd love to see a citation for your claim that Apple has a lower failure rate than any other manufacturer. Or is that yet more hyperbole?

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Achromatic1978]

Why should he? The OP made a claim, and someone asked him to show his source - what about that is hypocrisy?

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[commodoresloat]

I'm not the original poster but my reading of that is, what he thought was amazing was not the 2%, but the fact that of the entire Apple product line, that was the only instance of an over 2% failure rate. It's not that 2% is spectacular but that Apple only had one item come close to that.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by the rest of your response, the default "sub-par" you speak of also includes flames. I mean, come on, at least put some gusto into it.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Mr. Underbridge]

Defect rates are measured in PPM, not %. Logic also suggests otherwise - if every part in a laptop had a 2% failure rate, none would make it out the door. Engage brain.

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[Mr. Underbridge]

I'm not the original poster but my reading of that is, what he thought was amazing was not the 2%, but the fact that of the entire Apple product line, that was the only instance of an over 2% failure rate. It's not that 2% is spectacular but that Apple only had one item come close to that.

Well, first, that is really high - I wouldn't want to duplicate that number. Second, they have had a number pf problems with dodgy hardware. On the current PB line, that would include the hinge (mine was replaced), the latch, and the issue with bright spots on the display.

Yes, I am a PB owner. ;)

Re:For those of us who are ignorant

[gb506]

Add the cost of your time into the equation, then look in the mirror to see who'll be on hand to support it 24/7. As for reliability issues, why don't you go ahead and build a million PCs for a million different retarded consumers and see how many fail...

Is that your mother I hear? Must be lunch time for you, Johnny!

The real question

[the-amazing-blob]

After this move, will South Park run on linux?

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

WHO GIVES A FUCK?!

Quit making slashdot so god damn gimmicky.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this wasn't South Park, nobody would care. Is it really news that they are using a new technology? Companies shift technologies all the time in an effort to become more efficient. It is standard practice.

Re:Who cares?

[slashdotnickname]

If this wasn't South Park, nobody would care.
Yes, hence why it's on Slashdot... us nerds like the show and like to hear stuff about it. It's called entertainment, but if you'd prefer boring, humorless technology reports 24/7 might I recommend this site.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least it's not a dupe. Yet.

Re:Who cares?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why would someone who didn't care about Apple or South Park choose to click the "Read More" link and actually post a comment?

If "nobody would care," why'd you post? Yes, people care. It's just interesting news that gives some interesting stats about South Park's data storage, and they chose Xserves for it.

If they had chosen Linux servers, would you be bitching?

Re:Who cares?

[harlows_monkeys]

If this wasn't South Park, nobody would care. Is it really news that they are using a new technology?

It's news because South Park is pushing certain limits much farther than anyone else, and so it is useful to know what technology they use. Think back to shortly after The Simpsons became a hit, and then every other network tried to jump in with animated prime-time shows, and pretty much all failed. This is discussed on one of The Simpsons DVD commentaries, and Matt Groening and the others explain what these other shows did wrong. The big thing was trying to use too few people. These other shows would hire one or two big name writers, and expect them to write a whole season. On The Simpsons, on the other hand, they had a dozen writers, with most writers only working on one episode for a season. They had many directors, with each directory only responsible for an episode or two. So, it is not surprising that these other shows sucked...how can one or two writers and one or two directors produce year after year (or even one year) of quality on a weekly TV series?

But look at South Park. They do all the things that for those other shows were fatal mistakes. Most episodes are written by Trey Parker, or Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or by those two and Pam Brady. And besides writing, Parker and Stone direct. They write original music, and perform it. And they do a large number of the voices.

And on top of that, they do it on an insane schedule, sometimes not finishing a script until days before the episode must air.

Yet, it works. They produce a great show.

To do this requires very good technology. They aren't sending stuff off to Korea, to come back weeks or months later. They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series, and so they need technology that is very fast and very reliable, much more so than any other series needs.

Re:Who cares?

[Namronorman]

They had many directors, with each directory only responsible for an episode or two.

Haha, looks like someone uses the computer too mu... Nevermind

Actually, you're right. Their deadline is really tight. I think one of the things that made South Park last compared to many other shows that had the same way of doing things but was fatal for them, is the fact that they produce stuff so fast they can target current topics within a reasonable time frame, so therefore every episode is fresh and current!

Re:Who cares?

[PapayaSF]

They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series

No kidding! The episode in which they pulled Saddam out of his "spiderhole" was aired, as I recall, about 70 hours after the actual event. That's pretty much instant replay in the animation world.

Re:Who cares?

[NaCh0]

It's news because South Park is pushing certain limits much farther than anyone else

Perhaps, but certainly not storage limits. The article is worried about a big bad 100MB background image. Give me a break.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this wasn't South Park, nobody would care. Is it really news that they are using a new technology?

If I slip and break a leg in my bathroom it is no news, if the pope does it is. Weird, isn't it?

No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop posting this shit already, no one cares at all. Why do you think anyone does? Clearly there are no posts in this topic since no one cares.

Re:No one cares

[jessecurry]

I'm glad to see Apple hardware being used in a large scale, high profile, commercial setting. This is news because the Xserve platform is so new compared to all of the other server offerings.
If any other company released a product into an already highly developed market and began to have success I would like to know. It points to the company doing something "right".

What does Simpsons use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because its way better.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[CastrTroy]

Well, the simpsons are on 17. They must have pretty large storage needs.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[tinrobot]

Seeing as though The Simpsons are still drawn by hand, I would imagine "storage needs" involves warehouse space in addition to digital storage.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[slashdotnickname]

What does Simpsons use?
Because its way better.

The Simpsons are great, and I hope they go on for many more years... but I wish there was a way to convince Groening & Co. that reviving Futurama will be a success as well! I've become a big fan of it since rediscovering it on Adult Swim, and I know I'm not the only one. I feel Futurama still has a lot of potential material to explore... please Mr. Groening, at least test out one year (if not on Fox then Adult Swim), us fans will not let you down!

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[kimvette]

Matt Groening and David X. Cohen are definitely not the roadblocks for Futurama - FOX is.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[eargang]

Uhmm... dude. You know that it's not Groenig that's stopping the show, right? Creators are usually not in full control of their creations. Also, your post is way funnier when read in Fry's voice in my head. You kind of sound like him.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[Jeffus]

Like Arrested Development and Firefly....

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[harlows_monkeys]

Seeing as though The Simpsons are still drawn by hand

They switched to computers a few seasons ago.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[santaliqueur]

"The Simpsons are great..."

great is ok...but amazing would be great.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[ChadN]

The Simpsons is now an all digital production, according to the DVD commentary. It may involve "hand drawing", but that either means hand drawing immediately scanned into a computer (for cleanup and coloring), or drawing on a tablet, etc. that goes directly into a computer. I don't know what software is used, but I haven't searched either.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[MegaMcSucker]

I wouldn't want to be there when someone tells Cartman that "the simpsons did it."

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[AndreiK]

Yes, it takes a whole 30 gigs on my computer.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hundreds of Koreans in sweatshops.

No, it's true...

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[ManOfMidnight]

Though I am missing the last few seasons from my DVD collection, what I've heard from the commentary thus far is that they are the only remaining, currently airing, hand-painted cell animation series out there (or something to that extent). I would assume that any digital intervention in the production process would be scanning each cell into a digital format for easier and faster clean-up and editing.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[Heembo]

So he needs to store 10 or so terabytes, at most, of image and animation files? Big freEEEeeaking deal - Apple, Dell, Off the shelf RAID attached myself - RAID is not a big deal and any number of vendors could have pulled it off at a variety of budgets, from a few thousand to tens of thousands of more if you wanna get crazy and have stuff like secure remove nsa security like access from any net machine in the world. anyways.

It's all good - they had money to throw at the problem, and almost any RAID direction would have served their needs. No pun intended.

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[ChadN]

I wish I knew which commentary talked about it, but it was basically Al Jean (or someone) saying that they FINALLY switched over fully to "digital" production. I think it was somewhere on the fourth season DVDs. So while what you said apparently was true, I'm guessing as of around 2003 or so (my estimate for when the commentary was recorded), it may no longer be the case. Clearly my recollection is not definitive, but disregarding dates, I think the gist is accurate (that they recently, finally, went to fully digital production).

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it takes a whole 30 gigs on my computer.

You wouldn't want to seed that, would you? I've been waiting for weeks to see a seed and I'm so..... very...... close........

Re:What does Simpsons use?

[AndreiK]

Sorry, my school uses a packetshaper - no torrents get through, and tunneling limits the speed so much that it doesn't help.

Hm ...

[ScrewMaster]

Well, his method of choosing one vendor's product line over another certainly is efficient. Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.

Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.

Re:Hm ...

[blair1q]

Efficient is the key word here.

He's probably aware that anything he'd choose is adequate for the job that he'd put it to, and he's probably right that just choosing one and saving a few tens of thousands of dollars of meeting, ordering, installing, and evaluation time is plenty better than trying to find one that will increase their total efficiency by that much.

Re:Hm ...

[Dahamma]

I don't know... I think that "gut feeling" was actually caused by a noise 92 cents below the lowest octave of E-flat.

Re:Hm ...

[RobertKozak]

There is nothing wrong with "Gut Feeling". Sometimes that will actually give you the best answer.

Check out Blink! a book by Malcome Gladwell. A very thought provoking read.

Blink!

Re:Hm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.

Unfortunately, that story doesn't make for an inflamatory headline.

"South Park turns to Xserve because it's cheap and has a good track record" just doesn't get hits as much as "South Park is run by a bunch of Apple fanboys who don't know anything about IT"

Re:Hm ...

[Laser Lou]

Well, his method of choosing one vendor's product line over another certainly is efficient. Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.

Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.

I think that all depends on how good his gut is. I've had chitterlings several times now, and I can say that some guts are better than others.

Re:Hm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, this "gut-feeling" thing worked for GW Bush so I am sure it well be good enough for Trey and Matt.

Re:Hm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with "Gut Feeling". Sometimes that will actually give you the best answer.

By that logic, there's nothing wrong with writing the choices on pieces of paper, feeding them to the cat, and see which one he shits out first. Sometimes that will actually give you the best answer.

Re:Hm ...

[nmb3000]

Just go with your "gut feeling" and buy whatever your feelings tell you.

Are you sure it comes from your gut?

I think that special feeling might come from the cockles of our hearts, or maybe below the cockles, maybe in the sub-cockle area, maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys, maybe even in the colon. We don't know.

Don't jump to conclusions that these feelings come from the gut. My colon tells me you could be wrong.

Re:Hm ...

[catmistake]

There is nothing wrong with "Gut Feeling". Sometimes that will actually give you the best answer.

Agreed... and this story is a case in point.

Re:Hm ...

[lysergic.acid]

Yea, and sometimes eenie, meenie, minie, mo will give you the best answer too.

Re:Hm ...

[The Ilia]

Er... If that's how you like to make your decisions... Though, I'm sure there is a way to make that analogy without involving animal feces.

Re:Hm ...

[cg0def]

Well what he probably means by " gut feeling" is that he uses Apple computers for most other tasks so he went with their server line because of the good experiences that he has had. After all he is no geek or as sys admin so he can't give you 10 technological reason why he chose Apple over MS or linux. Plus isn't that the same reason why people chose MS Server over linux/unix most of the time ...

Re:Hm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?


Check out Blink! a book by Malcome Gladwell. A very thought provoking read.

Blink! [amazon.com]
--
Bet this .sig looks familiar.

You feel the need to paste this type of advertising shit into your post every time? Why in the hell would I click on the link? So you can get money off of me buying something AFTER I look at what kind of crap you have posted?

Give me a break. I'm normally a very nice person but this type of shit just rubs me the wrong way.

Re:Hm ...

[Jedi Alec]

oh, just shut up and sing the song, will ya? =)

Re:Hm ...

[Tim Browse]

Interestingly (well, I think so), I once worked with a guy who told me how he had decided to document most of the important decisions he made in his life, whether it be personal life, or at work, etc. He tried to write down as objectively as possible what he thought at the time, the pros and cons of each solution, etc. Not in huge detail, just enough for him to go back and look at it dispassionately a few years later. He also wrote down how he felt about the decision. He did this for a few years, so when he went back to the information he would be quite distant from the situation and his decisions, and so hopefully more objective when assessing whether he had made the right decision or not.

And after analysing the information, his conclusion? Very simple. Go with your gut feeling. That seemed to be the most reliable indicator of the correct decision to take.

It's made me wonder ever since :-)

Re:Hm ...

[RobertKozak]

Take a good look at the link. I just went to Amazon and looked up the book and copy and pasted its URL. Its not a referral link of any kind. Anyone making money off it is Amazon if you decide to buy from them.

I read the book a few weeks ago and thought it was a very interesting book. Excuse me for having upset your sensibilities by posting a link to a book that I thought many would find inetresting.

Re:Hm ...

[javaxman]

Whether you end up with the best tool for the job is another story.

He doesn't need the best tool, and he certainly doesn't need the cheapest. He's working for an outrageously successful, well-funded company. He needs a solution that gets the job done with a minimum amount of headache; for that set of requirements, his gut feeling probably did him well.

He picked a pretty much turn-key solution from a company famous for support, and a platform that fulfills all of his known requirements. Do you think he make the wrong choice ? If so, for what reason ?

Re:Hm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a good look at the link. I just went to Amazon and looked up the book and copy and pasted its URL.

You're either a liar or a fool. Based on your "gut feeling" post, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. But let's look at that link:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316172324/qid=113634494 4/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-9822958-0738558?n=507846 &s=books&v=glance

Do you see that "ref=" part? That's a referrer.
And by the way, that book is moronic.

Re:Hm ...

[jfranzen]

If I may clear something up. The actual question the reporter asked was "Why did you even consider using Apple? I've never even thought about them in regards to this type of thing." To which I answered, "This is gonna sound bad, but after looking at the specs, and using OSX for a while, I had a gut feeling that they might be ready for prime time, so I thought they would be worth considering." I did NOT make my final decision based on a gut feeling, but only after several months of real world testing under one of the tightest animation production schedules in television. Trust me on this one. Thanks,

J^2

Re:Hm ...

[blair1q]

I've been told I'm always thinking with my cockles, but my hearing is starting to go...

Re:Hm ...

[pagluy]

I believe that your "gut" feeling is your sub-conscience telling you what you really think is the right choice.

I figured maybe..

[twocoasttb]

...Cartman roshamboed someone for it.

Re:I figured maybe..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it wasn't Robert Smith.

Re:I figured maybe..

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think that a forum with as many secular humanists, international socialists, and cheese eatin' surrender monkeys as slashdot would at least be able to produce a correct spelling of "Rochambeau"

Re:I figured maybe..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am NOT a fan of Urban D, some of the admins are ASSHOLES! I remember one time I found a flaw in their voting system that allowed you to add thousands or millions of votes to which side you agree with so I was like wow, that's not good. Well anyways I email the creator to let him know and I told him how it worked and asked him to talk to me about it so I could go over it with him.

He accuses me of threatening him after I tried to help him. I now refuse to use his site. If someone is going to treat me like some punk because I offered to help, then they don't need any ad hits from me.

Throwing money away

[Anonymous Coward]

so they choose Apple for storage when Apple dont even manufacture hard drives
perhaps Ford should choose Starbucks for their new alternator system, or consult with Nike on the dashboard config

surely if you want specialist storage you go to a specialist storage company not a retail/consumer company ?

They took jer job

[rolandog]

I'm pretty sure that their providers of DL Tape are probably saying "They took mah job!"

Re:They took jer job

[dosguru]

DLT7000s are quite old now. Most of my clients who have been using DLT are switching first to SDLTs to give them >160GB/Tape instead of the >35GB/tape. SDLTs can read old DLT tapes and write to SDLT much more quickly, so the transitition is much easier. A couple of TB of data isn't that much any more. This really isn't news, but it is an example of the industry trend by a well know group.

Re:They took jer job

[Anonymous Coward]

DEY TOOK YER JAWB!

Re:They took jer job

[Anonymous Coward]

DERK 'ER J'RB!

Re:They took jer job

[Anonymous Coward]

DERKY DERR!

Re:They took jer job

[absinthminded64]

Every time an old DLT tape was inserted into one of the SDLT drives that I was responsible for the extraction process involved a screw driver. the SDLT drives would not eject the old DLT tapes so it was necessary to take the entire drive apart until the old DLT could be taken out manually.

Full quote... WTF?

[Red Flayer]

"Franzen said he chose Apple hardware based on a "gut" feeling that its technology would be good, and so far, he has not been disappointed."

Bad, bad Franzen. Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware... although this is a good example of brand awareness and marketing in action.

OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling, I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[fsterman]

They are graphic designers who wanted something too just work in a familiar setting. It is a *nix OS with a nice interface. Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface. If they can train themselves on how too use it instead of getting a Linux or MS boxen and hiring someone too admin it full time... I would've made the same decision.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[jellomizer]

Well sometimes a Gut Feeling is the best you can do. Even for Computer Gurus it is not always that cut and dry. There are a lot of factors to consider, and the venders don't make it easy for you to figure out these factors. Company A will give speed in Ghz Company B will give speed in Mips. Company C will give time for functions in an application. Will a system with a bigger bus perform my actions better then a computer with a faster clock? Searching the internet is not much help also. With bench marks proving that every fanboys favorite system is faster then their competition. Many time at the end it will come down to the Gut feeling, and I for one say go with that feeling. A Gut feeling is often created from an unconscious connection to know it is right. So say I didn't know which was faster for my use Faster Clock or bigger bus. My Gut tells me to go with the bigger bus. While I have a hard time justifying it, but my gut tends to realize the application transfers a lot of memory back and forth vs. one that just does a lot of calculations, so going for the bus is the best guess. That is why on the SAT they recommend that you choose you first choice after you have carefully read the problem. Because your Gut feeling will make you right 55% of the time. Besides if you chose completely by using rational thinking and it turned out to be a flop you probably should have said to yourself I should have went with X.

Here is an example.
A friend of mine was in the market for a new PC. His 2 main choices were a Dell and a Gateway. He looked at the specs and they all seems even except for the Price on the Gateway was $200 cheaper. His gut told him that he wanted the Dell but he chose the rational part of his mind and chose the Gateway. After a couple months the Hard Drive controller started going bad and other things as well. Making him wishing that he went with Dell.

As for your Job. When you justify the purchases with the execs. It is different because they all may have different gut feeling and with 4 People with a Gut Feeling of 55% of being right. There is a 9% chance that all your gut feelings with be the same and correct. Because of all the people involved you need to justify your actions better because Gut feelings reduce with more people.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling, I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.

And that's why it's better to go with your "gut feeling" if you can afford it. By the time you've invested all that time, money, and effort "justifying" the purchase to every pointy haired boss and pocket-protector wearing geek in the bureaucratic food chain, you've wasted whatever theoretical advantage you might have gained by choosing the theoretically "superior" product.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Red Flayer]

"Besides if you chose completely by using rational thinking and it turned out to be a flop you probably should have said to yourself I should have went with X"

Yes, but I tell myself that I was using the best information available to me at the time. I only regret my decisions when I didn't use due diligence in making the choice.

"When you justify the purchases with the execs. It is different because they all may have different gut feeling and with 4 People with a Gut Feeling of 55% of being right. There is a 9% chance that all your gut feelings with be the same and correct. Because of all the people involved you need to justify your actions better because Gut feelings reduce with more people."

Well, they all claim to make rational decisions and not be motivated by gut feelings. It's just a matter of making my choice seem the best according to their logic... and typically, I've done my research and can make my case. If I think it's a crap shoot, I'll tell them... and then they can use their prodigious guts.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[daveschroeder]

Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware.

Well, we purchased 35 Xserve RAID arrays for a single installation, for a total of 200TB of storage, after real research and comparisons as opposed to a gut feeling.

The installation is described here, with pictures. It is NOT a University-wide service; this was installed for one research project. We have much more storage around campus from EMC (in our two primary datacenters), Apple, Sun, and Storagetek, among others.

It has been up and running for almost a year now, and the only problem, across all 35 Xserve RAID units running 24x7, has been one failed disk. One alternative looked at was building whitebox PCs in huge tower cases and packing them with disk. Ultimately, it was decided that a major commercial vendor, from which 24x7 support and 4-hour on-site response is available for 3 years, was a good choice. And it was much cheaper than competitive commercial solutions. And at a cost of around $1.60/GB for enterprise storage, you can't really go wrong. And for the Mac OS X-haters out there, there is no Mac OS X as part of this solution. We are using commodity 1U servers running Fedora Core. The Linux boxes see it as generic fibre channel disk, because that's all it is. The servers are monitored with Apple's excellent Java-based, platform independent RAID Admin tools, and some command-line tools we wrote ourselves.

It's proven itself to be rock-solid. And that matches with my experience with the 20 Xserve servers we have installed, starting since around mid-2002: zero hardware failures, of any kind. Franzen had a good gut feeling. And, of course, given Apple's track record with reliability and lack of need for repairs (generally number one) when compared with other vendors from organizations such as Consumer Reports, guessing that the reliability of another Apple product will be good is probably a reasonable guess. ;-)

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad, bad Franzen. Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware... although this is a good example of brand awareness and marketing in action.

I suspect that "gut feeling" had a lot to do with the fact that they already use Apple hardware for almost everything else. That's the kind of detail that gets left out of fluff articles like this one.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put, if it is not 'cut and dry', then you are not a 'guru'. A true professional knows how to research such decisions.

As for a storage system, you need to consider the read and write transaction rates, transaction sizes, and transfer rates at average, peak, and rebuild loads for current and projected loads, the nature of the data's sequential access, required and projected space requirements, integrity requirements, availability requirements, warrenty requirements, and of course a budget. You will know the quality of an IT department's management when a disk in one of their RAID arrays fails, and brings all of its server's services to a crawl.

Choosing the lowest price, as in your empirical example, is not 'rational'. If your 'friend' knew what he was doing, he would have done the research to find out the common issues with the systems and the companies selling the systems.

Companies usually base purchasing decisions on economic feasibility. In other words, they decide what will give them the best return on investment. They do not simply pull numbers out of their ass. A that company makes 'gut decisions' on major purchases is either doomed for failure, or facing an upcoming 'restructuring'.

BTW, you might want to consult an English grammar book to help you with those sentence fragments.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Red Flayer]

They also probably get a nice marketing kickback from Apple... or at least their network gets some discount for cross-promotion.

I know my employer gets discounts from companies that advertise with us (print media)... a lot of the time, we get freebies, too (iPods, for example).

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[samkass]

"Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface."

While the performance of MacOS X as a MySQL server was well-documented by Anandtech to be sub-par, I haven't seen any benchmarks showing any performance problems with the xRAID/xServe combination as a file server. And last I checked, it was extremely competitive on a dollar-per-GB basis for the claimed performance and reliability levels. If they just need something to store lots of files online, and have it be easy to administer, it doesn't seem like a bad deal.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[WasterDave]

Y'know maybe they've got a pile of Apple stuff and a pile of other stuff and the Apple stuff works better. Or, perhaps, they're all really fucking busy and don't have time to piss around debating which is best.

I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.

Quite. The South Park guys, on the other hand, have to wedge a new show out the door once a week and maybe procedural memos and purchase justifications just don't come into it.

Dave

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[SpaceLifeForm]

There may be other reasons as to the decision that
he does not wish to disclose or even hint about at this time.
The GF (gut feeling) could just be a convienent explanation.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[spectre_240sx]

I need... to change... my pants...

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[hjf]

I, for one, welcome our new apple overlords.

in soviet russia, you would buy some cheap-ass motherboards with onboard SATA RAID and a whole lot of huge-ass hard drives. then run linux (BSD is dead) and samba, FTP or whatever... imagine a beowulf cluster of that! scalability is not such of a deal (obligatory simpsons qoute)

Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

and that will cost you wayyyy less than XServe RAID. the time you will lose installing the system? just a little less than the time it takes apple to deliver your system via overnight courier. anyone that tells otherwise it's just making FUD.

what we need is a mega-RAID to hold all the dupes being posted in slashdot.

i'm bashing at apple... I must be new here.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Pollardito]

The GF (gut feeling) could just be a convienent explanation.

sure makes a good article though, "_____ buys ____ 'just because'." you can't really take a lot away from it, or apply their insight into your own search for hardware

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Well sometimes a Gut Feeling is the best you can do. Even for Computer Gurus it is not always that cut and dry.

That's why computer gurus get evaluation units and test them. If you're buying 1000 units, a gut feeling ain't good enough.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[grouchomarxist]

Does Apple still support this when you're not running Mac OS X?

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Halo1]

It would surprise me if they didn't, given the Windows, Red Hat, Novell and Terra Soft certifications they boast about on their website.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[mr_zorg]

Does Apple still support this when you're not running Mac OS X?

Let us not forget that Apple is first, and foremost, a hardware company. So why not? While the make some really nice software, they have had to do so to lure you to their hardware because there were few other options on their platform. As many speculate, and I'm inclined to agree, their impending move to Intel based chips should allow their boxes to run Windows - which would break down the last barrier to widespread acceptance in corporate America and allow them to compete directly with Gateway and Dell and, thus, perhaps gain more marketshare. Of course, the question remains, if you can run Windows on a Apple box, will it still be a better box? Or will Windows drag its overall quality down?

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is why on god's green earth would you use "Apple" FC card's? That LSI junk is about the absolute WORST performance out of any FC card produced, and I won't even bother touching on MTBF/reliability.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we've purchased and about to configure 5 XServe Raids for video capture on a Linux setup as well. They've have proven on our other projects to be reliable and performance consistently.

I'm sure there's a cheaper solution out there, but the RIAD units seem to have just the right features and price point. Also the bling!

Get your 250GB external USB2.0 or firewire 400 Hard drives here for 89$! (aft rebs of course)

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I run pretty much on gut feeling all the time and rarely is it wrong. Gut feeling is the sensation of your "right" brain putting all the information, the knowledge, experience, everything that you know together. It's not a conscious thought process. The "left" brain is mighty slow and honestly easily biased. When you learn to let your right brain do the work its amazing the results you get in life.

I know typically right brained is considered "creative" but its really not. Its just where our brains do the work for us without us having to "think" about it. I've spent years training my brain to do things using the right brain. I don't think about what I am doing most of the time, it just happens. I know what to do - its just there. I know what to say, its just there. Everything is just there. I live in the moment, I don't analyze and think. I don't "reason" in the sense i weigh the choices. My brain does that for me behind the scenes, and I just have the answer come to me as I need it. My brain is miles ahead of where I am yet i never know it. When I get there everything is already figured out for me.

It makes programming, editing video, building computers, troubleshooting, driving, everything in life... a thoughtless experience. Its peaceful, your brain is shut off, you don't need to strain ever. It all just "is".

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Big Jason]

I'm paying about $0.60/gigabyte for HDS 9585 FC storage, how now brown cow?

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different
> ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos.

What a waste of time: First you make your decision based on good-old reliable gut feeling like everybody else. Then you'll have to make up some logical-sounding explanations for the managers that they don't understand anyway... Are you using SAP?

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Goth Biker Babe]

The profitability of a company is not absolute, it's relative to the investment in that company. Sales volume is also not the holy grail. What's the good of selling millions of something at a 1% margin when you can sell thousands and a 25% margin. One of the most profitable companies I know makes very high end audio equipment. They have about eight employees and turn out one or two items a month. Do Apple want to compete with Dell or Gateway? BMW sell a lot of cars, but they sell far less than say Ford and yet BMW have far less troubles than Ford. I for one would not want to see Apple products getting cheaper and nastier just to get their sales volumes up.

Actually that's a real problem I have with the commercial world at the moment. Everything is moving to a common denominator. Nothing is really good, it's just good enough and cheap enough for the masses. Well I'm not the masses and it would not be great if Apple started selling cheap hardware that would run Windows. I bought an Apple because I liked the style, liked the functionality and liked OS-X. Linux is a pain because nothing quite completely works. Windows is just damn right horrible. I've used it since 1990 and it's never been intuitive.

My next car will be either a BMW or Jaguar Sports/Station Wagon/Estate car because I want a well built car which performs, is nice to drive, and can carry my german shepherd dog. Yes I can find cheaper cars but it wont be special.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[daveschroeder]

Does Apple still support this when you're not running Mac OS X?

Yes, they do. Support, though the project hasn't needed it, is one of the main reasons we got it.

With AppleCare Premium, 24x7 telephone and email support is included, as well as 24x7 4-hour on-site hardware service. Apple supports it as fibre channel storage, and they don't care what it's attached to. See also Apple's non-Mac OS X certifications for Xserve RAID. No, it doesn't include Fedora Core, but they still support the product itself.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[hey!]

Well, it's true that many people who think of themselves as "gut" decision makers are really just too lazy to bother thinking. On the other hand a "gut" decision is not the same as an uninformed one. Gut feelings are no different from analytical results in this respect: their reliability depend on the quality of information that goes into them.

There are aspects to every difficult decision which I call "imponderables".

Imponderables are usually things that either involve predictions of the future (will Apple stay in business?), information you can't get (what are my competitors' plans?), or things which are subjective (is this consistent with my ethical values?). One of the biggest differences between a good decision maker and a bad one is the ability to recognize as imponderable issues that in theory could be analyzed, but not within the time and resource constraints available. Doing a good job at recognizing these is what keeps you from "paralysis by analysis" on one hand, and simply not doing your homework on the other.

Another approach is to completely dismiss any factor that is in any way imponderable. It's not necessarily an awful strategy, but it leads to excessive conservatism. There is a technology adoption curve, and the people who operate this way are on the extreme non-innovator end of the spectrum.

I think the "gut" aspect in this instance comes down to two factors. Is Apple is capable of or perhaps more precisely interested in supporting mission critical IT infrastructure? It's not a core business for them. The other is whether for the forseeable future such a solution would be easier to manage, given that they're probably already supporting a Mac infrastructure. This depends on your sense of your ability to handle multiple technologies from different vendors, the balance of time you have between getting things done and "sharpening your axe", the flexibilty of your users etc.

I've worked for some managers who would (I'm not kidding) insist that I try to get a personal meeting with Steve Jobs to find out what Apple's plans for its XServe line really are, not the tripe Apple is feeding to press and investors. That's not recognizing that for practical purposes this is information that is impossible to have. You're better off coming up with a gut sense of this, then analyzing the probable consequences if your gut is wrong.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[ericspinder]

OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling,

The cynic in me thinks that the 'gut feeling' was the same one which seems to drive both our government and business; the satisfaction of a fine meal in the clubhouse, after a golf outing at an exclusive club.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[CosmicDreams]

Thanks I was waiting for someone to get that out of the way.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[ThunderBucket]

>> My next car will be either a BMW or Jaguar Sports/Station Wagon/Estate car...

Jaguar? Weren't you just ripping on Ford?

X-type = Contour
S-Type = Lincoln LS

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[bill_mcgonigle]

$500 and it "just works" with Linux.

And you're right, they're not that fast. It's fine for a cost-sensitive performance-tolarant application.

The two I've been using have been in service for a year and a half with no errors - when would you expect I'd start seeing them?

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Where do you get them? All I could find was pricing from 1994 at $25K for a 13TB array and a link to a "fill out this form and sales will contact you" page.

So, chalk store.apple.com up as one reason somebody might have bought an XServe RAID.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[bill_mcgonigle]

pricing from 1994

Hey, that would have been great pricing in 1994! Increment the decade for a reality check.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Goth Biker Babe]

Jaguar? Weren't you just ripping on Ford?

X-type = Contour
S-Type = Lincoln LS

Actually...

X-Type = Mondeo floorpan, new metal work, jaguar suspension, jaguar modified Ford V6.
S-Type = Lincoln floorpan, new metal work, jaguar suspension, jaguar designed V8.

All of which are built in the UK.

Are you really telling me that this thing (3.9 litre, 280bhp V8) is the same as this? (4 litre, 400bhp supercharged V8 with a 0-60 of ~6 seconds).

They are not the same cars with just different metal work. US cars are generally asthmatic and drive like you're on jello. Ford may own Jaguar and admittedly some parts are shared (economy of scale) but there is a big difference between the models. You'll be saying an Aston Martin DB9 is the same as a Lincoln Town Car next. They are definitely not Ford Focuses or similar.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Gut feeling' is 'magic.'
Go on, conduct experiments with random samples of people. Have them use intuition to determine a few things:

Which can has the ball? No, ma'am, you can't manipulate the can. Use your gut.
Which structure will support the most weight?
Which HDD will last the longest?
Which car has the highest top speed?
Which DVD player has the broken firmware? (No, ma'am, you can't turn it on.)
Which pair of headphones has the best audio quality?
Which cantelope is ripe? (No, sir, you can't touch it.)

When people 'go with their gut' they're going to first look for things they are familiar with. Then after that they will pick things that look similar to things they are familiar with. Barring that they will pick whatever is most aesthetically pleasing. When picking from something they have little information about, they will pick bad choices. That's because when you're 'going with your gut' you aren't engaging in deduction, and without previous knowledge an inference might as well be a random guess. It's gambling. People see patterns where there aren't any more often than they see patterns where there are any.

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[mr_zorg]

...it would not be great if Apple started selling cheap hardware...

I completely agree. I hope they don't do that. Keep selling the same high quality, high asthetic that they do now, and allow it to run Windows? I may buy Dell or Gateway (or something else) crap simply because I have run Windows software - but if I could do so on a high quality Apple box? Sure, I'd pay extra for that!

Re:Full quote... WTF?

[Rhys]

It is interesting to hear other users of Xserve RAID/Xserves comment on things like this. Within a year we had our (2) Xserve raids throw 2 disks and 1 controller (!).

And don't even get me started on the repair parts for the cluster of Xserves themselves -- though if you have only 20 you're probably doing light-duty use with them, not heavy memory-hogging, CPU-killing number crunching on them. Nothing seems to find CPU/memory related errors like linpack...

Overheard at SP productions when hw came in

[FerretFrottage]

Sweeeeeeeet, but you get your bitch ass back in the kitchen and make me some pie!

Re:Overheard at SP productions when hw came in

[WorldRimWalker]

"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."

The fat white guy's name is Michael Moore.

Re:Overheard at SP productions when hw came in

[Anonymous Coward]

"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change." The fat white guy's name is Michael Moore.

Except Moore is a Democrat...

Re:Overheard at SP productions when hw came in

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Moore is a Democrat...

And he pushes for change. Apart from those two minor details, WorldRimWalker is spot on!

Re:Overheard at SP productions when hw came in

[Lars T.]

Well, he only got mods from guys going with their gut feeling that it was funny, no Insightfuls.

Re:Overheard at SP productions when hw came in

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear god people must have a shitty sense of humor to find that funny.

respect my vector

[hostingreviews]

Dear Trey or Matt: Switch to vector graphics methods, not raster! Save many disks of whatever. Kthnksbi.

Re:respect my vector

[4D6963]

Problem is they use 3D I think, since they use Maya

Re:respect my vector

[hostingreviews]

In any case, they could save it to punch cards and still afford it. Who gives a fsck?

Re:respect my vector

[tinrobot]

Why do that? You'd lose all the things that makes South Park look the way it does - paper textures, realistic shadows, and so on...

It's much better that they do the show in Maya. Not only do you get the photorealistic rendering that gives it that low-tech "animation stand" look, you get Maya's great animation and scripting tools, which make the animators and tech directors happy.

Re:respect my vector

[fsterman]

Wow, have you actually ever used Maya? Or any digital video software?

Re:respect my vector

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, they could make the whole thing in Flash for dirt cheap, actually.

Re:respect my vector

[mrchaotica]

You're not making any sense. First of all, Maya is a vector graphics program (not raster)! Second of all, vector graphics can do textures, and in fact is (IMHO) better suited to a "paper cutout" style of animation than raster is. Which, after all, is better: storing one copy of a texture plus a bunch of shapes (defined mathematically with vectors), or storing a whole lot of bitmaps, each of which basically just contains the texture and a bit mask to define which pixels are visible?

Re:respect my vector

[mrchaotica]

Although in this particular case you're right, switching to vector graphics doesn't necessarily save space. In particular, it's very inefficient if you've got a complex and detailed image that's going to be rendered at a relatively low resolution.

Re:respect my vector

[shank2001]

Uhhhh you obviously have not!!! Maya is NOT a "digital video software" it is a 3D package.

Re:respect my vector

[xombo]

Well, the problem there is that the texture would remain stationary as the object moved around on the stage.

Re:respect my vector

[mrchaotica]

Okay, so you would just have to define the position and orientation of the texture too. That's, what, two sets of coordinates?

Re:respect my vector

[quantax]

They aren't doing Southpark in 3D for the realistic shadows or paper textures, they're using Maya since it allows them much more freedom in the long run with the characters and animation, the very reason they would not use flash or any other 2D program. Character animation in Maya is great & intuitive, especially with animation as simple as Southparks, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes. When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, and instead of having to have an artist draw a cell of animation for each perspective of the character (front, rear, side, etc etc etc), they just turn them around in 3D, flatten the animation curves to give it that instant-motion look and they gotta working scene. A majority of their work is very likely the character animations, scene creation, lip-sync and post-render touch up to remove anything that might not have rendered the way they like.

If they used a 2D program, they would be spending more time dealing with the technical aspect of animation rather than just moving the characters around and putting them where they want them. This is not because 3D is better but simply because it is far more efficient and allows them more flexibility. As far as the paper-look, thats simply a matter of the render engine & post-render effects, nothing that couldn't be done with a 2D program either, but does take a decent amount of time to get looking good, atleast to the degree that post-render touchup will not take much time.

I would not be surprised if most cartoons in the future moved to 3D since the time-savings can really add up if you get a good setup going, and most cartoons animation movement quality is low to begin with so they can save themselves money on all aspects of it from time saved in the character animation phase.

Re:respect my vector

[hostingreviews]

Switching to vector saves space 90% of the time. Draw a circle in photoshop, 100x100px black and white, youre looking at 29,000 bytes. Same thing in vector: 318 bytes. I'm not sure I get your point...? Clarify?

Re:respect my vector

[hostingreviews]

my bad: raster: 28,672 bytes, vector: 327,680 bytes. Youre right! OMG!@#$

Re:respect my vector

[hostingreviews]

I've used maya (4.5, 5 etc), I've used photoshop, coreldraw, illustrator, premiere, flash, etc etc. Wow! Have I ever.

Re:respect my vector

[tinrobot]

When a character turns around in the show, the animators have keyframed the characters poses, so they have all their characters in 3D which can be place in any position, any perspective, etc within their scenes.

You know absolutely nothing about how South Park is set up. It is done in a 3D package, but the characters are by no means "3D" in the traditional sense -- they are simply flat parts assembled in 3D space, much like the Oxberry camera stand used for the original shorts.

Characters are built "flat" using NURBS curves and surfaced using the "make planar" function, which trims a plane to the outline of the curve. The characters are simply an assemblage flat bits of geometry - the digital equivalent of a cutout bit of paper. These flat bits are textured using scans of actual construction paper.

Animation is done using set driven keys on the visibility tracks of these parts. These keys are tied to the action of a software slider. Running the head turn slider, for example, would turn off visibility on the "right" head and turn it on for the "front" head (I'm simplifying here, but you get the point)

The original decision in 1997 to go with Alias Power Animator 7 was because of the ability to render accurate textures and shadows, as well as the ability to tie sliders to visibility. Back then the sliders were driven by expressions, but Maya allowed the switch to set driven keys, which are more eficient. Flash really wasn't an option back then but 2D software such as After Effects actually were considered - AE could do the textures, but shadows were difficult as were sliders. Thus the decision to go with a 3D package to essentially do a 2D show.

(If you haven't figured it out - I used to work there)

Re:respect my vector

[tinrobot]

Wow, have you actually ever used Maya? Or any digital video software?

Actually, I just wrote a book on Maya (which isn't video software, btw...) and I own several seats of it.

Re:respect my vector

[tinrobot]

First of all, Maya is a vector graphics program (not raster)! Second of all, vector graphics can do textures, and in fact is (IMHO) better suited to a "paper cutout" style of animation than raster is.

Last time I looked, Comedy Central does not broadcast in "vector."

You're going to have to rasterize someplace in the pipeline (hopefully before you get it into the Avid)

Re:respect my vector

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, you must not know the cardinal rule of /.

If you know all about something, you're not aloud to talk about it. Now, just relax, sit back, and let numerous uninformed teenagers with no experience give us their groundless opinions. Facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts!

Re:respect my vector

[johneee]

Wow. You just gave me my chuckle of the day. Let this be a lesson to all who get in to arguments on /.:

"Watch who you talk smack about, the person who you are arguing with may have literally written the book about it".

Re:respect my vector

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly did you manage to consume 327,680 bytes with a vector description of a circle satisfying x^2 + y^2 = 100px? Did you encode it in XML or something? Try to approximate it by hand using a few thousand line segments?

Re:respect my vector

[mrchaotica]

Well, that particular result is probably due to Photoshop saving a huge pile of metadata (layers, channels, maybe even undo actions?). If you made sure it was only specifying the circle part then I see no reason why it should be more than a few hundred bytes. For example, SVG (which, being XML, should be an upper bound since it's so wordy) for such an image is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/ svg11.dtd">
 
<svg width="100px" height="100px" version="1.1"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
 
<circle cx="50" cy="50" r="50" stroke="black"
stroke-width="1" fill="black"/>
 
</svg>

(modified from source at: http://www.w3schools.com/svg/svg_circle.asp)

That file is 307 bytes. In contrast, a 100x100 pixel, 1-bit depth GIF file of the same thing is 347 bytes.

Alright, now here's my point: there are two cases where the raster can be smaller. The first is if we reduce the size of the image to 50x50 pixels. In this case, the SVG gets exactly two bytes smaller, because we're replacing the "100"s in the width and height with "50"s. The GIF, on the other hand, shrinks to 167 bytes. In this case, the raster image is 138 bytes smaller!

The other case is if we had a very complex image, such as the IBM logo. Note that it's still a single color, so it can be stored as a 1-bit gif. Therefore, if we made a 100x100 pixel image of it it would still be only 355 bytes (and yes, I made one to check), while an SVG version would be much larger due to having to define all those paths. Even if it was created in the most efficient way possible (defining paths for each letter, defining a box to mask off a stripe, and defining an array of those boxes to mask off all the stripes) it would still be at least a kilobyte or so. And, keep in mind that that would be optimized hand-written SVG; a drawing application like Inkscape or Illustrator would likely be much less efficient.

Re:respect my vector

[mrchaotica]

Surely the point of keeping all the data is to preserve the "master copy," which ought to be the lossless vector data, not the rendering. Keeping the rasterized output instead would be like keeping the compiled binary of the program you just wrote, and throwing away the source code! Especially given that we're talking about relatively simple 2D animation here (as opposed to something like Shrek that needs a Beowulf cluster to render), they might as well keep the vector "source" and re-render as needed.

The Simpsons animates in real time for broadcast

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite the terrible strain on the animator's wrists.

Dude

[4D6963]

It kicks ass!

Re:Dude

[Anonymous Coward]

Apples, Macs, who cares? It's all just a bunch of tree-hugging hippie crap!

this is news?

[ilmdba]

so they dumped some DLT drives and a ciprico array for some LTO drives and some xserves?

wow.

this is news how??

Re:this is news?

[slashname3]

Give it time. When they dupe it later this week or next week it will be news then. It just has to have time to ripen, or rot as the case maybe.

Re:this is news?

[Nutria]

so they dumped some DLT drives and a ciprico array for some LTO drives and some xserves?

wow.

this is news how??

Especially since the DLT7000 is 1995 technology.

Re:this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention that it's also about a show that hasn't been relevant since the late 90's. Not in a stagnation kind of way, but more like an end-of-the-rope way. They've exhausted their material. All that's left is for them to implode and fade from existence. I hope it happens before they come up with another movie script.

Re:this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess to some people, it is a big deal when someone somewhere buys an Apple product.
Maybe the shelves have a nifty scroll wheel and the whole system looks really pleasing sitting in the lan room.

"South park compression"

[Entropy]

Bet they sure could save tons of HD space if they just had one clip of Kenny's death.

Re:"South park compression"

[Spy der Mann]

Bet they sure could save tons of HD space if they just had one clip of Kenny's death.

1. Save clips of Kenny's death.
2. ???
3. Profit!!

Why so huge?

[Cyno01]

Isn't South Park done in flash? I know a lot of Adult Swim is done in flash...

Re:Why so huge?

[poopdeville]

No. It's Maya.

Re:Why so huge?

[Anonymous Coward]

First time I saw the show, I figured it was PowerPoint.

Re:Why so huge?

[Anonymous Coward]

First time I saw the show, I figured it was PowerPoint.

Considering they used to do it by hand with construction paper cutouts that's probably the closest tool I can think of that equates. Get me some poster board and construction paper, I've got a presentation for school to whip up!

(Does anyone actually use anything other than a computer and PowerPoint for presentations in class these days?)

Re:Why so huge?

[La Camiseta]

(Does anyone actually use anything other than a computer and PowerPoint for presentations in class these days?)

Yes, Keynote.

Re:Why so huge?

[EvanED]

LaTeX + Beamer

Re:Why so huge?

[MBCook]

Could you provide any kind of link on how they do that? I don't watch South Park, but I am familiar with it and I figured it was Flash also. Isn't Maya used for 3D usually? Do you know why they used Maya instead of something else?

Really, I'd love to see an article on how many of these kind of cartoons (like the Flash ones CN plays, and any other cartoon that is not made using "tradition" methods) are made.

Re:Why so huge?

[HeLLFiRe1151]

Adobe http://www.spscriptorium.com/SPinfo/MakingOfSouthP ark.htm

Re:Why so huge?

[Anonymous Coward]

what i would like to know is why 3 word comments get modded up as insightful with out any refrence.

Re:Why so huge?

[Goalie_Ca]

It's so obviously done in flash.

Re:Why so huge?

[poopdeville]

http://www.spscriptorium.com/SPinfo/MakingOfSouthP ark.htm

Re:Why so huge?

[timeOday]

Looks more like construction paper to me.

Re:Why so huge?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was 'informative', and it's common knowledge. That's how.

Re:Why so huge?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's done in Maya, actually.

Re:Why so huge?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first used a Windows machine at school I actually made a small episode of South Park on PowerPoint. Worked quite well. Only got round to making Kenny and Cartman though.

Clearly this was posted...

[bradleyland]

Clearly this was posted just so we could all stand around and collectively laugh at the "gut feeling" comment.

Some other comments...

[Bake]

Aye! Why don't you go knit me a sweater before I slap you in the face!
Aye! Woman!!!

Aye! Why don't you stop dressing me up like mailman, and ... making me dance for you while you go and smoke crack in your bedroom and have sex with some guy I don't even know! on my dad's bed?!

Re:Some other comments...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye! Why don't you stop dressing me up like mailman, and ... making me dance for you while you go and smoke crack in your bedroom and have sex with some guy I don't even know! on my dad's bed?!

This has got to be the most awesome non sequitur of all time!

Why choose Xserve?

[nystagman]

One word: Hellastorage

Re:Why choose Xserve?

[AOL-CD-Man]

Well, that's easy:

1. Choose XServe.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

CONSUME My Balls

[Anonymous Coward]

FP

Advertisement!

[2nd Post!]

Actually, if you have similar needs and requirements, you know, now, one solution that works better than the other solutions that SouthPark started out with.

Lots of XServe jobs out there....

[ellisDtrails]

XServe Jobs on GetTheJob.com

Full quote... WTF?-Goatse.cx Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

"OTOH, it must be nice to have a job where you can make purchasing decisions based on a gut feeling, I normally have to justify every purchase three times in three different ways to three different execs... just like they send out procedural memos."

Good thing you don't have to do that with Linux. Just go with the company geek's "gut feeling" and sneak it in via the back door.

As long as...

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Just don't name your machine "kenny." It's not good to have it crash every episode - even if you can reboot it.

Gut check!

[version5]

If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for choosing Apple hardware. But doesn't it feel like the right thing...right here in the gut? Because that's where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen...the gut.

Did you know that you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody's gonna say `I did look that up and its wrong'. Well, Mister, that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

Now I know some of you may not trust your gut...yet. But with my help you will. The "truthiness" is, anyone can make IT decisions. I promise to feel IT decisions!

Re:Gut check!

[SanityInAnarchy]

You, sir, should apply for a job in the White House. Or better, the Supreme Court. I'm sure our President's gut would approve.

Re:Gut check!

[Anonymous Coward]

...try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

This sounds like the same way Mormons know their religion is true!

"But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right." -- D&C 9:8

Re:Gut check!

[clayasaurus]

My gut tells me you stole this from the Colbert Report.

Re:Gut check!

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like the same way Mormons know their religion is true!

Dumb-da-dumb-dumb-dumb

Re:Gut check!

[espressojim]

You misspelled plagiarise.

I've Got To Wonder..

[mpapet]

What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

GIMP tells me that's about 2mb.

I've got to try that "gut feeling" in a meeting with my clients sometime real soon.

Client: "So, why exactly should we install PKI infrastructure?"
Me: "I've got a gut feeling that you need it"

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[kv9]

What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

the many layers?

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[SynapseLapse]

True the image itself is only 2mb, but they render the show in Maya. So Scripts+models+textures+scenes=100mb.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Might be 1024x768 -- at least that's what my Powerbook says my TV can do. Still, if you're creating content, it's best to keep it around in as much detail as possible. South Park does do zooming on some of those backgrounds, and there are South Park posters. And of course, you're keeping all kinds of layers, too.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[black mariah]

Animation, asshat. We're not talking about single images, we're talking about 3d graphics. Or were you not aware that South Park is animated entirely in Maya? Yes, despite the 2d look it is done in a 3d package. 3d animation takes up far more space than you apparently think it does. Even my amateur-ass "Wow, look at the camera move!" crap will eat up 40 megs without blinking. I can only imagine how much space the files for an episode of South Park would eat up.

Plus, you're failing to take into account any audio that may be used.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[sheddd]

"What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?"

Gaah sorry for the rant but I get so irritated when people care about ppi/dpi when they're talking about digital images. I've wasted at least 8 hours talking with marketing people about images, and they insist on saying things like "I need a 600dpi image"... gaah!

I should just send them all one pixel images with a 'size' specified as 1/600in x 1/600in.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[Crizp]

What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

Because it's most likely not 800x600, but rather 4096x4096 just in case they would want to zoom in on something having the texture. Also, bear in mind that many of the backgrounds are probably still there from "Bigger, Longer, Uncut" movie and many others are probably made for possible future use in a new feature film. Rendering for the silver screen takes a bit higher res than 800x600...

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

Surely you jest, it takes a lot more than 100 millibits to make a background.

ppi has nothing to do with the final file size if you've already set the raster size.

Seriously, the article says "up to". If you have a crowd of a lot of people, with several layers being buildings, trees, mountains, sky and clouds, that can add up to a lot.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[forkazoo]

What, exactly takes 100mb about a background shown at 72ppi and 800x600?

GIMP tells me that's about 2mb.

The biggest issue that results in needing more space than your calculations would imply is the fact that you just picked numbers out of your ass with no basis in reality. First off, the 72ppi is non-sensical in this context, has no meaning, and doesn't effect the file size. Second, they have the backgrounds done in a much higher resolution than 800x600.

You see, they do the backgrounds as large pieces that they can zoom in on. This allows them to do things like a shot where they are walking along the road, with the road scrolling past. Background plates are also often many layers. This allows a simulated parallax effect while the scrolling is taking place. So, while an actual NTSC frame is only 720x486 maximum, there is no reason that the size of the background plates would be restricted to this resolution.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[Achromatic1978]

Your Powerbook says wrong. PAL - 720x576, NTSC - 720x480. Your TV output on the powerbook is a scaled output. No TV runs that res - SDTV/HDTV are different sizes altogether.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[Tim Browse]

Yeah, I used to get asked for '600 dpi screenshots' for the game I was working on.

They were easy to do, but they were really small. Happy times :)

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[corrie]

Is that in 1/15 of a second?

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[JFMulder]

Not necessarily. I think I recall reading that Episode 3 was played in digital theathers in 1080p.

But your point is still valid. Most shops work with at least 2k plates for their shots when compositing stuff together.

Re:I've Got To Wonder..

[jfranzen]

Actually, the 100 Megs is in referrence to the Maya binary file size, not the final rendered frames. We render at CCIR601 standard, which is 720x486 with a 0.9 pixel aspect ratio which gives us a little over a meg per frame... But the Maya binary file sizes are highly variable, dpending on the complexity of the shot. To put the scene file sizes into perspective, the default scene file with the four boys at the bus stop is about 10 Megs... One of the largest shots we've ever done, The Demon Horde shot for BFF (904), was over 150 Megs... Hope that helps,

J^2

...and in response Steve Jobs stated

[dickeya]

RESPECT MY AUTHORITAY!!!!

Xserve RAID units are really, really nice.

[E-Lad]

In mid 2005 we here at UMBC moved our AFS servers from a bunch of individual Dell/Linux and Sun/Solaris servers with DAS JBODs to Sun V20zs on a fabric with the Xserve RAIDs LUN'd out for each server. We love this set up and the Xserve RAIDs perform amazingly well for what they do (email, home directories for 15k active users). They're cheap, straight-forward to manage, and so far seem quite reliable.

Details on our setup here.

They're not even very interesting

[tap]

Their old system was a DLT7000 tape drive. I used one of these for backup around five years ago. They hold 35GB uncompressed per tape and have a trasfer speed of 5 MB/sec. Think about trying to backup a 350 GB drive on one of these things. DLT7000 was replaced by LTO-1 and SDLT about four plus years ago. These systems get 100 GB on a tape. I guess they skipped that generation and went to LTO-2, 200 GB on a tape.

Last time I was buying this stuff, a 24 tape auto-loader was around $15,000 and the tapes were $50 each. That's only about 6 terrabytes before you have to manually change tapes. If you look at how much it costs to build a multi-terrabyte NAS server with 250GB+ SATA drives (way less), and how much faster and easier to deal with it is, you have to wonder what the point of tape is nowdays.

Of course the South Park people's data isn't very big at all. They've only got two terra-bytes to deal with! That's nothing by today's standards. I built a system five times that size two years ago. For less than they paid for the Apple Xservers today too.

Clearly this was posted...A Gut Contraction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well when you're a geek. You have to go with your strengths.

15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[daveschroeder]

Why is 15TB of storage news? (And they don't even the full 15TB yet!)

What about the 200TB of Xserve RAID storage for a single project at the University of Wisconsin, which has been up and running for over half a year?

And no, this isn't a project serving a whole campus or an entire university student body. This is one single research project operated by one entity. Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park. ;-)

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[slashname3]

Why is 15TB of storage news?

Once they dupe the story 7 times they will be able to handle 200TB.

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[commodoresloat]

I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park. ;-)

Are you kidding? The south park guys would love the Large Hardon Collider.

erm, what?

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[Wisgary]

Because it's a shitty TV show which is much more important than academia when it comes to the press and media. Unless it's a world changing super drug/technology no one really gives a shit about what researchers do, they are however interested in the fact that the back catalog of South Park will be readily available in digital form, to sell to you in every possible future form of digital media with fun new DRM implementations, and that the producers will never have to delete a single crappy 2d scene ever again, so their stuff looks even more repetitive as each year passes.

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[pherthyl]

It's good to see the ivory tower is still standing tall.

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[Anonymous Coward]

because 200TB is common in acedemia... Plus, that's not dedicated to a single project, it's split among projects, at least 3 major ones listed on the site. Aparently, it's not even dedicated to one service.. There are larger installations dedicated to single purposes (I know of at least one site that has slightly over 200TB usable (400+ TB mirrored RAID) in a single parallel filesystem (GPFS)).

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park. ;-)

Not unless they use it to kill someone every 30 minutes.

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[Wisgary]

Yeah it has a pretty nice view of the world.

Re:15TB of Xserve RAID storage? What about 200TB?

[javaxman]

I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park. ;-)

Well, I guess it depends on your definition of "cool".

For most folks, though, even here on slashdot... there are few things anywhere near as cool as South Park.

Mod parent down.

[SanityInAnarchy]

You know what's worse than an interesting Slashdot article that isn't actually news?

When 50-60% of the comments are Slashdotters bitching that not everything on Slashdot is news.

Shut the hell up and go read another article.

Re:Mod parent down.

[bill_mcgonigle]

You know what's worse than an interesting Slashdot article that isn't actually news?

People bitching about people bitching?

Re:Mod parent down.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> You know what's worse than an interesting Slashdot article that isn't actually news?
> People bitching about people bitching?

People who think jokes get funnier the more you repeat them?

why this is important

[commodoresloat]

Only Apple servers will do the job when the South Park guys decide it's time to play "kick the server."

Re:why this is important

[parasonic]

Only Apple servers will do the job when the South Park guys decide it's time to play "kick the server."

[Nebraska Train Station]
A guy has Server in hand, ready for a drop kick.
Server: Don't kick the ser...
[Punt]
Server: Ow.
Nebraskan: Would you look at that honey, somebody dropped off a perfectly good trashcan.

Re:Many Layers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously putting the frame together, but once it's together, they don't flatten?

C'mon that would be a rendering PITA. What about the layers above the background? It just gets worse and worse and worser!!

Interview with JJ Franzen

[datafr0g]

http://www.southparkstudios.com/behind/interviews. php?tab=20#3

Interesting stuff - has some background technical info on how an episode is put together and what systems they use to do it all.

Re:Interview with JJ Franzen

[deathguppie]

I like this article, actually more interesting than the parent. For instance I didn't know that they used Maya. I also didn't know that Sean's favorite color was R: 238, G: 118, B: 246 ... which happens to be a light-gay-purple.. Not trying to offend gay people of course.. or light, or purple, for that matter

Re:Interview with JJ Franzen

[whatever3003]

S: It took me a day or two to lay down the basic architecture, the design of it, and then it was a few weeks of hacking. Its about 10 to 15 thousand lines of code.
JJ: Its all in PERL script, so its pretty straightforward.

As a Python guy this sort of thing makes me laugh ;)

Spelling Nazi warning

[Anonymous Coward]

"...a linear tape open setup complimented by Xserve RAID disk arrays."

So the Xserve RAID disk arrays flatter the linear tape setup with words of admiration? (I think they meant to say "complemented").

Re:Spelling Nazi warning

[SleepyHappyDoc]

So the Xserve RAID disk arrays flatter the linear tape setup with words of admiration? (I think they meant to say "complemented").

I'm not so sure. Apple's are supposed to be user-friendly, right?

DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just wait for it to come out on DVD like everybody else?

My gut feeling tells me that...

[lysergic.acid]

you're an idiot.

Re:My gut feeling tells me that...

[Paradise Pete]

My gut feeling tells me that you're an idiot.

There, see? Sometimes it works.

Re:My gut feeling tells me that...

[lysergic.acid]

But it cost me my karma. =(

mirror

[madpiggy_dj]

Mirror http://www.thebesttrek.net/forum/index.php?topic=3 45.0

Re:The Simpsons animates in real time for broadcas

[Joe123456]

and the slave like wipping thay get.

Mod parent down...

[TheNoxx]

Uh, wow, you're brilliant. So without the subject of the story, it's not a news story? Idiot.

Mod down.

Tapes can be moved to a secure location,

[winkydink]

which is kind of hard to do with a multi-terabyte NAS. For quick backups, nothing beats disk, but for archival storage, I'll stick with tape. Kind of hard to restore your environment when the building holding the NAS has been destroyed by some natural disaster.

Re:Tapes can be moved to a secure location,

[wilson_c]

"Oops! I just dropped all of the tapes" isn't nearly as scary as I just dropped the RAID.

Re:Tapes can be moved to a secure location,

[winkydink]

which, of course, is still less scary than, say, dropping the soap. :)

Re:Tapes can be moved to a secure location,

[tap]

You can get RAID cases where each drive has a hot-swap carrier that lets you remove them to carry to a new location. For SATA drives the carriers are nothing more than simple frames and don't need connectors and electronics like SCSI drives do. The gigabytes per volume/mass of high-capacity IDE drives is around that of LTO-1 tapes, so it's not like it's a lot more to move. The disk is of course a lot more fragile than a tape, no way around that.

Disk backups are a lot cheaper, faster, and easier than tape based though. So you have to consider what's better, a disk backup with twice-daily snapshots going back a month, that are online for users to grab files they deleted or messed up whenever they want, or a more physically robust tape system, which only has weekly snapshots, and requires an operator to deal with loading tapes into a library and slow retrevial times to get back a file.

You can always transport your backup to an offsite NAS over a network, even safer than moving tapes. The network bandwidth costs money, but the man hours involved in managing and transporting tapes add up fast too.

/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

I know this is off-topic, but most of the discussion so far has been pretty uninteresting, so I was wondering how other slashdotters feel about the "Blood Mary" episode of South Park being pulled off the air and basically being censored from TV or any other future reproductions because it offended a few religious conservatives.

Here's another news article on it featured in the North Korea Times.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[heinousjay]

"A chick bleeding out her vagina is no miracle. Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time."

Your hyperbole isn't necessary, though. This isn't censorship. It's a tv channel choosing their lineup.

I know it's fashionable to bash religion here on Slashdot, but there's no need to go overboard to gather virtual friends.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[Methuseus]

Being a Catholic I'm afraid I cannot comment on how I feel about that.

*quietly fires up bittorrent and finds link for episode*

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[Anonymous Coward]

An article on censorship from a North Korean website? You must be joking. Or maybe you are just feeling ronery and need some more attention.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[rynthetyn]

It wasn't "religious conservatives" that got offended (I'm a religious conservative), it was Catholics who got offended. There is a difference. Catholics don't like it because you just don't mess with Mary. All it did was remind me of the supposed miracle when an image of Jesus appeared on the wall of a church not far from where I grew up, an image which looked more like the South Park Jesus than anything.

Personally, I think that they've made episodes that were far more offensive to Catholics than that one, but then, being a good Presbyterian, what am I to know? If anybody should have gotten offended by that episode, it should have been Alcoholics Anonymous, that was the real target of the episode.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

Fox didn't choose to not air the episode--they did air the episode initially. It wasn't until certain groups exercised their political influence and used political and legal coercion did Fox pull the episode. And I can understand if the religious groups don't want the show on public television. I can even understand if the religious groups don't want the show on cable television. But to threaten Fox with legal action if they ever reproduced the episode in any form--even on DVD--that seems to fit the definition of censorship to me.

This isn't just another case of tv censors doing what they're paid to do. This is an instance of religious conservatives preventing the rendition, in any form, of a consitutionally protected form of free speech.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

Well, obviously it didn't offend all religious conservatives, nor did it offend all Roman Catholics. But I agree with you on the part about AA being the main target, and having more of a right to be offended as well. But alcoholics don't have much political sway in our society.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[LocalH]

Um, it's not Fox?

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[TheoMurpse]

I can't believe you had to pull an article from NORTH-FUCKING-KOREA to provide a source. I thought I had read someone denying that it actually was pulled. There isn't any news on any official South Park or Comedy Central site as far as I can locate, so I'll hold off on declaring it true.

I think that, of course, the Catholic Anti-Defamation League (that's who started this, right?) were completely in their rights. I think Viacom was completely within its rights. I think no one has done anything shady. I understand why the Catholics would be upset. However, they have to know it's futile, and will only fuel interest in the episode.

That also being said, I found the episode to be only watchable. In my opinion it ranks up there as one of the worst two South Park episodes (I've seen every one), right up there with the Cartman/J.Lo-hand-puppet-masturbates-Ben-Affleck episode.

But I also wonder: if Viacom is a publicly traded company, and one of the execs/board members/whoever used their religion as a basis for the pulling (NOT censorship) of the episode for the rest of the forseeable future, isn't that a conflict of interest? Wouldn't he be liable for lawsuits because they are supposed to maximize profits, right? Those are my 4 a.m. musings.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[ForestGrump]

incase you haven't found it yet...
http://mrtwig.net/torrents/SouthPark_914_-_Bloody_ Mary_(avi_MrTwig_net).torrent

Grump

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, the JLo Handpuppet episode was my all time favorite. See? Anecdotal.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[SgtFajita]

I wonder how the Catholic League would respond to a South Park episode that reenacts the unsavory bits of the Bible.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[javaxman]

It wasn't "religious conservatives" that got offended (I'm a religious conservative), it was Catholics who got offended. There is a difference.

You think there is a difference. In reality, Catholics are just one variety of religious conservative... a particularly powerful, common variety.

It is all about not being able to mess with Mary, though, you're right about that. I mean, they didn't get all crazy about the priest child molestation episode, it's interesting that *this* one made them mad.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[javaxman]

That also being said, I found the episode to be only watchable. In my opinion it ranks up there as one of the worst two South Park episodes (I've seen every one), right up there with the Cartman/J.Lo-hand-puppet-masturbates-Ben-Affleck episode.

Dude, Fat Butt And Pancake Head was one of the funniest episodes ever!

Jennifer Lopez (aka Eric Cartman's left hand)] Burrito. Taco taco. Burrito. Taco. Taco taco.
Don't think just because I got a lot of money,
I'll give you taco-flavored kisses, honey.
Fulfill all your wishes
with my taco-flavored kisses.

Taco taco. Burrito burrito. Taco taco.
Fulfill all your wishes
with my taco-flavored kisses! Taco taco.

It's just sad to think you could find that not funny...

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[javaxman]

Your hyperbole isn't necessary, though. This isn't censorship. It's a tv channel choosing their lineup.

Even if it's a company that decides to restrict art, it's still censorship. Even if it's self censorship, it's still censorsip.

Why is it that every time some company or country decides to restrict access to information or art, somebody comes up with this messed up line of reasoning to say "that's not censorship" ? You don't have to burn books, throw people in prison or black things out to censor. You just have to restrict access to information ( or art ), as is done in this case.

THIS is censorship, plain and simple, EVEN if it is the companie's choice to censor... it is NOT simply "choosing their lineup", *especially* if the episode is never released on any other medium, which is what I've read.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

oops, i mean Comedy Central

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

Do a search for "south park" "bloody mary" on google. Why would a North Korean news source make up something like this? I chose the North Korea Times article cuz I thought it was funny that they even report shit like this, but more importantly, because I know a lot of /. readers would try to dismiss the story as "communist propaganda" just because it happens to also be reported in the North Korea Times. You proved me right.

Secondly, how is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the right for telling the creators of South Park that they can't even release the episode on DVD? If they don't want to watch the episode, they don't have to go out and buy the DVD. There's far more offensive material out there that's being distributed on DVDs or even shown on cable television. They're basically telling Matt Stone and Trey Parker that they can't create religious satire, and that they aren't allow to publish that episode of southpark in any form just because it contains religious icons. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have not encroached on anyone's rights, so how can the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights be justified in encroaching on their right to free speech?

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[heinousjay]

Which part of Comedy Central's constitution protected this speech? I tried to find a copy of it online, but it's not available, so I figure you must have a hard copy somewhere.

Unless you meant the constitution of the United States? You couldn't have - surely your drug-addled (okay, I'm assuming here, but your handle is a strong hallucinogen) brain isn't conflating the government with a tv station, of all things.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

Ad hominems aside, so you don't think a show that happens to be licensed to Comedy Central for distribution counts as free speech? Well, gee, let's start pulling The Catcher in the Rye off the shelves cuz Little, Brown Books, and Back Bay Books don't have a constitution protecting free speech. And I suppose it's alright for China to ban all forms of media because they don't have a Constitution protecting free speech either.

But perhaps you're right, maybe my drug-addled brain is just confused...

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[Ohreally_factor]

But alcoholics don't have much political sway in our society.

You're kidding me, right? Who's the president of your country?

On the other hand, AA officially eschews being involved in public controversy of any sort. The "10th Tradition" of AA is "Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy." So, on an individual level, alcoholics might or might not be offended, but the AA organization would not take a position on South Park one way or the other.

Source: Wikipedia

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[TheoMurpse]

You proved me right.
I didn't dismiss it as propaganda. I found it funny that you posted something from North Korea. You must have misread my post.

Secondly, how is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the right for telling the creators of South Park that they can't even release the episode on DVD?
It's called freedom of speech. They didn't tell the creators of South Park they couldn't release it on DVD. They asked a Catholic board member of Viacom to pull the episode. They are well within rights to ask this (freedom of speech and all that). The board member of Viacom agreed (as he has loyalties to Rome), and this is whom I think could be in the wrong. Reread my post -- I do state that this board member may be in the wrong. However, all this is allowed under the Constitution of the US. I suggest you read it sometime before you try and argue that someone went beyond their rights. How is this any different than when someone using GNU/Linux asks NVidia to open up their video drivers? It's called freedom of speech, and we are well within our rights to request this.

In summation:
1) Request (by the Catholics) -- covered under free speech
2) Agreement (by the board member) -- covered under free speech
3) Action (by the board member) -- potentially a conflict of interest

I ask that you note that the only questionable act was performed by the board member, not by a Catholic organization.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[TheoMurpse]

Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

I'm pretty sure that the "civil rights" part of their name is concerned with the civil rights of Catholics. From their website:

What is the Catholic League?
The Catholic League is the nations largest Catholic civil rights organization. Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics lay and clergy alike to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.

Motivated by the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, the Catholic League works to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened.

I would argue that there was discrimination against Catholics in the history of the US (so it's not just paranoid Catholics; now Protestants on the other hand, that's a different story). I ask that you read up on the Kennedy presidency and his campaigning and so forth -- there were questions of his loyalty to Rome as being closer than those to the US. Etc, etc, etc. Why has their been only one Catholic president in US history? For the same reason there has been no woman, minority or gay president -- discrimination.

Note: I am not Catholic, I love South Park, and I think the Catholic group was stupid for doing this, so don't label me as a Catholic Fascist or anything like that. I love freedom of speech. The creators of South Park gave up rights to control the broadcast of episodes when they signed a contract with Viacom/Comedy Central. It was their choice to relinquish these rights.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[lysergic.acid]

well, technically you are right, but going through legal channels to bar the free speech of another (the end result of the CLRCR's actions) is still censorship. There have been many instances where censorship was the end result of perfectly legal actions, that doesn't justify it in anyway. It may justify their actions in a court of law, but ethics isn't determined by law.

Re:/.ers' thoughts on "Bloody Mary" being pulled?

[heinousjay]

Yeah, you are definitely confused. Don't worry, you're not the only person on Slashdot that has no clue about how the Constitution works. Just know this - Comedy Central is under no obligation to publish anything at all.

I'm not going to bother educating you any further, though. You'll most likely keep insisting your opinion supersedes reality, and I'll get frustrated.

are these really polite disk arrays?

[Anonymous Coward]

... or does lam1969 just not know the difference between compliment and complement?

On the next episode...

[SamMichaels]

I'm sure we'll see everyone with ipods, using itunes on ibooks, a new Apple tree infront of the school and a crooked Macintosh logo bumper sticker on the school bus.

Nothing like trade :)

Complimented

[Panaphonix]

It is quite an honor to be complimented by Xserve RAID drives. Thank you all!

Looking for a small and cheap NAS system

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though the article read more like an advertisement than a news post I'm happy it was posted as the comments are really great. My company is looking for a cheap NAS system with no hard drives for a back-up solution for our company's files. We already have many extra hard drives that we can put to use in a NAS. Can any of you recommend some good products that would solve our problem? Thank you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Its not flash

[chriswaclawik]

Nope. There was a special on VH1 about the history of South Park. The first couple episodes were done with construction paper, but the creators became frustrated with how long that took. They now use Maya (I think), even though the cartoon looks completely 2D. The creators have even admitted that the software they use is capable of MUCH more then what they actually use it for, but that the system they have works so there is no reason to change it. (Additionally, they sometimes do make really complex models: spaceships, for example)

Re:Its not flash

[Anonymous Coward]

They now use Maya (I think), even though the cartoon looks completely 2D.

I think I read somewhere that the pieces making up the scene do have a component in the third dimension. But very short/thin, to maintain the show's signature "construction paper" look.

Computer ink and paint only.

[tinrobot]

The characters are still drawn and animated in pencil.

Film Roman here in LA does design/boards/layout, while several studios in Korea do the actual animation as well as the digital ink/paint.

Apples hardware?

[Rickler]

I had no idea Apple made hard drives. Oh that's right, they don't; Apple only makes software and sells it's OS bundled with X-brand hardware. Hardware which Apple clearly does not make; Apple is merely a middle man who puts the pieces together like a monkey could then hikes up the price 10 fold.

Re:Apples hardware?

[aventius]

Besides IBM, name another major SAN OEM that makes their own hard drives.

Sun? No.
HP? No.
Dell? No.

Re:Apples hardware?

[tfb]

Almost no storage system vendors make hard drives. Many of them probably don't actually make anything in terms of hardware. What they `make' is several things which turn out to be a good deal more important than hardware:

• a system which has actually been properly designed in terms of performance, scalability and so on;
• a system which they will support, so you don't have to grovel around finding a replacement for some disk that has died and which turns out to not be a current part any more;
• a system which isn't designed by some spotty teenager who (a) will have no idea about the above two issues, and (b) will then leave or (worse) have some kind of tantrum and refuse to support it any more.

If your data is worth anything at all, and you are not in the commercially unusual position of being able to do your own system and support it etc (I'm ruling out google here, right) yourself, then it is very unlikely that the spotty-teen approach is better than the storage-system-vendor one, despite the latter having a higher up-front cost and being less fashionable on slashdot. Whether Apple are such a vendor I don't know: I guess they'd like to be.

Re:Apples hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM don't make their own HDDs either, we buy them in from various vendors and occasionally rebadge them.

Re:Apples hardware?

[lmlloyd]

You are overlooking one major factor here. Apple, Dell, HP, whoever, are just using off the shelf parts that anyone can buy, yet are charging quite a premium for all that support. I just recently did a cost analysis for a real estate company looking for a large storage solution. I got quotes from all the vendors, I even got a second round of counter quotes from all the vendors. In the end, the lowest quote was still so high, that you could build the boxes, and still have enough money to buy a complete second set of disks!

I'm sorry, your support argument sounds good, but it just falls apart when you think about it for five seconds. Sure, Dell or Sun will promise you no more than a 4 hour downtime, and that sounds pretty good. However, what I had this client do, was take all the money he would have given to Dell, build the servers he needed, and then fill a closet with identical servers. Now if a disk or even entire server goes down, he just walks over to the closet, pulls out a replacement, and is back up in minutes! He paid exactly the same amount he would have for the lowest quote, got the same or better hardware he would have received from a tier-1 vendor, and got twice as much of it, so that he has enough replacement parts to last him years. You don't need an expensive support contract if you already have a replacement on hand.

Re:Apples hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba.

Re:Apples hardware?

[tfb]

You have, of course, missed the point.

I know this is slashdot, but try to think for a minute: it's not about the hardware. It's about the design and about the human cost. Design is hard, and people are expensive - both people who can do the design and people who can then maintain whatever you designed. The biggest cost of almost all IT companies is salary, by quite a long way.

You might be up to designing a storage system which performs well and putting it together out of commodity boxes, but not many people are. So, OK, you can hire someone who can do that. Which will be quite expensive, especially since you probably want them on a short-term contract: more expensive than the hardware. Or, well, you could find a company who have a proven design, and just buy it: reinventing the wheel gets to drag after a while.

Now, so you've got your system, and your redundant second copy of it and all your spare disks (which you are storing, of course, in your very expensive datacentre real-estate, because you probably don't want to deal with the logistics of getting it there when it dies). Now a disk dies at 11PM, on Saturday. So, OK, you send one of your staff to site (at 2AM on Sunday morning now) to replace the disk. And now they start bitching at you about on-call allowances and out-of-hours rates, and charging you double time and travel and that kind of crap. Oh, and your staff have to live close to your datacentre, of course. Money money money. Perhaps you could just, like, contract out this support to a company who will turn up at short notice day or night, and will deal with all the logistics to get parts to you without you having to store them. Outsourcing: youy've probably heard of it, right? Very fashionable, I hear.

Now it's a couple of years down the line, and your storage needs have increased. You need an upgrade path. Well, let's say you were smart enough to keep on the guy (for it will be a guy, I seriously can't imagine a woman being quite this dumb) who designed it. So he will design you a new system (because you can't get the bits to grow the old one as it was commodity stuff), and then you can work out how to do the migration, and if you're lucky he'll have thought about that and made it easy. Money money. But, well, several things are more likely than that: either he wasn't so smart after all, and he didn't think about upgrade or anything, so suddenly it's a bunch more expensive to do it; or he was smart and now he's gone off and works for a storage vendor; or may be he was a consultant in the first place, and he'll gladly quote you (quite a lot, hmm) for consulting on the upgrade. Or may be you could choose a vendor based on their long term support & upgrade offerings, so none of this happens.

And, even more amazing, you can sit down and do the sums, and discover that buying the stuff from a decent vendor, outsourcing the support to that vendor (or another) turns out to be cheaper.

Re:Apples hardware?

[nolife]

Well, let's say you were smart enough to keep on the guy who designed it.

Pure FUD, You find someone that knows what they are doing and they can figure out the system in short time, we are not talking about debugging someones million lines of code here, it is simple hardware with off the shelf components.

Your entire section of the 11PM HD failure was nothing but FUD on many points as well. Anyone already on your staff that can pull out a failed drive and put in a new one.

I agree with some of your points but you are not being balanced at all or looking at this big picture. There are times when different levels of support are needed but full support is not needed all of the time. Where I work, we have a full contract with EMC that we assess annually but we have spare Cisco chassiss and cards laying around to support our network equipment that does not have premium 24/7 support. A cost analysis was done and someone determined that was the best way for us to go and buying spare equipment was much cheaper. You are dead set that everyone across the board needs premium support for everything and it will be cheaper which is not the case at all.

Re:Apples hardware?

[lmlloyd]

Oh yeah, so let me get this straight, in your world Dell, Apple, Sun, and HP all have keys to your server room and the codes to your alarm system, and logons to your network, so they can all get into your building in the middle of the night without your staff having to get out of bed? I hate to break it to you, if you have a catastrophic failure at 2:00AM requiring immediate hardware replacement, one of your employees is going to have to get out of bed in the middle of the night, no matter where you buy your hardware.

I mean, by your logic, why have a data center at all? Why not just outsource the entire thing to some other company? Oh, right, because some companies actually like to keep their proprietary information confidential, instead of just storing it in their Gmail account!

I'm sorry, your entire response is nothing but a huge rationalization founded on an incredibly false dichotomy in which these vendors are all staffed entirely by brilliant engineers who have nothing but your company's best interests at heart, while your company's only hiring options are incompetent boobs who have nothing but their self-interest at heart. The reality of the situation is that you can hire from the exact same pool Dell, or Apple, or Sun do, and if they work for you, then their interest is in getting it right. If they work for the vendor, their interest is in nothing more than the commission. Also, it is great to say that hardware is an insignificant cost compared to HR and office space, but I know plenty of company VPs who would tend to disagree, what with having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their data center hardware that they stuck in a cheap office park, and staffed with a few $50k employees.

I don't know where you live, but there really isn't a shortage of people who can work with these computer things. I suspect that you are just easily dazzled by the show these vendors put on of having a team of "experts" to help you "design your architecture." Your entire post reads like a Dell sales brochure. The reality of the situation is that most of these "Experts" are just salespeople reading off a script, and pushing the parts they've been told to push. Believe me, I used to work at a pretty large vendor, and I have seen it in action.

The problem is that in a few years, when you need to "grow your system" Dell, or Apple, or any of them, could give a crap less about anything but getting you to reinvest in a whole new set of hardware all over again. That is, by the way, how they make their money you know. I mean seriously, look at one of these quotes and think for a second. The services fees they charge for their 24/7 support are almost enough to buy the hardware in and of themselves! Sure, I suppose that sounds like a good enough deal if you are buying 5 systems, and want to get away with not having any IT staff in your office at all, but when you start talking about real purchasing in the hundreds of systems, that cost starts mounting. Besides, if you really think you can maintain a datacenter with hundreds of machines without a staff of in-house people who actually know what they are doing, then you are just plain insane.

in other news.....

[ShaunC1000]

I switched from storing my files on a windows server to a linux server.. this sort of stuff happens all the time.. not that big of deal

Sweeeeeet!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

God damn it, tape drive! Thats a BAD tape drive! That's MY SAN! Mom!

The History of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't hate Apple at all, but I found this amusing anyway.

http://www.drgw.net/~nnthayer/temp/applehistory.jp g

Feel the Gut...

[gishzida]

Can you imagine Yoda or Obi-Wan saying "Feel the Gut? It's in you and Around you...? Nah...

freebff

[Sfing_ter]

So instead of using decent lowcost hardware and running freebsd, they went with the gui clone?
John Goodman makes a great Daemon... does Steve Jobs plays Saddam?

Re:freebff

[theAtomicFireball]

So instead of using decent lowcost hardware and running freebsd, they went with the gui clone?

Ugh. No. It's a friggin' RAID array. It's not a computer. There's no OS X or BSD or Linux or Windows... it's a complex, but glorified hard drive (well, maybe that's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to put it in terms you can understand).

And even if it were, OS X is not a "clone" of FreeBSD; it's a derivative.

Re:freebff

[Sfing_ter]

It is true what they say, Mac People have no sense of humor.

There's actually some interesting infor here...

[HockeyPuck]

From a Storage Admin's perspective, they've got a pretty old infrastructure and they are moving to a newer, faster more flexible setup... smart move.

They started out with DLT7000, which I don't think you can buy anymore, but those drives could only backup about 32MB/s with compression. Compare that with a modern day LTO-3 drive which can backup 80MB/s WITHOUT compression. Even if they just installed 3year old 1Gb/s FibreChannel HBAs, and upgraded the tape drives, they would have had a better set up. Hopefully they upgraded their backup servers otherwise they'll hit bottlenecks just trying to drive faster tape and disk.

Even though they went with a Xserve based upon a 'gut feeling', the Xserve, while not the greatest array out there (even in the midrange/low end segment), I've seen worse.

I think the bigger news in the article is that they kicked out Legato. For a small shop like this, Legato might be over kill.

Good to see they are upgrading with the times.

Obligatory UG reference

[.DS_Store]

Phase 1: Upgrade storage hardware.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit!

2MB per frame

[Brendor]

NTSC video is 720px x 486px at 29.997 frames per second. 2 seconds of video is close to 100MB

He is also probably talking about assets pre rendering. Every character has textures associated with it, and the geometry, while not that huge, adds up.

South Park == New television business model

[Darth_brooks]

South Park, for whatever bashing it takes as infantile potty humor mixed in with occasional Left wing / Right wing issues, has set a new standard for cable TV shows. An average episode costs less than $100,000 USD (not counting whatever deals Creators Parker and Stone have with Comedy Central) and can go from concept to final print in two weeks. Throw in it's high ratings with the 18-35 crowd, and in one 30 second commercial spot, you the parent company have just recouped your initial investment.

Adult swim has taken this sort of guerilla approach, picking up cheap, quick turn around projects. There's no huge capital outlay (unless you're buying an old fox show that was a failure and will probably never see the light of day again.....) and even if it fails, you can drop something fresh into it's slot in no time.

I wonder if the business plan ripoff has contributed to the Viacom / AS fued? Or if viacom just can't remove their heads from thier asses...

Re:South Park == New television business model

[Anonymous Coward]

South Park, for whatever bashing it takes as infantile potty humor mixed in with incessant Right wing issues, has set a new standard for cable TV shows....

I fixed your post.

Re:South Park == New television business model

[TheoMurpse]

unless you're buying an old fox show that was a failure and will probably never see the light of day again.....

Was that a swipe at Futurama? Well you can bite my shiny metal ass!

Re:South Park == New television business model

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're suggesting is that cheap, low-quality budget work is a lesson that the television industry should learn from. Well besides the sad aspect that they have (this is exactly why Reality TV remains a reality) some of your examples are disturbingly bad fillers for timeslots when barely anyone is awake. 12oz Mouse, for example, is just total garbage. I'm sure it's cheap to produce, and if people that make infomercials are willing to pay for the a 4:30AM timeslot on the History Channel then any commercials they can fit in would pay for its development. It is, however, total garbage. If TV learned its lessons from 12oz Mouse, I would finally Do the Right Thing(tm) and stop watching television entirely.

The real successes of Adult Swim (besides ATHF and Sealab) are amusingly-enough cancelled Fox shows that are aired first in the lineup because that's what people actually want to watch. Fox decided to pick Family Guy back up precisely because of its performance on Adult Swim. They didn't offer to pick up Squidbillies.

XServe RAIDs

[Bobartig]

What should be said is that it is NOT PowerPC hardware, there are NO G5's in them, and they don't run OSX. They're a sleek chassis full of RAID hardware, fiber channel connectivity, and 7 independant SATA controllers each with 2 hot swappable drives. Price/GB compared to rival products is extremely competitive, as in worlds cheaper. With 2x 512MB caches and dual fibrechannel connectivity, performance is pretty amazing with a full compliment of drives. The RAID servers are certified to work with Novell, Oracle, Windows Server, MacOSX, RedHat, YellowDog, Emulex, Cisco, ATTO, ADIC, etc. etc. etc. They still need some method of administering it (its just the storage), which may be an XServe, or virtually any other modern computer.

Being this is 'South Park'

[Bellum Aeternus]

... insert obligitory 1, 2, 3, Profit! statement here.

manufactured controversy, viral marketing.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you lack talent, and don't have creativity, just try offending people.

Only Howard Stern can get away with that formula for very long. For everyone else, it's a sure sign that something is taking its last, dying breaths. Oh, Catholics are angry. Hmm. Um, that's a really hard group to offend too! Gee, I wonder what they'll do next? No, I don't.

Re:manufactured controversy, viral marketing.

[ckaminski]

Um.... South Park has been doing it for 9 years. I'd hardly call this a "last gasp".

Only the Pilot episode was construction paper

[qubezz]

The pilot episode was done with construction paper, which took several months. When the pilot was sold and they needed a production setup, they went with computer animation. Over the first several episodes after the pilot, the construction paper appearance made by the computer rendering improved, but the first episode has a great construction paper look that, in my opinion, still hasn't been replicated in the later computer created episodes. It's interesting to think of how much computer CPU power has increased since 1997 when the show first aired (think back to overclocking Celeron 300a's to 450MHz - that was a year or two AFTER they were computer animating South Park!)

The big problem with South Park production is that although the show is digitally animated at 24fps (frames per second), it is then telesync'd to 30fps, and THEN EDITED IN VIDEO (I don't know if this is still true in the lastest episodes, but was documented to be so in 1999 in interviews). It is probable that the original 24fps animation from earlier episodes in digital form is no more.

Editing the episodes after telesync not only destroys what could be a beautiful 24fps progressive film DVD, but the editing they do in video chops up the telesync terribly, messing up the field order with almost every edit. I have even seen edits where only half of an original 2-field film pair is present, making it impossible for software or a progressive scan dvd player to reconstruct a non-interlaced progressive film frame. Also the DVD transfers that they have done are not the best, they have composite video dot crawl and shimmer from leaving the digital domain - the first several DVDs look like they were made from analog tapes.

Even more interesting trivia is that the animators sometimes get the episodes done in less than a week and deliver them to Comedy Central the day they are supposed to air!

one less episode to store

[pintomp3]

http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,18055,00.htm l?rsstv

Sweet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now where's the torrent?

Re:The Simpsons animates in real time for broadcas

[Kankraka]

Actually that was Futurama, as seen in 2ACV16 - Anthology of Interest I's opening sequence. "Painstakenly Drawn Before a Live Audience."

MOD PARENT UP

[TheoMurpse]

Here is an explanation of the "brown noise" that makes you crap your pants when you hear it.

Such subtle, arcane humor. I love it!

Ah yes, I saw an episode where they have an iMac

[Spitfire15]

If you look carefully on Season 9 Episode 3, you can see that there is an iMac on the scene where the boys have their Talent Agency with Token. Two things: All Hail the Holy PSP + I broke the dam

Yeah, but Cartman takes up most of that space

[elrous0]

Okay, I couldn't resist.

-Eric

"Gut feeling"="The salesman had real charisma"

[elrous0]

At least that's usually how it works with my IT department. I have to work with those bozos, too. And if I had a nickel for the tens of thousands of $ they've wasted on technology just because some slick salesman conned them into having a "gut feeling," I'd have a shitload of nickels.

-Eric

Re:You fail at hardware zen!

[vertinox]

but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware...

Back in 1999 when I worked in a computer shop and anyone brought in a packard bell, I had a "gut feeling" they made a poor choice of hardware.

When someone brought in a computer with a hard drive giving a loud grinding sound I had a gut feeling that it would be a Western Digital (the ones they make these days are not so bad).

And I had a "gut feeling" that purchasing a computer with a Cyrix processor was just a bad idea.

Look... You can knock zen, instincts, and gut feelings all you want, but the truth of the matter is those things are your subconcious telling you things you already know but won't admit or not really concious of.

Well... Then again most of those things that you have gut feelings about is because of real world experiences. You can research specs and prices all you want with a PHD efficiency, but without proper knowledge that fantastic server on paper may die in a puff of smoke as soon as you turn it on because it was a peice of crap in reality.

Of course this would entail you have had experience with the company and its products before hand and that "gut feeling" hopefully isn't because you had a good experience with your iPod.

Foster's Home uses Flash...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" uses Adobe Illustrator and Flash for animation.

And a voice...

[SoulRider]

...coming from the general direction of Redmond could be heard saying, "IM GOING TO KICK YOU IN THE NUTS".

Vendor Whoring Article

[Anonymous Coward]

so .. much .. vendor .. whoring .. I .. really .. hate .. you .. guys </really pissed off cartman>

wrong and wrong

[Bishop]

DLT7000 holds 35GB uncompressed.
LTO-3 holds 400GB uncompressed.

As you could not get these two basic facts correct one can only assume that you are talking out of your ass.

Re:wrong and wrong

[ckaminski]

Do not confuse backup rates of MB/s with backup capacities of GB/tape.

US Too

[KMTechGuy]

The animation company I work for, Animation Collective, uses a similar setup. We have Apple Xserve G5s and XRaids. It is ridiculous the amount of data that we deal with. The raids constantly fill up. We just upgraded to the 7 TB XRaid, which I hope holds out for a while.

We are coming close to releasing a new production called Kappa Mikey. It is Nickelodeon's first ever global program acquisition.

One of our animators just posted an entry on the company blog. Check it out www.kappamikey.com/blog

Gut feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Everytime I have a gut feeling about Apple I have to run to the bathroom and puke...