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Interview w/ South Park Sysadmins
Darkfell wrote in to send us
a great interview over at Ars with the South Park Sysadmins. Its pretty long, but its actually an
excellent piece with lots of nuggets about the shows production, the
hardware and software that gets used, and the video games they play.
A quite excellent interview... highly recommended.
queue.music
Welcome to the Internet, where page impressions roam!
Oh, and this one guy, who's just pouty all daaay-ee!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I hate to break it to you, but people who beak up text into pages aren't doing it because they don't think you can scroll, they're doing it because it's easier on modem users, and more importantly, it gets them more ad banners. If you think that page was bad, I think you need to check out how most othe sites are doing it.
You know, I was through Fairplay this summer. I took a gander at South Park High School, and checked out the South Park oldtown. But I just couldn't find Chef. Is he real?
No, it takes an idiot to do that, since no respecting advertiser is going to want their ads placed in the midle of a page. Call any of the big ad companies and ask them what the rule is: it has to be in the top 480 rasters...
South Park is in Fairplay, CO, which is in Park County. It's at about 10,000 feet of elevation.
Dang--I'm stuck in the perpetual fog and blowing dirt of San Francisco's Richmond district (well, it seemed like a cool place to move to a year ago...) It seems like the uber-cool design work still goes on in Southern California, I'm hoping to get down there in 2-3 years time, after I've earned my programming stripes down in The Valley.
Based on the good ol rules of publishing stuff on paper. I guess the same people want their adds on the right page instead of the left. Oops.
I know. How do people *get* jobs like these? Are they just really really lucky?
Um. Maybe. It just wouldn't look as good. Sounds like they have only a few weeks to do an episode...try rendering x zillion frames of construction paper.
Ya, they probably could optimize that a lot. But they found an algorithm that looks good for construction paper. So that's the way it is.
And it *is* about computer effects. Just not the "nova and laserblast" effects of the last two decades that = computer effect. Computer effects can't be determined any more...as a matter of fact, *I* thought they still cut out paper for it.
I thought only cheapo porn sites did that.
Is it just for rendering or is it generalized?
If it's generalized, I imagine there's some interesting security holes...
I think you're right about the ads and wrong about the modems. You have to d/l the page contents anyway. It *adds* time (esp with high modem latency) to request another page.
"Hello, sir. Your page sucks, so I'm going to volunteer my time to fix it for you".
Get a life. He wasn't whining. He was making a useful and valid observation.
*You* are making misassumptions about JavaScript. It *does* slow down browsing (some of us use elderly computers), isn't all that stable, *NOT ALL BROWSERS HAVE IT* (some of us like Lynx, Amaya, etc...)..besides, I have Javascript off to avoid security problems. If I was going to have a site that exploited a Javascript hole, the first thing I'd do is to have a feature that required Javascript. That way, people would turn it right back on.
*And* I don't see why *I* should have to waste RAM/CPU on a proxy server and load multiple pages if there isn't a good reason, like the one he pointed out.
What? Even with the O2000 server, it still takes 30s - 1min just to draw a crudely detailed SP frame??? Come on, the N64 SP game animated characters in greater details than the show will ever be, and it still spits pictures in 30 frames per second! Why would a machine thousands times more powerful can't even reach the rendering speed of the console?
Heh. My dual PII 550 Linux box renders 640x480 in about .25 seconds per frame. Only Win NT takes 2 minutes per frame. Thank God I don't have to work at a job and put up with those formalities.
Good grief. Every time I read an article on "South Park" I figure it's about the neighborhood in San Francisco (where I happen to live, and where Wired is based). It always turns out to be some kids cartoon (albeit with swearing) that was made to be a mass-market version of the Christmas Story animations.
When I see "South Park SysAdmin", I immediately think it's about SysAdmins in San Francisco. Please be a little more concise next time, folks.
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I noticed
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I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
When I was reading that, I couldn't believe all the equipment they use to produce that show. I haven't watched it in a long time, and I guess I'm ignorant, but from what I've seen SP looks like a competent animator could do an episode by hand in a short time.
I wonder how many animators it took to produce those Warner borthers shorts (which look to me like they have 20 times the number of frames of south park).
support gun control: take guns from cops
SunExpert[1] online does exactly that, and the animated gifs are exremely distracting when you are trying to read text.
[1] Server/Workstation Expert? Bah.
If you work for an Internet company in the Marina, you probably work in this building complex - the same one I do. Periodic blackouts/brownouts, erratic elevators, no air conditioning on weekends, etc. Click the link for my gripe page. :-(
:-( ).
However, it should be noted that South Park's folks don't work here - I'm about an inch from the beach (but on the other side, so no ocean view
D
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Will somebody please tell me why anybody would care what hardware/software was used to make South Park??????
I could do that kind of animation on my old 386. South park is not about computer effects, nor should it be.
It is modern shakespeare:
* very simple, non-flashy presentation
* all kinds of dirty, lowbrow humor for the 'groundlings' to sit and drool all over themselves about
* biting social commentary that more intelligent people will appreciate and laugh about
Vidi, Vici, Veni
On of my all-time 'pissed off about the internet' is this "Read More..." shite. I'm quite capable of using a scrollbar to see the rest. Unless they don't want us printing it off and reading it on the way home.
Oh, and what's a render wrangler? Someone who goes around looking for spare CPU cycles?
Actually i thought it was an interesting interview, its a good behind-the-scenes look at how SP is made. BUt of course it only got linked to /. because the L-word is used, if they'd used NT or Solaris or whatever for sys-admin stuff it would never have got posted.
Consumers For Christ Brazil
I work on a project called Condor that many people use to queue up things like renders.
Its an oppertunistic batch queueing system. Meaning that it will run jobs on your machine when you are not there. In the lab I work in, I'll easially be able to get a month of CPU time out of the machines on people's desks that would otherwise go unused...
Good Fast Cheap. Pick any two.
It sounds like the one guy worked in the f/X feel before he was hired, and the other guys all knew him....
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If this is employment.. I am in the wrong friggin place. Calgon, take me away.
*sob*
-fester(ing?)
-'fester
if you don't want to get moderated down, make a clear, consise statement, and register for gods sake. Hiding behind AC is lame.
Todd.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
If I had all that equipment, I think I'd use it (and the software) to make a cool 3D show.
But that's just me.
Insert mind here.
I am really envious of these guys.. sure it sounds
like they work hard but, they have fun at the same
time! How the hell do people find these great gigs?
I would love to work for a place like
southpark or similar place. Anyone hiring? Senior
Admin (solaris/linux/ultrix/irix). Dam there must
be a cool job list out there somewhere! Working
at the phone company (current job) is easy as cake
but boring as all hell. I'll take hard over boring
anyday.
Malice95
For the admin machines, Linux is the system of choice as we need something very reliable for running the critical software like DNS, postgres SQL, mail, and so on. We use Apache for our intraweb server, although we run it on Jesus, our O2000 file server.
What is the deal with this people don't they know the Jesus O4000 file server gives BETTER performance in tcp/ip applications like apache than the outdated Jesus O2000 file server?
And didn't they know the Jesus O2000 file server shuts down and refuses at boot every sunday? due to a bug hard coded into the CPU.
I will say one good thing about the Jesus O2000 file server, it can change C code into binary in no time flat using gcc and the open source extentions 'water2wine.so'
"Why, with over 5 million"- BLAM!