The balance of the hammer plays a large part in how it feels to handle at the end of the day. With more weight toward the head of the hammer, your wrist will tire faster. However, it does feel heavier to the user, and when pounding nails through 2x4's, it seems faster.
Go to Home Depot and pick up two 20 oz hammers. One with a wooden handle, and the other with the head formed as a single piece with the shaft. You'll be able to tell the difference immediately. Preference is up to you.
Now, as for functionality, this hammer doesn't have a magnetic nail holder on the head, therefore, I won't buy it.
We're currently in the process of rolling out Linux at our animation studio (RedHat -- don't bitch, it's what our software vendors support). Being the one who knows linux best, I've tried a few things on the artists to see how they like it.
First thing I tried was KDE on RedHat 9. What an abysmal failure that was. I upgraded the machines to 3.2.1 using the kde-redhat rpms available here
The problem we had with that setup was the file browser. It's way too complex for non-knowledgeable linux users. 800 tabs on the left side of the screen to get to different parts of the file system just simply doesn't work. Nobody could get to anything.
So I switched them to a custom compiled version of gnome 2.6 on redhat 9 (again, vendors restrict us to it). It's actually gone quite well. However, the change I've had to make across the board is getting rid of the spatial windows (a pretty easy option to change, and now part of our default user config). We use a very large file structure to get around our assets and shots, and navigating it with a spatial browser would have taken a ton of windows and the user would have spent way too much time closing windows. So, their browser window has actually been quite sucessful.
In short, the gnome browser view is a winner, but spatial navigation just doesn't work for very large directory structures.
Look up Nick Foster, the number one researcher in Fluid Dynamics for graphics. He's not at Pixar, but at PDI/Dreamworks. Ever wonder why the water in Shrek 2, Shrek, and Antz looked so good? Here's a good start
Actually, back in the day, they used to have an equation for how they would decide on what hardware to buy for their renderfarm. Power consumption factored heavily into it. Although this was back in the day when they were rendering on sun systems. (I can't even remember when Suns had decent floating point specs).
This
parts store seems to call it the pitman arm.
And here's a good
description of the problem:
I thought the same thing as you though when I first ordered it. My Bentley's manual refers to it as the "Rear trailing arm to axle carrier connecting link". Guess that's too much to put on a web page. The second page also refers to it as a "Dog bone". Makes sense, the link kinda looks like one.
However, the rear wheels of the car actually do turn. They pivot as the wheel moves up and down to keep the correct angle on the road. Problem with mine, however, is that bushing is so worn that it does this rather imprecisely.
Re:Don't touch your brakes? Disagree!
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Brakes are the one part of the car that always amuses me. I'm the same way, I change my own brakes, they're easy. Think of it this way: Engineers know that brakes are a part that wear down. They are designed to wear, be replaced, and done easily. (It's really the reason behind the industry moving to disk brakes in the first place, incredibly easy to maintain).
However, with the idea that brakes are the "safety" part of the car, people feel they should only trust the highest trained mechanic to the job. Please, it's only slightly harder to do than changing your oil.
Rich
Re:Hacking cars is OK
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Your criteria for leaving it to the professionals is pretty much the same as my own. However, I have more balls than brains, so I often attempt to do many things I shouldn't. Only once, however, have I had to take it apart and put it back together again after I thought it was done.
The key to amature mechanics is to know someone very good who is willing to teach you what you need to know. Shortly after buying my car I went on the search for a mechanic who would not only maintain my car, but teach me what I needed to know to do the job myself. Sunday afternoon, I replace the sway bar links in the front and the pitman arms in the back. Hopefully this will tighten up the last things on my suspension and it will be good as new again.
As for what I drive, a 1988 BMW 535is. If you're in the Dallas area, and drive a BMW or Mercedes that is out of warranty, forget the dealer, take it to Carlton's Autohaus. He's behind the Ti campus at 635 and 75. He's great to deal with, knows these cars backwards and forwards, and is willing to teach you what you need to know. Nicest guy you will ever meet too.
I feel kind of bad now that I have moved out of my apartment and into a house with a garage and can work on my own car again. I've given that guy a ton of business in the first 6 months I've owned the car.
They didn't only use Pixar's renderer, and here is a dark tale of what Pixar did to another small startup Exluna
Notice how that link goes to Nvidia? There's a reason why. Quite a few years ago, a rather genius programmer left Pixar and started up his own company to write a competing renderer called Entropy. Pixar's renderer, while very fast and the basis for many effects and animation piplines throughout the industry, was getting a bit long in the tooth. It didn't have any raytracing abilities (outside of some clever hacks), and completely lacked the global illumination abilities that were neccassary for some believable lighting models.
Why do I bring this up? Because Gollum was almost exclusively rendered on this renderer. Pixar's Renderman was not capable of doing some of the stuff they needed for that beautiful skin shader at the time they developed Gollum.
Pixar didn't take lightly to this. They launched a lawsuit against Exluna saying they were violating certain patents they held regarding some antialiasing algorithms. Never mind that the renderer was far more advanced and was a complete drop in replacement for Pixar's competing product. This was a straight up ploy to get rid of the competition.
To this day, the Exluna developers still say they did not violate those patents and that they would have won in court. However, winning in court would have destroyed the company. Instead, they sold the company to Nvidia, where they are working on some even more advanced stuff, but under the protection of a larger and well financed (and lawyer'd) company.
There are may other Renderman based renderers out there, all of varying capabilities. Pixie, while technically advanced and written by a brilliant graduate student at berkely, has a few rough edges and is missing some important features. Aqusis is progressing nicely, but doesn't have many features that I rely on. Mental Ray, while not renderman compatable, has all the features and more, but you pay for it in speed. Right now, I'm using Pixie for my tests. It's free for me, but I wouldn't trust it in production just yet. For production I would still choose Pixar's Renderman, which has since incorporated much of the lighting features available in other renderers (somewhat pushed by the demands of their clients, but mostly because they used a lot of those special lighting tools in Finding Nemo).
For more information on all available Renderman capable renderers and how to use them, I suggest visiting the Renderman Repository
Alright, back to work for me. I'm supposed to present this skin shader after new years.
everything on this page (if you're a redhat person). here Works beautifully on nearly everything I throw at it. Although the mozilla plugin crashes a lot. Might have to try out the mplayer kind that someone else has posted.
Good to hear they moved over to Mental Ray on Linux. When I interviewed with them a year ago they were 100% windows -- even on the farm.
Now that it's over, what are you up to these days? Still working for them or have you moved on? Might have to update my profie so it's not so horribly out of date and we can move this conversation elsewhere.
The developers are using it at my company currently and I'm looking at deploying it in the texturing department coming up. The problem is, we have a bunch of artists bound to photoshop that have to run rendering software on a linux cluster. The easiest way I can see to do this is through cygwin.
Disney recently addressed this problem by paying Crossover to get photoshop running smoothly under linux. We're going the other way and will probably use cygwin to glue the two parts together.
(This could change however, because there may be other departments that just move to linux because they are not bound to photoshop)
Life would be great if Adobe would simply (ha!) release a native linux port of Photoshop.
I really hope not. I started using them in school in my figure drawing classes when I was experimenting with ink as a medium. My style is very much based on getting areas of tone out of odd scribbly lines. So, essentially, I'd put the pen down on paper and pick it up about a half hour later. Most pens I used cut out at random points breaking up these lines (which sometimes was a good thing), but the pilot was a continuous flow and didn't break up in that above manner. And if I wanted to make bolder lines or define some detail, I'd switch to the v7 version, which is the same pen but a slightly heavier line. I think I'd have to give up sketching if I couldn't find these pens anymore. (No, I don't like sketching in pencil)
I guess collecting cubes are better than contracting some blood disease like the Mitochlorians or whatever that crap was in EP 1. They'd have players running around the game just trying to get STD's so they can become a Jedi.
Heh, I think I just created the MMO version of Leisure Suit Larry.
I'd hardly consider that a policy of Rush Limbaugh. Rather, it's more of a pro-labor liberal policy. Remember, those ultra-conservatives nations like France and Germany (conservative in the american sense) moved to a 35 hour work weak a few years back (don't remember when exactly it was).
There are a ton of facets to the above argument to consider. While he has a point about the balance between producing and consuming, there is the simple matter of job growth.
Say a company has one over worked individual putting in around 70 hours a week. If the work week was suddenly dropped by 5 hours, then it actually would become more economically sound to hire another employee. This is one of the reasons that overtime pay is set at 1.5x the normal pay. There's a lot of overhead in simply having an employee on the books.
When the work week is set at 35 hours, your employee that was previously getting the equivalent of 45 hours extra pay is now getting 52.5 hours. It might not be quite the break even point, but if you factor in the increased productivity you get out of having less stressed employees, then hiring a new person to help out your over stressed individual is a smart move.
Take that individual theory of reducing the work week and apply it to the economy as a whole, and it is more than enough to show at least a small reduction in the unemployment rate. Half a percent maybe?
When you have mroe people employeed, then you have more people buying the basics they need to get by. And your overworked people have a little more time to stop and smell the roses, or maybe buy one.
I guess this is just the socialist in me coming out, especially looking back at that 60 hour week I handed in on my time sheet today.
His point was that, while their burgers suck, they have a system that can move two all beef patties out the door quickly and cheaply. You on the other hand, could only shit once or twice a day. You'd better stock up on ex-lax if you plan to reach the billions and billions served mark that McD's reached years ago.
And another thing: If I ever find myself at a interstate exchange where the only thing to eat was McDonald's and Natanh's Shit on Toast, I'll eat the pavement.
"No, the video card doesn't provide any bits that get put into the final image."
That's changing. Mental Ray is supposedly working on it. Larry Gritz's company, Exulna was bought out by NVidia after Pixar sued them into oblivion for patent infringement. Hmm... wonder what NVidia wants a top of the line Renderman complient renderer for? (Yes, they are working on it)
There are some concerns with the concept I have, but I get the chance to ask them Tuesday.
You mean like the difference in widget sets between OSX Cocca (or is ps7 carbon?) and win32?
Way back in the early days of Photoshop, there was an Irix port. So it's been done before essentially, and they could do it again. Also, the original version of Photoshop was written by some guys at ILM, which is why the Irix port lasted through the 3.x series.
So not all hope is lost for a native Linux port. I think there are other political reasons for it. However, studios like Disney, PDI, and whoever else was the third one pressuring Adobe to do it might get it done. They have deep pockets. Large corporations tend to listen to other large corporations.
This article will definately be making the rounds at our studio tomorrow. We were wondering if we could unify Texturing and Rendering on Linux.
I wouldn't have a clue where to find this information online anymore, but if you searched for it, you could find it.
There's a small difference in this industry (which I am happy to say I work in). There's a definate "king" to the industry, Pixar, and everybody is always shooting for that goal. "One day I will work at Pixar." is heard frequently by those just starting out (I think I've said it myself). But it takes years of experience and an enormous amount of talent to make it there, even in the less artistic sides like programming (which is what I do).
The problem that other companies have in trying to compete with the talent of Pixar, is that they just can't go out and buy it. Pixar could offer a competitive offer against Threshold for a prospective employee of a nice stack of shiny pennies and most artists would take Pixar. I would. They're the best of the best, and they attract the best of the best.
But other posters have it right. You compete by having a great story. Right now, I'm working at a company on another project while they're doing the storyboards for their next feature. It's an interesting process to watch. The production crew doesn't even get to look at the movie for many more months (partially due to budget constraints), but they're hammering out this animatic every minute detail they can possibly think of. And the idea is that it can stand on it's own as a movie, it will just LOOK like crap. That's where/when we come in.
Great talent is a hard thing to come by in this industry. Just running out and buying a few animators and a couple hackers won't get it done.
In the past, your argument about CNN's bias was true. Turner made sure of that when he controlled the company. Unfortunately, since CNN is now controlled by Time Warner AOL (and whatever other subsidiary you want to throw in there) they've just become another sensationalist news outlet -- completely devoid of any real news. That also means they no longer take a side on the issues. But then again, they never cover the issues because real issues and events from around the world are bad for ratings.
It all comes back to the fourth estate argument. Fox was a good fourth estate during the Clinton administration, but they're completely supportive of the Bush administration. Therefore, shouldn't CNN be launching large stories on the mistakes of the current government?
As a liberal, I disagree with the vast majority of the Fox news network's views, but 1) they have every right to say it, and 2) the country needs a news outlet that will investigate the government (as was the case under the Clinton administration).
Today, however, who will investigate Bush? None of the major networks will because they're afraid of offending viewers and losing ratings. They all forget how many newspapers and books the watergate scandal sold.
So, in effect, no, CNN does not effectively balance out FOX news anymore because they have yet to jump on the fallacies of the Bush adminstration and expose them to the country.
It's not a matter of balance between the two networks, but a matter of balance against the current government.
There's all sorts of arguments on this issue. I traveled Europe last year in the manner that I expect the article is intending. Hostels? Bah, I slept in the park. Or a beach if it was available.
Anyways, as a high level amateur photographer, I took 3 cameras with me. 1 Fuji digital, 1 Olympus OM-1, 1 Nikon F (The original, built like a tank, when you're not taking pictures, you can use it as a weapon in a bull fight). Guess which one didn't make it back? The Nikon. I fell in an irrigation ditch in rural Italy and broke the viewfinder and shutter speed dial. I could have used that camera as a weapon later on in my journey too.
Anyways, my point. They all have their advantages. Using digital (and I would have loved a pro digital outfit on the trip) you get an immediate response of what the final image is doing. However, I like to do a lot of high-speed/low-light situations, and most digital (even the high end) can't handle what I like to do with 3200 speed T-Max.
My suggestion: If he's serious about pictures, take both, and take extras. Get used to buying film along the route so it doesn't age in your pack before you expose it. Mail it back, *after processing it*, when you're in a reasonably sized and responsible city.
If all you're doing is taking snapshots, I highly reccomend digital, and as many CF cards (I'd go solid state, they're more durable than the microdrives). On rare occasion, you might find a hostel or internet cafe with a burner. Even better, I used a friends shell account that I could upload all my pictures to. Carry all your software with you so you can get the pictures off if you find a friendly computer somewhere.
I'm paying close attention to this thread. I intend to do a 3-4 month journey through South America in a couple years, and will be looking to take two cameras with me. Most likely a digital and a film, both probably nikons.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeff? Holy Shit.
Dallas.
Call me (could get some interesting calls from this one) 469-583-4047
That's exactly what I do. I was going to write a response to the article saying just this, but you beat me to it.
So I second this motion.
the 150 desktops we bought and immediately wiped because D^H"they" wouldn't sell us anything without windows.
The balance of the hammer plays a large part in how it feels to handle at the end of the day. With more weight toward the head of the hammer, your wrist will tire faster. However, it does feel heavier to the user, and when pounding nails through 2x4's, it seems faster.
Go to Home Depot and pick up two 20 oz hammers. One with a wooden handle, and the other with the head formed as a single piece with the shaft. You'll be able to tell the difference immediately. Preference is up to you.
Now, as for functionality, this hammer doesn't have a magnetic nail holder on the head, therefore, I won't buy it.
First thing I tried was KDE on RedHat 9. What an abysmal failure that was. I upgraded the machines to 3.2.1 using the kde-redhat rpms available here
The problem we had with that setup was the file browser. It's way too complex for non-knowledgeable linux users. 800 tabs on the left side of the screen to get to different parts of the file system just simply doesn't work. Nobody could get to anything.
So I switched them to a custom compiled version of gnome 2.6 on redhat 9 (again, vendors restrict us to it). It's actually gone quite well. However, the change I've had to make across the board is getting rid of the spatial windows (a pretty easy option to change, and now part of our default user config). We use a very large file structure to get around our assets and shots, and navigating it with a spatial browser would have taken a ton of windows and the user would have spent way too much time closing windows. So, their browser window has actually been quite sucessful.
In short, the gnome browser view is a winner, but spatial navigation just doesn't work for very large directory structures.
Look up Nick Foster, the number one researcher in Fluid Dynamics for graphics. He's not at Pixar, but at PDI/Dreamworks. Ever wonder why the water in Shrek 2, Shrek, and Antz looked so good?
Here's a good start
Actually, back in the day, they used to have an equation for how they would decide on what hardware to buy for their renderfarm. Power consumption factored heavily into it. Although this was back in the day when they were rendering on sun systems. (I can't even remember when Suns had decent floating point specs).
This parts store seems to call it the pitman arm. And here's a good description of the problem: I thought the same thing as you though when I first ordered it. My Bentley's manual refers to it as the "Rear trailing arm to axle carrier connecting link". Guess that's too much to put on a web page. The second page also refers to it as a "Dog bone". Makes sense, the link kinda looks like one. However, the rear wheels of the car actually do turn. They pivot as the wheel moves up and down to keep the correct angle on the road. Problem with mine, however, is that bushing is so worn that it does this rather imprecisely.
Brakes are the one part of the car that always amuses me. I'm the same way, I change my own brakes, they're easy. Think of it this way: Engineers know that brakes are a part that wear down. They are designed to wear, be replaced, and done easily. (It's really the reason behind the industry moving to disk brakes in the first place, incredibly easy to maintain).
However, with the idea that brakes are the "safety" part of the car, people feel they should only trust the highest trained mechanic to the job. Please, it's only slightly harder to do than changing your oil.
Rich
Your criteria for leaving it to the professionals is pretty much the same as my own. However, I have more balls than brains, so I often attempt to do many things I shouldn't. Only once, however, have I had to take it apart and put it back together again after I thought it was done.
The key to amature mechanics is to know someone very good who is willing to teach you what you need to know. Shortly after buying my car I went on the search for a mechanic who would not only maintain my car, but teach me what I needed to know to do the job myself. Sunday afternoon, I replace the sway bar links in the front and the pitman arms in the back. Hopefully this will tighten up the last things on my suspension and it will be good as new again.
As for what I drive, a 1988 BMW 535is. If you're in the Dallas area, and drive a BMW or Mercedes that is out of warranty, forget the dealer, take it to Carlton's Autohaus. He's behind the Ti campus at 635 and 75. He's great to deal with, knows these cars backwards and forwards, and is willing to teach you what you need to know. Nicest guy you will ever meet too.
I feel kind of bad now that I have moved out of my apartment and into a house with a garage and can work on my own car again. I've given that guy a ton of business in the first 6 months I've owned the car.
Rich
They didn't only use Pixar's renderer, and here is a dark tale of what Pixar did to another small startup Exluna
Notice how that link goes to Nvidia? There's a reason why. Quite a few years ago, a rather genius programmer left Pixar and started up his own company to write a competing renderer called Entropy. Pixar's renderer, while very fast and the basis for many effects and animation piplines throughout the industry, was getting a bit long in the tooth. It didn't have any raytracing abilities (outside of some clever hacks), and completely lacked the global illumination abilities that were neccassary for some believable lighting models.
Why do I bring this up? Because Gollum was almost exclusively rendered on this renderer. Pixar's Renderman was not capable of doing some of the stuff they needed for that beautiful skin shader at the time they developed Gollum.
Pixar didn't take lightly to this. They launched a lawsuit against Exluna saying they were violating certain patents they held regarding some antialiasing algorithms. Never mind that the renderer was far more advanced and was a complete drop in replacement for Pixar's competing product. This was a straight up ploy to get rid of the competition.
To this day, the Exluna developers still say they did not violate those patents and that they would have won in court. However, winning in court would have destroyed the company. Instead, they sold the company to Nvidia, where they are working on some even more advanced stuff, but under the protection of a larger and well financed (and lawyer'd) company.
There are may other Renderman based renderers out there, all of varying capabilities. Pixie, while technically advanced and written by a brilliant graduate student at berkely, has a few rough edges and is missing some important features. Aqusis is progressing nicely, but doesn't have many features that I rely on. Mental Ray, while not renderman compatable, has all the features and more, but you pay for it in speed. Right now, I'm using Pixie for my tests. It's free for me, but I wouldn't trust it in production just yet. For production I would still choose Pixar's Renderman, which has since incorporated much of the lighting features available in other renderers (somewhat pushed by the demands of their clients, but mostly because they used a lot of those special lighting tools in Finding Nemo).
For more information on all available Renderman capable renderers and how to use them, I suggest visiting the Renderman Repository
Alright, back to work for me. I'm supposed to present this skin shader after new years.
Rich
everything on this page (if you're a redhat person).
here
Works beautifully on nearly everything I throw at it. Although the mozilla plugin crashes a lot. Might have to try out the mplayer kind that someone else has posted.
Good to hear they moved over to Mental Ray on Linux. When I interviewed with them a year ago they were 100% windows -- even on the farm.
Now that it's over, what are you up to these days? Still working for them or have you moved on? Might have to update my profie so it's not so horribly out of date and we can move this conversation elsewhere.
Texans. It makes so much sense that their stupidity and their accent is both caused by some collective head injury.
The developers are using it at my company currently and I'm looking at deploying it in the texturing department coming up. The problem is, we have a bunch of artists bound to photoshop that have to run rendering software on a linux cluster. The easiest way I can see to do this is through cygwin.
Disney recently addressed this problem by paying Crossover to get photoshop running smoothly under linux. We're going the other way and will probably use cygwin to glue the two parts together.
(This could change however, because there may be other departments that just move to linux because they are not bound to photoshop)
Life would be great if Adobe would simply (ha!) release a native linux port of Photoshop.
I really hope not. I started using them in school in my figure drawing classes when I was experimenting with ink as a medium. My style is very much based on getting areas of tone out of odd scribbly lines. So, essentially, I'd put the pen down on paper and pick it up about a half hour later. Most pens I used cut out at random points breaking up these lines (which sometimes was a good thing), but the pilot was a continuous flow and didn't break up in that above manner. And if I wanted to make bolder lines or define some detail, I'd switch to the v7 version, which is the same pen but a slightly heavier line. I think I'd have to give up sketching if I couldn't find these pens anymore. (No, I don't like sketching in pencil)
I guess collecting cubes are better than contracting some blood disease like the Mitochlorians or whatever that crap was in EP 1. They'd have players running around the game just trying to get STD's so they can become a Jedi.
Heh, I think I just created the MMO version of Leisure Suit Larry.
I'd hardly consider that a policy of Rush Limbaugh. Rather, it's more of a pro-labor liberal policy. Remember, those ultra-conservatives nations like France and Germany (conservative in the american sense) moved to a 35 hour work weak a few years back (don't remember when exactly it was).
There are a ton of facets to the above argument to consider. While he has a point about the balance between producing and consuming, there is the simple matter of job growth.
Say a company has one over worked individual putting in around 70 hours a week. If the work week was suddenly dropped by 5 hours, then it actually would become more economically sound to hire another employee. This is one of the reasons that overtime pay is set at 1.5x the normal pay. There's a lot of overhead in simply having an employee on the books.
When the work week is set at 35 hours, your employee that was previously getting the equivalent of 45 hours extra pay is now getting 52.5 hours. It might not be quite the break even point, but if you factor in the increased productivity you get out of having less stressed employees, then hiring a new person to help out your over stressed individual is a smart move.
Take that individual theory of reducing the work week and apply it to the economy as a whole, and it is more than enough to show at least a small reduction in the unemployment rate. Half a percent maybe?
When you have mroe people employeed, then you have more people buying the basics they need to get by. And your overworked people have a little more time to stop and smell the roses, or maybe buy one.
I guess this is just the socialist in me coming out, especially looking back at that 60 hour week I handed in on my time sheet today.
His point was that, while their burgers suck, they have a system that can move two all beef patties out the door quickly and cheaply. You on the other hand, could only shit once or twice a day. You'd better stock up on ex-lax if you plan to reach the billions and billions served mark that McD's reached years ago.
And another thing: If I ever find myself at a interstate exchange where the only thing to eat was McDonald's and Natanh's Shit on Toast, I'll eat the pavement.
>>There are some concerns with the concept I have, but I get the chance to ask them Tuesday.
>I dind't understand this comment, clarify pls?
I get to go to a demo of the NVidia renderer next week. Grill them on some issues that I think might crop up when using this stuff in production.
"No, the video card doesn't provide any bits that get put into the final image."
That's changing. Mental Ray is supposedly working on it. Larry Gritz's company, Exulna was bought out by NVidia after Pixar sued them into oblivion for patent infringement. Hmm... wonder what NVidia wants a top of the line Renderman complient renderer for? (Yes, they are working on it)
There are some concerns with the concept I have, but I get the chance to ask them Tuesday.
You mean like the difference in widget sets between OSX Cocca (or is ps7 carbon?) and win32?
Way back in the early days of Photoshop, there was an Irix port. So it's been done before essentially, and they could do it again. Also, the original version of Photoshop was written by some guys at ILM, which is why the Irix port lasted through the 3.x series.
So not all hope is lost for a native Linux port. I think there are other political reasons for it. However, studios like Disney, PDI, and whoever else was the third one pressuring Adobe to do it might get it done. They have deep pockets. Large corporations tend to listen to other large corporations.
This article will definately be making the rounds at our studio tomorrow. We were wondering if we could unify Texturing and Rendering on Linux.
I wouldn't have a clue where to find this information online anymore, but if you searched for it, you could find it.
There's a small difference in this industry (which I am happy to say I work in). There's a definate "king" to the industry, Pixar, and everybody is always shooting for that goal. "One day I will work at Pixar." is heard frequently by those just starting out (I think I've said it myself). But it takes years of experience and an enormous amount of talent to make it there, even in the less artistic sides like programming (which is what I do).
The problem that other companies have in trying to compete with the talent of Pixar, is that they just can't go out and buy it. Pixar could offer a competitive offer against Threshold for a prospective employee of a nice stack of shiny pennies and most artists would take Pixar. I would. They're the best of the best, and they attract the best of the best.
But other posters have it right. You compete by having a great story. Right now, I'm working at a company on another project while they're doing the storyboards for their next feature. It's an interesting process to watch. The production crew doesn't even get to look at the movie for many more months (partially due to budget constraints), but they're hammering out this animatic every minute detail they can possibly think of. And the idea is that it can stand on it's own as a movie, it will just LOOK like crap. That's where/when we come in.
Great talent is a hard thing to come by in this industry. Just running out and buying a few animators and a couple hackers won't get it done.
Taos
"CNNs bias has been documented before"
In the past, your argument about CNN's bias was true. Turner made sure of that when he controlled the company. Unfortunately, since CNN is now controlled by Time Warner AOL (and whatever other subsidiary you want to throw in there) they've just become another sensationalist news outlet -- completely devoid of any real news. That also means they no longer take a side on the issues. But then again, they never cover the issues because real issues and events from around the world are bad for ratings.
It all comes back to the fourth estate argument. Fox was a good fourth estate during the Clinton administration, but they're completely supportive of the Bush administration. Therefore, shouldn't CNN be launching large stories on the mistakes of the current government?
As a liberal, I disagree with the vast majority of the Fox news network's views, but 1) they have every right to say it, and 2) the country needs a news outlet that will investigate the government (as was the case under the Clinton administration).
Today, however, who will investigate Bush? None of the major networks will because they're afraid of offending viewers and losing ratings. They all forget how many newspapers and books the watergate scandal sold.
So, in effect, no, CNN does not effectively balance out FOX news anymore because they have yet to jump on the fallacies of the Bush adminstration and expose them to the country.
It's not a matter of balance between the two networks, but a matter of balance against the current government.
There's all sorts of arguments on this issue. I traveled Europe last year in the manner that I expect the article is intending. Hostels? Bah, I slept in the park. Or a beach if it was available.
Anyways, as a high level amateur photographer, I took 3 cameras with me. 1 Fuji digital, 1 Olympus OM-1, 1 Nikon F (The original, built like a tank, when you're not taking pictures, you can use it as a weapon in a bull fight). Guess which one didn't make it back? The Nikon. I fell in an irrigation ditch in rural Italy and broke the viewfinder and shutter speed dial. I could have used that camera as a weapon later on in my journey too.
Anyways, my point. They all have their advantages. Using digital (and I would have loved a pro digital outfit on the trip) you get an immediate response of what the final image is doing. However, I like to do a lot of high-speed/low-light situations, and most digital (even the high end) can't handle what I like to do with 3200 speed T-Max.
My suggestion: If he's serious about pictures, take both, and take extras. Get used to buying film along the route so it doesn't age in your pack before you expose it. Mail it back, *after processing it*, when you're in a reasonably sized and responsible city.
If all you're doing is taking snapshots, I highly reccomend digital, and as many CF cards (I'd go solid state, they're more durable than the microdrives). On rare occasion, you might find a hostel or internet cafe with a burner. Even better, I used a friends shell account that I could upload all my pictures to. Carry all your software with you so you can get the pictures off if you find a friendly computer somewhere.
I'm paying close attention to this thread. I intend to do a 3-4 month journey through South America in a couple years, and will be looking to take two cameras with me. Most likely a digital and a film, both probably nikons.