Same reason we still look at and keep glass-plate photos of Civil-War Era scenes. It's a look back in history. The only photos we'll have until your holo-photos arrive will be Boring 2-d's. Sure, they may not be as wonderful as a more immersive format, but you can bet that they'll still be a major part of our society's history.
Actually, one of my favorite things to do is to look at old stereo images. There are a few at the Museum of Science in Boston...If I had to guess an era, I would say they were turn of the (last) century, given the deterioration of the prints and the characteristics of the photograph. A simple mechanical viewing apparatus is needed to view the photos in stereo, but boy is it immersive!
...although it can be done.
Yes, SGI hardware is not a cost-effective rendering platform. The newer MIPS processors certainly have their strengths, but big SGI iron is really quite expensive.
However, SGI systems are great for interactive modeling. Typically, you do all your artistic work on SGI, and then when it's ready, throw the bits at commodity boxen (or perhaps Sun hardware) for the final rendering.
At least that's how I hear it's done. In my case, I actually do it in reverse -- I model on my NT box and send it over to the old SGI for rendering, only because the SGI is stable enough to leave on 24/7.:-)
I work in Marlborough, Mass at a large helio-centric computer company, and nobody heard any mention of this vintage computer show. Given that 50% of tech employees in Mass are ex-DECies, and at least 25% of them have a VAX or PDP in their basement, I'm surprised there wasn't as many exhibitors or attendees. If only it had been advertised....something of this nature usually spreads pretty quickly by word of mouth, but I still didn't hear anything. Very odd.
If I had known about the show, I would have dragged along some of my old equipment, and some other stuff that people have around work. I've got a fully functional Atari ST, with mouse, external scsi drive, monitor, and all kinds of MIDI software...hook it up to my synths and I could have put on quite a show! Maybe I would have found someone there with a copy of Epoch UNIX too....a co-worker of mine has an old Epoch server board, that just needs a copy of the OS to run. Anyone here know where I can find a copy of Epoch UNIX?:-) Hmm...maybe I could have found someone at the show that has a use for a case of 8" floppies...I've got to get rid of these darn things. Heh.
Maybe it's because I'm a computer-artist wannabe and a lover of well designed machines, but I'm really sad to see Silicon Graphics in its waning hours. It even pains me to speak of them in this way. Yes, SGI gets trounced upon for having very high prices...but there was a time that the hardware you could get in an SGI box was THE fastest available for some kinds of graphics, period...unfortunately, that is no longer the case, so their sales model doesn't work anymore. Not that their sales model was ever really good, it just happened to work for a time...when you have the most cutting edge equipment, you can set the price of such equipment. SGI has long been known as the company who couldn't sell their way out of a wet paper bag, even if their systems were great. For me, the pure essence of geek within has alwas driven me towards SGI hardware..especially the older machines of the Indigo era. This is the time when they were the farthest ahead of the competition, I believe. (To this day I still like watching Jurassic Park and pointing out the little purple Indigos in the computer room sequences.):) For instance, the Indigo^2 Extreme came out at a time when 486 PCs were popular. The I^2 Extreme had a 200mhz MIPS r4400 cpu, with 1 or 2 meg of cache, integrated SCSI controllers, and a 3 card graphics set with 8 OpenGL(another thing SGI invented with IrisGL) processors, 2 raster engines, and a geometry preprocessor. All told, the GPUs were doing ~256MFLOPS. This kind of machine decimated anything available in a PC platform, so using PCs was not a viable option to many in that era. Anyhow, their glory days are past. I really wish they would have some respect and just dissolve the company, but it's obvious that the people who work there want to keep their jobs. Maybe I'm wrong, and SGI will crack down and focus their business in one area and regroup, becoming the technical leaders in a field again. I really hope that will be the case. The press about the use of SGI machines in the Final Fantasy movie has seemed to help them slightly, but at 59 cents a share, things look grim. I think a good question to ask is who would be interested in buying SGI for their technology and the talent that is left. Then, we could have a respectful moment of silence and move on. It's kindof like when a loved one has been on life support for some time, and though you know it's probably better to unplug them and let them go, you're glad they're still alive, if only technically.
All hail Silicon Graphics!
(big words from a Sun employee):)
-Mike, writing from an NT box, situated to the right of his two Silicon Graphics machines.
I should have waited for more of the grape website to actually load, and install chinese text support. I am dumb and apologize for wasting your time. Below is some useless crap I concocted to try to save my ass from looking like an idiot. I failed, just like I failed out of college and at just about every other aspect of my miserable fucking life. It is funny how that after a while you get used it, and sleep a lot to pass the time--because if you don't, you end up wanting to impale your head on a pointy wrought-iron fence and just be done with it.
I guess the specialized boards are doing far more floating point operations per set of data sent to them then I thought. I didn't see how they could do this without saturating the bus to the number crunching hardware -- or especially saturating the PC's cpu itself, because it would have to send the information to the boards, retrieve the results, and do I/O.
I find it hard to believe that any 1.7ghz PC can pull off 8 Teraflops, as the article states. (32/4) A single Gigaflop is attainable, but depends on what FLOPS weighting they are using....e.g. flops1, flops2...etc, which have different amounts of floating point divides, additions, and the like.
"THX" stands for the Tom Holmann Crossover. (name spelling may be slightly off)
Note: I have never found even the slightest mention of Tom's name on Lucasfilm's THX.com. Lots of thanks he gets.
Tom developed the Crossover as a method for converting movie theaters over to a system for reproducing sound, which had to adhere to specific standards. This was done to ensure that the recorded audio on a movie soundtrack would sound reasonably the same (to a degree of accuracy) from theatre to theatre. This may not sound like such a big deal now, but back in the 70's and before anything was free game. The vast majority were using monophonic reproduction, with the most emphasis being on cheaply reproducing midrange (human voice range) frequencies. Tom Hollman (and others, I can't remember exactly who) realized this extreme deficiency of theatre sound systems when they tried to incorporate advanced noise-reduction techniques into the recording process of movie sountracks, only to find out nobody noticed the difference when played back in the theatres!
Anyways, after this Tom laid down the specs for properly reproducing sound in theatres, and designed the THX for this purpose. It is my belief that he also designed audio reproduction systems as well as set standards for them.
"thx.com" gives all the credit to.....that's right. George Lucas. What a genius. =P
(Guess this blows my chances at working for ILM) hehe =)
I just feel that credit should be given where credit is due. And Lucasfilm isn't giving it.
There was a really great documentary about this (they even dragged out Julian Hirsch and Henry Kloss!) about a year ago on cable. Wish I could remember the name of the program, it was quite good.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, one of my favorite things to do is to look at old stereo images. There are a few at the Museum of Science in Boston...If I had to guess an era, I would say they were turn of the (last) century, given the deterioration of the prints and the characteristics of the photograph. A simple mechanical viewing apparatus is needed to view the photos in stereo, but boy is it immersive!
...although it can be done. Yes, SGI hardware is not a cost-effective rendering platform. The newer MIPS processors certainly have their strengths, but big SGI iron is really quite expensive. However, SGI systems are great for interactive modeling. Typically, you do all your artistic work on SGI, and then when it's ready, throw the bits at commodity boxen (or perhaps Sun hardware) for the final rendering. At least that's how I hear it's done. In my case, I actually do it in reverse -- I model on my NT box and send it over to the old SGI for rendering, only because the SGI is stable enough to leave on 24/7. :-)
I work in Marlborough, Mass at a large helio-centric computer company, and nobody heard any mention of this vintage computer show. Given that 50% of tech employees in Mass are ex-DECies, and at least 25% of them have a VAX or PDP in their basement, I'm surprised there wasn't as many exhibitors or attendees. If only it had been advertised....something of this nature usually spreads pretty quickly by word of mouth, but I still didn't hear anything. Very odd.
:-) Hmm...maybe I could have found someone at the show that has a use for a case of 8" floppies...I've got to get rid of these darn things. Heh.
If I had known about the show, I would have dragged along some of my old equipment, and some other stuff that people have around work. I've got a fully functional Atari ST, with mouse, external scsi drive, monitor, and all kinds of MIDI software...hook it up to my synths and I could have put on quite a show! Maybe I would have found someone there with a copy of Epoch UNIX too....a co-worker of mine has an old Epoch server board, that just needs a copy of the OS to run. Anyone here know where I can find a copy of Epoch UNIX?
EDIT.COM : 413 bytes for the version included in WinNT 4.0, and still rocks!
Beats the piss out of "edlin", at any rate.
-mpb
Maybe it's because I'm a computer-artist wannabe and a lover of well designed machines, but I'm really sad to see Silicon Graphics in its waning hours. It even pains me to speak of them in this way. Yes, SGI gets trounced upon for having very high prices...but there was a time that the hardware you could get in an SGI box was THE fastest available for some kinds of graphics, period...unfortunately, that is no longer the case, so their sales model doesn't work anymore. Not that their sales model was ever really good, it just happened to work for a time...when you have the most cutting edge equipment, you can set the price of such equipment. SGI has long been known as the company who couldn't sell their way out of a wet paper bag, even if their systems were great. For me, the pure essence of geek within has alwas driven me towards SGI hardware..especially the older machines of the Indigo era. This is the time when they were the farthest ahead of the competition, I believe. (To this day I still like watching Jurassic Park and pointing out the little purple Indigos in the computer room sequences.) :) For instance, the Indigo^2 Extreme came out at a time when 486 PCs were popular. The I^2 Extreme had a 200mhz MIPS r4400 cpu, with 1 or 2 meg of cache, integrated SCSI controllers, and a 3 card graphics set with 8 OpenGL(another thing SGI invented with IrisGL) processors, 2 raster engines, and a geometry preprocessor. All told, the GPUs were doing ~256MFLOPS. This kind of machine decimated anything available in a PC platform, so using PCs was not a viable option to many in that era. Anyhow, their glory days are past. I really wish they would have some respect and just dissolve the company, but it's obvious that the people who work there want to keep their jobs. Maybe I'm wrong, and SGI will crack down and focus their business in one area and regroup, becoming the technical leaders in a field again. I really hope that will be the case. The press about the use of SGI machines in the Final Fantasy movie has seemed to help them slightly, but at 59 cents a share, things look grim. I think a good question to ask is who would be interested in buying SGI for their technology and the talent that is left. Then, we could have a respectful moment of silence and move on. It's kindof like when a loved one has been on life support for some time, and though you know it's probably better to unplug them and let them go, you're glad they're still alive, if only technically.
:)
All hail Silicon Graphics!
(big words from a Sun employee)
-Mike, writing from an NT box, situated to the right of his two Silicon Graphics machines.
I should have waited for more of the grape website to actually load, and install chinese text support. I am dumb and apologize for wasting your time. Below is some useless crap I concocted to try to save my ass from looking like an idiot. I failed, just like I failed out of college and at just about every other aspect of my miserable fucking life. It is funny how that after a while you get used it, and sleep a lot to pass the time--because if you don't, you end up wanting to impale your head on a pointy wrought-iron fence and just be done with it.
I guess the specialized boards are doing far more floating point operations per set of data sent to them then I thought. I didn't see how they could do this without saturating the bus to the number crunching hardware -- or especially saturating the PC's cpu itself, because it would have to send the information to the boards, retrieve the results, and do I/O.
I find it hard to believe that any 1.7ghz PC can pull off 8 Teraflops, as the article states. (32/4) A single Gigaflop is attainable, but depends on what FLOPS weighting they are using....e.g. flops1, flops2...etc, which have different amounts of floating point divides, additions, and the like.
-Mike (on a 24 MegaFlop Indigo2)
Note: I have never found even the slightest mention of Tom's name on Lucasfilm's THX.com. Lots of thanks he gets.
Tom developed the Crossover as a method for converting movie theaters over to a system for reproducing sound, which had to adhere to specific standards. This was done to ensure that the recorded audio on a movie soundtrack would sound reasonably the same (to a degree of accuracy) from theatre to theatre. This may not sound like such a big deal now, but back in the 70's and before anything was free game. The vast majority were using monophonic reproduction, with the most emphasis being on cheaply reproducing midrange (human voice range) frequencies. Tom Hollman (and others, I can't remember exactly who) realized this extreme deficiency of theatre sound systems when they tried to incorporate advanced noise-reduction techniques into the recording process of movie sountracks, only to find out nobody noticed the difference when played back in the theatres!
Anyways, after this Tom laid down the specs for properly reproducing sound in theatres, and designed the THX for this purpose. It is my belief that he also designed audio reproduction systems as well as set standards for them.
"thx.com" gives all the credit to.....that's right. George Lucas. What a genius. =P
(Guess this blows my chances at working for ILM) hehe =)
I just feel that credit should be given where credit is due. And Lucasfilm isn't giving it.
There was a really great documentary about this (they even dragged out Julian Hirsch and Henry Kloss!) about a year ago on cable. Wish I could remember the name of the program, it was quite good.