I disagree. If Microsoft wants to do the whole licesnse thing right, by golly, let them do it. Flexlm is great. Use something like that to serve a license. It would enforce the EULA that everyone agrees to by opening the package to read the EULA. There is no need for this middle ground.
I would rather see them be 100% strict about how they license than see them have tough words in the EULA and then only follow up on it every now and then.
Hmmm... Maybe it is the silent helicopters overhead or all the people running arround with coppies of catcher in the rye... but this could be a conspiracy.
I doubt that any "real" linux user would bother to write a virus like that. I can see some script kiddie... maybe. Or... it could be some mega company out west that has an intrest in giving Linux a bad name. Infect a few machines, post it on your news site.
Why not? It is cheaper than adds that speak of how much better your (paid for) benchmarks are than Linux.
Or better... have a cron job to start the laundry every saturday at noon.
You just use the machine as a clothes hamper and every week they wash themselves. Perfect for bachelors.
The more digital screens that are up, the better.
I know one of the expenses for studios that produce 3D only is the converting from digital to film.
This process reverses the problem that other studios going from film to digital have. The color correction is a big one. I know that we have to look at it being a big factor for taking our digital content to film.
If the shoe fits...
If the robot can make deterministic judgements following rules as to a persons health status, that is AI. No hype about it.
I can also see where the system could purposely use logic to fail on the side of a human being alive when they are not instead of the other way arround.
I imagine that determining the persons health status being one of the simpler of the tasks that the robot has to do. Finding people and avoiding problems is hard for us people, let alone for a robot.
Give the people more credit.
I see four categories for these machines, not two...
Those that outperform expectations
those that meet expectations
those that don't meet expectations
and those that fit into your classifications.
History:
Working for a small studio, there are somethings that I am the sole support person on. The stuido wants to be high availability, so when things break, I have to run in and save the day. (Side note... caller ID is great... any call before my alarm goes off better be work).
Because of this, I have tried to make a personal rule that I have at least 10 hours between leaving work and going back in. Because of the flex schedule that I work with, if I am fixing things at 3 in the morning, people don't complain if I don't come back in till noon. My manager understands the give and take of being both a coder and a support person and what it can do to a person's schedule.
The downside:
Something broke last night. I found out about it 45 minutes before my alarm went off, so I went into work almost 2 hours before I am used to. I fixed the problem and then went on to my next project. The problem is that a person I needed to talk to was not going to be in for a while ( it ended up being 2 hours later ). I had to side the issue untill he got in, which frustrated me, cause I wanted to brainstorm and had allready shifted into thinking mode for the problem.
Summary:
Flex is good to keep a good, healthy environment when the job can call at all hours. The problem with flex is when you want to but don't need to talk to somebody because they may not be in.
Also, you should know that on real RAID systems (real as in real fast) not all of the HD is used.
This being the case, if it was worth getting that system and you put 160 GB drives in the machine, I doubt that they would be formated at 160 GB. The access time that is saved by not using the end of the drive is amazing.
I guess it depends on the size of the raid system.... some of those get sort of heavy...;)
If it is like our environment, only 5-20 megs are being pushed arround at any one time... and I can almost guarantee that servers are connected with 1000bT fibre.
Linux has been in the mainstreem for a bit.
I know many studios have been using it for various tasks, including rendering.
I can think of several studios that are using it to render (including us).
The price performance ratio to SGI boxes is large enough that even SGI houses (such as Weta) are looking at and using Linux. Notice though, that they are still using SGI boxes, just these are of the intel flavor.
hmmm... we had that on our team as well...
thus tolldog...
sort of strange having a login name, domain name and the like based off of some "athletic" event...
;)
MPAA boycot rules/ideas
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 3
You know that not all videos that are released to theatres are from members of the MPAA. And that sometimes they use the big boys for distribution... so it looks like an MPAA movie.
If a serious boycot was done, it could end up hurting the smaller, independent studios, the ones that need our support. Is giving a few cents to an evil empire so bad that you don't want to help those small rebel forces trying to make good film?
I suggest that before you decide to boycot a movie, look at who is producing the movie, not who is distributing it and base the decision on that.
As sort of an analogy...
I was a paper boy once. The paper had an editorial cartoon that offended the local Unions in our town. The union then boycotted the paper. But, the union, in all fairness, suggested that those that recieved delivery to still tip the paper carier (and maybe a little extra because we got payed per paper) to prevent a loss of revenue to the little guy.
It sounds like the author thinks that the idea of an OS has changed over time. Either that or UNIX has de-evolved into a lesser state.
I will agree that the average view of an OS has changed, now the average user will stare blankly if they are asked what an OS is until one says "You mean like Windows?" Where the average user in the 70's would *know* what an OS is.
Does this take away from UNIX?
Outside of nomenclature, I don't think so. UNIX is what it is, regardless of what a fan of OSX says.
Besides, OSX must be an OS, it has OS in the name. Same as OS/2. The rest of the machines out there must be running something... but we just can't tell for sure from the name.
Following the authors discussion, do you think he would view Linux as an OS. If not, would a specific distribution be considered an OS?
These are good questions to think of because technology and terminology is being trickled to the masses. We have to be able to communicate with these people. Should we look at differing our def of an OS?
I don't get anything for being on call.
If something breaks, I have to fix it or I get behind deadline.
I guess that is part of the problem of being your own support.
Others, that I know, have turned off the work cell phones on the weekend because they were getting nothing for being on call.
Be glad your company recognizes it but you should fight for better terms.
Distributed computing through transparency has been worked for a while now. I remember reading about a windows client that worked with just about any windows app.
I personaly use Platform's LSF product to control all of my queueing. I have custom perl scripts sitting arround it, allowing jobs to requeue on certain exits or even to validate that the output of the job is correct before saying that it is done.
Hook all of this up to a spiffy database to know where things are and were in the queues and you have a semi-decent render management toolkit
I have also read stuff on distributed fileserving as well, a pvfs system. Interesting ideas on ways to not need a massive system but use smaller, cheaper guys to get the job done.
"each with the greatest rendering weapon known to man, a Silicon Graphics Octane."
HAHAHA. Hardly. The Octane is good for hardware renders and animating on, but not for render boxes. I use both Octanes and VALinux boxes. Give me the Linux boxes any day. The price/performance runs circles arround the Octanes.
One reason is the fact that companies do not want data files outside of the company. Imagine if you had the Toy Story scene files and all the fun you could have making your own scenes with Woody and company and posting them on the web.
The second main reason is that it takes horsepower, memory and storage to render files. The frame sizes, depending on quality and resolution can result in several MBs. The memory required to make those frames can be on the order of 500 - 1000 MBs. Also, industry standard is an hour a frame for rendering film quality for CG.
Third and the greatest reason is that the renderer is not free. They are either in-house solutions and will never leave the company or they are licensed from whomever makes it to that company.
I have thought about this. I would love for fans to be able to render, heck, it would save us money on machines. Sadly though, I don't ever see it as a posibility.
One thing that you have failed to mention is that for Hong Kong to really and truely impact China, China will have to be able to afford the changes.
Hong Kong is so much smaller than China and it had the economic resources to develop into what it is.
China may have the resources to take some of the technology and give it to the rest of the country, but I would be suprised to see them be able to distribute even 10% of the technology to more than 30% of China's population. Not in the near future and not even in the near distant future.
Sadly, I feel that China will be a land of the have and the have nots and the gap between them will be larger than any other country.
What a book. I came out of college expecting for management to have read it or at least know about the concepts in it or at least resemble something of the suggestions that are made.
I was wrong. So I brought my college text book in and showed it to co-workers. And we all sat arround and talked about how good the book is. We even mentioned it to members of management.
Still they have not looked at the book.
I am tempted to buy a copy for everyone in the company that is above me, straight up the chain.
Re:Another one bites the du5t.
on
Kuro5hin Update
·
· Score: 1
Dude, your backgrounds rock, but your sense of politics suck.
Every article with VA or any other thing that points to something like VA you go on a rant.
VA is needed. We run VA. They provided us with rock solid hardware that has allowed us to do what we do. They are doing the same for Kuro5hin (it is just that they get free hardware...)
This is not the place for you to whine about your problems. I am getting tired of reading your posts complaining about VA. You may have been screwed over by them. Move on. Go make some more pretty backgrounds and please, for all of us, stop the bitching and moaning.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. If Microsoft wants to do the whole licesnse thing right, by golly, let them do it. Flexlm is great. Use something like that to serve a license. It would enforce the EULA that everyone agrees to by opening the package to read the EULA. There is no need for this middle ground.
I would rather see them be 100% strict about how they license than see them have tough words in the EULA and then only follow up on it every now and then.
Hmmm... Maybe it is the silent helicopters overhead or all the people running arround with coppies of catcher in the rye... but this could be a conspiracy.
I doubt that any "real" linux user would bother to write a virus like that. I can see some script kiddie... maybe. Or... it could be some mega company out west that has an intrest in giving Linux a bad name. Infect a few machines, post it on your news site.
Why not? It is cheaper than adds that speak of how much better your (paid for) benchmarks are than Linux.
Like I said... only a theory.
Or better... have a cron job to start the laundry every saturday at noon.
You just use the machine as a clothes hamper and every week they wash themselves. Perfect for bachelors.
The more digital screens that are up, the better.
I know one of the expenses for studios that produce 3D only is the converting from digital to film.
This process reverses the problem that other studios going from film to digital have. The color correction is a big one. I know that we have to look at it being a big factor for taking our digital content to film.
If the shoe fits...
If the robot can make deterministic judgements following rules as to a persons health status, that is AI. No hype about it.
I can also see where the system could purposely use logic to fail on the side of a human being alive when they are not instead of the other way arround.
I imagine that determining the persons health status being one of the simpler of the tasks that the robot has to do. Finding people and avoiding problems is hard for us people, let alone for a robot.
Give the people more credit.
I see four categories for these machines, not two...
Those that outperform expectations
those that meet expectations
those that don't meet expectations
and those that fit into your classifications.
I wonder if the monkey brain knows it is controling some limb. Can he see this limb move? Is there some sort of web cam for the monkey-bot arm?
I guess what I am asking is:
Can monkey see what monkey do?
History:
Working for a small studio, there are somethings that I am the sole support person on. The stuido wants to be high availability, so when things break, I have to run in and save the day. (Side note... caller ID is great... any call before my alarm goes off better be work).
Because of this, I have tried to make a personal rule that I have at least 10 hours between leaving work and going back in. Because of the flex schedule that I work with, if I am fixing things at 3 in the morning, people don't complain if I don't come back in till noon. My manager understands the give and take of being both a coder and a support person and what it can do to a person's schedule.
The downside:
Something broke last night. I found out about it 45 minutes before my alarm went off, so I went into work almost 2 hours before I am used to. I fixed the problem and then went on to my next project. The problem is that a person I needed to talk to was not going to be in for a while ( it ended up being 2 hours later ). I had to side the issue untill he got in, which frustrated me, cause I wanted to brainstorm and had allready shifted into thinking mode for the problem.
Summary:
Flex is good to keep a good, healthy environment when the job can call at all hours. The problem with flex is when you want to but don't need to talk to somebody because they may not be in.
Also, you should know that on real RAID systems (real as in real fast) not all of the HD is used. This being the case, if it was worth getting that system and you put 160 GB drives in the machine, I doubt that they would be formated at 160 GB. The access time that is saved by not using the end of the drive is amazing.
I guess it depends on the size of the raid system.... some of those get sort of heavy...;)
If it is like our environment, only 5-20 megs are being pushed arround at any one time... and I can almost guarantee that servers are connected with 1000bT fibre.
Linux has been in the mainstreem for a bit.
I know many studios have been using it for various tasks, including rendering.
I can think of several studios that are using it to render (including us).
The price performance ratio to SGI boxes is large enough that even SGI houses (such as Weta) are looking at and using Linux. Notice though, that they are still using SGI boxes, just these are of the intel flavor.
Dude, home systems with IDE drives this is not.
100 Terabytes of RAID storage, probably fibre chanel...
Not cheap, but ultra cool and fast as well
hmmm... we had that on our team as well...
thus tolldog...
sort of strange having a login name, domain name and the like based off of some "athletic" event...
;)
You know that not all videos that are released to theatres are from members of the MPAA. And that sometimes they use the big boys for distribution... so it looks like an MPAA movie.
If a serious boycot was done, it could end up hurting the smaller, independent studios, the ones that need our support. Is giving a few cents to an evil empire so bad that you don't want to help those small rebel forces trying to make good film?
I suggest that before you decide to boycot a movie, look at who is producing the movie, not who is distributing it and base the decision on that.
As sort of an analogy...
I was a paper boy once. The paper had an editorial cartoon that offended the local Unions in our town. The union then boycotted the paper. But, the union, in all fairness, suggested that those that recieved delivery to still tip the paper carier (and maybe a little extra because we got payed per paper) to prevent a loss of revenue to the little guy.
We should all follow this idea.
It sounds like the author thinks that the idea of an OS has changed over time. Either that or UNIX has de-evolved into a lesser state.
I will agree that the average view of an OS has changed, now the average user will stare blankly if they are asked what an OS is until one says "You mean like Windows?" Where the average user in the 70's would *know* what an OS is.
Does this take away from UNIX?
Outside of nomenclature, I don't think so. UNIX is what it is, regardless of what a fan of OSX says.
Besides, OSX must be an OS, it has OS in the name. Same as OS/2. The rest of the machines out there must be running something... but we just can't tell for sure from the name.
Following the authors discussion, do you think he would view Linux as an OS. If not, would a specific distribution be considered an OS?
These are good questions to think of because technology and terminology is being trickled to the masses. We have to be able to communicate with these people. Should we look at differing our def of an OS?
I don't get anything for being on call.
If something breaks, I have to fix it or I get behind deadline.
I guess that is part of the problem of being your own support.
Others, that I know, have turned off the work cell phones on the weekend because they were getting nothing for being on call.
Be glad your company recognizes it but you should fight for better terms.
Just wondering, but why were you using beowulf? PVM is good enough to do pvmPov renders. I have done it with straight pvm setups.
Distributed computing through transparency has been worked for a while now. I remember reading about a windows client that worked with just about any windows app.
I personaly use Platform's LSF product to control all of my queueing. I have custom perl scripts sitting arround it, allowing jobs to requeue on certain exits or even to validate that the output of the job is correct before saying that it is done.
Hook all of this up to a spiffy database to know where things are and were in the queues and you have a semi-decent render management toolkit
I have also read stuff on distributed fileserving as well, a pvfs system. Interesting ideas on ways to not need a massive system but use smaller, cheaper guys to get the job done.
"each with the greatest rendering weapon known to man, a Silicon Graphics Octane."
HAHAHA. Hardly. The Octane is good for hardware renders and animating on, but not for render boxes. I use both Octanes and VALinux boxes. Give me the Linux boxes any day. The price/performance runs circles arround the Octanes.
Rendering will never be the next distributed app.
One reason is the fact that companies do not want data files outside of the company. Imagine if you had the Toy Story scene files and all the fun you could have making your own scenes with Woody and company and posting them on the web.
The second main reason is that it takes horsepower, memory and storage to render files. The frame sizes, depending on quality and resolution can result in several MBs. The memory required to make those frames can be on the order of 500 - 1000 MBs. Also, industry standard is an hour a frame for rendering film quality for CG.
Third and the greatest reason is that the renderer is not free. They are either in-house solutions and will never leave the company or they are licensed from whomever makes it to that company.
I have thought about this. I would love for fans to be able to render, heck, it would save us money on machines. Sadly though, I don't ever see it as a posibility.
I agree with you.
One thing that you have failed to mention is that for Hong Kong to really and truely impact China, China will have to be able to afford the changes.
Hong Kong is so much smaller than China and it had the economic resources to develop into what it is.
China may have the resources to take some of the technology and give it to the rest of the country, but I would be suprised to see them be able to distribute even 10% of the technology to more than 30% of China's population. Not in the near future and not even in the near distant future.
Sadly, I feel that China will be a land of the have and the have nots and the gap between them will be larger than any other country.
Peopleware...
What a book. I came out of college expecting for management to have read it or at least know about the concepts in it or at least resemble something of the suggestions that are made.
I was wrong. So I brought my college text book in and showed it to co-workers. And we all sat arround and talked about how good the book is. We even mentioned it to members of management.
Still they have not looked at the book.
I am tempted to buy a copy for everyone in the company that is above me, straight up the chain.
Dude, your backgrounds rock, but your sense of politics suck.
Every article with VA or any other thing that points to something like VA you go on a rant.
VA is needed. We run VA. They provided us with rock solid hardware that has allowed us to do what we do. They are doing the same for Kuro5hin (it is just that they get free hardware...)
This is not the place for you to whine about your problems. I am getting tired of reading your posts complaining about VA. You may have been screwed over by them. Move on. Go make some more pretty backgrounds and please, for all of us, stop the bitching and moaning.
no kidding... to be one of the few in the first 1k... I barely missed it. Oh well
I am a Render Architect... things like this give me the willies...
The more real-time 3D viewers that we have (Game engines or otherwise) and the more content that is developed for it is less work for me.
I am glad to see somebody being inovative and working in a new medium... but as a simple guy that is trying to pay the bills:
Please keep buying 3D videos... the type that take time and people to render...
Ok, that being said... I am gonna sit back and watch me a nice, old, good-for-you 3D video.
Isn't this similar to the classaction suit that was (or is being) brought against AOL.
Maybe the suit is only in the proposal stages...