It seems that he wants to say that copyright laws are smacking directly in the face of the humans ever impressive need to modify things.
For something that seemed that it was about social and political reform, it was more somebody complaining about the newer copyright laws. The ones that prevent people from getting at content in maners other than how the distributors intend. Which is something that has always been a key part to copyright... those with distribution rights have always had a say in *how* something is distributed.
Sure they have new copyright protection schemes... which is unfortunate because of compatibility issues. But our need to distribute what isn't ours (and yes, a healthy dose of corperate greed) has led to it. Most people don't want more minimal copyright protection or even no copyright all together so they can modify and create something new, they want it because they are just as greedy as the corperations that are trying to protect their product, they are greedy because they want it for free.
The sad thing is that its hard to draw a line between those that want to modify for personal use, those that want to modify for creative endevors and those that want to rip people off. The latter is a vast majority of those that are violating and blatantly ignoring copyrights. Their our outlets for modifying copyrighted material if you are willing to pay licensing fees. Its only fair because you can potentially make money off of others work (and possibly cut into their market as well).
So what exactly is this modding that he seems to claim is ever growing in the digital age? I am guessing the real mods he is talking about and wanting is the "having our cake and eating it to" mod, where we continue to make revenue for whatever sort of work we choose to do for a living, but when it comes to some object, either real or virtual that we want, we should be able to take it if its for the greater good.
Society has always been changing, rights and rules are always in flux. America was founded by people who couldn't suffeciently modify their current system so they moved to where they could create a new one (and in time, modified the system that was unchanging). I think that there is more thing that is certain other than death and taxes, and that is people ultimately want what *they* want, and will try to make changes so they can get it. It can be money, world peace, sex, power, a better society, what ever it may be, they will spend considerable time and effort trying to get it, usually hoping against the other two certanties from getting in the way.
Wow... that was cool to see the Asbury College logo on the PDF slide show.
Completely unexpected.
My father used to chair the CS dept there... and I can still remember an incedent where I booted up an apple IIe in the lab and the second drive started to smoke. I left it running while I ran up three flights of stairs to tell my father.
what really gets me with this request is that he is skimping on memory and HD...
Why go for the gold with a motherboard and limit it to 2gb ram and only sata raid? Lets get some real memory in it, at least 8 gb. And why not ultra scsi raid. Enough space so you can have a raid 5 setup.
My animation you do in college doesn't need top of the line computers. Just animate rough models and swap in hero models for rendering. Unless you are doing complicated simulations or need to work in highly detailed scenes, you can get by animiating on some relativley average hardware.
"Going gold" means the gold candidate, or the final version of the game/software is ready for release.
It is what is after alpha, bets and release candidates. Gold is the version the public sees.
GT4 has not been released yet. There was a few demos you could get from Toyota and other places, but the full version was still under development.
Now as far as super duper, re-releases of games as in releasing a Quake 2 Ultra Gold Edition or something like, I completely agree. As in finding a way to remarket the same game and make another $50.
Using pov-ray for this is a great way to start... had I set one up, this is how I would have done it.
Distributed rendering, at its core, is pretty simple. The hardest part is management and quality control. I am glad to see that there are people out there willing to put the time into something like this.
From first hand experience... this won't happen, not for a long long time, if at all.
We used thousands of processors to render. We had terabytes of storage. It is a large undertaking. Every single frame and element of the frame had to be tracked. It had to be qualified. If something didn't work, we had to diagnose the system and get it back up and running. This is something that is too large of budget for a home brew system to work.
With other distributed systems, there are some checks and balances on the data ran, a way to know if you are sending back somewhat good data. The only way you can tell with this is to visually inspect the end result. If a person has a system that returns a bad slice of a frame, you now have to recreate that slice and track it, because its possible the problem is in the code, in the data files or it was a one time glitch with the system. Not a fun thing to do for hundreds of remote systems that aren't similar.
Render time also varies. It can be 5 minutes to 12+ hours. If a job gets halted, you lose that data, and have to recreate it. This isn't like generating millions of keys. There isn't a second init time before turning out data. At a previous studio, we had scene load times of over 30 minutes before it even started rendering. That needs to be accounted for in how you split up frames. If you have 30 minutes to load (after 45 minutes to download the data) and only render for an hours worth, you are getting a heavy hit on over head.
There are just too many issues with this working in a current setup. Stick to crunching numbers.
If you paid attention, Orbitz was not the crooks. Its another company with the money for nothing scheme... or possibly giving discounts, who knows, they are the shady one.
I am sure they gave a really nice presentation to Orbitz marketing though telling how good of service they could provide to Orbitz customers. Trust me, Orbitz is not in the business of ripping people off. Any large company needs to have a decently high customer satisfaction and repeat business to keep afloat.
*disclaimer - I previously worked for Orbitz, this post is my own opinion, not that of my previous employer, this is not based off of any information I have, purely speculation and guessing based on general business practices*
I tend to avoid any "special offers" because they almost always have some sort of string attached. I don't like strings. From tstorm's follup posts, it looks like some of the methodology is at least changing. It is very possible they have some sort of contract with the company so that they can't drop the promotion. I would not say this is an example of a company being bad. This is an example of how the standard web based sales company works. Most of them have contracts with people, some good, some bad. Sometimes you just don't know until its too late and you have to ride it out.
I would say that contacting customer service before you decide to never use Orbitz again makes more sense. If you are upset enough to not use them again, let them know why. They need to be better informed as to what customers like and don't like. Thats the only way a company can better serve you, the consumer. Without you, there is no company.
Sounds like the entertainment industry in general. When I was working on a small animated 3d feature film a few years back, I averaged over 80 hours a week for over a month. I peaked at over 100. My average week off peak was about 60. Crunch time kills. I know people that quickly quit the industry afterwards because it just isn't worth it.
The primary reason it happens is sliding deadlines, misunderstood goals and ill-prepared schedules. That and people being overly picky about parts of a project too early in the game.
I swore to myself that I was done with it. But I love the industry and got myself into a non-production role where I only work 50 hours a week. I am a much happier man now.
Having done this for a living a while now (as well as previously working on a dot com compute farm) they are really, really similar.
Render tasks break down even more granular than frames for many studios. I have seen over a dozen layers or passes for an individual fram that was composited later. Each item is tracked seperately, stored seperately, manipulated seperately.
Rendering is one of the best examples of compute and i/o bound tasks that scales well. If you have the network backbone, the fast storage servers and some clever way of handling just the raw amount of data that gets read to generate the small (in comparison) files, then all you need is a smart load balancer and something to track what is doing what. I have seen several different pipelines and implementations of just how to do this but in the end, even with different approaches, one could keep the CPU's at 100% for hours and hours on end, which is a good sign of an efficient cluster.
If you are rendering more than single frames for lighting tests, you don't really need a renderer that can do subsections... I am all for having large groups of machines so that the whole shot can be rendered at once, so that in the time it takes to do a frame, the whole shot is turned around. Its true this doesn't scale as well under light load, but it allows for much easier render management and allows more freedom on the choice of renderer.
From talking with friends, no renderer is really cache efficient. They need memory and lots of it, but the on chip cache doesn't do much to help.
The rest of it depends on what other bottle necks you have... obviously. Also scene size and complexity. I know that having as much stuff as close to the processor as possible always pays off. I am also going by what I have been told, I could be off.
The other big bonus for the AMD64 systems is more memory. I hate hitting swap.
Its been a while since I have worried about benchmarking and render testing, now its more about keeping the queueing system happy and the machines up. I could be going off of old info...
I am talking purely about the memory bus and the speed gains from that, not the 32bit vs 64bit nature.
The AMD64 systems have faster memory access than the Pentium based systems. Its comperable to the bus on Apple's G5 (AMD and Apple worked together on it).
I agree. Sometimes that is the best way to go. Actually, usuall that is the best way.
I do think there is a place for good, overtly Christian music. I just think there is too much of an emphasis on it.
There are actually some good Christian industrial flavored bands. Its just nobody finds out about them because the industry keeps that stuff burried. If you are into that stuff, Cornerstone always has a decent showcase every year, as well as plenty of fluff to bring in everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that he wants to say that copyright laws are smacking directly in the face of the humans ever impressive need to modify things.
For something that seemed that it was about social and political reform, it was more somebody complaining about the newer copyright laws. The ones that prevent people from getting at content in maners other than how the distributors intend. Which is something that has always been a key part to copyright... those with distribution rights have always had a say in *how* something is distributed.
Sure they have new copyright protection schemes... which is unfortunate because of compatibility issues. But our need to distribute what isn't ours (and yes, a healthy dose of corperate greed) has led to it. Most people don't want more minimal copyright protection or even no copyright all together so they can modify and create something new, they want it because they are just as greedy as the corperations that are trying to protect their product, they are greedy because they want it for free.
The sad thing is that its hard to draw a line between those that want to modify for personal use, those that want to modify for creative endevors and those that want to rip people off. The latter is a vast majority of those that are violating and blatantly ignoring copyrights. Their our outlets for modifying copyrighted material if you are willing to pay licensing fees. Its only fair because you can potentially make money off of others work (and possibly cut into their market as well).
So what exactly is this modding that he seems to claim is ever growing in the digital age? I am guessing the real mods he is talking about and wanting is the "having our cake and eating it to" mod, where we continue to make revenue for whatever sort of work we choose to do for a living, but when it comes to some object, either real or virtual that we want, we should be able to take it if its for the greater good.
Society has always been changing, rights and rules are always in flux. America was founded by people who couldn't suffeciently modify their current system so they moved to where they could create a new one (and in time, modified the system that was unchanging). I think that there is more thing that is certain other than death and taxes, and that is people ultimately want what *they* want, and will try to make changes so they can get it. It can be money, world peace, sex, power, a better society, what ever it may be, they will spend considerable time and effort trying to get it, usually hoping against the other two certanties from getting in the way.
Wow... that was cool to see the Asbury College logo on the PDF slide show.
Completely unexpected.
My father used to chair the CS dept there...
and I can still remember an incedent where I booted up an apple IIe in the lab and the second drive started to smoke. I left it running while I ran up three flights of stairs to tell my father.
His first question was if I had turned it off.
Turns out things were plugged in incorrectly.
-Tim
what really gets me with this request is that he is skimping on memory and HD...
Why go for the gold with a motherboard and limit it to 2gb ram and only sata raid? Lets get some real memory in it, at least 8 gb. And why not ultra scsi raid. Enough space so you can have a raid 5 setup.
I mean, if you are going to dream, dream big.
"In order to encourage you, we're offering this week, for all pre-orders placed before April 7th only"
If its an ad, its a poorly timed ad...
-Tim
ditto.
and ditto.
My animation you do in college doesn't need top of the line computers. Just animate rough models and swap in hero models for rendering. Unless you are doing complicated simulations or need to work in highly detailed scenes, you can get by animiating on some relativley average hardware.
The real bottleneck usually comes in rendering.
"Going gold" means the gold candidate, or the final version of the game/software is ready for release.
It is what is after alpha, bets and release candidates. Gold is the version the public sees.
GT4 has not been released yet. There was a few demos you could get from Toyota and other places, but the full version was still under development.
Now as far as super duper, re-releases of games as in releasing a Quake 2 Ultra Gold Edition or something like, I completely agree. As in finding a way to remarket the same game and make another $50.
Thats what openwave does?
I walk by their office every day, looking at it, wondering what they could possibly be doing.
-Tim
I used to play that game all the time... at least when my dad would let me on the system... now to try the Java version...
-Tim
Yes, yes it is.
That looks like a great concept project.
Using pov-ray for this is a great way to start... had I set one up, this is how I would have done it.
Distributed rendering, at its core, is pretty simple. The hardest part is management and quality control. I am glad to see that there are people out there willing to put the time into something like this.
-Tim
Here we see the same issues. Network is a big bottle neck. So is system memory. So is machine and OS QA.
-Tim
PS its great to be able to reply to posts from Bruce, most of the time they are so far out of my league.
Agreed. And there is a hefty QA process for any OS or hardware before its rolled out.
Also, almost all of PDI/Dreamworks's tools are built in-house for Dreamworks productions. Good luck getting that out the door.
-Tim
From first hand experience... this won't happen, not for a long long time, if at all.
We used thousands of processors to render. We had terabytes of storage. It is a large undertaking. Every single frame and element of the frame had to be tracked. It had to be qualified. If something didn't work, we had to diagnose the system and get it back up and running. This is something that is too large of budget for a home brew system to work.
With other distributed systems, there are some checks and balances on the data ran, a way to know if you are sending back somewhat good data. The only way you can tell with this is to visually inspect the end result. If a person has a system that returns a bad slice of a frame, you now have to recreate that slice and track it, because its possible the problem is in the code, in the data files or it was a one time glitch with the system. Not a fun thing to do for hundreds of remote systems that aren't similar.
Render time also varies. It can be 5 minutes to 12+ hours. If a job gets halted, you lose that data, and have to recreate it. This isn't like generating millions of keys. There isn't a second init time before turning out data. At a previous studio, we had scene load times of over 30 minutes before it even started rendering. That needs to be accounted for in how you split up frames. If you have 30 minutes to load (after 45 minutes to download the data) and only render for an hours worth, you are getting a heavy hit on over head.
There are just too many issues with this working in a current setup. Stick to crunching numbers.
-Tim
Now if you could only make it faster ;)
Well, maybe not... more machines makes me more important...
(Actually, the renderer is pretty fast and does a dang good job...)
-Tim
Actually I can... well not beowulf, per se, but there was a large farm used to turn out the frames.
Between in house and off site boxes, there were a lot of cpus thrown at this.
Goodness, I love my job...
-Tim
If you paid attention, Orbitz was not the crooks. Its another company with the money for nothing scheme... or possibly giving discounts, who knows, they are the shady one.
I am sure they gave a really nice presentation to Orbitz marketing though telling how good of service they could provide to Orbitz customers. Trust me, Orbitz is not in the business of ripping people off. Any large company needs to have a decently high customer satisfaction and repeat business to keep afloat.
*disclaimer - I previously worked for Orbitz, this post is my own opinion, not that of my previous employer, this is not based off of any information I have, purely speculation and guessing based on general business practices*
I tend to avoid any "special offers" because they almost always have some sort of string attached. I don't like strings. From tstorm's follup posts, it looks like some of the methodology is at least changing. It is very possible they have some sort of contract with the company so that they can't drop the promotion. I would not say this is an example of a company being bad. This is an example of how the standard web based sales company works. Most of them have contracts with people, some good, some bad. Sometimes you just don't know until its too late and you have to ride it out.
I would say that contacting customer service before you decide to never use Orbitz again makes more sense. If you are upset enough to not use them again, let them know why. They need to be better informed as to what customers like and don't like. Thats the only way a company can better serve you, the consumer. Without you, there is no company.
-Tim
Sounds like the entertainment industry in general. When I was working on a small animated 3d feature film a few years back, I averaged over 80 hours a week for over a month. I peaked at over 100. My average week off peak was about 60. Crunch time kills. I know people that quickly quit the industry afterwards because it just isn't worth it.
The primary reason it happens is sliding deadlines, misunderstood goals and ill-prepared schedules. That and people being overly picky about parts of a project too early in the game.
I swore to myself that I was done with it. But I love the industry and got myself into a non-production role where I only work 50 hours a week. I am a much happier man now.
-Tim
Exactly correct.
Having done this for a living a while now (as well as previously working on a dot com compute farm) they are really, really similar.
Render tasks break down even more granular than frames for many studios. I have seen over a dozen layers or passes for an individual fram that was composited later. Each item is tracked seperately, stored seperately, manipulated seperately.
Rendering is one of the best examples of compute and i/o bound tasks that scales well. If you have the network backbone, the fast storage servers and some clever way of handling just the raw amount of data that gets read to generate the small (in comparison) files, then all you need is a smart load balancer and something to track what is doing what. I have seen several different pipelines and implementations of just how to do this but in the end, even with different approaches, one could keep the CPU's at 100% for hours and hours on end, which is a good sign of an efficient cluster.
-Tim
If you are rendering more than single frames for lighting tests, you don't really need a renderer that can do subsections... I am all for having large groups of machines so that the whole shot can be rendered at once, so that in the time it takes to do a frame, the whole shot is turned around. Its true this doesn't scale as well under light load, but it allows for much easier render management and allows more freedom on the choice of renderer.
-Tim
From talking with friends, no renderer is really cache efficient. They need memory and lots of it, but the on chip cache doesn't do much to help.
The rest of it depends on what other bottle necks you have... obviously. Also scene size and complexity. I know that having as much stuff as close to the processor as possible always pays off. I am also going by what I have been told, I could be off.
The other big bonus for the AMD64 systems is more memory. I hate hitting swap.
Its been a while since I have worried about benchmarking and render testing, now its more about keeping the queueing system happy and the machines up. I could be going off of old info...
-Tim
I am talking purely about the memory bus and the speed gains from that, not the 32bit vs 64bit nature.
The AMD64 systems have faster memory access than the Pentium based systems. Its comperable to the bus on Apple's G5 (AMD and Apple worked together on it).
-Tim
I have used P3 and P4 based systems (and SGI's before that) and have been happy with the speed to dollar ratio.
I have never tested or looked at the render drive, the price seemed a tad high.
I would rather be able to do several frames at a time than one frame really fast.
I imagine the AMD64 based solutions will be nice farm boxes as well. Rendering is so IO intensive, having a wider, faster memory bus has to help.
-Tim
I agree. Sometimes that is the best way to go. Actually, usuall that is the best way.
I do think there is a place for good, overtly Christian music. I just think there is too much of an emphasis on it.
There are actually some good Christian industrial flavored bands. Its just nobody finds out about them because the industry keeps that stuff burried. If you are into that stuff, Cornerstone always has a decent showcase every year, as well as plenty of fluff to bring in everybody else.
-Tim