towers work just fine, most are front to back cooled, just like a rack mount also the hardware has more room too for more heat disapation.
if you have the rack space, its not a bad idea. I imagine that the racks they are on are cheaper than "real" racks. And I know a g5 tower will be cheaper than a comperable g5 xserve, whenever such a beast exists.
I was always on call, both with cell and pager, vpn access from home. I strolled into work sometime before noon (and somedays slightly after) but normally worked till 10 or 11 pm, regardless of when I came in. I worked at least a 60 hour work week.
When production ramped up, it went from 60 to 80 hours. Then from 80 to 100 hours. When the project was finished, I went back to my old schedule of comming in at 10, but since little was left to do at the time, I would leave about 5 or 6, cutting my work week down to 35 hours.
Others in the company had a more strict policy. Similar to the one described above. These were artists, some of which didn't function well until 10 am, but were still expected to be in for the 5 minute 9 am meeting. What was once a bunch of artists that did everything it took to get ahead in the work became a group that did just what was needed to get it done. The mandatory 9-6 schedule with the hour lunch at noon and 2 15 minute breaks drove them insane and ultimately turned a group that got things done before time and under budget into a collection of disgruntled people who were running behind and over budget. The sadest thing was that the management did not pick up on it. Sometimes a little bit of freedom is what is needed to get things done right.
If they are truely dailies, that means each animator has X number of seconds to watch. And it should be watched in context for a director to get the feel.
So, multiply the amount of new footage by 1.5 to give shots before and after and then multiply it by 10 or 15... it takes hours to go through all the dailies, at least in my experience.
The director shouldn't need to spend his whole day looking at clips, over and over. It can burn them out.
Again, this is based on my experience. Maybe Jackson wants to be more involved. I just know that we prefered to have the director view twice a week. That way his eyes were fresh and we had some of the rendering mistakes and animation issues worked out before he would see it.
Directors shouldn't watch most of the cuts... they have people between them and the artists for that reason. If a director spent all their time in dailies watching... they would not have time to do all that they need to do.
Fresh eyes are always good for proofing... its amazing what somebody new picks up the first 2 times through a shot.
Because for what they are doing, it takes a long long time to render... i think industry standard is still over an hour a frame.
And it has stayed pretty linear as machines get faster... because quality is always improving as well. They will always push the specs of the systems...
No real point in doing it real time... it still needs to be animated. And most of the animation has complex solvers on it to do all the itsy details that takes up time...
Adding more machines makes a big difference... it means that you get to do more takes on a shot.
Adding more horsepower, assuming the file I/O is fast and the machine doesn't swap... its close to being linear.
So a 20% improvement means that you get done 20% faster... or, more likely in the biz, thats 20% more wish-fixes that get done... or... even more likely... that means more complex shots.
I find it hard to believe that this is how adults react in such a situation?
Do they think that annoying some group of people will make it better? If I were the mozilla group I would have issues with giving in. Brute force does not mean its right.
A database and a browser are not the same. There would not be any confusion. There has to be a better way to handle this.
I think I would be less likely to use or work on the database project now... all because on how they reacted.
I don't think there is much of an advantage of longer data formats for rendering. I could be wrong, I haven't dug into render code in a long time. I know that addressing more memory is good and probably the only real advantage for 64 bit.
I know that most places never has enough space for a render farm. We had to run fiber offsite for half of ours... and the rest of ours was running alll over the studio, a few racks here, a few racks there. Its amazing how much space 500 1u or 2u boxes take up. And with 50 or some of them being midsize tower desktops....
Also, using the hyperthreading option on P4's can cost more money. Because it shows up as 2x the processors, and some vendors license by proc, not by box, you can take up twice the licenses. The little performance boost is not worth that...
I have had to say the same thing everytime a render farm story hits slashdot. Its amazing how much people talk about beowulf and ignore other clustering solutions exist.
The bandwidth for shared memory for rendering would be crazy. We were maxing Maya's renderer out with 2gb of ram. Sharing that over a network would kill a system. Of course, having 2 procs on the same box with real shared memory does much better. And is also why SGI's were the render king for a long time with their NUMA implementation and highspeed busses between boxes.
I spent yesterday with the parents (which may become my new home base while I am looking for work). Looked online at job postings on CG/Animation web sites last night then watched LOTR.
I spent this morning helping the parents shovel the lane and then treated myself to some time in the hot tub. Jumped out once to make a snow angel. That was really cold. Now I am looking again for work.
I can't wait for HR departments to come back from break. Being layed off two weeks before Christmas makes it difficult to find work right away. Places are posting jobs but they aren't ready to get back to you until after the holidays.
Oh... and i was going to go to the grandparents with my family... but the snow got in the way.
Studios are buying up Linux desktop work stations. It is the highend 3d aps like Maya that are driving the purchase. So NVidia has to follow suit and keep the hardware getting faster so more studios follow suit.
I was looking at heading the other direction. There are jobs in the midwest. I would look in Chicago (and suburbs), Columbus, Indianapolis or Detroit. All of my work experience is with CG/Animation, so to stay in the industry I pretty much have to leave the midwest. The midwest is really a good place to live and work. If you are used to the hour long commute, that opens you up to plenty of afordable housing in the midwest.
Different rates should apply to people working on software to help a company and working on software *for* a company.
In some lines of work, there is a steep learning curve to develop the needed software. Sometimes one may only get a few clients to develop this work for. So then they are presented with the option of re-developing similar software for each of the clients or building from a basic code base for all of the clients and then customzing as the site needs.
The second option is cheaper for the client and better for the software. It allows each client to benifit from the work that the consultant has done. And allows introduction of tried and true code instead of something recently developed.
It also saves the consultant from going crazy because they had just coded a similar routine 5 months earlier 4 blocks away from where they are curently working.
I have seen where some industries embrace the idea of having mindshare with the competition because the money is not made in the back end of how the work is achieved but the art in doing the work. They would be willing to sacrafice that small advantage of maybe having slightly better software than the other shops for having software that is going through many more iterations and having a much larger input into how it is used.
So... having a consultant own the code is not a slimeball thing to do. It makes good sense in some businesses. The important thing is having that spelled out in the contract. Then, everybody knows what they are getting in to.
Slashdot Mirror
That is probably one of the most interesting articles I have ever read. Thank you for pointing it out.
-Tim
towers work just fine, most are front to back cooled, just like a rack mount
also the hardware has more room too for more heat disapation.
if you have the rack space, its not a bad idea. I imagine that the racks they are on are cheaper than "real" racks. And I know a g5 tower will be cheaper than a comperable g5 xserve, whenever such a beast exists.
-Tim
My previous job, I had ultimate flex time.
I was always on call, both with cell and pager, vpn access from home. I strolled into work sometime before noon (and somedays slightly after) but normally worked till 10 or 11 pm, regardless of when I came in. I worked at least a 60 hour work week.
When production ramped up, it went from 60 to 80 hours. Then from 80 to 100 hours. When the project was finished, I went back to my old schedule of comming in at 10, but since little was left to do at the time, I would leave about 5 or 6, cutting my work week down to 35 hours.
Others in the company had a more strict policy. Similar to the one described above. These were artists, some of which didn't function well until 10 am, but were still expected to be in for the 5 minute 9 am meeting. What was once a bunch of artists that did everything it took to get ahead in the work became a group that did just what was needed to get it done. The mandatory 9-6 schedule with the hour lunch at noon and 2 15 minute breaks drove them insane and ultimately turned a group that got things done before time and under budget into a collection of disgruntled people who were running behind and over budget. The sadest thing was that the management did not pick up on it. Sometimes a little bit of freedom is what is needed to get things done right.
Why didn't they use a real 3d package and do render tests in Maya.
And I find it hard to believe that a 20 second render test will show much insight into a machines speed.
Why not go with a more realistic scene render that would take a couple hours??
If thats the case, I am sure there is a long line of people willing to sponser that next Windows project of yours.
Ah, you mean Corona.
So having a glass of Red Hat on the way to your systems administration job isn't so bad any more...
"I was studying up... honest."
or they are protecting you from getting screwed...
or they are keeping you from getting screwed
all depends on how you look at it i guess
I had hoped this would be a usb wireless device like i have for a desktop, not just s fancy wireless brige.
Oh well.
I would love to use the wireless device i have on the ps2. Its usb. Its a standard... why can't they make a driver for it?
-Tim
If they are truely dailies, that means each animator has X number of seconds to watch. And it should be watched in context for a director to get the feel.
... it takes hours to go through all the dailies, at least in my experience.
So, multiply the amount of new footage by 1.5 to give shots before and after and then multiply it by 10 or 15
The director shouldn't need to spend his whole day looking at clips, over and over. It can burn them out.
Again, this is based on my experience. Maybe Jackson wants to be more involved. I just know that we prefered to have the director view twice a week. That way his eyes were fresh and we had some of the rendering mistakes and animation issues worked out before he would see it.
-Tim
Directors shouldn't watch most of the cuts... they have people between them and the artists for that reason. If a director spent all their time in dailies watching... they would not have time to do all that they need to do.
Fresh eyes are always good for proofing... its amazing what somebody new picks up the first 2 times through a shot.
-Tim
Because for what they are doing, it takes a long long time to render... i think industry standard is still over an hour a frame.
And it has stayed pretty linear as machines get faster... because quality is always improving as well. They will always push the specs of the systems...
No real point in doing it real time... it still needs to be animated. And most of the animation has complex solvers on it to do all the itsy details that takes up time...
-Tim
Adding more machines makes a big difference... it means that you get to do more takes on a shot.
Adding more horsepower, assuming the file I/O is fast and the machine doesn't swap... its close to being linear.
So a 20% improvement means that you get done 20% faster... or, more likely in the biz, thats 20% more wish-fixes that get done... or... even more likely... that means more complex shots.
-Tim
but its not a Beowulf cluster...
Rendering and beowulf do not play nice together... its a distributed system... with queueing... much more like Sun's Grid, I am sure.
-Tim
There is more than the FLSA.
4 0.htm
Some states have laws in how much you can be worked or mandatory time off. http://www2.state.il.us/agency/idol/subpages/Law1
Now there are ways your company can sort of get around this. But... from my understanding, you still have to *request* working the seventh day.
Obviously, IANAL, so read up on your own.
-Tim
I find it hard to believe that this is how adults react in such a situation?
Do they think that annoying some group of people will make it better? If I were the mozilla group I would have issues with giving in. Brute force does not mean its right.
A database and a browser are not the same. There would not be any confusion. There has to be a better way to handle this.
I think I would be less likely to use or work on the database project now... all because on how they reacted.
I said know. Not know of.
All the artists I know... as in personally. The ones I have worked with.
I chose my words cautiously.
-Tim
All the artists I know hate the scroll wheel. They want 3 button mice.
Some software apps use all three buttons and combinations of them and keys to do things.
When its button 1 and 2 with a scroll wheel, all day long, it gets uncomfortable.
-Tim
perl development, linux admin 200+ renderfarm
western 'burbs.
http://resume.tolldog.com
-Tim
I don't think there is much of an advantage of longer data formats for rendering. I could be wrong, I haven't dug into render code in a long time. I know that addressing more memory is good and probably the only real advantage for 64 bit.
I know that most places never has enough space for a render farm. We had to run fiber offsite for half of ours... and the rest of ours was running alll over the studio, a few racks here, a few racks there. Its amazing how much space 500 1u or 2u boxes take up. And with 50 or some of them being midsize tower desktops....
Also, using the hyperthreading option on P4's can cost more money. Because it shows up as 2x the processors, and some vendors license by proc, not by box, you can take up twice the licenses. The little performance boost is not worth that...
-Tim
I have had to say the same thing everytime a render farm story hits slashdot. Its amazing how much people talk about beowulf and ignore other clustering solutions exist.
The bandwidth for shared memory for rendering would be crazy. We were maxing Maya's renderer out with 2gb of ram. Sharing that over a network would kill a system. Of course, having 2 procs on the same box with real shared memory does much better. And is also why SGI's were the render king for a long time with their NUMA implementation and highspeed busses between boxes.
-Tim
I spent yesterday with the parents (which may become my new home base while I am looking for work).
Looked online at job postings on CG/Animation web sites last night then watched LOTR.
I spent this morning helping the parents shovel the lane and then treated myself to some time in the hot tub. Jumped out once to make a snow angel. That was really cold. Now I am looking again for work.
I can't wait for HR departments to come back from break. Being layed off two weeks before Christmas makes it difficult to find work right away. Places are posting jobs but they aren't ready to get back to you until after the holidays.
Oh... and i was going to go to the grandparents with my family... but the snow got in the way.
-Tim
Nah... that has nothing to do with it.
Studios are buying up Linux desktop work stations. It is the highend 3d aps like Maya that are driving the purchase. So NVidia has to follow suit and keep the hardware getting faster so more studios follow suit.
-Tim
I was looking at heading the other direction.
There are jobs in the midwest. I would look in Chicago (and suburbs), Columbus, Indianapolis or Detroit.
All of my work experience is with CG/Animation, so to stay in the industry I pretty much have to leave the midwest. The midwest is really a good place to live and work.
If you are used to the hour long commute, that opens you up to plenty of afordable housing in the midwest.
-Tim
I disagree.
Different rates should apply to people working on software to help a company and working on software *for* a company.
In some lines of work, there is a steep learning curve to develop the needed software. Sometimes one may only get a few clients to develop this work for. So then they are presented with the option of re-developing similar software for each of the clients or building from a basic code base for all of the clients and then customzing as the site needs.
The second option is cheaper for the client and better for the software. It allows each client to benifit from the work that the consultant has done. And allows introduction of tried and true code instead of something recently developed.
It also saves the consultant from going crazy because they had just coded a similar routine 5 months earlier 4 blocks away from where they are curently working.
I have seen where some industries embrace the idea of having mindshare with the competition because the money is not made in the back end of how the work is achieved but the art in doing the work. They would be willing to sacrafice that small advantage of maybe having slightly better software than the other shops for having software that is going through many more iterations and having a much larger input into how it is used.
So... having a consultant own the code is not a slimeball thing to do. It makes good sense in some businesses. The important thing is having that spelled out in the contract. Then, everybody knows what they are getting in to.
-Tim