Then Mosaic got too popular and distracted everybody.
Heh, I hear you. I've often wondered how much further along VOD would be if it hadn't been for the web to keep us busy.
I got to play with one of SGI's set-top boxes at EPCOT around 1995. While it was a stripped down version (for demo only, it was only wired to a small server, not the actual Orlando VOD network), it was still very impressive. The GUI was snazzy, but easy to use and fast. Movies would start playing almost instantly, though there was a nifty pause/rewind feature to help folks queue up the film before the family was ready to sit down. There were also some networked games and shopping features as well. If I recall correctly, the box itself was a heavily modified SGI Indy with Scientific Atlanta buttons & remote. I can't imagine this would have been cheap to build, even if it were mass produced. The MIPS processor and commodity ram were probably the cheapest things inside the box. Indy had a pretty impressive 4-layer-per-side (8 layer total) mobo with a lot of goodies packed into a small area. Then there was the custom gfx, video compression, and networking hardware...
Still, it was cool to see just what was possible with 1992 - 1994 technology. Very fitting for EPCOT.
Labs of Sun machines, that's why
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MIT Gnome Invasion
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· Score: 2, Informative
Look through the pictures. Several of them have the Sun Microsystems logo prominently displayed....
That's because most of the computers in the Athena clusters ("computer labs") at MIT are Suns.
There are also many linux boxes and SGIs as well. MIT's Athena network is un*x only.
Make it record to like 6 pcmcia cards or something, that would be cool...
That's not such a crazy idea... in fact, that's what Panasonic just recently introduced for their pro ENG (electronic news gathering) camcorders. No moving parts means a much more reliable machine, probably something the reporters in Iraq wish they had. Removable solid state memory modules also allow the field producers to plug in directly to the PCMCIA/Cardbus slot on a Powerbook and edit right on the scene with no digitizing or downloading required.
The dome is great for most films intended for it, but you have to sit near the center (where the projector is) to get the full effect. Beware that more than half of the films shown at Dome theaters are actually intended for plain IMAX, and thus will look pretty strange.
I'm not familar with "IMAX HD", but there is a digital version of IMAX. To my eyes, the standard 15/70 IMAX film looks better than digital IMAX for the first few showings (and it should, with almost 10x as much film surface area as 35mm film). But... digital looks better than old, worn film. So it's pretty much a wash.
I've never been to a film that used the 3D shutter glasses.
Maybe I'm too picky, but my biggest complaint about upconverting 35mm movies to IMAX is the mismatched cinematography, not the technical gotchas. The whole idea behind an IMAX film is to give the audience a window into a different world. Think about the "native" IMAX films you've seen... rather than use a mixture of camera angles to project a story on a screen, an IMAX film treats the audience as a camera and the screen as window. Slow, wide pans... a large, detailed screen... conservative transitions. IMAX filmmakers want you to feel as though you're truly inside the new environment, actually being positioned to see the action in front of you... not just watching a story on a glorifed TV. A good, native IMAX movie does this -- it makes the audience feel as though they're truly hovering around the subject matter. A bad IMAX movie makes the audience tired, confused, or sick.
My other beef is with the public's misconception of the IMAX film format. Traditional (non-dome) IMAX uses 15/70 film. That is, 70mm film with 15 sprockets per frame. This is not plain "70mm film, which dedicates only 5 sprockets per frame. 15/70 IMAX has 3x as much film surface area as plain 70mm and nearly 10x as much as plain 35mm. (Plus other benefits, such as double the framerate and generally better audio. Though 35mm is catching up with some recent films being available in 48fps and new 7.1 channel audio from Sony SDDS and DTS).
Many IMAX theaters have larger or extra platters they can use to extend runtime. This is what our local IMAX (San Antonio) did to allow for the large format version of Jurassic Park in 1994.
My first experience with the web was with a very early version of Mosaic on an SGI Indigo workstation in 1993. While it was a bit of a novelty at first, it became quite handy when the (USA) national weather service began to make their data and graphics available via the web (rather than just FTP).
A few months later, we began using Mosaic on our Apple Mac Quadras when NCSA released versions for MacOS and Windows. Because most of my group used Macs or SGIs, we found the whole "web safe color" issue to be funny... our machines were already able to display 24 bit color! (Unlike most Suns and many PCs of the day).
Netscape 1.x was a very nice upgrade, but things began to go downhill with 2.x. and hit rock bottom at 3.0. (If you think Netscape 4.x is bad, try using Netscape Gold 3.0 for awhile!) Livescript/Javascript was cranky. Plugins were a mess. Java was way too slow. I stuck with Netscape 1.1N and 2.02 on my machines for a long time.
These days I'm a happy camper with Mozilla nightlies on my SGI and Safari on my Mac.
Apparently there is not much an SGI machine can do that a PC cannot do (or other unix machine) since SGI has not posted a yearly profit since 1997!
It's amazing they still have a few dollars in the bank. They've sold some patents and sold off Cray (albeit for pennies on the dollar from what they originally paid), but to last that long is impressive in itself.
Any any rate, SGI does offer unique and unmatched products *in certain areas*...
Do you need a shared-memory supercomputer that can scale to 512 processors with the same exact kernel that runs on a desktop model? Or how about 1024 processors with a simple kernel patch? Very few people need that much IO across that many processors, but for those that do, there is no better choice.
Do you need a machine that can handle dozens of channels of 2gbit fibrechannel without breaking a sweat?
Do you have an insanely complicated set of HD video files and other material that need to be layered/composited? Does this job need to be done yesterday? Is full-resolution/full-quality realtime effects work needed? Piranha or Inferno running on an Onyx 3000 (plus gobs of ram and disk arrays on several channels) can do this for you.
Are you interested in seeing the true potential of Linux? Do you want to work with a true Itanium2/Linux supercomputer... one that is way more than a cluster? Want to see a single machine (again, not a cluster) with 64 processors and 512 GB of RAM? Yes, Linux can handle it too, because of SGI's kernel patches and hw/sw architecture.
Not many people need or can afford SGI big iron... but for those that do, nothing beats the SGI Origin and it's baby cousin, the Altix.
It depends on which part of the production world you're talking about...
For rendering, you need raw CPU power and middle of the road networking. A rack of dual proc PCs and a 100BaseT switch is plenty for most 3D people.
For 3D modeling, a good graphics card and a strong PC behind it is what's needed. You want a card that can handle the polygons, can handle the textures, and has enough cache for all of the display lists. A 3DLabs Wildcat-series card on a modern PC is good enough for almost any 3D animator. And will be faster than all but the fastest SGI.
For compositing, you really do need the big iron. There is no PC out there that can handle 3+ streams of HD at the same time, let alone layer them, adjust the colors, add effects, etc. in real time. This can be done without much sweat on an big modern SGI running IFX Piranha or Discreet Inferno. The big catch is RAM and the RAID performance. 8 GB of ram is a good start and a sustained 500+ MB/sec coming off your multiple channels of fibrechannel is a must.
Don't get compositing confused with "painting". Painting is where you take one frame of a movie and touch it up with paint tools (Amazon Paint, FilmGIMP, etc) then flip thru the other frames noting any needed changes. This can be done on Mom's Pentium 3.
There are, of course, cheaper solutions that don't work as well... but for some folks, that may be good enough. Shake on a Mac, Linux box, or low end SGI does a good job. So does Combustion on a modern wintel PC. It's *can* work with HD, but you need patience and realistic expectations. It's not realtime in any way, by any stretch of the imagination.
So yeah... there are lots of machines to choose from, and many tools for many jobs. If the Shuttle could hold a real gfx card (Wildcat 7210, for example) it would be a 3D modeler's dream. With the ATI 9700, it's only for games or light use of Maya and friends.
You also have to keep in mind what gets bought with the money. A $2M SGI usually includes lots of RAID hardware... and a machine that can handle 100s (often 750+) sustained MB/sec without problems. It's required to do the heavy lifting jobs.
Also note that SGI doesn't sell "Render Farms". Big SGI gear is usually used to support one task... generally compositing, somtimes multiple projector realtime 3D work (such as a six-sided reality CAVE). The spare CPU cycles are sometimes used to render in the background.... but rarely is SGI hardware used to render when a cheap PC cluster can do it faster anyway. It'd be like trying to enter a F1 race with your Kenworth 18 wheeler.
There are also SGI workstations like the O2 and Octane... they used to be used for 3D modeling and low-res realtime work. Still used by many studios, and even broadcasters. Still very popular for the weather maps on the local news for for drawing the yellow "virtual first down line" on live football games. Not heavy work, but there are some gotchas involved. The stability is handy there.
A moden dual proc Xeon can come very very close to what an Octane was able to do in 1997. It's not the same thing, but it's close enough to do the job. Octane2 (with the right software) would be overkill, so here are the differences between a used Octane and a dual Xeon: The Xeon is new. That means you can get a good warranty and not have to worry about using used equipment. The wiz-bang factor. These days most SFX software runs on both IRIX and Linux. Even Apple's Shake does. So does all of the latest Linux utilities. It's "cooler" to many people to use a Linux workstation over an Octane. The CPU. Granted, the Octane's torque came from it's architecture, not its CPU... but this alone does not make up for the raw power of those Xeons. It's like racing an 18 wheeler with a F1 race car. The 18 wheeler can haul a lot more, but the F1 race car will get you to the local Wal-Mart a lot faster. For small tasks, the Xeon will feel a lot faster.
This is why you'll still see a lot of existing Octanes, Octane2s, Onyx/Onyx2/Onyx3000 systems in use by hollywood. They work fine. But for new employees, and for replacement hardware, you'll almost certainly see a dual proc PC running Linux. There are, of course, come artists that prefer one over the other.
As for render farms, you're right. It only makes sense to use Intel or AMD. Using SGI (or Sun) big iron for rendering would be insane. The render software isn't even optimized for IRIX or the SGI Origin architecture anymore. I think the very last holdout was ILM, who still had their three huge Origin 2000s. (Running 1999 R10K 250MHz processors [about the equiv of a PIII/550]..... no wonder they find their new renderfarm to be faster.....).
You're right on the money about ILM being behind Weta (and possibly others). ILM is still a cool shop, but not as current as many of the others. Hell, ILM did most of the work for Episode 1 on SGI O2s. O2s! The O2 was an ok video editor, by no means a 3D or CPU powerhouse! I can't belive they got it done at all. There are HUGE differences between the O2 and Octane.
Nobody in the Hollywood sector really misses SGI. Maybe for the stability of the recent hardware and the ease of maintaining a single machine rather than a network of smaller compute servers, but that's about it.
SGI really dropped the ball when it came to pricing. They still make top-of-the-line gear and awesome graphics engines, but the cost is insane. SGI even makes a machine (Origin 3900) that can scale to 512 CPUs with a single machine. Every 16 CPUs fits into a 4U rackmount "brick". They did this for cost savings, as MIPS processors are pretty cheap to build and don't put out much heat. Sure, SGI's maddly complicated interconnect chips cost a bit, but not that much in bulk. So what does SGI charge for 256 processors? $2 million!!
That right there is the problem. I don't think there would be a problem paying a 2x or even a 3x price difference to go with SGI over x86/Linux. But 10x? That's the deal breaker.
That and SGI's snobbish attitude. Trying to deal with SGI is like a 16-year-old trying to deal with a salesman at a Rolls-Royce dealership.
In the Fellowship of the Ring DVD, Peter jackson can clearly be seen watching golum on a monitor (low poligon, but golum none the less) performing the mo-cap Andy Serkis is performing IN REAL TIME; as it is happening (not after).
That was motion capture... but it was indeed real-time... very similar to what ILM is now doing. In fact, it's actually a bit more hardcore.
I dunno, I feel the ILM have been behind the bleeding edge for sometime now...
I would have to agree there. ILM these days is a lot like MIT... awesome background and history, still a great place, but not the definitive leader it once was.
BTW, if you look carefully at the motion capture monitor on that DVD scene... you'll see that it's SGI IRIX... *gasp*! : )
We have an open floor layout... desks, tables and computers galore for about 35 people. Works great, except for the the constant fight over the blinds and shades on the windows. When the sun starts shining straight in, causing way too much glare and blindness, someone will close the shades. Five minutes later, someone opens 'em again. A few minutes later, they get closed again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Sure beats a cube or a cramped office, though.
According to K & R, all of the code in The C Programming Language has been tested from the original text. However, the minimum wage printers often removed all or parts of punctuation marks and the such, thinking they were not originally intended to be on the printing plates.
Also, K & R have an EXCELLENT errata page: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/2ediffs .html
I do hope the codec can provide quality like that thruout an entire movie, regardless of action and wide variances in scene lighting. I'm happy with MPEG2 for standard-definition comtent, such as what's found on DVDs. Having a popular medium that's of higher quality that what most existing television sets can make use of is quite impressive and forward-looking. Now that we're moving on to HD, I hope the new codecs can make an equally impressive jump in quality. HD is a big thing because of... well... the high definition image! Most demos I've seen on high-end HDTVs thus far, especially those coming off of HD satellite, have not impressed me. I dunno... are you impressed by rampant artifacting and scene changes that take at least 3 frames to fully repaint? HD artifacts are not really what I was hoping for... This new MS Codec looks great with the sample clips, but will it really do the job? I sure hope so... and if not, I hope the industry can wait until a better one does come along.
I highly recommend a PowerBook G4. Mac OS X is pretty smooth and has the best looking japanese fonts out there. If you need to go the PC route, a Thinkpad is the only way to go. We've had way too many problems with Dells and Sony, as have others.
I used AppleWorks 2 and 3 on a machine with a single 5.25" drive (and Apple//c to be exact). It worked quite well, but I did have to swap disks to do a spell check. Bankstreet Writer was also nice.
Fonts weren't much on a issue for me, as I rarely used AppleWorks to print my final draft -- I'd usually save the file as plain ASCII and open it up in Publish-It (a nice Apple II DTP app) for final fonts, layout, and clip art.
Before I got a Mac, I upgraded to an Apple IIgs with an Apple StyleWriter 360 dpi inkjet printer. All of my 8-bit Apple II apps continued to work, plus a few even shipped with snazzy 16-bit IIgs versions (including Publish It and 8/16 Paint).
Laughing 'til he saw the output, anyway. Off a networked postscript laserprinter. The year was 1985.
I remember something very similar. A teacher was showing off some shiny new Macintoshes and some painting and word processing software (probably Mac Write and Mac Paint, maybe Aldus PageMaker). The printer was a first generation Apple Laserwriter networked to about 4 macs via AppleTalk/LocalTalk. At the time it seemed like black magic!
I do remember MS Excel, but I don't recall using MS Word or MS Works on the Mac until about a year later. There were some other Mac word processors at the time, but Excel is the one that sticks out in my mind.
This was about 1986, so the Macs may have even been Mac Plus'es.
Both my parents and grandparents still use an Apple IIc for printing labels. They each have an Appleworks database with addresses of friends and family. Plugged into the Apple is an ImageWriter II with pin-feed address labels. Their box of 5000 labels is starting to empty... may soon be time to find a new source for the labels or *gasp* upgrade.
An Apple II is about all a person needs for basic "computer skills", especially for spreadsheets. Sure, MS Excel can walk my dog and wash my car, but the basics (managing tables & columns, writing formulas) really hasn't changed since VisiCalc or AppleWorks for the Apple II.
There are also gobs of eductional titles available for the Apple II. Unlike most modern software, many of the old titles shipped with entire binders full of manual, usage, and educational tie-in materials. Some of the MECC titles even came with full reports and studies to prove the value of the software. Sure beats the eye candy "edutainment" software of today.
Still, nothing's better than a good teacher who knows how to regulate software usage.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Gobs of businesses used Apple II's in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't until the IBM PC (first shipped in 1982) became popular that businesses started to go that route.
Apple didn't do much to keep the business people... they quit focusing on the Apple II and instead built the Apple III (so overengineered that it didn't work --- there were actually chips on the board that disabled certain features -- read up on it at www.woz.org for the whole sad story). The Apple III was worthless and overpriced. The Lisa was pretty smooth, but very few businesses wanted to spend upwards of $10K per machine regardless of how much ram and HD space it had. By the time the Macintosh shipped in 1984, most mainstream business software was already PC-based, leaving only the graphics / DTP market to utilize the Mac and its features (Postscript support, a sane GUI, easy networking, etc).
Some businesses did stick with the Mac, though... in fact Microsoft Excel for Macintosh was released in 1985, it was the first true GUI spreadsheet and looks a lot like the Excel used today. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that PC users got the same look-and-feel for their Excel. (It was also around that time that MS Office began to take over the entire globe...)
Re:some Airports have an antenna connection
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Open Node In A Bag
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· Score: 1
My Extreme base-station does not sport an external antenna connector
Weird. Do you have the model with the USB port (print server) ?
Slashdot Mirror
Then Mosaic got too popular and distracted everybody.
Heh, I hear you. I've often wondered how much further along VOD would be if it hadn't been for the web to keep us busy.
I got to play with one of SGI's set-top boxes at EPCOT around 1995. While it was a stripped down version (for demo only, it was only wired to a small server, not the actual Orlando VOD network), it was still very impressive. The GUI was snazzy, but easy to use and fast. Movies would start playing almost instantly, though there was a nifty pause/rewind feature to help folks queue up the film before the family was ready to sit down. There were also some networked games and shopping features as well. If I recall correctly, the box itself was a heavily modified SGI Indy with Scientific Atlanta buttons & remote. I can't imagine this would have been cheap to build, even if it were mass produced. The MIPS processor and commodity ram were probably the cheapest things inside the box. Indy had a pretty impressive 4-layer-per-side (8 layer total) mobo with a lot of goodies packed into a small area. Then there was the custom gfx, video compression, and networking hardware...
Still, it was cool to see just what was possible with 1992 - 1994 technology. Very fitting for EPCOT.
Look through the pictures. Several of them have the Sun Microsystems logo prominently displayed....
That's because most of the computers in the Athena clusters ("computer labs") at MIT are Suns.
There are also many linux boxes and SGIs as well. MIT's Athena network is un*x only.
Make it record to like 6 pcmcia cards or something, that would be cool...
That's not such a crazy idea... in fact, that's what Panasonic just recently introduced for their pro ENG (electronic news gathering) camcorders. No moving parts means a much more reliable machine, probably something the reporters in Iraq wish they had. Removable solid state memory modules also allow the field producers to plug in directly to the PCMCIA/Cardbus slot on a Powerbook and edit right on the scene with no digitizing or downloading required.
Omnimax and IMAX Dome are basiclly the same thing.
t .a sp
http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/omnimax/abou
The dome is great for most films intended for it, but you have to sit near the center (where the projector is) to get the full effect. Beware that more than half of the films shown at Dome theaters are actually intended for plain IMAX, and thus will look pretty strange.
I'm not familar with "IMAX HD", but there is a digital version of IMAX. To my eyes, the standard 15/70 IMAX film looks better than digital IMAX for the first few showings (and it should, with almost 10x as much film surface area as 35mm film). But... digital looks better than old, worn film. So it's pretty much a wash.
I've never been to a film that used the 3D shutter glasses.
www.thetech.org
Look for the funky orange, blue, and yellow building on Market Street in downtown San Jose. Only a few blocks away from the light rail, too.
Maybe I'm too picky, but my biggest complaint about upconverting 35mm movies to IMAX is the mismatched cinematography, not the technical gotchas. The whole idea behind an IMAX film is to give the audience a window into a different world. Think about the "native" IMAX films you've seen... rather than use a mixture of camera angles to project a story on a screen, an IMAX film treats the audience as a camera and the screen as window. Slow, wide pans... a large, detailed screen... conservative transitions. IMAX filmmakers want you to feel as though you're truly inside the new environment, actually being positioned to see the action in front of you... not just watching a story on a glorifed TV. A good, native IMAX movie does this -- it makes the audience feel as though they're truly hovering around the subject matter. A bad IMAX movie makes the audience tired, confused, or sick.
My other beef is with the public's misconception of the IMAX film format. Traditional (non-dome) IMAX uses 15/70 film. That is, 70mm film with 15 sprockets per frame. This is not plain "70mm film, which dedicates only 5 sprockets per frame. 15/70 IMAX has 3x as much film surface area as plain 70mm and nearly 10x as much as plain 35mm. (Plus other benefits, such as double the framerate and generally better audio. Though 35mm is catching up with some recent films being available in 48fps and new 7.1 channel audio from Sony SDDS and DTS).
For more information on the IMAX format, check these out:
http://www.superspeedway.com/eng/imax1.html
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/imax1.htm
Many IMAX theaters have larger or extra platters they can use to extend runtime. This is what our local IMAX (San Antonio) did to allow for the large format version of Jurassic Park in 1994.
My first experience with the web was with a very early version of Mosaic on an SGI Indigo workstation in 1993. While it was a bit of a novelty at first, it became quite handy when the (USA) national weather service began to make their data and graphics available via the web (rather than just FTP).
A few months later, we began using Mosaic on our Apple Mac Quadras when NCSA released versions for MacOS and Windows. Because most of my group used Macs or SGIs, we found the whole "web safe color" issue to be funny... our machines were already able to display 24 bit color! (Unlike most Suns and many PCs of the day).
Netscape 1.x was a very nice upgrade, but things began to go downhill with 2.x. and hit rock bottom at 3.0. (If you think Netscape 4.x is bad, try using Netscape Gold 3.0 for awhile!) Livescript/Javascript was cranky. Plugins were a mess. Java was way too slow. I stuck with Netscape 1.1N and 2.02 on my machines for a long time.
These days I'm a happy camper with Mozilla nightlies on my SGI and Safari on my Mac.
No, for the Unixes there was NCSA Mosaic. Well, if you had Sun hardware, that is.
My first experience with Mosaic was on an SGI Indigo workstation... NCSA had binaries available for SGI's IRIX OS early on.
A few weeks later, someone got NCSA Mosaic working under Windows (forget who it was), and the rest is history...
I don't recall who did the initial Windows port, but NCSA had binaries for Windows 3.1 and MacOS 7 within a few months of the initial Unix releases.
Apparently there is not much an SGI machine can do that a PC cannot do (or other unix machine) since SGI has not posted a yearly profit since 1997!
It's amazing they still have a few dollars in the bank. They've sold some patents and sold off Cray (albeit for pennies on the dollar from what they originally paid), but to last that long is impressive in itself.
Any any rate, SGI does offer unique and unmatched products *in certain areas*...
Do you need a shared-memory supercomputer that can scale to 512 processors with the same exact kernel that runs on a desktop model? Or how about 1024 processors with a simple kernel patch? Very few people need that much IO across that many processors, but for those that do, there is no better choice.
Do you need a machine that can handle dozens of channels of 2gbit fibrechannel without breaking a sweat?
Do you have an insanely complicated set of HD video files and other material that need to be layered/composited? Does this job need to be done yesterday? Is full-resolution/full-quality realtime effects work needed? Piranha or Inferno running on an Onyx 3000 (plus gobs of ram and disk arrays on several channels) can do this for you.
Are you interested in seeing the true potential of Linux? Do you want to work with a true Itanium2/Linux supercomputer... one that is way more than a cluster? Want to see a single machine (again, not a cluster) with 64 processors and 512 GB of RAM? Yes, Linux can handle it too, because of SGI's kernel patches and hw/sw architecture.
Not many people need or can afford SGI big iron... but for those that do, nothing beats the SGI Origin and it's baby cousin, the Altix.
It depends on which part of the production world you're talking about...
For rendering, you need raw CPU power and middle of the road networking. A rack of dual proc PCs and a 100BaseT switch is plenty for most 3D people.
For 3D modeling, a good graphics card and a strong PC behind it is what's needed. You want a card that can handle the polygons, can handle the textures, and has enough cache for all of the display lists. A 3DLabs Wildcat-series card on a modern PC is good enough for almost any 3D animator. And will be faster than all but the fastest SGI.
For compositing, you really do need the big iron. There is no PC out there that can handle 3+ streams of HD at the same time, let alone layer them, adjust the colors, add effects, etc. in real time. This can be done without much sweat on an big modern SGI running IFX Piranha or Discreet Inferno. The big catch is RAM and the RAID performance. 8 GB of ram is a good start and a sustained 500+ MB/sec coming off your multiple channels of fibrechannel is a must.
Don't get compositing confused with "painting". Painting is where you take one frame of a movie and touch it up with paint tools (Amazon Paint, FilmGIMP, etc) then flip thru the other frames noting any needed changes. This can be done on Mom's Pentium 3.
There are, of course, cheaper solutions that don't work as well... but for some folks, that may be good enough. Shake on a Mac, Linux box, or low end SGI does a good job. So does Combustion on a modern wintel PC. It's *can* work with HD, but you need patience and realistic expectations. It's not realtime in any way, by any stretch of the imagination.
So yeah... there are lots of machines to choose from, and many tools for many jobs. If the Shuttle could hold a real gfx card (Wildcat 7210, for example) it would be a 3D modeler's dream. With the ATI 9700, it's only for games or light use of Maya and friends.
You also have to keep in mind what gets bought with the money. A $2M SGI usually includes lots of RAID hardware... and a machine that can handle 100s (often 750+) sustained MB/sec without problems. It's required to do the heavy lifting jobs.
Also note that SGI doesn't sell "Render Farms". Big SGI gear is usually used to support one task... generally compositing, somtimes multiple projector realtime 3D work (such as a six-sided reality CAVE). The spare CPU cycles are sometimes used to render in the background.... but rarely is SGI hardware used to render when a cheap PC cluster can do it faster anyway. It'd be like trying to enter a F1 race with your Kenworth 18 wheeler.
There are also SGI workstations like the O2 and Octane... they used to be used for 3D modeling and low-res realtime work. Still used by many studios, and even broadcasters. Still very popular for the weather maps on the local news for for drawing the yellow "virtual first down line" on live football games. Not heavy work, but there are some gotchas involved. The stability is handy there.
A moden dual proc Xeon can come very very close to what an Octane was able to do in 1997. It's not the same thing, but it's close enough to do the job. Octane2 (with the right software) would be overkill, so here are the differences between a used Octane and a dual Xeon:
The Xeon is new. That means you can get a good warranty and not have to worry about using used equipment.
The wiz-bang factor. These days most SFX software runs on both IRIX and Linux. Even Apple's Shake does. So does all of the latest Linux utilities. It's "cooler" to many people to use a Linux workstation over an Octane.
The CPU. Granted, the Octane's torque came from it's architecture, not its CPU... but this alone does not make up for the raw power of those Xeons. It's like racing an 18 wheeler with a F1 race car. The 18 wheeler can haul a lot more, but the F1 race car will get you to the local Wal-Mart a lot faster. For small tasks, the Xeon will feel a lot faster.
This is why you'll still see a lot of existing Octanes, Octane2s, Onyx/Onyx2/Onyx3000 systems in use by hollywood. They work fine. But for new employees, and for replacement hardware, you'll almost certainly see a dual proc PC running Linux. There are, of course, come artists that prefer one over the other.
As for render farms, you're right. It only makes sense to use Intel or AMD. Using SGI (or Sun) big iron for rendering would be insane. The render software isn't even optimized for IRIX or the SGI Origin architecture anymore. I think the very last holdout was ILM, who still had their three huge Origin 2000s. (Running 1999 R10K 250MHz processors [about the equiv of a PIII/550]..... no wonder they find their new renderfarm to be faster.....).
You're right on the money about ILM being behind Weta (and possibly others). ILM is still a cool shop, but not as current as many of the others. Hell, ILM did most of the work for Episode 1 on SGI O2s. O2s! The O2 was an ok video editor, by no means a 3D or CPU powerhouse! I can't belive they got it done at all. There are HUGE differences between the O2 and Octane.
Nobody in the Hollywood sector really misses SGI. Maybe for the stability of the recent hardware and the ease of maintaining a single machine rather than a network of smaller compute servers, but that's about it.
SGI really dropped the ball when it came to pricing. They still make top-of-the-line gear and awesome graphics engines, but the cost is insane. SGI even makes a machine (Origin 3900) that can scale to 512 CPUs with a single machine. Every 16 CPUs fits into a 4U rackmount "brick". They did this for cost savings, as MIPS processors are pretty cheap to build and don't put out much heat. Sure, SGI's maddly complicated interconnect chips cost a bit, but not that much in bulk. So what does SGI charge for 256 processors? $2 million!!
That right there is the problem. I don't think there would be a problem paying a 2x or even a 3x price difference to go with SGI over x86/Linux. But 10x? That's the deal breaker.
That and SGI's snobbish attitude. Trying to deal with SGI is like a 16-year-old trying to deal with a salesman at a Rolls-Royce dealership.
In the Fellowship of the Ring DVD, Peter jackson can clearly be seen watching golum on a monitor (low poligon, but golum none the less) performing the mo-cap Andy Serkis is performing IN REAL TIME; as it is happening (not after).
That was motion capture... but it was indeed real-time... very similar to what ILM is now doing. In fact, it's actually a bit more hardcore.
I dunno, I feel the ILM have been behind the bleeding edge for sometime now...
I would have to agree there. ILM these days is a lot like MIT... awesome background and history, still a great place, but not the definitive leader it once was.
BTW, if you look carefully at the motion capture monitor on that DVD scene... you'll see that it's SGI IRIX... *gasp*! : )
We have an open floor layout... desks, tables and computers galore for about 35 people. Works great, except for the the constant fight over the blinds and shades on the windows. When the sun starts shining straight in, causing way too much glare and blindness, someone will close the shades. Five minutes later, someone opens 'em again. A few minutes later, they get closed again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Sure beats a cube or a cramped office, though.
WTF is a Prairie Dog?
According to K & R, all of the code in The C Programming Language has been tested from the original text. However, the minimum wage printers often removed all or parts of punctuation marks and the such, thinking they were not originally intended to be on the printing plates.
s .html
Also, K & R have an EXCELLENT errata page:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/2ediff
I do hope the codec can provide quality like that thruout an entire movie, regardless of action and wide variances in scene lighting. I'm happy with MPEG2 for standard-definition comtent, such as what's found on DVDs. Having a popular medium that's of higher quality that what most existing television sets can make use of is quite impressive and forward-looking. Now that we're moving on to HD, I hope the new codecs can make an equally impressive jump in quality. HD is a big thing because of... well... the high definition image! Most demos I've seen on high-end HDTVs thus far, especially those coming off of HD satellite, have not impressed me. I dunno... are you impressed by rampant artifacting and scene changes that take at least 3 frames to fully repaint? HD artifacts are not really what I was hoping for...
This new MS Codec looks great with the sample clips, but will it really do the job? I sure hope so... and if not, I hope the industry can wait until a better one does come along.
I highly recommend a PowerBook G4. Mac OS X is pretty smooth and has the best looking japanese fonts out there. If you need to go the PC route, a Thinkpad is the only way to go. We've had way too many problems with Dells and Sony, as have others.
I used AppleWorks 2 and 3 on a machine with a single 5.25" drive (and Apple //c to be exact). It worked quite well, but I did have to swap disks to do a spell check. Bankstreet Writer was also nice.
Fonts weren't much on a issue for me, as I rarely used AppleWorks to print my final draft -- I'd usually save the file as plain ASCII and open it up in Publish-It (a nice Apple II DTP app) for final fonts, layout, and clip art.
Before I got a Mac, I upgraded to an Apple IIgs with an Apple StyleWriter 360 dpi inkjet printer. All of my 8-bit Apple II apps continued to work, plus a few even shipped with snazzy 16-bit IIgs versions (including Publish It and 8/16 Paint).
Laughing 'til he saw the output, anyway. Off a networked postscript laserprinter. The year was 1985.
I remember something very similar. A teacher was showing off some shiny new Macintoshes and some painting and word processing software (probably Mac Write and Mac Paint, maybe Aldus PageMaker). The printer was a first generation Apple Laserwriter networked to about 4 macs via AppleTalk/LocalTalk. At the time it seemed like black magic!
I do remember MS Excel, but I don't recall using MS Word or MS Works on the Mac until about a year later. There were some other Mac word processors at the time, but Excel is the one that sticks out in my mind.
This was about 1986, so the Macs may have even been Mac Plus'es.
Both my parents and grandparents still use an Apple IIc for printing labels. They each have an Appleworks database with addresses of friends and family. Plugged into the Apple is an ImageWriter II with pin-feed address labels. Their box of 5000 labels is starting to empty... may soon be time to find a new source for the labels or *gasp* upgrade.
An Apple II is about all a person needs for basic "computer skills", especially for spreadsheets. Sure, MS Excel can walk my dog and wash my car, but the basics (managing tables & columns, writing formulas) really hasn't changed since VisiCalc or AppleWorks for the Apple II.
There are also gobs of eductional titles available for the Apple II. Unlike most modern software, many of the old titles shipped with entire binders full of manual, usage, and educational tie-in materials. Some of the MECC titles even came with full reports and studies to prove the value of the software. Sure beats the eye candy "edutainment" software of today.
Still, nothing's better than a good teacher who knows how to regulate software usage.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Gobs of businesses used Apple II's in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't until the IBM PC (first shipped in 1982) became popular that businesses started to go that route.
Apple didn't do much to keep the business people... they quit focusing on the Apple II and instead built the Apple III (so overengineered that it didn't work --- there were actually chips on the board that disabled certain features -- read up on it at www.woz.org for the whole sad story). The Apple III was worthless and overpriced. The Lisa was pretty smooth, but very few businesses wanted to spend upwards of $10K per machine regardless of how much ram and HD space it had. By the time the Macintosh shipped in 1984, most mainstream business software was already PC-based, leaving only the graphics / DTP market to utilize the Mac and its features (Postscript support, a sane GUI, easy networking, etc).
Some businesses did stick with the Mac, though... in fact Microsoft Excel for Macintosh was released in 1985, it was the first true GUI spreadsheet and looks a lot like the Excel used today. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that PC users got the same look-and-feel for their Excel. (It was also around that time that MS Office began to take over the entire globe...)
My Extreme base-station does not sport an external antenna connector
Weird. Do you have the model with the USB port (print server) ?