blah bandwidth, but text as images prevents blind/visually impaired people, and search engines can't spider it.
Anyway, here's a quick OCR of it with some markup. Legal schmegal.
.
Figuring out how much data The Lord of the Rings project would create was the starting point for Jon Lab[r]ie. "The threee films are being shot simultaenously," he says, "and we're creating the effects for all three films in a single block.
"We expect to create and manage 100 Terabytes of data before this show is over. It's my job to plan for that growth and to meet the infrastructure challenges associated with it.
"There are 200 eople in the Weta production facility, every one of them involved heavily in the creation of a lot of digital data. I think of it as a kind of blizzard or storm of data flying through the facility," Labrie says. "What we're about is the ability to move large amounts of information around the facility all day, every day, and we rely on the SGI to help us do that. Ninety percent of our equipment is SGI."
Weta uses two SGI Origin 2000s as its primary file servers. One Origin 2000 is for near-line and offline tape-based storage. The other is for central online disk storage.
"Given the 100 Terabytes we're demanding a lot from those file servers. WE currently have four Terabytes of data on hard drives, which will eventually grow to 10. For nearline/offline storage we're using DMF, SGI's hierarchical storage management system. It's greatly simplified out management the thousands of tapes needed to store the bulk of the data."
Weta's primary rendering resource is based on SGI 1200 Linux servers. "Rendering hinges on the ability to efficiently use processor cycles," LAbrie says. "We have 32 dedicated processors today, and expect to extend this to well over 200 by the time we're finished. "We also have 90 Octane Irix workstations that we're using primarily for paint, rotoscoping, and compositing. These systems also contribute to the rendering pool when available."
The Linux workstations run Nothing Real's Shake, which is the primary compositing application at Weta. An eight-processor Onyx II also runs Inferno, Descrete Logic's high-speed, single seat compisiting system.
We have a large number of seats running Maya, Alias/Wavefront's modelling, rendering and animation system. Maya is the core 3D application for the facility," Labrie says.
"We also have a number of other applications for niche requirements: Houdini for effect and particle animation; 3D Equalizer and Softimage for camera match-moving. There's a sprinkling of other things, and a lot of proprietary technologies that we've been working on specifically for The Lord of the Rings.
"There are unique graphical applications that Peter Jackson has asked us to create. We've been in research and development for three years, planning and working on standalone proprietary systems or extensions to off-the-shelf applications. We're moving into the actual production of shots now.
"We've been writing custom extensions to Maya for the past two yeras to improve the look and performance of our computer-generated characters.
"Over the past four years we've used SGI workstations to custom-build a new crowd animation system, called Massive. We're using Massive for battle animation scenes with hundreds of thousands of fighting, screamingm, and dying Orcs, Elves and all the other magical and fantastic creatures that appear in The Lord of the Rings.
"For these sorts of graphical challenges, we prefer to work in the Irix/Unix world. The graphical engines available to us on the SGI platforms make our jobs easier. Of the 140 special-effects artists that will work on this project, nine out of 10 will work on SGI workstations.
"There are both classic and unique IT challenges, " says Labrie. "Classic challenges are the kinds of IT issues any company would expect to face: What sort of networking technology you use, how do you manage backups and disaster recovery? What kind of workstation is typical for a user? This typically breaks down to 'what's the fasted machine that I can use use to achieve what I need in a reasonable time for a reasonable cost?"
"The unique challenges are things that are specific to digital visual effects for film. Every director wants to deliver a unique viewing experience, to sho people things they've never seen before. We break down those expectations and requirements into specific technical challenges and get to work on them. The results could be as mundane as a new way of describing the internal skeleton of a creature of as fantastic as the Massive."
The three movies are The Fellowship of the Ring (to be released workside on 14 December 2001), The Two Towers (December 2002), and The Return of the King (December 2003). The trilogy shoot should wrap up early next year.
What happens when it's not a choice? In the same way that it was not a choice for many large OEM vendors to pay a windows tax? If GPL software becomes so popular that it becomes difficult not to use it in order to do whatever you want (yes, of course conflicting with the GPL for some people) then it would be interesting to see the courts turn over the GPL.
Or at least some key pieces of software under the GPL.
Restrictions can give freedom. The freedom to murder someone is not a provision that society wants so therefore society gains freedom by restricting what citizens can do (well, legally).
Closing the ASP loophole is an excellent move. The intention of the GPL is to open the source code of public deritive works. But if source code is never distributed in a binary form and instead uses thin clients (the web) then this is a loophole. If one were to modify Slash they could make public use of it without breaking the GPL, this makes clear the intentions of the GPL.
Oh, by the way, Has anyone noticed this trend to qualify religions? Bush doesn't recognise some beliefs as religions - therefore they don't get freedom of religious choice. Nice.
When things fade away and aren't in general use, interest in the product goes below a certain level, then it's safe to say it's deady dead dead.
DVD provides a different purpose to CD, it's not a competing medium. And i'm sure you still have 360k floppies, maybe 8 tracks, and your friends wallow in LD and CED with genuine Nitchén speakers but they're dead.
Yes, minidisc is dead. It holds more than MP3, and most minidisc players have more endurance than competing digital players, but it never really breached into mainstream and will only further fade in obscurity. Sony fucked up. Generic digital players of Mp3 and Ogg (and wav, ack) where the internal storage medium doesn't matter are where it's at and that won't change.
OpenWindows being a hybrid in that it duplicates MS Window's features (runs win32 binaries) but makes improvements due to Wine and Samba code (which I said my opinion was based upon; that both are more stable than the original for some applications and purposes and hopefully would only improve to beat Win16/32 in all areas as Microsoft are not concentrating on Win16/32 any more).
It's not proprietry, it's GPLed - though I'll grant you "slow and uglier".
I thought OpenWindows was a stupid idea, I agreed with most of the trolls at the time.
Granted. It crashes and crashes and suffers awful rot.
not too many eyeballs have refined it over the years,
Bollocks.
its most likely unreadable,
FUD.
hard to compile,
What?...well maybe if you're a tard.
not cross platform compatible,
Granted. If it was at all cross-platform I would assume they would have used it in CE or NT or whatever (I read `cross platform` as being n/bit independant).
purposely built to be incompatible with other platforms, in general, just a real mess.
Also true. The legacy incompatibility from breaking Caldera's DOS applications - that's still in there.
The code is just a joke.
Yes, this is probably true - a company's operating system not being cross platform, suffering system rot, being so very crash prone would qualify as "just a joke".
On the most part, AC, you're speaking out of your arse.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. The, um, "FuTuRe" of programming is libraries and better glue. Corba, and Soap.
Don't they have glyph composite symbols or something?
blah bandwidth, but text as images prevents blind/visually impaired people, and search engines can't spider it.
Anyway, here's a quick OCR of it with some markup. Legal schmegal.
.
Figuring out how much data The Lord of the Rings project would create was the starting point for Jon Lab[r]ie. "The threee films are being shot simultaenously," he says, "and we're creating the effects for all three films in a single block.
"We expect to create and manage 100 Terabytes of data before this show is over. It's my job to plan for that growth and to meet the infrastructure challenges associated with it.
"There are 200 eople in the Weta production facility, every one of them involved heavily in the creation of a lot of digital data. I think of it as a kind of blizzard or storm of data flying through the facility," Labrie says. "What we're about is the ability to move large amounts of information around the facility all day, every day, and we rely on the SGI to help us do that. Ninety percent of our equipment is SGI."
Weta uses two SGI Origin 2000s as its primary file servers. One Origin 2000 is for near-line and offline tape-based storage. The other is for central online disk storage.
"Given the 100 Terabytes we're demanding a lot from those file servers. WE currently have four Terabytes of data on hard drives, which will eventually grow to 10. For nearline/offline storage we're using DMF, SGI's hierarchical storage management system. It's greatly simplified out management the thousands of tapes needed to store the bulk of the data."
Weta's primary rendering resource is based on SGI 1200 Linux servers. "Rendering hinges on the ability to efficiently use processor cycles," LAbrie says. "We have 32 dedicated processors today, and expect to extend this to well over 200 by the time we're finished. "We also have 90 Octane Irix workstations that we're using primarily for paint, rotoscoping, and compositing. These systems also contribute to the rendering pool when available."
The Linux workstations run Nothing Real's Shake, which is the primary compositing application at Weta. An eight-processor Onyx II also runs Inferno, Descrete Logic's high-speed, single seat compisiting system.
We have a large number of seats running Maya, Alias/Wavefront's modelling, rendering and animation system. Maya is the core 3D application for the facility," Labrie says.
"We also have a number of other applications for niche requirements: Houdini for effect and particle animation; 3D Equalizer and Softimage for camera match-moving. There's a sprinkling of other things, and a lot of proprietary technologies that we've been working on specifically for The Lord of the Rings.
"There are unique graphical applications that Peter Jackson has asked us to create. We've been in research and development for three years, planning and working on standalone proprietary systems or extensions to off-the-shelf applications. We're moving into the actual production of shots now.
"We've been writing custom extensions to Maya for the past two yeras to improve the look and performance of our computer-generated characters.
"Over the past four years we've used SGI workstations to custom-build a new crowd animation system, called Massive. We're using Massive for battle animation scenes with hundreds of thousands of fighting, screamingm, and dying Orcs, Elves and all the other magical and fantastic creatures that appear in The Lord of the Rings.
"For these sorts of graphical challenges, we prefer to work in the Irix/Unix world. The graphical engines available to us on the SGI platforms make our jobs easier. Of the 140 special-effects artists that will work on this project, nine out of 10 will work on SGI workstations.
"There are both classic and unique IT challenges, " says Labrie. "Classic challenges are the kinds of IT issues any company would expect to face: What sort of networking technology you use, how do you manage backups and disaster recovery? What kind of workstation is typical for a user? This typically breaks down to 'what's the fasted machine that I can use use to achieve what I need in a reasonable time for a reasonable cost?"
"The unique challenges are things that are specific to digital visual effects for film. Every director wants to deliver a unique viewing experience, to sho people things they've never seen before. We break down those expectations and requirements into specific technical challenges and get to work on them. The results could be as mundane as a new way of describing the internal skeleton of a creature of as fantastic as the Massive."
The three movies are The Fellowship of the Ring (to be released workside on 14 December 2001), The Two Towers (December 2002), and The Return of the King (December 2003). The trilogy shoot should wrap up early next year.
Or at least some key pieces of software under the GPL.
Restrictions can give freedom. The freedom to murder someone is not a provision that society wants so therefore society gains freedom by restricting what citizens can do (well, legally).
Closing the ASP loophole is an excellent move. The intention of the GPL is to open the source code of public deritive works. But if source code is never distributed in a binary form and instead uses thin clients (the web) then this is a loophole. If one were to modify Slash they could make public use of it without breaking the GPL, this makes clear the intentions of the GPL.
It's a ripoff of BeOS's Tracker
Dude, I loved that game!
(heh heh heh)
Oh, by the way, Has anyone noticed this trend to qualify religions? Bush doesn't recognise some beliefs as religions - therefore they don't get freedom of religious choice. Nice.
Minidisk is stagnant and has been so for a few years.
ps. Minidisk has a format, yes.
ps2. Disco sucks. Punk is dead. Goth is dead. Nyah!
(Rah rah rah!)
When things fade away and aren't in general use, interest in the product goes below a certain level, then it's safe to say it's deady dead dead.
DVD provides a different purpose to CD, it's not a competing medium. And i'm sure you still have 360k floppies, maybe 8 tracks, and your friends wallow in LD and CED with genuine Nitchén speakers but they're dead.
Yes, minidisc is dead. It holds more than MP3, and most minidisc players have more endurance than competing digital players, but it never really breached into mainstream and will only further fade in obscurity. Sony fucked up. Generic digital players of Mp3 and Ogg (and wav, ack) where the internal storage medium doesn't matter are where it's at and that won't change.
I bet all my earthly belongings on it.
And hugs, don't forget hugs.
This has rather more to show for it, though.
That's requires as much skill as beating up a 'tard.
Goodness knows I write cross-browser DHTML, it works in both browsers.
And in law... don't forget law.
Good idea at the time, though.
Genius!
Do you have some links that show mod_perl is at all as fast as PHP?
Learn English yourself my little peasant. Abandon your childish Americanisms and King of the World will shower you with honours.
Yeah, those chinks can be evil bastards. Curse the whole lot of them in one region code!
Sounds like you need Giddy3!
OpenWindows being a hybrid in that it duplicates MS Window's features (runs win32 binaries) but makes improvements due to Wine and Samba code (which I said my opinion was based upon; that both are more stable than the original for some applications and purposes and hopefully would only improve to beat Win16/32 in all areas as Microsoft are not concentrating on Win16/32 any more).
It's not proprietry, it's GPLed - though I'll grant you "slow and uglier".
I thought OpenWindows was a stupid idea, I agreed with most of the trolls at the time.
So yes, there would be market. You lapid dickless hole.
Although this makes me sad too. The dancing gorillas are somewhat hypnotic.
Its bug ridden,
Granted. It crashes and crashes and suffers awful rot.
not too many eyeballs have refined it over the years,
Bollocks.
its most likely unreadable,
FUD.
hard to compile,
What? ...well maybe if you're a tard.
not cross platform compatible,
Granted. If it was at all cross-platform I would assume they would have used it in CE or NT or whatever (I read `cross platform` as being n/bit independant).
purposely built to be incompatible with other platforms, in general, just a real mess.
Also true. The legacy incompatibility from breaking Caldera's DOS applications - that's still in there.
The code is just a joke.
Yes, this is probably true - a company's operating system not being cross platform, suffering system rot, being so very crash prone would qualify as "just a joke".
On the most part, AC, you're speaking out of your arse.