Quit a six figure job in IT in 1999 to join the VFX crew for Farscape. My pay dropped overnight by 60% but I got to make spaceships for a living instead of fixing servers. I make more now obviously, but since the show got cancelled I've mostly been working on TV commercials. I sometimes think I should go back into IT before I stab some agency fuck in the head with my Wacom pen.
If spam is dead someone should tell IT that
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 1
Since mid-December 2005 I have caught 4293 spam emails in my gmail spam filter, nearly all of which comes via a redirected email address I have been using since 1999. I know the sensible thing to do is abandon that address and start a fresh one, but I refuse to let the bastards win.
I think the CPUs are the fastest available, but obviously we haven't maxed the RAM out like you guys have:) We're a small shop with a 200 CPU farm, mostly Intel boxes, but we're starting to eval AMDs, and we're seeing similar performance results to you. In fact I'm so impressed my next home workstation will be an AMD machine, the first time I will have bought non-intel.
1700 proc farm, huh? I love it. Crank every setting to 11, by the time you've closed the submit window your frames are done;-)
It's mildly annoying, that at 32 I still find I sometimes get my contractions mixed up. Especially if I am say, posting on slashdot in a hurry on my way out the door to lunch.
Seeing as you're keeping score, I also used the expression "to it's(sic) knees" twice in one paragraph as well. Oh, plus there were two commas after the word speed.
It's interesting that AMD is pushing their 64 bit technology with this game. If it weren't for video games then what other reason would we have to continue to build faster computers?
I work for a VFX company. Two desks over from me is a top of the line two CPU dual-core AMD with 3 gigs of RAM which we have brought to it's knees, rendering 2k res film frames of a photoreal CGI character. Hair passes, sub-surface scattering, motion blur, skin shaders, glossy reflection raytracing, volumetric dust passes to tie the character into the background plate, the list goes on. Give us any machine, with any amount of RAM and we will bring it to it's knees.
So, yeah, for the average gamer, office worker etc you're right. Who needs the speed,, but there are plenty of people out there who can't get enough CPU power:)
Battlestar Galactica, Lost, 24, Desperate Housewives and other shows are all as heavily torrented as Enterprise and they all rate through the roof. The ratings are determined by a very small number of "Neilson familes" and from viewer surveys. You or I downloading an episode of anything has no effect on that shows ratings.
The Neilson system relies on a diary system for the family members involved, it'd be a safe bet that even if someone in that household is using bittorrent to watch their TV they would record that they saw those shows in the diary anyway. After all they know their input has a direct input on the ratings and would support the shows they liked.
Obviously we can't expect you to comment on your feelings about these developments, but I'm curious if you guys retained any control or input over the film?
[I guess there's little chance of an answer, but I thought I'd throw it out there]
Your post is great and I agree with you, but you're targeting the wrong person. The writer wrote a screenplay set on Mars, with space marines and demons - but there are people on the production - and he can't name them because he will get in Deep Shit - who are steering the thing towards their "vision" which in most cases with these fuckers is a pastiche of the last ten dumb films they have seen.
Remember, Giaman and Pratchett's Good Omens screenplay was sunk by insane story notes from an executive producer that essentially changed everything from the book except the title. It happens every time with these adaptation films unless you have someone who gives a shit in a position of power to protect the property, for example Peter Jackson. (LOTR purists take note, I know he changed some things but at least he didn't set the story on a different bloody planet.
Trust me. Blame the producers/the studio meatwhistles/hell, maybe the director as well - but for this guy to state publicly that he's "disappointed" that his true-to-the-game screenplay has been drastically altered, then behind the scenes he's almost certainly so monstrously fucked off at these pricks he's having trouble seeing straight.
There's at least one of these cars being used by the New South Wales police here in Sydney and it's painted just like a regular cop car.
It drove past me once as I was walking to lunch in the city, the sight of two cops in this thing made me and a lot of other people piss ourselves laughing:-)
You could tell the cops felt like dicks in it, they just had these sheepish grins on their faces...
I'm running HL2 on a twin proc Xeon 3ghz with 2 gig of ram and a PCI-E ATI AX800 XT and I get stuttering. It's always right before a badguy shows up too.
It's easy man, copy your steam directory to whatever drive you want (even another machine) then re-install the Steam app over the top of it. You won't have to download anything (other than the one or two megs of updates to the client itself). If you're really paranoid, move the SteamApps directory somewhere else on your drive, then un-install, re-install and copy it into the new directory.
These guys have been causing problems in Sydney for years. I am referring to the Lebanese gangs here, not the Lebanese community at large who are probably as concerned about this as the rest of the population.
The Flemington Markets (where the victim worked) have always attracted a criminal element, as silly as it sounds more than a few of the produce stall vendors there have a connection to organised crime (note that in this city "organised" crime is way down the ladder in severity from the American Mob.)
I live in out in the midst of all this, and have seen first hand the way these guys operate. Make eye contact and they will literally go berserker on you. I watched three carloads of these guys stomp the living shit out of a scrawny 19 or 20 year old guy because he told them to "fuck off" after they threw fireworks at his girlfriend. I've seen brawls outside my apartment that could be called small riots and I've been attacked myself after one of these macho dickheads sexually assaulted my girlfriend in front of me. One new years eve I was in a crowd at Darling Harbor counting down at midnight, right on the stroke of midnight a gang of these guys linked arms, charged the crowd and just started wailing on anyone they could catch. Minutes later they'd fled. It's not politically correct to identify a gang by it's ethnicity but a large degree of their behavior arises out of environmental factors, especially their treatment of women and their gang-culture of machismo-on-steroids violence. Drive by shootings are a new phenomenon in this country and nearly all of them in this city are internecine warfare between rival groups of Lebanese and Arab young men, typically over the drug trade. In 1998 a police station was shot up with a fully automatic weapon.
Which brings me to my point that if they were dressed in paramilitary gear it was probably more to do with that than any exposure to Counterstrike. This wasn't some random assault by kids "corrupted" by some computer game, it was more than likely a gang reprisal where the assailants were known to the victim.
Bilal Skaf, the leader of the rapists converted to radical Islam in jail and has openly avowed his support of Al Qaeda and sent death threats to the judge and witnesses at his trial.
Re:Is anyone else torn between...
on
Half Life 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you lose your PC or your hard drive you can just login to Steam from your new PC and all the games you bought can be downloaded again. I've done it on the three machines I use all the time. You can also copy the Valve directory from machine to machine over the top of a fresh Steam install.
So, backup your Valve directory to a DVD-R, and if you ever lose that you can download it again any time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but they completely destroyed all the sets etc. when they cancelled the series - so are they now going to rebuild it all to make this miniseries? Now there's a lack of forward planning if ever I heard one.
Let me put it this way: Not only was everything that was destroyed after the cancellation rebuilt, but they actually finished the shoot for the whole miniseries a couple of weeks ago. The miniseries is already in post production.
no, no - SCO admin as in I admined a SCO system:-) Had I actually worked for SCO at some point I would now make up some more respectable job to cover that time on my resume.
Like clubbing baby fur seals to death or something.
I took a sixty percent pay cut back in 1999 to take a job as a junior VFX artist on Farscape season two. Before that I'd been in IT as a systems engineer since 1992 (I actually started off as a SCO admin. Who knew?) While I enjoyed that career at times and the money was certainly good, I was never really that happy doing it. CG had been a passion of mine since the mid 80's but I had convinced myself that I'd never get a chance to do it for a living.
Fast forward to the end of the century and I'd spent enough time doing 3D in my spare time to be able to blag my way into the industry (I offered to work for free for two weeks to get my foot in the door). It's been a tough run, especially in the first few years when the money wasn't so good, and there were times when I likened working on the show to a butcher knowing how sausages were made: once you knew what went into them you could never eat them again;-). But overall it's been worth every minute of it.
The bottom line for me, the thing that made me take the leap and the big financial hit was I was offered the chance to do something I loved for a living, and it was a chance I knew might not come around again so I jumped at it.
I like music. I'm sitting on a (small) pile of cash and I want to give you that hard earned cash for your product, but you just don't want to fucking take it. I will pay good money to download high quality VBR MP3s, with correct naming and ID tags so they can fit nicely into my iTunes databse. I am not interested in DRM, I've had too many computers and handhelds to be able to predict what I'll be using even a year from now, and if I pay for a song I expect to be able to fucking listen to it wherever and whenever I choose to (MPAA - same goes for goddamnned DVDs. Far as I'm concerned,- so long as I paid you your AUD$40 for a movie that comes on maybe two bucks worth of plastic and packaging - the whole world is region 0)
I will even - and lean in close here, peckerheads - pay for stuff that I already downloaded for free just to get the aforementioned nice ID tags and bitrate quality I want, not to mention knowing the artists get their due. Yup. And seeing as I would have paid for those tracks I'm not about to go throwing them on a P2P - they're mine.
Also, I'm not in the continental United States but last time I checked my currency converts into USD just fine but you won't take it (I'm talking to you, iTunes). So here I've been, out in the cold, clutching a fistful of dollars, my nose pressed up against the glass of Apple's spiffy new online music store unable to get in. Then along comes Bleep. Not only do they have stuff I couldn't find on iTunes (Boards Of Canada) but - get this - they will actually sell it to me. So I bought, and I'll keep on buying. I bought songs I had already downloaded for free. While looking for those songs I found more stuff I didn't even know I wanted and I bought those too. Hell, while downloading the big-ass zipfile I went back, had another look and now I have TWO big-ass zipfiles to download.
So in closing let me sum up: treat P2P like what it really is - free advertising and marketing info - embrace it then make the damned music available to buy at high quality and DRM free. Do you really think the success of iTunes is because it has DRM?? Do you know what would happen to sales if the tracks on iTunes suddenly went DRM free? Sales would remain constant, and would even pick up as the word got out to ornery pricks like me who just won't touch anything with DRM in it.
But you won't do any of it and Apple and other non-luddites will eat your lunch.
I think it's a very cool idea, but the colors and general decor of this example are pretty terrible. The Vos Pad looks to me to be entirely without human appeal. It works as a technology demo, as an almost abstract rendering of a "futuristic" apartment but it just reeks of designer-wank. I'm sure there's a lot of self congratulatory backslapping going on in coffee shops amongst the design-mavens who lap this stuff up, but the apartment itself looks to be as appealing to live in as a chip manufacturer's clean room. The faux zebra-skin couches, the overwhelming use of purple and the overall sterility of the space are very offputting ofter the initial wow of seeing the images.
That said however, I've ordered a bunch of of Luxeon LEDs in various colors - mostly the "warm whites" - to play around with. I think if you did this in a decent house or apartment with colors that didn't induce vomiting you could end up with something pretty special.
Here's a suggestion for TV networks : instead of trying to sue DVR manufacturers because it lets customers skip your crap, why don't you replace the crap with good ads (and no, I'm not talking about Budweiser or Taco Bell ads)? Of course, you may have to leave good taste behind once in a while, but I bet good ads would being better brand recognition with less airtime, meaning less ads for viewers overall and less DVR zapping.
This and other posts I see all the time on Slashdot hit that most hit of nails sqaure on the head. The market (that'd be us) wants to be able to watch our shows when it suits us and skip the crappy commercials so we buy PVRs. The Industry responds by suing PVR manufacturers, putting the commercials IN the shows themselves and generally jamming it's fingers in it's ears and humming really loud. And yet these same people, so terrified of losing advertising viewers, when confronted with the evidence that there are many commercials that not only do consumers want to see, they actually want to download them and pass them around to each other - (ie, the same people who skip over crappy ads like the good ads so much they will happily spend their own time and resources to distibute them) - the industry responds by trying to shut down the websites that make this possible (remember what they did to the first incarnation of adcritic) and if they ever do decide to make them available online they do so in some crappy streaming format. It must be just me, but if I'd spent a million dollars to produce a spot so funny/compelling/whatever that ordinary people are going out of their way to see, I'd make damnned sure it was available on the net in every format possible, via webistes, bittorrent, kazaa and carrier pigeon.
Faced with their markets avalanching away from their beloved business models to third party on-demand digital alternatives the various industries (RIAA, networks, advertisers et al) have made the decision that it's the consumer who is wrong and therefore the only solution is to re-apply their failed methodology with even more vigour only now with DRM, region encoding, lawsuits and "re-education" campaigns.
Networks and advertisers should be partnering with PVR makers, not fighting them - every PVR should not only report back (anonymously) exactly how many people are watching what show, but what commercials they are skipping and which ones they are stopping to actually see. Let the advertiser's message live or die by the quality of that message; no-one watches your ad? Tough. Make a better one. (I'm talking to whoever made the current crappy "Intern" Dell commercials here)
The networks also like to bleat on about trying to fund their shows from dropping advertising revenues. I worked on a show for years, and I can tell you that not only was money pissed against the wall, it was more often than not fed into high pressure hoses and blasted directly into the furnace. There's no way these shows actually cost these huge amounts to make. It's just from inefficiancies on set, all the way up to the top-heavy upper echelon parasites, vast amounts of production money is either wasted or siphoned off as "fees". If networks really are worried about the cost of producing these shows versus the amount of money they can recoup from selling advertising they could probably start by firing a few VPs, (for christ's sake, these people are simply content aggregators - how many "development execs" do they need to just buy shows from production companies and put em on the air?) and actually putting some damnned oversight into how their production budgets get spent.
Watching the trailer, it looks like they didn't opt to render using motion blur. Last I checked, using motion blur in Pixar's PRman only has a render time hit of 50%. With lower end software, you're looking at a few hundred percent. But I might be going by older numbers.
Very old numbers I'd say. I've used Max and Renderman professionally for four years. While prman's motion blur is very nice, it takes significantly longer to render than Max's image motion blur, which is one of the fastest around. It is less accurate but for the majority of shots I've worked on over the years it's not noticable.
Oh, and also "only" a render hit time of 50%? Film-res images can take hours to render a single frame (especially if you are using renderman). Add another 50% to that and you are in deep trouble. The "render hit" as you put it for Max's post image blur is only a few seconds per frame, even if those frames took an hour to render.
The only non-technical flaw I could spot was the way the characters moved. Final Fantasy augmented their hand-animated characters with tons of motion capture, so maybe using them as the bar is a little too high... but from what I've read, most of the character animation in Spiderman was done by hand. Keanna's animation is laughable compared to Spidey, and the software they used is no excuse.
You've got it backwards there. Final Fantasy augmented their motion capture with hand animation. Motion capture takes days or weeks of hand cleanup to make useable, and most animators prefer not to use it. Makes sense seeing as they all got into the industry to animate not clean up jittery popping motion capture all day.
Slashdot Mirror
Quit a six figure job in IT in 1999 to join the VFX crew for Farscape. My pay dropped overnight by 60% but I got to make spaceships for a living instead of fixing servers. I make more now obviously, but since the show got cancelled I've mostly been working on TV commercials. I sometimes think I should go back into IT before I stab some agency fuck in the head with my Wacom pen.
Since mid-December 2005 I have caught 4293 spam emails in my gmail spam filter, nearly all of which comes via a redirected email address I have been using since 1999. I know the sensible thing to do is abandon that address and start a fresh one, but I refuse to let the bastards win.
1700 proc farm, huh? I love it. Crank every setting to 11, by the time you've closed the submit window your frames are done ;-)
Seeing as you're keeping score, I also used the expression "to it's(sic) knees" twice in one paragraph as well. Oh, plus there were two commas after the word speed.
So, yeah, for the average gamer, office worker etc you're right. Who needs the speed,, but there are plenty of people out there who can't get enough CPU power :)
The Neilson system relies on a diary system for the family members involved, it'd be a safe bet that even if someone in that household is using bittorrent to watch their TV they would record that they saw those shows in the diary anyway. After all they know their input has a direct input on the ratings and would support the shows they liked.
[I guess there's little chance of an answer, but I thought I'd throw it out there]
Remember, Giaman and Pratchett's Good Omens screenplay was sunk by insane story notes from an executive producer that essentially changed everything from the book except the title. It happens every time with these adaptation films unless you have someone who gives a shit in a position of power to protect the property, for example Peter Jackson. (LOTR purists take note, I know he changed some things but at least he didn't set the story on a different bloody planet.
Trust me. Blame the producers/the studio meatwhistles/hell, maybe the director as well - but for this guy to state publicly that he's "disappointed" that his true-to-the-game screenplay has been drastically altered, then behind the scenes he's almost certainly so monstrously fucked off at these pricks he's having trouble seeing straight.
And that worries me because thats what I thought about Firefly too, and we know what the powers-that-be do to good science fiction shows :-(
It drove past me once as I was walking to lunch in the city, the sight of two cops in this thing made me and a lot of other people piss ourselves laughing :-)
You could tell the cops felt like dicks in it, they just had these sheepish grins on their faces...
I'm running HL2 on a twin proc Xeon 3ghz with 2 gig of ram and a PCI-E ATI AX800 XT and I get stuttering. It's always right before a badguy shows up too.
Either way, it works fine.
The Flemington Markets (where the victim worked) have always attracted a criminal element, as silly as it sounds more than a few of the produce stall vendors there have a connection to organised crime (note that in this city "organised" crime is way down the ladder in severity from the American Mob.)
I live in out in the midst of all this, and have seen first hand the way these guys operate. Make eye contact and they will literally go berserker on you. I watched three carloads of these guys stomp the living shit out of a scrawny 19 or 20 year old guy because he told them to "fuck off" after they threw fireworks at his girlfriend. I've seen brawls outside my apartment that could be called small riots and I've been attacked myself after one of these macho dickheads sexually assaulted my girlfriend in front of me. One new years eve I was in a crowd at Darling Harbor counting down at midnight, right on the stroke of midnight a gang of these guys linked arms, charged the crowd and just started wailing on anyone they could catch. Minutes later they'd fled. It's not politically correct to identify a gang by it's ethnicity but a large degree of their behavior arises out of environmental factors, especially their treatment of women and their gang-culture of machismo-on-steroids violence. Drive by shootings are a new phenomenon in this country and nearly all of them in this city are internecine warfare between rival groups of Lebanese and Arab young men, typically over the drug trade. In 1998 a police station was shot up with a fully automatic weapon.
Which brings me to my point that if they were dressed in paramilitary gear it was probably more to do with that than any exposure to Counterstrike. This wasn't some random assault by kids "corrupted" by some computer game, it was more than likely a gang reprisal where the assailants were known to the victim.
The rise of Lebanese gangs in Sydney
Sydney police besieged in their own station by Lebanese gang
Serial gang rapes in Sydney
Bilal Skaf, the leader of the rapists converted to radical Islam in jail and has openly avowed his support of Al Qaeda and sent death threats to the judge and witnesses at his trial.
So, backup your Valve directory to a DVD-R, and if you ever lose that you can download it again any time.
But what I'm really waiting for are some of the really great mods that I know are probably coming out once modders get up and running.
The engine is great, I find myself just wandering around checking out the decor :)
Let me put it this way: Not only was everything that was destroyed after the cancellation rebuilt, but they actually finished the shoot for the whole miniseries a couple of weeks ago. The miniseries is already in post production.
I know... bad day that day - sorry all... :-)
oh for fucks sake, ENOUGH with that "joke" already. Jesus...
Like clubbing baby fur seals to death or something.
Fast forward to the end of the century and I'd spent enough time doing 3D in my spare time to be able to blag my way into the industry (I offered to work for free for two weeks to get my foot in the door). It's been a tough run, especially in the first few years when the money wasn't so good, and there were times when I likened working on the show to a butcher knowing how sausages were made: once you knew what went into them you could never eat them again ;-). But overall it's been worth every minute of it.
The bottom line for me, the thing that made me take the leap and the big financial hit was I was offered the chance to do something I loved for a living, and it was a chance I knew might not come around again so I jumped at it.
I will even - and lean in close here, peckerheads - pay for stuff that I already downloaded for free just to get the aforementioned nice ID tags and bitrate quality I want, not to mention knowing the artists get their due. Yup. And seeing as I would have paid for those tracks I'm not about to go throwing them on a P2P - they're mine.
Also, I'm not in the continental United States but last time I checked my currency converts into USD just fine but you won't take it (I'm talking to you, iTunes). So here I've been, out in the cold, clutching a fistful of dollars, my nose pressed up against the glass of Apple's spiffy new online music store unable to get in. Then along comes Bleep. Not only do they have stuff I couldn't find on iTunes (Boards Of Canada) but - get this - they will actually sell it to me. So I bought, and I'll keep on buying. I bought songs I had already downloaded for free. While looking for those songs I found more stuff I didn't even know I wanted and I bought those too. Hell, while downloading the big-ass zipfile I went back, had another look and now I have TWO big-ass zipfiles to download.
So in closing let me sum up: treat P2P like what it really is - free advertising and marketing info - embrace it then make the damned music available to buy at high quality and DRM free. Do you really think the success of iTunes is because it has DRM?? Do you know what would happen to sales if the tracks on iTunes suddenly went DRM free? Sales would remain constant, and would even pick up as the word got out to ornery pricks like me who just won't touch anything with DRM in it.
But you won't do any of it and Apple and other non-luddites will eat your lunch.
Bite my balls Dinosaurs,
Angry of Sydney
USD$15 for a lightbulb that lasts for years rather than months? I think your definition of rich is somewhat different from mine.
That said however, I've ordered a bunch of of Luxeon LEDs in various colors - mostly the "warm whites" - to play around with. I think if you did this in a decent house or apartment with colors that didn't induce vomiting you could end up with something pretty special.
This and other posts I see all the time on Slashdot hit that most hit of nails sqaure on the head. The market (that'd be us) wants to be able to watch our shows when it suits us and skip the crappy commercials so we buy PVRs. The Industry responds by suing PVR manufacturers, putting the commercials IN the shows themselves and generally jamming it's fingers in it's ears and humming really loud. And yet these same people, so terrified of losing advertising viewers, when confronted with the evidence that there are many commercials that not only do consumers want to see, they actually want to download them and pass them around to each other - (ie, the same people who skip over crappy ads like the good ads so much they will happily spend their own time and resources to distibute them) - the industry responds by trying to shut down the websites that make this possible (remember what they did to the first incarnation of adcritic) and if they ever do decide to make them available online they do so in some crappy streaming format. It must be just me, but if I'd spent a million dollars to produce a spot so funny/compelling/whatever that ordinary people are going out of their way to see, I'd make damnned sure it was available on the net in every format possible, via webistes, bittorrent, kazaa and carrier pigeon.
Faced with their markets avalanching away from their beloved business models to third party on-demand digital alternatives the various industries (RIAA, networks, advertisers et al) have made the decision that it's the consumer who is wrong and therefore the only solution is to re-apply their failed methodology with even more vigour only now with DRM, region encoding, lawsuits and "re-education" campaigns.
Networks and advertisers should be partnering with PVR makers, not fighting them - every PVR should not only report back (anonymously) exactly how many people are watching what show, but what commercials they are skipping and which ones they are stopping to actually see. Let the advertiser's message live or die by the quality of that message; no-one watches your ad? Tough. Make a better one. (I'm talking to whoever made the current crappy "Intern" Dell commercials here)
The networks also like to bleat on about trying to fund their shows from dropping advertising revenues. I worked on a show for years, and I can tell you that not only was money pissed against the wall, it was more often than not fed into high pressure hoses and blasted directly into the furnace. There's no way these shows actually cost these huge amounts to make. It's just from inefficiancies on set, all the way up to the top-heavy upper echelon parasites, vast amounts of production money is either wasted or siphoned off as "fees". If networks really are worried about the cost of producing these shows versus the amount of money they can recoup from selling advertising they could probably start by firing a few VPs, (for christ's sake, these people are simply content aggregators - how many "development execs" do they need to just buy shows from production companies and put em on the air?) and actually putting some damnned oversight into how their production budgets get spent.
Very old numbers I'd say. I've used Max and Renderman professionally for four years. While prman's motion blur is very nice, it takes significantly longer to render than Max's image motion blur, which is one of the fastest around. It is less accurate but for the majority of shots I've worked on over the years it's not noticable.
Oh, and also "only" a render hit time of 50%? Film-res images can take hours to render a single frame (especially if you are using renderman). Add another 50% to that and you are in deep trouble. The "render hit" as you put it for Max's post image blur is only a few seconds per frame, even if those frames took an hour to render.
You've got it backwards there. Final Fantasy augmented their motion capture with hand animation. Motion capture takes days or weeks of hand cleanup to make useable, and most animators prefer not to use it. Makes sense seeing as they all got into the industry to animate not clean up jittery popping motion capture all day.