I saw _LOTR:FOTR_ at the Mall of Georgia IMAX. AFAIK it was a special 35mm print, not an IMAX 70mm print; I don't think that Jackson had an IMAX crew following him around for three years. What was shown on the IMAX was the same as what I had seen on the regular megaplex screen a few days earlier. The sound system made up for the slightly duller image (although one of my companions fell asleep -- until the Balrog made its appearance...)
Brad Templeton got most of the fiction authors up for a Hugo in 1993 to agree to publish their work on CD-ROM.
Vernor Vinge added a pile of notes about the writing of his novel "A Fire Upon The Deep" indexed to the text, giving the reader an insight into how he developed the story and the characters.
Disc-pressing plants need retooling every few years anyway. Stuff wears out, better lower-cost production equipment comes on the market and it's time to upgrade. They sell the old plant to Chinese companies...
AFAIK Blu-Ray discs will be pressed the same as DVDs and CDs are today, just to finer tolerances. The cost of production of a DVD is about 50 cents, same as a CD. A Blu-Ray disc might be more expensive to produce -- a buck perhaps. The retail cost of a CD or DVD bears no resemblance to the cost of the materials and production processes used. Blu-Ray will not be any different.
They could have used blue laser right at the beginning - they knew all about it.
Back then the only blue lasers were hand-made low-power hangar queens that lasted about two hours in use and cost a couple of hundred bucks each. Now they have a MTBF in excess of a thousand hours and cost substantially less, and once they get into mass production they'll get even cheaper and longer-lived. That's progress for you.
Current-model DVD players use their 650nm lasers to play CD-Rs which are written using 780nm lasers with no problem. It can't work the other way around -- a 780nm laser is too crude to accurately decode a DVD track, but there's no reason why a 405nm Blu-Ray laser shouldn't track and read a regular DVD or a CD.
One caveat is that CDs and DVDs are made in such a way that in their native pressed media, the depth of the pits is 1/4 the wavelength of the light normally used. This allows the laser optics to use an interference effect to enhance the signal; typically a pit in a pressed CD produces a 90% swing in the signal voltage from the optical detector. On a modern CD-R that drops to 30% as there is no pit involved, just a discoloured area of dye (CD-R/Ws are worse, at anything down to 14%).
First-gen Blu-Ray layers will play Blu-Ray pressed discs perfectly, DVD and CD pressed discs very well, DVD-Rs and CD-Rs not so well and rewriteable CD and DVD discs will be problematic. The next gen players will be better, just as modern DVD players don't have a problem with CD-R/W VCDs unlike the early days.
CD lasers run at 780nm, in the deep red-infrared end of the spectrum. DVD lasers run at 670nm, orangish-red. The Blu-Ray consortium plan to use a 405nm blue-violet laser (probably optically doubled from an 810nm infra-red laser). Optical doubling costs a lot of energy (about 90% or so of the input beam) but low-cost IR lasers have been in production for a long time, having been developed for CD-R writing operations. A read laser needs at least 10mW whereas a write laser needs about 100mW. They're still not going to be that cheap, at least to start with.
The use of optical doubling to get the 405nm beam means that a writeable Blu-Ray drive will take some time to develop. They may have to produce a native 400nm-range laser rather than relying on doubling, or develop new more sensitive optical dyes for the disc substrate.
The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts. HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC. Compressing HDTV harder is going to result in a display which is pretty well identical to existing DVD playback, rather negating the point of shelling out the bucks for a new receiver/display unit.
If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate; they can't get that from DVDs except by perhaps spinning them at four times their rated speed, and that only works for 44 minute TV episodes. If they want to sell two-hour long movies without having to do the laserdic thang of flipping and changing discs every hour or so, they'll need the blue laser.
Blu-Ray (tm) is backwards-compatible. It'll play anything that comes in a 12cm optical disc -- CD, CD/G, DVD, SVCD, maybe even DVD-Audio, but HDTV replay is the reason it was designed in the first place.
Don't expect to see Blu-ray (tm) recorders for a while though. It was bad enough getting DVD-R lasers to work.
Windows 98 did not include Windows 98 SP2, and SP2 was required for USB devices.
You might be thinking of W95 and W95 OSR2. The second supported USB (about as well as the first Mac OSes did, i.e. pretty horribly).
The only way to get it was to pay for the upgrade (which I think was $79 instead of $109).
Summat like that. W95 didn't last on the shelves very long, as I recall, before OSR2 became the standard pre-load.
SP2 came out about a year after '98,
I think you're referring to W98SE, a much more stable version of the W98 rewrite. It's my OS of choice on older kit with limited memory and CPU power. ME was an abortion and rightly ignored by the buying public.
[stuff clipped]XP is a glorified name for a 2000 SP
Since XP involved virtually 100% new code, I wouldn't really call it a Service Pack.
people were demanding free Service Pack upgrades.
Before I switched to W2KPro I was running NT4, and the last SP for that old warhorse was 6A. I never paid for any of those. Some were even published on magazine front-cover CDs.
W2K and W2KPro have two SPs already issued, and it looks like SP3 will be out sometime soon -- some "hotfix" patches have been seen to refer to SP3 in the docs. All these have been free for download.
How about USB peripherals? I had a USB floppy disk drive that works perfectly on my Sony Win laptop. I plugged it into an iMac running the last version of OS/9 and it worked perfectly there too, with native OS support and no need for extra drivers. When I tried it with OS/X on the same hardware, kernel panic
What version OS X was this? Public Beta, 10.0.4, 10.1 or what? There were a few problems with pre 10.1 systems and usb peripherals, but I haven't seen any (especially any that would cause a kernel panic) since 10.1.
It was a for-sale release, maybe 10.0.x back in February. I spend winter with friends in Atlanta - I run 100% Intel boxen, mine host is 100% Mac (and earns his living supporting an all-Mac enterprise). He was getting pissed off with the constant stream of patches to OS/X when it was supposed to work right first time -- his comments about the Spinning Beachball of Death were almost as bad as his mutterings about me polluting his house with the Spawn of Satan (Special Edition). We normally had to hard-reboot his iMac half a dozen times a day (as in, interrupt the power because the cute glowy-button stopped working). We certainly had a lot of fun trying to get some older programs running under the Classic interface.
I also had a go at fixing his other dead iMac -- you know, the one (Series B?) with the badly-designed power supply that dies after a year or so of use. No luck. A replacement PSU would cost about 150 bucks (as compared to a Win PC PSU that costs 30). Still, if you're rich then I suppose the TCO for a Mac doesn't worry you.
XP may be stable, but even it suffers severely from problems at times. My father, a rather strange home-user who is always interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest, recently purchased a new computer w/ XP preinstalled. Many, many system crashes and a few frustrated weeks later, he found that the system was *too fast* for XP
99% certain this would be a hardware problem; PCs aren't made by MicroSoft. A lot of Mom'n'Pop shops don't do proper burn-ins in order to shift the box out the door quick. The bigger manufacturers are more careful because a bad config of XP means 20,000 extra support calls next week.
On (new) systems running OS X, you're guaranteed that everything will work A-O-K. For the most part, its a guarantee on all systems that Apple lists as being "supported", though after-factory modifications abound and may not be supported *as well*.
How about USB peripherals? I had a USB floppy disk drive that works perfectly on my Sony Win laptop. I plugged it into an iMac running the last version of OS/9 and it worked perfectly there too, with native OS support and no need for extra drivers. When I tried it with OS/X on the same hardware, kernel panic.
I would expect a problem with a USB hot-swappable device to fail soft, not crash the OS. Steve Jobs is rumoured to have said "The floppy disc is dead". Is this his way of encouraging that?
Re:This surprises you how?
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You've got photojournalism people shooting digital because it's faster and offers some image structure advantages at high speed- no negatives to keep around for a 50 year retrospective.
And finally, you'll have the home consumer trying to back up all his photos to CD, organize them, and get thru the thousands upon thousands (note- most neg drawers aren't well organized either, but... ) of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
I know a guy, a keen photographer who got his wife and kid out the house before the fire really took hold. He didn't get his twenty-odd year collection of thousands of slides and negs out though. This was in the Eighties before he could have afforded to get them all digitised to a high standard.
All he has now are a few prints and some contact sheets of all that work. His pics of his mother -- gone. Snaps of his beloved boyhood dog taken with his birthday-present first camera -- gone. Forever.
He still shoots film and slide, medium format too. He digitises *everything*.
Those are all RRPs -- you can expect some serious discounting on the published prices.
The T220 example was just to show that the "HD" screen is not, as some Apple pundits would like to believe, the largest LCD panel out there. Even the smaller T210 has stuff like S-VHS and SVGA connectors as well as the extra resolution (and I've seen reconditioned T210s sell for 2500 dollars retail).
Still puzzled by the low pixel densities of Apple displays. If we get a 17" iMac I wonder what the max res will be -- current model desktop 17" LCDs are 1280 x 1024. Maybe the Apple will be 1152 x 864. We'll know soon enough.
Yeah, I had a look at the spec of the laughably-named Apple Cinema High Definition display a while back. Max resolution is 1920 x 1200 for a 23" diagonal. Apple Digital Bus connection only -- no SVGA or video inputs.
IBM's T210 21" LCD does 2048 x 1536, with SVGA, DVI, S-video and RCA composite video, including picture-in-picture. That's about 700 kpixels more than the Apple display.
IBM are also selling the T220, with a 3840 x 2400 maximum resolution for the same diagonal as the Apple "HD".
I've noticed that Apple's LCD panels always seem to be a step behind the rest of the world in their pixel density -- pretty ordinary laptops are running 1600 x 1200 resolutions while the Apple top-of-the-range G4 PowerBooks are stuck with a paltry 1280 x 854 dots (but look at the diagonal size! 15.2"! Wow!) I suppose they've got to shave the spec somewhere.
All you need to do is jigger the door safety switches on a Walmart Blue Tag special and learn Morse code. Open and shut the door to send text messages.
I would suggest *not* standing in front of the microwave while doing this.
If each frame requires 1 GB of data transfer using a PS2-like approach of bringing in each set of textures and then rendering the corresponding triangles, you get 1 fps. Render this on a cluster of 24 machines, and you get the 24 fps of 35mm cinema.
That's great... except where do you get those textures? You have to calculate them, most times frame by frame. The bleeding edge currently in CG animation is fur and hair modelling -- see Sully's fur in Monsters Inc. for an example of last year's Neat Thing. That's all sub-pixel stuff, even at 6000 x 4000 pixels resolution (70mm, not 35mm). Working out the mathematical dynamics of Sully's hair (collision, wind motion etc.) sometimes took minutes per frame.
Most top-notch cinema animation uses ray-trace in the mix of tools, especially for lighting effects, and no existing GPU can run a raytracer real-time, and especially not at 4k x 3k x 48 bpp.
The renderfarms you're talking about replacing with a 24-machine Beowolf cluster consists of four hundred or more Sun workstations, each hammering away 24/7/365. The producers have to allocate CPU time to various segments of the movie just like live-action movie producers allocate studio time or cash budgets. The directors have to cheat all the time to stay within that budget.
Your suggested system might be suitable for TV -- Max Headroom, maybe, with plastic hair and shiny suits, but not for the big screen, and not to compete in today's CG blockbuster film market.
IBM owned the PC-compatible marketplace for ten years, when a PC cost three thousand bucks, and made big profits during that time. Nowadays a desktop PC costs five hundred. They can't compete (except with laptops), and they don't even try any more. They leave Gateway, Dell, HPQ and the other dwarves to scrabble for a 3% manufacturing margin and continue to make gigabucks with Z-Server and their big iron and software divisions.
Remember IBM is still a bigger company than MicroSoft.
Came into work early one Monday morning, and on my way through the IT area noticed the new blade server had fallen over and crashed. Literally.
The six-foot cabinet was lying at an angle of about 45 degrees, propped up by three or four blade drawers that were fully extended on their guiderails.
This multikilobuck piece of super-hi-tech kit did not have the sort of anti-tipping mechanism el-cheapo filing cabinets have had for a century or more -- some method of preventing a user from extending more than one blade at a time. Somehow, somebody (maybe one of the cleaning staff -- we never did find out who) had pulled enough blade drawers out that the entire case had overbalanced and tipped forward.
Later the guys installing it found the manufacturer's solution to this problem in the packaging -- a large pressed-steel duckfoot meant to be bolted onto the front of the case. Hi-tech my fundament.
Harlan over-reacts a lot.
Dave Langford wrote a short piece in his monthly (multiple Hugo award-winning) SF fan newsletter ANSIBLE about the court AOL decision (see http://www.ansible.co.uk/ and check the April 2002 edition). Harlan got to hear about this, and the result was a call for his technically-enhanced friends to DoS the ANSIBLE site. Basically he was trying to get people to commit a Federal offence because he didn't like Dave's reporting of his court loss.
{Begin quote}
HARLAN ELLISON
- Sunday, April 7 2002 19:33:30
A SMALL FAVOR, IF YOU HAVE A MOMENT:
Apparently the English fan David Langford, who publishes a fanzine called
Ansible, has chosen either to misunderstand, or intentionally
misinterpret, the recent preliminary finding by Judge Cooper in my lawsuit
against AOL. He is passing along--on his electronic site--this
misinformation with the conclusion ELLISON LOSES AOL SUIT
{Clip}
And so: the small favor. Would some one or another of you find your e.way
onto that ANSIBLE site, whatever and wherever it is, and put a chokehold
on their crowing, lest they have to eat those rottten eggs poached in
their own perfidy.
{End quote}
Harlan detests the Internet. That doesn't stop him from asking others who use and understand it to commit a crime for him.
(Oh, and by the way, Dave Langford is Welsh, not English).
One problem with these flexidiscs is their reduced mass. CD and DVD drives determine the size of the disc inserted (or lack of a disc) by spinning up the turntable motor after the tray is closed and seeing how long it takes to reach a certain tacho speed. This allows for four states -
1. no disc
2. an 8cm disc (or the new business card discs, which don't work in some older drives because of this)
3. The standard 12cm disc.
4. Distorted or jammed disc (an error condition).
The lightweight flexidisc is likely to be recognised by a drive as either no-disc or 8cm, which is going to cause problems.
The adaptor mentioned will make up for this in part, but they are going to have to fabricate it quite precisely to make the disc/adaptor combo recogniseable as a "real" CD. There is also the possibility of the flexidisc lifting from the adaptor at high revs and hitting the lens on the optical sled. This is not a good thing to have happen to a four hundred buck DVD+RW drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw _LOTR:FOTR_ at the Mall of Georgia IMAX. AFAIK it was a special 35mm print, not an IMAX 70mm print; I don't think that Jackson had an IMAX crew following him around for three years. What was shown on the IMAX was the same as what I had seen on the regular megaplex screen a few days earlier. The sound system made up for the slightly duller image (although one of my companions fell asleep -- until the Balrog made its appearance...)
Brad Templeton got most of the fiction authors up for a Hugo in 1993 to agree to publish their work on CD-ROM. Vernor Vinge added a pile of notes about the writing of his novel "A Fire Upon The Deep" indexed to the text, giving the reader an insight into how he developed the story and the characters.
Disc-pressing plants need retooling every few years anyway. Stuff wears out, better lower-cost production equipment comes on the market and it's time to upgrade. They sell the old plant to Chinese companies...
AFAIK Blu-Ray discs will be pressed the same as DVDs and CDs are today, just to finer tolerances. The cost of production of a DVD is about 50 cents, same as a CD. A Blu-Ray disc might be more expensive to produce -- a buck perhaps. The retail cost of a CD or DVD bears no resemblance to the cost of the materials and production processes used. Blu-Ray will not be any different.
Back then the only blue lasers were hand-made low-power hangar queens that lasted about two hours in use and cost a couple of hundred bucks each. Now they have a MTBF in excess of a thousand hours and cost substantially less, and once they get into mass production they'll get even cheaper and longer-lived. That's progress for you.
Current-model DVD players use their 650nm lasers to play CD-Rs which are written using 780nm lasers with no problem. It can't work the other way around -- a 780nm laser is too crude to accurately decode a DVD track, but there's no reason why a 405nm Blu-Ray laser shouldn't track and read a regular DVD or a CD. One caveat is that CDs and DVDs are made in such a way that in their native pressed media, the depth of the pits is 1/4 the wavelength of the light normally used. This allows the laser optics to use an interference effect to enhance the signal; typically a pit in a pressed CD produces a 90% swing in the signal voltage from the optical detector. On a modern CD-R that drops to 30% as there is no pit involved, just a discoloured area of dye (CD-R/Ws are worse, at anything down to 14%).
First-gen Blu-Ray layers will play Blu-Ray pressed discs perfectly, DVD and CD pressed discs very well, DVD-Rs and CD-Rs not so well and rewriteable CD and DVD discs will be problematic. The next gen players will be better, just as modern DVD players don't have a problem with CD-R/W VCDs unlike the early days.
CD lasers run at 780nm, in the deep red-infrared end of the spectrum. DVD lasers run at 670nm, orangish-red. The Blu-Ray consortium plan to use a 405nm blue-violet laser (probably optically doubled from an 810nm infra-red laser). Optical doubling costs a lot of energy (about 90% or so of the input beam) but low-cost IR lasers have been in production for a long time, having been developed for CD-R writing operations. A read laser needs at least 10mW whereas a write laser needs about 100mW. They're still not going to be that cheap, at least to start with.
The use of optical doubling to get the 405nm beam means that a writeable Blu-Ray drive will take some time to develop. They may have to produce a native 400nm-range laser rather than relying on doubling, or develop new more sensitive optical dyes for the disc substrate.
The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts. HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC. Compressing HDTV harder is going to result in a display which is pretty well identical to existing DVD playback, rather negating the point of shelling out the bucks for a new receiver/display unit.
If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate; they can't get that from DVDs except by perhaps spinning them at four times their rated speed, and that only works for 44 minute TV episodes. If they want to sell two-hour long movies without having to do the laserdic thang of flipping and changing discs every hour or so, they'll need the blue laser.
Blu-Ray (tm) is backwards-compatible. It'll play anything that comes in a 12cm optical disc -- CD, CD/G, DVD, SVCD, maybe even DVD-Audio, but HDTV replay is the reason it was designed in the first place.
Don't expect to see Blu-ray (tm) recorders for a while though. It was bad enough getting DVD-R lasers to work.
You might be thinking of W95 and W95 OSR2. The second supported USB (about as well as the first Mac OSes did, i.e. pretty horribly).
The only way to get it was to pay for the upgrade (which I think was $79 instead of $109).
Summat like that. W95 didn't last on the shelves very long, as I recall, before OSR2 became the standard pre-load.
SP2 came out about a year after '98,
I think you're referring to W98SE, a much more stable version of the W98 rewrite. It's my OS of choice on older kit with limited memory and CPU power. ME was an abortion and rightly ignored by the buying public.
[stuff clipped]XP is a glorified name for a 2000 SP
Since XP involved virtually 100% new code, I wouldn't really call it a Service Pack.
people were demanding free Service Pack upgrades.
Before I switched to W2KPro I was running NT4, and the last SP for that old warhorse was 6A. I never paid for any of those. Some were even published on magazine front-cover CDs.
W2K and W2KPro have two SPs already issued, and it looks like SP3 will be out sometime soon -- some "hotfix" patches have been seen to refer to SP3 in the docs. All these have been free for download.
Is this a case of Apple ripping off Microsoft's ideas?
What version OS X was this? Public Beta, 10.0.4, 10.1 or what? There were a few problems with pre 10.1 systems and usb peripherals, but I haven't seen any (especially any that would cause a kernel panic) since 10.1.
It was a for-sale release, maybe 10.0.x back in February. I spend winter with friends in Atlanta - I run 100% Intel boxen, mine host is 100% Mac (and earns his living supporting an all-Mac enterprise). He was getting pissed off with the constant stream of patches to OS/X when it was supposed to work right first time -- his comments about the Spinning Beachball of Death were almost as bad as his mutterings about me polluting his house with the Spawn of Satan (Special Edition). We normally had to hard-reboot his iMac half a dozen times a day (as in, interrupt the power because the cute glowy-button stopped working). We certainly had a lot of fun trying to get some older programs running under the Classic interface.
I also had a go at fixing his other dead iMac -- you know, the one (Series B?) with the badly-designed power supply that dies after a year or so of use. No luck. A replacement PSU would cost about 150 bucks (as compared to a Win PC PSU that costs 30). Still, if you're rich then I suppose the TCO for a Mac doesn't worry you.
99% certain this would be a hardware problem; PCs aren't made by MicroSoft. A lot of Mom'n'Pop shops don't do proper burn-ins in order to shift the box out the door quick. The bigger manufacturers are more careful because a bad config of XP means 20,000 extra support calls next week.
On (new) systems running OS X, you're guaranteed that everything will work A-O-K. For the most part, its a guarantee on all systems that Apple lists as being "supported", though after-factory modifications abound and may not be supported *as well*.
How about USB peripherals? I had a USB floppy disk drive that works perfectly on my Sony Win laptop. I plugged it into an iMac running the last version of OS/9 and it worked perfectly there too, with native OS support and no need for extra drivers. When I tried it with OS/X on the same hardware, kernel panic.
I would expect a problem with a USB hot-swappable device to fail soft, not crash the OS. Steve Jobs is rumoured to have said "The floppy disc is dead". Is this his way of encouraging that?
You've got photojournalism people shooting digital because it's faster and offers some image structure advantages at high speed- no negatives to keep around for a 50 year retrospective.
And finally, you'll have the home consumer trying to back up all his photos to CD, organize them, and get thru the thousands upon thousands (note- most neg drawers aren't well organized either, but... ) of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
I know a guy, a keen photographer who got his wife and kid out the house before the fire really took hold. He didn't get his twenty-odd year collection of thousands of slides and negs out though. This was in the Eighties before he could have afforded to get them all digitised to a high standard.
All he has now are a few prints and some contact sheets of all that work. His pics of his mother -- gone. Snaps of his beloved boyhood dog taken with his birthday-present first camera -- gone. Forever.
He still shoots film and slide, medium format too. He digitises *everything*.
The T220 example was just to show that the "HD" screen is not, as some Apple pundits would like to believe, the largest LCD panel out there. Even the smaller T210 has stuff like S-VHS and SVGA connectors as well as the extra resolution (and I've seen reconditioned T210s sell for 2500 dollars retail).
Still puzzled by the low pixel densities of Apple displays. If we get a 17" iMac I wonder what the max res will be -- current model desktop 17" LCDs are 1280 x 1024. Maybe the Apple will be 1152 x 864. We'll know soon enough.
IBM's T210 21" LCD does 2048 x 1536, with SVGA, DVI, S-video and RCA composite video, including picture-in-picture. That's about 700 kpixels more than the Apple display.
IBM are also selling the T220, with a 3840 x 2400 maximum resolution for the same diagonal as the Apple "HD".
I've noticed that Apple's LCD panels always seem to be a step behind the rest of the world in their pixel density -- pretty ordinary laptops are running 1600 x 1200 resolutions while the Apple top-of-the-range G4 PowerBooks are stuck with a paltry 1280 x 854 dots (but look at the diagonal size! 15.2"! Wow!) I suppose they've got to shave the spec somewhere.
All you need to do is jigger the door safety switches on a Walmart Blue Tag special and learn Morse code. Open and shut the door to send text messages.
I would suggest *not* standing in front of the microwave while doing this.
That's great... except where do you get those textures? You have to calculate them, most times frame by frame. The bleeding edge currently in CG animation is fur and hair modelling -- see Sully's fur in Monsters Inc. for an example of last year's Neat Thing. That's all sub-pixel stuff, even at 6000 x 4000 pixels resolution (70mm, not 35mm). Working out the mathematical dynamics of Sully's hair (collision, wind motion etc.) sometimes took minutes per frame.
Most top-notch cinema animation uses ray-trace in the mix of tools, especially for lighting effects, and no existing GPU can run a raytracer real-time, and especially not at 4k x 3k x 48 bpp.
The renderfarms you're talking about replacing with a 24-machine Beowolf cluster consists of four hundred or more Sun workstations, each hammering away 24/7/365. The producers have to allocate CPU time to various segments of the movie just like live-action movie producers allocate studio time or cash budgets. The directors have to cheat all the time to stay within that budget.
Your suggested system might be suitable for TV -- Max Headroom, maybe, with plastic hair and shiny suits, but not for the big screen, and not to compete in today's CG blockbuster film market.
IBM owned the PC-compatible marketplace for ten years, when a PC cost three thousand bucks, and made big profits during that time. Nowadays a desktop PC costs five hundred. They can't compete (except with laptops), and they don't even try any more. They leave Gateway, Dell, HPQ and the other dwarves to scrabble for a 3% manufacturing margin and continue to make gigabucks with Z-Server and their big iron and software divisions.
Remember IBM is still a bigger company than MicroSoft.
Came into work early one Monday morning, and on my way through the IT area noticed the new blade server had fallen over and crashed. Literally.
The six-foot cabinet was lying at an angle of about 45 degrees, propped up by three or four blade drawers that were fully extended on their guiderails.
This multikilobuck piece of super-hi-tech kit did not have the sort of anti-tipping mechanism el-cheapo filing cabinets have had for a century or more -- some method of preventing a user from extending more than one blade at a time. Somehow, somebody (maybe one of the cleaning staff -- we never did find out who) had pulled enough blade drawers out that the entire case had overbalanced and tipped forward.
Later the guys installing it found the manufacturer's solution to this problem in the packaging -- a large pressed-steel duckfoot meant to be bolted onto the front of the case. Hi-tech my fundament.
{Begin quote}
HARLAN ELLISON - Sunday, April 7 2002 19:33:30
A SMALL FAVOR, IF YOU HAVE A MOMENT:
Apparently the English fan David Langford, who publishes a fanzine called Ansible, has chosen either to misunderstand, or intentionally misinterpret, the recent preliminary finding by Judge Cooper in my lawsuit against AOL. He is passing along--on his electronic site--this misinformation with the conclusion ELLISON LOSES AOL SUIT
{Clip}
And so: the small favor. Would some one or another of you find your e.way onto that ANSIBLE site, whatever and wherever it is, and put a chokehold on their crowing, lest they have to eat those rottten eggs poached in their own perfidy.
{End quote}
Harlan detests the Internet. That doesn't stop him from asking others who use and understand it to commit a crime for him.
(Oh, and by the way, Dave Langford is Welsh, not English).
1. no disc
2. an 8cm disc (or the new business card discs, which don't work in some older drives because of this)
3. The standard 12cm disc.
4. Distorted or jammed disc (an error condition).
The lightweight flexidisc is likely to be recognised by a drive as either no-disc or 8cm, which is going to cause problems.
The adaptor mentioned will make up for this in part, but they are going to have to fabricate it quite precisely to make the disc/adaptor combo recogniseable as a "real" CD. There is also the possibility of the flexidisc lifting from the adaptor at high revs and hitting the lens on the optical sled. This is not a good thing to have happen to a four hundred buck DVD+RW drive.