At least Steve is backing his own products now. Real question is how long have Pixar being using clusters of the new rack-mounted systems? Or testing any other nice hardware. With many render farms being linux (or other nix) based, OS X does seem like an ideal solution given powerful enough hardware. You can create a solid workflow of machine on a common platform that just about everyone in the team can use. OS X does after all have a friendly GUI as well as the powerfull backend. Guess renderman is on Darwin/OS X now too then:)
Yep, it's a real shame that again lack of knowledge/information is likely to cause confusion. For those in the know, cd's have long been a bizzare and often black art (especially in the early days of burning). Now companies such as Epic and Columbia (read: Sony) are selling things that in the eyes of 99% of the population are Audio-CD's. People don't don't tend to care what format a cd is in, but if it works in their cd-player, then they expect it to work in their computer's cd player. Selling non red-book format cd's in this way, causing the potential to damage hardware is a extreme case of taking advantage of the general public IMHO. Interestingly enough, it's not just computers that have problems, many other cd-playing devices have problems, altho non as drastic as the iMac it appears. (Altho you can nicely crash an x-box using a celine dione cd I believe). Now, I wonder how Sony made devices handle these non-cd's;)
...using come copy-protected cd's in the new flat-panel iMacs can be a VERY expensive mistake. Certain cd's cause the cd drive to jam and then the machine refuses to reboot. This means you have to take it to an Apple Dealer (or do it yourself it you know what your doing) to take the thing apart and manually wind the eject cogs. Seems there's no option for the good old fashioned paper-clip trick with these drives. More details here: http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/docs/cel dion.sh tml
It was interesting to hear some of the comments about the Aibo from ppl close to Sony at last years GDCE. Masaya Matsuura mentioned that some of the people around the design department got extremely upset with some of the things that the Aibo was made to do. "In Matsuura's office they had an Aibo for the employees to care for and play with. The Aibo is attracted to the color pink--he has a pink ball that he will walk up to and kick or butt with his head. To test the programming of Aibo, one of Matsuura's programmers tied a pink ball to a wire, attached to Aibo, dangling in front of his face. Of course, Aibo kept on walking forward, never stopping. A female employee was upset at this "torturing" of Aibo and sent a memo to Matsuura, causing an investigation as to why the robot dog was tortured and if others were upset by this."
Actually there have been quite a few technical discussions of OS X, just not always where you'd expect them. The International BSD conference in the UK last year had a number of OS X sessions. There's a lot of highly technical stuff out there pertaining to OS X, it's just not always where you'd expect, or delivered to you on a silver platter (as many traditional Mac users expect it to be);) Apple's dev site (end even more so the dev mailing lists) are also full of info and growing all the time.
...have appeared in the build up to the start of the WWDC (today). There's also an updated "UNIX Porting Guide" http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx /Darwin/ index.html
All of the latest updates can be found here: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/ whatsne w.html
One of the older bits of documentation I came across recently was that on Assembly under OS X, including details for the i386 architecture. http://developer.apple.com/techpubs /macosx/Develop erTools/Assembler/AssemblerTOC.html
user: cd/ rm -rf * "OMG! where have all my files gone" reply: "PEBKAC"
All people need to do is enable root and then su or sudo if they absolutely have to. If they can't fix any problem they are having not being logged in as root, then they should go and read some books. Hopefully some Mac users who are new to the *nix world will get some benefit from O'Reilly's new "Learning Unix for Mac OS X" book. Not that there aren't plenty of other books that should teach them the lie of the land, but I have a feeling this one will be popular as it's focussed on OS X.
If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways?
Then again, it seems extremely probable that more people than ever are willing to throw money at unfounded concepts in the hope of reaping back even more for themselves. At the same time, people seem to be extremely unwilling to throw money at projects which have solid foundations in helping humanity, but which they will unlikely get no monetary gratification for.
...from this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also a product of a deranged imagination.
(Well, reiteration of the unfortunate state of much of the world has to be wrapped in friendly quotes)
I remember an interview with D.A. concerning the TV adaptation where he recounted how many ppl had asked him about what computers and software they had used to make the actual Guide sequences. Much to their disappointment (and Adams' amusement) he replied "..umm, well, actually they were all hand-drawn." I'm still waiting for someone to create all of the info in the Guide excerpts in Flash;)
"I'm never going to be cruel to a Gin & Tonic again"
"Asked to evaluate language in the proposed settlements, Madnick studied the documents, then shook his head and said, "I somehow think there's something I'm missing, but I can't spot it at the moment."
The pre-prepared script from Microsoft that they had e-mailed to him perchance? This mail was of course lost when someone sent him a malicious VB script entitled "How to make quick easy money". ;)
While you may say "still", some of us have only just been able to get our hands on them, not having the resources to pay for Select or Premier membership. This is the first time the tools have been made available to us non-payed-up developers (this includes students, as they don't receive software-seeds). The tools included code based on gcc 3.1 which is itself still in testing and hasn't been released as 'final'. GCC3 is not the only major jump tho, ProjectBuilder has had a pretty major overhaul. I'm sure the tools will be out of Beta soon, WWDC 2002 is next week, and in for what it's worth the tools are pretty stable as they are, not perfect but pretty good. Apple have been using the new version of ProjectBuilder internally for a lot of things and if you checkout any recent additions to the Darwin opensource repository you'll see this for yourself:)
and done a long time ago too, like a year, so this is very much a case of non-news. You gotta love the DC signed by Stallman:) http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/images/lwe01.jpg There's also a LinuxDC site at sourceforge: http://linuxdc.sourceforge.net/
Agreed, it's a pretty standard beast in core hardware terms - vendor_id : GenuineIntel model name : Pentium MMX (stepping : 3) cpu MHz : 232.099722 ioports including: dma;keyboard;fpu;idex2;serialx2;eth T here's an Acer Labs M1521-1523 chipset with M5219 IDE controller. Interesting quote "After the install I stated poking around the machine to find out what kind of hardware it hads a so forth". After! I'd have thought cheking the hardware would have been the FIRST thing to do. Not to say it's not a fun little project, but getting something up and running (like the LCD display) would have been a bit more of an achievement. Or maybe a distributed cash-register-cluster;)
I thought that the disks were hybrid's now? As for color, you won't have a lot of choice for the sort of machine you would want to run LW, ie a TiPb. I know it was a joke but hey;) The iBooks are nice, but only have G3's (750cx) and poor GPU's (RageMobility128) which just can't cope too well with complex 3d. TiPb has a G4 and a RadeonMobility which are much more up to the job.
You could always try it on OS X, I'm not a 3D guy myself but know people who use LW and OS X. It isn't too shabby even on one of the new G4 iMac's. Apparently there will be some nice Altivec speedups in 7.5 too so the dual 1Ghz boxes should scream. ONe area that has been lacking is OpenGL support in OS X (no shader support etc) but these should be changing soon, watch out for developments at WWDC 2002. So you get the power and flexibility of nix + top-of-the-rang 3D app + some sexy hardware, can't go wrong IMHO:)
Slashdot Mirror
....and go straight to the original story:. html
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc2002/pixar
At least Steve is backing his own products now. Real question is how long have Pixar being using clusters of the new rack-mounted systems? Or testing any other nice hardware. With many render farms being linux (or other nix) based, OS X does seem like an ideal solution given powerful enough hardware. You can create a solid workflow of machine on a common platform that just about everyone in the team can use. OS X does after all have a friendly GUI as well as the powerfull backend. :)
Guess renderman is on Darwin/OS X now too then
heh :)
question is, can we use the Aibo SDK to get it to recognise a copy protected cd, bark and urinate on it?
Yep, it's a real shame that again lack of knowledge/information is likely to cause confusion. For those in the know, cd's have long been a bizzare and often black art (especially in the early days of burning). Now companies such as Epic and Columbia (read: Sony) are selling things that in the eyes of 99% of the population are Audio-CD's. People don't don't tend to care what format a cd is in, but if it works in their cd-player, then they expect it to work in their computer's cd player. Selling non red-book format cd's in this way, causing the potential to damage hardware is a extreme case of taking advantage of the general public IMHO. Interestingly enough, it's not just computers that have problems, many other cd-playing devices have problems, altho non as drastic as the iMac it appears. (Altho you can nicely crash an x-box using a celine dione cd I believe). ;)
Now, I wonder how Sony made devices handle these non-cd's
...using come copy-protected cd's in the new flat-panel iMacs can be a VERY expensive mistake. Certain cd's cause the cd drive to jam and then the machine refuses to reboot. This means you have to take it to an Apple Dealer (or do it yourself it you know what your doing) to take the thing apart and manually wind the eject cogs. Seems there's no option for the good old fashioned paper-clip trick with these drives.l dion.sh tml
More details here:
http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/docs/ce
..you can't teach an old dog new tricks ;)
It was interesting to hear some of the comments about the Aibo from ppl close to Sony at last years GDCE. Masaya Matsuura mentioned that some of the people around the design department got extremely upset with some of the things that the Aibo was made to do.
"In Matsuura's office they had an Aibo for the employees to care for and play with. The Aibo is attracted to the color pink--he has a pink ball that he will walk up to and kick or butt with his head. To test the programming of Aibo, one of Matsuura's programmers tied a pink ball to a wire, attached to Aibo, dangling in front of his face. Of course, Aibo kept on walking forward, never stopping. A female employee was upset at this "torturing" of Aibo and sent a memo to Matsuura, causing an investigation as to why the robot dog was tortured and if others were upset by this."
Actually there have been quite a few technical discussions of OS X, just not always where you'd expect them. The International BSD conference in the UK last year had a number of OS X sessions. ;)
There's a lot of highly technical stuff out there pertaining to OS X, it's just not always where you'd expect, or delivered to you on a silver platter (as many traditional Mac users expect it to be)
Apple's dev site (end even more so the dev mailing lists) are also full of info and growing all the time.
...have appeared in the build up to the start of the WWDC (today).x /Darwin/ index.html
/ whatsne w.html
s /macosx/Develop erTools/Assembler/AssemblerTOC.html
There's also an updated "UNIX Porting Guide"
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos
All of the latest updates can be found here:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx
One of the older bits of documentation I came across recently was that on Assembly under OS X, including details for the i386 architecture.
http://developer.apple.com/techpub
user: /
cd
rm -rf *
"OMG! where have all my files gone"
reply:
"PEBKAC"
All people need to do is enable root and then su or sudo if they absolutely have to. If they can't fix any problem they are having not being logged in as root, then they should go and read some books. Hopefully some Mac users who are new to the *nix world will get some benefit from O'Reilly's new "Learning Unix for Mac OS X" book. Not that there aren't plenty of other books that should teach them the lie of the land, but I have a feeling this one will be popular as it's focussed on OS X.
If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways?
Then again, it seems extremely probable that more people than ever are willing to throw money at unfounded concepts in the hope of reaping back even more for themselves. At the same time, people seem to be extremely unwilling to throw money at projects which have solid foundations in helping humanity, but which they will unlikely get no monetary gratification for.
...from this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also a product of a deranged imagination.
(Well, reiteration of the unfortunate state of much of the world has to be wrapped in friendly quotes)
I remember an interview with D.A. concerning the TV adaptation where he recounted how many ppl had asked him about what computers and software they had used to make the actual Guide sequences. Much to their disappointment (and Adams' amusement) he replied "..umm, well, actually they were all hand-drawn." I'm still waiting for someone to create all of the info in the Guide excerpts in Flash ;)
"I'm never going to be cruel to a Gin & Tonic again"
yeh, it would have been a case of taking "Think different" a bit far ;)
...or install Cygwin and use lynx ;)
"Asked to evaluate language in the proposed settlements, Madnick studied the documents, then shook his head and said, "I somehow think there's something I'm missing, but I can't spot it at the moment."
The pre-prepared script from Microsoft that they had e-mailed to him perchance?
This mail was of course lost when someone sent him a malicious VB script entitled "How to make quick easy money".
;)
While you may say "still", some of us have only just been able to get our hands on them, not having the resources to pay for Select or Premier membership. This is the first time the tools have been made available to us non-payed-up developers (this includes students, as they don't receive software-seeds). :)
The tools included code based on gcc 3.1 which is itself still in testing and hasn't been released as 'final'. GCC3 is not the only major jump tho, ProjectBuilder has had a pretty major overhaul.
I'm sure the tools will be out of Beta soon, WWDC 2002 is next week, and in for what it's worth the tools are pretty stable as they are, not perfect but pretty good. Apple have been using the new version of ProjectBuilder internally for a lot of things and if you checkout any recent additions to the Darwin opensource repository you'll see this for yourself
and done a long time ago too, like a year, so this is very much a case of non-news. :)
You gotta love the DC signed by Stallman
http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/images/lwe01.jpg
There's also a LinuxDC site at sourceforge:
http://linuxdc.sourceforge.net/
Agreed, it's a pretty standard beast in core hardware terms -
T here's an Acer Labs M1521-1523 chipset with M5219 IDE controller. ;)
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium MMX (stepping : 3)
cpu MHz : 232.099722
ioports including:
dma;keyboard;fpu;idex2;serialx2;eth
Interesting quote "After the install I stated poking around the machine to find out what kind of hardware it hads a so forth".
After! I'd have thought cheking the hardware would have been the FIRST thing to do.
Not to say it's not a fun little project, but getting something up and running (like the LCD display) would have been a bit more of an achievement. Or maybe a distributed cash-register-cluster
I thought that the disks were hybrid's now? As for color, you won't have a lot of choice for the sort of machine you would want to run LW, ie a TiPb. I know it was a joke but hey ;) The iBooks are nice, but only have G3's (750cx) and poor GPU's (RageMobility128) which just can't cope too well with complex 3d. TiPb has a G4 and a RadeonMobility which are much more up to the job.
....thats a bit harsh! I think there's a good future for these new-fangled devices everyones talking about.
You could always try it on OS X, I'm not a 3D guy myself but know people who use LW and OS X. It isn't too shabby even on one of the new G4 iMac's. Apparently there will be some nice Altivec speedups in 7.5 too so the dual 1Ghz boxes should scream. ONe area that has been lacking is OpenGL support in OS X (no shader support etc) but these should be changing soon, watch out for developments at WWDC 2002. :)
So you get the power and flexibility of nix + top-of-the-rang 3D app + some sexy hardware, can't go wrong IMHO