To me, what makes Pixar successful is that their business model seems to be based on quality not quantity. It seems the other movie houses will produce whatever they can get their hands provided the right names are attached, content be damned. It doesn't matter what kind of boring drivel or recycled plot line is thrown their way.
Pixar films, on the other hand, are fewer and further between. They are produced with a lot of tender loving care and it shows! All in all, this leaves us on the edges of our seats wondering what their next bundle of joy will be. Certainly Pixar could hire lots of techies and buy/lease plenty of horsepower to render with, but they don't! So each new movie gets its fair mind-share, and so they are fresh, witty, and a joy to watch. To me, that's what makes Pixar great...
"Pixar could hire lots of techies" Or they could just outsource to India! There fellow slashdotters... I saved you some time.
While reading this article, I was struck by the paragraph:
"From what we can see, the two factors in our success were competition and the creation of a market. Competition gave us a wide variety of choices as to motherboard, chipset and CPU. Once there was a reasonable market, vendors were concerned about being left out."
Initially my reaction was, "Yeah, the market existed, and they found a cheap way to exploit it, since you're doing all the work for them." But that was my pessimistic side. After careful consideration, I prefer to take the optimistic approach on this one. I prefer to think of it as them working for us. The fact that they put all the little stuff together for me, saves me a lot of time in my garage with breadboards and soldering irons. Now we can have more control than just what processor, cards, and OS go into our systems. And the more input we have into how our computers run, the better we can improve computing, innovate, and come up with knew ways of handling problems.
I would like to see some of people involved with this group get onto standards committees since now, it seems, they have a voice. I'd like to see more open source type input into some of tomorrow's technology. Maybe someday we can stop having kludge after kludge shoved down our throats... Wouldn't the world be a better place then?
Pudge, do your reading buddy... In the article linked to this post it says: "At 1.42GHz, the chip consumes 20W of power", in reference to the newly updated G4.
In this article we see, "The 970FX, meanwhile, consumes a mere 12.3W at 1.4GHz." Now which one of those would you rather have on top of your "small package"?
Sorry to interject off topic here, but I feel this needs clarification. Macs are VERY capable video editing stations on the cheap. (Sure you can argue the hardware is more expensive.. blah blah blah, but if you want editting cpaabilities, you need horsepower. Also note, the movie Cold Mountain was edited on a Mac) If it's software that's a concern here, check out the open source stuff that will compile nicely on OS X. Now try and do the same on a Windows box... Sorry guy Cygwin won't cut it for that.
As for my suggestion to the questioner. Get what you're comfortable with, the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER cards are nice, and from what I understand *most* are supported under Linux. (How hard is it to do video overlays in X?)
Oh great now my girlfriend is cyber-stalking me...;-) I guessn now I need to teach her some HTML so she can format her posts.
Beware sweety, there's lots of other dorks around here, just like me!
Games my girlfriend and I play...
on
Games For Both Of Us?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
My girlfriend and I play together very often, almost nightly in fact. We tend to get something new to play about once every three months. As we add games to our collection we can rotate around the ones we like. I tried the whole FPS thing, it was a no go; System Shock 2, Half-Life, and Halo fell flat on their faces. Interestingly though, she enjoyed watching hours of Star Wars: KOTOR. She was able to help with the interactive story-line and character alignment direction; while I took care of all the fighting. In fact, one of my good friends, also female and definitely not the video game type, came over and "played" too. It seems, to them, it was like watching an interactive soap opera. (If you've played the game, you might think so too.) This past weekend, she enjoyed watching me demolish XIII, a FPS with a damn good plot (starring David Duchovny).
However, the games that we truely play together or even competitively, are of a different vein.
We recommend:
Jardinians - "Like Breakout, But With More Gnome Bouncing", Fun to play competitively, and you can make your own levels to challenge each other. (Just make sure you can beat your own level)
Text Twist - Kind of a word jumble game. There's a free trial, give it a chance, it's a addictive. Fun to play cooperatively.
Super Collapse 2 This is an interesting puzzle game which is best played solo.
Spider Solitare - This one was free courtesy of Microsoft. Sure it's solitare, but you can play cooperatively too.
Monopoly Party - This old stand-by never dies. We stick to classic, not the weird "party mode". The CPU's are kind of stupid, but it's still a good time, especially with more people. The best part is, nobody has to be the bank, so games go sooo much faster.
Old NES ROMS - We have a hacked xbox that has a ROM emulator loaded on it and we love to play Super Mario 2 and some of the classics. And now we're talking about building a MAME/XNES Cabinet.
It seems that perhaps the "ease of portability" came back and bit them because of the modder scene. Perhaps they are looking at a non x86 platform to try to stem the tide of xbox hackers and homebrew apps.
I don't know which I'd prefer... Keep a Republican president and have to listen to these idiots go on about the election, or just give them a damn Democratic president so they'll shut up.
Don't say that... That seems to be the way of the Democratic Party followers these days, whine and cry until someone gives you what you want. I'm sorry everyone can't have everything the way they want it all the time, but that's life.
This guy can't keep enough food in the fridge and is contemplating living through the winter with no heat (unless he's waaaay down south) and he can still pay his hosting fees and domain renewals? Talk about mixed up priorities....
Does this mean that you only gain 3.49% when adding a 2nd processor? Obviously I don't expect things to scale linear but 3%!? Am I missing something here? And then 81.65% for quad? I'm not trolling, I'm looking for someone to explain what I'm missing.
Ummm, troll? Please. I'm sorry if you assumed I did this alone, but no, the IT org is stretched pretty thin as is thanks to layoffs and whatnot, day to day support is a huge pain without worrying about this.
I'm sorry if SOME of you guys work in tiny IT shops and don't know what it's like to support a huge corporation with global network and a follow-the-sun support model. You come do my job for a while, then maybe you'll see what a pain in the ass constant patching can be.
"this should make the jobs of admins everywhere easier"
No, this will make the lives of scriptkiddies everywhere easier. When you support 10,000 servers and 30,000 desktops for UNIX alone, things like this are a nightmare. I used to remember when being a sysadmin meant more than rolling out patches every week or so.
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
Whatever happened to the good ole days when people didn't believe everything they heard or read?
I'm just skeptical of an article that says we "heard from a friend of a friend." It's all too speculative, with little evidence of any real wrongdoing. Newel expressed concerns about the drivers that Nvidia was offering. He also said it took three times as long to write the codepath for NVIDIA, implying that they had to account for a lot more problems.
If you want to speculate, look at the slides from "shader day."
To qoute:
"During the development of that benchmark demo Valve found a lot of issues in current graphic card drivers of unnamed manufacturers:
Camera path-specific occlusion culling
Visual quality tradeoffs
e.g. lowered filtering quality, disabling fog
Screen-grab specific image rendering
Lower rendering precision
Algorithmic detection and replacement
Scene-specific handling of z writes
Benchmark-specific drivers that never ship
App-specific and version specific optimizations that are very fragile"
And we know that several of these have been explicitly tied to NVIDIA.
OK SO THE GPL ISN'T GPL'd? !!?!?!?!?!?!? WTF!?!?!?!?
You can't modify the GPL, remember
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
It boggles my mind that IBM seems to be sitting some what passive/defensively by and taking this crap from SCO. Then it occurs to me that perhaps they are letting SCO dig their own hole.
When all is said and done if SCO does not prevail they will owe IBM millions for improper revocation of licenses. The loss of the suit and the new liability could depress SCO's stock price to squat. SCO owes big bucks to lots of people. So now IBM can either buy the rights to UNIX from SCO, or swallow SCO. Although, I doubt they'd want the company since it's put itself in so much hot water.
I just hope that if IBM gets the UNIX code, we see more code make it into linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Pixar films, on the other hand, are fewer and further between. They are produced with a lot of tender loving care and it shows! All in all, this leaves us on the edges of our seats wondering what their next bundle of joy will be. Certainly Pixar could hire lots of techies and buy/lease plenty of horsepower to render with, but they don't! So each new movie gets its fair mind-share, and so they are fresh, witty, and a joy to watch. To me, that's what makes Pixar great...
"Pixar could hire lots of techies" Or they could just outsource to India! There fellow slashdotters... I saved you some time.
Not to sound snide or anything... It's just, if you are a geek, then you should know how to work one of those thing-a-mabobs.
"From what we can see, the two factors in our success were competition and the creation of a market. Competition gave us a wide variety of choices as to motherboard, chipset and CPU. Once there was a reasonable market, vendors were concerned about being left out."
Initially my reaction was, "Yeah, the market existed, and they found a cheap way to exploit it, since you're doing all the work for them." But that was my pessimistic side. After careful consideration, I prefer to take the optimistic approach on this one. I prefer to think of it as them working for us. The fact that they put all the little stuff together for me, saves me a lot of time in my garage with breadboards and soldering irons. Now we can have more control than just what processor, cards, and OS go into our systems. And the more input we have into how our computers run, the better we can improve computing, innovate, and come up with knew ways of handling problems.
I would like to see some of people involved with this group get onto standards committees since now, it seems, they have a voice. I'd like to see more open source type input into some of tomorrow's technology. Maybe someday we can stop having kludge after kludge shoved down our throats... Wouldn't the world be a better place then?
Hmmmmmm. "allowing it to send us anonymous package usage statistics"
It seems to me, if this were Tivo or some other "evil" corporation, slashdot would be up in arms over this "invasion of privacy."
Yeah, I said, so I'm a troll now, what'dya gonna go about it?... Bitter party of one!
Is is me or does it seem like we're breeding these genes back out of the gene pool at an alarming rate?
Oh well, I'm sure our new super-intelligent mouse overlords will take good care of us.
In this article we see, "The 970FX, meanwhile, consumes a mere 12.3W at 1.4GHz." Now which one of those would you rather have on top of your "small package"?
Obviously you've never heard of PERL. ;-)
As for my suggestion to the questioner. Get what you're comfortable with, the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER cards are nice, and from what I understand *most* are supported under Linux. (How hard is it to do video overlays in X?)
Beware sweety, there's lots of other dorks around here, just like me!
However, the games that we truely play together or even competitively, are of a different vein.
We recommend:
Jardinians - "Like Breakout, But With More Gnome Bouncing", Fun to play competitively, and you can make your own levels to challenge each other. (Just make sure you can beat your own level)
Text Twist - Kind of a word jumble game. There's a free trial, give it a chance, it's a addictive. Fun to play cooperatively.
Super Collapse 2 This is an interesting puzzle game which is best played solo.
Spider Solitare - This one was free courtesy of Microsoft. Sure it's solitare, but you can play cooperatively too.
Monopoly Party - This old stand-by never dies. We stick to classic, not the weird "party mode". The CPU's are kind of stupid, but it's still a good time, especially with more people. The best part is, nobody has to be the bank, so games go sooo much faster.
Old NES ROMS - We have a hacked xbox that has a ROM emulator loaded on it and we love to play Super Mario 2 and some of the classics. And now we're talking about building a MAME/XNES Cabinet.
...now if only I could break her into Linux.
It seems that perhaps the "ease of portability" came back and bit them because of the modder scene. Perhaps they are looking at a non x86 platform to try to stem the tide of xbox hackers and homebrew apps.
Imagine a beowulf... oh nevermind
Don't say that... That seems to be the way of the Democratic Party followers these days, whine and cry until someone gives you what you want. I'm sorry everyone can't have everything the way they want it all the time, but that's life.
I don't use webmail, you insensitive clod.
Oh wait, this isn't this weeks poll?
This guy can't keep enough food in the fridge and is contemplating living through the winter with no heat (unless he's waaaay down south) and he can still pay his hosting fees and domain renewals? Talk about mixed up priorities....
It may seem like i was on crack, but I promise they were prescription meds.
linux-2.6.0-test5 - 992.06 - Uni
linux-2.6.0-test5 - 1017.43 - Dual
linux-2.6.0-test5 - 5406.68 - Quad
Does this mean that you only gain 3.49% when adding a 2nd processor? Obviously I don't expect things to scale linear but 3%!? Am I missing something here? And then 81.65% for quad? I'm not trolling, I'm looking for someone to explain what I'm missing.
When you support 10,000 servers and 30,000 desktops for UNIX alone..
I'm sorry if SOME of you guys work in tiny IT shops and don't know what it's like to support a huge corporation with global network and a follow-the-sun support model. You come do my job for a while, then maybe you'll see what a pain in the ass constant patching can be.
"this should make the jobs of admins everywhere easier"
No, this will make the lives of scriptkiddies everywhere easier. When you support 10,000 servers and 30,000 desktops for UNIX alone, things like this are a nightmare. I used to remember when being a sysadmin meant more than rolling out patches every week or so.
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
Whatever happened to the good ole days when people didn't believe everything they heard or read?
I'm just skeptical of an article that says we "heard from a friend of a friend." It's all too speculative, with little evidence of any real wrongdoing. Newel expressed concerns about the drivers that Nvidia was offering. He also said it took three times as long to write the codepath for NVIDIA, implying that they had to account for a lot more problems. If you want to speculate, look at the slides from "shader day."
To qoute: "During the development of that benchmark demo Valve found a lot of issues in current graphic card drivers of unnamed manufacturers:
Camera path-specific occlusion culling
Visual quality tradeoffs e.g. lowered filtering quality, disabling fog
Screen-grab specific image rendering
Lower rendering precision
Algorithmic detection and replacement
Scene-specific handling of z writes
Benchmark-specific drivers that never ship
App-specific and version specific optimizations that are very fragile"
And we know that several of these have been explicitly tied to NVIDIA.
Now you know how it feels to be a Republican...
I wonder how development of directed energy weapons is coming?
WTF!?!?!?!?
You can't modify the GPL, remember Version 2, June 1991 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
When all is said and done if SCO does not prevail they will owe IBM millions for improper revocation of licenses. The loss of the suit and the new liability could depress SCO's stock price to squat. SCO owes big bucks to lots of people. So now IBM can either buy the rights to UNIX from SCO, or swallow SCO. Although, I doubt they'd want the company since it's put itself in so much hot water.
I just hope that if IBM gets the UNIX code, we see more code make it into linux.
Now wouldn't that be a fun scenario!?!?!?