Microsoft, as with all other vendors will be forced to port their products to Linux when Linux's market share grows to the point that it cannot be ignored.
I am an extremely media-oriented user, which is why i also have a Win95 desktop sitting next to my Linux box. I use this for 3D graphics, video and audio work. I would use NT, but NT is an expensive dog. I can't even play my games on NT.
However, I prefer to work on Linux, I prefer to surf the net on Linux, and given the availability of my software, i would ditch Windows permanently without a second thought. Wine now runs one of my most useful compositing tools (Newtek Aura) and with proper hardware OpenGL from SGI and NVidia, 3D app manufacturers will have no reason not to port. I've lost too much work to crashes to have any respect for a Windows OS.
I've been involved with streaming media reasonably heavily (setting up 5 radio stations and doing various live video streams) all using servers running BSD and RealNetworks servers.
There is NO WAY IN HELL i would trust an NT box to keep a bandwidth-heavy application like video streaming up 24 hours a day. Unless MS have *NIX based server software, theres no way i could even consider adopting their streaming software.
But thats purely a reliability issue, and at the end of the day you have to give your customers what they want. This applies to MS as much as anyone else, and the Linux-using customers will need to have their market serviced.
Linux users are seen as fringe by many large companies, but its us Linux users who will drive the next phase of the computing revolution. Linux is the face of a useful UNIX on the desktop, along with MacOS X perhaps, and against that, Windows cannot stand.
One day, Ballmer and Gates will roll out of bed and find their entire company is irrelevant because everybody who develops software has dumped their crappy OS and gone back to UNIX in one form or another.
With Apple's long overdue new OS, it is interesting to note that Microsoft is now the only major OS vendor without a *NIX-like or *NIX-based OS offering.
To me, this is pretty pointless.. I can see why you might use it for broadcast, like Dev Null on 'The Net', but on the internet it's pretty naff. Presumably they'll need to stream a voice-quality feed and either gesture information to a client-side app or send new images down as she talks. This will be much slower than just *reading* the news, so i doubt i'll be taking much interest. The only thing that might make it worthwhile is if someone hacked the system to make Ananova read the news completely naked. But being a virtual character, this isn't very exciting anyway. I do agree that a tux version would be neat. perhaps i could modify my existing tux model.. currently he only shoots a hole in bill gate's face but hey. http://www.spunk.co.nz/spunkezine/reanimator/
surely using PDF means many CPU cycles devoted to decoding and rendering vector descriptions for each icon.
Admittedly, the load would not be great, but all these little drains on performance add up.. one of the reasons i have largely switched to Linux is that my P200 running RH6.0 / Enlightenment / Gnome just feels faster than my Celeron400 running Windows 95.
Surely, for small, often photograph-based images, bitmaps are much more efficient than PDF?
Why don't they just shut the hell up and *SHIP* MacOS X? I guess Steve Jobs has changed his old tenet to 'Real Artists Sue'....
The real problem is that Win9x with an Aqua theme on it probably runs a lot nicer than Aqua itself.
Apple are finding themselves in the dubious position of only contributing a look and feel to their OS. The guts of it is BSD 4.4, the 'middleware' is NeXTStep, the MacOS has been around for years, so what have Apple actually *done*?
'Well, we did contribute some really nice transparent plastic to the landfills of the 21st century...'
I can see where the authors are coming from saying they don't support hardware acceleration, but this should be an OS-supported feature.
i.e. Video4Linux should have some kind of hardware abstraction layer, like Video for Windows.
This would allow hardware manufacturers to develop codecs for Linux (perhaps a sly way to do it would be to find some way of making VFW codecs work under V4Linux.)
Cos, without hardware acceleration, video editing on Linux or any platform is a joke, nothing more.
Uncompressed Video requires something like 22MB/s of dedicated bandwidth. This is a heavy load for any system to handle, hence the need for efficient compression schemes (read hardware compression) and high-speed storage.
My Iomega Buz does a pretty good (has some lousy 'features') on the whole of encoding and decoding MJPEG video under Windows. It needs about 4-5 MB/s sustained transfer rate from my hard disk for 720x576 (full-PAL, non-square pixels) video.
Theres no way my CPU (Cele-400) is fast enough to do MJPEG compression/decompression in realtime, and while the Athlons/P3s are undoubtedly fast, i bet they would struggle too.
I'd love to use my Linux box to do video editing/compositing etc., and interestingly, Newtek Aura 1.0 runs surprisingly well under WINE last time i looked.
What is the status of hardware support for Video4Linux? While analog MJPEG support is probably not of utmost concern, Linux should not let the DV revolution pass it by. Firewire and DV support is a critical area that Linux falls behind both the Mac and Windows, and as much video work is going down this path, this is where Linux developers should focus their efforts.
It seems to me then, that any surface with a hole in means that it's inside is indistinguishable from it's outside, topologically.
Wouldn't practically every surface imaginable fit into this category (if you count holes at microscopic, molecular and atomic scales)?
Doesn't this then mean that every object we encounter in everyday life has zero volume and could have an 'ACME' label slapped on it and sold at a methematical curiosity?
>I wonder how extensive your testing has been, and >how valid? Octane MXE? Onyx2?
Remember i am talking about *fillrate*, i.e the number of texels per second.
I do not dispute the fact that a lot of SGI hardware can transform and display many polys per second, far in excess of a TNT/TNT2. However, it is interesting to note how well the games cards compare in terms of fillrate etc. Add geometry processing, like with the GeForce, and the difference between a Reality Engine (quoted as maxing out at 12 million polys per second) and a GeForce (which probably maxes out around 10 million polys/sec) is getting pretty slim.
Also, Riven was built in SoftImage, which runs just as well on a cheap-ass Wintel workstation with a decent OpenGL accelerator (which some of the newer models of games cards will function very well as) as it does on an SGI O2/Octane for much less $$.
Anyway, Even with the best SGI hardware the Riven ppl could acquire, they still had a lot of trouble with the system (granted, it was mainly software) choking on the number of polygons to be rendered.
And for rendering horsepower, i don't think anyone could successfully argue that a network of SGI machines would outperform a network of Intel or Alpha machines, price-performance wise.
An R12000 Octane may be fast, but theres no way its faster than the 5-10 P3/K7 processors you could get for the same price.
I do a fair bit of 3D stuff with Lightwave and other packages, and my TNT2 performs pretty well for the money it cost me. I spose if you have twenty grand or so to throw around you can afford fancy gear, but personally i am extremely thankful to 3dfx and NVidia for bringing good quality 3D acceleration within the reach of the average user, or independent artist.
Something that SGI seems to have zero interest in doing.
Yeah, except the Voodoo 4/5's will support up to 1GB of texture memory, and up to 100 graphics CPUs for professional applications. I'm sure NVidia has a similar product in the works to compete. SGI has nothing to compete with this, or at least nothing that will be in any way proce-competitive.
The NVidia GeForce comes reasonably close on paper to outperforming an SGI Reality Engine (can't say for sure, i can't afford an SGI Reality Engine to test it)
The 800MB of texture memory is also just main memory AGP-style (faster, of course due to the crossbar-switch architecture), but how long before the K7 with it's Alpha-style crossbar bus surpasses the speed of the SGI bus at consumer prices?
3dfx use the same core as the consumer part, so they can make their money off the gamers, and they aren't totally reliant on their (not so numerous) high-end customers.
Yet for the first time their consumer cards will be part of an enormously scalable architecture which will most likely nail 3dlabs etc. to the wall.
I predict 3dfx and Nvidia will end up being the two 'big boys' in 3D graphics into the next millenium, maybe for no other reason than computer games and consumer VR applications will be a far bigger industry than broadcast, film, engineering and scientific visualisation combined.
It sounds like SGI does have the right idea, partnering with NVidia.
And fair enough, as of right now, today, you can't get a consumer graphics card that will give you access to 800 MB of texture memory (although, I think the AGP bus does support exactly this type of thing, storing textures in system memory), but the number of applications that really do run faster on SGI hardware are disappearing at an incredible rate.
And, on the other hand, there isn't any SGI hardware that can outperform even a TNT2 for fillrate.
Even a TNT2 can put textures onto polygons faster than any SGI hardware that i know of.
And show me an SGI machine that runs Quake 2/Quake 3 faster than an 500+ Mhz Intel PC + $300 Graphics accelerator for anything less than 5 times the price.
Your applications may benefit from an SGI box, but mine positively suffer.
One of the Miller? brothers is also working on VR worlds-type stuff, along with Richard Vander Wende, the man responsible for most of Riven's 'feel'. I would love to see Carmacks awesome talents + The Cyan teams awesom talents blended. Riven comes close to being a VR world, but lacks Quake's immersivity I would love to see the two combined.
How about some kind of fluid-filled bag, a breast implant comes to mind.... which could slide over itself, i.e. same idea as walking on a sphere, but flattened out into a 'pad'.
i'm thinking of a 'bag' filled with a suitably viscous fluid, and painted with 'dots' like a trackball. Inside the bag, thered be a teflon-coated ring to provide shape, which would allow the sides of the bag to slide nicely over it.
The bag would sit in a teflon coated 'dish' with one or more optical sensors, like a logitech trackball's (as suggested by a previous poster) in the bottom of it.
The fluid would provide suspension, and as the bag slid, motion could be easily tracked in any direction.
There are probably problems with this type of arrangement, but it seems more fundamentally workable than any assembly of single-axis treadmills. my 2c.
The film industry is pretty specific with regard to this. No reel, no job.
Fortunately, the equipment necessary to cut CG shots to video is pretty cheap these days, so all you really need to put in is the talent and hard work. (easier said than done, of course)
My advice to you (and this will likely raise howls of protest from many) is to warez (or, if youre extraordinarily rich, buy) whatever package will do the job for you and get as much quality work onto tape as you can. As one poster pointed out previously, its unlikely any individual is going to be able to shell out the $17,000 for a legal seat of Houdini, but one more skilled operator means at least one more sale in the future for Side Effects, those that the software is useless to would never buy it anyway... so i don't see the 'revenue loss' there. Please no flames, i don't want to start any piracy wars.
If youre not already in the industry, its probably harder to put together a lengthy demo tape, since you can't put a 3 minute sequence on there and note that you painted out the wires attached to the actor or whatever.
Still, the idea is to show off your abilities as much as possible, so it might be an idea to put down 'process-related' stuff, i.e. how you worked an idea from concept through to completion. i.e when you do an animation sequence, put your final rendered sequence at the beginning of the tape, then put on your animatics, your concept sketches, your set models etc. This gives a prospective emplyer a better view of not just what you can produce (lets face it, its bloody hard to do film-quality f/x on a desktop PC), but how much work you did to achieve your result, how you solved production problems etc. These things are just as important as your ability to produce a good looking result.
Although, in most large film f/x houses, the workflow is pretty compartmentalised - that is, if you want to do 'everything' - script, model, animate, production, post-production, direction, scoring and anything else you have time for, then you might find life difficult.
That is, in most cases you'll get a job doing one thing, one thing only, and that one thing is what will dominate your life for the duration of production.
The games industry might be more interesting, i know it is for me. Personally, i don't really 'get' movies.. Games are so much more interesting and immersive to me. YMMV.
I do a lot of stuff with Lightwave (www.newtek.com), and a little bit of Hash's Animation Master, which is the one package in the 3D animation arena that is actually affordable (Blender (www.blender.nl) is of course completely free, and deserves special mention). mainly as a hobby but i have been approached by a film f/x house, who said they were impressed but were worried that i might not enjoy doing just one task... (my background spans many areas, from 3D AutoCAD operation, to CGI programming)
i agreed with them, and frankly, my skills aren't quite honed enough for me to command a lead animator's position, or high-level TD, which might afford me the ability to work in a number of areas within the film production pipeline.
So, I just keep plugging away, modelling, animating and rendering stuff, which is a lot of fun. I pay the bills by doing CGI programming, teaching at a design school and working on te production crew for multimedia exhibitions.
I am 100% confident that i will be easily good enough to get a job 'in pixels', or to start my own games/fx company one day, but be aware that the only way to get there is to put in 150% effort, since making quality CG artwork is not as easy as it looks.
If you are familiar at all with the warez scene, you'll know that practically any piece of commercial software (especially for the Windows platform) is available for free, if you know where to look. The situation has been like this for quite some time now, lets say 4 years.
The main benefactor of this situation has been Microsoft (a lot of people buy computers so they can play games, and run apps that they basically know they don't actually have to pay for.) And of course, since the OS is bundled with the PC, MS gets their money no matter what.
In fact, i'd go so far as to say that the biggest reason Windows is so successful is the incredible range of pirated software available for it.
Linux is (and will be more) popular for the same basic reason. You can get software for free. In the case of GPLed and otherwise free software, you don't even have to break the law.
However, software sales have not decreased, and in actuality, most people who find a program to be genuinely useful, or who base their careers on the use of a piece of software, usually are quite happy to pay for it.
I buy games i know i could simply rip off an FTP server if i wanted to. I don't like buying games or apps that i can't try out first.
I do use several 3D apps that i have openly pirated, but only because the price tag on that software is genuinely far more than i can afford. I don't use the programs in a commercial capacity, but if i do i will certainly be buying them. If those programs hadn't been available through piracy, there would be no way that i could have become proficient with them and hence no way i could afford to base a business on my use of them. thats one less potential user of the software, and hence, one less potential sale. Do you count that as lost revenue?
The whole idea of 'software' encourages and in some ways makes unavoidable the issue of 'piracy'.
If a vendor of a product was really committed to eliminating warez, they would sell the product along with custom hardware to run it. If the product is that useful to their customers, then they should have no problem selling it. The fact is that this makes it so expensive to produce, that the market shrinks too much to justify production in the first place. Making your product easily piratable guarantees wide consumer acceptance and distribution, leading to greater potential sales.
This will probably raise howls of protest from developers of commercial software, but thats the way i see it.
The fact is, consumers demand the ability to pirate software. Piracy fuels 'innovation' and growth within the computer industry, not to mention facilitates the education of an entire new generation of future programmers etc.
How many 15 year olds can afford the $21,000 a year, for example, for a license to Side Effects' Houdini or a similar package? but if you put a thousand 15 year olds in front of it, and somehow 10 of those 15 year olds finds it to be a useful tool, making cool stuff with it, and grow up to be great computer artists, then thats 10 more seats of Houdini that they'll buy in future, as well as generating major interest among their peers etc., perhaps leading to further sales. If those 15 year olds had never even seen Houdini, then thats 10 possibly great computer artists, whose talents go to waste.
I think the real solution to this problem is to make WINE run IE, as well as all the multimedia plugins. You could run Win32 Netscape, Opera etc... sure, there'd be a performance penalty, but Windows itself comes with a hefty performance penalty, and that doesn't seem to stop people from running it. Linux shoudl be moving to 'Embrace and Extend' the Win32 platform. Easier said than done, to be sure, but this would certainly make Linux a moe attractive platform to many people. Hell, if connectix can do it on a mac (Virtual PC) why can't we do it on Linux? Anyone have any idea how far away WINE is from being able to run IE?
Tux giving Bill Gates a good spanking is the obvious choice. I think having bill gate's lilly-white ass getting enthusiastically caned by the penguin is the only really appropriate way to illustrate anything linux-related.
This is one of the apps i have been missing badly for a long time.
Despite what many people think, VRML2 is actually a pretty advanced, extensible and downright useful file format.
It is node-based and therefore supports complex activity. The way VRML 2 works reminds me a lot of the way high-end 3D programs like Maya are architected.
While i haven't used it much recently (since i haven't been able to get a browser for Linux), i think it is actually a really good foundation for a pervasive 3D imaging model.
It is based on ASCII text, which might make some of the hardcore go 'pfft', but theres no reason that it can't incorporate binary file formats, like BSP trees using EXTERNPROTOs.. the code to handle the binary data, if it is defined in the EXTERNPROTO can be dynamically loaded at runtime, that is a VRML browser can be extended in any way you like through a standard, documented mechanism.
take a look at what LivePicture did with their Panoramas - these were implemented as VRML2 EXTERNPROTOs, which were displayed in a cut-down VRML2 browser, and if they had finsihed what they started, this type of object (now very popular) could have been displayed without any extra effort by all compliant VRML2 browsers.
While the Quake/Unreal game engines are wonderful things, which support excellent performance, they are limited in many ways, and just aren't as approachable to the newbie as VRML2 is.
I can sit down and build a VRML2 world in an ASCII text editor, its a much more daunting task to make a Quake Level, even with emacs;)
Anyway, i strongly support this move, but would call for Blaxxun to go GPL goddamnit. All these 'Community Source' licenses just make developers nervous.
The GPL protects Blaxxun, by making sure their competitors can't directly profit (in a financial sense) from your generosity and effort. Plus, they get to say they were the first to support a truly open and cross-platform web standard. VRML won't go anywhere without a community, and if they want adoption by the Linux community, then i'd say the only way is with the GPL.
Otherwise, this will just incite the GNU people to write a truly free alternative e.g. GNOME vs KDE, and lets face it, nobody really wants to see another attempt to reinvent the VRML browser.
This is one of the apps i have been missing badly for a long time.
Despite what many people think, VRML2 is actually a pretty advanced, extensible and downright useful file format.
It is node-based and therefore supports complex activity. The way VRML 2 works reminds me a lot of the way high-end 3D programs like Maya are architected.
While i haven't used it much recently (since i haven't been able to get a browser for Linux), i think it is actually a really good foundation for a pervasive 3D imaging model.
It is based on ASCII text, which might make some of the hardcore go 'pfft', but theres no reason that it can't incorporate binary file formats, like BSP trees using EXTERNPROTOs.. the code to handle the binary data, if it is defined in the EXTERNPROTO can be dynamically loaded at runtime, that is a VRML browser can be extended in any way you like through a standard, documented mechanism.
take a look at what LivePicture did with their Panoramas - these were implemented as VRML2 EXTERNPROTOs, which were displayed in a cut-down VRML2 browser, and if they had finsihed what they started, this type of object (now very popular) could have been displayed without any extra effort by all compliant VRML2 browsers.
While the Quake/Unreal game engines are wonderful things, which support excellent performance, they are limited in many ways, and just aren't as approachable to the newbie as VRML2 is.
I can sit down and build a VRML2 world in an ASCII text editor, its a much more daunting task to make a Quake Level, even with emacs;)
Anyway, i strongly support this move, but would call for Blaxxun to go GPL goddamnit. All these 'Community Source' licenses just make developers nervous.
The GPL protects Blaxxun, by making sure their competitors can't directly profit (in a financial sense) from your generosity and effort. Plus, they get to say they were the first to support a truly open and cross-platform web standard. VRML won't go anywhere without a community, and if they want adoption by the Linux community, then i'd say the only way is with the GPL.
Otherwise, this will just incite the GNU people to write a truly free alternative e.g. GNOME vs KDE, and lets face it, nobody really wants to see another attempt to reinvent the VRML browser.
Then all those things Solaris does that Linux doesn't would quickly be assimilated into Linux and Solaris would melt away.
There would be nothing to stop Solaris from being maintained, marketed and developed independently, but.. why? For the Enterprise users, there would likely be some benefit, but at the end of the day both Solaris and Linux are just UNIX with a different name.
Linux has already won the battle, in that it has come to be a competitor to practically every major OS in the world without any appreciable commercial backing (excepting distro companies like RH) at all. I could get Solaris for free, noncommercial use, but i don't really want it, theres no community (that i know of) around it.
Even were Solaris to be released free like beer or speech, this would most likely only accelerate the adoption of Linux as the 'standard' free OS.
Anyway, Solaris has no cool penguin mascot, so whats the attraction?
Surely a simple version of Mozilla with 'DON'T PANIC' chrome running on a Palmtop would do the same?
Surely the WWW as a whole is more analogous to the HHGTTG than some individual site, with dubious content.
I think i'd want some serious storage on my Palmtop to handle this type of app though... say, 128 MB RAM and a 4-10 GB HDD or equivalent storage medium. Not many palmtops boast this kind of spec, and sadly, modem access won't really cut it IMHO. I spose it'll be fine for small, infrequent updates, but imagine the thousands of updates that would be spawned if this thing becomes popular.
I can see it now.'OK, i'm standing in front of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, i better consult the guide to find out what to do..'
PLEASE WAIT 3 HOURS WHILE THE GUIDE IS UPDATING ITS ENTRIES.... OH, AND DON'T PANIC.
Good advice, but waiting for a 56k modem to d/l content is like watching paint dry./me shudders and thinks of 'NT Option Packs' and 'Internet Explorer' web browser downloads...
Of course, since i switched to the world of Linux i don't need to download the bloat so much, but i seriously don't think a dial-up connection will be adequate for this type of app.
Perhaps it would be a good project for something like Jini/Javaspaces, where all the information is kept in a distributed network, and the individual device knows nothing about where it is retrieving/storing information.. Perhaps Sun should have called Jini 'Sub Ether' or whatever it is in HHGTTG. This would require fulltime (or close to it) connection to the network which implies wireless, Ricochet or Iridium style access.
Still, if theres one device that would give Iridium a reason for exisistence, it's this.
Perhaps we could just get 'DON'T PANIC' graphics for Everything.Blockstackers.Org, and we'd have the equivalent, for free.
Corel is quite free to release its proprietary parts of it's distribution under whatever beta license they like, so long as those parts, and only those parts are covered by their license.
That is, i, as a beta tester, would be quite free to redistribute, under the conditions of the GPL, any part of Corel's distro that is, or is based on GPLed software, regardless of what Corel might think or feel on the subject. In fact, their 'Beta License' is totally worthless and invalid as it obviously violates the GPL.
Anything thats entirely and independently developed by Corel can be made subject to any licensing agreement Corel desires.
The current 'blanket' beta license is clearly illegal, and must be replaced with a license that refers specifically to those packages/components that Corel has a legal right to protect.
This does not include *any* GPLed portions of their distro.
That is, Corel has absolutely no right to stop a beta tester distributing any portion of their distro that is covered by the GPL. Period.
They can politely request such restraint of action, but they cannot ask anyone to sign a legally binding document enforcing such.
Parts of the Corel distro that aren't covered by the GPL are another kettle of fish and should be considered as such.
However, the current Beta license should be considered totally worthless, and existing beta copies distributed under this license could (and perhaps should) be uploaded to as many public FTP servers as possible. Until Corel provides beta testers with a *legal* agreement, I don't see how they could have a leg to stand on in court.
If Corel doesn't like the GPL, if it doesn't suit their purposes as developers of a commercially oriented Linux distro, then they best get the FUCK OFF OUR PORCH and start work on their own closed version of *NIX.
hahahahahahahahaaaaa An SGI Reality Engine maxes out at 10 million polys/sec, and thats a best case benchmarked figure. Perhaps that second 8 was a typo? And frankly, SGIs are no longer cost-competitve in the face of add on gfx boards for standard PCs from 3DLabs, Intergraph etc. Perhaps by using technology from NVidia (who, shock-horror, have built their technology solely on the back of the games market), they can continue to be competitive in the face of wicked-fast 'games cards' with geometry processors etc. on board.
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Microsoft, as with all other vendors will be forced to port their products to Linux when Linux's market share grows to the point that it cannot be ignored.
I am an extremely media-oriented user, which is why i also have a Win95 desktop sitting next to my Linux box. I use this for 3D graphics, video and audio work. I would use NT, but NT is an expensive dog. I can't even play my games on NT.
However, I prefer to work on Linux, I prefer to surf the net on Linux, and given the availability of my software, i would ditch Windows permanently without a second thought. Wine now runs one of my most useful compositing tools (Newtek Aura) and with proper hardware OpenGL from SGI and NVidia, 3D app manufacturers will have no reason not to port. I've lost too much work to crashes to have any respect for a Windows OS.
I've been involved with streaming media reasonably heavily (setting up 5 radio stations and doing various live video streams) all using servers running BSD and RealNetworks servers.
There is NO WAY IN HELL i would trust an NT box to keep a bandwidth-heavy application like video streaming up 24 hours a day. Unless MS have *NIX based server software, theres no way i could even consider adopting their streaming software.
But thats purely a reliability issue, and at the end of the day you have to give your customers what they want. This applies to MS as much as anyone else, and the Linux-using customers will need to have their market serviced.
Linux users are seen as fringe by many large companies, but its us Linux users who will drive the next phase of the computing revolution. Linux is the face of a useful UNIX on the desktop, along with MacOS X perhaps, and against that, Windows cannot stand.
One day, Ballmer and Gates will roll out of bed and find their entire company is irrelevant because everybody who develops software has dumped their crappy OS and gone back to UNIX in one form or another.
With Apple's long overdue new OS, it is interesting to note that Microsoft is now the only major OS vendor without a *NIX-like or *NIX-based OS offering.
What does that tell you?
Apple can keep it's QT technology, i'd rather wait until someone comes up with a truly open video codec.
To me, this is pretty pointless.. I can see why you might use it for broadcast, like Dev Null on 'The Net', but on the internet it's pretty naff. Presumably they'll need to stream a voice-quality feed and either gesture information to a client-side app or send new images down as she talks. This will be much slower than just *reading* the news, so i doubt i'll be taking much interest. The only thing that might make it worthwhile is if someone hacked the system to make Ananova read the news completely naked. But being a virtual character, this isn't very exciting anyway. I do agree that a tux version would be neat. perhaps i could modify my existing tux model.. currently he only shoots a hole in bill gate's face but hey. http://www.spunk.co.nz/spunkezine/reanimator/
surely using PDF means many CPU cycles devoted to decoding and rendering vector descriptions for each icon.
Admittedly, the load would not be great, but all these little drains on performance add up.. one of the reasons i have largely switched to Linux is that my P200 running RH6.0 / Enlightenment / Gnome just feels faster than my Celeron400 running Windows 95.
Surely, for small, often photograph-based images, bitmaps are much more efficient than PDF?
Why don't they just shut the hell up and *SHIP* MacOS X? I guess Steve Jobs has changed his old tenet to 'Real Artists Sue'....
The real problem is that Win9x with an Aqua theme on it probably runs a lot nicer than Aqua itself.
Apple are finding themselves in the dubious position of only contributing a look and feel to their OS. The guts of it is BSD 4.4, the 'middleware' is NeXTStep, the MacOS has been around for years, so what have Apple actually *done*?
'Well, we did contribute some really nice transparent plastic to the landfills of the 21st century...'
I can see where the authors are coming from saying they don't support hardware acceleration, but this should be an OS-supported feature.
i.e. Video4Linux should have some kind of hardware abstraction layer, like Video for Windows.
This would allow hardware manufacturers to develop codecs for Linux (perhaps a sly way to do it would be to find some way of making VFW codecs work under V4Linux.)
Cos, without hardware acceleration, video editing on Linux or any platform is a joke, nothing more.
Uncompressed Video requires something like 22MB/s of dedicated bandwidth. This is a heavy load for any system to handle, hence the need for efficient compression schemes (read hardware compression) and high-speed storage.
My Iomega Buz does a pretty good (has some lousy 'features') on the whole of encoding and decoding MJPEG video under Windows. It needs about 4-5 MB/s sustained transfer rate from my hard disk for 720x576 (full-PAL, non-square pixels) video.
Theres no way my CPU (Cele-400) is fast enough to do MJPEG compression/decompression in realtime, and while the Athlons/P3s are undoubtedly fast, i bet they would struggle too.
I'd love to use my Linux box to do video editing/compositing etc., and interestingly, Newtek Aura 1.0 runs surprisingly well under WINE last time i looked.
What is the status of hardware support for Video4Linux? While analog MJPEG support is probably not of utmost concern, Linux should not let the DV revolution pass it by. Firewire and DV support is a critical area that Linux falls behind both the Mac and Windows, and as much video work is going down this path, this is where Linux developers should focus their efforts.
my 2c
It seems to me then, that any surface with a hole in means that it's inside is indistinguishable from it's outside, topologically.
Wouldn't practically every surface imaginable fit into this category (if you count holes at microscopic, molecular and atomic scales)?
Doesn't this then mean that every object we encounter in everyday life has zero volume and could have an 'ACME' label slapped on it and sold at a methematical curiosity?
>I wonder how extensive your testing has been, and >how valid? Octane MXE? Onyx2?
Remember i am talking about *fillrate*, i.e the number of texels per second.
I do not dispute the fact that a lot of SGI hardware can transform and display many polys per second, far in excess of a TNT/TNT2. However, it is interesting to note how well the games cards compare in terms of fillrate etc. Add geometry processing, like with the GeForce, and the difference between a Reality Engine (quoted as maxing out at 12 million polys per second) and a GeForce (which probably maxes out around 10 million polys/sec) is getting pretty slim.
Also, Riven was built in SoftImage, which runs just as well on a cheap-ass Wintel workstation with a decent OpenGL accelerator (which some of the newer models of games cards will function very well as) as it does on an SGI O2/Octane for much less $$.
Anyway, Even with the best SGI hardware the Riven ppl could acquire, they still had a lot of trouble with the system (granted, it was mainly software) choking on the number of polygons to be rendered.
And for rendering horsepower, i don't think anyone could successfully argue that a network of SGI machines would outperform a network of Intel or Alpha machines, price-performance wise.
An R12000 Octane may be fast, but theres no way its faster than the 5-10 P3/K7 processors you could get for the same price.
I do a fair bit of 3D stuff with Lightwave and other packages, and my TNT2 performs pretty well for the money it cost me. I spose if you have twenty grand or so to throw around you can afford fancy gear, but personally i am extremely thankful to 3dfx and NVidia for bringing good quality 3D acceleration within the reach of the average user, or independent artist.
Something that SGI seems to have zero interest in doing.
Yeah, except the Voodoo 4/5's will support up to 1GB of texture memory, and up to 100 graphics CPUs for professional applications. I'm sure NVidia has a similar product in the works to compete. SGI has nothing to compete with this, or at least nothing that will be in any way proce-competitive.
The NVidia GeForce comes reasonably close on paper to outperforming an SGI Reality Engine (can't say for sure, i can't afford an SGI Reality Engine to test it)
The 800MB of texture memory is also just main memory AGP-style (faster, of course due to the crossbar-switch architecture), but how long before the K7 with it's Alpha-style crossbar bus surpasses the speed of the SGI bus at consumer prices?
3dfx use the same core as the consumer part, so they can make their money off the gamers, and they aren't totally reliant on their (not so numerous) high-end customers.
Yet for the first time their consumer cards will be part of an enormously scalable architecture which will most likely nail 3dlabs etc. to the wall.
I predict 3dfx and Nvidia will end up being the two 'big boys' in 3D graphics into the next millenium, maybe for no other reason than computer games and consumer VR applications will be a far bigger industry than broadcast, film, engineering and scientific visualisation combined.
It sounds like SGI does have the right idea, partnering with NVidia.
And fair enough, as of right now, today, you can't get a consumer graphics card that will give you access to 800 MB of texture memory (although, I think the AGP bus does support exactly this type of thing, storing textures in system memory), but the number of applications that really do run faster on SGI hardware are disappearing at an incredible rate.
And, on the other hand, there isn't any SGI hardware that can outperform even a TNT2 for fillrate.
Even a TNT2 can put textures onto polygons faster than any SGI hardware that i know of.
And show me an SGI machine that runs Quake 2/Quake 3 faster than an 500+ Mhz Intel PC + $300 Graphics accelerator for anything less than 5 times the price.
Your applications may benefit from an SGI box, but mine positively suffer.
One of the Miller? brothers is also working on VR worlds-type stuff, along with Richard Vander Wende, the man responsible for most of Riven's 'feel'. I would love to see Carmacks awesome talents + The Cyan teams awesom talents blended. Riven comes close to being a VR world, but lacks Quake's immersivity I would love to see the two combined.
i'm thinking of a 'bag' filled with a suitably viscous fluid, and painted with 'dots' like a trackball. Inside the bag, thered be a teflon-coated ring to provide shape, which would allow the sides of the bag to slide nicely over it.
The bag would sit in a teflon coated 'dish' with one or more optical sensors, like a logitech trackball's (as suggested by a previous poster) in the bottom of it.
The fluid would provide suspension, and as the bag slid, motion could be easily tracked in any direction.
There are probably problems with this type of arrangement, but it seems more fundamentally workable than any assembly of single-axis treadmills. my 2c.
The film industry is pretty specific with regard to this. No reel, no job.
Fortunately, the equipment necessary to cut CG shots to video is pretty cheap these days, so all you really need to put in is the talent and hard work. (easier said than done, of course)
My advice to you (and this will likely raise howls of protest from many) is to warez (or, if youre extraordinarily rich, buy) whatever package will do the job for you and get as much quality work onto tape as you can. As one poster pointed out previously, its unlikely any individual is going to be able to shell out the $17,000 for a legal seat of Houdini, but one more skilled operator means at least one more sale in the future for Side Effects, those that the software is useless to would never buy it anyway... so i don't see the 'revenue loss' there. Please no flames, i don't want to start any piracy wars.
If youre not already in the industry, its probably harder to put together a lengthy demo tape, since you can't put a 3 minute sequence on there and note that you painted out the wires attached to the actor or whatever.
Still, the idea is to show off your abilities as much as possible, so it might be an idea to put down 'process-related' stuff, i.e. how you worked an idea from concept through to completion. i.e when you do an animation sequence, put your final rendered sequence at the beginning of the tape, then put on your animatics, your concept sketches, your set models etc. This gives a prospective emplyer a better view of not just what you can produce (lets face it, its bloody hard to do film-quality f/x on a desktop PC), but how much work you did to achieve your result, how you solved production problems etc. These things are just as important as your ability to produce a good looking result.
Although, in most large film f/x houses, the workflow is pretty compartmentalised - that is, if you want to do 'everything' - script, model, animate, production, post-production, direction, scoring and anything else you have time for, then you might find life difficult.
That is, in most cases you'll get a job doing one thing, one thing only, and that one thing is what will dominate your life for the duration of production.
The games industry might be more interesting, i know it is for me. Personally, i don't really 'get' movies.. Games are so much more interesting and immersive to me. YMMV.
I do a lot of stuff with Lightwave (www.newtek.com), and a little bit of Hash's Animation Master, which is the one package in the 3D animation arena that is actually affordable (Blender (www.blender.nl) is of course completely free, and deserves special mention). mainly as a hobby but i have been approached by a film f/x house, who said they were impressed but were worried that i might not enjoy doing just one task... (my background spans many areas, from 3D AutoCAD operation, to CGI programming)
i agreed with them, and frankly, my skills aren't quite honed enough for me to command a lead animator's position, or high-level TD, which might afford me the ability to work in a number of areas within the film production pipeline.
So, I just keep plugging away, modelling, animating and rendering stuff, which is a lot of fun. I pay the bills by doing CGI programming, teaching at a design school and working on te production crew for multimedia exhibitions.
I am 100% confident that i will be easily good enough to get a job 'in pixels', or to start my own games/fx company one day, but be aware that the only way to get there is to put in 150% effort, since making quality CG artwork is not as easy as it looks.
my 2c
If you are familiar at all with the warez scene, you'll know that practically any piece of commercial software (especially for the Windows platform) is available for free, if you know where to look. The situation has been like this for quite some time now, lets say 4 years.
The main benefactor of this situation has been Microsoft (a lot of people buy computers so they can play games, and run apps that they basically know they don't actually have to pay for.) And of course, since the OS is bundled with the PC, MS gets their money no matter what.
In fact, i'd go so far as to say that the biggest reason Windows is so successful is the incredible range of pirated software available for it.
Linux is (and will be more) popular for the same basic reason. You can get software for free. In the case of GPLed and otherwise free software, you don't even have to break the law.
However, software sales have not decreased, and in actuality, most people who find a program to be genuinely useful, or who base their careers on the use of a piece of software, usually are quite happy to pay for it.
I buy games i know i could simply rip off an FTP server if i wanted to. I don't like buying games or apps that i can't try out first.
I do use several 3D apps that i have openly pirated, but only because the price tag on that software is genuinely far more than i can afford. I don't use the programs in a commercial capacity, but if i do i will certainly be buying them. If those programs hadn't been available through piracy, there would be no way that i could have become proficient with them and hence no way i could afford to base a business on my use of them. thats one less potential user of the software, and hence, one less potential sale. Do you count that as lost revenue?
The whole idea of 'software' encourages and in some ways makes unavoidable the issue of 'piracy'.
If a vendor of a product was really committed to eliminating warez, they would sell the product along with custom hardware to run it. If the product is that useful to their customers, then they should have no problem selling it. The fact is that this makes it so expensive to produce, that the market shrinks too much to justify production in the first place. Making your product easily piratable guarantees wide consumer acceptance and distribution, leading to greater potential sales.
This will probably raise howls of protest from developers of commercial software, but thats the way i see it.
The fact is, consumers demand the ability to pirate software. Piracy fuels 'innovation' and growth within the computer industry, not to mention facilitates the education of an entire new generation of future programmers etc.
How many 15 year olds can afford the $21,000 a year, for example, for a license to Side Effects' Houdini or a similar package? but if you put a thousand 15 year olds in front of it, and somehow 10 of those 15 year olds finds it to be a useful tool, making cool stuff with it, and grow up to be great computer artists, then thats 10 more seats of Houdini that they'll buy in future, as well as generating major interest among their peers etc., perhaps leading to further sales. If those 15 year olds had never even seen Houdini, then thats 10 possibly great computer artists, whose talents go to waste.
thats my 2c.
I think the real solution to this problem is to make WINE run IE, as well as all the multimedia plugins. You could run Win32 Netscape, Opera etc... sure, there'd be a performance penalty, but Windows itself comes with a hefty performance penalty, and that doesn't seem to stop people from running it. Linux shoudl be moving to 'Embrace and Extend' the Win32 platform. Easier said than done, to be sure, but this would certainly make Linux a moe attractive platform to many people. Hell, if connectix can do it on a mac (Virtual PC) why can't we do it on Linux? Anyone have any idea how far away WINE is from being able to run IE?
Tux giving Bill Gates a good spanking is the obvious choice. I think having bill gate's lilly-white ass getting enthusiastically caned by the penguin is the only really appropriate way to illustrate anything linux-related.
Goddamnit, they must have taken it down. I'll put it up on another server soon.. man that sucks.
my 3D tux...
x .mov
http://www.spunk.co.nz/tux.gif
and, for those of you who can view Quicktime (Cinepak codec, 335k)
http://www.spunk.co.nz/spunkezine/reanimator/tu
if you want a penguin like this, i may be persuaded to pose and render him in a variety of ways.
drop me a line on ikekrull@freemail.co.nz
This is one of the apps i have been missing badly for a long time.
;)
Despite what many people think, VRML2 is actually a pretty advanced, extensible and downright useful file format.
It is node-based and therefore supports complex activity. The way VRML 2 works reminds me a lot of the way high-end 3D programs like Maya are architected.
While i haven't used it much recently (since i haven't been able to get a browser for Linux), i think it is actually a really good foundation for a pervasive 3D imaging model.
It is based on ASCII text, which might make some of the hardcore go 'pfft', but theres no reason that it can't incorporate binary file formats, like BSP trees using EXTERNPROTOs.. the code to handle the binary data, if it is defined in the EXTERNPROTO can be dynamically loaded at runtime, that is a VRML browser can be extended in any way you like through a standard, documented mechanism.
take a look at what LivePicture did with their Panoramas - these were implemented as VRML2 EXTERNPROTOs, which were displayed in a cut-down VRML2 browser, and if they had finsihed what they started, this type of object (now very popular) could have been displayed without any extra effort by all compliant VRML2 browsers.
While the Quake/Unreal game engines are wonderful things, which support excellent performance, they are limited in many ways, and just aren't as approachable to the newbie as VRML2 is.
I can sit down and build a VRML2 world in an ASCII text editor, its a much more daunting task to make a Quake Level, even with emacs
Anyway, i strongly support this move, but would call for Blaxxun to go GPL goddamnit. All these 'Community Source' licenses just make developers nervous.
The GPL protects Blaxxun, by making sure their competitors can't directly profit (in a financial sense) from your generosity and effort. Plus, they get to say they were the first to support a truly open and cross-platform web standard. VRML won't go anywhere without a community, and if they want adoption by the Linux community, then i'd say the only way is with the GPL.
Otherwise, this will just incite the GNU people to write a truly free alternative e.g. GNOME vs KDE, and lets face it, nobody really wants to see another attempt to reinvent the VRML browser.
my 2c
This is one of the apps i have been missing badly for a long time.
;)
Despite what many people think, VRML2 is actually a pretty advanced, extensible and downright useful file format.
It is node-based and therefore supports complex activity. The way VRML 2 works reminds me a lot of the way high-end 3D programs like Maya are architected.
While i haven't used it much recently (since i haven't been able to get a browser for Linux), i think it is actually a really good foundation for a pervasive 3D imaging model.
It is based on ASCII text, which might make some of the hardcore go 'pfft', but theres no reason that it can't incorporate binary file formats, like BSP trees using EXTERNPROTOs.. the code to handle the binary data, if it is defined in the EXTERNPROTO can be dynamically loaded at runtime, that is a VRML browser can be extended in any way you like through a standard, documented mechanism.
take a look at what LivePicture did with their Panoramas - these were implemented as VRML2 EXTERNPROTOs, which were displayed in a cut-down VRML2 browser, and if they had finsihed what they started, this type of object (now very popular) could have been displayed without any extra effort by all compliant VRML2 browsers.
While the Quake/Unreal game engines are wonderful things, which support excellent performance, they are limited in many ways, and just aren't as approachable to the newbie as VRML2 is.
I can sit down and build a VRML2 world in an ASCII text editor, its a much more daunting task to make a Quake Level, even with emacs
Anyway, i strongly support this move, but would call for Blaxxun to go GPL goddamnit. All these 'Community Source' licenses just make developers nervous.
The GPL protects Blaxxun, by making sure their competitors can't directly profit (in a financial sense) from your generosity and effort. Plus, they get to say they were the first to support a truly open and cross-platform web standard. VRML won't go anywhere without a community, and if they want adoption by the Linux community, then i'd say the only way is with the GPL.
Otherwise, this will just incite the GNU people to write a truly free alternative e.g. GNOME vs KDE, and lets face it, nobody really wants to see another attempt to reinvent the VRML browser.
my 2c
Then all those things Solaris does that Linux doesn't would quickly be assimilated into Linux and Solaris would melt away.
There would be nothing to stop Solaris from being maintained, marketed and developed independently, but.. why? For the Enterprise users, there would likely be some benefit, but at the end of the day both Solaris and Linux are just UNIX with a different name.
Linux has already won the battle, in that it has come to be a competitor to practically every major OS in the world without any appreciable commercial backing (excepting distro companies like RH) at all. I could get Solaris for free, noncommercial use, but i don't really want it, theres no community (that i know of) around it.
Even were Solaris to be released free like beer or speech, this would most likely only accelerate the adoption of Linux as the 'standard' free OS.
Anyway, Solaris has no cool penguin mascot, so whats the attraction?
Surely a simple version of Mozilla with 'DON'T PANIC' chrome running on a Palmtop would do the same?
.'OK, i'm standing in front of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, i better consult the guide to find out what to do..'
/me shudders and thinks of 'NT Option Packs' and 'Internet Explorer' web browser downloads...
Surely the WWW as a whole is more analogous to the HHGTTG than some individual site, with dubious content.
I think i'd want some serious storage on my Palmtop to handle this type of app though... say, 128 MB RAM and a 4-10 GB HDD or equivalent storage medium. Not many palmtops boast this kind of spec, and sadly, modem access won't really cut it IMHO. I spose it'll be fine for small, infrequent updates, but imagine the thousands of updates that would be spawned if this thing becomes popular.
I can see it now
PLEASE WAIT 3 HOURS WHILE THE GUIDE IS UPDATING ITS ENTRIES.... OH, AND DON'T PANIC.
Good advice, but waiting for a 56k modem to d/l content is like watching paint dry.
Of course, since i switched to the world of Linux i don't need to download the bloat so much, but i seriously don't think a dial-up connection will be adequate for this type of app.
Perhaps it would be a good project for something like Jini/Javaspaces, where all the information is kept in a distributed network, and the individual device knows nothing about where it is retrieving/storing information.. Perhaps Sun should have called Jini 'Sub Ether' or whatever it is in HHGTTG. This would require fulltime (or close to it) connection to the network which implies wireless, Ricochet or Iridium style access.
Still, if theres one device that would give Iridium a reason for exisistence, it's this.
Perhaps we could just get 'DON'T PANIC' graphics for Everything.Blockstackers.Org, and we'd have the equivalent, for free.
Corel is quite free to release its proprietary parts of it's distribution under whatever beta license they like, so long as those parts, and only those parts are covered by their license.
That is, i, as a beta tester, would be quite free to redistribute, under the conditions of the GPL, any part of Corel's distro that is, or is based on GPLed software, regardless of what Corel might think or feel on the subject. In fact, their 'Beta License' is totally worthless and invalid as it obviously violates the GPL.
Anything thats entirely and independently developed by Corel can be made subject to any licensing agreement Corel desires.
The current 'blanket' beta license is clearly illegal, and must be replaced with a license that refers specifically to those packages/components that Corel has a legal right to protect.
This does not include *any* GPLed portions of their distro.
That is, Corel has absolutely no right to stop a beta tester distributing any portion of their distro that is covered by the GPL. Period.
They can politely request such restraint of action, but they cannot ask anyone to sign a legally binding document enforcing such.
Parts of the Corel distro that aren't covered by the GPL are another kettle of fish and should be considered as such.
However, the current Beta license should be considered totally worthless, and existing beta copies distributed under this license could (and perhaps should) be uploaded to as many public FTP servers as possible. Until Corel provides beta testers with a *legal* agreement, I don't see how they could have a leg to stand on in court.
If Corel doesn't like the GPL, if it doesn't suit their purposes as developers of a commercially oriented Linux distro, then they best get the FUCK OFF OUR PORCH and start work on their own closed version of *NIX.
..my 2c
hahahahahahahahaaaaa An SGI Reality Engine maxes out at 10 million polys/sec, and thats a best case benchmarked figure. Perhaps that second 8 was a typo? And frankly, SGIs are no longer cost-competitve in the face of add on gfx boards for standard PCs from 3DLabs, Intergraph etc. Perhaps by using technology from NVidia (who, shock-horror, have built their technology solely on the back of the games market), they can continue to be competitive in the face of wicked-fast 'games cards' with geometry processors etc. on board.
Ah yes so it is...
:)
i remember now
Jeez, just imagine how much better WW2 would have been for the allied soldiers with one of these Ottoman-Toilet PCs...
I mean, they could have emailed for backup and still had somewhere comfy to sit while they waited for the german tanks to roll in.
my god, this thing fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down...
(i forget which movie that came from)