Okay, you've convinced me. I give up. From now on, I'm sticking strictly with ASCII. And none of this mixed-case business, either. I'm going back to the old days to keep things simple.
Not really...from what I read, the choice was between a Fuel and a Lintel box...the origonal article didn't mention anything about a Mac...
I think we've established fairly thoroughly that a Linux system is inappropriate for this user. He's not a technical user, so an operating system as complex and challenging as Linux isn't for him. (Linux has the twin faults of being complex to use and poorly documented. IRIX is complex to use but richly documented. Windows and Mac OS X are easier to use, mostly-- not completely, but mostly--obviating the need for end-user documentation.) Since the submitter said that the user was "fed up" with Windows, that leaves IRIX and OS X.
why couldn't he contact say Dreamworks and work with them to get a Linux box built to Dreamworks' specs....
I don't know how Dreamworks works, but at ILM they build their own machines to their own specifications and create their own software distributions for them. This lets them tune every aspect of both hardware and software to suit their own needs. Since their top priority is a balance between quality and productivity, the way they set up their computers is a demonstrable competitive advantage in the market... and the visual effects market is kill-or-be-killed. So doing what you suggest would be, in effect, asking them to give you all their secrets. Probably would never happen.
Too, remember what I said upthread about how studios like ILM-- and presumably Dreamworks as well-- are essentially factories, and design their desktop computers to fit that model. The computers they use at ILM aren't million-dollar monsters; they're really cheap PC-clones or O2s, and the artists do everything with low-resolution proxies or wireframes. The real magic happens in the render farm. So even if this guy got a workstation right out of ILM or Dreamworks or wherever, he'd probably hate it because he'd have to send everything off to render overnight before he could see the results of his work.
Lest my opinion on this matter be unclear to those who read the grandparent of this comment, I love the fact that Lucas isn't afraid to borrow-- steal, whatever-- ideas and incorporate them into his own stories. There are only about seven truly original plots anyway, and they were old news when Homer was telling stories about the Trojan War.
As for your statement that the ghost has left him, I have to disagree. Yeah, the two extant Star Wars prequels aren't as good as many people wish they had been. (In all fairness, they never could have lived up to the fanboys' expectations, but that's another argument.) But the underlying story is fantastic stuff. The way the bad guys manipulate the good guys, playing both sides of the fence to achieve their goals, just blows me away.
I don't want to start a big Star Wars thread, but just consider for a second the backstory behind Episodes I and II. Palpatine orchestrated the Naboo conflict for the purpose of overthrowing the chancellor of the Senate, sure, but an even deeper motive was to put the Trade Federation's army of droids into a serious combined-forces battle to demonstrate their inherent fallibility. They were almost defeated by a bunch of disorganized natives, for cryin' out loud. The net result was that Palpatine set the stage for the creation of an army of clones which would, ultimately, become his personal instrument of control over the galaxy.
There are plans within plans going on there that haven't really been called out explicitly in any of the movies thus far. In that way, the entire Star Wars saga kind of reminds me of the Foundation books by Asimov: the actual subject matter of the stories is fairly trivial in scope compared to the machinations going on off-screen. It's a deep, deep story. It's possible that Lucas himself isn't up to the task of telling it in the best possible way, which would be a shame. But you've got to give the man credit where it's due.
No, SGI doesn't bother putting Viewperf results up because they're about as meaningful as Quake FPS. The only benchmark that matters is the "try it and see" benchmark.
At NAB in April, I spent about an hour running Maya at the SGI booth on a just-introduced Fuel with V12 graphics. Then I played with the same cut of software on Windows and Linux on various other computers. No comparison. Fully textured and lit scenes were interactive as hell on the Fuel, and chunky on the PCs. Yeah, some of the dual- and quad-processor PCs could do a better job of running real-time dynamics simulations, but for interacting with scenes-- work you'll spend most of your time doing-- the Fuel was definitely the way to go.
How so? Once the systems are set up, there should be little to no administration required for the render farm...
Heh. That's a good one. "Little to no administration." Heh. Now pull the other one.
what happens if his monitor dies...well, he'd have to order one (couldn't go to the corner shop and pick one up)...
Why not? Are they no longer making monitors that take DVI or VGA?
And how easily could he find Irix support...
1-800-800-4SGI (4744). Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Listen, if you don't like the SGI idea, that's fine. But don't suggest that this guy go down the Linux path. That way lies madness. The choice is really between a Fuel and a Mac. Linux... there's just no reason to subject yourself to Linux in this situation.
In an office with three Indigone-2's why have I had to reboot at least one of them every week?
Because you're a idiot?
How the fuck is somebody supposed to answer that question?? I haven't the foggiest clue why you keep rebooting your Indigo 2s. That's between you and your god.
Did you miss the part of the conversation where we were talking about Maya? Maya, when modeling interactively, is completely graphics-bound. (The dynamics stuff hits the CPU very hard, but that's not something an architect would use.) Whether you have two CPUs makes little difference when using Maya for interactive modeling. Therefore, the Fuel and the Octane2 are pretty much indistinguishable. (I know this because I've used Maya on both of those platforms, with V12 graphics, and I'll be damned if I can tell the difference most of the time.) So if the Octane2 is faster than the whatever-it-is PC, then the Fuel will be as well.
Unless you're not talking about Maya. Which is what this is starting to sound like.
Traditional characters are making a comeback in mainland China
Okay, I stand corrected on that one. Am I correct in assuming that there's a one-to-one mapping between simplified and traditional characters? For every character, that is, there's zero or one simplified forms and one traditional form?
I know there is also the issue of certain words that can appear as either kanji or Hiragana...
Yeah, but that's different. That's mapping a set of characters to one character. Way beyond simple case matching there. Hell, that borders on "do what I mean" technology. But then again, input systems like Kotoeri can map hiragana input to kanji (in a one-to-many way with lots of user input), so maybe it's possible.
Nope. The business of America is business. What Enron did was against the rules, but it's an accounting practice found in virtually every company in America. Enron was used to set an example. Any other company would have served just as well, but they picked Enron. And while it certainly worked-- practices nationwide are being reviewed and revised-- was it really worth it? Enron is gone. Andersen is gone. The pensions of thousands of people are gone. What a horrible price to pay for what was basically a difference of opinion over the interpretation of the ledgers.
If you took the time to educate yourself a bit, I think you'll find that the world is not as scary as you seem to think that it is. Stuff doesn't happen by conspiracy of the oligarchy. Stuff just happens, by accident, by coincidence, by pure dumb luck.
Doesnt that at least make you CURIOUS?
Again, nope. It's not unusual in the slightest. Defense is a private industry. People in that industry should act in their own best interest. If things like this didn't happen, I'd be curious.
YOU, who is beligerently opposed to ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT CORPORATE AMERICA'S INTERESTS.
I'm not opposed to discussion. I'm opposed to senseless rants. Like this one you're having right now. They bore me because they're all vitriol and no facts. Calm down, drop your faulty assumptions, and go do some research. When you have more facts, come talk some more and we'll have a discussion.
More likely it was just a sneaky plot to artificially inflate Slashdot's hit count so they can keep charging advertisers who don't know any better to place ads that 90% of Slashdot readers filter out and never see. Quite the scam, actually.
Herbert? How? Lucas has publicly admitted taking ideas from Campbell and Kurosawa (Episode IV owes a lot to The Hidden Fortress), but I don't see any significant resemblance between anything Lucas has written and anything Herbert wrote. Apart from the fact that they're both dealing with space and empires, of course.
The claim that Lucas took ideas from Asimov makes more sense, and that hardly makes sense at all. Then again, there are people who say Niven should sue Bungie, so you can never tell.
You're closer than you might realize, except for the part about the low end. SGI might have plans for a new low-end workstation in that price range, but if they do I'm not aware of it, and I can't say I'd be happy about it if they did.
But for the new stuff... think about the Origin 300. Just read the tech documents on it, and think about it for a little while.
The only boxes that can keep up with a dual 2GB Dell Linux box in almost all situations are the Onyx or Octane systems.
That doesn't add up. Fuel has the exact same graphics as Octane2: V12. (I think you can buy V10 for Fuel, but I'm not positive. Maybe you have V10?) The only real difference between Fuel and Octane2 is the number of processors. If the Octane2 compares favorably to the PC, then the Fuel should as well.
Like I told the other guy, your experience is not typical. I've worked with many, many SGI machines, both at SGI itself and elsewhere, and these machines just don't crash unless there's a hardware problem. Certain releases of IRIX got out with bugs in them, of course, and if you're unlucky enough to happen onto one, you can run into trouble. But otherwise, the OS just runs forever.
And, speaking personally, I've never seen Netscape lock up the X server. It is definitely possible to crash your X server if you're not careful, but that hardly qualifies as a system crash. Nobody but the guy at that head notices anyway, and all he has to do is issue the vulcan death grip and log back in.
One of our servers is an ancient SGI (33MHz of raw power!) who's record was well over 100 days uptime, it only got shut down for a new disk drive.
I should have mentioned this in my other post, but you just reminded me of it. I once worked with a Challenge L server with twelve R4400 processors, running IRIX 6.2. That machine never, in the slightly over three years that I worked there, went down. Not even for maintenance. (It already had all the disks and stuff that it needed, so there was simply nothing to be done to it.)
It was under a pretty heavy load, too-- over 100 users logging in interactively to edit and compile software, and it was also the ClearCase VOB-- and it simply never went down. I remember checking the uptime once and seeing that it was over 900 days. Amazing.
For all I know, that machine is still up today, with an uptime pushing 2000 days.
And of course, I don't how much more high end you can get than CGI work for a major animated film...
Considerably.
The thing about the big effects houses is that they typically try to spend as little on the workstations as possible, while investing big in the render farm or farms. For example, compositors at ILM use CompTime on things like O2s and cheap Linux machines. You can't do anything in real time at full resolution on those machines; you use proxies for everything, then submit the job to the render farm for full-resolution processing and go on to work on your next shot. The next day, you look at the results of your render in dailies and make changes based on it, repeating the whole process.
That works well in what is basically a factory setting. But it's not right for everyone. If you're working by yourself, like the subject of this discussion will be, it makes more sense to have a computer that's as interactive as possible so you can get instant feedback. Instant feedback at ILM wouldn't help anybody, because you have to take your work to the VFX supe anyway for review. Making the desktop machines more interactive in that setting would just be a waste of money.
No. O2 was dark blue, and O2+ was purple. Fuel is bright red.
And "dago" is just plain wrong. Fuels are not ugly. They're really eye-catching. Better than the sickly green of the Indigo2 or the first-generation Octane, or the now-boring blue of everything else SGI sells.
Why, when someone questions Corporate America's motives, do people people tend to respond with "WELL THEN LETS GO BACK TO BEING HUNTER/GATHERERS" ?
Because you're advocating an extreme, and unjustifiable, point of view. Rant all you like about how the corporations are trying to conquer the world, but be prepared to listen to the sarcasm and mockery the follows.
I agree that I've sounded a little crazy....
A little crazy? Listen to this: "What if it really does get *bad* and everyone is too afraid to speak up for fear of people like you calling them crazy?" Or how about your assertion that "corporate interests" are "attempting to buy our rights away." The kicker, of course, is this: "Why stick up for big business? It HATES you."
You're suffering from paranoid delusions, mary_will_grow. You really might want to consider seeing a doctor. Thorazine can work wonders.
So Linux would seem to be a better choice as you can do normal stuff with a Linux box(web browsing and email).
Barely. I'm not going to get into a Linux flame war. Just know that my opinion of Linux as a single-user, general-purpose desktop operating system is not high.
One of the main reasons that the CGI house are going to Linux on the workstation is that they are cheap, compared to SGI machines.
You're sort-of right, but for the wrong reasons. The first Linux box you deploy costs considerably more, in time and energy, than a single SGI workstation. According to folks at ILM, they had to actually go in and do a lot of driver-level work to get the Linux NFS implementation to work reliably for them. So their first Linux box cost them tens of thousands of dollars to deploy.
But their 100th Linux box-- by which time they'd gotten all the bugs worked out-- cost them practically nothing above the cost of the hardware, which is very inexpensive compared to SGI hardware. So Linux as a professional animation or compositing workstation platform makes sense, but only in context of an economy of scale.
This submitter was asking about a single workstation for a single user. I don't think Linux would be a good choice there. It's harder to configure and use than IRIX, and it's less fully featured than OS X. In this specific case, I think Linux would probably be the worst of both worlds.
...the preformance growth curve over time for PC hareware is way steaper than for SGI hareware.
That's true, but again in a way that nullifies the point. PC hardware improves more quickly than SGI hardware, but the SGI hardware was a hell of a lot better than the PC hardware to start with, so it's a question of catching up. There's no PC in the world that can match the capabilities of an Octane2 or a Fuel*. Someday the PCs will catch up, but not for a while yet.
The implication of this fact is actually a pretty good thing for the owner of the SGI gear. Like Macs, SGI workstations keep their value much longer than PCs do. Last year's top-of-the-line PC is worth a couple hundred bucks now, at best. Last year's Mac or SGI can be sold for 80% of its list price. So if you buy a Mac or an SGI, your investment may possible be greater (in the case of an SGI, definitely so) but it'll be protected longer.
* Of course, if you don't need those particular capabilities, the Octane2 or the Fuel would be a big waste of money for you.
I don't know about FireWire cables, but copper FC cables are actually really heavily shielded. At least, they're supposed to be. So it's natural that they'd cost more than ordinary DB9 serial cables.
I have to confess that I don't actually know what HACMP requires at the switch level-- I've never used that particular HA implementation-- but setting up FC failover on SGI systems is about as simple as it gets. You just set a config file on the host telling it what the primary and failover device paths are for each LUN, and off you go. It requires no special configuration at all on the switch, so it's very close to plug-and-play.
Not every application of fibre channel has to be complicated.
Ohhhh-kaaaay. (Backs away slowly and looks around for a rock.)
Leaving aside a moment that actual merits-- or lack thereof-- of your comment (how do you define "proprietary hardware platform" anyway?), what would you suggest? Is Linux the only acceptable answer to any question of the basic form, "What's a good alternative for x?" Because you know that Maya only runs on IRIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, right? Since Windows is "Microsoft crap" and OS X is "crippled FreeBSD," does that mean you're okay with the IRIX alternative? Seeing as how SGI hardware is far more proprietary than Apple hardware, I don't see how you could be. So what you're really saying here is that Linux is the only politically acceptable answer, right?
I think that's about enough of that attitude. Use the right tool for the job. If the right tool happens to be "a proprietary hardware platform running a crippled FreeBSD," then bully for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it bad that I didn't even notice anything was wrong until you pointed it out?
I think I need to take a break or something. I'm starting to parse HTML in my head.
Okay, you've convinced me. I give up. From now on, I'm sticking strictly with ASCII. And none of this mixed-case business, either. I'm going back to the old days to keep things simple.
:wq
THANKS FOR YOUR INPUT. SEE YOU AROUND.
Not really...from what I read, the choice was between a Fuel and a Lintel box...the origonal article didn't mention anything about a Mac...
I think we've established fairly thoroughly that a Linux system is inappropriate for this user. He's not a technical user, so an operating system as complex and challenging as Linux isn't for him. (Linux has the twin faults of being complex to use and poorly documented. IRIX is complex to use but richly documented. Windows and Mac OS X are easier to use, mostly-- not completely, but mostly--obviating the need for end-user documentation.) Since the submitter said that the user was "fed up" with Windows, that leaves IRIX and OS X.
why couldn't he contact say Dreamworks and work with them to get a Linux box built to Dreamworks' specs....
I don't know how Dreamworks works, but at ILM they build their own machines to their own specifications and create their own software distributions for them. This lets them tune every aspect of both hardware and software to suit their own needs. Since their top priority is a balance between quality and productivity, the way they set up their computers is a demonstrable competitive advantage in the market... and the visual effects market is kill-or-be-killed. So doing what you suggest would be, in effect, asking them to give you all their secrets. Probably would never happen.
Too, remember what I said upthread about how studios like ILM-- and presumably Dreamworks as well-- are essentially factories, and design their desktop computers to fit that model. The computers they use at ILM aren't million-dollar monsters; they're really cheap PC-clones or O2s, and the artists do everything with low-resolution proxies or wireframes. The real magic happens in the render farm. So even if this guy got a workstation right out of ILM or Dreamworks or wherever, he'd probably hate it because he'd have to send everything off to render overnight before he could see the results of his work.
Lest my opinion on this matter be unclear to those who read the grandparent of this comment, I love the fact that Lucas isn't afraid to borrow-- steal, whatever-- ideas and incorporate them into his own stories. There are only about seven truly original plots anyway, and they were old news when Homer was telling stories about the Trojan War.
As for your statement that the ghost has left him, I have to disagree. Yeah, the two extant Star Wars prequels aren't as good as many people wish they had been. (In all fairness, they never could have lived up to the fanboys' expectations, but that's another argument.) But the underlying story is fantastic stuff. The way the bad guys manipulate the good guys, playing both sides of the fence to achieve their goals, just blows me away.
I don't want to start a big Star Wars thread, but just consider for a second the backstory behind Episodes I and II. Palpatine orchestrated the Naboo conflict for the purpose of overthrowing the chancellor of the Senate, sure, but an even deeper motive was to put the Trade Federation's army of droids into a serious combined-forces battle to demonstrate their inherent fallibility. They were almost defeated by a bunch of disorganized natives, for cryin' out loud. The net result was that Palpatine set the stage for the creation of an army of clones which would, ultimately, become his personal instrument of control over the galaxy.
There are plans within plans going on there that haven't really been called out explicitly in any of the movies thus far. In that way, the entire Star Wars saga kind of reminds me of the Foundation books by Asimov: the actual subject matter of the stories is fairly trivial in scope compared to the machinations going on off-screen. It's a deep, deep story. It's possible that Lucas himself isn't up to the task of telling it in the best possible way, which would be a shame. But you've got to give the man credit where it's due.
Okay, end of digression.
No, SGI doesn't bother putting Viewperf results up because they're about as meaningful as Quake FPS. The only benchmark that matters is the "try it and see" benchmark.
At NAB in April, I spent about an hour running Maya at the SGI booth on a just-introduced Fuel with V12 graphics. Then I played with the same cut of software on Windows and Linux on various other computers. No comparison. Fully textured and lit scenes were interactive as hell on the Fuel, and chunky on the PCs. Yeah, some of the dual- and quad-processor PCs could do a better job of running real-time dynamics simulations, but for interacting with scenes-- work you'll spend most of your time doing-- the Fuel was definitely the way to go.
How so? Once the systems are set up, there should be little to no administration required for the render farm...
Heh. That's a good one. "Little to no administration." Heh. Now pull the other one.
what happens if his monitor dies...well, he'd have to order one (couldn't go to the corner shop and pick one up)...
Why not? Are they no longer making monitors that take DVI or VGA?
And how easily could he find Irix support...
1-800-800-4SGI (4744). Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Listen, if you don't like the SGI idea, that's fine. But don't suggest that this guy go down the Linux path. That way lies madness. The choice is really between a Fuel and a Mac. Linux... there's just no reason to subject yourself to Linux in this situation.
In an office with three Indigone-2's why have I had to reboot at least one of them every week?
Because you're a idiot?
How the fuck is somebody supposed to answer that question?? I haven't the foggiest clue why you keep rebooting your Indigo 2s. That's between you and your god.
Did you miss the part of the conversation where we were talking about Maya? Maya, when modeling interactively, is completely graphics-bound. (The dynamics stuff hits the CPU very hard, but that's not something an architect would use.) Whether you have two CPUs makes little difference when using Maya for interactive modeling. Therefore, the Fuel and the Octane2 are pretty much indistinguishable. (I know this because I've used Maya on both of those platforms, with V12 graphics, and I'll be damned if I can tell the difference most of the time.) So if the Octane2 is faster than the whatever-it-is PC, then the Fuel will be as well.
Unless you're not talking about Maya. Which is what this is starting to sound like.
Traditional characters are making a comeback in mainland China
Okay, I stand corrected on that one. Am I correct in assuming that there's a one-to-one mapping between simplified and traditional characters? For every character, that is, there's zero or one simplified forms and one traditional form?
I know there is also the issue of certain words that can appear as either kanji or Hiragana...
Yeah, but that's different. That's mapping a set of characters to one character. Way beyond simple case matching there. Hell, that borders on "do what I mean" technology. But then again, input systems like Kotoeri can map hiragana input to kanji (in a one-to-many way with lots of user input), so maybe it's possible.
Doesn't that at least make you CONCERNED?
Nope. The business of America is business. What Enron did was against the rules, but it's an accounting practice found in virtually every company in America. Enron was used to set an example. Any other company would have served just as well, but they picked Enron. And while it certainly worked-- practices nationwide are being reviewed and revised-- was it really worth it? Enron is gone. Andersen is gone. The pensions of thousands of people are gone. What a horrible price to pay for what was basically a difference of opinion over the interpretation of the ledgers.
If you took the time to educate yourself a bit, I think you'll find that the world is not as scary as you seem to think that it is. Stuff doesn't happen by conspiracy of the oligarchy. Stuff just happens, by accident, by coincidence, by pure dumb luck.
Doesnt that at least make you CURIOUS?
Again, nope. It's not unusual in the slightest. Defense is a private industry. People in that industry should act in their own best interest. If things like this didn't happen, I'd be curious.
YOU, who is beligerently opposed to ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT CORPORATE AMERICA'S INTERESTS.
I'm not opposed to discussion. I'm opposed to senseless rants. Like this one you're having right now. They bore me because they're all vitriol and no facts. Calm down, drop your faulty assumptions, and go do some research. When you have more facts, come talk some more and we'll have a discussion.
More likely it was just a sneaky plot to artificially inflate Slashdot's hit count so they can keep charging advertisers who don't know any better to place ads that 90% of Slashdot readers filter out and never see. Quite the scam, actually.
Bastard, indeed.
Herbert? How? Lucas has publicly admitted taking ideas from Campbell and Kurosawa (Episode IV owes a lot to The Hidden Fortress), but I don't see any significant resemblance between anything Lucas has written and anything Herbert wrote. Apart from the fact that they're both dealing with space and empires, of course.
The claim that Lucas took ideas from Asimov makes more sense, and that hardly makes sense at all. Then again, there are people who say Niven should sue Bungie, so you can never tell.
For the price of 1 SGI box you could probably have at least 5 or 6 dual 2Ghz processor Intel/AMD boxes on a cluster...
At which point they'll have to start talking about a full-time sysadmin, and that's not cheap.
We're talking about one guy, here, and an architect at that. Don't go designing your dream-renderfarm for him. That won't suit his needs at all.
You're closer than you might realize, except for the part about the low end. SGI might have plans for a new low-end workstation in that price range, but if they do I'm not aware of it, and I can't say I'd be happy about it if they did.
But for the new stuff... think about the Origin 300. Just read the tech documents on it, and think about it for a little while.
The only boxes that can keep up with a dual 2GB Dell Linux box in almost all situations are the Onyx or Octane systems.
That doesn't add up. Fuel has the exact same graphics as Octane2: V12. (I think you can buy V10 for Fuel, but I'm not positive. Maybe you have V10?) The only real difference between Fuel and Octane2 is the number of processors. If the Octane2 compares favorably to the PC, then the Fuel should as well.
That's funny. My copy of Maya 4.5 on my Mac seems to be absolutely identical to the latest release on the other platforms.
Maya for Mac used to be behind the other releases. No more.
Like I told the other guy, your experience is not typical. I've worked with many, many SGI machines, both at SGI itself and elsewhere, and these machines just don't crash unless there's a hardware problem. Certain releases of IRIX got out with bugs in them, of course, and if you're unlucky enough to happen onto one, you can run into trouble. But otherwise, the OS just runs forever.
And, speaking personally, I've never seen Netscape lock up the X server. It is definitely possible to crash your X server if you're not careful, but that hardly qualifies as a system crash. Nobody but the guy at that head notices anyway, and all he has to do is issue the vulcan death grip and log back in.
One of our servers is an ancient SGI (33MHz of raw power!) who's record was well over 100 days uptime, it only got shut down for a new disk drive.
I should have mentioned this in my other post, but you just reminded me of it. I once worked with a Challenge L server with twelve R4400 processors, running IRIX 6.2. That machine never, in the slightly over three years that I worked there, went down. Not even for maintenance. (It already had all the disks and stuff that it needed, so there was simply nothing to be done to it.)
It was under a pretty heavy load, too-- over 100 users logging in interactively to edit and compile software, and it was also the ClearCase VOB-- and it simply never went down. I remember checking the uptime once and seeing that it was over 900 days. Amazing.
For all I know, that machine is still up today, with an uptime pushing 2000 days.
And of course, I don't how much more high end you can get than CGI work for a major animated film...
Considerably.
The thing about the big effects houses is that they typically try to spend as little on the workstations as possible, while investing big in the render farm or farms. For example, compositors at ILM use CompTime on things like O2s and cheap Linux machines. You can't do anything in real time at full resolution on those machines; you use proxies for everything, then submit the job to the render farm for full-resolution processing and go on to work on your next shot. The next day, you look at the results of your render in dailies and make changes based on it, repeating the whole process.
That works well in what is basically a factory setting. But it's not right for everyone. If you're working by yourself, like the subject of this discussion will be, it makes more sense to have a computer that's as interactive as possible so you can get instant feedback. Instant feedback at ILM wouldn't help anybody, because you have to take your work to the VFX supe anyway for review. Making the desktop machines more interactive in that setting would just be a waste of money.
No. O2 was dark blue, and O2+ was purple. Fuel is bright red.
And "dago" is just plain wrong. Fuels are not ugly. They're really eye-catching. Better than the sickly green of the Indigo2 or the first-generation Octane, or the now-boring blue of everything else SGI sells.
Why, when someone questions Corporate America's motives, do people people tend to respond with "WELL THEN LETS GO BACK TO BEING HUNTER/GATHERERS" ?
Because you're advocating an extreme, and unjustifiable, point of view. Rant all you like about how the corporations are trying to conquer the world, but be prepared to listen to the sarcasm and mockery the follows.
I agree that I've sounded a little crazy....
A little crazy? Listen to this: "What if it really does get *bad* and everyone is too afraid to speak up for fear of people like you calling them crazy?" Or how about your assertion that "corporate interests" are "attempting to buy our rights away." The kicker, of course, is this: "Why stick up for big business? It HATES you."
You're suffering from paranoid delusions, mary_will_grow. You really might want to consider seeing a doctor. Thorazine can work wonders.
Barely. I'm not going to get into a Linux flame war. Just know that my opinion of Linux as a single-user, general-purpose desktop operating system is not high.
One of the main reasons that the CGI house are going to Linux on the workstation is that they are cheap, compared to SGI machines.
You're sort-of right, but for the wrong reasons. The first Linux box you deploy costs considerably more, in time and energy, than a single SGI workstation. According to folks at ILM, they had to actually go in and do a lot of driver-level work to get the Linux NFS implementation to work reliably for them. So their first Linux box cost them tens of thousands of dollars to deploy.
But their 100th Linux box-- by which time they'd gotten all the bugs worked out-- cost them practically nothing above the cost of the hardware, which is very inexpensive compared to SGI hardware. So Linux as a professional animation or compositing workstation platform makes sense, but only in context of an economy of scale.
This submitter was asking about a single workstation for a single user. I don't think Linux would be a good choice there. It's harder to configure and use than IRIX, and it's less fully featured than OS X. In this specific case, I think Linux would probably be the worst of both worlds.
That's true, but again in a way that nullifies the point. PC hardware improves more quickly than SGI hardware, but the SGI hardware was a hell of a lot better than the PC hardware to start with, so it's a question of catching up. There's no PC in the world that can match the capabilities of an Octane2 or a Fuel*. Someday the PCs will catch up, but not for a while yet.
The implication of this fact is actually a pretty good thing for the owner of the SGI gear. Like Macs, SGI workstations keep their value much longer than PCs do. Last year's top-of-the-line PC is worth a couple hundred bucks now, at best. Last year's Mac or SGI can be sold for 80% of its list price. So if you buy a Mac or an SGI, your investment may possible be greater (in the case of an SGI, definitely so) but it'll be protected longer.
* Of course, if you don't need those particular capabilities, the Octane2 or the Fuel would be a big waste of money for you.
I don't know about FireWire cables, but copper FC cables are actually really heavily shielded. At least, they're supposed to be. So it's natural that they'd cost more than ordinary DB9 serial cables.
I have to confess that I don't actually know what HACMP requires at the switch level-- I've never used that particular HA implementation-- but setting up FC failover on SGI systems is about as simple as it gets. You just set a config file on the host telling it what the primary and failover device paths are for each LUN, and off you go. It requires no special configuration at all on the switch, so it's very close to plug-and-play.
Not every application of fibre channel has to be complicated.
Ohhhh-kaaaay. (Backs away slowly and looks around for a rock.)
Leaving aside a moment that actual merits-- or lack thereof-- of your comment (how do you define "proprietary hardware platform" anyway?), what would you suggest? Is Linux the only acceptable answer to any question of the basic form, "What's a good alternative for x?" Because you know that Maya only runs on IRIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, right? Since Windows is "Microsoft crap" and OS X is "crippled FreeBSD," does that mean you're okay with the IRIX alternative? Seeing as how SGI hardware is far more proprietary than Apple hardware, I don't see how you could be. So what you're really saying here is that Linux is the only politically acceptable answer, right?
I think that's about enough of that attitude. Use the right tool for the job. If the right tool happens to be "a proprietary hardware platform running a crippled FreeBSD," then bully for you.