Yep I lived in the US for 1 year. I'm just amazed that they've managed to convince 250 million people that working your whole life and resfusing to take your one week off a year vacation for fear thet it might cause you to be passed over for a promotion is a good thing.
It seems to me in the US the priorities between corporate life and "lifestyle" or personal development are all out of whack and that's why even small gaps in your resume are an issue in the US but no big deal in other western countries.
I don't understand why in the US it is such an issue with having a gap in your resume? When I was 25 I quit my job in Australia and spent a full year travelling, living off my savings going through Asia/India/Europe. I told this to people from the US and they were horrified? How will you explain this to employers, they said? I tell them the truth, I decided to take a year off and travel.
Here in Australia this is quite common and perfectly acceptable, also in europe it's no big deal many people over there do this.
So if I lived in the US and I say I decided I didn't want to work because I had saved enough money to live on and I wanted to travel/write the american novel/sit at home and play video games/whatever, exactly why should an employer care?
Same applies for periods of unemployment, why does a gap matter?
* butt ugly interface * three pages of dance/electronic music with a grand total of 27 albums to choose from! * WMA only * no support for MacOS or Linux * no indie music
And why would I be interested again?
Rather than just stocking the stuff you can buy in any mall why don't online music retailers specialise in stuff that is hard to find? Eg set up international music store per genre eg a psytrance store that sells globally. I can't walk into a record store and buy this stuff cause no one in Sydney stocks it so I either have to steal it off soulseek or order physical CD's from overseas retailers and wait. I would think it would be much easier to obtain international distribution rights from more obscure independant labels as well.
The US has been preaching free trade, golbalization and opening of markets to the rest of the world for years now. Funny how when other coutnries actually start to compete with them they scream blue murder and beg for protectionism.
Take the film production and visual effects post production industry that I know something about as I work in that Industry in Australia. A worker doing the same job as me in LA would probably get paid double what I get in US dollars.
Recently Australia has been competing in film production and post production because our dollar is lower so the costs are cheaper and we have good skilled crews and visual effects houses here (Animal Logic, Photon, Fuel, etc). of course this has called for someActors to call for strikes against productions going overseas.
So if we can do as good a job than you for cheaper then tough, you have to lower your costs (wages) to compete globally or watch your jobs go overseas.
The US has enjoyed a priviliged and isolated position in the world economy for too long, when the US lowers it's dollars and wages to globally competitive levels then it will recover.
Don't like compitition, well then make sure you control enough capital that you have don't have to compete globally for a living.
Welcome to the global labour market, you guys asked for it now you've got it so go compete.
MMM, look I normally don't defend the US or large corporations which do desverve much of the shit they get, BUT
IT services jobs are mostly being farmed out to India and the Phillipines as the article said. both India and the Phillipines are stable democracies. Multinational corporations usually don't like to invest in dictatorships because therre is too much risk of instability, a coup or some kind of revolution losing their whole investment. Even when a dictator stays in power there is a huge cost incured doing business in Military dictatorships as corruption costs (bribery) has to figured into every stage of a business deal.
Unless the dictatorship has resources you can't get elsewhere (oil, gold, diamonds) there ain't much investment there as it's too high risk.
So yeah, globablization is a nasty thing when it's your job being shipped overseas to a less developed country but at least you can take some consolation in knowing it will probably be shipped to a less developed democracy....
Yes, there is graphics programs for video mixing post production and visual effects that use the OpenGL card to render output.
Here is one, particle illusion: http://www.wondertouch.com/default.asp
There are also just starting to emerge programs for VJ's that use OpenGL or direct X to do realtime video mixing by treating movies as a texture stream mapped on polys.
Search www.audiovisualizers.com or www.vjcentral.com and you'll find lots of info.
Alan Moore is very British, he used to write for 2000AD years ago before he moved to DC Comics to write "The Watchmen".
"The Ballad of Halo Jones" is his best work during the time he was writing for 2000AD, very worthwhile and available in Graphic Novel form. "Dr and Quinch" comes a close second but is probably harder to find.
Clearly this guy didn't do his research, as others have pointed out Shrek was rendered on Linux, and Weta used a render farm of SGI 1200 Intel Linux boxes for "Lord of the Rings".
See here: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/linux/2 001/011 56783.html
Weta used mostly SGI Octanes for 3D and compositing workstations so whats new about dreamworks is that they are switching all the artists workstations to Linux because already for several years now most big VFX houses have been using SGI and NT workstations and Linux render farms.
Um, changing to Linux for rendering in 12-18 months?? What rock has IBM been under? Visual Effects house have been using Linux rendering already for the past 12-18 months. Final Fantasy was rendered on a 1200 CPU Linux render farm (see the recent Ars Technica article can't be bothered to find a link).
Lord of the Rings has at least several hundred CPU linux render farm of SGI 1200 boxes(see here: http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/98898287 4 ), sure other hollywood houses have them as well.
SGI doesn't care because they sell a lot of rack mount linux intel render servers. The real next wave of adoption of Linux in visual effects is as 3d and compositing workstations. Maya, Shake, Rayz, Houdini all run fine on Linux with the right 3d card. The only reason Linux boxes don't dominate in Visual Effects is that high bandwidth playback eg playing 2k images in realtime of a disk array is not really possible under Linux. That's why they still have a ton of SGI octanes kicking around.
Pixar doesn't have to pay per license because
they wrote Renderman so they get it for free.
But POVRAY? Please, this hasn't been used
on any films that I know of (and yes I work
in the film visual effects industry).
There is a free version of Renderman called
BMRT (www.bmrt.org) but many many
visual effects companies do pay $10,000
US per copy for Renderman render licenses
or slightly less than that for Maya or
Mental Ray render licenses.
Here is a real world example, this has not happened to me but to other people I know.
I am a freelance visual effects operator creating graphics effects work for feature films and tv commercials. The contract I sign when working explicitly states that I do not own the copyright to works I create, and that full ownership of copyright (usually) belongs to the production company.
Normally, after finishing a job the company will give me copies of the work I have done in a non protected digital format which I can then use for my own personal use in my showreel which I must show to other companies to obtain more work.
However sometimes things go wrong, the company goes bankrupt or there is a falling out between the freelancer and the company or they just forget and you don't have a copy to use for your showreel. In these cases I can get a copy of the DVD of the film in which work I have done appears and using DeCSS obtain an unencrypted portion of the shots I have worked on to use in my showreel.
This showreel is not distributed, it is taken by me and shown to a small number of companies to get more work and so falls under fair use. This same situation could happen to print graphics designers or sound engineers or artists once DMCA protected mechanisms become more prevelant.
Linux is used by graphics professionals just not a lot in print yet. But in visual effects and in particular film visual effects, linux render farms are already common and linux graphic workstations are becoming increasingly common.
Most large visual effects houses have inhouse calibration tools that match monitor LUT's (look up tables) to film recorders so they are sure what they see on the monitor is what goes to film and gets projected.
An Australian company Rising Sun Research has just released CineSpace which is available on linux / irix and windows nt/2000. Never seen it so can't say anything about it but it's available here:
https://research.rsp.com.au/index.cfm
I used to work for a Video Post Production
facility and we had a Pioneer DVD Burner and
Authoring software for the PC (not sure
exactly what, it wasn't my area).
We could author DVD's just fine with this setup
that would play on standalone DVD players or
on Computers with DVD drives. It was common
for clients to ask for copies of their commercials
on DVD and we could provide them no problem.
I believe you can choose to author an unencrypted
regionless DVD (which is what we were doing) and
players will play them fine.
OSS Projects are like memes or genes aka Richard Dawkins. Throughout their lifetime they compete for scarce resources: developer time, computational resources and user adaptation. Succcessful ones obtain a lot of resources and prosper, they reproduce and even mutate (code fork). The death of any individual project does not mean the death of that OSS meme, if it's a good meme it adopted by other projects.
This evolutionary nature is the strength of OSS, the fittest survive and the unfit whither and die (lose developers and user interest). In evolution and in OSS diversity is a good thing. Expecting OSS to only produce one text editor is like expecting evolution to only make one type of insect: after all they are so similiar why do we need 6 million species of insects?
In Greg Egan's Diaspora a gamma ray burst
from two colliding stars destroys all biological
life on earth. Luckily the post humans have
already uploaded themselves to firmware by then
and spread out into the universe to figure out
why the heck it happened.
In the 1970's the USSR placed on mars a probe that contained a piece of paper with the signature of Leonid Bhreznev on it. Do you really think they sterilized it?
I'm just reading KenMcLeod's "The Sky Road" and it has a the amusing reflection that scientists arrive on mars to find it is being very slowly
terraformed by microbes descended from Leonid Bhreznev's sweat.
If you pay the money to buy a license for IRIX 6.5 for it, then you get all the headers you need to install gcc and in fact you even get gcc precompiled for irix on the freeware cd.
Also, check ebay, people sometimes auction off complete IRIX cd sets for pretty cheap, you maybe be able to get a irix 6.5 set for $50 then you're sorted.
And yes irix 6.5 will run on any SGI with an R4000 or later cpu (except the R4000 Crimson or Indigo 1).
You want tech heaven? You want ultra obsessed geeky otaku fanboys? You want to go to where Ramen noodles come from? You need to try asia.
The following cities in asia are ultra techie:
Bangalore, India: The Silicon Valley of India, huge computer industry and very western compared to the rest of india. English is the first language for most tech workers in India.
Singapore: Clean, efficient, wired city. English is the first language. The state religion is capitalism and anyone found spitting gum on the sidewalk will be publically flogged.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: The government is spending billions on fibre connections.
Tokyo: Bladerunner, Otaku, PS2 what more needs to be said?
Anyone read Greg Egan's Distress A group of anarchist biotechnicans steal patented biotech and use it to "grow" a huge articifical island from bioenginnered coral species.
Then they declare explicitly that their island will respect no patents or copyright laws. Of course all the major coutries boycott them, but it becomes a haven for free thinking hacker types.
Actually the theory of relativity has the solution to long term interstellar travel. The theory goes that time slows down as the speed you are traveling at increases. As you approach the speed of light time almost comes to a standstill. This means that a flight to alpha century at just under light speed would take a little over 4 years for the people on earth but mere days for the crew of the ship.
Yep, but the problem is how you get any significant amount of mass to within a fraction of lightspeed. In fact getting any significant amount of mass to even a 10th of lightspeed requires so much energy that we have no clue how to do it yet.
You don't say what CPU speed the OnyxII was. If it's one of the original R10000 275MHZ Onyx2's then you're comparing a 3 year old CPU to 6 month old ones (The PIII750 and G4).
Also no one buys an Onyx2 for CPU only non-multiprocessing applications. Throw a simulation scene with 500,000 polys frame/ 80MB textures at the Onyx2 and it will smoke any PC or Mac out there.
Yes, your GeForce will do better on games, but games and vissim are very different.
Also throw an application that needs massive memory bandwidth between processes at the Onyx2 and it will also shine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep I lived in the US for 1 year. I'm just amazed that they've managed to convince 250 million people that working your whole life and resfusing to take your one week off a year vacation for fear thet it might cause you to be passed over for a promotion is a good thing.
It seems to me in the US the priorities between corporate life and "lifestyle" or personal development are all out of whack and that's why even small gaps in your resume are an issue in the US but no big deal in other western countries.
I don't understand why in the US it is such an issue with having a gap in your resume? When I was 25 I quit my job in Australia and spent a full year travelling, living off my savings going through Asia/India/Europe. I told this to people from the US and they were horrified? How will you explain this to employers, they said? I tell them the truth, I decided to take a year off and travel.
Here in Australia this is quite common and perfectly acceptable, also in europe it's no big deal many people over there do this.
So if I lived in the US and I say I decided I didn't want to work because I had saved enough money to live on and I wanted to travel/write the american novel/sit at home and play video games/whatever, exactly why should an employer care?
Same applies for periods of unemployment, why does a gap matter?
lemme see,
* butt ugly interface
* three pages of dance/electronic music with a grand total of 27 albums to choose from!
* WMA only
* no support for MacOS or Linux
* no indie music
And why would I be interested again?
Rather than just stocking the stuff you can buy in any mall why don't online music retailers specialise in stuff that is hard to find? Eg set up international music store per genre eg a psytrance store that sells globally. I can't walk into a record store and buy this stuff cause no one in Sydney stocks it so I either have to steal it off soulseek or order physical CD's from overseas retailers and wait. I would think it would be much easier to obtain international distribution rights from more obscure independant labels as well.
The US has been preaching free trade, golbalization and opening of markets to the rest of the world for years now. Funny how when other coutnries actually start to compete with them they scream blue murder and beg for protectionism.
Take the film production and visual effects post production industry that I know something about as I work in that Industry in Australia. A worker doing the same job as me in LA would probably get paid double what I get in US dollars.
Recently Australia has been competing in film production and post production because our dollar is lower so the costs are cheaper and we have good skilled crews and visual effects houses here (Animal Logic, Photon, Fuel, etc). of course this has called for someActors to call for strikes against productions going overseas.
So if we can do as good a job than you for cheaper then tough, you have to lower your costs (wages) to compete globally or watch your jobs go overseas.
The US has enjoyed a priviliged and isolated position in the world economy for too long, when the US lowers it's dollars and wages to globally competitive levels then it will recover.
Don't like compitition, well then make sure you control enough capital that you have don't have to compete globally for a living.
Welcome to the global labour market, you guys asked for it now you've got it so go compete.
MMM, look I normally don't defend the US or large corporations which do desverve much of the shit they get, BUT
IT services jobs are mostly being farmed out to India and the Phillipines as the article said. both India and the Phillipines are stable democracies. Multinational corporations usually don't like to invest in dictatorships because therre is too much risk of instability, a coup or some kind of revolution losing their whole investment. Even when a dictator stays in power there is a huge cost incured doing business in Military dictatorships as corruption costs (bribery) has to figured into every stage of a business deal.
Unless the dictatorship has resources you can't get elsewhere (oil, gold, diamonds) there ain't much investment there as it's too high risk.
So yeah, globablization is a nasty thing when it's your job being shipped overseas to a less developed country but at least you can take some consolation in knowing it will probably be shipped to a less developed democracy....
Yes, there is graphics programs for video mixing post production and visual effects that use the OpenGL card to render output.
Here is one, particle illusion:
http://www.wondertouch.com/default.asp
There are also just starting to emerge programs for VJ's that use OpenGL or direct X to do realtime video mixing by treating movies as a texture stream mapped on polys.
Search www.audiovisualizers.com or www.vjcentral.com and you'll find lots of info.
Alan Moore is very British, he used to write for 2000AD years ago before he moved to DC Comics to write "The Watchmen".
"The Ballad of Halo Jones" is his best work during the time he was writing for 2000AD, very worthwhile and available in Graphic Novel form. "Dr and Quinch" comes a close second but is probably harder to find.
What sort of pansy so called energy drinks are those
choices?
In Europe, Asia and Australia we have Red Bull.
Caffeine, Taurine, and B Vitamins. Works a treat.
There's a heap of imitators like Red Stallion and V that
include Guarana into the mix as well.
Sheesh these Americans, always last to catch up
(see PAL, GSM phones)...
Clearly this guy didn't do his research, as others have pointed out Shrek was rendered on Linux, and Weta used a render farm of SGI 1200 Intel Linux boxes for "Lord of the Rings".
2 001/011 56783.html
See here:
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/linux/
Weta used mostly SGI Octanes for 3D and compositing workstations so whats new about dreamworks is that they are switching all the artists workstations to Linux because already for several years now most big VFX houses have been using SGI and NT workstations and Linux render farms.
Um, changing to Linux for rendering in 12-18 months?? What rock has IBM been under? Visual Effects house have been using Linux rendering already for the past 12-18 months. Final Fantasy was rendered on a 1200 CPU Linux render farm (see the recent Ars Technica article can't be bothered to find a link).
7 4 ), sure other hollywood houses have them as well.
Lord of the Rings has at least several hundred CPU linux render farm of SGI 1200 boxes(see here: http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/9889828
SGI doesn't care because they sell a lot of rack mount linux intel render servers. The real next wave of adoption of Linux in visual effects is as 3d and compositing workstations. Maya, Shake, Rayz, Houdini all run fine on Linux with the right 3d card. The only reason Linux boxes don't dominate in Visual Effects is that high bandwidth playback eg playing 2k images in realtime of a disk array is not really possible under Linux. That's why they still have a ton of SGI octanes kicking around.
The US: Make it military, then we can hide how much it costs in the interest of "National Security".
Russia: We'll get dumb rich Americans to pay us to build it for joy rides. See here: Russia restarting Buran program for space tourism purposes.
Hmm, clever blokes those Russians, eh?
Actually you're half right.
Pixar doesn't have to pay per license because
they wrote Renderman so they get it for free.
But POVRAY? Please, this hasn't been used
on any films that I know of (and yes I work
in the film visual effects industry).
There is a free version of Renderman called
BMRT (www.bmrt.org) but many many
visual effects companies do pay $10,000
US per copy for Renderman render licenses
or slightly less than that for Maya or
Mental Ray render licenses.
Here is a real world example, this has not happened to me but to other people I know.
I am a freelance visual effects operator creating graphics effects work for feature films and tv commercials. The contract I sign when working explicitly states that I do not own the copyright to works I create, and that full ownership of copyright (usually) belongs to the production company.
Normally, after finishing a job the company will give me copies of the work I have done in a non protected digital format which I can then use for my own personal use in my showreel which I must show to other companies to obtain more work.
However sometimes things go wrong, the company goes bankrupt or there is a falling out between the freelancer and the company or they just forget and you don't have a copy to use for your showreel. In these cases I can get a copy of the DVD of the film in which work I have done appears and using DeCSS obtain an unencrypted portion of the shots I have worked on to use in my showreel.
This showreel is not distributed, it is taken by me and shown to a small number of companies to get more work and so falls under fair use. This same situation could happen to print graphics designers or sound engineers or artists once DMCA protected mechanisms become more prevelant.
Linux is used by graphics professionals just not a lot in print yet. But in visual effects and in particular film visual effects, linux render farms are already common and linux graphic workstations are becoming increasingly common.
Most large visual effects houses have inhouse calibration tools that match monitor LUT's (look up tables) to film recorders so they are sure what they see on the monitor is what goes to film and gets projected.
An Australian company Rising Sun Research has just released CineSpace which is available on linux / irix and windows nt/2000. Never seen it so can't say anything about it but it's available here:
https://research.rsp.com.au/index.cfm
I used to work for a Video Post Production
facility and we had a Pioneer DVD Burner and
Authoring software for the PC (not sure
exactly what, it wasn't my area).
We could author DVD's just fine with this setup
that would play on standalone DVD players or
on Computers with DVD drives. It was common
for clients to ask for copies of their commercials
on DVD and we could provide them no problem.
I believe you can choose to author an unencrypted
regionless DVD (which is what we were doing) and
players will play them fine.
OSS Projects are like memes or genes aka Richard Dawkins. Throughout their lifetime they compete for scarce resources: developer time, computational resources and user adaptation. Succcessful ones obtain a lot of resources and prosper, they reproduce and even mutate (code fork). The death of any individual project does not mean the death of that OSS meme, if it's a good meme it adopted by other projects.
This evolutionary nature is the strength of OSS, the fittest survive and the unfit whither and die (lose developers and user interest). In evolution and in OSS diversity is a good thing. Expecting OSS to only produce one text editor is like expecting evolution to only make one type of insect: after all they are so similiar why do we need 6 million species of insects?
Search through the digits in pi until you find a sequence that corresponds to the decimal ascii code values of the decss code.
Pi is infinitely long, the corresponding sequence must be in there somewhere.
Then just quote Pi starting at blah blah big
for decss.
In Greg Egan's Diaspora a gamma ray burst from two colliding stars destroys all biological life on earth. Luckily the post humans have already uploaded themselves to firmware by then and spread out into the universe to figure out why the heck it happened.
In the 1970's the USSR placed on mars a probe that contained a piece of paper with the signature of Leonid Bhreznev on it. Do you really think they sterilized it?
I'm just reading KenMcLeod's "The Sky Road" and it has a the amusing reflection that scientists arrive on mars to find it is being very slowly
terraformed by microbes descended from Leonid Bhreznev's sweat.
If you pay the money to buy a license for
IRIX 6.5 for it, then you get all the headers
you need to install gcc and in fact you even get
gcc precompiled for irix on the freeware cd.
Also, check ebay, people sometimes auction off complete IRIX cd sets for pretty cheap, you maybe be able to get a irix 6.5 set for $50 then you're sorted.
And yes irix 6.5 will run on any SGI with an R4000 or later cpu (except the R4000 Crimson or Indigo 1).
You want tech heaven? You want ultra obsessed geeky otaku fanboys? You want to go to where Ramen noodles come from? You need to try asia.
The following cities in asia are ultra techie:
Bangalore, India: The Silicon Valley of India, huge computer industry and very western compared to the rest of india. English is the first language for most tech workers in India.
Singapore: Clean, efficient, wired city. English is the first language. The state religion is capitalism and anyone found spitting gum on the sidewalk will be publically flogged.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: The government is spending billions on fibre connections.
Tokyo: Bladerunner, Otaku, PS2 what more needs to be said?
Not quite every other regime.
Read about what's happening in Burma/Myanmar.
www.freeburma.org
The SLORC make the CPC look like kindergarten teachers by comparision.
A group of anarchist biotechnicans steal patented biotech and use it to "grow" a huge articifical island from bioenginnered coral species.
Then they declare explicitly that their island will respect no patents or copyright laws. Of course all the major coutries boycott them, but it becomes a haven for free thinking hacker types.
The rest of Egan's works are pretty cool too.
Yep, but the problem is how you get any significant amount of mass to within a fraction of lightspeed. In fact getting any significant amount of mass to even a 10th of lightspeed requires so much energy that we have no clue how to do it yet.
You don't say what CPU speed the OnyxII was. If it's one of the original R10000 275MHZ Onyx2's then you're comparing a 3 year old CPU to 6 month old ones (The PIII750 and G4).
Also no one buys an Onyx2 for CPU only non-multiprocessing applications. Throw a simulation scene with 500,000 polys frame/ 80MB textures at the Onyx2 and it will smoke any PC or Mac out there.
Yes, your GeForce will do better on games, but games and vissim are very different.
Also throw an application that needs massive memory bandwidth between processes at the Onyx2 and it will also shine.