The quote was that it takes animators a few days per 2 seconds of animation. *Animators* shouldn't need more than GPU lighting.
Interactive lighting is a god-sent. I just used it on a TV spot a couple months ago for the first time with Brazil 3 and it was like upgrading to a car from a tricycle. Now I never want to go back to adjust, re-render, adjust, rerender ever again.
Well I think they're referring to writing code for Intel's MIC (Knights Tail). Which acts pretty differently from writing for a single CPU. It acts more like a computer cluster of networked computers than a multicore cpu.
Also even with threading and SMP renderers have problems with parallel tasks when you start ray-tracing since each ray spawns more rays and those rays spawn rays and keeping track of them and loading the correct memory into L1,2 and 3 cache causes delays. You might start with 12 rays which are nice and concurrent and shading the same object but then you get a reflection and each spawned ray now is on 12 different material and you now can no longer use SIMD.
If Dreamworks has a novel means of optimizing coherence to fully utilize the new Intel CPU architectures then they could very easily be seeing render times that are 40x-60x faster.
Yeah my first thought was "Why are animators rendering their sequences instead of just using the GPU viewports?
Then I remembered that he had been talking this up in regards to Larabee last year. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement in parallelism. I'm working on the side for Caustic Graphics which is also working on a hardware card to make rendering more parallel and efficient. And I'm sure they would also love to get their hands on Knights Trail. But I don't know that Dreamworks is "revolutionizing" animation by planning to buy larabee/knights trail chips when they eventually are released haha.
That's very conflated, history is very important, because you couple that with the mere fact that life still exists, clearly those temperature variations weren't cataclysmic then (the cold ones were very damaging), so why should they be now?
Life still exists even after cataclysmic impacts so why bother diverting an incoming comet?
Render farms don't use GPUs. Good luck fitting a 3D scene into 1GB of memory!
Maybe for a couple specialty applications custom written for a few narrow pipeline tools but certainly not the backbone which is still all PRman, Arnold, Vray, Brazil and Mental Ray. None of which use the GPU yet. Only production renderer nearing GPU acceleration is Final Render and maybe Brazil/Vray for specialized passes.
So what you're saying is that if a glacier moved through Manhattan it wouldn't be a problem. I mean hell, there used to be glaciers in Manhattan all the time, why the big fuss *now*?
The reason your argument is 'fucking stupid' and not just 'stupid' is the same reason that having a volcano erupt under you is quite different in every single way from a volcano having erupted where you're standing 100k years ago.
I mean shit son, not that long ago Japan was entirely under water, who gives a shit about a little wave?
I would like to see that argument in a court of law. "Your honor, members of the jury, I don't see what the fuss is all about. Yes a bulldozer drove through Xenobyte's home but only 10 years ago that was an empty lot! That lot has seen far greater changes in the last 100 years than last Tuesday. So who's to say that humans are responsible for driving that bulldozer through his living room? Why, 1,000 years ago huge glaciers would have driven through his living room."
Everything you just listed above is paid for in my property taxes, my fuel taxes (both that I pay and UPS/Fedex when delivering my Amazon packages), and my water bill. Why you need sales tax from me if I'm not using a brick and mortar store to buy something?
Because you're already obligated to pay that tax. Sales taxes are really a form of income tax in disguise. Technically most "sales" taxes in states aren't even sales taxes they're "Use" taxes.
They aren't taxing the business, they're taxing the customer.
Technically as a result even if you order something online you're evading taxes if you *don't* declare the purchase and pay it. Now unless you buy something large (for instance I just bought a very expensive camera and need to declare the purchase) it's probably going to fall within the "nobody will notice" class of tax evasion but legally speaking they aren't trying to extract a new tax out of you... they're just streamlining the collection of a tax you've already (by virtue of your representatives and ballot initiatives) imposed on yourself as a means of funding your public services.
This *ISN'T* a new tax. This is an effort to enforce an existing tax. If you just want to pay a property and fuel tax then you need to take it up with your representatives.
By the way, gas taxes only provide a teeny tiny fraction of the necessary funds for a state's road infrastructure. Transit money is often paid for out of the general fund.
It's Open Source. So unless you're a developer your opinion is going to be derided, disregarded and dismissed.
If non-programmers want input on their products then they need to pay developers to prototype their ideas. A developer's idea of a great UI and innovative interface is:
You would not have expected Microsoft a decade ago to release an open operating system while Apple released a vertically integrated and closed down market?
Microsoft is many things, but bending over backwards to let anything run on their systems (including malware) has been one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses since the beginning.
Not true. You can do behavioral conditioning to associate one negative to another. For instance I was hearing about a situation where a child was I believed slapped when they touched a fuzzy bunny. They would associate negative experiences with rabbits and fear them.
I would say a little physical violence against a child if it prevents a greater injury is justified. For instance tackling a child might hurt them and could even break a bone but if they were about to step in front of a truck then it's the lesser of two evils. But maybe not just tackling a child if they are about to walk into a flower garden.;)
It's ingenious really. Politicians get to say they killed nuclear power (15 years from now) so they appease the anti-nuke crowd. Pro-nukes wins either way, if reactors are replaceable and some technology does come along then we get cheap clean energy anyway, if not then the nukes stay around.
Unless we find an alternative it's essentially pro-nuke legislation dressed up as greenpeace.
Actually I'm an artist at an animation company but except for everything about your guess you're spot on.;)
By your logic, I should sink countless hours of my time into a new system that, to date, at least 7 distros have issued public statements saying they're delaying any transition to GNOME 3 indefinitely. Upgrading to the latest and greatest because it's the latest and greatest is not good logic. Give me a reason.
That same argument could be used against Linux though. "Why should I sink countless hours of my time into a new system when I'm already used to Windows?"
If you want to roll out the QWERTY vs DVORAK argument then that's fine but that's different from "Geeks aren't afraid of change!".
That's saying "Geeks aren't afraid of change, they just reject change even when it's empirically faster because they're used to the old system."
Which is exactly my point. Dvorak is faster. But I don't switch because it's worse but because I don't want to learn a new thing. Which is *exactly* what Shuttleworth was saying.
I don't know if Unity is empirically better, but I have seen tons of areas where geeky users push back because they are really fast at doing back asswords workflows.
Wiping a computer almost always does make it "go faster", for a long list of reasons, but you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater to do it. This hasn't changed all that much from when I was born except that there is added data and software and thus more complexity for a complete re-install. (Perhaps the one thing that has changed is that the DRM has become idiotic in an attempt to force duplicate purchases, but you can avoid software like that).
It went right over your head
He said 'whipping' as in hitting with a whip. We used to whip horses, it made them go faster, then we moved on, but some people do the equivalent of whipping their computers etc because "if it worked then, and I went faster, my computer should go faster when I hit it too!"
Yet we live in different times and it just doesn't apply anymore.
^ This.
Whipping not Wiping. When you apply a usage philosophy from horses to computers it's not going to work.
We don't use reigns to steer a cursor either. What's best for one system doesn't necessarily translate to another one. And when you try to apply old methodologies to new systems it often produces poor results.
Maybe one SDK has really fast XML parsing and another really fast SQL interfaces. Both might be fast but ultimately you have to judge each implementation without assuming the old system informs the best way to use the new system.
And how ridiculous is it to say geeks are "too cool" to use a product. What are you smoking!?!? Geeks love new things that function well and allow them to do cool things. They do not shun these things based on idiotic social protocol.
Geeks claim to be all about change and innovation but in all honesty in many ways they're as set in their ways as anyone else.
According to Geeks the window manager was perfected by Microsoft in Windows 95 and everything else has been an abomination.
They don't care what the statistics or the user testing show... they know they're right. After all it's been that way since 1994.
Someone below mentioned they disable Aero in order to avoid the window manager using system resources... even though it probably uses 1MB of RAM of their 8,000 MB system. There are legions of geeky cargo cults who still live in 1998 and practice superstitious rituals to make their computers go faster.
I'm just as guilty as the next guy. The reason we geeks never evolve is because we aren't willing to buy-in to the notion that there's a better way. We test the waters but still hold onto bad workflows. If you try to do it the old-way with the new system you won't get anywhere. It's like whipping your computer to make it go faster. You have to adapt to the new ways. If you try to do things the old way then it often is clunky and slow.
We believe that since we've used the system for 20+ years we know the best way to do something we've done forever. But sometimes the old way kind of works but in all honesty they've changed the entire philosophy of how to do something.
I can't count how many times I've tried to work the same way I've worked in old software in a competitor's package. It was horrible! Why? Because I was *doing it wrong*. Once I learned how the new software worked and stopped trying to cram my square plug approach through a round hole I realized that the new system was actually a lot faster when you worked with its philosophy.
The problem is that there is no way to win. If we cut out the red tape you get a case like Solyandra where they get accused of impropriety and not carrying out due diligence.
It's really hard to have a scandal when you require everybody to go through painful budgeting and bidding processes.
We see this in the private sector too. We could do the job, we could do it cheaply and we could do it fast but we have to quadruple bid against 3 competitors and it has to be a fixed bid... so we jack our rates as do our competitors. Instead of trusting us and having a good working relationship they get paranoid and penny conscious which costs them huge down the road.
But from their perspective they can always pass the buck if they make everybody bend over backwards on bidding. "We quadruple bid it! It's not our fault it ran over budget!"
Now... the denialists on SlashDot are saying "Fine, CC is happening but we don't agree that humans cause it" which just boggles the mind.
Thats pretty much what we 'denialists' have always said, if you'd been paying attention rather than having your head up someones ass saying 'they are right and you are wrong because we're louder!'. Instead, you don't even actually know what the debate is about.
Ummmm, there are denialists on THIS VERY THREAD which are arguing that climate change isn't real because "it hasn't warmed in 10 years".
We had a large free solution deployed for several years. It was kind of aggravating to manage and finally invested in a commercial payed solution.
I just calculated that the commercial solution saved us the full price of the software and its support contract every 2 years on electricity. And that's ignoring the hundreds of hours gained from efficiency.
All operating systems are effectively free. If $120 every 3 years for Windows is a sizable expense per employee... your'e doing something horribly wrong at your company. That's probably 1/3rd of their coffee expenses.
If you payed me $40 a year to use linux I would say no. I've setup both linux and windows pipelines before. The setup and maintenance time I had to invest in finding esoteric software incompatibilities with XYZ build of linux were double or quadruple on Windows. Software says "supports Win7" and it probably supports Win7. If software says "Supports RedHat" it... usually, sometimes kind of maybe supports it depending on what version of graphics drivers you're running and what version of OpenGL you have installed and whether or not you're running on Intel... etc etc..
My time is billable at $100+ an hour. If I have to spend 20 minutes a year dealing with Linux incompatibility bullshit or how to get two monitors to work... it's costing me money.
It's not that Steve Jobs is particularly exceptional. What's exceptional is that someone like Steve Jobs got into a position of power and authority.
If Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs the designer he would have probably been fired for not playing politics and that would have been the end of it... hell it even happened once! The only reason Steve Jobs was able to be Steve Jobs was because Apple failed miserably and they were desperate. With nothing to lose someone with above average creativity and common sense was able to purge the Excel Jockeys.
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
Well, in 1900 41% of the country was working agriculture.
Now it's 2%. So I would say that Combines and tractors *did* ruin agricultural jobs. Luckily for all of those farm hands though we had other unskilled labor to choose from.
This time the machines aren't just coming for the uneducated... it's coming for the middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
Right but a Lighting TD isn't an animator. ;)
The quote was that it takes animators a few days per 2 seconds of animation. *Animators* shouldn't need more than GPU lighting.
Interactive lighting is a god-sent. I just used it on a TV spot a couple months ago for the first time with Brazil 3 and it was like upgrading to a car from a tricycle. Now I never want to go back to adjust, re-render, adjust, rerender ever again.
Well I think they're referring to writing code for Intel's MIC (Knights Tail). Which acts pretty differently from writing for a single CPU. It acts more like a computer cluster of networked computers than a multicore cpu.
Also even with threading and SMP renderers have problems with parallel tasks when you start ray-tracing since each ray spawns more rays and those rays spawn rays and keeping track of them and loading the correct memory into L1,2 and 3 cache causes delays. You might start with 12 rays which are nice and concurrent and shading the same object but then you get a reflection and each spawned ray now is on 12 different material and you now can no longer use SIMD.
If Dreamworks has a novel means of optimizing coherence to fully utilize the new Intel CPU architectures then they could very easily be seeing render times that are 40x-60x faster.
Yeah my first thought was "Why are animators rendering their sequences instead of just using the GPU viewports?
Then I remembered that he had been talking this up in regards to Larabee last year. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement in parallelism. I'm working on the side for Caustic Graphics which is also working on a hardware card to make rendering more parallel and efficient. And I'm sure they would also love to get their hands on Knights Trail. But I don't know that Dreamworks is "revolutionizing" animation by planning to buy larabee/knights trail chips when they eventually are released haha.
That's very conflated, history is very important, because you couple that with the mere fact that life still exists, clearly those temperature variations weren't cataclysmic then (the cold ones were very damaging), so why should they be now?
Life still exists even after cataclysmic impacts so why bother diverting an incoming comet?
Render farms don't use GPUs. Good luck fitting a 3D scene into 1GB of memory!
Maybe for a couple specialty applications custom written for a few narrow pipeline tools but certainly not the backbone which is still all PRman, Arnold, Vray, Brazil and Mental Ray. None of which use the GPU yet. Only production renderer nearing GPU acceleration is Final Render and maybe Brazil/Vray for specialized passes.
So what you're saying is that if a glacier moved through Manhattan it wouldn't be a problem. I mean hell, there used to be glaciers in Manhattan all the time, why the big fuss *now*?
The reason your argument is 'fucking stupid' and not just 'stupid' is the same reason that having a volcano erupt under you is quite different in every single way from a volcano having erupted where you're standing 100k years ago.
I mean shit son, not that long ago Japan was entirely under water, who gives a shit about a little wave?
I would like to see that argument in a court of law. "Your honor, members of the jury, I don't see what the fuss is all about. Yes a bulldozer drove through Xenobyte's home but only 10 years ago that was an empty lot! That lot has seen far greater changes in the last 100 years than last Tuesday. So who's to say that humans are responsible for driving that bulldozer through his living room? Why, 1,000 years ago huge glaciers would have driven through his living room."
Everything you just listed above is paid for in my property taxes, my fuel taxes (both that I pay and UPS/Fedex when delivering my Amazon packages), and my water bill. Why you need sales tax from me if I'm not using a brick and mortar store to buy something?
Because you're already obligated to pay that tax. Sales taxes are really a form of income tax in disguise. Technically most "sales" taxes in states aren't even sales taxes they're "Use" taxes.
They aren't taxing the business, they're taxing the customer.
Technically as a result even if you order something online you're evading taxes if you *don't* declare the purchase and pay it. Now unless you buy something large (for instance I just bought a very expensive camera and need to declare the purchase) it's probably going to fall within the "nobody will notice" class of tax evasion but legally speaking they aren't trying to extract a new tax out of you... they're just streamlining the collection of a tax you've already (by virtue of your representatives and ballot initiatives) imposed on yourself as a means of funding your public services.
This *ISN'T* a new tax. This is an effort to enforce an existing tax. If you just want to pay a property and fuel tax then you need to take it up with your representatives.
By the way, gas taxes only provide a teeny tiny fraction of the necessary funds for a state's road infrastructure. Transit money is often paid for out of the general fund.
Nope I think you have it completely backwards.
It's Open Source. So unless you're a developer your opinion is going to be derided, disregarded and dismissed.
If non-programmers want input on their products then they need to pay developers to prototype their ideas. A developer's idea of a great UI and innovative interface is:
> $ convert label.gif +matte \
\( +clone -shade 110x90 -normalize -negate +clone -compose Plus -composite \) \
\( -clone 0 -shade 110x50 -normalize -channel BG -fx 0 +channel -matte \) \
-delete 0 +swap -compose Multiply -composite button.gif
"So efficient!"
So your proposal is what? Politicians can never find private employment again in their life after being elected to office?
What are they supposed to do after they're out of office?
You would not have expected Microsoft a decade ago to release an open operating system while Apple released a vertically integrated and closed down market?
Microsoft is many things, but bending over backwards to let anything run on their systems (including malware) has been one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses since the beginning.
When I think "scientific rigor" the first association that springs to mind is "mass media journalism". /s
Not true. You can do behavioral conditioning to associate one negative to another. For instance I was hearing about a situation where a child was I believed slapped when they touched a fuzzy bunny. They would associate negative experiences with rabbits and fear them.
I would say a little physical violence against a child if it prevents a greater injury is justified. For instance tackling a child might hurt them and could even break a bone but if they were about to step in front of a truck then it's the lesser of two evils. But maybe not just tackling a child if they are about to walk into a flower garden. ;)
It's ingenious really. Politicians get to say they killed nuclear power (15 years from now) so they appease the anti-nuke crowd. Pro-nukes wins either way, if reactors are replaceable and some technology does come along then we get cheap clean energy anyway, if not then the nukes stay around.
Unless we find an alternative it's essentially pro-nuke legislation dressed up as greenpeace.
Actually I'm an artist at an animation company but except for everything about your guess you're spot on. ;)
By your logic, I should sink countless hours of my time into a new system that, to date, at least 7 distros have issued public statements saying they're delaying any transition to GNOME 3 indefinitely. Upgrading to the latest and greatest because it's the latest and greatest is not good logic. Give me a reason.
That same argument could be used against Linux though. "Why should I sink countless hours of my time into a new system when I'm already used to Windows?"
If you want to roll out the QWERTY vs DVORAK argument then that's fine but that's different from "Geeks aren't afraid of change!".
That's saying "Geeks aren't afraid of change, they just reject change even when it's empirically faster because they're used to the old system."
Which is exactly my point. Dvorak is faster. But I don't switch because it's worse but because I don't want to learn a new thing. Which is *exactly* what Shuttleworth was saying.
I don't know if Unity is empirically better, but I have seen tons of areas where geeky users push back because they are really fast at doing back asswords workflows.
Wiping a computer almost always does make it "go faster", for a long list of reasons, but you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater to do it. This hasn't changed all that much from when I was born except that there is added data and software and thus more complexity for a complete re-install. (Perhaps the one thing that has changed is that the DRM has become idiotic in an attempt to force duplicate purchases, but you can avoid software like that).
It went right over your head
He said 'whipping' as in hitting with a whip.
We used to whip horses, it made them go faster, then we moved on, but some people do the equivalent of whipping their computers etc because "if it worked then, and I went faster, my computer should go faster when I hit it too!"
Yet we live in different times and it just doesn't apply anymore.
^ This.
Whipping not Wiping. When you apply a usage philosophy from horses to computers it's not going to work.
We don't use reigns to steer a cursor either. What's best for one system doesn't necessarily translate to another one. And when you try to apply old methodologies to new systems it often produces poor results.
Maybe one SDK has really fast XML parsing and another really fast SQL interfaces. Both might be fast but ultimately you have to judge each implementation without assuming the old system informs the best way to use the new system.
And how ridiculous is it to say geeks are "too cool" to use a product. What are you smoking!?!? Geeks love new things that function well and allow them to do cool things. They do not shun these things based on idiotic social protocol.
Geeks claim to be all about change and innovation but in all honesty in many ways they're as set in their ways as anyone else.
According to Geeks the window manager was perfected by Microsoft in Windows 95 and everything else has been an abomination.
They don't care what the statistics or the user testing show... they know they're right. After all it's been that way since 1994.
Someone below mentioned they disable Aero in order to avoid the window manager using system resources... even though it probably uses 1MB of RAM of their 8,000 MB system. There are legions of geeky cargo cults who still live in 1998 and practice superstitious rituals to make their computers go faster.
I'm just as guilty as the next guy. The reason we geeks never evolve is because we aren't willing to buy-in to the notion that there's a better way. We test the waters but still hold onto bad workflows. If you try to do it the old-way with the new system you won't get anywhere. It's like whipping your computer to make it go faster. You have to adapt to the new ways. If you try to do things the old way then it often is clunky and slow.
We believe that since we've used the system for 20+ years we know the best way to do something we've done forever. But sometimes the old way kind of works but in all honesty they've changed the entire philosophy of how to do something.
I can't count how many times I've tried to work the same way I've worked in old software in a competitor's package. It was horrible! Why? Because I was *doing it wrong*. Once I learned how the new software worked and stopped trying to cram my square plug approach through a round hole I realized that the new system was actually a lot faster when you worked with its philosophy.
The problem is that there is no way to win. If we cut out the red tape you get a case like Solyandra where they get accused of impropriety and not carrying out due diligence.
It's really hard to have a scandal when you require everybody to go through painful budgeting and bidding processes.
We see this in the private sector too. We could do the job, we could do it cheaply and we could do it fast but we have to quadruple bid against 3 competitors and it has to be a fixed bid... so we jack our rates as do our competitors. Instead of trusting us and having a good working relationship they get paranoid and penny conscious which costs them huge down the road.
But from their perspective they can always pass the buck if they make everybody bend over backwards on bidding. "We quadruple bid it! It's not our fault it ran over budget!"
God you're one ignorant fuck, you know that?
Now... the denialists on SlashDot are saying "Fine, CC is happening but we don't agree that humans cause it" which just boggles the mind.
Thats pretty much what we 'denialists' have always said, if you'd been paying attention rather than having your head up someones ass saying 'they are right and you are wrong because we're louder!'. Instead, you don't even actually know what the debate is about.
Ummmm, there are denialists on THIS VERY THREAD which are arguing that climate change isn't real because "it hasn't warmed in 10 years".
*Double or quadruple [that of] Windows.*
Oops. My poor grammar could be read opposite of the intent.
We had a large free solution deployed for several years. It was kind of aggravating to manage and finally invested in a commercial payed solution.
I just calculated that the commercial solution saved us the full price of the software and its support contract every 2 years on electricity. And that's ignoring the hundreds of hours gained from efficiency.
All operating systems are effectively free. If $120 every 3 years for Windows is a sizable expense per employee... your'e doing something horribly wrong at your company. That's probably 1/3rd of their coffee expenses.
If you payed me $40 a year to use linux I would say no. I've setup both linux and windows pipelines before. The setup and maintenance time I had to invest in finding esoteric software incompatibilities with XYZ build of linux were double or quadruple on Windows. Software says "supports Win7" and it probably supports Win7. If software says "Supports RedHat" it... usually, sometimes kind of maybe supports it depending on what version of graphics drivers you're running and what version of OpenGL you have installed and whether or not you're running on Intel... etc etc..
My time is billable at $100+ an hour. If I have to spend 20 minutes a year dealing with Linux incompatibility bullshit or how to get two monitors to work... it's costing me money.
Price of content is rising? Since when? DVDs are cheaper than ever.
That's the real miracle of Steve Jobs.
It's not that Steve Jobs is particularly exceptional. What's exceptional is that someone like Steve Jobs got into a position of power and authority.
If Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs the designer he would have probably been fired for not playing politics and that would have been the end of it... hell it even happened once! The only reason Steve Jobs was able to be Steve Jobs was because Apple failed miserably and they were desperate. With nothing to lose someone with above average creativity and common sense was able to purge the Excel Jockeys.
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
Well, in 1900 41% of the country was working agriculture.
Now it's 2%. So I would say that Combines and tractors *did* ruin agricultural jobs. Luckily for all of those farm hands though we had other unskilled labor to choose from.
This time the machines aren't just coming for the uneducated... it's coming for the middle class.
Lincoln didn't need to do anything; he should have just let the southern states go. He's responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 people.
Alternately, the south didn't need to secede. The southern confederacy is responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 people.
And on the bright side, millions of African Americans are now free as a side-effect.