Roger
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Posts posted by Roger
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This sale will never complete. Whoever bid this thing up this much is doing it as a goof.
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This is some weapons-grade BS, that's for sure. I wasn't surprised when I found out Jobs was up to these kind of shenanigans, but consider my monocle popped at this revelation.
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I have to say, it would eliminate a lot of the bother with product activation, or using AM on multiple systems, since you could only use it on one machine at a time, but have it available on several systems. Tablet/laptop and desktop, for instance.
But I imagine Martin would have to give a pretty decent size cut to Valve, so I don't see that happening if only for that reason.
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I'm glad he's recognizable, at least. I let myself get to caught up with it being "perfect", between that and waiting too long to pick it back up, that was what did me in as far as making the deadline.
I think if I can knock out the details tonight, add a "skirt" or bumper to the base, he should start looking pretty close.
I'd like to redo the head, and if I wanted a photoreal version then I'd probably have to spend maybe another week getting the textures and lighting right.
But even with a half-finished model, if you knew what it was right away then that's a success in my book. Just need to finish now.
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Well here is what I was trying to bang out last night. I think you might be able to guess what it is. I didn't feel comfortable sending it in, though. I'm going to finish it today and post in the WIP thread.
Even if I missed the deadline, I think it's worth doing still.
I wish I had started over from scratch a few weeks ago, I might have gotten him done in time. I was really wedded to doing a strict recreation but then decided "screw it, I'll just do an interpretation of the character" but by the time I'd settled on that I had let too much time go by.
I think it would have been tough to finish the eyes, ears, tail, gun/snout and properly texture him with only an hour to go.
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I thought I was going to be able to knock something out at the last minute.
As usual, what I think and what is the reality of things are completely different.
Rather than turn something half-ass in, I think I will keep working on this and just post it later, and wait for the next contest.
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Is there any way to bevel after the fact?
I'm racing to finish my contest entry, and one of the parts is looking really awful with knife-like edges, but I'm not sure how best exactly to bevel it.
I could try adding more CPs and then smoothing the points, and seeing if that helps. It looks really rough right now, though. -
Well that is good, gives me until about 1:55 AM Central then.
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Maybe I should apply. I don't get a costume now. And I always wanted a laser death-ray.
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So are these due midnight Pacific time?
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Originally I thought it was a CPU but I think it may be some sort of coprocessor board like the Nvidia Tesla. I could be wrong though. It could be all 3, I suppose, and just depending on what they want depends on how it is implemented (single chip in single socket: highly integrated system, multiple chips on a card: coprocessor board, etc).
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/8217/intels-knights-landing-coprocessor-detailed
I can remember reading about ASCI Red (government supercomputer) being able crack the teraflop barrier back in 1997. This single cpu handles 2 or 3 times that.
Still, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised given this is nearly 20 years later.
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LOL. Very clever.
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I recall when I worked at Nortel we had a license for Alias Animator. It had been purchased for a very ill-advised venture into something called "VR" which I was not a part of, but after the smoke cleared Alia Animator was still there in our office.
This was around 1998 or so. It was a $30,000 program that ran on a $60,000 SGI "workstation."
I gave it a try but I was dumbfounded... what did it have that A:M v5 didn't have? Maybe there was something but I couldn't detect anything notable and everything was harder and more tedious than in A:M.
Alias version 9 was the last one I used. It was not terribly easy to use. My favorite part was that it was a $30k program with several plug-ins that cost $5k-$10k a piece. So you spent $30,000 but still needed to spend more if you wanted all the super-cool features.
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Why anyone would buy Maya over AM, I do not know. I've never actually used Maya (although I have used Alias, wayyyyy back when the land was young and so was I) so maybe there is something there that is worth paying $185/month for.
As much as I dislike subscription fees, AMs is at least reasonable. The only way it would be more reasonable is if you could somehow have a license you could move between systems, but only use one copy of. Like if it was on a usb key or something.
But for the price of one month of Maya, you can get 2 copies of AM! For a whole year! And have money left over for lunch. How cool is that?
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And yes, would probably have to be some scientific app. I can't imagine anything outside of oil&gas exploration or panning around inside an MRI of your brain in realtime or editing multiple 4k video streams that would even begin to stress this thing.
And if I was buying something like this, unless I had some burning need where it would pay for itself in a month, the whole time I would be thinking "in ten years the average phone will have these specs"
Even though I still thing the new Macs look goofy, they're actually not a bad value considering you get the workstation-level ATI graphics cards for practically nothing. Although the base model of this machine will exceed it in number of cpu cores at the same price, when you start adding in a workstation class graphics card you can't match the price. However, you're locked into whatever config you go with with the Mac, unless they offer an upgrade service.
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I don't know if there are any applications that could truly use that many cores. Maybe some sort of scientific thing?
I don't understand this...
1 terabyte of RAM1 terabyte SSD
8GB of hard disks
Herp-derp. Chalk that up to a typo due to me being exhausted. I meant to type 8TB 
I'm assuming if you wanted to you could probably throw as many SSDs in there as you wanted, but the configurator program only allows for 1, everything else has to be a regular HD.
Still, pretty nuts. The RAM alone is about $23000.
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So curiosity got the better of me and I configured an "ultimate xeon" system:
Basically the same as the above, but with the following difference
4 Tesla K40 cards
Quadro 6000
4 12 core xeons
Other than that, more or less the same. For a whopping total of $78000. I cannot even imagine spending that kind of money, or what you would use it for. Anything that used GPU computing would probably run instantly.
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Found this on another tech site today, so I had to start playing with their configurator:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/peak/quad_...r/customize.php
The base is about $7500, if you max everything out, it ends up being $45,000. I didn't do a Xeon system, I'm afraid to. It would probably be double.
For those of you wondering, that gets you:
Quad 16 core Opterons for a total of 64 cores
1 terabyte of RAM
1 terabyte SSD
8TB of hard disks
Quadro 6000 with 12GB of RAM
2 Bluray burners
4k monitor
mouse and keybard
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I think someone is taking the piss, that can't be for real. Or maybe they are trying to be "hip" and show a retro look? That would be "omigosh high end graphics!" in 1985 maybe.
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I don't know if this is just a bad photo they took, or if that's the way the drive actually looks. Are there pinholes in the surface? My guess is that if my eyes aren't deceiving me, these must be for ventilation? Why not just make the entire top of the drive a heat sink?
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Standard bluray is I think only 25 or 50 GB max. So yes, backing up an entire terabyte disk would be crazy tedious, even with 50GB disks it would take 20 disks and way too much time.
There is a new format that goes up to 100GB on a single disk. 100GB is about the right size for a primary OS partition and your main apps. You still wouldn't want to try and back up an entire disk, though, because even with only a 500GB drive you still need 5 disks.
The only reason I say back up to optical media at all, is it is less likely to fail than a hard disk. Backing up to hard disk is fine, but if that hard drive is not running for a long time you run the risk of the drive not spinning up. At least this is what I've run into when trying to use removeable hard disks. With more modern drives with a good 5 year warranty, I suppose as long as you're backing up the entire system to 3 different hard drives you are giving yourself a bit of a hedge against drive failure. It will still take you a non-trivial amount of time to back the data up.
Maybe hard disk backups are the way to go these days, tape solutions are much more expensive, optical disks can't hold anything near the contents of a modern terabyte or mult terabyte hard disk.
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As far as A:M goes I don't think disk speed time is a big bottle neck, presuming you have normal RAM available. If one does lots of hi def video editing then disk speed probably is a bigger issue.
So RAID for speed might be less of a priority than RAID for security?
You could also do a RAID 6 with regular 1 terabyte drives for about the same price, they would be more prone to failure but give you 2 terabytes of space.That's the one I'd go for if that's the one that can have one drive fail and still preserve the data.
I have my OS on it's own partition so it's easy to image that and restore it separately from gobs of data that clutter the rest of my system.
Yeah, I'm not really concerned with raw speed since I don't edit 4k video or anything crazy like that. I'm most concerned with data security, and ease of backing up the partition the OS and main apps are on. What I'm not sure of, is if you can have a RAID split into say a C: and D: drive, or if it has to be treated as one large drive. I would think that you could do it, but not having set up a RAID before I'm not sure of the nitty gritty details. I know what the basic RAID levels are, but beyond that I'm not sure about the rest.
But yes, that is probably the way to go. I think 1 terabyte drives are like $50 each these days, and you could put the OS on a 100GB flash drive, then do a daily backup job to the RAID and then do a weekly backup of the OS partition off the RAID to a bluray. That might be the best combination of speed, price, capacity and data security.
And with RAID 6 you can actually have two drives fail and still restore the data, since it uses two drives for parity. The only way to get better data security than that would be to mirror the RAID.
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So I've been trying to work out what the best backup solution is for a fairly large (several 100GB )filesystem.
You could do RAID 6 with 4 256GB SSDs for about $400, create a 100GB system partition and then back that up to BDXL bluray.
The RAID wouldn't be very large (only 512GB) but would be wicked fast. Downside is it is very pricey. It probably would be less likely to fail since the drives are solid state.
You could also do a RAID 6 with regular 1 terabyte drives for about the same price, they would be more prone to failure but give you 2 terabytes of space.
Or you could keep the entire main system partition on a 100GB flash drive, back up to blu-ray and also to a 2 terabyte RAID 6 NAS in the basement.
Anyone else out there have any opinions on the best disk setup for a workstation? However, without backing up the NAS you're still playing with fire.
A temporary change of career might fund the present one
in Off Topic
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Not sure, I think that's how it is supposed to work. Although with the number of ridiculous auctions I see, that don't ever seem to sell, that may not be the case. I think you used to have to pay, maybe they changed it.