[Beowulf] noob understanding

[Robert G. Brown]

On Sat, 20 May 2006, Jim Lux wrote:

> Perhaps they get paid to tolerate the pain?
> And, in some environments, it's easier to use Windows than anything else. 
> Certainly, if I had to develop a bunch of form based applications using back 
> end webservices which I'd also have to develop, the Windows platform makes 
> things fairly easy, mostly because the development environment hides all the 
> icky-ness of the API.

But not the management pain.  Or the general expense of running Windows
at a serious development or server level.

> But.. if you want state of the art "production quality" things like flapping 
> capes on Superman, natural looking hair on Sully, etc., you're probably going 
> to use whatever platform supports the modeling tools you need.  It IS true 
> that a lot of the underlying algorithms get initially developed in a *nix 
> world, but by the time they get integrated into a production suite, the 
> choice is more driven by whatever the users are currently familiar with, and 
> if that's windows, that's what it will get ported to.

I was just thinking about renderman and Pixar, which is currently linux
IIRC.  An Pixar is the current god of rendered movies, are they not?
There are (apparently) serious tools out there for moviemaking using
Linux rendering farms, but the particular tools being used in this case
(it sounds like) do not integrate with linux, by deliberate design
because MS owns a huge block of the company.  Typically, of course.
They're not a monopoly or anything...

    rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu