[Tig] where.. neutral review RED?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, throb - Robert Nederhorst wrote:
>>
>> Mac and Windows are expensive to purchase and maintain, and don't scale
>> well.  They are best for end-user stations and not so much for "crunching".
>
> also untrue.  i have 200 machines at the office, all running windows 
> for a renderfarm. they crunch a TON of data every day.  file sizes 
> are anywhere from 60mb to 500mb in size. for 3d rendering and 2d 
> compositing, we have experienced little problems other than the ones 
> that everyone experiences when setting up a somewhat large computing 
> cluster.

Rendering and compositing have somewhat different requirements than 
other parts of the chain.  Consider that once the film is mounted in 
the telecine that the telecine colorist can do almost all of his work 
from just one well-optimized interface which has been proven for a 
number of years.  The situation is different when provided a large 
number of computer files (the "digital negative") which need to be 
converted to a different format before they can be worked on.

> mac is BSD based (as you know of course) so you can do significant
> scripting in that world easily.

Yes.  My main complaint about Mac is that due to Apple's philosophy, 
the only "support" path is a continuous upgrade path in which each 
upgrade is not completely compatible with the previous version.  It is 
not uncommon for new machines that come in the door to require the 
latest OS release (due to hardware tweak) even though they are claimed 
to be the same model as the ones purchased a year before.  Apple's OS 
release/support policy is that availability of the previous OS version 
ceases on the day that the new release is available.

Microsoft has now stopped shipping Windows XP so Windows users are 
going to be exposed to horrors that they have long forgotten about 
during XP's quite long support path.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/