The collected works of GIJoe - Page 2

GIJoe
From Germany -> UK -> Germany...
Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of shake it, baby! at April 23, 2006, 12:24 p.m...
here are a few shake-interface related tips that i dug out since i just set it up on a new box. this should all work on shake 3.x and possibly earlier versions. not tested on 4:

set

Code: Select all

sys.hardwareType = 1;
to speed up interface redraw. originally intended for the infamous sgi slow2, this even makes a difference on a fast dual opteron box, yet it still looks nice.
set

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sys.maxThread = x;
to assign a number of CPU's to shake. mainly intended for rendering, i found it to help in the interface as well, especially with paint.
put these into a *.h file in your nreal/include/startup/ui folder

set

Code: Select all

gui.doBoxAltFxIcons = 1; gui.doBoxColumns = 6;
to change the icons to a different theme, this time with small images and large text buttons. the second command set's the number of images in a row. the value of 6 fit's nicely with my 1600x1200 resolution.
put these into a *.h file in your nreal/include/startup/ folder

dig out the manual and look under customization for the complete picture. they even supply you with a script to generate your own icons.[/code]

Hth.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of shake it, baby! at April 24, 2006, 1:57 a.m...
lewis wrote: Thanks for that. I find the default icons annoyingly difficult to interpret, but making a whole set of text-only ones would take for-ev-er...


the alternative iconset are close to being text-only already. so far i've not wanted to do my own set but i guess it's actually not that much work. check the docs under cookbook and there the altIcon macro. it should be easy to edit out the image-part and make the macro render only text when ran against the shake-node collection, or whatever it does. ;)

Do you happen to know what the hardwareType actually does? Is there any visible quality difference?


can't say for sure how it looks on IRIX, but on the linux box i set up, the switch prevents all too many mouse-over highlighting effects on various GUI elements. it draws a more noticeable rectangle around those fields. looks a little less elegant than the default setup but still not clunky. for a starter, input fields might even become more easy to spot. at least i know in the beginning i sometimes missed an inputfield among all those subtle grey shades.

btw. there's also a switch to change the whole layout of shake to tremor-style, somewhat similar to the discreet interface. i think i'd have to dig out that switch from older manuals though. seems, apple tries to make people forget about it.
shitty pic but all i found on the web: http://www.cgtimes.com.cn/upload2004040 ... 718011.jpg
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of shake it, baby! at April 24, 2006, 6:46 a.m...
ah, so there it hides, thx. maybe after all apple isn't as evil as i thought, i might just have looked in the wrong direction. btw. just tried the sys.hardwareType interface-switch on IRIX, looks even better than on linux, hardly any difference visually from the defaults, but faster.

btw. am i the only one who get's an annoyingly stuck screen on shake load? the desktop freezes for a brief period, like with some cheesy old win95 hardware check. ;) and if i put the pointer down onto the tablet during that period, i have to restart wacomd afterwards. grr!
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of shake it, baby! at April 24, 2006, 9:50 a.m...
i did color code a few of the schematic's icons myself. it was so annoying to stare at a mass of dull grey cloned blobs from a distance, afterwards it became easier to read axes, lights, etc. when zoomed out but it's nothing anywhere near your stuff.
interesting - and it looks like you're turning batch into a shake-default-like colorful icon mess :lol:
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of SGI 320 can't boot after upgrade to 1Gb at April 27, 2006, 12:48 p.m...
despite the general opinion around here of windows being utter unreliable s**t, i can't say i had unresolvable crash problems over the years. in every case it was either drivers or hardware incompatibilities that could be worked around. reinstalls are not the cure to everything (and take a lot of time as opposed to some google hunting).

ok, no experience with sgi x86 boxes here, just general troubleshooting strategies: are you sure that this RAM is compatible at all with your 320, if so, is it confirmed to be working with your motherboard/BIOS ... whatever revision? any special hardware requirements (e.g. different voltage? the 320 is 1998/99-ish, 512 mb sticks probably are not. with those many vendors involved, specifications are ... problematic in the pc world, to say the least)? what about power supply revisions and thermal problems on the 320. possible causes?

windows stresses the hardware quite some on boot. if it crashes there your system might simply be flakey. i know i had it happen to me more than once.

you could also try and test your memory using something like memtest86.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Odyssey/Vpro and Octane Compression - slight update at May 24, 2006, 12:41 p.m...
nice one dave! and if you ever have enough of the noise, sell me the cosmo board for cheap and enjoy the silence ;)
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of Odyssey/Vpro and Octane Compression - slight update at May 24, 2006, 2:34 p.m...
i take that as a sign that you have been playing with the idea already, then :P
so, did you test the board yet? green flicker or not?

i myself have laid eyes on a DM6/DVS SD card, by the way. that one fit's into the PCI slot and does uncompressed. if only the price was right, but i'm getting there ;)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Barco Creator at July 11, 2006, 1:15 p.m...
so that's the infamous barco creator! thanks for showing.
"image manipulation" is so fuzzy a description ;) - is it a decent paint software like photoshop or more of a bunch of color correction tools? i can't spot a palette, brush editor or other painting goodies, that's why i'm asking...
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Barco Creator at July 15, 2006, 6:26 a.m...
meh, lack of brush size preview is really a bad joke in PS3. good to hear that barco got it right. what does creator offer in terms of undo-levels? and does it feature something similar to those "i-couldn't-live-without" PS layer blend styles?
the lack of those pisses me off in studiopaint endlessly. :twisted:
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 7:44 p.m.
Wrote on the subject of MakeHuman 0.9 on IRIX? at Nov. 5, 2006, 10:07 p.m...
so what is this? a collection of morphtargets that can be applied to some more or less human-shaped basemesh? from an animation-standpoint the topology is rather unimpressive i have to say, what kind of application is it targeted at?
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of Wings available for Irix precompiled at Feb. 13, 2007, 11:04 a.m...
tested it briefly on my octane2 D600V12 - only problems i encountered during that session were that you could close it instantly by hitting the window border's close button once. no "want to save question", nada.
also when i maximized the window, it became huuuuge, several times screen size (mine's 1600x1200) and windows opened up outside the visible screen area and were not resizeable any more. had to hand edit the prefs to get it to look how i wanted it.

but now after a system restart it refuses to run anymore, what gives? user root, 6.5.27, chcap set and all and suddenly it cannot find libgcc_s.so.1 anymore.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of SGI Octane vs PC??? at March 13, 2007, 1:13 p.m...
that would give a 33% speed increase. not enough to beat that athlon MP.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of SGI Octane vs PC??? at March 13, 2007, 2:22 p.m...
deBug wrote: Probably more than 33%, note that 4xR10k@300MHz = 2xR12@400 witch would indicate R12k is 50% more efficient than R10k.
R14 might have a similar increase in speed that is due to architecture rather than increased clock frequency.


well, previous benchmarks scattered over these forums showed an almost exactly linear speed increase according to cpu frequency. my own tests reflected this very well (i own a dual400 and a dual600 octane and did some render-comparisons with that duo).

the maya renderer used in the linked benchmark probably does not utilize more than two cpu's, which would explain the weak results of the onyx. and there is no R10k-300, only an R12k chip with that frequency - also afaik, of course. ;)

edit: just ran the benchmark: 01:57 min is the result for dual-600's oct2. on a newer version of maya/mental ray though
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Wings available for Irix precompiled at March 18, 2007, 9:11 a.m...
just wanted to bump this. ;) anyone still working on it? for me, it sometimes works, sometimes it simply refuses to start.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of ShotMaker... at April 9, 2007, 7:29 a.m...
cool to see that you are still developing this! will try the new version soon.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of ShotMaker... at April 9, 2007, 2:48 p.m...
ok, i had a quick look at the image viewer - notes below

- i was missing the '..' entry in the filebrowser window. i know you have an icon for going up in the tree but it's something very common in other apps, might make sense to add it to speed up navigation.

- seems extremely unresponsive when i open a sequence in rgba/u8 format, regardless of filetype, everything slows down to a crawl

- bombs with segfault when a certain .mov file is in the directory (mplayer shows it as 'mjpa' format) and is quite slow or hangs (with codecs warning in the shell) as soon as you open up a directory full of video files (all kinds of formats). i'll install that libiconv and see if it makes a difference.
not sure which direction you intend to go with this app but if it's a sequence viewer, shouldn't it just ignore the video files? i'd suggest to put in a functionality where the user can specify the path to his preferred video player - and invoke that when a movie is opened.

otherwise i quite like it! adjustable gui colors, unobtrusive interface. seems very zippy (tested on dual600) as well. however, i only tested with SD/8bit files so far.
GIJoe
Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
and authored 739 notes
Wrote on the subject of ShotMaker... at May 6, 2007, 8:38 a.m...
hi dj, forgot about writing the reply, sorry.

ok, i did just install the most recent libiconv (from nekoware). that didn't fix the problem, it's still crashing on that movie-file and i have no libquicktime on the system.
i also tried out the windows build of 0.6.0 and it's not crashing on that very moviefile nor slowing down when i step into a directory of video files at all.

on both windows and irix, scaling from PAL to 16x9 slows down the playback, gr_osview shows that one cpu is more or less maxed out/task manager gives me slightly under 30% cpu usage (on four logical CPU cores).
systems in question are a dual600 oct2 and a dual 3 ghz xeon HT.

what i noticed is that the windows build has the same performance issue with my tga sequences in 720x576, 24 bit + alpha channel (renderoutput from a 3D app), shown as rgba/u8 in djv_view. playback drops to about 1 frame per second if such a sequence is opened.

and i have only tga/tif/rgb 8bit images for testing unfortunately.

btw. something that i found in the windows build - it only shows me three drives in the directory menu in the filebrowser, even if there are more. i can still access them by typing the letter but it left me wondering.

cheers.
GIJoe
Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
and authored 739 notes
Wrote on the subject of ShotMaker... at June 3, 2007, 12:56 p.m...
phew, it has certainly been a while, hasn't it? ;)

i tried 0.6.1 windows the other day in the company and i noticed that it does not seem to handle UNC filepaths, you might want to look into that. it was slow on file sequences with alpha again tho. i can send you some example files that make the windows and irix builds choke for me. although... these are nothing special, you should be able to easily replicate by adding alpha to any PAL/HD image sequence in tga format, for example.

this time, i tested on the work box, which is an AMD 4400 X2 or so, with geforce 79something GTX and 2 gigs of RAM, running XP.

if you still want it, i can send you a mov file that's crashing the irix build here.
sorry for the late replies.

i found that this app would be quite cool to have at work, a decent player for those HD image sequences outputted from a console devkit could definitely speed up work for some departments which are now using ugly things like adobe premiere for that task. :)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Twilight - hot stuff in '92 at Dec. 3, 2007, 6:28 a.m...
ok - but isn't this still included with irix 6.5 as a wallpaper? i thought i've seen it a few years ago, same with the rotating cube, cpu eater or what it was called.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of Miro DC30 compared to O2 AV1 video at Jan. 9, 2008, 11:45 a.m...
i think the o2 analog video is a bit better than the DC30 - used to have both back in the day and did some comparisons. the o2 has quite the edge over the dc30 for the software definitely - it comes with gui and commandline tools that work nicely whereas the dc30 was kinda hacked into premiere, for me never worked reliably and support soon vanished and stayed limited to very few releases. the drawback with the o2 is the slow system itself, encoding times can be enourmous.

just the recommendation to not invest a lot into the system if you are hoping to make it useful. it's just way outdated and doesn't play well with recent tools on other platforms. been there, done that and all. it's been 11 years of technological advance since the o2 video and dc30 were considered prosumer level equipment.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Miro DC30 compared to O2 AV1 video at Jan. 10, 2008, 1:07 p.m...
it's premiere 4.2 in crash-edition tho, running on the least supported platform. don't expect too much. a mac mini intel with one of these firewire-video converter thingies with analog i/o will probably take a day to edit and encode what your o2 will take a week for. ;)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Miro DC30 compared to O2 AV1 video at Jan. 11, 2008, 1:22 p.m...
jdboyd wrote: Of course, who says you have to encode on the same machine you edit on?


the OP seems to plan on doing the whole thing on the o2. even if only used for capture, the MJPEG the o2 spits out can be cumbersome to transfer to another platform and uncompressed footage is a whole other story. e.g. my r12k 270 machine was barely able to playback uncompressed PAL footage (frame sequences) from RAM at 25 fps... editing this in premiere, i'd rather not imagine.

what sense does it make to split the tasks? the analog video is not so unique, really. a decent canopus firewire video box will probably deliver atleast the same quality, go for less than any strange o2 cpu upgrade that won't make a huge difference anyway and spit out a format that modern day apps can actually work with without going through extra steps. ok, enough of the warnings now. there's a plethora of topcis regarding o2 and video here and in the newsgroups. enough to be turned on or away. ;)
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of Piranha vs. Shake Irix at Feb. 20, 2008, 7:36 a.m...
afaik, piranha is another one of these hardware-accelerated compositors with a layer/stack kinda approach vs. a node-based one, some video editing module and intended for those client-attended sessions. looks nothing like shake to me, more similar to smoke or perhaps mistika.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Smoke Flame 2009 out at April 29, 2008, 12:21 p.m...
i bet the situation will be reversed when you start looking at render times tho...

;)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Snow leopard is it worth the upgrade? at Jan. 16, 2010, 5:25 p.m...
snow leopard is giving me grief - it doesn't deal well at all with removable media on my box, causing finder to hang and zombify all the time, only to be fixed by a reboot.

with leopard, i restarted the box only for system updates and such - approx. once every three months. with snow leopard, i am doing this several times a week easily - every time the finder locks up proper after using removable media for a bit. boot up/shut down time is noticeably slower now and i can't quite say that i noticed a lot of general speedup otherwise but the machine was fast under leopard anyway. the extra 20 - 30 free gigabytes on the systemdisk are well appreciated though.

unless 10.6.3 solves my problems with the finder (a seemingly common issue well documented on the apple forums), i'll do a clean reinstall - of 10.5, thank you very much. ;)

oh yeah, another thing that has changed for the worse - there are some graphical glitches on the desktop, causing black boxes to pop up on the screen occasionally. like a screen area that's not being refreshed properly. not so in 10.5 (macbook, newer-style intel onboard gfx).
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of WTB: Dual CPU modules for Octanes at June 4, 2011, 3:02 p.m...
one dual-600 and one dual-400 module available. shipping from germany.

make me an offer (PM)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Amiga Technologies A4000T at May 5, 2014, 12:23 a.m...
congrats on your purchase, but...
in your picture there you have the amiga squatting right on the pinnacle of coolness .* this looks wrong. :D

*at least that's what i thought when i - as a former amiga user - sat in front of an indy for the first time a few years after.
i was very reminded of the amiga by the indy and it's OS. but it was just more awesome in every way. and sadly - to a student - made of pure unobtainium back then.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of Amiga Technologies A4000T at May 5, 2014, 9:44 a.m...
Pontus wrote:
GIJoe wrote: in your picture there you have the amiga squatting right on the pinnacle of coolness .* this looks wrong. :D
The amiga is under the table :) The Indy is being hold down by an Apple. </nitpick>


aw, you're right. should have enlarged the image instead of just ranting away, apologies. my experience with amiga pretty much stops with A1200 and it shows. :oops:
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of Maya and SGI with V12 graphics questions at May 6, 2014, 3:23 p.m...
years later - the answer: high quality viewport rendering was not ever brought to the sgi. infact, at the time it showed up in maya it was not even working in all PC-based configurations either and not available for all supported platforms (surely including linux). i don't think any SGI graphics cards were even capable of the kind of pixel shaders that were commonplace on PC boards?

and if memory serves: alias switched from IRIX as their development environment to windows around or right after releasing maya 3. whatever came after was not targeted at SGI's but rather ported. pretty sure IRIX was a quickly vanishing target market for them around the year 2000.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Maya and SGI with V12 graphics questions at May 8, 2014, 7:28 a.m...
yes i remember running some V12-specific demo highlighting this stuff as well at one point.
i don't think SGI's implementation was compatible with nvidia's though, perhaps just some limited featureset (VPro came out before Geforce?) that would have required too many resources to port the maya viewport shading option. it's not like high quality viewport was useful in production much either early on, pretty slow on geforce-3-ish cards is what i remember. you'd turn it on only to take a screenshot/playblast in those days.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of putting macbook to sleep at pre-defined time? at May 13, 2014, 5:36 p.m...
hi,

google didn't come up with anything - i'm looking for a method to put my MBP to sleep at some pre-defined time a la 'go to sleep at <this time> on <that date>, no questions asked' .
ideally to be run from terminal and as a normal user, not root.

the background is that i had to disable most of the power management on mine since the automatic GPU-switching when connected to an external monitor on wakeup can lead to a kernel panic (one of the gazillion of documented yet eternally unresolved problems on the apple forums, sadly).

just looking for a way to prevent the machine from running for hours idling where it would normally go to sleep automatically after finishing a job.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of putting macbook to sleep at pre-defined time? at May 14, 2014, 3:52 a.m...
ClassicHasClass wrote: cron job that does osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to sleep'. T,FTFY. :)


thanks - that would be the ticket - but how to put in a cron job that only runs once? they also use some unreadable format to set up. not good if you have to google everytime for the syntax beforehand. ;) alternatively, there may be a way to embed it into a shell-script that is fed a variable for date and time and keeps waiting until that condition is met.
or any hack that would enable a normal user to execute 'pmset schedule sleep', really. that one has all the functionality already...

Have you tried the 'Schedule' option in the Energy Saver module of System Preferences?


yes, but it's graphical frontend only. i'm not familiar with automator however... perhaps time to brush up on that?

just in case...
http://gfx.io/
you can also force which graphic card you want to use, so no more switching will occur.


i use that but power-source-based switching has been removed from it - and seems to be the cause.
i just wish there was a way to disable the integrated stuff completely and force the use of the discrete GPU at all times. battery life be damned.

thanks guys, time to have a look at scripting and automator, i think. :)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of osx 10.10 at June 8, 2014, 8:54 p.m...
looks like a case of acquired taste. anything upwards of 10.5 looks somewhat 'better' to me but overall i don't mind.

what i'd however really like to see -
dark UI colors - in fact: customizable colors for all UI elements.
finder with two-column display and a path-input bar (breadcrumbs a la windows)
oh and tabs - but they might have them already, judging by some pictures on the 'net.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of osx 10.10 at June 10, 2014, 8:40 a.m...
testing forklift now, thanks for the tip. :idea:

thing is, i'd really have all that functionality natively in the finder. using a filemanager separate from the default OS provided one is not so optimal in my experience.

my MBP (running lion 10.7) will be written off and replaced end of this year, the replacement one will surely run this 10.10. i expect the usual troubles with basic functionality that apple only manages to sort out by the time the last handful system updates roll around and everyone is gearing up for 10.11...
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of osx 10.10 at June 10, 2014, 12:36 p.m...
a computer should just do the job it is expect to, really. developers fumbling around with the latest trends in UI design and functionality for the f*ck of it just gets into my way of using it. especially if i have no choice but to run exactly this OS on that hardware. which seems to be very much the case in apple land. at least in windows-land i usually have the choice to install something that i can approve of, even if it's not the latest and greatest...
for osx, i simply don't ever upgrade the OS on the same machine, full stop. lesson learned. :) phase out machine, phase out OS version.

and the choice is very much between windows and osx for the majority who have to use certain commercial software. going linux or whatever is sadly a pipedream at this point for reasons of compatibility and practicality.
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of softimage XSI for IRIX at June 14, 2014, 6:58 a.m...
don't have a link and it's been a long while but i believe this was running in some sort of emulation. very slow and incomplete and nearly unusable.
if you manage to find it, don't expect too much. :)
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of PC case recommendations? at Oct. 12, 2014, 4:32 p.m...
smj wrote: Very pleased with Fractal Design's Define R4


i use the R4 as well for my new box. some observations: pretty sturdy build, quite large (wider than normal pc cases and deeper) and heavy. plastic front panel comes off a little too readily for my taste. the front microphone jack is recessed, causes problems with my headphone plug (shure in-ear's). quite annoying that one.
the power LED is super bright and not diffused. that thing illuminates the whole room. i put some black tape over it where i could but it probably needs sanding on all the transparent plastic around the power button.
it's all black on black inside. even in daylight i have to bring out a flashlight to see what i'm doing when going through the innards. ok, maybe buying a black motherboard didn't exactly improve things in this regard... ;)
GIJoe
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Wrote on the subject of Linux desktop recommendations? at Oct. 13, 2014, 12:32 a.m...
i think for graphics linux is actually getting quite good - or so i hear.
i'm not using it myself at the moment since some of the software i rely on is windows exclusive but my second hand info is:

krita - 2D paint
blender, maya, houdini, mudbox - 3d
mari - 3d paint
nuke, piranha, mistika - compositing
maxwell, octane - renderer

most of these are commercial grade, current apps. there's probably a good deal more compositing/simulation/rendering related stuff on linux.

wouldn't recommend an old version of windows - current apps are now more and more no longer compatible with XP and previous versions. you'd have to stick with older software - fine for some applications, a bummer in other cases.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of If you could only have one at Oct. 17, 2014, 2:48 p.m...
if i could only have one - it would be an indy. nice, compact, stylish and the first sgi i ever came in contact with. it would be one for the bookshelf though, not to be turned on for more than to see if it actualy still works.

that being said nowadays i would not want an sgi anymore - when i got into them in the early 00's they were still relatively recent and usable (had an octane2 dual-600 since about 2004-5). now they're just old hardware that usually ran really hot. wouldn't trust that from a reliability POV alone. not for properly using them anyway. collecting - not my style personally - but you might just pick the prettiest one then. ;)

your best use case is probably the fuel from a practical POV.
GIJoe
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Who joined March 29, 2003, 11:44 a.m.
Wrote on the subject of 5dwm at Nov. 16, 2014, 2:18 a.m...
yeah not bad at first glance. however i looked her up and she definitely has seen better days - like 4Dwm, really. i mean srsly - that thing was acceptable because it was usable enough and sat on top of the (then) only cool unix boxes that didn't just run boring stuff from the depths of some server room. of all the desktop environments available on linux, it wouldn't exactly be my first choice in the year 2014. ;)