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Prop-2 Release Date and Price - Page 20 — Parallax Forums

Prop-2 Release Date and Price

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  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,253
    edited 2017-10-03 16:20
    Heater, that is exactly what happened with Hollywood movie post production and effects.

    All of them were largely on proprietary tools leading up to Jurassic Park. SGI IRIX powered a lot of stuff, and Alias did rendering, effects, animation, etc.. other programs did compositing, tracking.

    Anyway, the allure of Linux was cheap and fast rendering. Titanic was done on a Linux cluster, Microsoft thought they could get in with NT, and it turns out the studios wanted a UNIX.

    SGI ran into trouble with MIPS and got gutted on a graphics deal with Microsoft. End of an era.

    The studios all wrote tools, shared a lot of them, and that became a sort of commons. From there, vendors were forced to port to Linux, and Alias who got it before being bought by Autodesk, made sure MAYA and it's tightly integrated MEL language, ran supreme on Linux.

    The rest is history. That commons, as well as the studios writing their own software, gave rise to things like Weta, who did Lord of the Rings.

    Arguably, that movie would never have been made, had it not been for the transition by the studios and effects people from being users to developers.

    That story goes way back for all of us. Using a computer is not doing computing, not applying the tool at its fundamental leverage point.

    Linux, OSS, GNU is all about doing that. It is not necessary that all to do computing, own their machines and envioronment, only it being possible for those who are inclined.

    That commons today is very robust. One can do a lot, just for the asking and effort to learn.



  • Back in those days, I had a pile of SGI hardware to play with.

    And... this one borked machine. Pentium 90, sold by "lucky computers", lol. It had some sort of odd bus noise and non parity RAM.

    Sidebar: most machines still run non ECC RAM. Crazy!

    That p90 crashed all the time. Ended up in my cube. Put RH 5.2 on it for grins. Syslog was screaming, kernel panics, the works. But, it stayed up, and I used it for some light work.

    Amazing.
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,126
    Heater. wrote: »
    That all sounds overly complex to me.
    It's a very simple principle but, sure, complexity in larger interactions does result. Just like the Mandelbrot Set.

    Economics is far from simple as it follows all the rules provided. In this case the GPL provided a new rule.

    If you meant free market economics then that, by itself, always degenerates to monopoly control. The free market principle is only useful as a simulation.

  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    I don't necessarily disagree with you. But...

    The GPL does not provide new rules. It totally relies on the rules that exist around it. Namely copyright law.

    We do not have, and perhaps never have had "fee market economics". Except I might admit that the likes of Google and Facebook are the closest we have come. Operating beyond the rule of law as they do.

    The good news is that historically the monopoly control fails eventually. Think Roman Empire or the East India Trading Company.



  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,126
    New or not, every licence applies rules to the associated products. And yep, those licensing rules are built on top of legal laws.

    The detail of the rules is important for enabling investment.
    Heater. wrote: »
    We do not have, and perhaps never have had "fee market economics". Except I might admit that the likes of Google and Facebook are the closest we have come. Operating beyond the rule of law as they do.
    No we don't, but that doesn't stop there being a lot of supporters and advocates - think neo-liberalism.
    The good news is that historically the monopoly control fails eventually. Think Roman Empire or the East India Trading Company.
    Along with the lives that depended on them. Boom and bust isn't exactly an ideal objective.
  • Heater. wrote: »
    The good news is that historically the monopoly control fails eventually. Think Roman Empire or the East India Trading Company.

    "The game isn't over. The game is never over; and so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost." - Peter Watts, Blindsight (notes and references)
  • KeithE wrote: »
    Heater. wrote: »
    The good news is that historically the monopoly control fails eventually. Think Roman Empire or the East India Trading Company.

    "The game isn't over. The game is never over; and so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost." - Peter Watts, Blindsight (notes and references)

    (off-topic: great book. If you want hard science fiction, Peter Watts is your author!)
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,126
    As for the new rule the GPL provided: It is the reliable enabling, ie: discouraging selfishness, of open collaboration on a long term goal. This would have been a critical component for Linux to be considered as investment material.

    Most if not all other licence agreements make no attempt to encourage open collaboration on a goal. The BSD licenses show that up quite strongly. Their approach is "This is a finished product, no further input required. Use it however you like."
  • tryittryit Posts: 72
    edited 2017-11-15 07:05
    A year ago or so there was chatter about a Prop-2 celebration at Parallax headquarters, to celebrate the completion. Did this happen already? If not, will it happen?
  • Hasn't happened. "will it happen"? I'm sure there will be some kind of celebration when the first working chips are delivered. No one is seriously attempting to guess when. Too many things have yet to happen.
  • tryit wrote: »
    A year ago or so there was chatter about a Prop-2 celebration at Parallax headquarters, to celebrate the completion. Did this happen already? If not, will it happen?

    When we have working chips we will start planning a P2 celebration at Parallax. We may run an event in the Spring focused on education, however.

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