[rescue] Sun 711

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 01:38:24AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On May 2, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > Yes, it does.  But, it does hold up to simple loads.  Further, two of them
> > together hold up to fairly heavy loads. 
> 
>   Maybe, but so do better processors.  And they're not painful to
> use. :)

True.  And one day I will switch.  The question is when will I be able to 
afford to, and will it be a G3, G4, or an SGI?  

BTW, I loaded jahshaka and finally got it working (took hours, but it was
due to a clash between a custom Qt install, and the borked debian package
isntall).  So far performance sucks on a dual P2-350.  The paint system
doesn't seem to do anything worthwhile, but that's just a first glance. 
I could have missed something[1].  Compositing is extremely limited.
The animation system looks decent, but didn't do much with it.  It crashed.
Why is text animation a seperate piece?  

On the whole, the thing seems badly misguided, but could still be usefull
for somethings.  If I can get the editing working, then hopefully it would
at least be usefull for simple editing and titling.

On a side note, I love the idea of connecting widgets.  This is the approach
that so many programs other than After Effects uses, and if should just 
appeal to geeks.  Look at how frequently it is used in the simple audio
synthesis programs.  So why are they taking to it here?  Just throw together
a simple sequencer (to control the start and stop of clips and other stuff),
and a simple diagram editor to connect plugins together, and then writing
any given plugin should be easy.  If/when I get to doing this (if I can
ever stay focused long enough), this is the approach I plan to take.

For a reference of what I mean, see programs like RayZ (from Silicone Grail),
Inferno, etc. 

OK, perhaps I'm exagerating.  Some plugins, like a good paint system are just
darn hard.  Really, I have no clue how to do a really good paint system. 
Part of my lack of clue relates to a lack of clue about morphing to lines with
a non identical number of control points.


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd