At 09:27 PM 10/6/98 -0400, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
>
>An article by (apparently) some of the people involved indicates both
>Linux and NT were involved, as well as some SGI hardware. It seems to
>be from the middle of a long argument. <http://www.wibble.net/~sky/>
You're right, it's exactly the kind of long argument that I described
in my original message: everybody's fighting over who gets credit
for what, what their title was (in a business where people pride
themselves on self-generated ridiculous titles for their business
cards, or better yet, were never given a particular title because
their job was so short-term), who did what, who managed to get the
attention of a salivating magazine writer, who believes every word,
doesn't fact-check, and happily reprints every word. What the
computer press does is truly twisted sometimes.
DEC wants to trumpet the fact that Alpha chips "made" Titanic.
Red Hat wants everyone to know that Linux was involved, without
feeling the need to tell the whole story. Carrera wants credit
for making, configuring, and delivering the boxes.
The reality is that they use whatever they can use, and it only
needs to work for a few months of production, which explains the
"too many machines in overheated room" part of the story. They
needed WinNT to run the off-the-shelf 3D modeling and rendering
programs, they liked Linux so they could compile their custom
software and run it on a network. Those boxes did nothing but
render and composite for weeks at a time.
Digital Domain fired most of those people shortly afterwards -
that's life in the computer graphics business.
So what does this have to do with classic computers? A relevant
lesson to the discussion of who invented what-where, I think.
Some say freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press;
I say sometimes all you need is a good PR pitch and a gullible reporter. :-)
- John
Received on Wed Oct 07 1998 - 09:07:48 BST