Rendering Frames at Pixar

Post ImageI recently agreed to help a colleague with a video project, and we met this week to go through some of the raw footage. While we were chatting I mentioned that the animated movies that are made today take longer to render than those of ten years ago, simply because they are becoming so much more realistic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember where I had read or heard this, nor could I recall the exact numbers involved. From a post today on The Long Tail:

On 1995 computer hardware, the average frame of Toy Story took two hours to render. [A decade later on 2005 hardware] the average Cars frame took 15 hours, despite a 300x overall increase in compute power. The artists have an essentially infinite appetite for detail and realism, and Pixar’s resources have grown over the decade so it can afford to allocate more computers to the task, allowing each to run longer to achieve the artist’s and animator’s ambitions for the scenes.

Once again the blogosphere comes to the rescue!

Read: The Long Tail

Invention vs. Innovation

Post ImageToday Don Dodge posted about a Wall Street Journal article that asks whether Microsoft is driving innovation or playing catch-up with rivals. If I were to ask myself why I read Don’s blog, today’s post would be the answer. Don is careful not to fall into the “Microsoft copies everyone!” or “No they don’t they’re awesome!” traps, and instead gets right to the heart of the matter:

People tend to confuse invention with innovation, as the WSJ has here. They use the words interchangeably, but they are very different.

Invention is the creation of a technology that is totally new. Innovation takes a collection of prior inventions to the next level by combining them with existing products or technologies, and producing a commercially viable product that solves a customer problem.

Both invention and innovation are vitally important to our industry. Microsoft does both but rarely gets credit for it.

I have quoted quite liberally from his post, but I wanted to get all the main points. In the post he also explains how R&D are related to invention and innovation. Definitely go read the entire thing, it’s worth it.

Read: Don Dodge

Northern Voice 2007

Post ImageFebruary is one of my favorite months of the year. It’s short, classes stop for an entire week, and in Vancouver there’s a great little event called Northern Voice. The 2007 edition of the conference was announced a while ago, and today I see that registration is officially open:

Frankly, all of us Northern Voice organizers have gotten behind the eight-ball a bit on this years conference. We all keep getting busier-we’re approaching some kind of busyness event horizon where we’ll just cease to exist. Regardless, our ducks are back in a row.

Such an honest group! In addition to opening registration, they have extended the speaker submission to Friday, December 1st. If you’d like to register for Northern Voice, you can do so here.

Read: Northern Voice

Xerox is working to reduce, reuse, and recycle

Post ImageI suspect that for most people, the term “xerox” conjures up images of paper thanks to the American document management company of the same name. Xerox (the company) is more than just photocopiers and printers though – the company has a long history of research and development. And they are at it again, this time trying to apply the Three R’s to paper:

[Brinda Dalal’s] research is part of a three-year-old technology development effort to design an add-on system for an office copier to produce “transient documents” that can be easily reused. The researchers now have a prototype system that will produce documents on a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint. Currently, the process works without toner and produces a low-resolution document that appears to be printed with purple ink.

The printed information on the document “disappears” within 16 hours. The documents can be reused more quickly by simply placing them in the copier paper tray. The researchers said that individual pieces of paper had been printed on up to 50 times, and the only current limit in the process appears to be paper life.

The idea makes sense to me. Companies have already reduced the amount of paper they need to use, so Xerox sees an opportunity to help them reuse and recycle it too. The end goal is to try to reduce the amount of paper that companies actually use.

Those of you who know me fairly well are probably confused because normally I am championing the death of paper, not reading about ways to extend its lifetime. As much as I would like to have everything stored and presented digitally, I realize we’re not there yet. And, as the article points out, a complete change to bits and bytes isn’t likely to happen anytime soon:

“People really like paper,” said Eric Shrader, a computer scientist who is area manager for printing systems at the Hardware Systems Laboratory of the research center, which is known as PARC. “They like the way it feels.”

Until e-paper is perfected, this paper erasing technology Xerox is working on might work quite well indeed.

Read: CNET News.com

Notes for 11/26/2006

Long time no post! I just haven’t been on the computer much. Here are my weekly notes:

  • Just got back from dinner at 4th and Vine downtown. Every Sunday they show movies during the dinner, and tonight they showed Who killed the electric car? Dinner was quite good, but the movie could have been better. It felt like an extended commercial, and the people involved seemed like fanatical environmentalists. Oh, and when they realized they couldn’t answer the question properly, they just blamed everyone.
  • I also went to the Edmonton Oilers Super Skills competition today. Rexall Place was nearly sold out, it was amazing. There was easily double the amount of people that attended last year.
  • All the wonderful technology we have at our fingertips is usually a good thing, unless you’re a bad teacher.
  • Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve done trig. All I remember is SOHCAHTOA.
  • I was very disappointed this week to learn that the Xbox Live Video Marketplace is only available in the United States. Then with news of all the problems, I realized that it should have all the bugs worked out by the time it comes to Canada!
  • An article I read yesterday claims that tweens are the new teens. I would be surprised if this is the first time such an argument has been made.
  • Megan invited me to a performance of Macbeth at my old high school on Friday. It was pretty well done, and incorporated professional and student actors. It all came back to me with the line “my dearest chuck” which I incorrectly read as “my dearest chunk” in front of the entire class in high school. Good times!

Thoughtful Discussions

I went for dinner earlier tonight with Megan and some of her family to celebrate her second University degree (today was the convocation). So first of all, congratulations Megan! You now have two degrees before I have my first.

The dinner was good (Olive Garden) but the discussion was better. We talked about all sorts of things, but almost all the topics were problems that we were trying to figure out the cause of. Do students do poorly in school because of their parents? Why can’t you apply for a passport online? Things like that. I don’t think we were able to agree once! The discussion was really lively and interesting though.

As I thought about it more on the way home, it occurred to me that maybe there would be less problems for us to chat about if there was more thoughtful discussion taking place. A lot of times it seems like decisions are made without any real thought or discussion going into them.

Anyway, something to think about. Time to work on the essay I have due tomorrow!

Joel is wrong about Windows Vista's off switch

Post ImageNormally I agree with what Joel Spolsky has to say, but not today. His latest article, Choices = Headaches, smells like a lame attempt to bash Windows Vista just for the sake of it. He takes issue with the “fifteen” ways you can shutdown Windows Vista, though only nine of those apply to non-laptops. Here’s what he says:

I’m sure there’s a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Joel apparently doesn’t think you can just press the power button – yet that’s exactly what I’d bet most people will end up doing. You can read all about the power button in this CNET News.com article which, by the way, was published over a year ago. Here’s a choice quote:

And with Vista, Microsoft plans to make it so that a PC seems more like all the other consumer electronics out there. Pressing the power button will give users the feeling they are either turning the machine on or turning it off.

So it really is as easy as Joel would like. And for crazy people out there like myself who want all the shutdown options, they are still there, tucked away neatly in a little menu.

I guess Joel’s main problem is having too much choice. Personally, I’m a fan of choice. The research I have come across is pretty divided on whether choice does more good or more harm. That said, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail certainly makes more choice seem like the way to go. His newest catchphrase – the economics of abundance – conveys this idea really well too.

Note: I haven’t tried Windows Vista since the early betas, so I don’t know if the power button functionality has changed or not, but I haven’t come across anything to suggest that it has. Joel doesn’t say anything about it in his post either.

You can read more about this story here and here.

Read: Joel on Software

Passports required for U.S. entry starting January 2007

Post ImageI guess this means I am going to have to get my passport renewed. Today, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary revealed that the United States will start requiring travelers entering the country to show passports beginning January 23rd:

The department had been expected to institute the passport requirement for air travelers around the beginning of the year. Setting the date on Jan. 23 pushes the start past the holiday season.

The requirement marks a change for Americans, Canadians, Bermudians and some Mexicans.

No more driver’s license or birth certificate to gain entry. The article mentions that only about one quarter of Americans have a passport. I wonder what the numbers are like here in Canada?

Read: Yahoo News

Edmonton Technology Startups

Post ImageWhen it comes to technology startups, it seems as though Edmonton can’t hold a candle to Toronto, Vancouver, or even Ottawa. Very rarely in my travels, physical or virtual, do I hear about really interesting tech things happening in Alberta’s capital city. Yet I know there must be. I mean, surely we aren’t the only ones, right? Nah, there’s others…we just need to help each other become more visible.

So the first step is to identify all the interesting tech startups (or established but relatively small companies) based in Edmonton. I’ve started tagging some, such as Zigtag, Nexopia, and ProExams, at del.icio.us using the tag edmontontech. I encourage you to do the same! Or, if you’re not into the social bookmarking/tagging thing, leave me a comment or email me with your Edmonton-based tech companies.

I suppose step two would be getting together with some of the companies to see what kind of interest there is in making our neck of the woods more visible to the rest of the world. I’d like to start changing Edmonton’s image with respect to tech startups. We have a great economy, relatively low living expenses, and lots of smart people. We’re just not regarded as all that great a place to start a tech company.

But first, step one. What Edmonton-based tech startups do you know about?

What's a Yahoo! to do?

Post ImageAlmost every day now I read something about Yahoo! and its “problems” and/or “options”. Those are in quotes because it seems people are very divided on Yahoo! – some think it’s in trouble, others don’t. I’ve been a Yahoo! user since the days of the grey page-background, and if you count sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, I’m still a pretty active user. Allow me to put on my Yahoo! pundit hat for a moment.

I guess Yahoo!’s main problem is Google. Now that there’s a search-media company consistently outperforming Yahoo!, it makes them look old and stagnant. It’s actually pretty unfair, because let’s be honest, no one has the kind of growth that Google does. Yahoo! actually does pretty well in terms of search traffic, advertising dollars, and all that other stuff, but where they seem to be lacking is in respect.

So what’s a Yahoo! to do? Here are the most commonly suggested strategies I have come across:

Replace CEO Terry Semel
This suggestion is actually fairly new, and if you read Eric Jackson’s open letter to Yahoo!’s founders, it starts to make sense. Seems to me this is a relatively short-term fix though.

Buy AOL
Apparently Yahoo! has approached Time Warner about purchasing AOL. I think this would be a good deal for Time Warner, and a not so good one for Yahoo!. It would bring the failed AOL Time Warner merger to a complete end, but it would only provide a minor increase in Yahoo’s traffic and advertising, all things considered.

Buy Facebook
This rumor has been floating around for months actually. It might bring some more eyeballs to Yahoo!, but it would do nothing to help transform or improve the company. And besides, from everything I’ve read, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) is no Caterina Fake (Flickr founder).

Merge with eBay
The two companies might seem complimentary because of their completely different focuses, but that might present a problem rather than a solution. I agree with Fortune: I think this one is unlikely, because I think integrating eBay and Yahoo! would prove extremely difficult.

Sell to Microsoft
This one is my favorite, and it has a long history too, first appearing in June. Microsoft certainly has the cash, and it turns out that the two companies are fairly well-aligned – Yahoo! has made heavy investments into IE7, is a PlaysForSure supporter, and has hooked up with Microsoft on a number of initiatives ranging from Sitemaps to Instant Messaging. According to the latest comScore data (released today), a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would have around 40% of the search market compared with Google’s 45%. Of course, there are some easy to spot problems with this deal – mainly that Microsoft has invested heavily in Live Search and adCenter already. That’s not a total deal-breaker though.

Stay the course
The people that don’t view Yahoo! as floundering like this suggestion. Sure Google is #1 for now, but it can’t stay that way forever, right? Seems like this is Yahoo!’s currently preferred course of action. If they could somehow turn around their disappointing sales and profit numbers, this one might be the best option after all.

The Microsoft option is especially appealing to me, because it would have extremely broad ramifications for the industry. It also seems somewhat unlikely, given Microsoft’s huge investments in their online properties (MSN, Live.com, etc). That said, purchasing Yahoo! would instantly make them the leader on the web, a position they have long sought after. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo! ended up staying the course though, and in the end, maybe that’s better for everyone – Yahoo! included.

Update: Here is more excellent commentary on Yahoo’s current situation.