201–210 of 278 posts
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Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.
The name rhymes with "frighten". Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich... Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.
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What a respectful view of the audience. Too bad this approach was replicated what feels like approximately 0 times after it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kl6rsi7BEtk
A lot of it came from Creighton. He always researched the technical details of his books to a deep level, and in fact he was also a successful computer programmer, winning an Academy Award for some scheduling software he worked on (and author, and medic and screenwriter!). What's great is he self-identified as a hacker. https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n2/26_Michael_Cri... > Although he does not consider hi…
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Right - if it was all SGI, or even a mix of unix workstations, I wouldn't have blinked. It's just the macs that throw me.
Why? Hybrid systems were and still are common. Today a common IT setup is Macs connecting to UNIX servers over the network.
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The Jurassic park crew supposedly had a lot of money, and I would argue that any computer nerd, at the time depicted, would have gone with that combo. SGI for Unix and the power and Macs for admin. I would have.
SGI machines mostly cost a lot of money for the 3D graphics hardware. They didn't make much sense for other purposes.
Ah back in those days computers were still cheap.
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Err, no. SGIs were first very expensive (3D) graphics workstations and later mostly also-rans in some other markets like storage and general-purpose big servers. Servers were Sun, x86, HP-PA, IBM R6000 RISC (and probably some more UNIX / RISC systems). Workstations were PC, Sun, Apple (mostly for graphics / design), some NeXT.
Er, yes. Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines. The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving. (Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)
My uncle (John Monsour) worked on this movie as the “24 Frame Computer Sync Engineer”. Because film cameras and CRT monitors have different frame rates, you needed to use specialized electronics to synchronize them with the camera frame rate otherwise you would have banding and weird moving artifacts on all the screens. It’s crazy to imagine needing to do this for all the screens visible in these shots. Later monitor…
How was the syncing actually achieved?
It's conceptually easy, but I'm sure there's lots of technical issues. Some devices might need slightly earlier or later timing of their pulse. Many devices don't accept a genlock input from the factory, and might need to be modified or substitited. In this case, all the video screens were controlled from outside the room, so they would have picked genlockable devices.
There's a lot of details around the time the shutter is open and the time the image takes to draw... You would need to do a lot of test shots to find what works best.
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Crichton was frighteningly good as a prognosticator and futurist. Certainly for a writer with a medical degree. He fought the good fight, trying to inculcate caution. Most of his books (even from the seventies) hold up surprisingly well until the early 2000s. They got a bit weird by 2006. But then so did our ideas of future tech.
He even wrote a non fictional book on Personal Computers back in 1983 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life
https://archive.org/details/herbert-barnard-1980-without-me-...
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IMO this is the social internet at its best. Pretty obscure question answered relatively quickly with answer and source.
AI immediately gives me the same answer. I can’t tell if I like this easy access to detail or lament the growing irrelevance of “social internet” for these kinds of things. It reminds me of pre-phone disagreements among pals. You’d argue and argue and maybe eventually agree to disagree. Today someone just looks up the trivia and it’s all over.
"The search engine found the answer too" is not an interesting response.