Saturday, June 16, 2007

All the gear and no idea

I spend most of my life trying not to be the sort of person who has all the gear to do a job but is unable to do it (All the gear and no idea). Today I went to help Phil set something up and I must say I had a real ATGANI afternoon. His brothers company atov wanted to project a rendered scene across 4 projectors. This would need a huge scene many times the quality of the average dvd. To do the job Phil bought one of the most powerful computers on the market, an Apple Mac Pro. It has got 4 processors 8 GB of Ram and two graphics cards.

The only problem is, it cant do the task, I am not sure anything can apart from very high end specialised kit. Stretching video across that many screens is virtually unheard of so probably untested. I think this sort of bleeding edge kind of things will require custom development and or input from someone heavily involved with this sort of technology.

T%his evening Phil myself and Nick went for some drinks in the Farmers Arms in Poynton. It was a pretty chilled out evening very relaxing after a hard week working and a frustrating time trying to make video play. Bruce even joined us later on.

We had a bit of a debate going on. I don't subscribe to the Britain is a small country and its full idea. Britain has such small cities compared to China, we have so much unused land really, even something like 1% usage of the greenbelt would house many millions of people. We mostly suffer from a lack of development the last new towns were constructed in the 1960/70's. Even Manchester big by UK standards is a minnow in the grand scheme, the leader of the industrial revolution is now something like 78th place the world GDP rankings. Far too many bright people disapear off to London or abroad, its a real brain drain down south, sorting that out attracting more business would require a real change in planning legislation to allow some more development. I don't feel threatened by immigrants I feel more threatened by a collapse in the UK.

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