By Marcel Valcarce (Marcelval) (66.218.35.191) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 01:15 pm:

From an article appearing in business week...

"According to folks inside Apple's Rendezvous development program, a prominent maker of 3-D rendering software will release a new version of its product with Rendezvous compatibility. Aside from allowing graphics geeks to share images and information, the software will have the ability to check CPU (central processing unit) usage on other Rendezvous-enabled machines around the office -- and send intensive tasks to the computer currently handling the lightest workload. It's a form of distributed computing with no middleman required."

So who do we think the "prominent maker of 3-D rendering software" is? Is it Newtek? If not they better hope it's not Alias. They better hope its from a 3rd party and will be compatible with Lightwave. Otherwise Newtek may see a drop in sales...

Full url if you are interested in the whole article about Rendezvous' quick acceptance in the marketplace.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2003/tc2003025_0198_tc056.htm

By John A. Johnson (Johnny) (199.4.18.2) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 01:26 pm:

man, that sounds GREAT!

J

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 02:50 pm:

I agree. If the company implementing this technology is not Newtek, then Newtek should be looking at this development very closely.

Although Rendezvous is Apple's technology, Apple licenses it to other companies to use at no cost. Most printer manufacturers (ie Canon, Epson etc) are incorporating Rendezvous into their printers. It didn't occur to me that a distributed renderer for a 3D app could use this, but in hindsight it seems obvious.

Newtek: Investigate this further. This is the answer to your Screamernet woes. Don't let your competition do it first.

By ted devlin (Eblue) (12.149.3.2) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 03:38 pm:

Rendezvous is Not Apple's tech.
it is a re-packaging of something called zeroconf and is an INDUSTRY standard.

http://www.zeroconf.org/

the list of companies involved with this astounding, Ibm, MS, Sun, and Apple to name a few.

it is a very solid and well supported emerging technology.

By Ed Mag (Ed_M) (64.12.103.36) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 06:08 pm:

[[[Rendezvous is Not Apple's tech.
it is a re-packaging of something called zeroconf and is an INDUSTRY standard. ]]]

Ted, it IS Apple's Technology. Apple assigned a bunch of engineers for the ZeroConf project and was the biggest backer. I think it's safe to call it theirs... OH and by the way, who other than Apple has made it available to anyone up to this point?

http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2909171,00.html

--
Ed

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 07:30 pm:

Arnie.... would you like to comment? Do you think that Rendezvous has potential to be used in a distributed rendering system for a 3D application?

By ted devlin (Eblue) (68.46.132.42) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 10:00 pm:

ed,
the article you ref'd is inaccurate. heres why
apple owns the name Rendezvous
apple owns the code they wrote that implements zeroConf.

thats it

zeroConf, its underlying principals, and access to the technologies that make zeroConf Possible across platforms, either belong to the IETF (which gives the ideas away for free) or are free.

"The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual"

that from the page i ref'd and the true designers of the industry standard. (the IETF zeroConf group btw has been around since 1999)

the ideas that make up zeroConf belong to the technical community. Anybody with the desire can write an implementation that adheres to zeroConf. Apple just trumped everyone by doing it well, first, and offering their solution in a way that makes them stronger. The fact that everybody owns ZeroConf, is its most compelling feature, it has Zero overhead at the beginning of development, it makes the task of implementation easier bc the ITEF gives you instructions, and it garuntees compatibility, across platforms.

the article, and many others, seem to have confused rendezvous (a software product) with zeroConf (an industry standard and a communications protocol).

and sadly, this thread seems to have confused rendezvous with some cure-all elixir for networking products.

zeroconf, can't cure screamernet's ills.
its great technology, but here are the issues:

1. its not cross platform... yet some MS people are part of the group that defined it, so its a safe bet that there will be an implementation, but Newtek does not bet on products that haven't shipped.

2. Screamernet in its current incarnation Can Take Advantage of ZeroConf... Screamernet can certainly see any mounted drive, whether appletalk, appleshareIP, SMB, etc... so Rendezvous should pose no problems. But that doesn't give screamernet a shot in the arm does it? and it certainly doesn't sound like the tenacious renderer described in the quote.

3. heres the killer. tight intergration, i mean the kind of hardcore-lightyears-ahead-of-everybody-else integration with ZeroConf, is a full time job. Newtek doesn't do things like that.
The monster ref'd in the original quote isn't simply a rendezvous, enabled renderer. it can install itself, recover from errors, manage a growing/shrinking list of slaves at need based on cpu usage, find missing files. Newtek has no interest in this type of logic problem.

This product is a mac only solution, and there really are only a handful of 3d software companies that have the salt to do this, and do it well.

No. Lw is most likely not going to get a Rendezvous Screamernet, its someone else, and i think i know who.

did you catch it? let me make it a bit more plain...
"a prominent maker of 3-D rendering software"
ie: they make rendering software but not neccessarily 3d modelling or animation software.

do you need another hint?
steve's other job makes 3d-rendering software, and there has been... some pressure... to see it ported to the mac.

By Nothing Real (Lwlurker) (12.101.188.241) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 10:56 pm:

The article doesn't state the the renderer is for the Mac. It does say, "In fact, Apple has open-sourced Rendezvous and released source code for versions designed to work on Linux machines as well." Which brings up another question. Why would anyone want to render on a mac? Apple's developing solutions for Linux, so that technology could be applied to more powerful computing solutions - apart from Microsoft. Part of Apple's strategy is to weaken Microsoft's grip on the market, even if it means supporting non-apple hardware. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple ends up being a cute VW Bug company that sells aftermarket parts for Ferraris. At least they're willing to work with people outside their (slow, yet expensive) box!

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 11:44 pm:

Lwlurker said:
"Why would anyone want to render on a mac?"

This is just anti-Mac hubris. Through most years Apple has had faster boxes than on the Wintel side. When the G3 processor was released it beat the pants off anything that Intel was offering. Mr Lurker.... where were you lurking then? I'm sure you were using Windows, regardless of the speed.

It's a strange thing how Windows users feel the need to log onto the Mac forum for no other reason than to diss Mac hardware.

By Marcel Valcarce (Marcelval) (66.218.35.191) on Thursday, February 06, 2003 - 10:07 am:

Right on Beam! Mr. Lurker also misses the point that Rendezvous does not exist for Linux (to my knowledge there is no other ZeroConf implementation out there). Someday I am sure all platforms will have it, but right now Apple has a lead.

So if a company is writing a Rendezvous enabled network renderer it is being written with the Mac in mind. If it is Renderman (and I would put down money that Ted is right) then it is certainly a cross platform solution. The difference between platforms will be that with Macs on the network you won't have to do a lick of work to get it running.

I'll tell you what, if Apple ever does come out with quad proc 970 (or maybe 980) xServes people will want to render on those.

So then the only issue is how do you get a RIB file out of Lightwave?

By Ed Mag (Ed_M) (152.163.189.134) on Thursday, February 06, 2003 - 11:47 am:

Not for nothing, but Dean Dauger mentioned that something like this would be coming, and he mentioned it last year... Warned that NewTek would be proven wrong when the time is right. Well, the hour is almost upon us.

--
Ed M.

By John C. Welch (Jcwelch) (18.18.3.76) on Thursday, February 06, 2003 - 12:11 pm:

Okay, so let's clear up some misconceptions:

1) Zeroconf isn't a standard yet. It's a proposed standard. It's still being hashed out.

2) Zeroconf isn't a single proposed standard. It's three: v4Link - local addressing, mDNS, and DNS - SD

3) "Although Rendezvous is Apple's technology, Apple licenses it to other companies to use at no cost. "

Rendezvous is a trademark. The technology under Rendezvous is free to anyone who cares to use it. Apple can't license it, because it already exists. Apple is simply integrating it.

4) "Rendezvous is Not Apple's tech.
it is a re-packaging of something called zeroconf and is an INDUSTRY standard."

Partially true. The creator of the Zeroconf idea is Stuart Cheshire, a software engineer at Apple and a very Smart Guy. Apple could have not put their packaging idea out to the IETF, but they did. that's why it's in the standards process. It's not a standard yet though.

5) " its not cross platform... yet some MS people are part of the group that defined it, so its a safe bet that there will be an implementation, but Newtek does not bet on products that haven't shipped."

Incorrect. v4LL, the IP number discovery system was first shipped by Microsoft with Windows 98. Apple followed suit a few years later with one of the Mac OS 8 versions. mDNS has been around a while, and is the least - used part of Zeroconf. DNS-SD is used to a limited exent every time you use DNS to find a web server. It's *all* cross platform. MS is implementing parts of it *today* as is Red Hat and a few other Linux vendors.

6) "heres the killer. tight intergration, i mean the kind of hardcore-lightyears-ahead-of-everybody-else integration with ZeroConf, is a full time job. Newtek doesn't do things like that.
The monster ref'd in the original quote isn't simply a rendezvous, enabled renderer. it can install itself, recover from errors, manage a growing/shrinking list of slaves at need based on cpu usage, find missing files. Newtek has no interest in this type of logic problem. "

well, they better think about it. telling people to mount drives for this stuff is a losing proposition. Networking is growing up past the "let's emulate a local environment" idea, and if Newtek doesn't adjust for this, they're going to get left behind. The user level mount idea was never the best way to do it *anyway*

7) "This product is a mac only solution"

Not even close to the truth.

By Nothing Real (Lwlurker) (12.101.188.241) on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 10:44 am:

Mr. Tracer: it's not anti-mac to say they're considerably slower at rendering than the intel/amd counterparts. The G3 never beat anyone's pants, but before the G4 came out, it was running at 500 MHz, and holding its own against the newly arrived Intel 600 MHz chips. Maybe that means "beating pants" to you -- whatever. But Apple never caught up since then, except for where altive-specific applications were concerned. I don't know of a renderer out there that has figured out how to benefit from altivec (and its limitations), so the mac remains slow. Nothing strange about offering an opinion, is there?
Mr. Valcarce: The article that spawned this little discussion points out that Apple is, in fact, developing Linux solutions for Rendezvous. And I stated it in my earlier comments. How much did you read? So my point was that Apple, who is pushing this technology forward, is driving it forward for Linux, thus leading me to believe that they want this capability for other (faster?) machines. This, I think, shows more wisdom than they have displayed in a long time.
I don't wish Apple was slow. And I don't wish that Apple limit their better accomplishments to 3% of the market when there's money to be made with a larger sector that could finance their efforts to get back more market share. It's one thing to get market share from people who have trouble turning a PC on (ala their "switch" campaign). It's another thing to go after businesses and tech people who love the options available to them in the Wintel world. By making Linux more attractive, they take from Microsoft while giving to themselves. It's called strategy, and it's worth noting that they're thinking outside their own box.
Mr Ed: Newtek never denied that technology such as rendezvous would never come into existence. Newtek doesn't have the same funding as Apple, so they're limited on how much "revolution" they can program on any given year. They've placed a gamble on their Toaster product (I heard the number was around $10M invested on it), and I think it's hurt them a little, since the economy's dropped out a little. I don't know how the Toaster's doing, but I doubt it'll be the revenue generator that Lightwave was.
Mr. Welch: forums truly benefit from the accuracy of individuals such as yourself. Gives mac users a good name, too ;) Maybe they're not all bull-headed converts from troublesome PCs after all.
No worries.