Just ordered...

[Martin Naef]

Hi Peter and Andy

Peter Korsten wrote:
>> Rent-a-render farm, especially an automated version would indeed be  
>> cool but I think there are way to many variables right now to make it  
>> worth it as a buisness model. 

I was under the assumption that quite a few of these actually exist, and 
are used frequently. It's just not economical for a small company like 
you to run a full render farm, yet you'll run into project where you 
just need them to make the deadline. It's not just the cost of the 
hardware that bogs you down, but also licensing as some of the renderers 
are charged per node.

I can understand your concerns about the NDA, especially if you do 
product visualisation before a company announces it. But then, keep in 
mind that IP is a big issue for everybody in the animation and 
visualisation business, so I can't imagine the render farm company 
risking its reputation by leaking data and breaking their NDA.

> It's early days, but I definitely see the computer/computing business go 
> back to a client/server model, but with the internet thrown in. A move 
> away from generic PCs that are customised for a specific task, to 
> smaller, dedicated devices that do just a few things, but do those very 
> well. And store all your data on the 'net.

I'm sceptical - we've heard the story before too many times under 
different names, yet it always turned out that bandwidth was more scarce 
than local processing power or storage capacity. However, it is clear 
that some form of centralised document storage will be used for 
increasingly more services (it's already standard for e-mail).

> home PCs. I don't see very dramatic changes there, except for maybe thin 
> clients and applications like Word that run on a server.

I think they'll rather push things like their sharepoint servers and 
other forms of server-based document hosting and collaboration. After 
all, even my mobile phone these days has enough power to run something 
like word...

Martin