Posted on 10/10/2005 5:04:05 AM PDT by Salo
In a stroke of irony, Microsoft's Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system.
Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox announced last week that Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh will act as executive producers for the film, based on the best-selling game for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console.
Bungie, the Microsoft-owned development firm which created the game, confirmed that Peter Jackson's post-production firm Weta Digital would be involved in the movie.
Weta Digital uses more than 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora version of the Red Hat distribution of the Linux to produce special effects for movies that have so far included Lord of the Rings and King Kong.
About half the processors are rented out by the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre – a joint venture between Telecom and Weta – when they are not needed for film-making.
The open-source Linux operating system is growing in popularity in the server market, threatening the market share of Microsoft's Windows Server, though it hasn't managed to make major inroads on the desktop.
Halo centres on the adventures of an armour-clad super soldier known as the Master Chief who battles an alien horde, and the movie is certain to be laden with special effects rendered using Weta's servers.
The game has sold 13 million copies worldwide, generating $US600 million in revenue, and was the making of the Xbox games console.
Microsoft will receive $US$5 million up front from Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, plus a cut of ticket sales.
The script for Halo was written by Alex Garland, who penned the sci-fi hit 28 Days. The movie is expected to be released mid-2007.
IBM running linux is communism ping.
Wait. Peter Jackson is producing the Halo movie? Sweet zombie Jesus.
The irony is probably lost on Microsoft. Netcraft shows a small herd of Microsoft.com servers run linux, and I seem to remember that MSN was hosted on servers running BSD.
Your Ticket Supports Communism bump.
That was Hotmail, not MSN and those were converted years ago.
As for the movie, I suggest Denise Richards for the role of Cortana!
A movie about Halo? Just when I had stopped laughing about the trailers of the Doom movie...
Let me see... does this mean that Microsoft is communist now, too?
Could one even do this on Microsoft-based servers?
I second that!
OSS PING
If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me
No way I have it a decent authority that Linux is not nearly mature enough to do this... Has to be a mistake..
Halo was Bungie long before it was Microsoft.
It totally depends on the rendering package that's used. I run Carrara 4 Pro on XP and it comes with a 5 render node license. I run nodes on 5 other XP machines and they all render animation frames together. No server OS is needed. You can purchase licenses for more nodes but then I would have to buy more computers and an OS for each one.
i had the same reaction. i love to kill me some sci-fi creatures but to watch them on the big screen? no so much.
i do LOVE to play halo so i might give it a chance, if it's the same guys that put together LordftheRings they might be able to pull off the halo monsters.
is microsoft paying these people? i thought communism was free. so confused.
Links?
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