SharkD wrote:
> Interesting. I wonder what the speed would be compared to rendering it on my
> machine (AMD Sempron 3000), and what the end cost would be?

They claim it's about a 1.7GHz Xenon machine. Of course, they have mondo 
machines they're running virtual machines on top of. Experience 
indicates that on average this is about right, while in practice there 
are small variations over the scale of a minute or two.

> Also, I'm not sure I could figure out how to set it up. 
 > You would need to select an operating
> system, install POV-Ray and so on. One of the Linux options would be most cost
> effective, but I've never used Linux before.

It's not too difficult. They already have images available. You could 
boot up a machine, use rpm or yast or whatever to install POV-Ray, and 
run it. If you've done any sort of system admin before, it's pretty 
straightforward.  You haven't, so it would probably be better to get 
someone to set it up for you.

I have no idea how you make a Windows image. I haven't tried that.

> I wonder if someone could set up an account and then charge other users (via
> Paypal, maybe?) to render scenes?

Yes, you can. Indeed, if I understand it, you can set up for-fee machine 
images, where the customer pays you some number of cents per hour for 
the privilege of using your machine image. And that number can, of 
course, be zero.

I have a program that lets you launch off a number of jobs to a number 
of servers, intended for use with Amazon's S3 and EC2.  I never quite 
finished it up.  The basics work, but stuff like creating the directory 
structures into which you need to organize your jobs and having the 
program launch new servers and such never got finished, mainly because I 
wrote it before Amazon added a bunch of goodly stuff to their EC2 
interfaces that would make that much easier.

I'm happy to offer it to anyone who wants to help out. Maybe someone who 
really knows Linux well enough to know where it caches all your 
embarrassing secrets could help set up a machine image with POV-ray 
already installed and such, appropriate for looking up what bucket 
they're supposed to be using and launching the client side of the code. 
I can probably do most of it, but knowing how I can give away a disk 
image that's not going to have any of my passwords built into .bashrc or 
some such is a bit rough. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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