I don't think brute force always wins. In fact, algorithmic efficiency for many things has actually increased FASTER than Moore's Law. That means that for many classes of algorithms, if you tried today's state-of-the-art algorithm on hardware thirty years old, it would actually beat out the thirty-y...

About power... Yeah, it'd be dumb to run them year round. Just run them during the winter! All the power just can be used to heat your house/office!

But you can't actually do that in XP. You have to connect a CF card to a PATA adapter for it to work, since USB is initialized late in boot-up. That will work. The USB way also works in Vista, though. They might work in linux, too, even if you might have to replace the usb pen drive every year or tw...

Why purchase vista, anyways? The used PCs would have xp pro on them, no chance of Vista. Plus, you could probably just boot them to a linux usb pen with indigo on it. You could use some older machines from AMD, too (sempron doesn't have the same long-pipeline problems as P4). Is there a good benchma...

triangles only? Really? I am sad. Well, I guess I'll take my pitch somewhere else... ...Ha! I saw something about a sphere in the manual! Anyways. Yeah. But if you're working with something that just won't fit in 4gb of ram, you'd probably have to upgrade to a server-grade motherboard (with many slo...

What about 8 gigs? 16? 4 gig ram modules are ridiculously expensive, whereas a 16-gig flash drive is reasonable, still. I don't know how much ram is needed for various scenes, since I've pretty much just discovered indigo. I prefer things without triangles (triangles tend to use sooo much memory!).....

A render farm wouldn't be expensive with a few used P4 computers for less than $100 each. 20 cores for $2000? not too bad! Just get the old computers from some corp. upgrading to vista and use psexec to control it... it wouldn't be that hard. No programming would be required except for knowing the b...

What about putting the virtual memory on the pen drive? Granted, that has a tendency to wear out the flash cells, but modern usb pen drives are pretty resilient and the random read times for them are at least an order of magnitude greater than with magnetic hard drives.

What about a 64-bit linux distribution just for indigo that can be put on a usb pen drive and booted to, so the user gets this 20% increase in performance (64-bit vs 32-bit and linux vs. windows) without having to totally install a new operating system? That doesn't sound that complicated with all t...

I liked the pov-ray integrated text editor with context highlighting and well-integrated help documentation. Pov-ray is set to be open-sourced soon, so perhaps those two things can be brought over to the indigo world? That would help usability tremendously, if you included a way to see an earlier "p...

I guess what I was trying to say was that the more procedural stuff, the better! I'm a beginner. I've used pov-ray on and off for the last ten years (I haven't done anything grandiose), but I must say that the coolest thing about this sort of stuff is the near limitless levels of complexity possible...

This is so awesome. I love the physically accurate (well, close!) aspect of raytracing (or whatever this "unbiased" stuff is called). Ever since I heard about the concept, I've thought that procedurally generated objects are what dreams are made of... It's so much more elegant to just basically tell...