5 ms·

This was pretty much my thought as well. The results of this cost-benefit analysis make me raise my eyebrow, and, same as you, I can only assume that OS X perme

by to3m 12y ago

This was pretty much my thought as well. The results of this cost-benefit analysis make me raise my eyebrow, and, same as you, I can only assume that OS X permeates the infrastructure from top to bottom, to an extent that makes pulling it out too painful to even contemplate. Image processing shaders of this type aren't that hard to write. If you're worried about them not matching some piece of client software exactly (Quartz Composer, Photoshop, etc.), you still have options. And those options - e.g., webapp for previewing/something else/etc. - you'll probably want anyway, for the benefit of designers that don't run OS X. (The filtering aspect of the system I find a little surprising anyway - the idea of an image-focussed client-aware DPI-aware CDN makes sense to me (and I like it!), but something that does your Photoshop filters in the cloud sounds less compelling. I would have expected people to prefer to do that locally, and upload the result. But... while I've worked with many artists and designers, I'm not one myself. So maybe they'll go for that. And/or maybe a lot of their customers take advantage of the fact that the processing appears to be free. And I'm prepared to contemplate the possibility, however unlikely, that they might know their customer base better than I do.)

dinasaurusrex 12y ago
(full disclosure: I work at imgix) Uploading pre-edited images takes time/resources, and in general a lot of our customers rely on us to do all of their image processing so that they don't have to. Additionally, creating edited versions of images in advance presents two problems: 1) Any future site redesigns or edits must now be applied en masse to the existing images or risk older images not complying with the new scheme, and 2) Instead of only managing the one original source image in the origin, now we're talking about maintaining all of the different edited versions, which is very inefficient from a storage and image management perspective. There are many advantages to applying all of the image transformations on-demand, rather than in advance. Keep in mind that we are not simply photo filters, but a full end-to-end image processing offering (which applies everything from simple photoshop edits like cropping, face detecting, color correction, watermarks, etc. to automatic content negotiation and automatic resizing/responsive design) that works on the fly; this means that our customers now can make batch edits to their entire corpus of images through a few simple code edits. This can become extremely cost-effective, but also helps in reducing page weight significantly.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  Hackintoshes would make a lot more sense.
  - joshmn 12y ago
    Of course they would. Legally? Yeah, good luck. Edit: I think the more obvious answer to this is that they would rehouse these babies in a more convenient, albeit likely custom form-factor.
    - skuhn 12y ago
      It is appealing in a way, but I also think it would put the business at legal risk in a way that is totally unconscionable. We cannot run a Hackintosh in production for a single moment, the long term ramifications could be immense. The chassis we designed represents my attempt to re-house the Mac Pros in something more suitable for the datacenter.
      - joshmn 12y ago
        Yeah, the legal risk just isn't worth it. It'd be interesting to see someone rip apart a Mac Pro and build an entire form-factor around its setup. Don't get me wrong, what you guys have done is extremely beautiful in all ways, but I can't help to think that if someone wanted to do this with say a Mini... say you take a 1u rack, drill some new holes into it... hmm.
        skuhn 12y ago
        The Minis are incredibly simple machines inside, and their airflow is not great. You could pop their logic boards out and run them without the chassis. With some thought it wouldn't be too tough to significantly improve their airflow for this environment. I do have an existing rack design that holds 64 of them (and other people have gone denser, with operational compromises I prefer not to make), so there's no great impetus on my side to rip them out of their enclosures. My Mac Mini rack design is shown in a little more detail in our previous article: http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-internet http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-int...

by to3m 12y ago

dinasaurusrex 12y ago

(full disclosure: I work at imgix) Uploading pre-edited images takes time/resources, and in general a lot of our customers rely on us to do all of their image processing so that they don't have to. Additionally, creating edited versions of images in advance presents two problems: 1) Any future site redesigns or edits must now be applied en masse to the existing images or risk older images not complying with the new scheme, and 2) Instead of only managing the one original source image in the origin, now we're talking about maintaining all of the different edited versions, which is very inefficient from a storage and image management perspective. There are many advantages to applying all of the image transformations on-demand, rather than in advance. Keep in mind that we are not simply photo filters, but a full end-to-end image processing offering (which applies everything from simple photoshop edits like cropping, face detecting, color correction, watermarks, etc. to automatic content negotiation and automatic resizing/responsive design) that works on the fly; this means that our customers now can make batch edits to their entire corpus of images through a few simple code edits. This can become extremely cost-effective, but also helps in reducing page weight significantly.

blkhp19 12y ago
Hackintoshes would make a lot more sense.
- joshmn 12y ago
  Of course they would. Legally? Yeah, good luck. Edit: I think the more obvious answer to this is that they would rehouse these babies in a more convenient, albeit likely custom form-factor.
  - skuhn 12y ago
    It is appealing in a way, but I also think it would put the business at legal risk in a way that is totally unconscionable. We cannot run a Hackintosh in production for a single moment, the long term ramifications could be immense. The chassis we designed represents my attempt to re-house the Mac Pros in something more suitable for the datacenter.
    - joshmn 12y ago
      Yeah, the legal risk just isn't worth it. It'd be interesting to see someone rip apart a Mac Pro and build an entire form-factor around its setup. Don't get me wrong, what you guys have done is extremely beautiful in all ways, but I can't help to think that if someone wanted to do this with say a Mini... say you take a 1u rack, drill some new holes into it... hmm.
      - skuhn 12y ago
        The Minis are incredibly simple machines inside, and their airflow is not great. You could pop their logic boards out and run them without the chassis. With some thought it wouldn't be too tough to significantly improve their airflow for this environment. I do have an existing rack design that holds 64 of them (and other people have gone denser, with operational compromises I prefer not to make), so there's no great impetus on my side to rip them out of their enclosures. My Mac Mini rack design is shown in a little more detail in our previous article: http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-internet http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-int...