BIG MEDIA COMPANIES have a well-deserved reputation for being deeply clueless about information technology. Studio executives view it as a necessary evil, albeit useful for padding byzantine accounting in order to pay their actors and investors as little as possible. But the smaller studios producing the computer animation wizardry driving many popular movies are more sophisticated. They are moving to Linux on x86 platforms, and are realizing both lower costs and higher performance.

Thus Cnet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the operation responsible for special effects in the Star Wars series and other major films, has replaced a bunch of SGI RISC boxes running Irix with less expensive Intel machines running Linux.

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