Slashdot Mirror
Universal3D vs. Real Open Standards
viveka writes "Back in April, Slashdot reported the announcement of a Universal 3D File Format by Intel, Microsoft & others - to be "as open as MP3". Of course, that's not all that open. And this turns out to be the sneaky part. There is a real open standard already - X3D is ISO-ratified, royalty-free, and has multiple open source implementations. U3D is "going to be submitted to ISO" - one day - but right now they're talking to ECMA, which allows royalty-bearing patents.
I found this article by Tony Parisi, co-chair of the X3D Working Group a fascinating insider's picture of the standards wars, along with insights into what it takes to release an online game, what really killed VRML, and why open standards do (and don't) matter.
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore ;)"
MS isn't interested in helping the competition, they're trying to push down the competition. As long as they have a monopoly and they ignore standards, it can make it even easier for them to retain their monopoly. We hear all the time about how people don't want to use non-MS products due to incompatabilities. I would be very surprised if MS ever actually does conform to web standards and such.
Hi there
Ok seriously there are too many hyperlinks. Which one is the article. You don't need to hyperlink every single word to get your point across!
Are Real Open Standards anything like Real Ultimate Power?
Game... blouses.
Maybe that is why VRML and X3D were not successful. Storing binary data like 3D vector data and texture data in a text file and then compressing the text file to get acceptable file sizes is just plain stupid.
Binary storage for 3D data makes a lot more sense since it is more compact and easier to parse, and there are also standards such as the IEEE float and double standard.
But nowadays everything has got to be XML, even if it does not make any sense at all. XML is fine for configuration files and office documents, but for image and vector data it is just not the right tool.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Remember, the MP3 standard is covered by patents owned by the Fraunhofer Institute and THOMSON, and they enforce their patents.
Don't foget Collada This format, headed up by sony and supported by all the major 3d modelling packages, was first released at SIGGPAPH, and it has a lot of promise.
Almost all competition is a good ting, if there weren't competition we wouldn't be sat here using computers that can do what they can do and in a world that is as advanced as it is.
;-)).
A standard is a good standard if it does it's job well and fits in with business demands. Technical superiority isn't always the best predictor of a winner. May the best standard win (which is a no-lose statement btw
Unfortunately, with Microsoft's money and monopoly of the desktop, that trick might work. In fact it probably will work, unless some of us put together good ideas and good software using the open standard X3D before the bad guys get their bandwagon rolling.
WTF? When did they... oh, wait. I thought this was Open Standards by Real... nevermind :)
Here is stuff straight from their standards page:
* Open source, so no licensing issues.
* Has been officially incorporated within the MPEG-4 multimedia standard.
* XML support makes it easy to expose 3D data to Web Services and distributed applications.
* Compatible with the next generation of graphics files - e.g. Scalable Vector Graphics.
* 3D objects can be manipulated in C or C++, as well as Java.
Sure looks like everything VRML attempted to be an then some, guaranteed to be another crash and burn.
"Hats off to WildTangent, the only one of the bunch who ever had a working business model". I know a few programmers that worked at WildTangent and I've play tested a few of their games. All of them were awful. The only people I've seen get realtime 3d right is Linden Lab, but that requires way too much infastructure.
..where is the Firefox plugin? ;)
A binary format for X3D is being defined. X3D supports multiple file encodings describing the same abstract model.
But nowadays everything has got to be XML, even if it does not make any sense at all
The XML encoding enables smooth integration with web services and cross-platform inter-application file and data transfer. An excellent idea, surely. See the X3D FAQ for more details.
...nobody would embrace a semi-private offering like U3D. X3D truly is a mess.
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i think this one is the actual article.
not even slashdotted yet, probably because it's so hard to find.
maybe someone forgot to tell them, but mp3 is far from open... it is owned and to legally use it there are copyright fees involved...
I disagree. Storing vector data in text files has tha advantage that in extreme case, I can always edit the file with just a text editor.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
X3D isn't a file format standard. It's some lame web 3D, lets resurrect VRML with a new name, specification.
/ v36/
There are at least two opensource 3d file format standards that I know of developed by actual companies in the industry:
http://www.softimage.com/products/pipeline/dotxsi
http://www.tweakfilms.com/main/gto.html
A binary format for X3D is being defined. X3D supports multiple file encodings describing the same abstract model.
Nice to hear that. That will increase the chances of X3D being accepted as a true standard tremendously.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Anybody who still believes that Microsoft and open standards fit on one page is misguided. Standards are ok with MS, as long as noone else can exert any control over them.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore ;)
Why not? Microsoft still has 95% of the browser market, if you think "that trick doesn't work anymore", you're a moron. They're still in a position to dictate standards, and they've shown that they have no qualms about doing so.
Of course, this is yet another area where there is simply nothing that is truly patentable, but I'm sure they can sucker the idiots at the patent office to give them a few, anyway.
Do you have ESP?
The VRML plug-in came free with Navigator. You can still download version 3.04 from ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/english/3. 04/ if you're interested. I remember a few sites using it back in the day, but I don't know which ones are still around. Even if there aren't any VRML sites left, Navigator includes a sample VRML file to play around with. It looked promising, but I think Shockwave flash ultimately succeeded in its place due to their (relatively) small file sizes.
Tony Parisi doesn't seem to get it--the best way to kill off X3D from getting mindshare was to make it an ISO standard, because almost all ISO standards cannot be freely shared in electronic form and the process takes too long to revise deficiencies. What is really pathetic is with all of his experience Parisi still wasn't able to see that the best way to spread a software technology and overthrow the existing order is to make the standard as freely accessible as RFCs or W3C standards.
For software ISO standards only "work" with already existing market leaders. And even market leaders can be eventually dragged down by the restrictions of being an ISO standard, such as the deficiencies of C++ leading to the creation of Java and C#. Making a software technology such as X3D an ISO standard before it had any market share was simply madness, and Parisi should have known better.
Going out on a limb here, but couldn't it also be that there is NO USE for 3d on the internet? Most people won't even dive deeper than 2 clicks to get where they want to be, and you think that they are going to walk down a virtual street into a virtual store and manually look around? No chance in hell, snow blind be damned.
I agree! XML is overused just because it seems cool. A binary format is far superior for storing lots the shear number of verticies in todays 3d scenes. I skimmed through the X3D samples, and while primatives are as simple as tags, actual gemometry is rediculous! Storing a single component/attribute of a vertex (with as many as 4 components and 10+ attributes) is about 12 bytes to a binary format's 4 bytes (for a standard float). I see X3D has some compression mechenisms, but I can't imagin how those are of any use if they are text based. They would need to stay in the xml document and therefore must use CData feilds which still makes the format bloated even with a specialized compression algo for verticies.
http://brandonbloom.name
Ah, the compression is nearly as I expected:
y Co mpression/index.html
http://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/examples/Binar
I'd be interested to see someone convert one of those samples to a binary format.
http://brandonbloom.name
One of my gripes with vrml is that angles are specified in radians, and it looks like x3d is the same. Maybe it makes the transform math simpler, but Arghhh! Who in the world decided that radians were more intuitive to work with than degrees? Do they think no one will ever write 3d models by hand? I like to have "turn this a quarter turn" work out to a rational number.
Maybe there's some way to set the default input mode to degrees, and someone will enlighten me.
-jim
There IS no market for web 3D. Since it wasn't possible to create a market beforehand, perhaps this was the only option for him. It looks, from his blog, like he got to this point only after several failed ventures. A VRML successor was the end result of these. Therefore, making this an ISO standard probably wasn't his initial goal. It was probably easier than admitting that his work in the recent past had mostly been a wasted.
My biggest question is: why is this on the Slashdot front page? I don't think most people care.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Tim
While the size of some 3D data sets is a concern with XML, XML is otherwise very well suited for such data. It is often irregular (which makes relational databases tough) and hierarchical (with elements sitting at different places in a scene graph). So it fits XML almost perfectly.
Furthermore, with XSLT, or any of the bindings that enable XML structures to be reflected as objects in a programming language, processing the data becomes easy.
Finally, you can always edit it manually.
Binary descriptions are nice, usually compact (not always). But with binary descriptions you always have to worry about floating point formats, endianness and how to represent the data in your program - so for every binary data description you have to write a reader for the data, a writer and a new converter for every output format you might choose. With XML, libraries for reading, writing and converting (XSL is very powerful for that) are being written for most languages so you can use one of those that is already there, or if you do have to write one, you can reuse it for other types of data in the future.
I've written programs to read and write binary data of more types than I'd care to admit, and I've stared at hex dumps of the data files for way too long. I've had to look at un-documented or under-documented binary formatted files and puzzle out what every bit did more than a few times. (Of course since the DMCA I would never puzzle out undocumented binary data files.)
Finally you say, "XML is fine for configuration files and office documents" but there are those who say that XML is precisely wrong for those kinds of files. In fact, every time someone mentions XML as being used for "Purpose X" on slashdot, you can expect the immediate response "XML is completely inappropriate for Purpose X" comments.
I'm also a bit curious - for the 3D descriptions, how does bzipped XML compare to an equivalent binary file for size?
That's why everyone's got one!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I don't see that as being enough overhead to avoid using xml. Squirting a complex X3D file at a device will only take a fraction of a second with _todays_ speeds, why not make it human readable/easily edited/open ?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Yeah, that was kind of the point the story submitter was trying to make when they put "as open as MP3" in quotes, and made the crack about a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format. Even if you're not going to RTFA you could at least RTF/.S.
Try doing calculus-based physics for a while, then toss your conceptions about radians being a mere matter of convention out the window. Even if the computer's doing the work on the coefficients, it's a great place to introduce bugs.
If you really care, it's a piece of cake to write a script that'll translate all the degrees in your hand-made model into radians. That's one translation, encapsulated, instead of hundreds throughout a client program.
Seriously, if you're taking the time to write 3-D models by hand, you can spare an hour to work out a translating solution. The rest of us have real work to do and we need radians.
Yes, I was responding more to the company's remark "as open as MP3" and not the summary, but I felt it necessary to add to the summary by pointing out that MP3 patents are ACTIVELY ENFORCED. The MPEG collection of technologies are, technically, open standards. A lot of companies donate patented MPEG technologies, but do not enforce those patents, except Fraunhofer Gesellschaft of course. This is what makes MP3 a pseudo-open format. This was not mentioned in the summary.
"Finally you say, "XML is fine for configuration files and office documents" but there are those who say that XML is precisely wrong for those kinds of files. In fact, every time someone mentions XML as being used for "Purpose X" on slashdot, you can expect the immediate response "XML is completely inappropriate for Purpose X" comments."
I think a more insightful question would be: why? Is it because they're luddites? Strange for a tech site. Or mabe a "back in my day" reaction? How about the "Java effect"? Or is it simply that most don't actually understand XML beyound the dictionary definition? Obviously if one doesn't understand something, bad things can happen that may color one's perception when trying to wade into unknown waters.
Please look up the definition of "web services".
Hint: they have nothing to do with browsing the web.
Shouldn't this be modded as funny? As in "I can always view the 3D image with just a text editor."
...it's opt-in targeted e-marketing!
To summarize: if your code is slipped into another product and not clearly mentioned in the license and listed in the installer, or if it phones home without telling the user that it's going to do it, IMHO it is spyware. WildTangent (as it was bundled with AIM) fits both those conditions.
Maybe you're not selling spyware anymore, but you did in the past, and on slashdot that reputation takes a *long* time to live down. Just look at any thread about Realplayer...
0 1 - just my two bits
Human readable: readable my humans without any tools such as computers.
According to the Collada team, about Collada and X3D:
"We do not have this handy, and doing a fair comparison will take some time. I am not sure we (The COLLADA team) are the best to answer this question, as we may be seen as biased. But, without waiting for a detailed comparison, I can give you some elements: We asked game developers and modeler companies about X3D, and we could not find one project using X3D as file format. If you are a game developer reading this and using X3D, please speak up now! COLLADA goal is to be co-designed by the main players so they all embrace it and support it directly. In other words, import/export for COLLADA is provided and supported directly by the tool vendors. COLLADA is designed as a interchange format, while X3D is designed as a content deployment format, targeting web type applications. This may create great divergences between the formats."
So they are targeted at different demographics, apparently.
The issue is the decompressed size. Fact is, you are going to have to decompress the data before you can parse it. Something like X3D is going to be HUGE compared to a binary 3D format. So, that leaves you one of three options when dealing with it:
1) Decompress just as needed and render. Ok, but bzip2 requires a non-trivial amount of processor power to execute, and in any srot of high performance situation, you'll be doing a lot of decompression. You'll end up slowing way down wating on that.
2) Decompress all objects for a scene to memory. That'll work but require a massive amount of memory comparitivley. Not going to find too many takers on an engine that needs a GB to deal with a scene that normal engines can handle in 128MB or less.
3) Decompress all objects for a scene to disk. Better, but still going to use a lot more memory as the objects are loaded. Also will be slower, because of more disk access, and slower loading times for a scene because of the decompression process.
Look, a text based markup works well for something like the web because the size of files is not significant compared to the result, and most of the data in the document is text to be displayed anyhow. The same is not true of graphics, espically not in any modren context like a game's 3D engine. You need to be able to get the data into memory fast, and it needs to be as small as possible and still be usable. With UT2004 occupying 6 CDs, and Doom 3 occupying 3 (and being faster when it's data is decompressed, though most of it is binary) you do not want a file format that is going to drasitcally increase the space requirements.
Notice that there are good open formats that are binary, and for good reason, like PNG and OGG. With good documentation and standardization, they are easy to deal with in a program, yet they occupy little space in disk or memory and parse quickly. Try and reimplement a graphics format like OGG in XML and see what you get. It'll either be huge, or well compressed, necessitating a decompression step.
It's a nice thought that all file be human readable, but it's just not realistic for deceant performance. After all, why not take it a step further, have all program work from source, have the comptuer interpret them on the fly. Well, there's a good reason that's not done for many programs. Even Java compiles to a bytecode, and doesn't run straight from source.
What is easy to use for a human is not the same as what is easy to use for a computer.
FYI, Microsoft has "collaborated" on an even broader project in the past called Fahrenheit. That is an interesting piece of CG history which people may want to remember when buying in to projects like this.
And finally, I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want to exchange 3D geometric and animation data over a network using XML -- especially in a human readable form. That's simply masocistic. Even moderately sized data of that type becomes unwieldy in that form. If there was ever a less appropriate use of XML I can't think of it.
Human readability is overrated. Microsoft Word documents are far from human readable without a viewer, but no one has complained about that. Documents are "human readable" if there is a good viewer that readers have access to.
"Squirting a complex X3D file at a device will only take a fraction of a second with _todays_ speeds"
I highly doubt anyone plans to leave the 3d data in the X3D format within a 3d engine or when sending it to the graphics card. All of the data will be loaded into tightly packed and optimized buffers stored in video memory. Remember, real time 3d applications are concerned with fractions of seconds.
http://brandonbloom.name
Those pages are rather old and do not represent the final format. There is two proposals right now and a vote to be taken on selecting the one to go forward in mid October. One of them is based on using the XML schema to automatically generate a compression scheme (which also happens to be one of the submissions to the W3C Binary XML WG) and the other is a custom X3D-only implementation, but is fairly standard in it's treatment of binary data. You should see more info on these surfacing in a couple of months, so ignore those pages for now.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
But what if I need to write an app to search and index thousands of docs? What if I need to exportion the docs to HTML/TeX/SGML or Pig Latin? Call MS and pay $$. Not a solution. I realize that there are open solutions to this paticular problem now, but they only exist after a lot of reverse engineering. I'm betting that your handy-dandy MS doc file viewer is MS Word, though.
In fact, I can't understand users who don't see this as a problem. Why the #$@@#! should we accept closed formats when better open ones exist?
Re X3D, of course the X3D data gets converted to cg and shaders before being sent to the card, that's what an X3D viewer does. My point was that one can put a description of a very complex scene into X3D into a pretty small space, and that even a big gain in compression means a lot less now than it did a few years ago. Trading space for portability and readability is well worth it.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I'm going to accept advice on the future from someone who can't tell the difference between your and you're.
Right.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Actually it's a contradiction in terms.
I mean, Real and "Open"? I don't think so.
(for all you Helix fans, I'm talking about the binary codecs)
Quarter turn = 90 degrees = PI / 2 radians
Or learn a little VBA/VBScript and save $$.
Who in the world decided that radians were more intuitive to work with than degrees?
Well, given that radians are based on the actual mathamatics of angles (i.e., one radian is a "straight angle"), I guess God did. Or whatever deity you believe in. Athiests will have to blame it on random chance, and I'm not sure about agnostics.
Seriously, degrees (and minutes and seconds) are just like other "traditional" units of measure (like yards and feet and inches), in that some humans in the past cooked them up based on something pretty arbitrary. Working with them is a pain. The SI units make much more sense.
Only people who grew up with non-SI units prefer non-SI units. That's why I sometimes use inches rather then centimeters, and still think of temperatures in Fahrenheit and not Celsius. It's not that the non-SI units are "more intuitive"; they're simply what I'm used to.
Obviously, you're used to degrees. I am too. However, you and I and everyone else here at Slashdot today will not be around forever. As the time passes, more and more people will grow up on SI. Better that this standard use units based on something relevant to the subject, rather then the arbitrary decisions of old.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You insist that every computer language you use has a C-like syntax.
You insist that every document or format be readable in a simple text editor.
You prefer piping between primitive programs over using a more powerful integrated one.
You always use the same tools because you can't memorize any more CLI commands and you consider menus to be unmanly.
Nothing to do with standard breaking(standard breaking just slows down the fight back). All to do with packaging. Now linux ships with Mozilla not IE so in 5 to 10 years time we could be looking at a market turned up side down. With Microsoft with 5% and linux with 95% Then the browser share would shift accordingly. Basicly what is the most dominate will be the ditactor. Microsoft bigest problem taking on linux in the server world ie Linux/FreeBSD sets the standards not them breaking the standard just makes there stuff work badly Ie one of the resons why windows 2003 is so slow when sending web pages on line.
The linux roll out is comming and really fast market problems only way linux market on servers can grow now is to takeout the desktops.
Obviously. I am a giant walking vagina compared to you. ::NOT WORTHY::
The real path to male liberation
It's great to see VRML is back, but that one little episode still grates me.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
As I recall, VRML had an semi-optional binary format that basicly converted the syntax into binary tokens. Very compact.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Then why can't I view flash on my Debian powerbook? Anyway, providing audio and moving pictures to a browser isn't what XML is for.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Not too argue too much with your points, but I fail to see this one...
You might be a luddite if...You insist that every document or format be readable in a simple text editor.
Since XML is supposed to be the new thing, and since people want to get away from binary data, how would i then be a luddite, since in this case, i would actually WANT change?
There'll never be a universal standard for 3D because it's so application-specific. Some applications work with polygons and some work with parametric objects. It's the reason why only 3ds max can read .max files - objects and modifiers are represented parametrically, and only the plugins that generated them know how to create them.
Then of course, the rendering applications like to have their own formatting of data for speed and efficiency issues. A DirectX game will have data stored in an optimal format that's different from say how a PS2 game will.
Using XML is ridiculous, it's a terrible waste of space and introduces a large processing overhead before the data is ready for rendering. There's a reason games often store 3D data in the format the platform directly processes - so it can be read off disk and immediately blasted to the screen.
Was this thread penned by a long-time MacOS 9 user?
You people that get all giddy about the ease of XML miss the problems of space and speed. XML data may be all nice and human readable but that doesn't matter. It's not machine readable and it's huge. As a really simple example: If I want to represent a colour in binary, I do it with 3 bytes, one for red, green and blue. That covers all teh values of a 24-bit space, which is what is commonly used. In XML I need up to 8 bytes to represent the same colour data, since it's all text. Also, given the control characters, and the fact that I probably do it as three numbers delimited by commas.
Now this alone is bad enough, a dramatic increase in the memory needed to hold all this data, but even worse is that it all has to be parsed. Graphics cards do not speak XML. OpenGL and DirectX do not use XML. So, one can either store the data in a binary format that can be fed directly to the OGL/DX layer, or one can do an additonal parse of XML data, then feed the result to the graphics card.
The problem is you are thinking only of the human end, as though computers were infinetly powerful and simply do what we want with no delay. Well that's not the real world. In reality the computer is the limiting factor, and you need to figure out how to squeeze as much out of it as you can. That very often means doing things in a way that suits it, not you.
Human readable structures are fine for some things, but for 3d models and textures they are not. Go ahead, develop an XML texture format and put it up against DDS or JPEG, see how your sizes compare. You will be talking probably an order of magnitude larger. Maybe you think that's no big deal, well, what about for something like UT2004 that has 2.8GB of textures? Would it be no big deal to make that 28GB?
Look, when computers can do any task with ease, and have a near infinite amount of storage, then I'd love to hear the argument for going to all human readable files, at the expense of speed and memory. However, for now, we have to deal with the fact that we want computers to be faster than they are. To make them work as fast as possible, we have to present them with data in a format they want and use the space available efficently.
So, Mr. Pedantic, try it. Show my an XML sound format that can compete with Vorbis (since you want to whine about it) in terms of size and decoder performance.
I think it's a bit early to be calling X3D unsuccessful.
Storing binary data like 3D vector data and texture data in a text file and then compressing the text file to get acceptable file sizes is just plain stupid.
I would agree that in general you'd want to stick to binary formats for textures, largely because there's a lot of very-well supported image formats out there already, and vast numbers of programs and libraries that will read them. Also, the type of data stored in images tends to be fairly flat and simple - just a large grid of colour values.
However, I don't think it's neccesary for most other things.
Text formats give you several huge advantages:
I work in the Visual Effects industry, and almost all our render and geometry data is stored in text files. We find this to be incredibly useful because you often need to write scripts that will chop and change the data, which is very easy with text files.
and i can always edit any specified binary format with a hex editor.
b.w.t. there are enough hex editors available that allow for comfortable editing of ieee std. numbers etc. without having to know the bit patterns.
another approach would be to use have some import/export tool that transforms the real (efficient) format into some text format (possibly xml) to allow for easier exchange an manipulation. that would be to use xml as it was really intended: to exchange data, not to use it internally in the core of systems.
MP3 is open "The Open Group" way. Think of early Unix advertising before the free Unix-likes got popular. =)
"Open" in Ancient Computer Marketing Vocabulary means roughly "if you have a little bit of money to cover our expenses and the holiday trips for our executives, you can get a specification from us - and if you pay even more, you can actually use the thing for making money."
Yes, it was "open" - because you had a chance of getting the specification and license somehow.
"Closed" was defined as "oh, damn, I don't think we have specs for this thing for sale, even looking at the format makes my head ache", or "Don't even ask about the spec, and we'll sue if you reverse-engineer this thing."
The meanings have fluctuated a bit, especially regarding "open" - you see, back in the day, people thought that stuff that was merely a bit open was "open". Nowadays, there's open... and then there's Open. =)
This is actually rather clever; putting up so many links that the gonzos won't find and burn the real link. Pity about the first 5 links though...
Real Open St...buffering...
Talk about a poor title.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
2D graphics data expressed as XML can be highly efficiently gzipped.
You can see from these examples of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The same documents in any other available 2D format are generally larger.
And yet, when ungzipped, these SVG files are verbose XML text. You can see that by right-clicking when you view any of those examples with Adobe viewer and selecting View Source.
SVG is a good example of how XML can be implemented efficiently over the wire (gzipped into efficient filesize) and yet accessed by the programmer at either end with no more than a text editor.
XML is relatively new, but my point was that people want to stick with their old way of editing, i.e. with a text editor. A binary standard would require them to use a new tool.
What's odd to me about many programmers is that they are perfectly willing to adopt a system that requires special tools for viewing, but they don't want special tools for creating (e.g. using a browser to view web content is OK, but it's a good thing HTML is in ASCII so you can edit it with a text editor.)
No. I don't even know enough about MacOS 9 to get the point (or the joke, if there was one). What's the connection?
another approach would be to use have some import/export tool that transforms the real (efficient) format into some text format (possibly xml) to allow for easier exchange an manipulation. that would be to use xml as it was really intended: to exchange data, not to use it internally in the core of systems.
This is not different from editing the binary file with a specialized program. Being able to edit the text file means being able to do small corrections without regenerating the file (important when the latter is impossible/takes too much time), or when the program you use to create the file doesn't work the way you indent.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Huh? Pi radians is a straight angle. One radian is a little over 60 degrees, hardle a straight angle.
While I agree that radians are related to a natural property of circles (specifically, the length of a one radian arc is equal to the radius of the arc), it isn't what you claimed.
-- MarkusQ
Binary storage for [...] data makes a lot more sense since it is more compact and easier to parse, and there are also standards such as the IEEE float and double standard.
Of course. That's why widely used and well-established for the past 20 years data transfer standards like PostScript use binary.
Oh, wait...
-- Alastair
you still need word, so you still pay $$
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
"Pi radians is a straight angle."
Oops. Yah. You're right. That was from memory and I'm not a math guy. My bad. Thanks for the correction.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore ;)"
.NET?
Wait - you guys can see this is a scam when it's ECMA accreditation of U3D, but can't see it's a scam with ECMA accreditation of
Last time, I checked MP3 wasn't open. There is some company that owns the patent. We just all decided to ignore it and they never really bothered to ask for royalties.
No, we use
$ ed
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,