TRADOC funds the unit, which burns up money thinking. Then the unit tries to interest some university lab to build a demo. By the time the contract is let, most of the money's gone. Then the university kids run over budget and lose interest. The Colonel who came up with the idea gets promoted, and our kids are out on the battlefield of the Neverending War defending themelves with trashcan lids.
How the hell is TRADOC still in business after FCS?
There are all kinds of creationists, many of whom have graduated from high school, and even more of whom think assault is a poor debating technique. For instance, some folks, without denying the existence of a deity, believe he/she/it acted to create the big bang and pretty much left things alone after that. You probably recognize those folks as deists. But since they hypothesize a point in spacetime where/when the universe didn't exist, they're creationists too.
Just like fundamentalist and charismatic evangelical Protestant Christians have grabbed the name "Christian" for themselves (and in the process, claiming by implication that the largest Christian denomination on the planet isn't Christian), so recent creationists, who believe the earth was created somewhere in the neighborhood of 4004 BCE, have tried to grab the name "creationist" all for their very own little selfish selves.
Using "creationist" to describe recent creationists (a) keeps silent about the existence of alternatives to recent creationism at a time when people might be ready to move on to intellectually richer beliefs, and (b) fails to emphasize just how fringy recent creationsts are. Most folks believe "God created the world". But only a minority (even of Christians) believe Adam and Eve had pet dinosaurs.
Let's call them what they are: recent creationists.
I remember a task I had to convert a set of World
Toolkit NFF files to Inventor, or to some file
format where we already had a converter that would
turn them into Inventor, like DXF.
I spent a fun week exploring through the computer
graphics repositories of the time (it was some years
ago), but I finally decided I'd had enough fooling
around, so I hacked out some quick C and converted
the files.
The converter I wrote and debugged in a couple of
hours was virtually guaranteed to crash and burn
on any WTK NFF files but those, but I didn't care.
What I needed was those files in Inventor so I
could get on with the job of lighting and animating them.
That's the problem with the Booch Components and
a good percentage of the things I see out there in the repositories today: they solve the general problem with such elegance that they're really optimally useful only
for people who want to understand the general
problem instead of knowing exactly enough to solve the specific problem
they have.
Well, here's a news flash: a good part of the time I'm to busy to learn
how to solve the general problem. What's more, I know I'll never need this knowledge I acquire again, so a quick in-and-out of my brain is all I need.
--
The end
Consider the following level zero problem. You have a server full of files people in your group have produced over the past few years. You want to find out what's in each file.
Not only is this one of those problems everybody
has, but I think it can be shown that if you can't solve this problem, you're out of luck generating any kind of content structure without reinventing your company's knowledge from the ground up.
As soon as the person who created the file saves it on the server, the "what is this file?" metadata is irretrievably lost, except to the extent that the creator named the file something meaningful and put it in a directory whose path was meaningful -- and to the extent that you and the creator have enough common experience that what's meaningful to her is meaningful to you.
But even in that all too rare exceptional case, *some* metadata is lost. Further, every day that goes by makes the overt content of the document less relevant to today's experience and shared knowledge. Any little metaphors I threw into the document about CP/M, for example, are pretty much Greek to modern readers. And it doesn't matter how un-clever you are and how careful you are to avoid metaphors: language is metaphor!
Information is lost through entropy. Explaining how to reverse entropy in the sunny manner the authors of this book use in the sample chapter is nothing short of deceptive.
Btw, I've published on systematic software reuse, and these authors aren't even close to kindergarten level in that difficult field. So the book is doubly worthless.
So lemme get this straight -- you're dissing SuSE Linux because a Turtle Beach sound card won't light up on it?
Think back to when you were trying to get that sound card to play on Windows? Remember? That was the time you invented a half dozen brand new cusswords.
They sound great (the first time I got a SoundBlaster Platinum something or other after a TB Tropez Plus, I took one listen and said "You've got to be kidding"), but they're hell to get running on any computer and OS.
Cesar Chavez was a Mexican union activist in the 1960's.
My son speaks at several educational technology conferences every year, and one of his current presentations mentions Cesar Chavez and the farm workers in some context. He decided to illustrate that point with a picture of former welterweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez, just to see how long it would take the educators in his audience to point out the error.
My business card says "Embedded Software
Engineer" and my current job is member of the software architecture team for the Common Operating Environment
of perhaps the largest System of Systems project ever.
I see preliminary designs
for databases of objects that magically exist in
pure object-land (i.e., they don't actually do anything) and yet somehow the work gets
done.
By training and disposition, whenever I don't smell silicon, I become deeply suspicious, so my first reaction is that such designs are nonsense. Perhaps it will not always be this way -- for instance, perhaps the designers of those very systems will get around to saying who actually does something and how they do it.
But I've grown to realize that I must accept a certain amount of nonsense (subject always to good engineering judgment and a demonstration that some of these fanciful schemes can actually work) because the "how" absolutely must not enter into the design.
If I have to say to someone writing the software for communicating between commanders and various kinds of "things" (I'm going to apply some severe declassification here) that to talk to a big orange truck you have to stick a 32-bit word into a mailbox interrupt register at such-and-such and address, while to talk to a little red truck you have to send "HELLO, WORLD!" to port 80, they're going to say to me, "Just what the hell have you been doing in your software architecture group for the past six months?"
This is a gross example -- but the less obvious examples are nearly as bad, from my point of view.
For instance, since one of the requirements for this SoS is that communications not be of the form, "Let's tell the enemy what we're going to do", and since communications security is best done by people who know what they're doing, we will not train every engineer to manage communications security everywhere in his application, but rather layer the architecture so that, to the greatest extent possible, engineers will not even know it's happening.
Indeed, I expect the architecture our team develops to survive several iterations of "how"s. The first implementation better not work as well as the final implementation, or somebody's wasting money.
In short, we'll use elementary principles of engineering in order to define common objects that communicate with one another in precisely defined ways at a level of abstraction that's appropriate for the objects themselves. That some objects will have precise real-world counterparts (e.g., big orange truck) is merely evidence that the architecture is sane. And if some of those objects have functions associated with them, that's because in the real world functions aren't performed by spirits and demons, but by (now let's not always see the same hands) objects!
This ain't rocket science, people. If you've written an API that you can't jack up, haul out the Yugo that's underneath, and replace it with a Viper with no one the wiser except the customer who appreciates how fast he's going, you've screwed up. You've let the "how" creep into your "what".
(Hoping some people will return my phone calls and answer their email so I can stop talking about this and get back to doing it).
offerors should emphasize
radical concepts that may contain high technical risk but
if enabled would have commensurate high military payoff.
These are typical words for a DARPA solicitation. The last thing DARPA wants to hear about is something you're pretty sure will work.
The problem space for this one is fairly prosaic in comparison to some recent ones (nanotech, weird biology, real AI), but the problems addressed (being absolutely sure you can communicate in a hostile and confusing environment, fighting on any randomly chosen battlefield like it's your home field, and weapons that will kill the bad guys but not the good guys) are first class Hard Problems.
Notice also that the amount of money they've got to spend on all three projects in this area is US$5M. Chicken feed. Shrinking budgets and a proper insistence that defense dollars show up on the battlefield preclude much else.
to visit exciting places, meet interesting people, and kill them.
so you mean that all this time i've been developing my hand/eye coordination i've been testing technologies that are now used in the military?
Yup.
Imagine yourself for a moment wearing a brass hat. You've got a stream of young civilians coming in to begin their military service. Your goal is to train those young people so that they:
Defeat the enemy,
Remain as safe as possible, and
Come back home
The US military folks have realized since before the Gulf War that young people are entering the military having spent hundreds or thousands of hours developing gaming skills.
This is potentially free training -- there's no way the military could possibly pay to train that many hours or train to that level of skill. And study after study has shown that gaming skills transfer over to combat situations, and that transfer of training is even more dramatic when combat displays and actions can be adapted to be more like their videogame counterparts.
What's more, military training is inherently dangerous, while videogaming seldom results in anything worse than a blister on your thumb.
Anybody who's thinking Ender's Game may be forgiven -- though Card had to spend an enormous amount of plot time developing a military and political situation where allowing Ender and friends to do their thing wasn't wildly improbable.
So keep on pushing them buttons. If you decide to help your country in warfare against its enemies, the skills you develop will raise your chances of coming back home.
Best Buy is merely spouting the accepted wisdom in the investor community ("CD copying reduces sales") and announcing support for anti-copying technologies in order to assure the investors that the management team is on top of things and deserves their confidence.
It's called CYA. The execs are trying to save their own jobs.
If we walk on by our local Best Buy store, or better still, walk in and complain, then walk out with our wallets firmly in our pockets, they'll get the message soon enough.
So does this mean that in 2005 my new Geforce8MX will speed up my porn- browsing?
Nope, it just means that Microsoft is clearing the decks for MPEG-4.
By requiring 2D graphics to use the 3D pipeline, board makers can put more
MPEG-4 logic in hardware instead of having to parse out the 2D elements in software and send them down a different pipe as the existing spec would (arguably) have required.
The mail as saved doesn't correspond one-to-one with the email as sent.
End of story. Eudora just failed test zero.
Easy enough to demonstrate: on a Windows machine send yourself an HTML file called "foo.html". When it comes back, observe that the file is now called "foo.htm".
<plan9>stupid, stupid, stupid</plan9>
I dimly recall there's some funny business with Eudora changing or discarding some of the headers too, but I was so offended by the first thing I found that I wiped Eudora off my disk at once.
Don't lie to me about deadlines
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I may or may not be an Einstein, but forget about not lying to me about the health of the company. I can figure that out by myself. But never lie to me about a deadline.
If you say "I absolutely have to have this by such-and-such a date," I'll sacrifice my mind and body to make the deadline.
But if I turn my work in and discover that you weren't serious about the deadline, it'll be a cold day in hell before I do it for you again.
People in our business can talk and often write lucidly, but not one of us can draw worth a damn. Because of the pictures and tables, this is a great resource to show PHBs who need pictures and tables to draw their short attention spans back to the text.
...though it's usually done by one person or someone acting as a czar.
The secret, boys and girls, is a web-based UI. Granted, that doesn't fill the bill for a lot of applications, but for a pretty good number of applications it works just fine.
Or rather, the opening shot in what promises to be a long, well funded campaign to shape the next internet into the corporate image.
QOS and all the other things the suits need are already in place in IPv6. It's just a question of how they'll be applied. Existing service providers want to charge for QOS as a utility. Unfortunately, that means only a small subset of the corporate economy gets the benefit. This is an attempt to build grassroots support among the suits to provide QOS another way, a way that will benefit more corporations.
The way the world works today, you can buy bandwidth depending on your pocketbook. For instance, my cable provider has bronze, silver, and gold plans with corresponding amounts of bandwidth and prices. Cable modem is faster (and more expensive -- most places) than ISDN which in turn is faster and more expensive than POTS.
What the backbone providers and ISPs want to do is meter QOS. For an extra ten bucks a month, your pr0n will wave its card at the tollbooth and sail on through, while the HOT XXX TEENS destined for those of us with lighter wallets will wait in line.
You think the net is slow now, wait till this happens.
The announcement is designed to change that. Under this vision, if I may be permitted to connect the dots on something that's poorly articulated in the LA Times article, people who click on www.bloatedweasels.com will be given gold service if they're the top-level managers (i.e., they'll get really fast downloads), silver service if they're regular customers (a little slower), and the rest of us will be given bronze service.
Since this is considerably less onerous than what the backbone providers have in mind, I'm for it.
Since it will take approximately fifteen minutes before/. and similar sites manage to give gold service to everybody, I'm for it again.
If you'd prefer an IDE (resource editor, nice debugger), try lcc-win32.
Yes, I know it's only a C compiler, but you'd be surprised how coding in the Win32API instead of MFC can speed up and un-bloat your code.
The only contact with MS you really need is to download the PSDK, which so far has been free and anonymous, and even then the PSDK is just nice to have, not essential.
It's for Windows and it isn't freeware any more, but it only costs US$35, which is an order or two of magnitude cheaper than a lot of the tools that geo folks use.
It accepts DEMs and a number of other 3D geo input formats and produces 3D output in VRML and Terragen, all sorts of 2D image formats, and even MPEG and AVI movies of flythroughs.
I don't get a commission or anything. I just think it's a cool tool, and converts geodata to some potentially very useful formats.
On the off chance you're in geoscience and don't know about GeoVRML, click here.
And what's more, they're going after it exactly where they fired their opening volley: U.S. Government code.
There are a number of open source, GPL Government projects going on today, and a number of others where people are working to retrofit the GPL to existing codebases. I'm participating in one that's struggling to get started in HLA, the Defense Modeling & Simulation Office's High Level Architecture, which is the DOD standard for interoperating networked simulations.
A large number of very influential corporations would be tickled pink if the code that they developed using the taxpayers' money stays locked in their own private safes. Microsoft is simply the point man on this effort to perpetuate a whole apparatus of sweetheart deals and fraud against the American taxpayer.
The argument that GPL is somehow un-American seems absurd your average/. reader. In fact, we may be wondering why they would bother to even give an argument like that. Simple. That argument carries a lot of weight with program officers for the military who have to contend with superiors who really do see a Commie under every bed.
Never, never doubt that Microsoft means precisely what it says.
Of course, I shouldn't be talking. Most of my FORTRAN legacy (still running on flight simulators at USAir, British Airways, and SAS) was in SEL/Gould/Encore FORTRAN 77+ which has DO...END DO, CASE, and even string libraries -- which were buggy as hell: you were better off doing your own string routines using EQUIVALENCEd INTEGER*1 and INTEGER*8 arrays.
When our online charges for connecting to the GE235's at Dartmouth got too heavy, the intro CS instructors switched us over to AFBIC (All FORTRAN BASIC Interpretive Compiler). We punched our source files onto punch cards that were fed into our IBM 7094 and learned to wait hours to see if it compiled instead of getting "immediate" feedback like we'd had before. But it definitely saved money.
AFBIC differed from BASIC in that we had to use ".LT." instead of "<" and a couple of other things I don't remember any more (gimme a break, this was 1966).
Did AFBIC ever show up anywhere else? Am I correct that AFBIC was a homegrown program at Hopkins?
Slashdot Mirror
Considering what these guys are doing to the auto industry, we may be literally like Cuba, driving 1950s Buicks and swapping chickens for car parts.
TRADOC funds the unit, which burns up money thinking. Then the unit tries to interest some university lab to build a demo. By the time the contract is let, most of the money's gone. Then the university kids run over budget and lose interest. The Colonel who came up with the idea gets promoted, and our kids are out on the battlefield of the Neverending War defending themelves with trashcan lids.
How the hell is TRADOC still in business after FCS?
There are all kinds of creationists, many of whom have graduated from high school, and even more of whom think assault is a poor debating technique. For instance, some folks, without denying the existence of a deity, believe he/she/it acted to create the big bang and pretty much left things alone after that. You probably recognize those folks as deists. But since they hypothesize a point in spacetime where/when the universe didn't exist, they're creationists too.
Just like fundamentalist and charismatic evangelical Protestant Christians have grabbed the name "Christian" for themselves (and in the process, claiming by implication that the largest Christian denomination on the planet isn't Christian), so recent creationists, who believe the earth was created somewhere in the neighborhood of 4004 BCE, have tried to grab the name "creationist" all for their very own little selfish selves.
Using "creationist" to describe recent creationists (a) keeps silent about the existence of alternatives to recent creationism at a time when people might be ready to move on to intellectually richer beliefs, and (b) fails to emphasize just how fringy recent creationsts are. Most folks believe "God created the world". But only a minority (even of Christians) believe Adam and Eve had pet dinosaurs.
Let's call them what they are: recent creationists.
I spent a fun week exploring through the computer graphics repositories of the time (it was some years ago), but I finally decided I'd had enough fooling around, so I hacked out some quick C and converted the files.
The converter I wrote and debugged in a couple of hours was virtually guaranteed to crash and burn on any WTK NFF files but those, but I didn't care. What I needed was those files in Inventor so I could get on with the job of lighting and animating them.
That's the problem with the Booch Components and a good percentage of the things I see out there in the repositories today: they solve the general problem with such elegance that they're really optimally useful only for people who want to understand the general problem instead of knowing exactly enough to solve the specific problem they have.
Well, here's a news flash: a good part of the time I'm to busy to learn how to solve the general problem. What's more, I know I'll never need this knowledge I acquire again, so a quick in-and-out of my brain is all I need.
--
The end
Consider the following level zero problem. You have a server full of files people in your group have produced over the past few years. You want to find out what's in each file.
Not only is this one of those problems everybody has, but I think it can be shown that if you can't solve this problem, you're out of luck generating any kind of content structure without reinventing your company's knowledge from the ground up.
As soon as the person who created the file saves it on the server, the "what is this file?" metadata is irretrievably lost, except to the extent that the creator named the file something meaningful and put it in a directory whose path was meaningful -- and to the extent that you and the creator have enough common experience that what's meaningful to her is meaningful to you.
But even in that all too rare exceptional case, *some* metadata is lost. Further, every day that goes by makes the overt content of the document less relevant to today's experience and shared knowledge. Any little metaphors I threw into the document about CP/M, for example, are pretty much Greek to modern readers. And it doesn't matter how un-clever you are and how careful you are to avoid metaphors: language is metaphor!
Information is lost through entropy. Explaining how to reverse entropy in the sunny manner the authors of this book use in the sample chapter is nothing short of deceptive.
Btw, I've published on systematic software reuse, and these authors aren't even close to kindergarten level in that difficult field. So the book is doubly worthless.
Think back to when you were trying to get that sound card to play on Windows? Remember? That was the time you invented a half dozen brand new cusswords.
They sound great (the first time I got a SoundBlaster Platinum something or other after a TB Tropez Plus, I took one listen and said "You've got to be kidding"), but they're hell to get running on any computer and OS.
My son speaks at several educational technology conferences every year, and one of his current presentations mentions Cesar Chavez and the farm workers in some context. He decided to illustrate that point with a picture of former welterweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez, just to see how long it would take the educators in his audience to point out the error.
Afaik, he's still waiting.
I see preliminary designs for databases of objects that magically exist in pure object-land (i.e., they don't actually do anything) and yet somehow the work gets done.
By training and disposition, whenever I don't smell silicon, I become deeply suspicious, so my first reaction is that such designs are nonsense. Perhaps it will not always be this way -- for instance, perhaps the designers of those very systems will get around to saying who actually does something and how they do it.
But I've grown to realize that I must accept a certain amount of nonsense (subject always to good engineering judgment and a demonstration that some of these fanciful schemes can actually work) because the "how" absolutely must not enter into the design.
If I have to say to someone writing the software for communicating between commanders and various kinds of "things" (I'm going to apply some severe declassification here) that to talk to a big orange truck you have to stick a 32-bit word into a mailbox interrupt register at such-and-such and address, while to talk to a little red truck you have to send "HELLO, WORLD!" to port 80, they're going to say to me, "Just what the hell have you been doing in your software architecture group for the past six months?"
This is a gross example -- but the less obvious examples are nearly as bad, from my point of view.
For instance, since one of the requirements for this SoS is that communications not be of the form, "Let's tell the enemy what we're going to do", and since communications security is best done by people who know what they're doing, we will not train every engineer to manage communications security everywhere in his application, but rather layer the architecture so that, to the greatest extent possible, engineers will not even know it's happening.
Indeed, I expect the architecture our team develops to survive several iterations of "how"s. The first implementation better not work as well as the final implementation, or somebody's wasting money.
In short, we'll use elementary principles of engineering in order to define common objects that communicate with one another in precisely defined ways at a level of abstraction that's appropriate for the objects themselves. That some objects will have precise real-world counterparts (e.g., big orange truck) is merely evidence that the architecture is sane. And if some of those objects have functions associated with them, that's because in the real world functions aren't performed by spirits and demons, but by (now let's not always see the same hands) objects!
This ain't rocket science, people. If you've written an API that you can't jack up, haul out the Yugo that's underneath, and replace it with a Viper with no one the wiser except the customer who appreciates how fast he's going, you've screwed up. You've let the "how" creep into your "what".
(Hoping some people will return my phone calls and answer their email so I can stop talking about this and get back to doing it).
Ever hear of a CB (circuit breaker)? Works like a charm.
Note the relevant words:
These are typical words for a DARPA solicitation. The last thing DARPA wants to hear about is something you're pretty sure will work.
The problem space for this one is fairly prosaic in comparison to some recent ones (nanotech, weird biology, real AI), but the problems addressed (being absolutely sure you can communicate in a hostile and confusing environment, fighting on any randomly chosen battlefield like it's your home field, and weapons that will kill the bad guys but not the good guys) are first class Hard Problems.
Notice also that the amount of money they've got to spend on all three projects in this area is US$5M. Chicken feed. Shrinking budgets and a proper insistence that defense dollars show up on the battlefield preclude much else.
Yup.
Imagine yourself for a moment wearing a brass hat. You've got a stream of young civilians coming in to begin their military service. Your goal is to train those young people so that they:
The US military folks have realized since before the Gulf War that young people are entering the military having spent hundreds or thousands of hours developing gaming skills.
This is potentially free training -- there's no way the military could possibly pay to train that many hours or train to that level of skill. And study after study has shown that gaming skills transfer over to combat situations, and that transfer of training is even more dramatic when combat displays and actions can be adapted to be more like their videogame counterparts.
What's more, military training is inherently dangerous, while videogaming seldom results in anything worse than a blister on your thumb.
Anybody who's thinking Ender's Game may be forgiven -- though Card had to spend an enormous amount of plot time developing a military and political situation where allowing Ender and friends to do their thing wasn't wildly improbable.
So keep on pushing them buttons. If you decide to help your country in warfare against its enemies, the skills you develop will raise your chances of coming back home.
Best Buy is merely spouting the accepted wisdom in the investor community ("CD copying reduces sales") and announcing support for anti-copying technologies in order to assure the investors that the management team is on top of things and deserves their confidence.
It's called CYA. The execs are trying to save their own jobs.
If we walk on by our local Best Buy store, or better still, walk in and complain, then walk out with our wallets firmly in our pockets, they'll get the message soon enough.
Ada was just ahead of its time.
Nope, it just means that Microsoft is clearing the decks for MPEG-4.
By requiring 2D graphics to use the 3D pipeline, board makers can put more MPEG-4 logic in hardware instead of having to parse out the 2D elements in software and send them down a different pipe as the existing spec would (arguably) have required.
In other words, nothing to see here, move along.
End of story. Eudora just failed test zero.
Easy enough to demonstrate: on a Windows machine send yourself an HTML file called "foo.html". When it comes back, observe that the file is now called "foo.htm".
<plan9>stupid, stupid, stupid</plan9>
I dimly recall there's some funny business with Eudora changing or discarding some of the headers too, but I was so offended by the first thing I found that I wiped Eudora off my disk at once.
If you say "I absolutely have to have this by such-and-such a date," I'll sacrifice my mind and body to make the deadline.
But if I turn my work in and discover that you weren't serious about the deadline, it'll be a cold day in hell before I do it for you again.
Nothing to see here, move along.
People in our business can talk and often write lucidly, but not one of us can draw worth a damn. Because of the pictures and tables, this is a great resource to show PHBs who need pictures and tables to draw their short attention spans back to the text.
The secret, boys and girls, is a web-based UI. Granted, that doesn't fill the bill for a lot of applications, but for a pretty good number of applications it works just fine.
It's called constraining the solution space.
QOS and all the other things the suits need are already in place in IPv6. It's just a question of how they'll be applied. Existing service providers want to charge for QOS as a utility. Unfortunately, that means only a small subset of the corporate economy gets the benefit. This is an attempt to build grassroots support among the suits to provide QOS another way, a way that will benefit more corporations.
The way the world works today, you can buy bandwidth depending on your pocketbook. For instance, my cable provider has bronze, silver, and gold plans with corresponding amounts of bandwidth and prices. Cable modem is faster (and more expensive -- most places) than ISDN which in turn is faster and more expensive than POTS.
What the backbone providers and ISPs want to do is meter QOS. For an extra ten bucks a month, your pr0n will wave its card at the tollbooth and sail on through, while the HOT XXX TEENS destined for those of us with lighter wallets will wait in line.
You think the net is slow now, wait till this happens.
The announcement is designed to change that. Under this vision, if I may be permitted to connect the dots on something that's poorly articulated in the LA Times article, people who click on www.bloatedweasels.com will be given gold service if they're the top-level managers (i.e., they'll get really fast downloads), silver service if they're regular customers (a little slower), and the rest of us will be given bronze service.
Since this is considerably less onerous than what the backbone providers have in mind, I'm for it.
Since it will take approximately fifteen minutes before /. and similar sites manage to give gold service to everybody, I'm for it again.
Yes, I know it's only a C compiler, but you'd be surprised how coding in the Win32API instead of MFC can speed up and un-bloat your code.
The only contact with MS you really need is to download the PSDK, which so far has been free and anonymous, and even then the PSDK is just nice to have, not essential.
It's for Windows and it isn't freeware any more, but it only costs US$35, which is an order or two of magnitude cheaper than a lot of the tools that geo folks use.
It accepts DEMs and a number of other 3D geo input formats and produces 3D output in VRML and Terragen, all sorts of 2D image formats, and even MPEG and AVI movies of flythroughs.
I don't get a commission or anything. I just think it's a cool tool, and converts geodata to some potentially very useful formats.
On the off chance you're in geoscience and don't know about GeoVRML, click here.
3D geodata flythroughs on the web may be an answer to Jim Blinn's famous comment about finding a use for real time 3d.
There are a number of open source, GPL Government projects going on today, and a number of others where people are working to retrofit the GPL to existing codebases. I'm participating in one that's struggling to get started in HLA, the Defense Modeling & Simulation Office's High Level Architecture, which is the DOD standard for interoperating networked simulations.
A large number of very influential corporations would be tickled pink if the code that they developed using the taxpayers' money stays locked in their own private safes. Microsoft is simply the point man on this effort to perpetuate a whole apparatus of sweetheart deals and fraud against the American taxpayer.
The argument that GPL is somehow un-American seems absurd your average /. reader. In fact, we may be wondering why they would bother to even give an argument like that. Simple. That argument carries a lot of weight with program officers for the military who have to contend with superiors who really do see a Commie under every bed.
Never, never doubt that Microsoft means precisely what it says.
Of course, I shouldn't be talking. Most of my FORTRAN legacy (still running on flight simulators at USAir, British Airways, and SAS) was in SEL/Gould/Encore FORTRAN 77+ which has DO...END DO, CASE, and even string libraries -- which were buggy as hell: you were better off doing your own string routines using EQUIVALENCEd INTEGER*1 and INTEGER*8 arrays.
AFBIC differed from BASIC in that we had to use ".LT." instead of "<" and a couple of other things I don't remember any more (gimme a break, this was 1966).
Did AFBIC ever show up anywhere else? Am I correct that AFBIC was a homegrown program at Hopkins?