FormZ is a waste of time for architecture. Sure, you can generate some nice looking models and pictures fairly rapidly, but it's pretty much impossible to use that work in later stages of design development [...] If a package like MicroStation TriForma had just a little bit better support for initial design modeling, that it would have it all over FormZ or any other architectural CAD package on the market currently.
It would be wonderful to be able to carry a CAD design from initial conception through to working drawings without re-entering one's data. Unfortunately (and my teachers agree), there is no single CAD system that supports this; apparently the software issues of initial design development are different from those of the later stages of producing construction documents and most CAD systems lean towards one or the other--thus TriForma does not support initial design and may never. Given that, FormZ is no worse (and perhaps a bit better) than any other initial design medium. It is a natural fit for students, because schools focus on initial design.
One thing we may hope for with open source is, at least, some open standards in CAD file formats, so that systems can be used together. Meantime, as a student, I want FormZ.
Having looked a little at QCAD, I like it a lot. Good things about it include:
The UI is simple and direct, making good use of a two-button mouse.
The navigation is very smooth, even though there are a lot of menus.
The drawings are clear and accurate
But:
I have found no way to control the scale of printed drawings, a major negative for people who need them. (It is possible I have missed this feature.)
The system does not handle English-system units, a big negative for US users who have to work in feet and inches or fractional inches. (I believe people working with metal parts use decimal inches and should have no problems.)
The system uses its own vector fonts, which looks very dated. Hopefully future versions of it will work with the emerging open source font support.
The system does its arithmetic in single-precision floating point and only stores six digits of precision. Very large scale designs like detailed city plans or ICs probably will have accuracy problems. (But then, QCAD clearly was not intended for either application area; this is a frustrated architecture student writing.)
The system uses AutoDesk's DXF format as its primary document format. DXF is, unfortunately, limited; AutoCAD uses DXB internally, which is proprietary.:(
So it's a good beginning, but I'd like to see a lot more development.
BTW, is anyone else interested in FormZ on Linux? (Vendor AutoDesSys.) Were it available on Linux, I think a lot of starving architecture students would quickly snap it (and Linux) up.
Part of the television patents were stolen. Didn't you know? Look up the name Edwin H. Armstrong!
RCA flat-out stole the technology of frequency modulation from Armstrong to use in television and was able to hold off Armstrong's lawsuits because of its great legal resources. The Britannica says:
When FM slowly established itself, Armstrong again found himself entrapped in another interminable patent suit to retain his invention. Ill and aging in 1954, with most of his wealth gone in the battle for FM, he took his own life.
But--and I didn't know this until I looked up Armstrong's bio--this was the second time that Armstrong had gotten stiffed in a patent suit. Armstrong, it turns out, had a hand in almost every innovation in broadcast radio. In 1912 he invented the vacuum-tube oscillator and, again from the Britannica:
Armstrong's priority was later challenged by [15]De Forest in a monumental series of corporate patent suits, extending more than 14 years, argued twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally ending--in a judicial misunderstanding of the nature of the invention--in favour of De Forest.
As far as I can tell, the patent system works best for people who have the most money. I am convinced it is at the very least in need of reform.
It's there--competitive with at least the low-end SGI hardware. Basically, there is a hierarchy of computations in 3-D graphics. (Copied from the flightgear hardware requirements page.)
Stuff you do per-frame (like reading the mouse, doing flight dynamics)
Stuff you do per-object (like coarse culling, level-of-detail)
Stuff you do per-polygon or per-vertex (like rotate/translate/clip/illuminate)
Stuff you do per-pixel (shading, texturing, Z-buffering, alpha-blend)
At each level of the hierarhcy the amount of computation goes up an order of magnitude or so. The GeForce256 moves up the hierarchy to the per-polygon level, providing, (eventually, when the software properly supports it) an order-of-magnitude improvement in 3-D rendering, just like an SGI system does. There is apparently going to be Linux OpenGL support, too. Price, I believe, is in the $250 range.
This looks to me like the classic legal tactic of claiming the earth and sky and seeing if anyone will actually buy in. For this to work, either (1) a noticeable percentage of web-site operators will have to go along with it and (2) it will have to survive a court challenge.
If funding and organization can be found, it would probably be a Good Thing to attempt a defense against the highly dubious legal theories this is based on. Hmmmm...I wonder if the H2O project might be interested.
This is the Baby Bell's bill. It changes the requirements taking action against monopolistic practices from writing a letter to the FCC to either filing a lawsuit, or getting the Department of Justice--not well informed in communications law--to bring charges.
Re:looks ok i guess.... but, promotes telco monopo
on
Internet Freedom Act
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· Score: 1
A quick check of Project Vote Smart reveals that local telcos are one of Rep Goodlatte's two biggest campaign contributors. Any questions?
The bill will only outlaw spam with a forged return address and will probably allow the local telcos to take over the long-distance voice market without any regulation as well. Let's give this thing thing the treatment it deserves!
I think it's a windfall for the local telcos
on
Internet Freedom Act
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· Score: 1
At first blush, it's a windfall for the local telcos, allowing them into the local internet business without FCC regulation. Other ISPs, if they felt the local telco was undertaking unfair practices, could sue, and presumably, long after the local ISP went out of business, their creditors could collect. It would probably also gut the existing voice services as a side effect.
Give the guy a break...he really has been supporting the internet for a long, long time and he is on our side. This "open source" thing is a tiny little note in a very large site of quite reasonable politics.
So...who is going to fund you while you "work on what you find interesting?" I mean, you can be a starving hacker if you really want to be with or without this...but maybe with this you won't have to be.
Well, I don't think they can take us anywhere we don't want to go. And we need people to take the lead on the legal and political side. All due respect to ESR, RMS, and Linus, we really aren't political activists--we're hackers. Which is fine, but we need a social and political framework in which to operate.
In general, I would say FS/OS will have won if it becomes an acceptable and common mode of software development. It will lose if, for instance, new software ideas are patented as a matter of course. In the longer term, it will lose unless we find a way to reliably fund it.
As to potential failure, I was thinking more of the social determinist streak, where it is assumed (1) that the effects of a new technology is known and (2) that those will be benign. For instance, Alfred Nobel believed that his development of explosives would discourage war by scaring people off. In more recent history, the Pruitt-Igoe low-income housing development was supposed to improve the lives of people, simply by being good design. They had to dynamite it. 20th-century architectural history is littered with utopian schemes that didn't work because the people didn't go along. From which I state a Great Law: design does not control behavior (unless, perhaps, one is designing prisons.)
As for organization, I think a broad-based advocacy organization on the lines of the H2O project would be a good start. Maybe a Free Software Foundation that gives grants for development in a wide range of worthwhile areas. Who knows, maybe we could even get some NSF funding? People tend to disparage Al Gore, but he's been on our side since before we realized we were a we--if elected to the Presidency, he could be a powerful ally.
Well, I don't know about you, but if I were going up again Microsoft, Lucent, IBM, Sun, not to mention most of the world's biggest media firms, I'd sure like good legal team. Last time I looked, the GPL was a legal document, what, hey?
A surprising number of public-minded people do, in fact, become lawyers--did you think it was only software engineers who feel a need to contribute to society? I can't currently reach the Berkman Institute (this may be the Slashdot effect in action), but Bollier, at least, has a short resume at the end of his article. He's apparently a media activist of long-standing.
In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.--Karl Marx
(People really ought to read Marx, instead of disparaging him from ignorance.)
The reactions to this article bespeak appalling historical and political ignorance. I believe, that without political organization, much of the Open Source or Free Software movement will be co-opted, inasmuch as it supports the current system of the software business, and the remains that do not support that system outlawed.
If the OS/FS movement is to maintain its much-vaunted freedom, we need political and historical sophistication and organization, and this article is a welcome step in that direction.
You will not win against the closed-source types as individual designers, even very talented individual designers. That is a Utopian fantasy of designers and every designer in history who has ever tried to put it into practice has failed. Design cannot create social forms--only social, sometimes political, action can do that. Stallman knows this--that is why he founded the FSF. How people act and believe is important.
You have, in this article, support from some genuinely effective and decent activists. I suggest you treat them decently and with respect, for you will need them and you have a long hard journey ahead of you.
Eric, thank you for reminding all of us that social and political reality is seldom simple. That said, let me point out that while OSS can't be crushed, it could be marginalized. You may be sure that MS is already working on it.
Every new technology is marked by dreams of freedom. Seldom are these dreams fulfilled. If the hope of OSS is to be fulfilled, we need more political subtlety than so far I see manifest. We can start by bringing some ideas back from the various doghouses to which they have been sent: ideas like organization, cooperation, and competition. If a healthy balance among them can be found, then OSS can come into the mainstream and stay.
Currently, we have two basic theories at work here. There is the Stallman's theory of the plain value of unlimited sharing and the Raymond's theory that, basically, unlimited sharing can be compatible with unregulated capitalism. I have a great deal of respect for both men, but they are not primarily historians, philosophers, economists, businessmen, or politicians and I don't think they've "got it" yet.
The strongest area of Stallman's theory, I think, is the long-overdue critique of intellectual property, especially the patent system, which has become very much a tool of corporate power. The strongest area of Raymond's theory, I think, lies in its tolerance of a broad range of approaches. The greatest weakness of both theories, it seems to me, are their unwillingness to deal with issues of organization; they are drenched in the individualist anarchism that has become popular in our time.
The shared software community suffers badly from its unwillingness to organize, in my view. To take a perhaps-slippery computing analogy, it is as if one tried to design a computer, but believed that operating systems were unnecessary, that somehow programs would resolve all issues of resource sharing at run-time and that no program would ever, for instance, step on another's memory location.
At the other extreme, we have the sick-corporate model of development, where it is believed that autocracy can solve all programs, and that organization can somehow substitute for creativity. Perhaps a computing analog of this would be Microsoft.
Such analogies are slippery things at best, and it is easy to construct variants which justify all kinds of horrors--that is not my intent. But I think, in the long term, some of the problems of sharing source code are best resolved by some sort of formal organization, and the sooner we accept this, the sooner we will begin to make progress in this difficult, important area.
Come on, all you wannabe capitalists, why aren't you cheering?:P
What such banking practices will end up doing, especially if we see a few more whacked-out "reforms" from Washington, is returning us to the pre-1930s banking system by shoving most of the lower class and lower-middle class out of the banking system. This implosion in savings will lead to an implosion in capital investment.
Yes, indeed, credit unions were invented exactly because of this kind of garbage. Some political activism in their favor would be productive, I should think, if only to scare the regular bankers.
Slashdot Mirror
An anonymous commentator writes:
It would be wonderful to be able to carry a CAD design from initial conception through to working drawings without re-entering one's data. Unfortunately (and my teachers agree), there is no single CAD system that supports this; apparently the software issues of initial design development are different from those of the later stages of producing construction documents and most CAD systems lean towards one or the other--thus TriForma does not support initial design and may never. Given that, FormZ is no worse (and perhaps a bit better) than any other initial design medium. It is a natural fit for students, because schools focus on initial design.
One thing we may hope for with open source is, at least, some open standards in CAD file formats, so that systems can be used together. Meantime, as a student, I want FormZ.
Having looked a little at QCAD, I like it a lot. Good things about it include:
But:
So it's a good beginning, but I'd like to see a lot more development.
BTW, is anyone else interested in FormZ on Linux? (Vendor AutoDesSys.) Were it available on Linux, I think a lot of starving architecture students would quickly snap it (and Linux) up.
Part of the television patents were stolen. Didn't you know? Look up the name Edwin H. Armstrong!
RCA flat-out stole the technology of frequency modulation from Armstrong to use in television and was able to hold off Armstrong's lawsuits because of its great legal resources. The Britannica says:
But--and I didn't know this until I looked up Armstrong's bio--this was the second time that Armstrong had gotten stiffed in a patent suit. Armstrong, it turns out, had a hand in almost every innovation in broadcast radio. In 1912 he invented the vacuum-tube oscillator and, again from the Britannica:
As far as I can tell, the patent system works best for people who have the most money. I am convinced it is at the very least in need of reform.
It's there--competitive with at least the low-end SGI hardware. Basically, there is a hierarchy of computations in 3-D graphics. (Copied from the flightgear hardware requirements page.)
At each level of the hierarhcy the amount of computation goes up an order of magnitude or so. The GeForce256 moves up the hierarchy to the per-polygon level, providing, (eventually, when the software properly supports it) an order-of-magnitude improvement in 3-D rendering, just like an SGI system does. There is apparently going to be Linux OpenGL support, too. Price, I believe, is in the $250 range.
of those Usenet articles by people who can't lose an argument?
This looks to me like the classic legal tactic of claiming the earth and sky and seeing if anyone will actually buy in. For this to work, either (1) a noticeable percentage of web-site operators will have to go along with it and (2) it will have to survive a court challenge.
If funding and organization can be found, it would probably be a Good Thing to attempt a defense against the highly dubious legal theories this is based on. Hmmmm...I wonder if the H2O project might be interested.
Here led by Ed Foster, who first brought this to public attention.
This is the Baby Bell's bill. It changes the requirements taking action against monopolistic practices from writing a letter to the FCC to either filing a lawsuit, or getting the Department of Justice--not well informed in communications law--to bring charges.
A quick check of Project Vote Smart reveals that local telcos are one of Rep Goodlatte's two biggest campaign contributors. Any questions?
The bill will only outlaw spam with a forged return address and will probably allow the local telcos to take over the long-distance voice market without any regulation as well. Let's give this thing thing the treatment it deserves!
At first blush, it's a windfall for the local telcos, allowing them into the local internet business without FCC regulation. Other ISPs, if they felt the local telco was undertaking unfair practices, could sue, and presumably, long after the local ISP went out of business, their creditors could collect. It would probably also gut the existing voice services as a side effect.
Give the guy a break...he really has been supporting the internet for a long, long time and he is on our side. This "open source" thing is a tiny little note in a very large site of quite reasonable politics.
So...who is going to fund you while you "work on what you find interesting?" I mean, you can be a starving hacker if you really want to be with or without this...but maybe with this you won't have to be.
Well, I don't think they can take us anywhere we don't want to go. And we need people to take the lead on the legal and political side. All due respect to ESR, RMS, and Linus, we really aren't political activists--we're hackers. Which is fine, but we need a social and political framework in which to operate.
In general, I would say FS/OS will have won if it becomes an acceptable and common mode of software development. It will lose if, for instance, new software ideas are patented as a matter of course. In the longer term, it will lose unless we find a way to reliably fund it.
As to potential failure, I was thinking more of the social determinist streak, where it is assumed (1) that the effects of a new technology is known and (2) that those will be benign. For instance, Alfred Nobel believed that his development of explosives would discourage war by scaring people off. In more recent history, the Pruitt-Igoe low-income housing development was supposed to improve the lives of people, simply by being good design. They had to dynamite it. 20th-century architectural history is littered with utopian schemes that didn't work because the people didn't go along. From which I state a Great Law: design does not control behavior (unless, perhaps, one is designing prisons.)
As for organization, I think a broad-based advocacy organization on the lines of the H2O project would be a good start. Maybe a Free Software Foundation that gives grants for development in a wide range of worthwhile areas. Who knows, maybe we could even get some NSF funding? People tend to disparage Al Gore, but he's been on our side since before we realized we were a we--if elected to the Presidency, he could be a powerful ally.
Well, I don't know about you, but if I were going up again Microsoft, Lucent, IBM, Sun, not to mention most of the world's biggest media firms, I'd sure like good legal team. Last time I looked, the GPL was a legal document, what, hey?
A surprising number of public-minded people do, in fact, become lawyers--did you think it was only software engineers who feel a need to contribute to society? I can't currently reach the Berkman Institute (this may be the Slashdot effect in action), but Bollier, at least, has a short resume at the end of his article. He's apparently a media activist of long-standing.
Your fears seem to be unjustified.
(People really ought to read Marx, instead of disparaging him from ignorance.)
The reactions to this article bespeak appalling historical and political ignorance. I believe, that without political organization, much of the Open Source or Free Software movement will be co-opted, inasmuch as it supports the current system of the software business, and the remains that do not support that system outlawed.
If the OS/FS movement is to maintain its much-vaunted freedom, we need political and historical sophistication and organization, and this article is a welcome step in that direction.
You will not win against the closed-source types as individual designers, even very talented individual designers. That is a Utopian fantasy of designers and every designer in history who has ever tried to put it into practice has failed. Design cannot create social forms--only social, sometimes political, action can do that. Stallman knows this--that is why he founded the FSF. How people act and believe is important.
You have, in this article, support from some genuinely effective and decent activists. I suggest you treat them decently and with respect, for you will need them and you have a long hard journey ahead of you.
Eric, thank you for reminding all of us that social and political reality is seldom simple. That said, let me point out that while OSS can't be crushed, it could be marginalized. You may be sure that MS is already working on it.
Every new technology is marked by dreams of freedom. Seldom are these dreams fulfilled. If the hope of OSS is to be fulfilled, we need more political subtlety than so far I see manifest. We can start by bringing some ideas back from the various doghouses to which they have been sent: ideas like organization, cooperation, and competition. If a healthy balance among them can be found, then OSS can come into the mainstream and stay.
The prisoner's dilemma is a negative-sum game. Software economics is (we hope, anyway) a positive-sum game...but we are still arguing over the rules.
Currently, we have two basic theories at work here. There is the Stallman's theory of the plain value of unlimited sharing and the Raymond's theory that, basically, unlimited sharing can be compatible with unregulated capitalism. I have a great deal of respect for both men, but they are not primarily historians, philosophers, economists, businessmen, or politicians and I don't think they've "got it" yet.
The strongest area of Stallman's theory, I think, is the long-overdue critique of intellectual property, especially the patent system, which has become very much a tool of corporate power. The strongest area of Raymond's theory, I think, lies in its tolerance of a broad range of approaches. The greatest weakness of both theories, it seems to me, are their unwillingness to deal with issues of organization; they are drenched in the individualist anarchism that has become popular in our time.
The shared software community suffers badly from its unwillingness to organize, in my view. To take a perhaps-slippery computing analogy, it is as if one tried to design a computer, but believed that operating systems were unnecessary, that somehow programs would resolve all issues of resource sharing at run-time and that no program would ever, for instance, step on another's memory location.
At the other extreme, we have the sick-corporate model of development, where it is believed that autocracy can solve all programs, and that organization can somehow substitute for creativity. Perhaps a computing analog of this would be Microsoft.
Such analogies are slippery things at best, and it is easy to construct variants which justify all kinds of horrors--that is not my intent. But I think, in the long term, some of the problems of sharing source code are best resolved by some sort of formal organization, and the sooner we accept this, the sooner we will begin to make progress in this difficult, important area.
Come on, all you wannabe capitalists, why aren't you cheering? :P
What such banking practices will end up doing, especially if we see a few more whacked-out "reforms" from Washington, is returning us to the pre-1930s banking system by shoving most of the lower class and lower-middle class out of the banking system. This implosion in savings will lead to an implosion in capital investment.
Yes, indeed, credit unions were invented exactly because of this kind of garbage. Some political activism in their favor would be productive, I should think, if only to scare the regular bankers.