Although not mentioned often in the media, one of the most-kept secrets in the 3D industry is a relatively inexpensive tool called TrueSpace by Caligari.
First, note that this tool does NOT produce the kind of photorealistic images you get in lightwave, BUT what it has going for it is market-leading modeling tools and bar none the absolute most intuitive user interface on the market (this is not to say that the renderer is bad, the latest version now comes with a real nice third-party renderer which produces very nice renders).
I recommend you give it a try so it becomes your modeling program, and then export your work to render in Lightwave or whatever else.
Note that all the tools you mention Maya has (as well as Lightwave and the others) actually appeared first in many cases in TrueSpace (like the clay deformation tool, as well as many other "free form organic" tools.
The cool thing about it is that you actually create your objects and scenes in true 3D (but you can also bring top/bottom/left/right/front/back views if you wish), and the controls are simply awe-inspiring in easy of use and downright common sense (I have NEVER read the manual, and this something hard to say about any other 3D program out there). Oh yeah, everything is in real time as well, even in solid render mode!
This has to be the most-copied tool in the 3D world, and ironically the one that gets the least amount of credit. Check it out, I think they have an older version you can download as trialware for free.
On a side note, since you design GUIs, and come from a Photoshop background, I think you'll find this tool to be very intuitive. I myself use it for creating pseudo-3D GUI elements all the time, and then bringing it in into Photoshop for further refining.
Most people who spend a couple of years at the computer quickly realize a few things about keyboard-based text-entry:
1. It is faster than handwriting.
2. Other people can understand what you type.
3. It is easier on foreigners who use other forms of writing (like Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Arabic languages), in other words it is a better way to communicate in an increasingly global society.
I consider Tablet PCs a step back in the communications department. Does it have good points? yes, like the ability to draw doodles, figures, and graphs easily (that is still faster today to do it by hand than by computer commands, but only for simple graphs). My guess is that Microsoft engaged on such a proyect solely because "the man" Bill Gates transformed it into his pet project. On a small side note, if there really wanted this thing to succeed at some level I'd have done the following:
1. Focus on vertical industries only, in areas and industries where this type of devices are commonly used.
2. Develop technology to extend battery life to at least a full working day (say, 10 hours), since these devices are *supposed* to be carried arround all day, that's the point; what good would it be to have it docked recharging every 2 hours for 3 hours? for that case simply buy a laptop.
Finally, like many have commented on the net, this seems to be a breed taking everything a PDA and a Laptop does, but not taking into account the benefits of each (portability, simplicity, and battery life).
Botton line: pass this one on, and instead buy yourself a superslim notebook and a PDA-Phone like a Handspring Treo. You'll even have money left to buy some accessories.
If you definitelly need speed AND flexibility, I'd write the main application logic and GUI in full Java, then profile the application to find out those parts that really need to be accelerated, and write those as C++ code (you'd be VERY surprised at how easy it is to do this with Java; your Java code wouldn't even know that it is calling C++ code).
Give it a try, that way you can use only one IDE for all of your code (NetBeans, Forte, JBuilder, Visual Age, are all good tools).
I bet this is really just an elaborate plan by the phone companies in panama. They probably brived a few lawmakers into passing the law, as is often the case in third world countries. However this is so exagerated that I wouln't be surprised if this doesn't last too long. I personally see this as a big disrespect to freedom, privacy, civil rights, common sense, innvation, and everything else good that can be fit in between.
Wouldn't a LDP proyector be a better choice here?
on
Making A Videowall
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· Score: 2
I don't want to take credit away from this proyect (I already have it archived into my "cool video hacks" category), but I think in this particular case it would be cheaper, simpler, faster to setup, smaller, and more convenient to simply use a DLP-based video proyector with a high lumens value (plus you could get a much larger image with better image quality as freebies).
If you notice, the Vide Whale is only about 6 feet high, and it suffers from a software problem which is basically not cropping the areas between the monitors (makes it look pretty bad). So, why not the DLP solution? I'm pretty sure they can get something decent for about 3,000 dollars, which I bet is way cheaper than the price of all the machines, video cards, monitors, and cables combined (not to mention the time saved when setting it up and the costs saved in transportation).
Actually, it is not bad for games. Read their specs at http://www.iridigm.com/ben_quality.htm, they clearly state "Fast response allows artifact-free video and gaming", which basically means fast frame rates for your Quake needs.;-)
Allow me to say that you (and the other person that replied) seem to be a bit confused about two things:
1. There is no "faceless" technician at the other end. What IBM is trying to do is exactly the opposite of that. They want to put tons of resources behind their Grid Computing initative so that companies have good reasons to move to that environment (i.e.: less downtime, more secure data, better performance, etc). It is to IBM's best interest to provide the highest quality service possible, or else nobody will join in or everyone will drop out after their first year (and remember that this is a per-ussage service, so the happier the customers are, the better for IBM).
2. What consumes most of the bandwidth in an internal company network is actually "raw" data. This meaning, database calls, method calls, etc. However once you outsource your IT department, you'll simply use your applications (preferably) using a web browser. This means that the only bandwidth being used by your company will be to display web pages. All the heavy work will be done at the datacenter backend. As for memos and attachments, those are things that will depend on the situation of each company. Some might simply opt to deal with those directly in their intranets, others will outsource it.
I think many people are missing the point. This is not a return to Mainframe-style time-sharing (although the technical descriptions and business model might seem that way).
What IBM is proposing is that companies should not have to deal with running an IT department, when all they want to run is their business. They can simply pay for CPU cycles just as they pay for electricity, and their applications will simply use those cycles to perform their desired computation/storage.
Think about this: No more dealing with hardware. No more huge IT staff. No more complex budgeting for IT. No more upgrade nightmares.
Also, companies with as weak IT department will now be confident that the IBM (or whoever) datacenter folks will handle all the security concerns for their application (user access, encryption, authentication, DoS, hackers, etc). Likewise, they will feel confident that the datacenter folks will mirror and backup their data offsite in the event of a catastrophe, something only large companies today can afford to do.
Once companies realize the benefits of this, not only will they rent CPU cycles, they might even decide to rent applications as well. Today the Applications Service Providers model has not taken off due to a lack to a killer app. I think Grid Computing is that killer app.
>> So you're saying then that Apple should migrate >> to a slower processor because the public perceives >> that chip to be faster! That's a pretty bizarre >> statement to make.
Yes, that's *exactly* what I'm saying. And remember that x86 chips are way cheaper than PPC chips due to competition between Intel and AMD. You could actually build a dual-processor x86 system that is faster and cheaper than a single-processor PPC system.
On a side note, remember a history lesson: Back in 1985, when Apple had black and white displays, PCs had monocrome display, and both had "beep" sounds and no multitasking, the Commodore Amiga had a super-high resolution display (comparable to today's 800x600 SVGA), 4-channel stereo sound (or 16 in software), 4096 colors, super fast hardware-assisted video acceleration, true multitasking, a faster CPU (twice as fast as a PC's or Mac's), a video output (for simultaneous Monitor and TV output), true hardware plug-and-play (no software installation required, ever), it was *cheaper* than PCs or Mac, and god know what else it had, and it still failed in the market. Why? People were interested in running programs everyone else had, and plug in devices everyone else had.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't like that "herd" mentality, and as a matter of fact I'd take a Mac, Amiga, BeOS, or Linux machine anyday over Windows, but the fact is that this is not how "average joe" thinks. "Average Joe" buys a machine, and if software and devices he can buy at the local store don't work on it, he simply returns it.
It's also one of the reasons I use PCs for work. I cannot find the tools I need on Macs or Linux systems (although, great advances in this area have been done recently), and thus I have to use Windows. I don't like it but I have to live with it. At home I then come back to my trusty "alternative" machines.
Botton line: marketing wins anyday over reality, it's just how (sadly) the world works most of the time.
You're missing an important point. First of all, I myself admit (as an example) that even a 500Mhz PPC beats hand down a Pentium 4 at 900Mhz in most real world situations. HOWEVER, I know this because I'm a techie. Most people, specially "average joe" has no clue as to why a 500Mhz CPU can be as fast as a 900Mhz CPU. He just sees the numbers and buys the "faster" one.
The same thing will happen next year when we see a 5Ghz x86 processor being compared to a 1.8Ghz PPC processor. In the consumer market space, it's not necessarily who has the best technology, but rather who can make the customer *think* that they have the best technology, and in the world of marketing, numbers speak.
Let's see, so we'll have a 1.8 Ghz PPC CPU by the end of 2003. By then Moore's law predicts we'll have a 5 ghz 64-bit x86 CPU. Now more than ever I see a reason for Apple to "make the switch" to a x86 architecture.
I think the author made a few mistakes on his article.
1. It is not true that being first on a new market usually leads to failure (the author seems to imply that). Exactly the opposite, history has shown once and again that being first is most of the time to your advantage, and most of the time leads to success. Is this the case with TiVo? Judge by yourself
2. The author of the article gave a bad example with the Amiga. What killed the Amiga was not the industry or the users or the competition, it was Commodore itself. It had the most awful marketing department in the world (and this is an understatement).
3. The newton's failure was not being first, but being over-engineered to an excessive cost (the author does imply something to this respect). The market was not prepared for such an expensive and large unit at that time.
I will advice you on the things your 3D Experiment Project should have:
1. A plug-in architecture, based on a very simple to use API. This way you concentrate on the basics, and hopefully then allow everyone else to develop plug-ins to extend the functionality. This will save you a lot of time.
2. Provide a tutorial to show how simple it is to develop a plug-in for it.
3. Use XML-based formats for your files.
4. Plan from the start for the program to be distributable, so one can render on multiple nodes on a network.
5. Check out the TrueSpace user interface. TrueSpace's output is not as refined as the big guys, but the 3D interface is bar-none the easiest to use (and it also support traditional 4-screen views). You can download a demo from there to check it out yourself.
6. Make it run on Linux, Mac OS/X, and Windows 2000/XP.
7. This is a long shot if you don't use Java, but if you program to the Java 3D API you automatically support OpenGL, Direct 3D, QuickDraw, etc, saving yourself a step in the process.
8. Include a scripting language for ALL internal functions and user interface commands and menus. That way a hard-core programmer has access to the low-level stuff, and a casual programmer can create simple scripts to automate a series of keystrokes and menu commands. Javascript could be great for this, or maybe some XML-based language?
9. Plan to include support for 3D glasses. They trully make modelling and animating a lot easier.
10. Include a utility to import/export to at least one well-known format, so people can get started right away experimenting with their 3D objects and scenes (Lightwave, 3DS MAX, Maya, etc).
And this link is of an independent reviewer's images in the field.
The amazing thing is that this is a first-generation true-high-end digital product behaving as a latest-generation super-high-end analog product. Expect the image quality to go even higher in the coming months/years.
On the surface, this seems to me like a stupid lawsuit that cannot hold in court, since it is clearly trying to violate the consitutional right of free speech (i.e.: "you cannot say I suck, I'll sue you").
However, *maybe* (and I repeat, just maybe), if beyond any reasonable doubt the guy can prove that the people who made the first comments made them with the premeditated malicious intention of bringing down his business, then that's another matter. However that still does not give him the right to sue everyone else (if that holds in court, Microsoft could be suing the slashdot parent company on the basis that they're hosting anti-microsoft discussions by some users).
In the end, my guess is that the case can not hold in the supreme court, if it ever gets there. if he wins a few cases it's probably because he's got tons of money to spend on lawyers or just some very good lawyers, or everyone else's lawyers suck.
Motorola lagging behind Intel is really simple market perception due to the now "standard" performance benchmark being a simple "GHz" tag. So most users (and non-technical press writers) simply assume that x86 chips are faster because they run at a higher clock rate.
As any knowledgable engineer knows this is not the case at all (as a matter a fact, in some benchmarks the PowerPC architecture beats the x86 architecture even when running at a much lower clock rate; just try photoshop on both platforms).
However, I also believe that market perception is a very important part of our society, and if you don't play the game you'll pretty much be left out unless you come with a revolutionaty technology that clearly makes a 10Ghz x86 chip feels like a snail compared to your clock-less chip. So in this regard, yes, Motorola is lagging behind x86 chips, and if I were Apple I'd be VERY worried about this. Just remember, Joe Somebody who just bought a 1.2 Ghz Mac will feel a little weird when his friend just bought a 2.5 Ghz PC, even when in real-world ussage both would perform about the same. Perception.
After reading some posts, some people seem to be a bit confused as to what this is and how it can be used. Well, for the/. crowd, here's a specific example which will put all this into perspective:
Now that generating waves becomes a software problem, it means that theoretically anything that before needed hardware to modulate/demodulate (or encode/decode, depending how you look at it) signals can now be done in software. Practially, this means that you can transform your machine into a WiFi or Bluetooth system by simply installing the right software. It also means that as new future wireless technologies emerge, your hardware can support them by a simple software install.
Similarly, anything that uses radio waves can be "emulated", like a good old FM/AM radio (the website has sample code for this), a Walky-Talkie, a home wireless phone, or even a cell phone!!!
So now you see why there's a lot of exitement around this. If the project could only get more funding (Intel? AMD? IBM? Sun? Motorolla? Sony?) to speed this up...
MobyTurbo, I agree with your comment on BSD being very compatible with Linux. My point is a marketing point of view. I'd have no problems simply renaming the Apple-supported BSD variant as Linux (of course, after making sure all Linux APIs are supported).
You are right in what you say. My point is "let's play the marketing game". Remember, things are not what they are but what people believe they are.
Here I'm posting an article I wrote about the Mac OS X on the PC Platform long ago and that I tried getting publish on/.. Well, maybe now is a good time to post it after all
As we all know, with Linux we have the best free (as in beer) operating system in the market. It's fast, it's stable, it's well-supported, it scales, and it has a GUI environment that although very acceptable to the Linux community, it really is not up to par to the elegance and simplicity of the Mac OS/X GUI (and god spare me some flames, even the Windows XP interface feels better than the "stock" KDE or GNOME shipped with Linux).
On the other hand, we have Mac OS/X, the most amazing GUI out today for any platform. It certainly makes our friend Bill G. jelaous. It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood. However, even though it has a great backbone in the form of an open BSD system, the truth is that it is doubtfull the apple folks will get the steam, hype, and generally market support that Linux is constantly getting lately in all media, corporations, and geeks alike. Add to that the fact that Mac OS/X runs only on the PowerPC platform (at least officially), and you get a lot of potential market away from Apple.
So how about this, why not have Apple port it's whole Mac OS/X upper layers to the x86 platform, publish some specs for Linux vendors to "plug under", and run it on top of such Linux-based (as opposed BSD-based) systems???
With this we'd get the great support Linux enjoys in the enterprise (even when I'm first to recognize that BSD is just as good technical-wise, but this is a market-driven world folks), it'd also get the support from the millions of geeks who own a x86 machine, it'd get the support of all the OEMs who would almost inmmediatelly start providing hardware/software products for the platform, and just as important it would get the support of the common user thanks to its simple, elegant, and fast GUI system.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure soon after we could start converting all Wintel users to the new platform ("Mac OS/Linux"?), since a new hardware investment would not be needed. Just a software download and a much lower price than a Windows license (say, 50 bucks?).
I know, some will argue that "what makes Macs different is the tight integration of the OS with the hardware" and blah blah blah, but heck, should this that I propose take off, I'm sure that Apple will have enough leverage to publish standards making this integration much simpler and still remain open, while benefiting everyone.
Note that since the Mac OS layer would sit on top of a MacOS-compliant Linux distro, it means that teckies will NOT be forced to use the Mac OS GUI, since they could use their Linux distro as usual, minus the Mac stuff. They could even keep using their old KDE or GNOME GUIs.
So, how does Apple make money? selling the top layer (software services and GUI), and if they want even selling slick custom-built hardware boxes like they do today with the OS pre-installed.
Now, please stop all the flames about "sotfware should be free and I shouldn't have to pay to use the Mac OS/X layer on top of Linux" and all that. Software should be free, but people also have families to take care of, and Apple's effort should be rewarded by paying them. Case closed.
As for Linux, imagine all of a sudden a flood of trully useable applications being ported from the Mac (and even Wintel) world to the new "Mac OS/Linux". This would eliminate the barrier many have when trying to move from Wintel to Mac: "my apps don't work or I can't access my data".
Also imagine the simplicity of installing, deinstalling, and managing applications that Mac OS would bring (do not tell me how debian, RPMs, etc are great, they suck big time if you ever had to use them regularly; yes I have).
This, I think, it's what would really bring a true competitor to the Windows monopoly. I'm sure that *I* would switch inmediatelly.
And BTW, as an example let's take my own case: I do not use Linux regularly because it's just too darn hard to do anything (unless you _already_ knew how to do it). Sure once you get it working it's fine and dandy, but heck, sometimes to get it to work you have to get the sources, read the FAQs, HowTos, set some flags, find dependencies, get extra libraries, etc.
Likewise, I don't use Mac OS/X because I can't go out and afford to buy a whole new machine architecture. I already have my decent 1.2Ghz Celeron, it works fine, why should I switch and spend US$1,700 just to use a nice GUI?
However allow me to keep my machine, give me the stability and power of Linux, and the elegance and simplicity of the Mac, and you can count me in right away.
Now don't get me wrong, Linux is *awesome* for someone that knows how to use it, or has the time to learn it. I think's it's an amazing platform for Apache, mySQL, PHP, firewalling, routing, Java, Perl, etc, but it could be much more if it was easier to administer and use.
You gotta understand that the people in large corporations are afraid of getting into something they don't understand or think it's too complex, this is why Windows NT has gotten such a large market share; People very close to me admit it, they use WinNT even if they have to reboot it once every 2 weeks because it is *easy* to use. And folks, yes I agree that maybe "they're not qualified enough to have such a job", but the reality is that they are here to stay and always will be here to stay, and Microsoft is counting on them.
Add to all this the distressing fact that the Windows OS _is_ getting better all the time (ask a Win95/98/Me user how many times they rebooted WinXP lately, or check out the Windows.Net Server Beta). Eventually (the truth hurts folks), Windows will be as fast and stable as Linux, and yes, they will copy the Mac look and get away with it just as they did with Windows. And they will have a market of several hundred million users who (like a herd) will simply follow Microsoft because simply they're not tech-savvy enough to realize that there are other choices. And developers will continue increasingly target the Windows platform because numbers speak: Do I sell for 4 million Linux machines, 5 million Mac machines, or 500 million Wintel machines?
This is the time folks to trully all come together and trully create a second option to Wintel. Let's combine the best of what we have (a Linux foundation, X86 hardware, and Mac OS upper services and GUI layers), and trully create something we can be proud of a few years from now.
So what's the next step? Someone should send this article to Apple's Steve Jobs, and have Steve meet with the heads of the major Linux distros to define some specs that all would follow to support the Mac Layer. Rally some OEMs to make their products "Mac Linux"-ready (so that they could support the tight-integration features that makes Macs such a joy to use today), and rally the big software developer houses and let them know about this and get them excited, and let's all rally behind this effort and give them all the support the open source community is famous for. This could be the beginning of a trully beautiful relationship...
The problems with UML tools is that they [sometimes] generate skeleton code out of your models, and then you go in and fill in the "meat". However, if you change the model then either you lose your changes (i.e.: the meat you put in after countless hours of effort) or you have to forget about changing the model with the tool and do changes yourself.
So what I think we need is some form of tool that always matches the model to what you're programming. More or less like what IDEs do when you're designing a GUI while the write code automatically to represent the GUI, while allowing you to change the GUI code and have those changes reflect in the GUI design itself.
With a tool like that, it could also be possible to generate a UML schema from your own spaguetti code, and then change the model visually, with the net efect that the tool would refactor your classes, method calls, variable names, and packages to match the model.
And of course, with a such a tool you could (and should for all new projects) start with the UML in visual mode, and then fill in the specific code.
Note that I've seen countless tools that claim to do this, but none of them really give you enough freedom to make changes on the code or in the model.
This pattern of behavior (where two completelly different things show the same underlying behavior and/or explanation) is exactly one of the things that Stephen Wolfran is trying to explain in his book A New Kind of Science (see amazon link and reviews here)
Basically, everything in the universe can be explained as a huge network of nodes, where all these node do is computations following very simple rules. From such simple rules we get all the laws of physics, human behavior, chaotic behavior, and in this case the behavior of an earthquake and Internet traffic.
Whatever you publish, simply be honest about it. Unlike business folks, knowledgeable developers (who usually drive tech decisions) are good enough to dissern between hype and fact.
Also be willing to listen to the community. Sometimes you will not like what you hear, and you have to put your "open mind" hat and listen for real to such comments and see if maybe you are wrong and what they suggest makes sense.
Another very important issue is support. Who or how will the product/service/technology that you propose be supported? Be very clear about it. Are you in it for the long run or just until you can sell your stock. Will it be a community-supported project, and if yes, what are you doing to get support?
I'd also recommend you publish as much data about the project as you can, but keep it simple and provide tons of examples. Remember that when a developer can easily understand what something is about, he/she is more likely to give it a try. And if upon giving it a try he/she finds out how easy it is to work with it, your chances of having one more developer on you side increase substantially.
Finally, provide as many resources in the form of URLs, sample code, tutorials, white papers, newsgroups, email addresses, etc as you can provide. There's nothing more frustrating that working for several hours and then being dead stuck without any resources to help you out on your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Although not mentioned often in the media, one of the most-kept secrets in the 3D industry is a relatively inexpensive tool called TrueSpace by Caligari.
First, note that this tool does NOT produce the kind of photorealistic images you get in lightwave, BUT what it has going for it is market-leading modeling tools and bar none the absolute most intuitive user interface on the market (this is not to say that the renderer is bad, the latest version now comes with a real nice third-party renderer which produces very nice renders).
I recommend you give it a try so it becomes your modeling program, and then export your work to render in Lightwave or whatever else.
Note that all the tools you mention Maya has (as well as Lightwave and the others) actually appeared first in many cases in TrueSpace (like the clay deformation tool, as well as many other "free form organic" tools.
The cool thing about it is that you actually create your objects and scenes in true 3D (but you can also bring top/bottom/left/right/front/back views if you wish), and the controls are simply awe-inspiring in easy of use and downright common sense (I have NEVER read the manual, and this something hard to say about any other 3D program out there). Oh yeah, everything is in real time as well, even in solid render mode!
This has to be the most-copied tool in the 3D world, and ironically the one that gets the least amount of credit. Check it out, I think they have an older version you can download as trialware for free.
On a side note, since you design GUIs, and come from a Photoshop background, I think you'll find this tool to be very intuitive. I myself use it for creating pseudo-3D GUI elements all the time, and then bringing it in into Photoshop for further refining.
TThhies etss whyat's whrr0ng wWigth tthe thcabblE Pc, eiit's
[dead battery]
Most people who spend a couple of years at the computer quickly realize a few things about keyboard-based text-entry:
1. It is faster than handwriting.
2. Other people can understand what you type.
3. It is easier on foreigners who use other forms of writing (like Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Arabic languages), in other words it is a better way to communicate in an increasingly global society.
I consider Tablet PCs a step back in the communications department. Does it have good points? yes, like the ability to draw doodles, figures, and graphs easily (that is still faster today to do it by hand than by computer commands, but only for simple graphs). My guess is that Microsoft engaged on such a proyect solely because "the man" Bill Gates transformed it into his pet project. On a small side note, if there really wanted this thing to succeed at some level I'd have done the following:
1. Focus on vertical industries only, in areas and industries where this type of devices are commonly used.
2. Develop technology to extend battery life to at least a full working day (say, 10 hours), since these devices are *supposed* to be carried arround all day, that's the point; what good would it be to have it docked recharging every 2 hours for 3 hours? for that case simply buy a laptop.
Finally, like many have commented on the net, this seems to be a breed taking everything a PDA and a Laptop does, but not taking into account the benefits of each (portability, simplicity, and battery life).
Botton line: pass this one on, and instead buy yourself a superslim notebook and a PDA-Phone like a Handspring Treo. You'll even have money left to buy some accessories.
is it only me, or has anyone noticed over the years that "tree" discussions always come up near christmass time???
Chould we call this the Linus Christmass Tree phenomenom?
If you definitelly need speed AND flexibility, I'd write the main application logic and GUI in full Java, then profile the application to find out those parts that really need to be accelerated, and write those as C++ code (you'd be VERY surprised at how easy it is to do this with Java; your Java code wouldn't even know that it is calling C++ code).
Give it a try, that way you can use only one IDE for all of your code (NetBeans, Forte, JBuilder, Visual Age, are all good tools).
Hey,
I live in a third-world country, and I never said this doesn't happen in a country like the U.S.
It happens in *every* country, but it happens much more often (and it is much easier to do) in a third-world country lika Panama.
I bet this is really just an elaborate plan by the phone companies in panama. They probably brived a few lawmakers into passing the law, as is often the case in third world countries. However this is so exagerated that I wouln't be surprised if this doesn't last too long. I personally see this as a big disrespect to freedom, privacy, civil rights, common sense, innvation, and everything else good that can be fit in between.
I don't want to take credit away from this proyect (I already have it archived into my "cool video hacks" category), but I think in this particular case it would be cheaper, simpler, faster to setup, smaller, and more convenient to simply use a DLP-based video proyector with a high lumens value (plus you could get a much larger image with better image quality as freebies).
If you notice, the Vide Whale is only about 6 feet high, and it suffers from a software problem which is basically not cropping the areas between the monitors (makes it look pretty bad). So, why not the DLP solution? I'm pretty sure they can get something decent for about 3,000 dollars, which I bet is way cheaper than the price of all the machines, video cards, monitors, and cables combined (not to mention the time saved when setting it up and the costs saved in transportation).
Actually, it is not bad for games. Read their specs at http://www.iridigm.com/ben_quality.htm, they clearly state "Fast response allows artifact-free video and gaming", which basically means fast frame rates for your Quake needs.
Mr. Uradu,
Allow me to say that you (and the other person that replied) seem to be a bit confused about two things:
1. There is no "faceless" technician at the other end. What IBM is trying to do is exactly the opposite of that. They want to put tons of resources behind their Grid Computing initative so that companies have good reasons to move to that environment (i.e.: less downtime, more secure data, better performance, etc). It is to IBM's best interest to provide the highest quality service possible, or else nobody will join in or everyone will drop out after their first year (and remember that this is a per-ussage service, so the happier the customers are, the better for IBM).
2. What consumes most of the bandwidth in an internal company network is actually "raw" data. This meaning, database calls, method calls, etc. However once you outsource your IT department, you'll simply use your applications (preferably) using a web browser. This means that the only bandwidth being used by your company will be to display web pages. All the heavy work will be done at the datacenter backend. As for memos and attachments, those are things that will depend on the situation of each company. Some might simply opt to deal with those directly in their intranets, others will outsource it.
I think many people are missing the point. This is not a return to Mainframe-style time-sharing (although the technical descriptions and business model might seem that way).
What IBM is proposing is that companies should not have to deal with running an IT department, when all they want to run is their business. They can simply pay for CPU cycles just as they pay for electricity, and their applications will simply use those cycles to perform their desired computation/storage.
Think about this: No more dealing with hardware. No more huge IT staff. No more complex budgeting for IT. No more upgrade nightmares.
Also, companies with as weak IT department will now be confident that the IBM (or whoever) datacenter folks will handle all the security concerns for their application (user access, encryption, authentication, DoS, hackers, etc). Likewise, they will feel confident that the datacenter folks will mirror and backup their data offsite in the event of a catastrophe, something only large companies today can afford to do.
Once companies realize the benefits of this, not only will they rent CPU cycles, they might even decide to rent applications as well. Today the Applications Service Providers model has not taken off due to a lack to a killer app. I think Grid Computing is that killer app.
>> So you're saying then that Apple should migrate
>> to a slower processor because the public perceives
>> that chip to be faster! That's a pretty bizarre
>> statement to make.
Yes, that's *exactly* what I'm saying. And remember that x86 chips are way cheaper than PPC chips due to competition between Intel and AMD. You could actually build a dual-processor x86 system that is faster and cheaper than a single-processor PPC system.
On a side note, remember a history lesson: Back in 1985, when Apple had black and white displays, PCs had monocrome display, and both had "beep" sounds and no multitasking, the Commodore Amiga had a super-high resolution display (comparable to today's 800x600 SVGA), 4-channel stereo sound (or 16 in software), 4096 colors, super fast hardware-assisted video acceleration, true multitasking, a faster CPU (twice as fast as a PC's or Mac's), a video output (for simultaneous Monitor and TV output), true hardware plug-and-play (no software installation required, ever), it was *cheaper* than PCs or Mac, and god know what else it had, and it still failed in the market. Why? People were interested in running programs everyone else had, and plug in devices everyone else had.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't like that "herd" mentality, and as a matter of fact I'd take a Mac, Amiga, BeOS, or Linux machine anyday over Windows, but the fact is that this is not how "average joe" thinks. "Average Joe" buys a machine, and if software and devices he can buy at the local store don't work on it, he simply returns it.
It's also one of the reasons I use PCs for work. I cannot find the tools I need on Macs or Linux systems (although, great advances in this area have been done recently), and thus I have to use Windows. I don't like it but I have to live with it. At home I then come back to my trusty "alternative" machines.
Botton line: marketing wins anyday over reality, it's just how (sadly) the world works most of the time.
You're missing an important point. First of all, I myself admit (as an example) that even a 500Mhz PPC beats hand down a Pentium 4 at 900Mhz in most real world situations. HOWEVER, I know this because I'm a techie. Most people, specially "average joe" has no clue as to why a 500Mhz CPU can be as fast as a 900Mhz CPU. He just sees the numbers and buys the "faster" one.
The same thing will happen next year when we see a 5Ghz x86 processor being compared to a 1.8Ghz PPC processor. In the consumer market space, it's not necessarily who has the best technology, but rather who can make the customer *think* that they have the best technology, and in the world of marketing, numbers speak.
Let's see, so we'll have a 1.8 Ghz PPC CPU by the end of 2003. By then Moore's law predicts we'll have a 5 ghz 64-bit x86 CPU. Now more than ever I see a reason for Apple to "make the switch" to a x86 architecture.
I think the author made a few mistakes on his article.
1. It is not true that being first on a new market usually leads to failure (the author seems to imply that). Exactly the opposite, history has shown once and again that being first is most of the time to your advantage, and most of the time leads to success. Is this the case with TiVo? Judge by yourself
2. The author of the article gave a bad example with the Amiga. What killed the Amiga was not the industry or the users or the competition, it was Commodore itself. It had the most awful marketing department in the world (and this is an understatement).
3. The newton's failure was not being first, but being over-engineered to an excessive cost (the author does imply something to this respect). The market was not prepared for such an expensive and large unit at that time.
I will advice you on the things your 3D Experiment Project should have:
1. A plug-in architecture, based on a very simple to use API. This way you concentrate on the basics, and hopefully then allow everyone else to develop plug-ins to extend the functionality. This will save you a lot of time.
2. Provide a tutorial to show how simple it is to develop a plug-in for it.
3. Use XML-based formats for your files.
4. Plan from the start for the program to be distributable, so one can render on multiple nodes on a network.
5. Check out the TrueSpace user interface. TrueSpace's output is not as refined as the big guys, but the 3D interface is bar-none the easiest to use (and it also support traditional 4-screen views). You can download a demo from there to check it out yourself.
6. Make it run on Linux, Mac OS/X, and Windows 2000/XP.
7. This is a long shot if you don't use Java, but if you program to the Java 3D API you automatically support OpenGL, Direct 3D, QuickDraw, etc, saving yourself a step in the process.
8. Include a scripting language for ALL internal functions and user interface commands and menus. That way a hard-core programmer has access to the low-level stuff, and a casual programmer can create simple scripts to automate a series of keystrokes and menu commands. Javascript could be great for this, or maybe some XML-based language?
9. Plan to include support for 3D glasses. They trully make modelling and animating a lot easier.
10. Include a utility to import/export to at least one well-known format, so people can get started right away experimenting with their 3D objects and scenes (Lightwave, 3DS MAX, Maya, etc).
For those still holding on to analog film, check these links out with samples taken with the Canon 1Ds.
This link are Canon's official images.
And this link is of an independent reviewer's images in the field.
The amazing thing is that this is a first-generation true-high-end digital product behaving as a latest-generation super-high-end analog product. Expect the image quality to go even higher in the coming months/years.
On the surface, this seems to me like a stupid lawsuit that cannot hold in court, since it is clearly trying to violate the consitutional right of free speech (i.e.: "you cannot say I suck, I'll sue you").
However, *maybe* (and I repeat, just maybe), if beyond any reasonable doubt the guy can prove that the people who made the first comments made them with the premeditated malicious intention of bringing down his business, then that's another matter. However that still does not give him the right to sue everyone else (if that holds in court, Microsoft could be suing the slashdot parent company on the basis that they're hosting anti-microsoft discussions by some users).
In the end, my guess is that the case can not hold in the supreme court, if it ever gets there. if he wins a few cases it's probably because he's got tons of money to spend on lawyers or just some very good lawyers, or everyone else's lawyers suck.
Motorola lagging behind Intel is really simple market perception due to the now "standard" performance benchmark being a simple "GHz" tag. So most users (and non-technical press writers) simply assume that x86 chips are faster because they run at a higher clock rate.
As any knowledgable engineer knows this is not the case at all (as a matter a fact, in some benchmarks the PowerPC architecture beats the x86 architecture even when running at a much lower clock rate; just try photoshop on both platforms).
However, I also believe that market perception is a very important part of our society, and if you don't play the game you'll pretty much be left out unless you come with a revolutionaty technology that clearly makes a 10Ghz x86 chip feels like a snail compared to your clock-less chip. So in this regard, yes, Motorola is lagging behind x86 chips, and if I were Apple I'd be VERY worried about this. Just remember, Joe Somebody who just bought a 1.2 Ghz Mac will feel a little weird when his friend just bought a 2.5 Ghz PC, even when in real-world ussage both would perform about the same. Perception.
After reading some posts, some people seem to be a bit confused as to what this is and how it can be used. Well, for the /. crowd, here's a specific example which will put all this into perspective:
Now that generating waves becomes a software problem, it means that theoretically anything that before needed hardware to modulate/demodulate (or encode/decode, depending how you look at it) signals can now be done in software. Practially, this means that you can transform your machine into a WiFi or Bluetooth system by simply installing the right software. It also means that as new future wireless technologies emerge, your hardware can support them by a simple software install.
Similarly, anything that uses radio waves can be "emulated", like a good old FM/AM radio (the website has sample code for this), a Walky-Talkie, a home wireless phone, or even a cell phone!!!
So now you see why there's a lot of exitement around this. If the project could only get more funding (Intel? AMD? IBM? Sun? Motorolla? Sony?) to speed this up...
MobyTurbo, I agree with your comment on BSD being very compatible with Linux. My point is a marketing point of view. I'd have no problems simply renaming the Apple-supported BSD variant as Linux (of course, after making sure all Linux APIs are supported).
You are right in what you say. My point is "let's play the marketing game". Remember, things are not what they are but what people believe they are.
Here I'm posting an article I wrote about the Mac OS X on the PC Platform long ago and that I tried getting publish on /.. Well, maybe now is a good time to post it after all
.Net Server Beta). Eventually (the truth hurts folks), Windows will be as fast and stable as Linux, and yes, they will copy the Mac look and get away with it just as they did with Windows. And they will have a market of several hundred million users who (like a herd) will simply follow Microsoft because simply they're not tech-savvy enough to realize that there are other choices. And developers will continue increasingly target the Windows platform because numbers speak: Do I sell for 4 million Linux machines, 5 million Mac machines, or 500 million Wintel machines?
As we all know, with Linux we have the best free (as in beer) operating system in the market. It's fast, it's stable, it's well-supported, it scales, and it has a GUI environment that although very acceptable to the Linux community, it really is not up to par to the elegance and simplicity of the Mac OS/X GUI (and god spare me some flames, even the Windows XP interface feels better than the "stock" KDE or GNOME shipped with Linux).
On the other hand, we have Mac OS/X, the most amazing GUI out today for any platform. It certainly makes our friend Bill G. jelaous. It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood. However, even though it has a great backbone in the form of an open BSD system, the truth is that it is doubtfull the apple folks will get the steam, hype, and generally market support that Linux is constantly getting lately in all media, corporations, and geeks alike. Add to that the fact that Mac OS/X runs only on the PowerPC platform (at least officially), and you get a lot of potential market away from Apple.
So how about this, why not have Apple port it's whole Mac OS/X upper layers to the x86 platform, publish some specs for Linux vendors to "plug under", and run it on top of such Linux-based (as opposed BSD-based) systems???
With this we'd get the great support Linux enjoys in the enterprise (even when I'm first to recognize that BSD is just as good technical-wise, but this is a market-driven world folks), it'd also get the support from the millions of geeks who own a x86 machine, it'd get the support of all the OEMs who would almost inmmediatelly start providing hardware/software products for the platform, and just as important it would get the support of the common user thanks to its simple, elegant, and fast GUI system.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure soon after we could start converting all Wintel users to the new platform ("Mac OS/Linux"?), since a new hardware investment would not be needed. Just a software download and a much lower price than a Windows license (say, 50 bucks?).
I know, some will argue that "what makes Macs different is the tight integration of the OS with the hardware" and blah blah blah, but heck, should this that I propose take off, I'm sure that Apple will have enough leverage to publish standards making this integration much simpler and still remain open, while benefiting everyone.
Note that since the Mac OS layer would sit on top of a MacOS-compliant Linux distro, it means that teckies will NOT be forced to use the Mac OS GUI, since they could use their Linux distro as usual, minus the Mac stuff. They could even keep using their old KDE or GNOME GUIs.
So, how does Apple make money? selling the top layer (software services and GUI), and if they want even selling slick custom-built hardware boxes like they do today with the OS pre-installed.
Now, please stop all the flames about "sotfware should be free and I shouldn't have to pay to use the Mac OS/X layer on top of Linux" and all that. Software should be free, but people also have families to take care of, and Apple's effort should be rewarded by paying them. Case closed.
As for Linux, imagine all of a sudden a flood of trully useable applications being ported from the Mac (and even Wintel) world to the new "Mac OS/Linux". This would eliminate the barrier many have when trying to move from Wintel to Mac: "my apps don't work or I can't access my data".
Also imagine the simplicity of installing, deinstalling, and managing applications that Mac OS would bring (do not tell me how debian, RPMs, etc are great, they suck big time if you ever had to use them regularly; yes I have).
This, I think, it's what would really bring a true competitor to the Windows monopoly. I'm sure that *I* would switch inmediatelly.
And BTW, as an example let's take my own case: I do not use Linux regularly because it's just too darn hard to do anything (unless you _already_ knew how to do it). Sure once you get it working it's fine and dandy, but heck, sometimes to get it to work you have to get the sources, read the FAQs, HowTos, set some flags, find dependencies, get extra libraries, etc.
Likewise, I don't use Mac OS/X because I can't go out and afford to buy a whole new machine architecture. I already have my decent 1.2Ghz Celeron, it works fine, why should I switch and spend US$1,700 just to use a nice GUI?
However allow me to keep my machine, give me the stability and power of Linux, and the elegance and simplicity of the Mac, and you can count me in right away.
Now don't get me wrong, Linux is *awesome* for someone that knows how to use it, or has the time to learn it. I think's it's an amazing platform for Apache, mySQL, PHP, firewalling, routing, Java, Perl, etc, but it could be much more if it was easier to administer and use.
You gotta understand that the people in large corporations are afraid of getting into something they don't understand or think it's too complex, this is why Windows NT has gotten such a large market share; People very close to me admit it, they use WinNT even if they have to reboot it once every 2 weeks because it is *easy* to use. And folks, yes I agree that maybe "they're not qualified enough to have such a job", but the reality is that they are here to stay and always will be here to stay, and Microsoft is counting on them.
Add to all this the distressing fact that the Windows OS _is_ getting better all the time (ask a Win95/98/Me user how many times they rebooted WinXP lately, or check out the Windows
This is the time folks to trully all come together and trully create a second option to Wintel. Let's combine the best of what we have (a Linux foundation, X86 hardware, and Mac OS upper services and GUI layers), and trully create something we can be proud of a few years from now.
So what's the next step? Someone should send this article to Apple's Steve Jobs, and have Steve meet with the heads of the major Linux distros to define some specs that all would follow to support the Mac Layer. Rally some OEMs to make their products "Mac Linux"-ready (so that they could support the tight-integration features that makes Macs such a joy to use today), and rally the big software developer houses and let them know about this and get them excited, and let's all rally behind this effort and give them all the support the open source community is famous for. This could be the beginning of a trully beautiful relationship...
The problems with UML tools is that they [sometimes] generate skeleton code out of your models, and then you go in and fill in the "meat". However, if you change the model then either you lose your changes (i.e.: the meat you put in after countless hours of effort) or you have to forget about changing the model with the tool and do changes yourself.
So what I think we need is some form of tool that always matches the model to what you're programming. More or less like what IDEs do when you're designing a GUI while the write code automatically to represent the GUI, while allowing you to change the GUI code and have those changes reflect in the GUI design itself.
With a tool like that, it could also be possible to generate a UML schema from your own spaguetti code, and then change the model visually, with the net efect that the tool would refactor your classes, method calls, variable names, and packages to match the model.
And of course, with a such a tool you could (and should for all new projects) start with the UML in visual mode, and then fill in the specific code.
Note that I've seen countless tools that claim to do this, but none of them really give you enough freedom to make changes on the code or in the model.
This pattern of behavior (where two completelly different things show the same underlying behavior and/or explanation) is exactly one of the things that Stephen Wolfran is trying to explain in his book A New Kind of Science (see amazon link and reviews here)
Basically, everything in the universe can be explained as a huge network of nodes, where all these node do is computations following very simple rules. From such simple rules we get all the laws of physics, human behavior, chaotic behavior, and in this case the behavior of an earthquake and Internet traffic.
Whatever you publish, simply be honest about it. Unlike business folks, knowledgeable developers (who usually drive tech decisions) are good enough to dissern between hype and fact.
Also be willing to listen to the community. Sometimes you will not like what you hear, and you have to put your "open mind" hat and listen for real to such comments and see if maybe you are wrong and what they suggest makes sense.
Another very important issue is support. Who or how will the product/service/technology that you propose be supported? Be very clear about it. Are you in it for the long run or just until you can sell your stock. Will it be a community-supported project, and if yes, what are you doing to get support?
I'd also recommend you publish as much data about the project as you can, but keep it simple and provide tons of examples. Remember that when a developer can easily understand what something is about, he/she is more likely to give it a try. And if upon giving it a try he/she finds out how easy it is to work with it, your chances of having one more developer on you side increase substantially.
Finally, provide as many resources in the form of URLs, sample code, tutorials, white papers, newsgroups, email addresses, etc as you can provide. There's nothing more frustrating that working for several hours and then being dead stuck without any resources to help you out on your problem.