They used to do this on the Woollongong-Sydney freeway. Had a big sign over each lane that said how fast the driver was going. Turned the road into the local drag strip as drivers tried to see how fast they could go! In the end they took it down because it encouraged more people to speed than to slow down...
I beg to differ. You may wish to have a look at the online traffic analysis reports at various places that map network traffic. The one I go to is the Internet Traffic Report It quite clearly shows that Mae West has been generating 100% packet loss for well over 24hrs now. Here's the North American page. According to the 7 day report, it dropped off air on the 21st and hasn't been back since. Means that I still can't get to most USA based sites that I like to frequent. Sure the 'net routes around the problem, but when something like 70% of the asia-pacific traffic goes through it, that puts a hell of a lot of strain on all the other points.
Well, for the past 36 hours at least Mae West has been un-responsive to the rest of the world. Basically, for those of us down under, that's let about 40% of the USA sites unreachable. Didn't even realise/. was dead, just thought the whole of the USA was dead (and started rejoicing at the thought....:P )
Since SQL Server doesn't provide good JDBC support (and 3rd party JDBC drivers for SQL Server are extremely expensive) it doesn't have a chance.
Perhaps you might want to look at the J2EE reference implementation, which is free. Right up front in the readme are the 3 supplied drivers - Oracle, Cloudscape and SQL Server v7.0. They've been there for a couple of years at least (1.2 release was middle-late 1999 IIRC). And, being a reference implementation, those drivers have to support the full specication - including XA transaction support. So, the drivers are hardly crap, maybe just not well optimised enough or that the underlying database is crap.
Disagree completely. Have you ever had to deal with the jerk? Waaaay back in the very early 90's (ie when the prevailing domain was always.oz.au) when we had a company that wanted to be on the net the guy just flat out refused to give us a domain name at all. Just would not listen. If you weren't a university or from the government then he just didn't want to know you. Took us a couple of years and the explosion of the US based internet before he would even consider it.
While I agree with the basic policies, I really do not like the guy at all. Strikes me as a one of those old sniveling monarchs who would cut peoples heads off if they brought him bad news or looked at him the wrong way. I certainly agree that he should have the authority taken off him because he is not worthy of it.
Not just on the PS2. There is a whole section of the Java development effort in the system at the moment aimed directly at console gaming. This effort is to take the J2ME specification and add to it all the goodies that a game console needs - 3D, Audio and video (Java3D, JavaSound and JMF respectivetly in the Java world).
Take a look at the JSR 134 for this:
http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/134.jsp
In combination with this, there is a bunch of work in the JCP wings for dealing with USB devices (based on a pre-existing OSS Java USB API for Linux no less!)
Not necessarily. I know my old company set the firewall up to actually filter the content of the streams. That is, with the HTTP connection it would look at the incoming mimetype and filter based on that. We had huge problems with a bunch of people listening to streaming radio all day that consumed all the company's bandwidth preventing others from doing useful work. After patiently asking the offenders to stop, and they didn't, the content filter was activated. I could read web pages and download software, but not listen to streamed content.
This is the same company that owns the matel patent. In effect, this is the next generation PowerGlove, but with a lot of extra goodies added eg Full finger motion, not just pinch, 6DOF tracking etc. The demos even had some gesture recognition built into it (eg point to move forward etc)
This is not exactly a new thing. It was being demonstratedat Siggraph last year (Late July) so it has been around for almost a year now. Don't know why it is taking so long to develop though. The interface is all USB and I offered to write Linux drivers for it last year. The sales and technical people seemed extremely interested at that prospect (and also for Java3D) but they never got back to me:(
There's obviously something wrong with the software industry. How can so many programmers get so rich? Hopefully the end result of the C/Java/PERL movement will be that VB programmers start earning a realistic salary.
I'm sure OO purists would more often recommend Eiffel
And that's exactly the point - purists. I have come up against a number of these fascinating creatures in my time. Their ideology is so fixed you just give up and ignore them. One project I was lucky not to be on, one such purist wanted to send radar feeds over RMI "because that is the way it must be done in an OO world". Let's try tracking 1000 different objects at 20hz and shuffle that over the ideologically pure way. This project ended up being 2 years late (from an original 18month timespan) and went on to use C++ and raw sockets as the communication mechanism.
You wonder why languages like C++ and Java are winning the mindshare of the developers over "pure" languages like Eiffel and Smalltalk? Stupid comments like this, and the people that make them are the bane of a commercial software developer's life. I have yet to see one actually produce a real, working system (and I've run across probably a couple of dozen or more in my code-development life). The reason - complete inflexibility. There is only one "true" way and all others are punishable (and yes, I've seen them try that trick with management).
So, use the right tool for the job. That tool is the one that gets things up and running and maintainable in the fastest amount of time.
When we looked at this (very large scale file compression and image munging system), the answer was Alpha. Best bang per buck and also the systems that surrounded it (bus architectures, supporting components etc etc). A little more expensive than x86 and a pain if you only have access to x86 binary libraries but definitely worth it.
If you are only doing integer work then probably an Athlon system would be better than PPC for raw number crunching. This is a rough gut feel based on using various friends' Macs and my own Athlon system in general use (doing lots of stuff like compiling etc). My feeling is the surrounding infrastructure such as the CPU bus make it more worthwhile - particularly if you can grab an Athlon with the 266MHz bus:)
Subject says it...the BNF notation, which could easily be put into YACC or Bison, was freely available and downloadable from SGI.
But not usable in a commercial product.
Sure the file format was simple, but the event model was very ambiguous and open ended in many fashions - and that's after my working group spent a lot of time trying to fix it with revisions to the ISO spec and then the EAI spec following that. (Yes, I lead the working groups to do that. Check the user bio).
I also spent a lot of time working on the J3D loader to get the model up to scratch and it is a real shit to do if you want anything other than a time zero loader.
My understanding of X3D is that they still haven't cleared up many of the inconsistencies, just swept them under the carpet.
Not quite right. VRML 1.0 was based on OI. VRML 2.0 is not and barely resembles it terms of capabilities.
In the end, both try to do the same thing: Scengraph based graphics representation, User programmable behaviours, customisable/extensible node types. They just do it in very different ways.
But I thought that TGS (template graphics systems) "owned" Inventor now...maybe they just licensed it and the contract just expired,
Correct. The interesting thing that I want to know is how does this news effect the Coin3D folks who already have an OSS (QPL) version of OI. They were showing this off at Siggraph and it looked pretty complete and very quick.
Yup, a lot of papers. None of them have been accepted from memory (there might be some in this years, but I'll let you know in a week or so). I've been going for the past 5 years and nothing useful yet from them. Even went back through my old proceedings to check. Jim Blinn joked at his keynote two years ago about the complete lack of anything useful from them. Can't get much harder proof than that....
So I'm curious if maybe your old company were responsible.
No. Our systems were only just starting to be deployed (however we had 2 or 3 contracts for 20,000 odd screens each that we had to fulfill). We had 20 or so in SE Asia and a heap spread around the USA - maybe 40 or so (I believe we had a demo box in Times Square, NY). All these boxes were running Linux so maybe you got the BSOD screen saver:). BTW, believe it or not, all the rendering software was written in Java. Worked surprisingly well too (decent performance when doing Video work etc).
They spent 2billion dollars a year on research. that has to result in something good,
Yup, a paperclip and someone by the name of Bob. These guys have hired most of the top line researchers (starting from Jim Blinn and downwards) in 3D graphics and have had them for over 3 years now and they still can't produce something new. Last thing I remember was something called taranatulla (sp?) I think and wasn't that a huge sucess!
These guys are obviously enjoying themselves, but I have yet to see a single Siggraph paper from someone with MS Research in their title. Don't know WTF they are up to, but obviously the life must be pretty good for the researchers.
The company I have just left ( RBuzz.com) was in the process of rolling out approximately 50,000 linux boxes in an embedded style system. These machines were to be controllers for electronic display systems (Gas Plasma, video walls etc). We had similar restrictions - Althon 750s + 64MB per screen handled.
For this the installers decided to go with Debian for the customisability (can strip to minimal feature set easily compared to RH and others) and easy upgrade capabilities for very large installations.
As a personal workstation I prefer Mandrake over everything else. Have used RH (and a former Slackware devotee) at work for the development machines and decided to give Mandrake a burn on one of the home boxes. Much prefer the feel of the setup (even though it is sort of a recompiled RH). RH seems to install just about everything, even when trying to do minimal stuff, whereas madrake does everything nicely. As a bonus they compile everything with the pentium (-m586)options so if you have only pentiums and above then this should give that little extra boost in a small memory footprint environment.
Footnote: The reason I left was that due to some political bullshit the VC people decided that they really wanted to use Windows boxes as the display hardware right at the last minute (ie a month before we'd finished the software development). So, if you are walking through a train station or shopping mall and the screen gets a BSOD - blame the fscking VC's that don't have a bloody clue. They destroyed an extremely profitable business model and wouldn't surprise me (and the rest of the developers that left) if the company now went broke within 6 months.
Re:SCO isn't great but it's as good an OS as Linux
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 1
What about ease of installation
Sco's installation is the most pathetic of all of them. I remember I used to be able to get Solaris x86 installed on an IDE CDROM drive quicker than Sco back in '97 (they didn't support IDE drives back then and you had to hack it to make it think they were SCSI drives). In fact, the sco install was the only time I actually liked the MS install process - you had to reboot Sco more times that Windows!
For example, we had a fairly non-standard machine - 3 SCSI cards including an old 8 bit ISA card for a QT drive, 2 CDROMs, and a combination of SCSI and IDE disks. It took me 3 days to get that sucker installed with SCO. For linux it took about 2 hours and that included a kernel recompile.
Where do corporations go for help?
The same place they go for linux. The web. We used to buy half a million dollars worth of Sco software a year and the support was non-existant. That argument is complete crap when it comes to commercial software. Believe it or not the only time I've seen this working really well is with a current contract I'm doing for mBox.com with the iPlanet software (the NS/SUNW combo). There we've had really good service because their engineers did some really stupid coding things (limiting user IDs in the directory server to an unsigned 16 bit number for example - no good when you've got a couple of hundred thousand users!). For the rest of the products (Solaris, Oracle 8i, Eftpos payment systems etc) the service has been all but non-existant. Most of the bugs I've had answered/fixed from newsgroups and web searches.
Yup, watch out for them redbacks under the dunny seat in the olympic village. They might kill you. Don't forget all the brown snakes. Always having to throw them out of the boot of my LandRover! Dunno how the mungrels crawl in there. They're a real pest. Personally kill five of the blighters in the past week alone...
Also, all of them killer kangaroos hoping down the main street of Sydney are a bloody nuisance too. They cause a lot problems during peak hour. Hope they get rid of them for the Olympics. But, I guess the greenies will have a bit of a problem with that.
OK, I'll assume ignorance on your part because not everyone sits down to read a 2000+ page specification as an after-dinner entertainment. I have ( I had to review the Geometry spec as part of my VRML work back a few years ago).
The stream format in MPEG-4 is the QT streaming protocol. You can also use the QuickTime file format over those streams if you want to. However, the codecs for whatever goes over the stream is not the Sorenson codec, which is the most used of the QT options in QT players.
MPEG-4 is a huge beast of many different layers. There's the streams, then the synchronisation protocols, then you have audio, video and geometry over the top of that. In the Version 2 spec and MPEG/J there are even whole APIs defined for interacting with the stream (They basically ripped my entire work that I did on the VRML External Authoring Interface and put it in there without so much as a single credit!)
And also a bloody good way to DoS the system too. Every new sid that does not exist in the database will create a new story with comments. Some script-kiddie with a perl script and a dictionary can kill MySQL pretty bloody quickly with that.
Oh, and I just checked with CmdrTaco and his reply "Its (sic) intentional". Woops, let's see how scalable slashdot.org setup is now....
Volume rendering can be done on specialised hardware (many medical imagining systems) or by pretending with 3D texture mapping. There is a small technical difference between the two, but close enough for the average person not to notice the difference.
The reason that you've seen it run better on more equipped systems is that they probably were not MS oriented. Win32 OpenGl does not have 3D texture mapping (still is only OGL 1.1) so you have probably been seeing these on Sun's or SGIs, where there is already hardware support. The reason your system ran slow was because it was an all software implementation.
Unfortunately, this article highlight's the author's shortcomings in understand what a lot of high-end 3D graphics is about and how it is implemented.
The one major thing the author misses about 3D texture maps is that rarely are they hand drawn by an illustrator. A typical map is a procedural texture (think of rendering a marble texture using POVRay) so generating a lump of marble is not that difficult a thing to do.
For games, the programmer just needs to fire up Povray, 3DS etc and get it to generate the appropriate texture volume and then put that in the image cache with the standard 2D versions. I'm sure a lot of game engines will handle this pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
They used to do this on the Woollongong-Sydney freeway. Had a big sign over each lane that said how fast the driver was going. Turned the road into the local drag strip as drivers tried to see how fast they could go! In the end they took it down because it encouraged more people to speed than to slow down...
I beg to differ. You may wish to have a look at the online traffic analysis reports at various places that map network traffic. The one I go to is the Internet Traffic Report It quite clearly shows that Mae West has been generating 100% packet loss for well over 24hrs now. Here's the North American page. According to the 7 day report, it dropped off air on the 21st and hasn't been back since. Means that I still can't get to most USA based sites that I like to frequent. Sure the 'net routes around the problem, but when something like 70% of the asia-pacific traffic goes through it, that puts a hell of a lot of strain on all the other points.
Well, for the past 36 hours at least Mae West has been un-responsive to the rest of the world. Basically, for those of us down under, that's let about 40% of the USA sites unreachable. Didn't even realise /. was dead, just thought the whole of the USA was dead (and started rejoicing at the thought.... :P )
Perhaps you might want to look at the J2EE reference implementation, which is free. Right up front in the readme are the 3 supplied drivers - Oracle, Cloudscape and SQL Server v7.0. They've been there for a couple of years at least (1.2 release was middle-late 1999 IIRC). And, being a reference implementation, those drivers have to support the full specication - including XA transaction support. So, the drivers are hardly crap, maybe just not well optimised enough or that the underlying database is crap.
While I agree with the basic policies, I really do not like the guy at all. Strikes me as a one of those old sniveling monarchs who would cut peoples heads off if they brought him bad news or looked at him the wrong way. I certainly agree that he should have the authority taken off him because he is not worthy of it.
Take a look at the JSR 134 for this: http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/134.jsp In combination with this, there is a bunch of work in the JCP wings for dealing with USB devices (based on a pre-existing OSS Java USB API for Linux no less!)
Not necessarily. I know my old company set the firewall up to actually filter the content of the streams. That is, with the HTTP connection it would look at the incoming mimetype and filter based on that. We had huge problems with a bunch of people listening to streaming radio all day that consumed all the company's bandwidth preventing others from doing useful work. After patiently asking the offenders to stop, and they didn't, the content filter was activated. I could read web pages and download software, but not listen to streamed content.
This is not exactly a new thing. It was being demonstratedat Siggraph last year (Late July) so it has been around for almost a year now. Don't know why it is taking so long to develop though. The interface is all USB and I offered to write Linux drivers for it last year. The sales and technical people seemed extremely interested at that prospect (and also for Java3D) but they never got back to me :(
There's obviously something wrong with the software industry. How can so many programmers get so rich? Hopefully the end result of the C/Java/PERL movement will be that VB programmers start earning a realistic salary.
And that's exactly the point - purists. I have come up against a number of these fascinating creatures in my time. Their ideology is so fixed you just give up and ignore them. One project I was lucky not to be on, one such purist wanted to send radar feeds over RMI "because that is the way it must be done in an OO world". Let's try tracking 1000 different objects at 20hz and shuffle that over the ideologically pure way. This project ended up being 2 years late (from an original 18month timespan) and went on to use C++ and raw sockets as the communication mechanism.
You wonder why languages like C++ and Java are winning the mindshare of the developers over "pure" languages like Eiffel and Smalltalk? Stupid comments like this, and the people that make them are the bane of a commercial software developer's life. I have yet to see one actually produce a real, working system (and I've run across probably a couple of dozen or more in my code-development life). The reason - complete inflexibility. There is only one "true" way and all others are punishable (and yes, I've seen them try that trick with management).
So, use the right tool for the job. That tool is the one that gets things up and running and maintainable in the fastest amount of time.
If you are only doing integer work then probably an Athlon system would be better than PPC for raw number crunching. This is a rough gut feel based on using various friends' Macs and my own Athlon system in general use (doing lots of stuff like compiling etc). My feeling is the surrounding infrastructure such as the CPU bus make it more worthwhile - particularly if you can grab an Athlon with the 266MHz bus :)
But not usable in a commercial product.
Sure the file format was simple, but the event model was very ambiguous and open ended in many fashions - and that's after my working group spent a lot of time trying to fix it with revisions to the ISO spec and then the EAI spec following that. (Yes, I lead the working groups to do that. Check the user bio).
I also spent a lot of time working on the J3D loader to get the model up to scratch and it is a real shit to do if you want anything other than a time zero loader.
My understanding of X3D is that they still haven't cleared up many of the inconsistencies, just swept them under the carpet.
Not quite right. VRML 1.0 was based on OI. VRML 2.0 is not and barely resembles it terms of capabilities.
In the end, both try to do the same thing: Scengraph based graphics representation, User programmable behaviours, customisable/extensible node types. They just do it in very different ways.
But I thought that TGS (template graphics systems) "owned" Inventor now...maybe they just licensed it and the contract just expired,
Correct. The interesting thing that I want to know is how does this news effect the Coin3D folks who already have an OSS (QPL) version of OI. They were showing this off at Siggraph and it looked pretty complete and very quick.
Yup, a lot of papers. None of them have been accepted from memory (there might be some in this years, but I'll let you know in a week or so). I've been going for the past 5 years and nothing useful yet from them. Even went back through my old proceedings to check. Jim Blinn joked at his keynote two years ago about the complete lack of anything useful from them. Can't get much harder proof than that....
No. Our systems were only just starting to be deployed (however we had 2 or 3 contracts for 20,000 odd screens each that we had to fulfill). We had 20 or so in SE Asia and a heap spread around the USA - maybe 40 or so (I believe we had a demo box in Times Square, NY). All these boxes were running Linux so maybe you got the BSOD screen saver :). BTW, believe it or not, all the rendering software was written in Java. Worked surprisingly well too (decent performance when doing Video work etc).
Yup, a paperclip and someone by the name of Bob. These guys have hired most of the top line researchers (starting from Jim Blinn and downwards) in 3D graphics and have had them for over 3 years now and they still can't produce something new. Last thing I remember was something called taranatulla (sp?) I think and wasn't that a huge sucess!
These guys are obviously enjoying themselves, but I have yet to see a single Siggraph paper from someone with MS Research in their title. Don't know WTF they are up to, but obviously the life must be pretty good for the researchers.
For this the installers decided to go with Debian for the customisability (can strip to minimal feature set easily compared to RH and others) and easy upgrade capabilities for very large installations.
As a personal workstation I prefer Mandrake over everything else. Have used RH (and a former Slackware devotee) at work for the development machines and decided to give Mandrake a burn on one of the home boxes. Much prefer the feel of the setup (even though it is sort of a recompiled RH). RH seems to install just about everything, even when trying to do minimal stuff, whereas madrake does everything nicely. As a bonus they compile everything with the pentium (-m586)options so if you have only pentiums and above then this should give that little extra boost in a small memory footprint environment.
Footnote: The reason I left was that due to some political bullshit the VC people decided that they really wanted to use Windows boxes as the display hardware right at the last minute (ie a month before we'd finished the software development). So, if you are walking through a train station or shopping mall and the screen gets a BSOD - blame the fscking VC's that don't have a bloody clue. They destroyed an extremely profitable business model and wouldn't surprise me (and the rest of the developers that left) if the company now went broke within 6 months.
Sco's installation is the most pathetic of all of them. I remember I used to be able to get Solaris x86 installed on an IDE CDROM drive quicker than Sco back in '97 (they didn't support IDE drives back then and you had to hack it to make it think they were SCSI drives). In fact, the sco install was the only time I actually liked the MS install process - you had to reboot Sco more times that Windows!
For example, we had a fairly non-standard machine - 3 SCSI cards including an old 8 bit ISA card for a QT drive, 2 CDROMs, and a combination of SCSI and IDE disks. It took me 3 days to get that sucker installed with SCO. For linux it took about 2 hours and that included a kernel recompile.
Where do corporations go for help?
The same place they go for linux. The web. We used to buy half a million dollars worth of Sco software a year and the support was non-existant. That argument is complete crap when it comes to commercial software. Believe it or not the only time I've seen this working really well is with a current contract I'm doing for mBox.com with the iPlanet software (the NS/SUNW combo). There we've had really good service because their engineers did some really stupid coding things (limiting user IDs in the directory server to an unsigned 16 bit number for example - no good when you've got a couple of hundred thousand users!). For the rest of the products (Solaris, Oracle 8i, Eftpos payment systems etc) the service has been all but non-existant. Most of the bugs I've had answered/fixed from newsgroups and web searches.
Consult the Book of Armament, Chapter 5 versus 1 to 13
"And the lord did Sayeth..""
yeah, yeah, get on with it...
Take thy holy Hand-granade and count to three. Not two, and not four, and five is definitely right out!
Or something like that. I suggest you watch Monty Python's Holy Grail as to why you should be scared of cute furry bunnies.
Also, all of them killer kangaroos hoping down the main street of Sydney are a bloody nuisance too. They cause a lot problems during peak hour. Hope they get rid of them for the Olympics. But, I guess the greenies will have a bit of a problem with that.
Na, that's why we leave the kids tied on ropes out on the front verandah.....
The stream format in MPEG-4 is the QT streaming protocol. You can also use the QuickTime file format over those streams if you want to. However, the codecs for whatever goes over the stream is not the Sorenson codec, which is the most used of the QT options in QT players.
MPEG-4 is a huge beast of many different layers. There's the streams, then the synchronisation protocols, then you have audio, video and geometry over the top of that. In the Version 2 spec and MPEG/J there are even whole APIs defined for interacting with the stream (They basically ripped my entire work that I did on the VRML External Authoring Interface and put it in there without so much as a single credit!)
Oh, and I just checked with CmdrTaco and his reply "Its (sic) intentional". Woops, let's see how scalable slashdot.org setup is now....
The reason that you've seen it run better on more equipped systems is that they probably were not MS oriented. Win32 OpenGl does not have 3D texture mapping (still is only OGL 1.1) so you have probably been seeing these on Sun's or SGIs, where there is already hardware support. The reason your system ran slow was because it was an all software implementation.
The one major thing the author misses about 3D texture maps is that rarely are they hand drawn by an illustrator. A typical map is a procedural texture (think of rendering a marble texture using POVRay) so generating a lump of marble is not that difficult a thing to do.
For games, the programmer just needs to fire up Povray, 3DS etc and get it to generate the appropriate texture volume and then put that in the image cache with the standard 2D versions. I'm sure a lot of game engines will handle this pretty quickly.