As far as I know, it was just burried in a proprietary codebase when I left Cisco. Too bad too, as I had rewritten huge portions of the security related packages. By the time I left the programming had all moved to Bangalore, and you wouldn't want what was coming from that group...
This reminds me of an interesting experience I had once 3+ years ago. I worked for Cisco on a line of security products being implemented in Java. We (I) spent a lot of time talking w/ engineers at Sun about problems and limitations of various API's that we would have LOVED to get improved or expanded, there were far too many things we just couldn't do without rewriting many packages from scratch so they could be extended.
The response from Sun engineers I talked to always amounted to some version of - 'those APIs are the result of too many meetings between vested parties, for political reasons it would be nearly impossible to extend them in the way you want'.
At the same time, I spent some time talking with my counterparts at IBM (at conferences.) Over and over again I discovered (through completely non NDA conversations at these conferences) that they already had rewrites of just about all of (if not in fact 100%) the libraries. They had already rewritten everything from scratch so they could make the needed extensions themselves, they just didn't have permission to give them to anyone else. (So I had to do the same, at least for all the java.security and JCE stuff I needed...)
So its entirely feasible that IBM has had for years a parallel implementation of all the libraries, and releasing them as open source would be relatively trivial. The only issue holding them up is the Java license terms regarding package naming, i.e. I believe they would need explicit permission to release packages named 'java[x].*'
"The US" is not benefiting from cheap labor - the benefits a corporation gains from outsourcing is passed mainly to the executives of the corporation through non-salary compesentation (options, bonuses, etc.), and to a lesser extent to the shareholders of said corporations.
The public is benefiting in the short term from the continually lowering retail price of consumer goods manufactured primarily in China.
The long term result is simple - good bye middle class. The growth in the service sector is primarily servicing said middle class, so the service sector dies with the middle class.
As much as I love capitalism, we are seeing its worst side now - as corporations realize they can behave with no morals (as modern society has decided there is no such thing, all is relative), there is no reason to create jobs, take care of employees, etc. There is nothing of concern other than the next quarter stock valuation...
To make it even worse, the modern system doesn't allow executives to benefit significantly from their stock shares until they SELL them (dividends are still overly taxed), so there is no real reason to think about the long term survival of the corporation either...
Add currency trading velocity issues and foreign holding policies for US treasury bonds, and the western economy is getting scary - inertia only lasts so long...
I'd have to disagree - one of the basic advantages of sending humans is that if a computer decides to shut off the engines 50m in the air, a human would be smart enough to turn them back on and land the thing.
Remember the first moon landing? Armstrong saw the rocks at the site were too big and numerous, and flew it somewhere safer...
There are advantages to sending humans, and enough lost space missions could pay for one Mars Direct launch...
Think of an ablative surface - fusion crusts occur when there is very little ablative action, this meteorite was melting and shedding surface, so the surface didn't get hot enough to form the crust.
Post has been up long enough, slow topic, we'll see...
First is on desk, thats normal sized pen in front.
This is closeup of surface detail...
Sorry for small pic size, these were taken w/ PDA...
According to a friend who saw one, it looks like a smoke trailing line that hits the ground with a large "whomph" like sound (how do you spell that?), and leaves a surprisingly small crater. A friend of mine saw one hit, a little over a foot in diameter, about 150 pounds. 2 days later it was still warm enough to set paper on fire.
Nobody believed him when he tried to report it, other than making "Joe Dirt" references, so it's now mine.:)
Neat side notes - The outside surface has visible feathery outside surface from how it was eroding as it traveled. Also the iron softenes up nicely - you can even see how it deformed some from the impact, and there's a smooth curved arc in the front when it rotated briefly just after impact.
Very cool... I'd post a URL to the pics, but I don't want to pay for the/. bandwidth - I'd have to sell the damn thing to cover the bill.:)
Heh - it's the only site I read as religiously as slashdot.:)
There are several physicists that have attempted to grab it all through patents (Miley, Bussard), and there are plenty of people who read the board and never contribute, only leach ideas to add to their own patent filings, but there are a number of people that still openly contribute VERY good ideas.
On the self-sustaining account, a number people doubt it, but I don't... There are some really neat aspects to the fusor, and there are MANY unexplored operating characteristics.
I bet that once we get a few amateur devices with pairs of synchronized wakefield accelerators firing into a reasonably designed virtual inner grid, with some rudimentary magnetic shielding of the grid and geometry optimized for recirculation, I bet we'll start seeing more accounts of self-sustaining reactions. Of course, theres the added problem that at those reaction rates the device had better be buried in a concrete bunker in the backyard...
Raise the grid voltage, change your ion source from deuterium gas to laser vaporized boron, and we can start playing with the mythical p+B11-> 2 beta reaction, and start playing with direct conversion! That's just too cool... I'd be happy to get a few picowatts of DC out of the reactor, that's my personal goal.
If you take a look over at fusor.net, there are actually a bunch of us working towards just that. The main problem with the Farnsworth's team later designs is that they require very complex ion guns - the type that uses a gas pressure significantly higher in the guns than in the main chamber they fire into, requiring two sets of vacuum gear and more plumbing. We're still working on homemade ion guns.
Actually, some list members have recently figured out how (in theory) to use something called a wakefield accelerator to get many orders of magnitude more powerful ion guns than anything Farnsworth could ever build, and these toys are buildable by the amateur machinist.
Many list members (including myself, although I still a month or so away from "first plasma" in my first fusor) are building this hardware right now.
1) The automatic selection of a non NAT proxy to relay packets between NAT parties can eliminate the NAT direct connection issue completely. This could be part of the service agreement, such as "supernodes" in the Kazaa architecture being elected from service users with large pipes.
2) Many network programmers have been playing with a clever exploit based on sequence number prediction to route back into a NAT obscured host, and this exploit works through a surprisingly percentage of deployed NAT boxes.
How about a small pulpit icon, to represent that the following story contains religious views regarding open source software?
While there are many of us who enjoy contributing to open source (myself included), the fact remains that the majority of people who program for a living are constrained to do so on proprietary platforms of one form or another, even if they are working on proprietary applications built on top of open source software.
Articles (and topics) such as these, while nice trollbait and conversation fodder, nonetheless constitute a view that is basically a religious viewpoint - the position that giving up your evil proprietary platforms and converting to one of the true open source ways will save you, while somehow not causing you and your family (and bandwidth hungry habits) to starve to death, is as much a position based on blind faith as any other I've ever heard.
1. There's a sufficiently long interval between when a monopoly begins flexing its control and when it is either stopped by antitrust law or made irrelevant that an obscenely large amount of money can be made, and
2. Changes in law have reduced penalties in most cases to forms like "rebate coupons", allowing the guilty to effectively keep all the proceeds.
Its like Microsoft - technically they're just playing the system, and don't forget that the US has the best government money can buy...
I'd throw out an additional requirement for an ideal OpenGL GUI library, one that's lead me to start developing my own (It'll be open source when done.)
It'd be nice if a cross-platform widget/GUI library existed that would allow me to place the GUI's into the environment, by rendering to textures or virtual GUI planes, instead of just as yet another 2d desktop library. Its not TOO much additional work if done from the beginning...
Think of the fun you could have w/ full GUI support in the environment. A 3d embeddable Gecko control, anyone?:) (Wish that code was cleaner...)
The release date has been pushed several times, this is just the latest public date, after a number of its key developers defected when Sony tried to force them to release it well before it was ready. They're burning good people out, and that doesn't make a good product.
They likely mean the laser heated a spot on the projectile sufficiently to initiate low order detonation of the explosives therein. This would likely break it into enough pieces to keep it well short of its original intended target...
I'd second this. I stare at a monitor 10-15 hours a day. My eyesight finally degenerated to the point where I got tested, and my vision sucked. Astigmatism in both eyes, I forget the scores, but I got perscribed reasonably thick glasses. Everybody else in my family wears them, I figured it was unavoidable...
I hated them. I did more research, and found out about eye exercises. I adopted new habits, most notably staring out window at horizon for a few seconds every 10 mins.
About a year later I tossed the glasses in a drawer. That was >10 years ago, and I currently test at 20:20 again. The astigmatism is still there, but its managable, brain processing seems to remove wierd smear/blur if I use both eyes, which I tend to do most of the time anyway...
Its a tough problem, and I'm in the same boat. I'm a professional game programmer, about 15 years in the industry (SSI, Bethesda, Accolade, others...)
10+ years ago I started an VR engine project that I wanted to eventually place into the public domain - I've even continued to get employment contractual waivers from employers to allow me to do so. Over the last 10 years I have invested hundreds of hours trying to cultivate relationships with others who could contribute.
Here's the problems I keep running into:
1a. High-end games are VERY hard, and most people who have the requisite skillset already work in games. 1b. Most people who work in games have signed contracts precluding them from working on other games, including open source peojects. 1c. People who could otherwise help are kept so busy with the sweatshop hours most game houses run on that they have little to no time available to contribute!
2. If work on a game project is done on the side, it becomes very difficult to keep up with the state of the art. I've had to throw away huge sections of my codebase (especially 3d) and begin again to keep it competitive! It gets depressing when you know the code your working on at work is now n>1 years behind the engine you're building on the side. Low tech starting points do not inspire people to join...
3. If development work on an open source engine is done in the open, it becomes trivial for other developers to "steal your thunder" by encorporating your best ideas into their titles, which due to funding, ship before you! It also becomes possible for certain parties to use their access to your work to begin patent abuse! (ala Rambus, etc.) Personal example: In the few weeks after I announced on my website that I was going to publish my VR scalability whitepapers, I had a huge traffic spike from the research.microsoft.com domain. I changed my mind...
The other problem is related to tools. Games generally require significant content. Good content generally requires good tools, which generally means expensive. 3ds Max and Maya are very expensive. Artists who have purchased these tools for personal use NEED to make enough $ to recover their investment, not to mention keep food on the table. Audio tools are nearly as expensive...
I think it could happen, but only if a sufficient critical mass was acheived. I haven't seen it happen yet...
A grade "A" title single player game can cost $2-4M to develop. The majority of that figure is salaries for the people involved: Averages might be 2-5 programmers, 5-10 artists, and 3-10 support people, all over 18-24 months, plus overhead.
Comments on game quality aside, most big games (lots of levels, high replayability, lots of art, lots of sound/music) take a heck of alot of money to develop. Someone has to front all that money. And if they think that releasing under the GPL will prevent them from recouping their investment, or have a significant negative impact on the bottom line, then it won't be released under the GPL. Period.
What you have here is a simple incompatability of business models, or at least the perception thereof. Games traditionally have to make a pile of money fast, so investors can make a return, and salaries can be paid for the team to start on the second project. You're looking at $1-2M per team per year before overhead. How can a GPL model provide that?
That's not to say it isn't theoritically possible to release the software under the GPL and sell all the content under another or traditional license, but someone needs to demonstrate that a GPL model can take in that $1-2M per year for a relatively short-lived product like a game before it'll happen.
Dunno... the OpenGL support has been sufficient to date, I'm using Cg a few hours a day, and you can generate OpenGL fragment shaders by compiling to a D3D target and passing the output through their D3D to GL shader translator, which while a pain has allowed our shader prototyping to continue.
I'm more hoping that nVidia can leverage Cg to keep the pressure up on the OpenGL ARB to move to v2 faster, despite the intra-vendor infighting, patent pressure from M$, and the dilema r/e multipass strategies.
To do this, nVidia must make Cg usable for bleeding edge ATI products as well, and the divergence w/r/t pixel shader functionality is considerable. I'm hoping they won't do anything to preclude ATI supporting Cg, should ATI really choose to do so. At the same time, I don't expect ATI to do anything to damage their role reversal w/ nVidia w/r/t being M$'s favored vendor (and candidate for XBox2 chip supplier), so I'm not expecting ATI to step forward anytime soon onto the Cg front, or even GL 2...
This means nVidia needs to take some initiative to demonstrate they will not preclude support for next gen pixel shaders, especially features that cannot be trivially abstracted unrolled from a high-level language, like 3 and 4 levels of dereferencing of textures instead of one. Unfortunately, I have not had any favorable impressions on this topic when I talk to developer relations at nVidia.
Other than that, for a v1.01, they've done their usual damn fine job of providing stable code, and I'm enjoying the advantages of C over ASM for most of the grunt level shaders we need...
I love the line regarding Codeplay's own product: "This approach will be extended to embrace emerging new hardware features without the need of proprietary 'standards'." So, the point is: 'Don't waste your time on that competitors product, wait for us to finish ours!' Where have I heard this marketing approach before?:)
Codeplay's VectorC is optimized around Playstation2 centric vector graphics hardware and scene graph libraries, whereas nVidia's Cg is optimized for most current PC accelerators. Most playstation developers use licensed scene graph libraries, whereas most PC game developers use custom or licensed engines over low level libraries, so both approaches are appropriate for their current customer base...
I think its reasonable to assume Cg will evolve with its target hardware, and I'd rather nVidia do a good job with the current version than waste time hypothetical future features. I'm using Cg now, and its a great step in the right direction - a high level shader language not owned by M$ and/or tied to D3D.
I think the biggest issue w/ Cg is how nVidia is going to address the divergence in silicon budgets between themselves and ATI - nVidia is pushing for more, faster vertex shaders, while ATI (w/ M$'s backing) is pushing for more powerful pixel shaders, i.e. D3D pixel shaders v1.4, exposed in D3D 8.1, are supported in ATI Radeon 8*, but no publically announced nVidia cards support the nicely expanded instruction set and associated capabilities. nVidia also needs to complete fragment[pixel] shader support for OpenGL (and release source or a multithreaded version of the GL runtimes...)
I recently picked up a Sony NR70V PDA/MP3 player. The docs and software did not mention MP3's in any other context than uploading to their software for conversion ATRAC3 for playback on MagicGate memory sticks. (blech...)
However, if you use the included software to upload MP3's to a regular memory stick as a mounted USB drive, the included player plays MP3's just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked around - if you're looking for open source JCE and related code (like ASN.1 IO), try http://www.bouncycastle.org/
As far as I know, it was just burried in a proprietary codebase when I left Cisco. Too bad too, as I had rewritten huge portions of the security related packages. By the time I left the programming had all moved to Bangalore, and you wouldn't want what was coming from that group...
This reminds me of an interesting experience I had once 3+ years ago. I worked for Cisco on a line of security products being implemented in Java. We (I) spent a lot of time talking w/ engineers at Sun about problems and limitations of various API's that we would have LOVED to get improved or expanded, there were far too many things we just couldn't do without rewriting many packages from scratch so they could be extended.
The response from Sun engineers I talked to always amounted to some version of - 'those APIs are the result of too many meetings between vested parties, for political reasons it would be nearly impossible to extend them in the way you want'.
At the same time, I spent some time talking with my counterparts at IBM (at conferences.) Over and over again I discovered (through completely non NDA conversations at these conferences) that they already had rewrites of just about all of (if not in fact 100%) the libraries. They had already rewritten everything from scratch so they could make the needed extensions themselves, they just didn't have permission to give them to anyone else. (So I had to do the same, at least for all the java.security and JCE stuff I needed...)
So its entirely feasible that IBM has had for years a parallel implementation of all the libraries, and releasing them as open source would be relatively trivial. The only issue holding them up is the Java license terms regarding package naming, i.e. I believe they would need explicit permission to release packages named 'java[x].*'
"The US" is not benefiting from cheap labor - the benefits a corporation gains from outsourcing is passed mainly to the executives of the corporation through non-salary compesentation (options, bonuses, etc.), and to a lesser extent to the shareholders of said corporations.
The public is benefiting in the short term from the continually lowering retail price of consumer goods manufactured primarily in China.
The long term result is simple - good bye middle class. The growth in the service sector is primarily servicing said middle class, so the service sector dies with the middle class.
As much as I love capitalism, we are seeing its worst side now - as corporations realize they can behave with no morals (as modern society has decided there is no such thing, all is relative), there is no reason to create jobs, take care of employees, etc. There is nothing of concern other than the next quarter stock valuation...
To make it even worse, the modern system doesn't allow executives to benefit significantly from their stock shares until they SELL them (dividends are still overly taxed), so there is no real reason to think about the long term survival of the corporation either...
Add currency trading velocity issues and foreign holding policies for US treasury bonds, and the western economy is getting scary - inertia only lasts so long...
What makes you think Cisco VOIP hardware isn't already fully compliant with CALEA requirements?
(I'm an ex Cisco security/crypto programmer)
I'd have to disagree - one of the basic advantages of sending humans is that if a computer decides to shut off the engines 50m in the air, a human would be smart enough to turn them back on and land the thing.
Remember the first moon landing? Armstrong saw the rocks at the site were too big and numerous, and flew it somewhere safer...
There are advantages to sending humans, and enough lost space missions could pay for one Mars Direct launch...
Think of an ablative surface - fusion crusts occur when there is very little ablative action, this meteorite was melting and shedding surface, so the surface didn't get hot enough to form the crust.
Post has been up long enough, slow topic, we'll see...
First is on desk, thats normal sized pen in front.
This is closeup of surface detail... Sorry for small pic size, these were taken w/ PDA...
heh, note to self - preview before post...
According to a friend who saw one, it looks like a smoke trailing line that hits the ground with a large "whomph" like sound (how do you spell that?), and leaves a surprisingly small crater. A friend of mine saw one hit, a little over a foot in diameter, about 150 pounds. 2 days later it was still warm enough to set paper on fire.
:)
/. bandwidth - I'd have to sell the damn thing to cover the bill. :)
Nobody believed him when he tried to report it, other than making "Joe Dirt" references, so it's now mine.
Neat side notes - The outside surface has visible feathery outside surface from how it was eroding as it traveled. Also the iron softenes up nicely - you can even see how it deformed some from the impact, and there's a smooth curved arc in the front when it rotated briefly just after impact.
Very cool... I'd post a URL to the pics, but I don't want to pay for the
Heh - it's the only site I read as religiously as slashdot. :)
There are several physicists that have attempted to grab it all through patents (Miley, Bussard), and there are plenty of people who read the board and never contribute, only leach ideas to add to their own patent filings, but there are a number of people that still openly contribute VERY good ideas.
On the self-sustaining account, a number people doubt it, but I don't... There are some really neat aspects to the fusor, and there are MANY unexplored operating characteristics.
I bet that once we get a few amateur devices with pairs of synchronized wakefield accelerators firing into a reasonably designed virtual inner grid, with some rudimentary magnetic shielding of the grid and geometry optimized for recirculation, I bet we'll start seeing more accounts of self-sustaining reactions. Of course, theres the added problem that at those reaction rates the device had better be buried in a concrete bunker in the backyard...
Raise the grid voltage, change your ion source from deuterium gas to laser vaporized boron, and we can start playing with the mythical p+B11-> 2 beta reaction, and start playing with direct conversion! That's just too cool... I'd be happy to get a few picowatts of DC out of the reactor, that's my personal goal.
If you take a look over at fusor.net, there are actually a bunch of us working towards just that. The main problem with the Farnsworth's team later designs is that they require very complex ion guns - the type that uses a gas pressure significantly higher in the guns than in the main chamber they fire into, requiring two sets of vacuum gear and more plumbing. We're still working on homemade ion guns.
Actually, some list members have recently figured out how (in theory) to use something called a wakefield accelerator to get many orders of magnitude more powerful ion guns than anything Farnsworth could ever build, and these toys are buildable by the amateur machinist.
Many list members (including myself, although I still a month or so away from "first plasma" in my first fusor) are building this hardware right now.
1) The automatic selection of a non NAT proxy to relay packets between NAT parties can eliminate the NAT direct connection issue completely. This could be part of the service agreement, such as "supernodes" in the Kazaa architecture being elected from service users with large pipes.
2) Many network programmers have been playing with a clever exploit based on sequence number prediction to route back into a NAT obscured host, and this exploit works through a surprisingly percentage of deployed NAT boxes.
How about a small pulpit icon, to represent that the following story contains religious views regarding open source software?
While there are many of us who enjoy contributing to open source (myself included), the fact remains that the majority of people who program for a living are constrained to do so on proprietary platforms of one form or another, even if they are working on proprietary applications built on top of open source software.
Articles (and topics) such as these, while nice trollbait and conversation fodder, nonetheless constitute a view that is basically a religious viewpoint - the position that giving up your evil proprietary platforms and converting to one of the true open source ways will save you, while somehow not causing you and your family (and bandwidth hungry habits) to starve to death, is as much a position based on blind faith as any other I've ever heard.
They have learned that:
1. There's a sufficiently long interval between when a monopoly begins flexing its control and when it is either stopped by antitrust law or made irrelevant that an obscenely large amount of money can be made, and
2. Changes in law have reduced penalties in most cases to forms like "rebate coupons", allowing the guilty to effectively keep all the proceeds.
Its like Microsoft - technically they're just playing the system, and don't forget that the US has the best government money can buy...
I'd throw out an additional requirement for an ideal OpenGL GUI library, one that's lead me to start developing my own (It'll be open source when done.)
:) (Wish that code was cleaner...)
It'd be nice if a cross-platform widget/GUI library existed that would allow me to place the GUI's into the environment, by rendering to textures or virtual GUI planes, instead of just as yet another 2d desktop library. Its not TOO much additional work if done from the beginning...
Think of the fun you could have w/ full GUI support in the environment. A 3d embeddable Gecko control, anyone?
The release date has been pushed several times, this is just the latest public date, after a number of its key developers defected when Sony tried to force them to release it well before it was ready. They're burning good people out, and that doesn't make a good product.
They likely mean the laser heated a spot on the projectile sufficiently to initiate low order detonation of the explosives therein. This would likely break it into enough pieces to keep it well short of its original intended target...
I'd second this. I stare at a monitor 10-15 hours a day. My eyesight finally degenerated to the point where I got tested, and my vision sucked. Astigmatism in both eyes, I forget the scores, but I got perscribed reasonably thick glasses. Everybody else in my family wears them, I figured it was unavoidable...
I hated them. I did more research, and found out about eye exercises. I adopted new habits, most notably staring out window at horizon for a few seconds every 10 mins.
About a year later I tossed the glasses in a drawer. That was >10 years ago, and I currently test at 20:20 again. The astigmatism is still there, but its managable, brain processing seems to remove wierd smear/blur if I use both eyes, which I tend to do most of the time anyway...
Its a tough problem, and I'm in the same boat. I'm a professional game programmer, about 15 years in the industry (SSI, Bethesda, Accolade, others...)
10+ years ago I started an VR engine project that I wanted to eventually place into the public domain - I've even continued to get employment contractual waivers from employers to allow me to do so. Over the last 10 years I have invested hundreds of hours trying to cultivate relationships with others who could contribute.
Here's the problems I keep running into:
1a. High-end games are VERY hard, and most people who have the requisite skillset already work in games.
1b. Most people who work in games have signed contracts precluding them from working on other games, including open source peojects.
1c. People who could otherwise help are kept so busy with the sweatshop hours most game houses run on that they have little to no time available to contribute!
2. If work on a game project is done on the side, it becomes very difficult to keep up with the state of the art. I've had to throw away huge sections of my codebase (especially 3d) and begin again to keep it competitive! It gets depressing when you know the code your working on at work is now n>1 years behind the engine you're building on the side. Low tech starting points do not inspire people to join...
3. If development work on an open source engine is done in the open, it becomes trivial for other developers to "steal your thunder" by encorporating your best ideas into their titles, which due to funding, ship before you! It also becomes possible for certain parties to use their access to your work to begin patent abuse! (ala Rambus, etc.) Personal example: In the few weeks after I announced on my website that I was going to publish my VR scalability whitepapers, I had a huge traffic spike from the research.microsoft.com domain. I changed my mind...
The other problem is related to tools. Games generally require significant content. Good content generally requires good tools, which generally means expensive. 3ds Max and Maya are very expensive. Artists who have purchased these tools for personal use NEED to make enough $ to recover their investment, not to mention keep food on the table. Audio tools are nearly as expensive...
I think it could happen, but only if a sufficient critical mass was acheived. I haven't seen it happen yet...
That's simply due to money!
A grade "A" title single player game can cost $2-4M to develop. The majority of that figure is salaries for the people involved: Averages might be 2-5 programmers, 5-10 artists, and 3-10 support people, all over 18-24 months, plus overhead.
Comments on game quality aside, most big games (lots of levels, high replayability, lots of art, lots of sound/music) take a heck of alot of money to develop. Someone has to front all that money. And if they think that releasing under the GPL will prevent them from recouping their investment, or have a significant negative impact on the bottom line, then it won't be released under the GPL. Period.
What you have here is a simple incompatability of business models, or at least the perception thereof. Games traditionally have to make a pile of money fast, so investors can make a return, and salaries can be paid for the team to start on the second project. You're looking at $1-2M per team per year before overhead. How can a GPL model provide that?
That's not to say it isn't theoritically possible to release the software under the GPL and sell all the content under another or traditional license, but someone needs to demonstrate that a GPL model can take in that $1-2M per year for a relatively short-lived product like a game before it'll happen.
Dunno... the OpenGL support has been sufficient to date, I'm using Cg a few hours a day, and you can generate OpenGL fragment shaders by compiling to a D3D target and passing the output through their D3D to GL shader translator, which while a pain has allowed our shader prototyping to continue.
I'm more hoping that nVidia can leverage Cg to keep the pressure up on the OpenGL ARB to move to v2 faster, despite the intra-vendor infighting, patent pressure from M$, and the dilema r/e multipass strategies.
To do this, nVidia must make Cg usable for bleeding edge ATI products as well, and the divergence w/r/t pixel shader functionality is considerable. I'm hoping they won't do anything to preclude ATI supporting Cg, should ATI really choose to do so. At the same time, I don't expect ATI to do anything to damage their role reversal w/ nVidia w/r/t being M$'s favored vendor (and candidate for XBox2 chip supplier), so I'm not expecting ATI to step forward anytime soon onto the Cg front, or even GL 2...
This means nVidia needs to take some initiative to demonstrate they will not preclude support for next gen pixel shaders, especially features that cannot be trivially abstracted unrolled from a high-level language, like 3 and 4 levels of dereferencing of textures instead of one. Unfortunately, I have not had any favorable impressions on this topic when I talk to developer relations at nVidia.
Other than that, for a v1.01, they've done their usual damn fine job of providing stable code, and I'm enjoying the advantages of C over ASM for most of the grunt level shaders we need...
Codeplay's VectorC is optimized around Playstation2 centric vector graphics hardware and scene graph libraries, whereas nVidia's Cg is optimized for most current PC accelerators. Most playstation developers use licensed scene graph libraries, whereas most PC game developers use custom or licensed engines over low level libraries, so both approaches are appropriate for their current customer base...
I think its reasonable to assume Cg will evolve with its target hardware, and I'd rather nVidia do a good job with the current version than waste time hypothetical future features. I'm using Cg now, and its a great step in the right direction - a high level shader language not owned by M$ and/or tied to D3D.
I think the biggest issue w/ Cg is how nVidia is going to address the divergence in silicon budgets between themselves and ATI - nVidia is pushing for more, faster vertex shaders, while ATI (w/ M$'s backing) is pushing for more powerful pixel shaders, i.e. D3D pixel shaders v1.4, exposed in D3D 8.1, are supported in ATI Radeon 8*, but no publically announced nVidia cards support the nicely expanded instruction set and associated capabilities. nVidia also needs to complete fragment[pixel] shader support for OpenGL (and release source or a multithreaded version of the GL runtimes...)
Actually, it has already happened! Very smart approach, now they just need to figure out how to keep 'em alive longer...
However, if you use the included software to upload MP3's to a regular memory stick as a mounted USB drive, the included player plays MP3's just fine.