I think if you put all this into historical context then the failure of the courts to break up Microsoft's monopoly was only to be expected.
Historical remedies to monopolies have always been late and ineffectual. (Indeed, the actual presence of anti-monopoly laws is almost unique to the US. Many countries don't seem to care.) The best we can hope for from the courts (and this is optimistic) is that they not be manipulated to help maintain the monopolies.
Even this hope seems forlorn.
When you trace newspaper stories about Microsoft's lobbying efforts over the last several years, it is amazing how cheap it is to buy political influence rather than, say, develop better products.
I remember back in college a drunk law student asked me, "What do you think the Law is for?" I muttered something about public safety, enforcing social norms, protecting property, and he laughed at me.
"The Law exists to protect the rich from the poor."
It's protecting Microsoft from us. And it's protecting the MPAA from people who want to skip the advertising on their DVDs.
I'd say that, having tried most of well-known 3D toolsets, the questions you should ask are:
Price Features Ease of Use Future Options
Price is interesting. Quite a few free options exist, usually these are teaser products for commercial software or essentially useless rubbish.
For a fully-functional general purpose toolset you are probably looking at $2000+
Features
I think you ALWAYS want a tool with a SCRIPTING language. This eliminates ElectricImage (and a bunch of less serious contenders), but leaves you with Cinema4D, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, and Maya. (If you're willing to pay $7500+ there's also SoftImage and Houdini etc. Let's ignore them.)
Ease of Use
Cinema4D has the least dynamic UI. A lot of stuff seems to take place in dialog boxes.
Lightwave has the least standard user interface and it also divides itself into modelling and layout programs (as does ElectricImage). While many Lightwave users don't seem to mind this, I find it very very annoying. To my mind, a model, texture, and animation setup belong in ONE place.
Max is a truly great program. I think that Maya's price drop, Lightwave's vastly improved texture support, and Cinema4D's interface enhancements have made choosing it less obvious than would have been the case two years ago. Max is worth buying a PC for (I'm a Mac user).
But with Maya's price drop, I think it's a hard pick. Maya is harder to learn, but deeper.
Future Options
3D Studio Max is Windows only, whereas the other three options are fully cross-platform (as is ElectricImage). Maya has a big daddy (Maya Unlimited -- Maya Complete isn't complete, cough). In general, qualified Maya operators EARN MORE MONEY than operators of the other programs. But that's in general. A good artist can always learn a new program.
Special Considerations
If you don't need scripting, and plan to render huge polygon-count scenes and need fast rendering then ElectricImage leaves all the other products in the dust. That's why it gets used to do stuff like blow up Los Angeles in T2, or much (all?) of the space combat in Episode 1.
If you desperately want to animate lots of human figures, and don't really need super fine control over them (e.g. crowd scenes for a splash sequence in a video game) Max's Character Studio suddenly looks good.
Integrated vs. Modular
Some people mentioned Rhino. There's also Form*Z and other specialised modellers. Some toolsets are actually modular themselves (ElectricImage and Lightwave spring to mind).
I think that there's a good reason to have an integrated toolset, EVEN IF you use specific tools for specific purposes. You might want a dedicated modeller, but in general it's very useful to have complete control of everything in one place. Sometimes an animation problem requires a modelling solution (e.g. when a limb creases badly when bent). Having to work in a different tool to deal with such problems is like having to quit your word-processor to reformat a heading...
Most people can't allocate 2GB of RAM for use as cache or RAM disk because their computer can only *take* 2GB or less of RAM. Most PCs max out at between 512MB and 2GB RAM, most Macs max out at 1GB to 2GB of RAM.
I'd suggest a better option would be a fast hard disk or RAID appliance with 2GB of cache.
I'm writing this on a dual 1GHz G4 sitting next to my Dell 2.4GHz PIV. The Mac is perfectly fast, sometimes a bit slower than the Dell, usually similar, in some remarkable cases -- usually Photoshop or Video related (where Altivec kicks in) it leaves the PIV in the dust.
There are non-performance related differences:
The Mac cost me 2.5x as much.
The Mac is an utter joy to use. The rendering of text by Quartz -- e.g. in a web browser (I use Chimera) -- is simply lovely; the PC cannot come close.
The Mac (running 10.2) is MUCH more stable than the PC (running XP Home).
Macs cost less to own in many production environments (i.e. those where there are "knowledge workers"). In places where Windows is more cost-effective (e.g. data entry), dumb terminals are probably far more cost-effective (the Windows machines may well be running dumb terminal emulation software).
I bet a lot of us remember our HP calculators with a great deal of fondness.
They were great because they did stuff other calculators just didn't do, and they did it really well.
They were also very expensive (twice as expensive as TIs and far more expensive than Casios and Sharps), harder to use (you needed to learn Reverse Polish Notation), and incredibly slow (they actually ran in software on general purpose processors rather than being hard-wired -- as a consequence they were often 10x or more slower than Casios at trig functions for example).
Macs do stuff PCs simply can't do and do it really well, and do most things PCs can do better. Arguably they're a little slower at some things. but much faster at others. But like HPs they're harder to use and cost 10x more... Um wait... no that's not right...
Pick a PC if you value your free time at $0.10 per hour;)
"Almost all products produced by governments are inferior"
Who's counting? I'm not saying the government doesn't suck at doing many things, but if some FSF rhetoric is recycled left-wing crap, this is mindless right-wing crap.
Do you prefer your army to be public or private? Macchiavelli suggested that mercenary (non-government) armies are less reliable than citizen militias, and most citizens of democratic countries seem to agree.
When asked to choose between Democrat-flavored private health care and Republican-flavored private health care in a New York Times survey, most respondents picked *neither* and opted for Canadian-style public health care.
So national security and healthcare *products* seem to be better when provided by government. Are you so sure that software is different?
Five years back when I was working at the company formerly known as Andersen Consulting we'd periodically get reports from Gartner and similar outfits giving their estimated cost of ownership for desktop PCs.
Back in those days the cost of ownership for a typical PC, including hardware, software, and support but NOT including lost productivity was $12000-15000.
The cost of Lotus Notes was about $6000/seat. (The software cost is pretty much an invisible component.)
The cost of a typical X-windows workstation with email, word-processing, etc. was $2500. (X-windows workstations were the IT department holy grail for low tech support costs. They also embody the centralised IT wet dream of not letting the users configure their own systems...)
Now there's a hidden cost in X-windows workstations. They won't do a lot of things that random people might like them to do, such as run Microsoft Excel. The usual reaction to this is for a person to buy a PC to run Excel on the sly. Because the company doesn't support this PC its support costs are off the books (and when your $150k/year middle manager is doing his or her own tech support, an off-the-books PC is costing a LOT more than $22k/year).
Ford Motor company at some point counted the off-the-books PCs in its organisation and discovered it had far more PCs off-the-books than on.
I think an interesting and uncommented upon facet of all this mindblowing technology is how poorly utilised it all is.
E.g. Photoshop, After Effects, and Flash do not have any acceleration support for GPUs. The GPU can do gaussian blurs in realtime, but if I want a gaussian-blurred layer in Photoshop I can't even do it non-destructively.
Mac OS X 1.2's most intriguing feature is Quartz Extreme -- the integration of GPUs into the OS graphics core. Now moving around your anti-aliased, drop-shadowed, translucent window doesn't hit the CPU. We even get technology demos showing After Effects style compositing tasks being performed in real time, but where's the REAL After Effects (or Combustion, or whatever) in all this?
It also begs the question, when will all this processing power be made accessible in a standardised platform-neutral AND (to the extent it's practical) application-neutral way? It seems like we're very close to having a massively parallel co-processor that could be doing video and audio compression as well as rendering Lara Croft's bosom (now one poly per pixel).
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever became of this fine volume?
So supertankers are unsinkable? Never mind.
I think that terrorists are pretty capable of drilling holes in supertankers, and luckily for us, South America is full of them.
Well actually water is densest at 4 degrees C. So if the temperature of [some of] the water increases beyond 4C it may overflow.
Um you want to have less heat to dissipate, but dissipate it as efficiently as possible...
So you're both right... or wrong. Whatever.
I think if you put all this into historical context then the failure of the courts to break up Microsoft's monopoly was only to be expected.
Historical remedies to monopolies have always been late and ineffectual. (Indeed, the actual presence of anti-monopoly laws is almost unique to the US. Many countries don't seem to care.) The best we can hope for from the courts (and this is optimistic) is that they not be manipulated to help maintain the monopolies.
Even this hope seems forlorn.
When you trace newspaper stories about Microsoft's lobbying efforts over the last several years, it is amazing how cheap it is to buy political influence rather than, say, develop better products.
I remember back in college a drunk law student asked me, "What do you think the Law is for?" I muttered something about public safety, enforcing social norms, protecting property, and he laughed at me.
"The Law exists to protect the rich from the poor."
It's protecting Microsoft from us. And it's protecting the MPAA from people who want to skip the advertising on their DVDs.
Note: the thinkpad in question runs on a 486DX4 100MHz I believe... Those things were dogs when they were new :p
I'd say that, having tried most of well-known 3D toolsets, the questions you should ask are:
Price
Features
Ease of Use
Future Options
Price is interesting. Quite a few free options exist, usually these are teaser products for commercial software or essentially useless rubbish.
For a fully-functional general purpose toolset you are probably looking at $2000+
Features
I think you ALWAYS want a tool with a SCRIPTING language. This eliminates ElectricImage (and a bunch of less serious contenders), but leaves you with Cinema4D, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, and Maya. (If you're willing to pay $7500+ there's also SoftImage and Houdini etc. Let's ignore them.)
Ease of Use
Cinema4D has the least dynamic UI. A lot of stuff seems to take place in dialog boxes.
Lightwave has the least standard user interface and it also divides itself into modelling and layout programs (as does ElectricImage). While many Lightwave users don't seem to mind this, I find it very very annoying. To my mind, a model, texture, and animation setup belong in ONE place.
Max is a truly great program. I think that Maya's price drop, Lightwave's vastly improved texture support, and Cinema4D's interface enhancements have made choosing it less obvious than would have been the case two years ago. Max is worth buying a PC for (I'm a Mac user).
But with Maya's price drop, I think it's a hard pick. Maya is harder to learn, but deeper.
Future Options
3D Studio Max is Windows only, whereas the other three options are fully cross-platform (as is ElectricImage). Maya has a big daddy (Maya Unlimited -- Maya Complete isn't complete, cough). In general, qualified Maya operators EARN MORE MONEY than operators of the other programs. But that's in general. A good artist can always learn a new program.
Special Considerations
If you don't need scripting, and plan to render huge polygon-count scenes and need fast rendering then ElectricImage leaves all the other products in the dust. That's why it gets used to do stuff like blow up Los Angeles in T2, or much (all?) of the space combat in Episode 1.
If you desperately want to animate lots of human figures, and don't really need super fine control over them (e.g. crowd scenes for a splash sequence in a video game) Max's Character Studio suddenly looks good.
Integrated vs. Modular
Some people mentioned Rhino. There's also Form*Z and other specialised modellers. Some toolsets are actually modular themselves (ElectricImage and Lightwave spring to mind).
I think that there's a good reason to have an integrated toolset, EVEN IF you use specific tools for specific purposes. You might want a dedicated modeller, but in general it's very useful to have complete control of everything in one place. Sometimes an animation problem requires a modelling solution (e.g. when a limb creases badly when bent). Having to work in a different tool to deal with such problems is like having to quit your word-processor to reformat a heading...
Most people can't allocate 2GB of RAM for use as cache or RAM disk because their computer can only *take* 2GB or less of RAM. Most PCs max out at between 512MB and 2GB RAM, most Macs max out at 1GB to 2GB of RAM.
I'd suggest a better option would be a fast hard disk or RAID appliance with 2GB of cache.
I'm writing this on a dual 1GHz G4 sitting next to my Dell 2.4GHz PIV. The Mac is perfectly fast, sometimes a bit slower than the Dell, usually similar, in some remarkable cases -- usually Photoshop or Video related (where Altivec kicks in) it leaves the PIV in the dust.
There are non-performance related differences:
The Mac cost me 2.5x as much.
The Mac is an utter joy to use. The rendering of text by Quartz -- e.g. in a web browser (I use Chimera) -- is simply lovely; the PC cannot come close.
The Mac (running 10.2) is MUCH more stable than the PC (running XP Home).
Price matters.
Cost of ownership *should* matter.
Macs cost less to own in many production environments (i.e. those where there are "knowledge workers"). In places where Windows is more cost-effective (e.g. data entry), dumb terminals are probably far more cost-effective (the Windows machines may well be running dumb terminal emulation software).
I bet a lot of us remember our HP calculators with a great deal of fondness.
;)
They were great because they did stuff other calculators just didn't do, and they did it really well.
They were also very expensive (twice as expensive as TIs and far more expensive than Casios and Sharps), harder to use (you needed to learn Reverse Polish Notation), and incredibly slow (they actually ran in software on general purpose processors rather than being hard-wired -- as a consequence they were often 10x or more slower than Casios at trig functions for example).
Macs do stuff PCs simply can't do and do it really well, and do most things PCs can do better. Arguably they're a little slower at some things. but much faster at others. But like HPs they're harder to use and cost 10x more... Um wait... no that's not right...
Pick a PC if you value your free time at $0.10 per hour
"Almost all products produced by governments are inferior"
Who's counting? I'm not saying the government doesn't suck at doing many things, but if some FSF rhetoric is recycled left-wing crap, this is mindless right-wing crap.
Do you prefer your army to be public or private? Macchiavelli suggested that mercenary (non-government) armies are less reliable than citizen militias, and most citizens of democratic countries seem to agree.
When asked to choose between Democrat-flavored private health care and Republican-flavored private health care in a New York Times survey, most respondents picked *neither* and opted for Canadian-style public health care.
So national security and healthcare *products* seem to be better when provided by government. Are you so sure that software is different?
He works as a writer but doesn't know the meaning of the word "admonish".
Five years back when I was working at the company formerly known as Andersen Consulting we'd periodically get reports from Gartner and similar outfits giving their estimated cost of ownership for desktop PCs. Back in those days the cost of ownership for a typical PC, including hardware, software, and support but NOT including lost productivity was $12000-15000. The cost of Lotus Notes was about $6000/seat. (The software cost is pretty much an invisible component.) The cost of a typical X-windows workstation with email, word-processing, etc. was $2500. (X-windows workstations were the IT department holy grail for low tech support costs. They also embody the centralised IT wet dream of not letting the users configure their own systems...) Now there's a hidden cost in X-windows workstations. They won't do a lot of things that random people might like them to do, such as run Microsoft Excel. The usual reaction to this is for a person to buy a PC to run Excel on the sly. Because the company doesn't support this PC its support costs are off the books (and when your $150k/year middle manager is doing his or her own tech support, an off-the-books PC is costing a LOT more than $22k/year). Ford Motor company at some point counted the off-the-books PCs in its organisation and discovered it had far more PCs off-the-books than on.
I think an interesting and uncommented upon facet of all this mindblowing technology is how poorly utilised it all is. E.g. Photoshop, After Effects, and Flash do not have any acceleration support for GPUs. The GPU can do gaussian blurs in realtime, but if I want a gaussian-blurred layer in Photoshop I can't even do it non-destructively. Mac OS X 1.2's most intriguing feature is Quartz Extreme -- the integration of GPUs into the OS graphics core. Now moving around your anti-aliased, drop-shadowed, translucent window doesn't hit the CPU. We even get technology demos showing After Effects style compositing tasks being performed in real time, but where's the REAL After Effects (or Combustion, or whatever) in all this? It also begs the question, when will all this processing power be made accessible in a standardised platform-neutral AND (to the extent it's practical) application-neutral way? It seems like we're very close to having a massively parallel co-processor that could be doing video and audio compression as well as rendering Lara Croft's bosom (now one poly per pixel).