You are ignoring the immense value that an off the shelf format with extant support brought to the table. You are taking one single aspect of the Open Inventor file format which you see as negative and using it to critiqe the choice while completely ignoring the many merits of the file format. That is a completely biased approach.
Nobody can say for sure what else might have emerged in those days, but I'd guess it would have taken way longer, may have ended up worse than Open Inventor and would have ultimately fared no better in the market. The Open Inventor choice helped support for VRML especially early on, that seems obvious and contradicts your claim. Could the format be improved for some applications? Yes. Was there a better choice available for VRML? Probably not.
No, this isn't a major scene graph dominance play. It will help apps on Linux, there may be a resurgence of interest in Open Inventor, customers can get Inventor on Linux and Open Inventor support will benefit. To see this is SGI's hat in the ring in a scene graph war is a mistake.
It would never fly, not after Cosmo3D, OpenGL++ & Fahrenheit. The API story has come full circle and landed back at square one, if you look at the history of this you might guess why but there are other scene graph products supported by SGI based on customer demand, it's not about scene graph wars. The time for that has passed, there's a more pragmatic climate out there and as others have already observed, scene graphs make distinctive design tradeoffs which affect suitability for specific markets. For example SGI also has Volumizer, Performer, and Optimizer which fulfill rather specific requirements which Open Inventor isn't ever likely to address.
No, your data around Fahrenheit are just hopelessly wrong, what's disturbing is that you presented this as if it were fact and it's in such diometric opposition to the truth.
Most of the errors are glaring but I'll address the most glaring offensive to the real engineers at SGI:
You claim Microsoft stole SGI's best people. I can't think of one. I think one engineer form SGI did some contracting for Microsoft after SGI halted it's efforts on Fahrenheit but Microsoft didn't steal any of SGI's best people, never mind the hoards you imply. Good people have left SGI at various times for places like NVIDIA, ArtX, ATI, 3DFX and others but I can assure you that Microsoft isn't the place SGI engineers dream of working in, the very opposite is true. The assertion is almost comical, and they can keep Rocket Rick Beluzzo, he exploded on the launch pad after FSG hit the fan.
Your releasing your app as Open Source is not predecated on the underlying libs being Open Source. You could go ahead and release your code today, building them would simply require a developer to own the prerequisites.
This is an interesting point.
VRML used the ASCII 3D format which is naturally very large, much larger that a binary equivalent and a binary inventor format existed, although compressing the ascii should have been possible.
I expect the motivation was to allow people to text edit the data in ascii format, much as you can with html. This is a strength of Inventor but it's getting to the stage where this kind of thing is impractical.
It's the Open Inventor file format, there are two flavors, ASCII and binary. 3DStudioMAX has a file format, but you don't call 3DStudioMAX a file format, you call it a modelling and animation package.
It's LGPL, it's free speech..... and beer if you used to pay $4000 for a licencse from a private vendor.
There are several corrections which should be made here.
First the left right parser in order graph traversal just applies incremental state changes to the OpenGL state machine. This is easy, the application of these state changes is extremely well documented, intuitive and trivial.
Second, this traversal design has advantages and disadvantages, but it is a conscious decision. It is actually a powerful and intuitive way of structuring a database where as changes get made to a scene graph they have repercussions for the appearance of objects based on the predictable drawing order, this is how all graphics hardware works today and the state engine in OpenGL is the primary motivation for doing things this way.
Third, this approach seems efficient from a graphics and processing standpoint, unfortunately it is not. The main problem is that when you draw an object in the middle of the graph it's appearance potentially depends on data at any stage previously encountered in the graph traversal, this is entirely predictable but you still have to traverse the graph and at least check for the possibility. So, on balance I think it's the wrong approach but I can understand the motivation.
Fourth, this is DEFINITELY NOT what killed VRML, what killed VRML was the utter lack of demand at that time for 3D on the web. SGI sunk millions into the Cosmo effort and pulled the plug when the "second web" didn't happen (OK you might say it did but it wasn't about 3D cartoons in a web browser). With hindsight there was insufficient interest to justify the expense of making 3D easy enough to be viable. Meanwhile folks smart enough to invest in real infrastructure software for B2B or eCommerce made a killing.
Just look how fast VRML died when SGI stopped pumping millions into it's development & promotion. It practically vanished overnight but it was an Open 3D format, and it was good enough as a standard to get used if it was needed. Just look at some of the horrendously bad standards out there. The traversal order issue is trivial by comparison and certainly didn't affect the acceptance.
Finally, this Open Source release has zip, nada, zero to do with the Fahrenheit project. It is definitely a grass roots effort, I know because I saw it happening and I saw the engineers (and a few folks in marketing) arguing passionately for this to happen. If Fahrenheit were still around it might have been different but one of the reasons Fahrenheit isn't around is SGI's commitment to Linux and inability to get Fahrenheit on that platform so there's nothing sinister here. This release is about helping Linux growth and applications availability, improving support for Inventor, and meeting customer demand for Inventor on Linux.
SIM have a clone called Coin which is the one you're thinking of. There are other Open Source clones but none are complete or the official version. I hope they get merged now, since multiple implementations seems pointless, particularly if all the others are incomplete.
None of the others, not even Coin, is complete, they just don't compare favourably, the Inventor tree which has been released is the SAME fully functional code base that applications on IRIX have been developing against for years. It is the official implementation, not a separate implementation with gaps in functionality.
The Open Inventor *file format* was used for VRML 1.0 but that is incidental to this product. This isn't about web graphics, (although the code could help folks working on VRML support).
There is much more to Inventor than the file format, it is an API, not a file format, you develop powerfull 3D applications with this product, not meaningless graphics for web pages.
VRML 1.0 was based on the Open Inventor ASCII *file format* with minor extensions like links to URL's but that's about all. Open Inventor is a rich 3D graphics API with manipulators and a suite of useful tools which have also been released. Literally thousands of 3D applications have been written on Open Inventor. It is primarily a 3D graphics programming interface which also has a native file format.
It seems to me that exploiting patented technology developed on campus to generate revenue is going to free these institutions not enslave them. Which situation do you think is more healthy; an organization which is living hand to mouth and constantly needs to beg corporations, the government and alumni for research grants and funding which heavily influences the research areas explored or a financially independent entity which can choose it's own path and might even tend to pursue more valuable intellectual endeavor?
I know what I think is better.
The trouble with the argument as presented by Katz is that it simply bemoans the change and rather foolishly assumes that things in the past were much better. That just isn't true, academia was never a utopian ideal Katz assumes it was.
If you base your assessment on the number of factual inaccuracies and misleading biased claims in the authors articles and divide by the number of readers you arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Fred Moody is the worst journalist since records began.
I'm not sure who should be more ashamed, Moody because he used to work for Microsoft or Microsoft because they once employed this idiot.
I was pretty shocked when I first heard of these tactics but this interview is really encouraging.
It looks like this was a few loose cannons in a large department. If anything this will have served to help nVidia clarify and communicate their own practices internally. I expect we won't see this kind of thing from them again in a hurry now they've had a chance to calibrate their moral compass.
There's nothing wrong with marketing to your products strengths, the problem here was the tactics used. Downplaying a feature or whatever has nothing to do with what went on here and isn't an "offence".
Infact you have it confused on the facts anyway. Sure it was nvidia who had decent support for 32 bit rendering, but I don't see nvidia promoting 16 bit uber alles, it's just there as an option and happens to be faster than ATI, it's the reviewers who are drawing the comparrisons. NVidia still holds it's own in 32 bit mode.
Anyway, the rendering bottlenecks have moved as technology is changed since the Riva vs Voodoo days. Now that bandwidth is the issue it makes a lot of sense to try and skimp on precision, and the higher resolution possible makes the dithering artifacts less visible, combine that with the antialias filter reconstruction and you can even buy back a couple of bits of precision when you resize to video.
How do you know he has even signed the official secrets act? You need to sign it, but you knew that right?
The work is referenced and there is evidence through the freedom of information act and the eye witness testimony of former GCHQ employees, in addition to the film footage.
As for a D-notice on his writings, it would let the cat leaping out of the bag as well as raising issues of human rights abuse if he simply ignored the notice. Worst case he'd move, and even the mighty British home secretary can't D-notice a report commissioned by the European parliament.
The only official line is plausible deniability and for fools like you that seems to be enough. Keep scoffing at the poor unwashed masses and their tabloid mindset being taken for a ride here, but who's really the gullible idiot?
There's ample evidence that Echelon exists and if it didn't that would be the real surprise here.
What kind of a nut job sit's smugly pointing to the draconian powers dating back to the last world war and the complete lack of accountability and public oversight on this issue and says it can't be going on because there's no evidence?
What's the point of life here if we don't enrich it with our imagination?
Your argument could have been made at any stage since the industrial revolution. Why invent the steam train instead of helping starving people? Or why the internal combustion engine, or the train or the aircraft? Why write poetry or play music? Why bother even living in the first place?
Why are you online instead of in some disaster area helping starving people?
The truth is that life is about more than helping the starving.
Helping starving people in Somalia was tried if you recall, the UN ended up in the crossfire between factions with POPULAR support (and not just the US troops) to some extent starving people are victims of circumstance to another they make they sustain the society they suffer in, that's true around the world. A call for everyone to "help" is not the answer.
The fact is that if you or I did this we'd get nowhere. It would be a complete non event. The only reason King can even think about doing this is his prior relationship with publishers. Even if he makes it with this it's not a nightmare for the publishers.
This business is all about distribution and name recognition.
You'll know the world has changed when we get a famous author who has "made it" entirely through self publishing on the web, until then the publishers can rest easy.
1) there's no memory on this board and a SETI client needs quite a lot, 8 processors would hose PCI even with an on chip cache.
2) anything in an old cruise missile is going to be hot or slow or both unless it was redesigned and repackaged and that would be $expensive$. Remember.5 micron fabrication would be optimistic and transistors would be more like it.
3) The layout of these chips is bloody dense (too dense) and it looks like SMT, again meaning a repackage since that's recent compared to cruise.
OK, several posters have pointed out that this might be illegal in some way.
Is there a lawyer in the house? Say someone wanted to complain about this and make it stop, who would they write to? I mean instead of just bitching and hoping that nVidia PR will stop pulling this kind of stunt, how do we really do something about it? I don't trust the honour system to do the trick on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
You are ignoring the immense value that an off the shelf format with extant support brought to the table. You are taking one single aspect of the Open Inventor file format which you see as negative and using it to critiqe the choice while completely ignoring the many merits of the file format. That is a completely biased approach.
Nobody can say for sure what else might have emerged in those days, but I'd guess it would have taken way longer, may have ended up worse than Open Inventor and would have ultimately fared no better in the market. The Open Inventor choice helped support for VRML especially early on, that seems obvious and contradicts your claim. Could the format be improved for some applications? Yes. Was there a better choice available for VRML? Probably not.
No, this isn't a major scene graph dominance play. It will help apps on Linux, there may be a resurgence of interest in Open Inventor, customers can get Inventor on Linux and Open Inventor support will benefit. To see this is SGI's hat in the ring in a scene graph war is a mistake.
It would never fly, not after Cosmo3D, OpenGL++ & Fahrenheit. The API story has come full circle and landed back at square one, if you look at the history of this you might guess why but there are other scene graph products supported by SGI based on customer demand, it's not about scene graph wars. The time for that has passed, there's a more pragmatic climate out there and as others have already observed, scene graphs make distinctive design tradeoffs which affect suitability for specific markets. For example SGI also has Volumizer, Performer, and Optimizer which fulfill rather specific requirements which Open Inventor isn't ever likely to address.
No, your data around Fahrenheit are just hopelessly wrong, what's disturbing is that you presented this as if it were fact and it's in such diometric opposition to the truth.
Most of the errors are glaring but I'll address the most glaring offensive to the real engineers at SGI:
You claim Microsoft stole SGI's best people. I can't think of one. I think one engineer form SGI did some contracting for Microsoft after SGI halted it's efforts on Fahrenheit but Microsoft didn't steal any of SGI's best people, never mind the hoards you imply. Good people have left SGI at various times for places like NVIDIA, ArtX, ATI, 3DFX and others but I can assure you that Microsoft isn't the place SGI engineers dream of working in, the very opposite is true. The assertion is almost comical, and they can keep Rocket Rick Beluzzo, he exploded on the launch pad after FSG hit the fan.
SGI has done as much as it can Open Sourcing the OpenGL SI, and infact they have announced new terms releasing the conformance tests too.
On the diff between Performer and Inventor, the text you posted is completely accurate although Performer is not Open Source.
Your releasing your app as Open Source is not predecated on the underlying libs being Open Source. You could go ahead and release your code today, building them would simply require a developer to own the prerequisites.
This is an interesting point.
VRML used the ASCII 3D format which is naturally very large, much larger that a binary equivalent and a binary inventor format existed, although compressing the ascii should have been possible.
I expect the motivation was to allow people to text edit the data in ascii format, much as you can with html. This is a strength of Inventor but it's getting to the stage where this kind of thing is impractical.
It's the Open Inventor file format, there are two flavors, ASCII and binary. 3DStudioMAX has a file format, but you don't call 3DStudioMAX a file format, you call it a modelling and animation package.
It's LGPL, it's free speech..... and beer if you used to pay $4000 for a licencse from a private vendor.
There are several corrections which should be made here.
First the left right parser in order graph traversal just applies incremental state changes to the OpenGL state machine. This is easy, the application of these state changes is extremely well documented, intuitive and trivial.
Second, this traversal design has advantages and disadvantages, but it is a conscious decision. It is actually a powerful and intuitive way of structuring a database where as changes get made to a scene graph they have repercussions for the appearance of objects based on the predictable drawing order, this is how all graphics hardware works today and the state engine in OpenGL is the primary motivation for doing things this way.
Third, this approach seems efficient from a graphics and processing standpoint, unfortunately it is not. The main problem is that when you draw an object in the middle of the graph it's appearance potentially depends on data at any stage previously encountered in the graph traversal, this is entirely predictable but you still have to traverse the graph and at least check for the possibility. So, on balance I think it's the wrong approach but I can understand the motivation.
Fourth, this is DEFINITELY NOT what killed VRML, what killed VRML was the utter lack of demand at that time for 3D on the web. SGI sunk millions into the Cosmo effort and pulled the plug when the "second web" didn't happen (OK you might say it did but it wasn't about 3D cartoons in a web browser). With hindsight there was insufficient interest to justify the expense of making 3D easy enough to be viable. Meanwhile folks smart enough to invest in real infrastructure software for B2B or eCommerce made a killing.
Just look how fast VRML died when SGI stopped pumping millions into it's development & promotion. It practically vanished overnight but it was an Open 3D format, and it was good enough as a standard to get used if it was needed. Just look at some of the horrendously bad standards out there. The traversal order issue is trivial by comparison and certainly didn't affect the acceptance.
Finally, this Open Source release has zip, nada, zero to do with the Fahrenheit project. It is definitely a grass roots effort, I know because I saw it happening and I saw the engineers (and a few folks in marketing) arguing passionately for this to happen. If Fahrenheit were still around it might have been different but one of the reasons Fahrenheit isn't around is SGI's commitment to Linux and inability to get Fahrenheit on that platform so there's nothing sinister here. This release is about helping Linux growth and applications availability, improving support for Inventor, and meeting customer demand for Inventor on Linux.
SIM have a clone called Coin which is the one you're thinking of. There are other Open Source clones but none are complete or the official version. I hope they get merged now, since multiple implementations seems pointless, particularly if all the others are incomplete.
None of the others, not even Coin, is complete, they just don't compare favourably, the Inventor tree which has been released is the SAME fully functional code base that applications on IRIX have been developing against for years. It is the official implementation, not a separate implementation with gaps in functionality.
P.S.
...and the FAQ WON'T tell you it's a 3D format, if you'd read the FAQ you'd know what it actually was. Go read the FAQ you cite.
The Open Inventor *file format* was used for VRML 1.0 but that is incidental to this product. This isn't about web graphics, (although the code could help folks working on VRML support).
There is much more to Inventor than the file format, it is an API, not a file format, you develop powerfull 3D applications with this product, not meaningless graphics for web pages.
No your post is a bit misleading.
VRML 1.0 was based on the Open Inventor ASCII *file format* with minor extensions like links to URL's but that's about all. Open Inventor is a rich 3D graphics API with manipulators and a suite of useful tools which have also been released. Literally thousands of 3D applications have been written on Open Inventor. It is primarily a 3D graphics programming interface which also has a native file format.
It seems to me that exploiting patented technology developed on campus to generate revenue is going to free these institutions not enslave them. Which situation do you think is more healthy; an organization which is living hand to mouth and constantly needs to beg corporations, the government and alumni for research grants and funding which heavily influences the research areas explored or a financially independent entity which can choose it's own path and might even tend to pursue more valuable intellectual endeavor?
I know what I think is better.
The trouble with the argument as presented by Katz is that it simply bemoans the change and rather foolishly assumes that things in the past were much better. That just isn't true, academia was never a utopian ideal Katz assumes it was.
If you base your assessment on the number of factual inaccuracies and misleading biased claims in the authors articles and divide by the number of readers you arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Fred Moody is the worst journalist since records began.
I'm not sure who should be more ashamed, Moody because he used to work for Microsoft or Microsoft because they once employed this idiot.
NeXT (also run by Jobs) had a cube, a grey looking thing if I recall. Hmm, maybe Jobs should sue Cobalt.
no,
it's nVidia
I was pretty shocked when I first heard of these tactics but this interview is really encouraging.
It looks like this was a few loose cannons in a large department. If anything this will have served to help nVidia clarify and communicate their own practices internally. I expect we won't see this kind of thing from them again in a hurry now they've had a chance to calibrate their moral compass.
There's nothing wrong with marketing to your products strengths, the problem here was the tactics used. Downplaying a feature or whatever has nothing to do with what went on here and isn't an "offence".
Infact you have it confused on the facts anyway. Sure it was nvidia who had decent support for 32 bit rendering, but I don't see nvidia promoting 16 bit uber alles, it's just there as an option and happens to be faster than ATI, it's the reviewers who are drawing the comparrisons. NVidia still holds it's own in 32 bit mode.
Anyway, the rendering bottlenecks have moved as technology is changed since the Riva vs Voodoo days. Now that bandwidth is the issue it makes a lot of sense to try and skimp on precision, and the higher resolution possible makes the dithering artifacts less visible, combine that with the antialias filter reconstruction and you can even buy back a couple of bits of precision when you resize to video.
You could keep the moderators busy, but the key difference here was the open submission policy. Slashdot has moderated submissions.
As for DoS, everyone is vulnerable, but a single ageing box is probably less of a challenge than most.
You can't crack a box and spoof while doing it. You might clean up the logs once you're in but you're thinking of a different type of attack.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
How do you know he has even signed the official secrets act? You need to sign it, but you knew that right?
The work is referenced and there is evidence through the freedom of information act and the eye witness testimony of former GCHQ employees, in addition to the film footage.
As for a D-notice on his writings, it would let the cat leaping out of the bag as well as raising issues of human rights abuse if he simply ignored the notice. Worst case he'd move, and even the mighty British home secretary can't D-notice a report commissioned by the European parliament.
The only official line is plausible deniability and for fools like you that seems to be enough. Keep scoffing at the poor unwashed masses and their tabloid mindset being taken for a ride here, but who's really the gullible idiot?
There's ample evidence that Echelon exists and if it didn't that would be the real surprise here.
What kind of a nut job sit's smugly pointing to the draconian powers dating back to the last world war and the complete lack of accountability and public oversight on this issue and says it can't be going on because there's no evidence?
What's the point of life here if we don't enrich it with our imagination?
Your argument could have been made at any stage since the industrial revolution. Why invent the steam train instead of helping starving people? Or why the internal combustion engine, or the train or the aircraft? Why write poetry or play music? Why bother even living in the first place?
Why are you online instead of in some disaster area helping starving people?
The truth is that life is about more than helping the starving.
Helping starving people in Somalia was tried if you recall, the UN ended up in the crossfire between factions with POPULAR support (and not just the US troops) to some extent starving people are victims of circumstance to another they make they sustain the society they suffer in, that's true around the world. A call for everyone to "help" is not the answer.
You're exactly right.
The fact is that if you or I did this we'd get nowhere. It would be a complete non event. The only reason King can even think about doing this is his prior relationship with publishers. Even if he makes it with this it's not a nightmare for the publishers.
This business is all about distribution and name recognition.
You'll know the world has changed when we get a famous author who has "made it" entirely through self publishing on the web, until then the publishers can rest easy.
1) there's no memory on this board and a SETI client needs quite a lot, 8 processors would hose PCI even with an on chip cache.
.5 micron fabrication would be optimistic and transistors would be more like it.
2) anything in an old cruise missile is going to be hot or slow or both unless it was redesigned and repackaged and that would be $expensive$. Remember
3) The layout of these chips is bloody dense (too dense) and it looks like SMT, again meaning a repackage since that's recent compared to cruise.
OK, several posters have pointed out that this might be illegal in some way.
Is there a lawyer in the house? Say someone wanted to complain about this and make it stop, who would they write to? I mean instead of just bitching and hoping that nVidia PR will stop pulling this kind of stunt, how do we really do something about it? I don't trust the honour system to do the trick on this one.