Issue #18: 15 January, 1996.

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"When you are very successful, it leads you to believe you are very bright and you understand better. You must be smart -- look at how much money you are making.

"Then the environment changes and management goes into denial. It says, 'Let's keep doing what we did to make us successful, only more aggressively.'

"You're not allowed to talk about failure, as if it just can't happen."

-- Bob Palmer, hired as the new CEO to turn-around DEC, being quoted by C.M. Farkas and P. DeBacker in Maximum Leadership (Holt & Co).

Who Was First with Win95-logo CAD?

Autodesk and Numera were both claiming to be the first with a Win95 certification logo from Microsoft. (Personally, I don't consider an endorsement from Microsoft to be a desireable thing. After all, Adobe PageMaker manages quite nicely without it, thank you.) So, I asked and here's what spokespeople from both CAD vendors had to say:

Numera Software (Visual CADD):
"I think all you have to do is look and see who has a product on the market and who doesn't."
-- John Brock 74771.1077@compuserve.com

Autodesk (AutoCAD):
"Visual CADD may be the first CAD software to ship a product for Windows 95, but AutoCAD R13 is the first major CAD vendor to achieve MS-Windows 95 logo compliance.
"The first CAD product to achieve MS-Windows 95 logo compliance is the American Small Business Computers Design CAD for Windows 95."
-- jennifer.heller@autodesk.com

Corel Loses That Win95 Shine

We now have evidence that jumping on the Win95 bandwagon is no panacea for sure success:
"Taking the Windows 95 hype too seriously has left Corel Corp facing a disappointing fourth quarter. The company said sales of its new CorelDraw 6 graphics software, which requires Windows 95, haven't met expectations because the operating system itself didn't take off as fast as it had hoped."

-- NewsBytes (9 Jan '96)

CompuServe Replaces GIF

In the 15 Dec 95 issue of Upfront eZine, we reported on PNG. You may have dozed past that one but now it's time to wake up and take notice: CompuServe has announced it will replace GIF with PNG as its "official" file format. PNG is a public-domain (GIF's problem), loss-less (JPEG's problem), compressed (BMP's problem) file format for raster graphics. In a year from now, PNG may well become the king of raster formats. More info on PNG at http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/PNG/

Ever notice that GIF backwards is FIG (as in "figure")? Too bad the acronym PNG is so forgettable. CompuServe is switching away from GIF to avoid paying royalties to UniSys. Reports a new Upfront subscriber, who wishes to remain anonymous:

"The real scoop on Unisys is that they have a patent on LZW compression, which is built into the GIF file format. It goes way beyond that, however, as Adobe will attest since they had to license LZW for Postscript. Unisys is out talking to anyone who may have used LZW either directly or indirectly."

CAD Needs Greater Usability

"Suresh Bhavnani's CAD usability paper is available at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/suresh/index.html. It's a very worthwhile read."

-- Jason Osgood josgood@frame.com

Source for the VRML v1.0 Spec

The final version of the VRML 1.0 spec can be found at http://vrml.wired.com/vrml.tech/vrml10-3.html

How Does TriSpectives Compare with the Big Boys?

Last month, we reprinted Frank Zander's breathless review of TriSpectives from 3D-Eye. Zander, you may recall, is prez of the Vancouver AutoCAD User Society. I've now received my copy of TriSpectives and am not quite as impressed. Sure, I can model in real-time fully-rendered mode but I find TriSpectives pretty slow, with much disk thrashing going on. OTOH, I have a lessor machine than Frank's -- 8MB less RAM and 15MHz less CPU speed but four times the screen area.

With another perspective on TriSpectives, here are comments from Multi-CAD magazine's technical editor:

"The question about how does 3D/EYE's TriSpectives do fast continuous rendering without OpenGL...

"It's worth noting that the Hewlett-Packard HP7000 series Unix workstations have an OS software extension that does real-time 3D rendering not too much worse than when the high-cost optional hardware rendering graphics board is installed.

"HP Solid Designer normaly operates all the time in fully-shaded mode, regardless of whether hardware rendering is available. It does it well enough to not cause users to turn it off.

"I think HP SD is unique in this. All the other top-end 3D CAD systems (like Catia, Unigraphics, Ideas, CV, and Pro/Engineer) auto-switch to wireframe temporarily whenever the model view is rotated, moved, or zoomed and then snap back (almost instantly!) to fully shaded when movement stops -- unless the optional OpenGL hardware is installed, which often is.

"The HP 7000 is of course a very high speed RISC machine of considerable cost but it shows what can be done -- possibly more efficiently in software at the OS level."

-- Geoffrey Harrod geoffhar@brisbane.DIALix.oz.au

Which confirms one of my Rules of Computing: "Software always supercedes hardware."

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