Some of these are simple code quirks, such as spelling mistakes in code that are repeated elsewhere by necessity (what does the variable $accress do?), others are amusing comments (”TODO: ask Moshe about this”). Most irritating are the features that one might expect, based upon what is already there, but that don’t exist – being able to restrict user access based on store for example.

One thing that I’ve spent a bit of time working on lately is being able to sort products by their average rating. It seems to me that, if you have a rating system and the rating is displayed on products, then it would make sense that you’d be able to sort by those ratings. Apparently not.

Whilst I do hope that some of these major annoyances will be fixed in the future, a part of me also hopes they don’t as it will mean all the work that I’ve put into them will be rendered meaningless! What would be really nice would be if Varien accepted patches for Magento. That way we wouldn’t to expend even more time trying to “extensionise” something that should be in the core system anyway.

Magento as a product continues to progress but sometimes I wish the community had more involvement in direction and helping it move forward.

Perhaps I should explain a bit more. The price stickers used are the nasty metallic kind that are very difficult to remove – particularly from the paper covers found on books and comics. Minotaur also shrinkwraps all its products (or at least all the ones I buy) but does this over the top of the price sticker. You you take the wrapping off and expect a nice, pristine book only to discover it’s still got this ugly sticker on it. Attempting to remove it results in tearing the cover half the time or, at the very least, leaves behind a sticky residue.

I have to wonder why they couldn’t just put the stickers on top of the shrinkwrap. Seriously, why? Are they worried that people will be able to remove them easier in the store and make off with their valuable merchandise? If you’ve ever been in the store you’d probably realise such a thing is extremely unlikely – the only people who frequent the shop loyal fans who are not likely to go on a shoplifting spree. If this is a concern, why not just shrinkwrap the books twice or something?

Basically, I cannot see any logical reason why Minotaur would insist on making the buyer’s purchase that little bit less valuable. So please Minotaur – put the price stickers on after you’ve shrinkwrapped them!

Such is the case with the newest Ctrl+Alt+Del:

Now compare that to this Penny Arcade comic from exactly two months ago:

Damn, Tim could have at least tried to throw in some Lord of the Rings reference at the same time…

Say what? I didn’t realise the ACCC had a problem with Google’s search results!

Going and looking at the results themselves I have to wonder what the problem is:

Do the results look “misleading”? Here’s a version highlighting the sponsored links:

I think having the sponsored links off to the right and at the top of the main results highlighted with a different background colour makes it pretty obvious they’re different. The words “Sponsored Links” helps too. So what could be the problem here? Anyone have any idea?

Ray tracing has always been interesting to me. For one thing it’s how “real” rendering works so whenever you render something in Maya or 3D Studio MAX you’re most likely seeing ray tracing at work. Ever since reading Black Art of 3D Game Programming way back in my youth (nearly a decade ago now) I always wondered why ray tracing wasn’t being put into games. The answer was, of course, that the performance is terrible. From the sounds of the article this is slowly becoming a non-issue.

The other obvious question then is that, if ray tracing scales so well on multi-core processors, then wouldn’t dedicated hardware such as, I don’t know, a GPU allow for real-time rendering? Modern GPUs are essentially hugely parallel processing systems and it seems rendering billions of rays per second with dedicated hardware would be a lot faster and free up the CPU for doing more important things. I haven’t heard anything about AMD, NVIDIA or even Intel thinking about adding ray tracing to their GPUs. The closest thing I’ve heard is a thing called SaarCOR which seems to be designed as an architecture for creating real-time ray tracing hardware. The latest news on the site is from 2005 though so I don’t have a lot of hope for them. Back in 2004 the following progress had been made:

Video and images are rendered in realtime on the SaarCOR Prototype FPGA implementation running at 90 MHz.
This small prototype with only one rendering pipeline achieves already realtime frame rates of 15 to 60 fps in 512×384 and 32 bit colour depth and between 5 to 15 fps at 1024×768 in our benchmark scenes as presented on this page. Thus the prototype with on 90 MHz already achieves the performance of the highly optimized OpenRT software ray tracer on a (virtual) Pentium-4 with 8 to 12 GHz!

See here for more info. What this tells me is that dedicated hardware really is capable, already, of performing real-time ray tracing. The aforementioned prototype had a single pipeline running at 90MHz but a modern GPU typically has at least 8 pipelines running at speeds around 500MHz, with high-end cards hitting 32 pipelines and around 700MHz. What kind of frame rates would be possible using that kind of hardware? Seeing as ray tracing seems to scale almost linearly with the number of CPU cores, I’d apply a similar reasoning here and say that speeds of 200 fps at 1024×768 should be possible. If ray tracing scales well with the number of pixels as well, which is seems to do, then even larger displays with 1920×1200 resolutions should run at good speeds (~60 fps).

Of course, this is all purely guesswork on my part but I don’t think I’m that far off on my estimates. So why don’t we have this hardware? I’d fathom the reason is simply that it’d be too expensive for the graphics chip makers to attempt to come up with a completely new architecture for ray tracing that also has to accommodate the existing rasterisation architectures and capabilities.

In terms of software, I think being able to use high performance ray tracing when building a graphics engine would be a dream come true. Suddenly things that require lots of tricks, techniques and black magic to achieve, such as shadows and reflections, are handled completely automatically by the ray tracing system. All you’d have to do is define the meshes and the materials to be placed upon them along with the lights and cameras (and action?) and almost everything else would be taken care of. Advanced effects would have to be programmed into the pipeline but I don’t see many of those being needed often as currently most games are just trying to achieve as much realism as possible in their graphics.

The PC Perspective article also has some information about how anti-aliasing and texture filtering can be efficiently achieved through ray tracing. Collision detection can also be done via ray tracing as the maths is essentially the same.

There is an existing project called OpenRT that aims to provide an API, similar to OpenGL, for interfacing with low-level ray tracing hardware and software which could be used by game developers. I’m a bit dubious about this though since they’re not really “open” in the sense of using open source software but that’s not really all that different from OpenGL. What we need is an open source implementation so that more people can start playing around with the API. One is already in progress and we’ll have to wait and see how successful it becomes.

Overall, I’d say the future looks bright for the use of ray tracing in games but we need to start seeing real commitment from GPU makers to start implementing the functionality. Running on CPUs is alright in the short term for experimentation and development but it’s not very viable in the long run.

Tabs.

This is, after all, pretty much what tabs were invented for. On top of that using spaces have the following problems:

• They require too many for decent indentation. As in, at least 2 spaces per indentation level.
• They make it harder to change the level of indentation.
• Indenting and outdenting is slower.
• They add unnecessary bulk to the character count. (Important for things like HTML.)

The only decent argument I heard against tabs is that they’re often too large (such as equivalent to 8 spaces). My response to this: I never realised we were meant to cater to Notepad users! Seriously, do you just not know how to adjust the tab display size in your editor?

As for the even more important debate about many spaces a tab should be:

Four.

That is all.

1. Not letting the viewer skip or fast forward things

   Especially if those things are useless copyright information (mostly in other languages) or titles for the publisher. I’m trying to decide which I hate more: a 40 second copyright screen or a 2 minute “pirating DVDs is bad” video. The anti-pirating video is annoying and completely useless for most people (”oh … I was fully intending on pirating this DVD that I just bought until I saw this!”) but, on the other hand, the copyright screen is downright boring.

   Copyright information at the end of a show can be quite annoying as well when it’s not skippable. Particularly if it prevents you returning to the menu for several minutes so you can’t watch the next episode. The Dead Like Me DVDs actually prevented me using the stop button! I’m not sure why the DVD specifications would say this is allowed…

2. Long pre-menu intros

   In particular, intros which are exactly the same as the opening credits in the actual show. I’m looking at you Farscape. Movies which show the highlights from the movie itself are pretty bad as well, most of all if they end up containing spoilers!

3. Not having a chapter start immediately after the opening titles

   DVDs allow you to jump around so why can’t I use it to skip the minute long opening credits?

4. Interlacing

   Can the world just agree that interlacing is no longer necessary, is a terrible way to format video and move on?

5. Not including a “Play All” option

   Repeatedly stepping through menus to watch each episode of a series gets really old, really fast. Particularly if each episode has its own submenu.

Now, some of these things, I feel, should not be part of the DVD spec at all. Unskippable content? Sure it’s good for the publishing company because they get to have their logo displayed and piss us off with anti-piracy campaigns … but we’ve already paid for the damn discs so why should they care? The ironic thing is that pirated DVDs do not suffer from these problems!

Interlacing is really just a pet peeve of mine. I can understand why it was needed back in the ancient days of television but for (almost) the last decade or so it’s been largely useless, particularly now that we have digital TV … which still allows for interlacing. Except that digital interlacing is downright stupid because the interlaced version of a resolution is roughly the same quality as the non-interlaced version of the resolution below it. For example, 1080i is roughly the same as 720p. Even for shows that are old and were created with TV in mind, surely the production studio can just run the footage through a de-interlacing filter before putting it on the DVD? Since there are multiple kinds of interlacing DVD viewers sometimes can find an optimal one to use. For example, when watching Babylon 5 on PowerDVD enabling de-interlacing creates artefacts on the still shots but not enabling it produces artefacts in motion shots! Am I expected to switch between them manually?

So there you have it, my top 5 annoying things about DVDs. So far.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic development for the open source community. Microsoft has basically pledged to support the Novell developers by providing test suites and the like so that complete compatibility can be (almost) guaranteed. This would mean that application written for Silverlight on Windows or Mac would run just as well in Linux or any platform supported by Mono and Moonlight. Microsoft has also said they will provide, for free, binaries such as video and audio codecs that will be capable of plugging in to Moonlight. I thought this was obvious if Moonlight is a perfect clone of Silverlight but I guess that means they won’t try to place some sort of WGA crap in the way.

One thing that could potentially be very positive about this development is that it is going to put a good deal of pressure on Adobe to make Flash more open. Currently Adobe provides Flash binaries for Linux but these sometimes lag behind the Windows and Mac versions, there is no (native) 64-bit version available and the binaries are protected by a license agreement that prohibits them being bundled with distributions. Moonlight, on the other hand, has no such restrictions, should support any platforms (64-bit or otherwise) that Mono does and the development team has already done an incredible job of keeping up with Silverlight development – even before it was officially released! Currently only Firefox is supported but other browsers should be on their way. If Adobe wants to keep hold of the “rich internet media” market then they’re going to make some compromises with the open source community (especially Linux users).

The other area that Adobe might be feeling some heat is with their upcoming AIR runtime. The promise of AIR is significant but there is a fundamental problem that it relies on proprietary Adobe runtimes so true cross-platform support is unlikely and it is doubtful that Linux distributions will be able to include the runtimes as part of their base systems, which I think somewhat limits the possibilities. The Moonlight team have already said that they would like to allow desktop applications to be built with the software. Moonlight will, most likely, lack any ability to create applications with HTML & JavaScript (as AIR does) but this might not be that important in the long run.

Of course, where one sees potential for greater openness by the big players in the market, others may see a strategic move by Microsoft, which is the first step in another “embrace and extend” campaign. Basically, they could push Adobe out of the market by killing Flash and, when this has been achieved, they can start adding “Genuine Microsoft Silverlight”-only extensions and tools which pushes users and developers to Microsoft’s platforms, where they can increase the amount of vendor lock in. Personally I don’t think this is the case right now but I don’t doubt that the company would be willing to take advantage of such a situation if it starts to arise (who wouldn’t?).

I would like to start exploring this new technology further once Moonlight and its development tools have progressed a bit further. Anything that can bring a richer internet experience to everyone, no matter what platform they use, is a good thing in my book. I’m a bit worried that all this might depend on using .Net software on the server or something so further research is definitely needed.

Need I Point Out The Obvious?

I think one of the fundamental flaws in the article is the logical contradiction that becomes evident near the end. The author argues that competition is not good because it sets up non-competition (a monopoly), which leads to stagnation of the technology. I’m not sure how Kroc didn’t notice but this contradicts the rest of the article. Competition is bad, but non-competition is worse? Sorry but a market either has competition or it doesn’t. If there’s only one vendor then there’s a monopoly; two vendors and there’s competition. I fail to see how a “lesser of two evils” scenario isn’t immediately obvious.

Price vs. Quality

Kroc points out that a low price does not necessarily mean a low TCO, which is quite true, but I think there might be something missing here. That thing is the fact that price is not the only reason people buy products. To use the car manufacturer analogy, if people only bought things for price then no-one would ever purchase a Mercades over a Daewoo. Quality is a factor in all purchasing decisions but – and this is the important part – people have to weight this against the price and decide whether it’s worth it and whether they’re really only getting ripped off.

Perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about is the case of Apple Inc. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would argue that Apple makes cheap products. What they do make (or are meant to make anyway) is products with superior quality. According to Kroc’s slightly short-sighted view of the competition process this must mean that they don’t get any business. Yet every year Apple pumps out more and more stock that is eagerly snapped up by the public. Sure, not everyone likes having to pay hundreds of dollars more for basically the same hardware as a PC but they pay extra for the extra quality.

Competition vs. Standards

Competition gives us the current format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray as well as the plague that is DRM. Surely that means it’s bad right? Again, this isn’t entirely true. Here, standardisation must be used a counter-force to competition. This isn’t a pipe dream either: the reason there’s a format war at the moment is, basically, because the two sides were two pig-headed to agree on what the features to combine from both were. The camps did try to sort out a solution whereby there would be a single format for HD content but no compromise was ever reached. Good work human nature.

As for DRM, well, this isn’t actually caused by competition but by paranoia and complete disrespect for consumers. Instead of doing the intelligent thing by lowering artificially high prices, providing enhanced quality, including extra features and so on, the record labels instead chose to treat all of their customers like scum. They didn’t even try to compete, they tried to strong-arm the industry into a shape that they preferred. This is not what competition means.

So, I think the thing to realise here is that, while competition can be good, it does need to be tempered by some sort of standardisation and rules. This is why we’re meant to have government bodies doing things like inspecting quality to make sure that it doesn’t fall below acceptable levels or that companies don’t engage in unfair business practices, or standardisation bodies to make sure there’s a base that everyone agrees to work with.

Driving Technology … Into The Ground?

I like the choice that is given:

• A 1 GHz computer that was ultimately efficient, 100% interoperable with all equipment, all standards and with no proprietary lock-in;
• A 4GHz computer running Windows Vista.

Whilst I do understand what the author is saying here, I think (yet again) that there are some things missing.

First of all, no mention is made of what operating system that 1GHz computer is running. Similarly, why does the 4GHz computer need to run Windows Vista? If there’s a more efficient OS out there, then why not run that on the 4GHz machine? Logically that would be the ideal option.

Secondly, we again come back to a question of getting what you pay for and whether or not that’s really worth it. It’s entirely possible that someone could create an operating system that would boot instantly, be ideally efficient, etc – the only problem is no-one is willing to pay $10,000 for it. Say what? You see, it turns out that programmer pay checks are really the biggest cost involved in creating software. No company would be willing to spent an extra few years tweaking their software to run as fast as humanly possible when people only care that it runs fast enough and is cheap enough (and those companies that tried this are now in the graveyard of the tech industry). Microsoft has gotten to where it is today by building software that’s “good enough” for most people, while being significantly cheaper.

Continuing on from that last point, and coming back to the price vs. quality debate again, is that the software from days of the Amiga and RISC OS simply does not have the features of the “bloated” software of today. True, some of that bloat is unnecessary due to unnecessary features, poor designs, poor programming, etc, but overall it’s because it’s simply too expensive to add in a new feature without increasing lag or boot time or whatever. Usually software engineers correctly make the right choice when it comes to decision between features, cost and performance.

Hardware and software are actually not as “in cahoots” as some people may think. Intel does not keep pumping out faster and faster chips because Microsoft makes slower and slower software. If Intel didn’t make faster and more efficient chips then people would stop buying them, regardless of whether or not the software ran fine on them. After all, competition always results in a rival that puts out a superior product for the same price.

I do think one quote from the article is particularly telling: “Imagine an Amiga after 25 years of constant leading progress …” Hang on, what does “leading progress” mean? Leading who? I think the author is inadvertently referring to Amiga out-competing it’s competitors. Yet it didn’t. IBM won out because it had hardware and software that were good enough for consumers, while being cheaper, and because IBM and Microsoft just did a much better job of selling their systems. People won’t buy what they don’t know is there.

Anti-competition

I do agree with this but I’ve actually already written the counter-point above. It’s only natural that a business will use every trick in the book to get ahead and make more money … if they can get away with it. Especially if it ends up turning customers away. People are pretty stupid in general but eventually everyone wakes up. Notice that the tide is starting to turn on the DRM issue. The music industry is starting to find out that, as people wake up to what DRM is and what the consequences are (”what – you mean I can’t copy the song onto my iPod!?!?!”), customers are going to stop buying those products and their customer base is going to start dwindling away.

As consumers we also depend on third parties to step in to mediate some times. In Australia the ACCC is meant to act as a corporate watchdog and protect us from cheating companies. They don’t always do their job effectively but it’s a lot better than if they weren’t there.

Summary

The take away message is that all the problems with competition laid out in the article are not really problems with competition itself but problems with how companies approach competition or expose a lack of proper control over the process. On the whole competition completely results in better conditions for consumers, we just have to be careful that we don’t trust in the process too much and weed out the poor products from the good ones.

I also think that, if you’re going to write such an article, you should check that the fundamental point (”competition is not good”) is actually backed up by what you’re saying and that you’re not really saying something else (”competition is not always ideal in and of itself – but it’s better than the alternative”).