130 replies to this topic

[Dan Borman]

We've seen many release dates come and go, here's another one:

Manifold's OEMs who do not require extensive supporting code have been working with new Manifold technology for over a year. Work at Manifold is steadily proceeding to incorporate the new technology into new retail GIS products. Those will provide improved performance when released - probably later this year.

From this Manifold Forum thread: http://www.georefere...forum/t115480.5

Hoping not to be disappointed come January 1, 2013.

I think sending these hints out is a set up as an annual sheduled task

[Dan Borman]

I think sending these hints out is a set up as an annual sheduled task

Actually, silly jokes aside, I suspect that Mike's comment regarding making Windows utility code thread safe is very telling, offering an insight into why the release date continues to remain elusive.

[BCowper]

Actually, silly jokes aside, I suspect that Mike's comment regarding making Windows utility code thread safe is very telling, offering an insight into why the release date continues to remain elusive.

Still can't get past the feeling they've been working on other higher priority/profit products and Manifold was put on the back burner. Mike is a pretty straight shooter over there, so hopefully that means the focus has returned to getting Manifold 9 out.

[NicKV]

We've seen many release dates come and go, here's another one:

Manifold's OEMs who do not require extensive supporting code have been working with new Manifold technology for over a year. Work at Manifold is steadily proceeding to incorporate the new technology into new retail GIS products. Those will provide improved performance when released - probably later this year.

From this Manifold Forum thread: http://www.georefere...forum/t115480.5

Hoping not to be disappointed come January 1, 2013.

I was hoping that i would not be disappointed on January 1, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, so i wont be holding my breath just yet.

It appears to be a case of "Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today", with this company and its product.

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Jam_tomorrow

And in other but related news...

Microsoft reaches a settlement with Uniloc over the former's infringement of Uniloc patents.

[Dan Borman]

Actually, silly jokes aside, I suspect that Mike's comment regarding making Windows utility code thread safe is very telling, offering an insight into why the release date continues to remain elusive.

Still can't get past the feeling they've been working on other higher priority/profit products and Manifold was put on the back burner. Mike is a pretty straight shooter over there, so hopefully that means the focus has returned to getting Manifold 9 out.

But wouldn't that make perfect business sense to you? I don't think Manifold can be accused of not being upfront about being a commercial entity.
If I was a business and had developed some (revolutionary) new technology, I'm pretty sure I would want to focus on the most profitable markets first and one where presumably they will also be getting valuable real world deployment feedback from fellow software engineers. If they have pulled off what has been tantalizingly hinted at all these years, the value of the technology would reach far beyond sensibly priced GIS.

Edited by Dan Borman, 30 March 2012 - 03:57 PM.

[Dale A]

Actually, silly jokes aside, I suspect that Mike's comment regarding making Windows utility code thread safe is very telling, offering an insight into why the release date continues to remain elusive.

Still can't get past the feeling they've been working on other higher priority/profit products and Manifold was put on the back burner. Mike is a pretty straight shooter over there, so hopefully that means the focus has returned to getting Manifold 9 out.

But wouldn't that make perfect business sense to you? I don't think Manifold can be accused of not being upfront about being a commercial entity.
If I was a business and had developed some (revolutionary) new technology, I'm pretty sure I would want to focus on the most profitable markets first and one where presumably they will also be getting valuable real world deployment feedback from fellow software engineers. If they have pulled off what has been tantalizingly hinted at all these years, the value of the technology would reach far beyond sensibly priced GIS.

I note that one well known Manifold representative on the Geo forum has an interest in a render cluster service. I wonder if that is where some of the effort has gone. As an aside, if future versions are coming out this year, then we should start to hear the odd rumour of beta testing offers very soon, if not now.

[BCowper]

But wouldn't that make perfect business sense to you? I don't think Manifold can be accused of not being upfront about being a commercial entity.
If I was a business and had developed some (revolutionary) new technology, I'm pretty sure I would want to focus on the most profitable markets first and one where presumably they will also be getting valuable real world deployment feedback from fellow software engineers. If they have pulled off what has been tantalizingly hinted at all these years, the value of the technology would reach far beyond sensibly priced GIS.

I wasn't arguing that it's not good business sense, its great for Manifold/CDA if that's the case, but frustrating for us users. Personally the 4-5 year gap has meant switching to ArcGIS for all my end product maps, as the limited cartographic capabilities that we hoped would be improved, have remained the same. It has also lead me to not promoting the product to fellow colleagues with as much enthusiasm. But I still use 8 frequently and it still beats ArcGIS 10 for spatial and data analysis in many areas. I'm just not going to get my hopes up for something that may never materialize in a similar fashion to MapInfo's infamous Project Grande; I'll get my jam elsewhere.

[Dan Borman]

I wasn't arguing that it's not good business sense, its great for Manifold/CDA if that's the case, but frustrating for us users. Personally the 4-5 year gap has meant switching to ArcGIS for all my end product maps, as the limited cartographic capabilities that we hoped would be improved, have remained the same. It has also lead me to not promoting the product to fellow colleagues with as much enthusiasm. But I still use 8 frequently and it still beats ArcGIS 10 for spatial and data analysis in many areas. I'm just not going to get my hopes up for something that may never materialize in a similar fashion to MapInfo's infamous Project Grande; I'll get my jam elsewhere.

I find myself in the same boat. I love the software, but find all the secrecy enormously frustrating. I used to recommend it left, right and center, though have eased back from this in the last couple of years due to the ongoing version drought.
What keeps me going is that 8 (especially at 64bit) remains a terrific tool and 4-5 years in the more complicated the task I throw at it, the more capable it seems and the more I realize just how thoughtfully it has been put together.

[tonyw]

Hi,
This is encouraging, an update to 8.0.28 Manifold 8 http://www.manifold....tes/updates.htm It's been 8 months (Oct 2011 to June 2012) since the last update. I was losing hope. However this new update has some performance improvements along with the regular fixes so that's a good sign development is continuing.

I'm still on my self imposed exile from participating in the official Manifold forum given the change in tone in how the forum is moderated. I was banned for posting what I thought was useful info for implementing Manifold IMS, but I inadvertently mentioned the name of non-Manifold software/service (Hamachi ,there I said it again).

-Tony

[NicKV]

Hi,
This is encouraging, an update to 8.0.28 Manifold 8 http://www.manifold....tes/updates.htm It's been 8 months (Oct 2011 to June 2012) since the last update. I was losing hope. However this new update has some performance improvements along with the regular fixes so that's a good sign development is continuing.

I'm still on my self imposed exile from participating in the official Manifold forum given the change in tone in how the forum is moderated. I was banned for posting what I thought was useful info for implementing Manifold IMS, but I inadvertently mentioned the name of non-Manifold software/service (Hamachi ,there I said it again).

-Tony

It is almost five years since version 8x was published.

I do not share your view that it is encouraging. That they have released a series of bug fixes, is hardly cause for celebration. It just indicates that the company is not quite dead. That they have done this suggests that a new release is not imminent, as there would be little purpose in doing it if it were.

Something looks like it has gone badly wrong inside this company. Feel free to pick 'n mix from the following possible reasons:

• A global recession and lack of financial support from banks and venture capitalists.
• Bad management
• An over ambitious premature and unexpectedly time consuming development strategy of the technically very challenging objective of parallelisation of software a use multicore CPUs and GPUs, that is aiming to be revolutionary when it should have been evolutionary
• Only supporting hardware and software of one GPU manufacturer is a decision that perhaps now haunting them. Picking the wrong GPU hardware manufacturer and it proprietary programming language and API to support , in Nvidia over AMD and its support for open standards, when it should have hedged its options and developed software that supported use of GPUs from both manufacturers. Nvidia has had numerous technical problems with and has been barely able to manufacture its Fermi and Keplar generations of GPUs Manifold System 9x parallisation was intended to reliant on, whereas AMD's latest GCN GPUs are available volume from date of release. Additionally, Keplar GPUs have very poor DP FLOPS performance compared to AMD GCN GPUs which thrash Keplar at DP and SP benchmarks. The lavish praise heaped on Nvidia by Manifold Software suggests that Manifold Software may have taken development money from Nvidia for the former to develop its software to run on Nvidia's GPUs, perhaps with the caveat that it would not develop or delay delopment of its software to run on AMD GPUs and Fusion APUs.
• Loss of senior development staff.
• Lawsuits over patent infringement
• GIS development is no longer their core business and priority
• Other, unknown.

Also, Manifold Software's development strategy is one that it is a very risky one for the following additional reason. The company receives numerous submissions from users about what they would like to see in the next version. From these submissions it picks some that it will incorporate. Some of these submissions are technically trivial others are very complex. Manifold Software has openly stated it does not employ developers with anything other than a background in computing and mathematics. Very worryingly, it does not employ developers with backgrounds in GIS generally, earth or environmental sciences, surveying, cartography or remote sensing etc etc which risks a systemic failure to understand in depth what is being asked for. Why something has to be done the way requested and not another. Because of the paranoia of the business, there is no feedback discussion with the user community during development and especially those that have submitted suggestions, about how the suggestions are going to be/being implemented. There is then a great risk that after a great deal of time and money has been spent developing a submission, that the end result is not what is required, is implemented in a non-standard and unverified way, does not meet user expectations or produces an incorrect or questionable results. This is especially true for scientifically complex proposals, where there is an established, verified, standard and/or scientifically correct way to process information, and if this is not followed, the results are unacceptable, period. Even then, even if done right, the GUI design for providing new feature might then suck.

Edited by NicKV, 01 July 2012 - 03:58 AM.

[tonyw]

Hi Nick,
Good points, I don't dispute them.

Re: NVIDIA, I bought into that technology having purchased a Manifold specific desktop 15 months ago. The PC was nicely spec'd out for that time in anticipation of Manifold 9. It's still a nice PC and I'm using it occasionally for editing video but it sits unused otherwise. Manifold 8 still runs satisfactorily on my laptop.

[NicKV]

Hi Nick,
Good points, I don't dispute them.

Re: NVIDIA, I bought into that technology having purchased a Manifold specific desktop 15 months ago. The PC was nicely spec'd out for that time in anticipation of Manifold 9. It's still a nice PC and I'm using it occasionally for editing video but it sits unused otherwise. Manifold 8 still runs satisfactorily on my laptop.

Many people, myself included, did exactly what you did after V8x was released in anticipation of V9x.

You know, what really annoys me about this ongoing SNAFU, is that many of the suggestions for new features that others and I submitted for inclusion in a future version, did not require making use of GPUs. For example, I spent a huge amount of time researching and then writing up suggestions for image processing to enhance remote sensing images. None of the operations I suggested were so complex or advanced that they required GPUs. Most operations were based on mathematical expressions that could stated in three of four lines. They were the kinds of operations that had been provided in image processing software for years. They could be performed efficiently by using just a single CPU core. Most are even available in amateur freeware for gods sake. I would dearly like to go into that business and bang a few heads together!

Sadly, for all the hype and rhetoric, it is increasing looking like the emperor has no clothes.

[tonyw]

You know, what really annoys me about this ongoing SNAFU, is that many of the suggestions for new features that others and I submitted for inclusion in a future version, did not require making use of GPUs. ...Most are even available in amateur freeware for gods sake. I would dearly like to go into that business and bang a few heads together!

Sadly, for all the hype and rhetoric, it is increasing looking like the emperor has no clothes.

Hi Nick,
And some fixes should be relatively easy and would unleash so much usefulness. I posted on the Manifold forum that with the current implementation of using image servers, there is no way to select any of the coordinate systems offered by an OGS WMS. The Manifold rep wrote back that the ability to select a coordinate system would be a "feature" and is not a deficiency in the software. Yet even the open source GIS are able to select a coordinate system. This simple fix or feature, I don't care about the semantics, would let me tap into the lands and resource data our provincials government has made available. Sadly I have to move all my components to qGIS to use the images from a WMS in the standard provincial BCAlbers projection. Manifold is so close to being able to do this I don't understand why the developers stopped short.

[BCowper]

I thought AdamW's 5,00th post would coincide with the launch of Manifold 9, but alas it was not to be.

[NicKV]

And some fixes should be relatively easy and would unleash so much usefulness. I posted on the Manifold forum that with the current implementation of using image servers, there is no way to select any of the coordinate systems offered by an OGS WMS. The Manifold rep wrote back that the ability to select a coordinate system would be a "feature" and is not a deficiency in the software. Yet even the open source GIS are able to select a coordinate system. This simple fix or feature, I don't care about the semantics, would let me tap into the lands and resource data our provincials government has made available. Sadly I have to move all my components to qGIS to use the images from a WMS in the standard provincial BCAlbers projection. Manifold is so close to being able to do this I don't understand why the developers stopped short.

Because those who are developing the software are not in direct communication with and in tune with the needs and expectations, of those who use it. They do not understand how users want to use their software, what they want to do with it, nor the subjects/discipline their users are using their product in.

Edited by NicKV, 04 July 2012 - 09:42 AM.