First post here from long time Arc & first time Manifold user. My handle says it all, pronounced "Envy Idea". Get it? Nvidia rules!

Congrats to Manifold for supporting CUDA. I've been waiting for this a long time. I got a question, though, if anyone can comment: any guesstimate on when the hetero parallel technology in the press release at http://www.manifold.net/info/pr_gpu_record.shtml will come out? I see in other threads there is debate if this is a new version of Manifold or an upgrade to 8. Anyone know which it is?

It's going to be a paid upgrade, Manifold 9.0, priced at $50 - $100.

ArcGIS Project - Jings crivens help ma boab!

It's going to be a paid upgrade, Manifold 9.0, priced at $50 - $100.

A clarification: there's never been anything said outside of NDA on what the pricing policy for upgrades from the current Release 8 to any expected Release 9 will be.

Not true.

"The new Manifold technology previewed in London will ship in the first half of 2009 and will be offered to all Manifold Release 8 licensees for an update fee between $50 and $100 per license."

From Manifold Press Release at http://www.manifold.net/info/pr_gpu_record.shtml

Well, there are two ways of getting information on the roadmap for new products. One is guessing from snippets of text. If you do that you have to be careful not to read into the text information which is not there.

A much better way is to take advantage of the company's NDA presentations that cover the road map in detail. No need for any guesses then. I strongly have always recommended that people with a serious interest in futures should take advantage of the NDA presentations at user meetings.

Those meetings were advertised in this forum well in advance with all sorts of repeated advice that folks with an interest in the roadmap should make it a point to attend. At those meetings people could have asked any question they wanted to clarify anything they felt was not discussed in sufficient detail in the, what? 200+? slides that were presented and demos given.

However, if anyone failed to attend those meetings and now wants to make guesses, it becomes necessary to pay close attention to whatever text is being guessed at. For example, in the quotation above it says nothing about Release 9 but is careful to steer people into 8. It refers only to the new Manifold heterogeneous parallelization GPU technology that is discussed in that press release, which people who attended the NDA meetings know is not even the defining characteristic of the next product. As I noted in my other posting in this thread that new GPU technology was a candidate for being released as an add on to 8.

I will repeat what I have written many, many times in this forum: if you have an interest in new products you must take advantage of the opportunities to learn about them in detail at user meetings. This is much better than reading tea leaves or guessing.

Oh, come on, Dimitri. You said, "A clarification: there's never been anything said outside of NDA on what the pricing policy for upgrades from the current Release 8 to any expected Release 9 will be."

A press release published on the Manifold site listed a price.

That's hardly "guessing from snippets of text." Pretty unambiguous, actually, considering you just told us there would be no 8.x.

A press release published on the Manifold site listed a price.

There are a lot of prices listed on the Manifold site, not one of them being for a new release. Suppose we had issued a GPU extension for 8, as an option instead of having to buy Surface Tools. What then? It would have been a very good product with lots of buyers. We could have tossed in a few dozen raster image functions in addition to surfaces and sold it for $100 a pop. That would be a steal considering what remote sensing packages go for, so even if you do only a part of it here or there but you do it very fast $100 is slam-dunk. Not a bad idea, as there is big demand for that. It is actually tempting because it is easy to do and would make a lot of revenue. But it would not have been the right thing and it would have led to bad feelings later on I think if people thought they had been lured into double-paying. I almost regret joining this thread because now we can't do it. :-)

That's hardly "guessing from snippets of text." Pretty unambiguous, actually, considering you just told us there would be no 8.x.

To be more accurate, I wrote nothing about any "8.x." If you are going to hang your hat on reading tea leaves (not something I recommend) you have to make sure you are extrapolating from correct details. If you read what I said (which was written perfectly openly in a single go) it is all talk about extensions, not about a new 8x product.

if you have an interest in new products you must take advantage of the opportunities to learn about them in detail at user meetings

In 2008, there was a Users Meeting in Ontario Canada, but unfortunately no Manifold representation to discuss upcoming products or allow us to sign an NDA.

My company doesn't allow me to travel outside of the province so I was unable to attend the one in the US (let alone the one overseas). I've inquired with Manifold about signing an NDA but they turned me down.

After a while, it truly makes future planning difficult trying to guess what Manifold is doing next and no word from Manifold on their future plans.

It's unfortunate that your company doesn't allow you to travel outside of the province, but that's not Manifold's fault. For the last few years there have been two user meetings a year, one in Europe and one in the US, with a variety of other settings. In 2008, for example, I gave at least four other talks, including one at the GeoTec 2008 conference in Ottawa to which readers of this forum were invited (http://forum.manifold.net/forum/t65521.1).

One reason Manifold goes to the effort of producing massive presentations to give in person is that we believe the material is dense and technically complex and that it is a highly serious matter to be treated with the greatest respect. Those who have a sufficiently serious interest to show up in person to make the commitment the seriousness of the material warrants are welcome to come and to learn.

The company also takes competition seriously as do other GIS companies, all of whom are more than a little tense at who will gain or lose share in the multibillion dollar GIS industry. As those who follow, say, ESRI closely can tell you, ESRI are acutely interested in what Manifold is doing and often have followed Manifold's initiatives. There's no point in giving ESRI or any other competitors advance information on Manifold's plans. In-person presentations under NDA provide a way for Manifold users who have a serious interest in futures to get roadmap information with fewer risks of broadcasting that information to competitors.

I'd also point out that the costs of attending a user meeting can be very low. Round-trip airfares in Europe have been very low to London, and attending a user meeting in the US can be done easily for under $1000. If your company has a serious enough need to know Manifold's roadmap, that's a small expense and well within what people routinely spend to attend other technology events such as Oracle's annual gathering, NVIDIA's Nvision and so on.

Well I'm now really confused, if the previously announced $50/$100 cost isn't for the upgrade to 9.0 what is it for?

Edit: from reading Dimitri's comments it sounds like there was a potential update planned for 8.0 that got shelved, I'd always assumed that the announcement was for an upgrade to 9.0. You know what they say about assuming.

What with this and the expired potential release date for 9.0 can Manifold.net return to their normal silence on new tehnologies until they're nearly out the door?

ArcGIS Project - Jings crivens help ma boab!

Well I'm now really confused, if the previously announced $50/$100 cost isn't for the upgrade to 9.0 what is it for?

Have you read my other posts in this thread? If there is anything in the post that begins with "Welcome to..." and ends with "...as those come along" which is confusing I apologize for not writing with sufficient clarity or length. As you may know, English is not my native language so I am always ready to rephrase my words to clear up any confusion.

In case the technical content of the prior Press Release is causing any confusion, by the way, I strongly encourage you to re-read it to understand the focus of the new GPU technology and its relation to Release 8. I thought that page took pains to focus on Release 8, but I can see how that may have been misunderstood if someone had something else in mind.

Whatever the price, it'll be good value if past upgrades are any indication. Really looking formard to v9.

and the expired potential release date for 9.0

What expired potential release date? Manifold has never issued a release date for 9, nor, for that matter, for any prior release. It's never been done that way and never will be. That's how the process works, as the various NDA presentations on the development process take pains to make clear.

Fair enough I should have said 'and the now no longer to be released CUDA update for 8.0', which was announced:

the new technology is released sometime in the first half of 2009.

ArcGIS Project - Jings crivens help ma boab!

Welcome to the forum. I like your handle, as NVIDIA indeed rules. :-)

We popped out those press releases to make it clear by counter-example that some talk that was going on regarding the fortunes of NVIDIA was total BS. It was being said that CUDA was limited to only one or at most two GPUs. We knew from two years of work that was not so and you could run as many GPUs as you could physically fit into a motherboard, and that the attacks on NVIDIA were unfair and totally inaccurate. [They also had the potential to threaten our rollout of what we'd spent a long time working on. :-) ] So we decided to do some hands-on demonstrations that you could indeed run six or even eight GPUs and to publish a cookbook for how to do it. This also fit very well with our plans to show off a bit on our own stuff, made for some interesting demos and press coverage, and to build commercial recognition/demand for CUDA usage (positioning for an upcoming product we have).

The demos were very successful and the press coverage was mind-boggling. Besides doing interviews with what seems to be hundreds of outlets worldwide, I have personally demo'd those machines several dozen times to our partners, all of whom now have very active CUDA projects. There have by now been at least a couple of hundred E boxes of various kinds built (see the second press release for a link to the building instructions for an E box). Several of the world's largest technology companies are now doing CUDA development using Manifold E boxes or their own designs directly derived from our E box. At one point there were so many E boxes being built with four GTX 295 cards each that the supply of 295's nationwide was used up and the transition to single PCB was messed up for lack of stock on dual PCB cards. Out of stock everywhere. Everyone now knows, for sure, hands-on, you can run eight GPUs (two per card, four cards per box) doing CUDA. I am very proud to say we played a small role in all that.

Of course, having made a fuss like that about six to nine months ahead of when we planned we had to figure out something tangible to back it up with. Our original plans were to take the CUDA technology we have developed for our next new Manifold product and to package it this summer in a separate product for immediate release. Release 8 already uses CUDA so the wiring is inside there for extending CUDA usage fairly easily. It would have been relatively easy to add a new parallel extension product for 8 that provided heterogeneous parallelization with more CUDA functions. This also would have made it possible for Release 8 people who were not ready to make the jump to our next release, 9, not to feel pressured about having to move, and it would have decoupled some relatively tactical CUDA things from the strategic objectives of 9 and claims of those objectives on moving the 9 schedule closer in or further out. However, 9 was going so well that we decided that it would be stupid to issue an extension to 8 when within a few months no one would want to be using it because 9 would become the next new thing. Also, people might have ended up feeling cheated if they paid $50 or $100 for an extension to 8 and then discovered that all that is in 9 anyway and they end up paying a fee to get to 9. It's a small fee in any event but you know how it is - nobody likes it if they feel they've had to pay even a small fee twice for the same thing.

So the decision was made that all plans to issue any new extensions to 8 are off the table. That's been overtaken by 9, which I expect will be out this year assuming we don't add any big new things to it (there's talk about adding localization for national languages but I think that's best put off for next year). 9 has grown a lot, more than doubled in size from plans even earlier this year, bringing forward things that used to be planned for 10, but I think that however much we feel we have a big window of opportunity it's time to use that window with a big new release this year so people have some time to digest it before we lay yet more new stuff on them.

8, of course, will be continued to be supported with routine updates. I agree it's annoying to have old news up on the website, but our policy in the past for better or for worse has been to leave the chips where they fall and to not amend archived pages.

By the way, I've searched the forum and don't see any other threads with a debate like you mention. What thread would that be? I'm curious as that discussion was supposed to be very confidential information. :-) For a roadmap or any details on future releases, Manifold policy is to provide such information only under an NDA in face to face meetings, such as at a user meeting.

Hope this helps. You've made the right choice with Nvidia, although of course in the future Manifold will also be supporting GPGPU processing from AMD as well as massively parallel architectures from Intel as well as those come along.

Wow! Thanks for the detailed answer. I know what you mean with the GTX 295. I tried to get one in May and couldn't find any in stock. I like the E box instructions. Did you write them? I'm going to build an E box using the ASUS P6T7 mobo and EVGA CO-OP GTX 295, mostly for folding.

The thread I read is http://forum.manifold.net/forum/t77740.87

I think your strategy is right. Go for the new product and don't add on to the old product. I don't care about foreign languages so don't waste time on that!

The thread I read is http://forum.manifold.net/forum/t77740.87

OK. I see what's going on. Since you are new to the forum, let me take a moment for some information that may help you or others.

A while back the forum got big enough that some users were complaining other users were making posts they'd rather not see. You know, the usual friction, trolls, spam, people being objectionable or annoying to someone's tastes, etc., that happens as forums grow. So the forum admins added the ability to maintain personal blacklists of people whose posts you're not interested in seeing, and there was also a system blacklist for truly objectionable trolls that's on by default. You can control these settings by clicking on your Profile and scrolling down to the bottom where the controls are.

However, if you add someone to your "do not display" list you don't see any threads they've started. I don't like wasting my time on rude or unproductive folks so I added the author of that thread on my "do not display" box once that capability became available. Adios author, and, (the way it works) adios to any threads that author started. I suppose that's a cautionary tale both for the design of the forum and for usage since giving each individual the right to customize their viewing also means there will be some splitting up of the forum into different subsections, but there's no way to tell who is or has not turned someone off and thus a thread. Maybe that's good because in some cases it is an object lession not to associate with people who are unproductive, rude or likely to turn off others who may have contributions that interest you.

There's also a cautionary tale in taking with a grain of salt comments from folks who for whatever reason are not informed or who discuss misinformation. Everyone who knows the roadmap doesn't discuss it in a public forum because they are under NDA. Everyone had the opportunity to join in and learn the roadmap in intense detail - sign an NDA and manage to stay awake and pay attention through hours of detailed presentations and you know the score. :-)

Everyone had the opportunity to join in and learn the roadmap in intense detail

Everyone who have the time and/or $.

IMS related products and services: Dynamic Maps

I agree it's annoying to have old news up on the website.

Why not a simple news release stating that all is going well but we're having too much fun adding new stuff to 9 and that it will be released possibly this year but possibly next year depending on what new items get added. It would ease the wondering and unnecessary posts.

Maybe you guys need an image of a rocket ship with the Manifold logo on it! :-)

Mike, I appreciate the spirit of the suggestion, but there is nothing on the website now that talks about 9 so it would confuse people to discuss it. What would that news release be? "Our unannounced plans for something we cannot discuss are proceeding just fine but since it is unannounced and we cannot discuss it outside an NDA this is all we can say?" :-) Outside of a small group of people on this forum and those who have attended user meetings there is no one who visits the website that has heard of 9.

Regarding any new products we might offer outside of 9 related to the GPU technology that's discussed in the two press releases, that's a more complex question. We know for now that Manifold won't offer an extension to 8. But that's not the only other possible product either by us or by our partners (this being a public forum that's all I will say in that direction) so how directionality could be offered that would not be more confusing than what is there now is not easy to say. The only way to discourage people from jumping to conclusions is to offer massive detail spelling out every possible thing. But that is not usually possible even if others are not involved, nor does it always discourage as many people from jumping to conclusions as it encourages. :-)

Regarding unnecessary posts, well, there's only a handful of those and that's always going to be the case in a forum. If someone doesn't read this thread, why repeat what it contains in some other setting that won't be read?

I see your point but still it seems that the press release others cited above says that something will ship in the 1st half of the year. Since the London meeting advertised a preview of 9, I assumed that meant version 9 was presented in London and that was its target release. Non-forum folks wouldn't see this as version 9 but rather some product with expanded CUDA technology.

Anyway your comments in this thread is all I was really after. That being version 9 is going well, more stuff is being added, and it will most likely be released this year. Surely that can only mean that Manifold is busy adding all my suggestions. :-)

Surely that can only mean that Manifold is busy adding all my suggestions. :-)

Well, most of them, sure. :-)

Given all the backpedaling Dimitri has done in this thread, maybe Manifold ought to just pull that press release off its site.

Dimitri can jailhouse-lawyer it all he wants, but at best, it's misleading.

I couldn't agree with you less Ralphie.

We now know that the view from the mountaintop has changed radically, for the better, since that press release was drafted.

Would you wish for something different? Not me.

Dimitri has even more frank than usual here and a lot of people will be grateful.

I don't wish for anything different.

I'm happy with what I read today.

I just think the press release was misleading.

Ralphie it is no need to be feeling about any misleading. It is easy to be other thinking and not be seeing the writing as the other is thinking. This is happening all of the time with technical. It is OK and normal. No person is to be blamed. Now we can be understanding the informations after discussion.

I have been studying about the press. A press means for the newspaper and the television and not for the Manifold. It is the writings for the press different than for the Manifold person. You cannot fit an elephant into thimble. It is more simple for the press.

I think they have been making the right decision. No need to dig the well every day to drink every day. Dig one good well and drink for many days.

Without getting childish, I hope:

The press release certainly wasn't misleading at the time. And bearing in mind its main purpose, which was to discuss what Manifold can do with CUDA, and what CUDA can do in the right hands, it isn't substantially misleading now.

It's just that if—as I and many other eager users have done—you read it with the sole purpose of devining when Manifold 9 might be released, you currently get the wrong message.

But let's give some credit where it's due. What Manifold 9 is has never been publicly defined by Manifold. What it is has evidently grown. (We know this from Dimitri's posts: plans for 9 have "more than doubled in size" compared with earlier this year. Words which are probably impressionistic rather than quantitative, but that does not detract from them.)

Manifold have collectively thought, more than a bit, about what should be in 9 and (thus) when it should be released. We (we enthusiastic users, who seem to feel a tug of "ownership" for the product) all respect the decisions embodied in past releases. So it's not much of a stretch to think their current decisions will also turn out right.

Dimitri, thank you for clearing the air on this subject. I too had certain impressions based on the snippets of official info available, the discussion in that related thread, and my own conclusions. I take this issue as a good sign that there is tremendous interest in the product and its possibilities, although the official silence was disconcerting in light of some of the comments (including those on an independent blog).

In my case, the challenge is how to make decisions on developing new product. I am a very small business, I have a product I want to develop using Manifold, and with both limited funds and only so much time to seize the opportunity, it is difficult to know whether to invest in the development using the current version, or to wait for an unspecified period of time.

Taking the IMS as the case in point: the web mapping landscape has changed significantly since version 8 was released. I have my own hypothesis about what we might see in the next version, although I haven't shared it in the forum because I might be wrong and because you wouldn't like to see wild speculation. If new horizons are opened up by Manifold or its partners with the next release, I suspect I would want to develop on that platform. I am afraid that the framework may be different enough that I would have wasted what I have to invest. On the other hand if I'm wrong, or if the framework is not changed significantly, I could be losing significant time by waiting, and I can't plan since I don't have a time frame.

I don't expect the world to change simply for me and my sob story, but I do believe that there would be numerous users encountering a similar dilemma. And with limited opportunity to access user conferences and to peek at the roadmap (for which I understand the reasons), you can understand why I'm writing this post.

If I could make two suggestions, they would be: 1) Lean on the side of earlier release vs. more features (QA still being paramount); and 2) Consider a mechanism for a small number of users to be able to sign on to the NDA to be able to learn some limited information about the roadmap.

Thank you.

gosens - those are fair points and the company wants to make it as easy as possible for you. There is nothing more deeply a part of Manifold's bones than to want to give the average guy the same chances as the mighty and the powerful.

Here the desire to provide the best, most powerful software at the earliest date at the lowest price conflict with the desire to give long public lookahead on details, which can help you minimize the cost of transitions. I don't know any way around that. If you push hard to deliver the most possible right up until the end what happens is that the most useful information for coding tends to get overrun by the release process itself. The quickest way to get advance data is to deliver the product itself.

It's a bit like recursion, where you get the fastest and best results when the recursion runs to completion and surfaces with the actual results. Try to stop it and surface for regular progress/status reports on the process and you just end up making it slow and losing the benefits of recursion.

1) Lean on the side of earlier release vs. more features (QA still being paramount); and 2) Consider a mechanism for a small number of users to be able to sign on to the NDA to be able to learn some limited information about the roadmap.

Point 1 is well taken. It's true we decided to increase the scope of 9 to accommodate some relatively large things which we previously planned to do after 9. An example of such a thing is support for localization throughout the entire user interface, which we've decided to try for. This is a huge deal, as it would allow users themselves to provide localizations for text of menu commands, controls, tooltips and everything else. If we can pull it off (it is not guaranteed, but I am guardedly optimistic) it would allow people to add their own languages. Knowing the richness of the user community I'd bet very quickly we'd see German, French, Tagalog, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and many other languages pop up.

We realize that we can not release 9 if we keep increasing its scope. We don't take decisions like this lightly. We think that the last increase in scope was the right thing to do even though this was a really tough call. We think further increases in scope are unlikely, but we can't and won't promise that we won't do them.

Regarding 2, that's something we have been trying to figure out how to do. It's not just an NDA, it is the very large amount of material involved to spin up users, with just about every user having a different set of what they need. So far it seems best to focus all effort not on preparing preliminary materials but to invest it into getting more final materials out quickly.

By the way, if you have your own hypotheses or desires, do not hesitate to send them in as suggestions. There are two reasons for doing so: first, if it is not in there now you want your desires in the pipeline. Second, when large teams are doing big projects it is never possible to synchronize perfectly with never any gaps with somebody waiting on something else. Those gaps are opportunities for someone to take something off a list of targets and get it done, which is what our people do. May as well have your desires on that list if an opportunity comes up. :-)

It is a long time between releases now, I'm actually starting to worry about running out of activations for the first time. Might have to go for the 64 bit upgrade if the new release is too much further away.

Dimitri, by "support for localization" do you mean just the ability to customize language or does it also mean the ability to modify the GUI beyond the current capabilities? I think Manifold should have a simplier user interface option for the novice user like what is available in this new GIS software product: www.depiction.com

The makers of this software are leveraging the principles of Manifold's "GIS and networking" essay. Low cost software, fancy GUI, and easy access to data on web. I haven't tried it but it sure looks like a nice step forward passed Google Earth and possibly a good way to get an organization's GIS data into novice user hands.

"support for localization" do you mean just the ability to customize language or does it also mean the ability to modify the GUI beyond the current capabilities?

You can modify the GUI today, if what you mean is to remove toolbars, etc. If you want to do a full custom GUI you can do that as well... that's what the API is for or, as is often done, use a web application for something trivial.

"Localization" = "other languages."

I haven't tried it but it sure looks like a nice step forward

Umm... the aphorism "you can't tell a book by its cover" comes to mind. :-) Never trust a web site where links such as "Learn more about Depiction" lead to more marketing BS and not to information. Without documentation online you can't guess except to buy it. You could do a trial and tell us what you think after some "hands on" work. :-)

On GUIs: it is not a difficult thing to create a GUI that is trivially easy to learn to use. What is difficult is to create such a GUI that is not useful only for trivial things. The approach that's worked has been to enforce limitations. For example, MapPoint I happen to like a lot as an example of a GUI that is easy to use. But a key part of the simplicity is that MapPoint is a hermetically sealed environment revolving around one, known map.

To expand upon that, it would be easy to do a specific GUI tailored for a specific application that would be easier to use for that application than a general purpose tool. But then it becomes unbearable or unusable for other things. People often get into a business by targeting something specific and then they expand. But as they expand into more general things they end up creating a GUI with a lot of after-the-fact "hair." It is usually better if you know you are going to be serving a wider audience to design a more general purpose thing to begin with. That's the path taken by famous applications like PhotoShop or Illustrator or Visual Studio, for example, and that is the path taken by Manifold.

Yes, you have to learn a bit more all at once to get anything done in, say, PhotoShop (I use the classic term since not everyone knows what CS4 is but "PhotoShop" has become like "xerox" in its universal recognition) or in Manifold. But once you get your head around those core methods you have very much more flexibility and power than can be accomplished with more dedicated (such as wizard style) GUIs.

As always, if there is any way in which you think Manifold's GUI could be improved I would encourage you to jot down a few lines and send in a quick suggestion.

Thanks for clarifying localization. I imagine that will please many folks.

You could do a trial and tell us what you think after some "hands on" work. :-)

Well since I brought it up I went ahead and gave it a try. It will have some appeal to non-GIS folks but as you suggested it is a very limited GUI with whole new set of terms. It looks nice though and if it meets your specific needs (focused on emergency responders) it may be good. I looked for some ideas on changes to Manifold GUI without success.

... encourage you to jot down a few lines and send in a quick suggestion.

What I've submitted in the past is 2 things. First, a clean screen option that runs the map up to the edges of the screen (more space than current F11 option) and then tools accessed via a right click on the screen that opens up cascading dropdowns for main tools and link to all tools. Great for small screens, laptops, or processes needing a few tools. A big map view is a joy to use! Second, a GUI that makes it easy to setup your own toolbars with the tools you want. Both are great options in mapmaker.com software.