Stories about: Fractal

Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot a some of the more familiar ones.

Microsoft faces a tough battle starting Monday at a meeting in Geneva that will influence how widely the company's latest document format will be used in the future.

Aussie mining software and services company Runge announced today it will acquire geoscience software vendor Fractal Technologies, its third buy in this sector for the year.

A group of professors has formed a research collaboration to train students how to design future versions of the World Wide Web.

Multimedia developer Jered Cuenco calls it the "gray box application" phenomenon: when a developer, befuddled by a graphic designer's computer-drawn mockups and unclear instructions, comes back with a prototype full of generic gray buttons, plain white backgrounds, oversize headlines in blinking Times New Roman text and other such crimes against user interfaces.

The MPEG standards are an evolving group of compression and decompression standards defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group for digitizing and delivering audio, video and multimedia over computer systems and networks, including the Web.

With the release of Maxon Computer Inc.'s Cinema 4D XL 6.0, 3-D professionals have reason to be excited. This powerful modeling, rendering, and animation package has undergone a thorough upgrade; it's now packed with hundreds of new features and has a substantially redesigned interface. It's not perfect, but Cinema 4D is an excellent tonic for Mac 3-D pros envying their Windows-using counterparts, who have several tools at their disposal.

High-school trigonometry students might take an opposing view, but mathematics can be beautiful. While only the most mathematically adept may grasp this notion when dealing with raw numbers, U&I Software LLC's ArtMatic 1.2 clearly demonstrates the concept. This graphics application uses mathematics to let you create vibrant, psychedelic images with almost no effort.

Many Mac users had to be scratching their heads after MetaCreations Corp.'s December 14, 1999, announcement that the company plans to sell off graphics applications that don't fit with its new focus on 3-D visualization technologies for Web-based retailers.

Telstra and 3com have formed a partnership to target Telstra's OnRamp ISDN products at SMEs (small to medium enterprises).