Slashdot Mirror
Blender Is GPL
BartV writes with a low-key snippet from the new blender.org: ""Today, Sunday oct 13, 2002, we've launched the Blender sources as GNU GPL to the Internet. Blender has become Free Software forever!" This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware; read some of our previous postings about Blender to follow the story from idea to release.
Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in
mysql://blender_org:@localhost/blender_org failed to connectCan't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)
The triumph that is free software.
MySQL errors before any posts are made to /., now that's a record.
I'll drink to that!
no even any comments and the article is gone. mysql errors all over the place.
:-(
no chance of mirroring or copy and pasting the article even
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
i agree with this post
and Babbabooey to you all!
When you get older you will stop caring about trivialities of teen angst like worrying over freedom of software, manufactured bands like Britney Spears or the "evil" movie studios.
Teen angst is something that results when you realize that the whole world is screwed up and you only have a few useful years to do anything about it before you get sucked into being a part of why its so messed up. Post-teenage angst is that hopelessness that you feel when you realize you wasted your only chance to change your miserable little corner of the universe on keg parties and chasing after females that rejected you anyways, and now you've been sucked into the whole machine and must grind out your remaining years as another redundant cog that perpetuates the whole thing.
I know. I was you, now I am the cog in the machine content in my own little niche and see absolutely nothing wrong with it.
a) Blender under the GPL
OR...
b) Sex with a mare
PS. I do not recommend secret option c) Sex with a Blender.
HTH HAND
Now GPLed. Infintie hours free.
I was reading through some of the previous articles b/c as we all know, the server is /.'ed.
I found a lot of complaints about the UI of the program (see one here)
Any of the hardcore Blender users planning on actually doing some development on the UI (and some features which other programs have, ie default lighting?)
I am really interested in doing some of my own editing soon and I would love to see an easy to use program that isn't referred to as " the vi of 3D modelling "
Just some thoughts until we can see the actual article.
While I was poking around on www.blender3d.com yesterday, I clicked through one of the Links/Sponsors and found some fairly cool things.
The site is http://www.quelsolaar.com/ with 2 projects based on blender (I think, but they might not be) at http://www.quelsolaar.com/loqairou/screens.html and http://www.quelsolaar.com/quelsolaar/screens.html (a 3rd project lacks screenshots, but is a new experimental interface for blender, it says)
Some really cool stuff, coming real soon.
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
Why does the "Postings about blender" link tell me the security cert has been revoked? and then it says something about a secure site, and then i see the search, and no secure site?
Just curious...
Bender is GPL? Where can I download his 6502 source code? Is it free as beer?
Maybe we all can chip in to buy word from MS. I pledge $5 for this cause.
Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in /usr/local/www/data-www.blender.org/pnadodb/driver s/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 121
/usr/local/www/data-www.blender.org/pnadodb/driver s/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 121
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in
mysql://blender_org:@localhost/blender_org failed to connectCan't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)
not to mention I did see an AD for MS Visual Studio here too.
The main reason that the GPL is good is because it insures that the source code will always be free and that any distribution of the software can always be fixed and updated -- even if the original authors lose interest. The concept is very elegant, yet it is so simple and easy to comprehend. Of course the GPL may not appeal to every developer, but for those who value freedom and an ongoing legacy, it is a wonderful instrument. Blender will now live on, to be improved and enjoyed for many more years to come, thanks to the GPL.
Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in /usr/local/www/data-www.blender.org/pnadodb/driver s/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 121
Maybe they need a Beowulf Cluster of those things.
Phase 1. Make blender GPL
Phase 2. ???
Phase 3. Profit.
Bender Is GPL? wweee!
get xited
As usual, and as with /. itself, the weakest link is MySQL. Why oh why our free software community is so infatuated with programming that it cannot see the importance of using a real DBMS?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of more than 25 books of American history -- including "Band of Brothers" and multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon -- died early Sunday. He was 66. "Out of writing all those books, people were looking for Waldo in his prose," Brinkley said. "His books are ones that will be in print for a long time. He'll be sadly missed as a teacher and a friend by so many."
...is some open source drink recipies!
Just so you know, any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design and doesn't take into consideration human factors and usability.
1) Company Releases Software
2) Company Goes under
3) 'Community' raised 100k eur
4) ???
5) ???
6) ???
7) Software Gets GPL'd
8) ???
9) PROFIT.
You wanted it you got it....! blender is OpenSource now. We are very sorry that the site is down now but we had to move the server because our previous ISP unplugged us last thursday! Stay tuned we will be up soon.
WTF?!?!?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Looks like they took the money and ran...
$ nc -vvv slashdot.org 80
/.'s X-Bender header be replaced with:
slashdot.org [64.28.67.150] 80 (http) open
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: slashdot.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 19:53:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Bender: Like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with bending.
Pragma: private
sent 36, rcvd 413
In celebration of this amazing event i hereby propose
X-Blender: Like most of lifes problem, this one can be solved with Free Software!
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Is a GPL'd margarita mix!
mmmm free as in margaritas.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
Was it "worth it"? I don't know the first thing about blender or very much about this buy-out. Was the source available prior to the buy-out so that it could be inspectad/evaluated?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
This is the BEST free software news i've heard in two years. This is fantastic!
.avi motion renders.
:)
I made a few simple scenes long ago, but i had a problem with it being closed source and only outputting munged
I was just looking at my scene files yesterday, very interesting timing.
I can't wait, hopefully multithreading / SMP support will be added some day
So, who made this possible? They deserve major kudos from all of us.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
What is Blender? Its website doesn't seem to be of much help...
Well, I guess I can't really complain about the moderation of this comment. I mean, I suppose it could be considered interesting by someone else, even though I don't on the grounds that just because your pop-psychobabel is cynical that doesn't mean it isn't pop-psychobabel.
The enemies of Democracy are
this comment isn't offtopic, and deserves to be modded up.
goddamn nazi moderators can't handle a joke that disses their oh-so-precious free software.
but of course if this was a microsoft joke, then hey it's "+5, Funny!". Har Har Har!
Now that Blender is GPLed, it will ahve the same effect on its market that GCC has had on the compiler market. It will destroy any incentive to innovate (who can compete with free?) and so the technology will stagnate. Sad.
This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware
When will Microsoft start selling Win3.1 out to GPL?
*DrugCheese rants*
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That way the more people that have it, the easier it is to get.
Make a 90% transparent glass object. Make it cast a shadow on a surface. Notice the shadow is as dark as it would have been if the object was 100% opaque.
With a ray tracer, on the other hand, the shadow's darkness would depend on the transparency of the object casting the shadow (as in real life).
Another solution, of course, would be to have Blender export POV-Ray scenes.
Other than this, I'd say Blender *rocks*, the interface is great, once you get the hang of it.. just a couple of evenings playing around, and it should pretty much feel fine. Remember, just because the interface is different, it doesn't have to be crap (yes, steeper learning curve blah blah).
What's Blender do again??
.05% of users who use it this is a big deal, but for the 99.95% who would never use Blender or even anything like it this whole Blender GPL thing seems to have gotten a huge amount of press for what it does.
Seriously, I'm sure for the
Now if something like Photoshop had gone GPL, that is something that a bunch of us might actually be excited about. But Blender going GPL really does nothing for most users, that's why I'm just surprised it has gotten as much attention @Slashdot as it has. Nothing against Blender users of course, but this just isn't the watershed moment Slashdot editors think it is.
I also doubt this will be used as a "case study" for software companies looking to get rid of old software.
Why does a search for "goadsecx" get renamed to "goatse"? Even stranger still, why is goatse under the Scientology catagory? Is goatse a front for Scientology, or are Scientologists just a bunch of assholes?
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Color me stupid, but what is blender and why is it important?
HEY! We don't need no HATE crimes!
HATE CRIMES!!!
(nt)
And funnily enough, supposedly 'independent' news site indymedia.org has NOTHING to say about it.
No, wait, I forgot. 'Independent' actually means "Pathetic whining sociology students that are desperately trying to rebel against their parents affluence with the video cameras that daddy's big business bought for them."
It occurs to me, what with all the debate going on concerning the validity of open source as a business model, that we are missing the bigger lesson from the blender story.
While I know that those 100 k Euros probably did not really cover all the assets of NaN, all the same, it showed it is possible.
What would people say to programming teams picking up desired projects, and then 'holding them ransom' and waiting for some form of corporate sponsorship, perhaps?
Or just doing it the way blender did it, and accepting private donations? That way, the projects that people really deem worthy would be the ones that made it into the open source community. Survival of the most valuable?
Good idea? Bad idea? Comments?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
BTW-
You never replied to my message about DRM/Palladium. In fact, you never reply when I ask you to explain a DRM system compatible with free software and general purpose computing. I don't think you have an answer to it. Reply to my old message or in my journal if you want to discuss more.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Interesting viewpoint- I'm kind of the opposite: I wish for file systems to become more database like. Especially transactions:
I'd love to tell the os/filesystem to do the following in one atomic action:
make world ; script_to_fungle_etc_files ; backup_to_some_other_server ; reboot
and it would either complete fully or fail and rollback.
I'd like to do this for my
select files from
and views would be cool:
I could point my grandmother's file browser to open up the file system in a simplified view of the whole network.
I understand your points and certainly agree: there is much abuse of poor MySQL - I just hope that MySQL or our file-systems can rise to the task.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
MySQL cannot hold up in a production environment. Please, admit it. Don't make up lies. Don't pretend that this is a one-off incident, a statistical anomaly.
Just say it. MySQL cannot be trusted to run websites of any worth to any level of reliability. It's OK. You don't have to feel you're betraying your Open Source brethren. There are plenty of other Open Source databases out there that work better.
MySQL is only as popular because of marketing. That's all. Every time a crack appears in the thin veneer of respectability, a thousand astroturfing zealots will instantly attempt to paper it over with their cries of "You shouldn't be using Stored Procedures anyway - here's how to implement them in Perl and PHP. But we don't believe in developer lockin at all. Honest."
MySQL is the answer to a question no-one asked. Let it die.
The truth will set you free.
If I had a buck everytime some ignorant, stuckup, self described digerati exhorting someone that they should be using a "real database" or "real programming language" or "real operating system" than I would be typing this from a wireless laptop on the beach on my own private island.
What makes you so sure that MySQL was the source of the problem? You know I have seen error messages from "real" databases before, Oracle, DB2, etc. The problem could be from bad programming, hardware failure, network loss, etc.
You've screwed up your life. What makes you think your response to an obvious troll post would be worthwhile to anyone apart from yourself.
You are an egotistical self-obsessed cuntsniff, and I hope one day that someone close to you will die of cancer.
I know it is always easier to just sit back and wait for others to do things. In this case make donations. I do not use Blender, I probably will not use it in the foreseeable future, but I might end up using free software that uses Blender. Anyways, thank you folks for the donations. Every one and all of them counted :-)
... you can (if you want to) make a userfriendly and efficient interface - the two are not contradictory.
People who find the UI difficult to use remind me of people who can't read sheet music bitching about how hard it is to play the violin. Perhaps the reason you find blender difficult is you lack a foundation in 3d to base your knowledge upon.
The other camp that complains about the UI is the Lightwave and Max crowd who are comparing this relatively small program to a full featured suite.
Blender is a good tool. It is about to get better. I dig the fact that it will be part of Linux distros from now on.
I believe in Blender so much I gave my fifty and became a member. And yes, I'm very happy right now.
int cu_isectLL(float *v1, float *v2, float *v3, float *v4, short cox, short coy, float *labda, float *mu, float *vec)
hmm, very intereting...
We donated our money to the Blender project with the expectation that it would be Open Sourced and GPL'd - however, this seems not to be the case. Included in the source is the so-called 'BL License' that allows 3rd parties to use the existing Blender code base and keep their modifications to themselves. This stifles a major part of the GPL and is not what we paid for!
From the License:
For teams that don't want to operate under the GPL, we're also offering
this "non-GPL" Blender License option. This means that you can download
the latest sources and tools via FTP or CVS from our site and sign an
additional agreement with the Blender Foundation, so you can keep your
source modifications confidential. Contact the Blender Foundation via
email at license@blender.org so we can discuss how we handle the
practical matters
blender-source-2.25b.tar.gz
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
So, now that people have link to the source... has anyone tried to compile it? I have not been able to compile it. Seems as if the makefiles are messed up pretty badly.
Hey, this is my sig, if you don't like it, STOP READING MY POSTS!
For those not able to access the site, the source is up. However, there isn't any compiled versions up, and efforts to compile a windows version have been unsuccessful, according to the postings on the user forums.
Why is everyone making such a big deal about Blender? And going so far as to buy it as a community to GPL it? All I see here is people bitching about it (not intuitive, interface sucks, missing crucial features). Why not join together as a community and purchase something better like a mail/calendaring server that could compete with exchange? This would be FAR more beneficial to the community and the world! Isn't Bynari's Insight server available? Why the hell doesn't the community get organized and purchase that? Or look for something else. Exchange is the real killer server app and the open sores community still has nothing to counter it.
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From an engineering standpoint, it isn't bullshit at all. It's the same as processor power and power consumption. While you could in -theory- create a processor that was both fast and low power, that doesn't make it bullshit when you decide to optimize for one or the other. Interface design is engineering just the same, and you almost always have to make tradeoffs.
The enemies of Democracy are
When Gnome, KDE, XFCE etc. kicks its ass?
you would be the type who should be really interested in ReiserFS's future development. The creator of reiserfs shares many of your viewpoints. The release of Reiser4 scheduled for the end of this year will be a big step in that direction.
People who find the UI difficult to use remind me of people who can't read sheet music bitching about how hard it is to play the violin.
Music notiation is an anachronism. A (modified) piano-roll grid style is much more simpler and intuitive. It is almost like reading a spectragrph. Durations are purely visual, no duration notation to mentally translate into actual duration. Long dash, play long. Short dash, play short. KISS at its best.
(Last time I said this it started a huuuge flamewar.)
Table-ized A.I.
I've put up an extra mirror for you ... here. Enjoy!
In a way yes, but not ultimately. Because the people behind MySQL and filesystems do not really grok the task, which is ultimately a database one and thus should be handled under the relational model.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I'd love to tell the os/filesystem to do the following in one atomic action:
make world ; script_to_fungle_etc_files ; backup_to_some_other_server ; reboot
and it would either complete fully or fail and rollback.
Reboot failed! Rolling back...
Deleting backup
Defungling
Decompiling
And then I learned about better ways to seperate content and form - XML, CSS, XSL/XSLT, etc.
A bunch of inconsistent buggy 3-letter acronyms is the solution?
CSS doesn't need to have a different syntax than HTML/XML, yet it does.
If you think about what an DBMS does, its a layer on top of the file system to more effectively store data, with features. For most sites (Slashdot style sites are good exceptions actually) the content is stored in a database for no reason other than seperation!
File systems are *limited*. They force you to cram the whole world into a tree-shaped mess. The real world is a big graph (network), NOT a tree. Trees are fine on a small scale, but I would rather be able to search, sort, filter, join, index by many different ways and criteria without physically copying crap around. DB's are the best general-purpose virtualization devices available. I would LOVE to be able to do SQL on my files.
Yes, maybe they are not good at certain things, but IMO their use should be *expanded*, not decreased.
If their database is too whimpy to handle the load, then switch to Postre or Oracle or something. Better flexibility sometimes requires more power.
Should they be required to go back to fricken trees just to handle the slashdot effect?
-Tablizer-
Table-ized A.I.
Savin my pennies to buy BeOS from Palm...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why not join together as a community and purchase something better like a mail/calendaring server that could compete with exchange? ... Why the hell doesn't the community get organized and purchase that?
Go right the fuck ahead. Fire it up. Ask around. Raise some money.
Do you think these people who got Blender GPL'd would take their money back to give to some exchange client? I think not.
People put their money where they want to see development. Blender is far more exciting software than what you speak of to most of the people here.
The people bitching about blender are probably those that have nothing better to do than bitch most of the time; probably much like yourself.
Some very anal-retentive person needs to give this code some love like only a seasoned open source fanatic who hasn't pooped in ten days can do.
Scorched earth is the term that comes to mind when I look at the source.
I would hold off on messing with the source for a few days unless you have a few days to kill.
I was trying to view it before it was on slashdot and I got "too many connections" errors.
and while we're on it, using 4th and 5th mouse buttons would be a good thing too
:-)
I never understood this philos. Perhaps you can steer me.
There are plenty of keys on the keyboard, so WHY do we need yet more on the mouse?
You can point with the mouse, and press a key with the other hand. It is more accurate that way because the pressing hand is not the moving hand. Thus, you don't veer off accidently while pointing.
Perhaps it is a personal thing, but I don't like a lot of mouse buttons. The keyboard does a better job at being a button surface IMO.
Hey, glue the keyboard to the top of the mouse and then we have the best of both worlds, at least on paper
Table-ized A.I.
Quoting a recent article of mine
> Blender is the 'vi of 3D modelling' I'd say thats nailing it on the head. I've had one of our TA's (Teaching Assistants) in the VR Lab swear by Blender and he took the time to show us how to use it. Blender was powerful, fast and free on our SGIs, it just took too long to train anyone with it and there was no way the professor of the intro to VR class could have taught that to the students. All Blender needs is a decent UI. It doesn't have to be the best, all most people need a a few icons and text to let them know what those colored buttons on the screen actually do. Instead of having us guess and be frustrated.
Now let's go out and make the GIMP of 3D modeling and rendering! :) Make sure those contributions keep going to them too!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
(* exactly what reason do you have for spouting THAT little tidbit as if it was fact? *)
Okay, it is my personal preference. The ideal UI for person A may not be the ideal for person B.
That further reinforces the suggestion (described elsewhere) that the UI should be user-customizable.
However, a drawback of that is that it makes manuals harder to use. Perhaps have a "default" interface that the manuals are in. Once somebody gets used to the app, then they can customize their interface.
Either that or give names to the operations, and then have a mapping layer handle which keystroke goes with which command.
For example, the manual may say "Use the Blur3 command to get this effect.....". One then checks the chart or does a table query to find out which keystroke set that maps to.
Or better yet, include the command name plus the *default* keystroke: "Use the Blur3 (Shift+B)command to get this effect.....".
That would be the best compromise IMO. Further, it may make scripting easier if all commands have a name.
Table-ized A.I.
The point is that it's stupid to do a database operation to pull flat content out of a table!
Flat is often crappy if a page is dynamically generated and changes often. I would have to look at their specific needs rather than pass a "flat" judgement that X is always bad.
Databases are wonderful tools if used right. We don't know their full story.
Walk a mile in a man's database before you smell like shoes........ur, how did that go again?
Table-ized A.I.
GPL isn't free... GPL is restricted crap.
// BSD enthusiast
Free as in free beer with restrictions...
Also I've talked to the author of Blender and just like I said above, it is GPL so they can restrict people from using sources... free my ass...
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That site seriously needs an "ABOUT" area. I visited the site, poked around and left with NO IDEA of what the software does and if I would want it. Oh well, whatever it is, it can't be THAT great.
Is there a generally accepted term for the situation in which closed-source software is ransomed off to become open-source? Something like freeware, shareware or postcard-ware. Perhaps ransom-ware? Hostage-ware?
I ask because it seems to me that this payment model may become popular as an intermediate between the closed-source and open-source worlds. Basically, "ransom-ware" is similar economically to how patents work; monopoly rights are exploited for a short time, after which the technology enters the public domain.
Consider a simple example: if a company would normally make $1M off of royalties from a patented technology over the lifetime of the patent, let's say that instead they ransom it for the same $1M. Now companies that want to use the technology would have a strong incentive to reach the $1M mark as soon as possible. This could very well lead to companies adopting the technology faster and more pervasively than they would under the old patent royalty scheme. The patent system rewards users for waiting until a patent expires to adopt a technology; the ransom system rewards users who adopt the technology as soon as possible. Obviously, some people will try to exploit the system by waiting for others to pay the ransom, but hopefully this won't compromise the advantages. In the case of Blender it hasn't.
I'm sure there are plenty of flaws in my brief analysis of this kind of payment system, but I'd sure be interested in hearing more about it.
Emacs...
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Are they still accepting donations?
Blender is an amazing 3d rendering engine, but it is also alot more. You can build 3D games with it. Edit video with it. Edit sound with it. All this and more crammed into a 3MB binary (the UI rocks if you let it, but it aint your typical Windowsintric UI). For most of its lifespan it was given away. Last year, in effor to keep it alive, the owners began to charge for portions of it. Eventually they went bankrupt, but the Blender community stayed alive.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
Blender does not have a raytracer at this time. Through the Python functionality, however, a couple of people have worked on export scripts, for POV and Lightflow at least AFAIK. The issue of Renderman output has been debated and it is definitively a near-future possibility for integration into the actual program.
Blender itself can also save mesh models to DXF as well as VRML 1 formats. This is also quite useful.
ask Google and you should be able to find the existing Python export scripts.
Made me laugh, anyway. Stupid moderators on crack.
Yup, writing POV files would be a very, very handy feature. Remember also that parallel POV processing is an ancient and pretty much perfected art. It also gives the best raytraced output of anything I've come across, which is why I use it despite the lack of modelers.
:v)
To become truly cunning, integrate the POV script reading engine from Giram (another GPL modeller, based on the GTK), and add the ability to display camera views on different X desktops. This will allow people to add 3D VR modeling capabilites through stereo viewers etc.
I fancy making a stereo VR viewer from a couple of cheap LCD TVs, 2 VGA cards with video output and some magnifier goggles. I've waited too damned long for VR to go mainstream already.
Rant over.
Vik
This is redundant, but....
Blender has a pretty easy GUI compared to some of the other ones out there. Once you get the basics down its very easy. It *is* a one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse kinda deal, but its just as complicated as say...maya.
I too was once in a position of confusion... But then I went out to my local library and actually got a book on blender. The first chapter gave me a boost and I figuered out the rest on my own. Try it.
Nice move and happy to see Blender GPLed finaly!
;)
My sincere congrats, Tom!
But at this time in the site there are just 430 people online and the site runs very slowly. Why don't you use PHP-Nuke software for your site. It's faster... just looks at the master site... sometimes there are more than 700 users online and the site is a rocket!
Anyway, are there some intentions to release Blender's binary files?
Bye
Fuck off you stupid son of a bitch. I was only wondering what the fuss was all about and why someone/some group/some company (rhat) doesn't try to create a competitor to exchange server. I haven't the time, but thought it was worth suggesting. In reference to another reply, NOT another exchange client, a server. Pay attention. You fucking morons that hang out here haven't got a clue. All you want to do is flame people - so fuck you. A good exchange server competitor/challenger is not just a calendaring/smtp server. It would require that, contact space, a simple install routine and an easy configuration tool as well as support for other exchange clients like outlook so migration is possible. Get your fucking heads out of your asses, stop flaming people and learn how to read.
Alias/Wavefront sells software to people in college because it creates an artist pool that 3D industry can pull from. But it doesn't give power to the artist to own their tools. In both cases someone is paying Alias/Wavefront for the tools,
and if one can't buy the tools, their work must not be worth it. Note, Van Gogh was in poverty most of his life, and some Gallery [according to Dave Barry] bought 90 cans of crap for a lot of money. Does this say something desperately wrong about how we associate price with value?
Well, blender may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but blender.org sure have a lame web page!
You shouldn't have to resort to Google to find out what Blender is, or what it does. Nor should you have to dig many levels deep in links to find out.
Where's the "What is blender" link? Or, the "Blender FAQ" link? Or, just the one paragraph description on the top-level home page?
Maybe some day when it's less slashdotted, I'll explore some more.
I wonder why they didn't got with the more truly free BSD license.
The guy who was designing the UI accidently dropped the UI draft into a blender. They eventually turned the blender off and used the draft as-is.
It doesn't say what Blender is *anywhere* on their stupid website. That is very, very bad site design.
evil adrian
So how was the conference? Anybody smoke any good buds and hack some Blender code?
Maya is definitely easier to use than Blender. At least with Maya, previous experience with other GUI applications will help you, whereas with Blender it's almost like learning a whole new GUI system.
I agree. In no way, shape, or form, is the "vi" interface a good one.
Huh? It's fast, it's efficient and it's easy on your fingers. How is that a bad thing? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone has to agree.
Hear hear!
Back when I got my first unix box (FAR enough back that, when then entire list of email-connected sites fit on three pages, mine was there), I wanted to build and try emacs. But there was this little problem - the machine had only 2 megabytes and no demand paging. Emacs (even back then) wouldn't fit. (A tongue-in-cheek claim was circulating that the name was an acronym: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. B-) )
So I learned to use vi.
And then I was VERY active on a bulletin board for several years - using vi. And I got very fast with it.
Some time later I had access to a bigger machine and a colleague pointed out that emacs had a vi emulation mode - so I could ease in without having to learn new navigation keys right off the bat. I looked into it - and it had TWO distinct vi emulation modes. Oops. With one I might have tried it. But I didn't have time to find the better of the two. So I dropped it.
A little later a Netnews posting demoed a potential attack on those who used emacs as a news reader or mail reader. Seems that emacs had a little-know feature: You could include a snippet of lisp code in the comments in a program file, and emacs would run it. This was intended to set up tab stops, language editing modes, and the like. But this also worked in mail and netnews reading modes. The demo's lisp code would pop up a "See, I got you!" window and delete itself from the display of the item itself. But in principle it could do anything you could do from emacs - which is anything you can do from any shell, with a lisp interpreter handy to do complicated stuff. No clicking on attachments - just LOOK at the letter or news item and you're owned.
Windows macro virus vulnerability? Emacs had it first, and BETTER! B-) Imagine a lisp worm in netnews forging postings in your name, both replicating itself on "nice" groups and faking love letters on alt.binaries.pictures.child-molestation. Or dumping the contents of any "src" directory you can read to an alt.binaries group. (And heaven help you if you read news or mail when logged in as root...)
Of course this "feature" was on by default in the standard distribution. In those days, or days not too much earlier, RMS' approach to security was rumored to be having a blank password on root in his personal machine and letting this be known - in the belief that if there was no skill needed to break in, and thus no reputation to be gained, nobody would bother. (Apparently that worked with MIT students. But don't try it with the general population net-connected.)
Well, I had spent years doing classified research, which made me itch about security holes. So I decided to stick to vi for a while longer - along with the plethora of unix utilities that do essentially anything I need done that's beyond vi's power.
Since then I've occasionally seen an emacs-ism that has tempted me - like colored displays of comments vs. declarations vs. code. But every time I'm tempted I watch a colleague doing simple text editing with emacs, and count the keystrokes he has to use to do the simple stuff that constitutes the bulk of my editing work. And it always seems to take him a lot more strokes with emacs than it takes me with vi. So I'm generally not tempted for long.
Vi was designed for a very different world - the world of dumb character-based computer terminals in the days before ANSI standardized their behavior. There were literally HUNDREDS of different terminal designs, with a boggling array of differences in display geometry, control-character to cursor-motion mapping, and other odities. Vi (actually the "visual" mode of the "ex" editor) encapsulated these idiosyncrasies in a "termcap" (terminal-capability) definition file, thus letting the user do full-screen WYSIWYG editing on ANY of them using a common set of keystrokes - and letting the sysadmin add definitions for new terminals as they came out. This brought the user out of the dim world of command-line-only editors (such as "ed" and "teco") into the instant feedback of a screen display - halfway to the window systems that weren't available yet.
And - much to the surprise of its author - it did it very well. So well that people like me (who now have the vi commands "hard-wired" into our nervous systems from long use) still use it when we have serious text hacking to do.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think your assessment is pretty much right on. I'm a classical violinist and can sight read pretty darn well, but even I sometimes wish that something could be done to help make certain things stand out better... and along those lines I've always wondered if something could be done to *augment* standard notation with color?
For example, what if all the notes were a different color (blue for A, red for B, etc...). That might help seeing what's going on in a gazillion 32nd note run all squished together on a line -- or make it easier for folks with eyes that aren't quite what they used to be.
I guess it will never happen because of the associated costs and other PITA factors, but I can dream...
Ok, I got the tarball from www.blender.org. Now what ? I did a good shot at trying to compile it, lots of editing makefiles and so on. A great part does compile, but everyting seems broken.
Can someone PLEASE step us through the process of compiling blender on Linux ?
check out http://www.wings3d.com - it's a bitch ass free as in opensource modelling tool that rocks. - it isnt intuitive either but look what strange language they use: erlang...
i love this tool - would be cool if blender modelling would be as in there - allhtough i can export in some format and import it for animation in blender then
...you bastards!
ow with Blender as open-source, I guess we can expect all the usual nasty open-source things to happen -- it'll become an autoconf/automake monster, linked to a hundred different libraries all doing the same thing. The UI will be switched over to GTK etc. etc. :-)
I'm going by the sample principle as the UI. If the best tool for the job happens to be autoconf, and GTK turns out to give a fantastic UI to Blender, then so let it be. But don't think I'll be convinced.
Christmas came early this year.
woohoo
You know, I've always wondered about the code behind the "ice crush" and "puree" features.
Why not use Vim then... syntax highlighting, multi-level undo and all the other goodies, but with the efficient VI key bindings :-)
For those not able to access the site, the source is up. However, there isn't any compiled versions up
Binaries and all kinds of documenation (pdf format) have been available for member downloads for some time. If you cannot compile the source yourself (rock on Gentoo!), you can always donate $50 and become a member. There will be ongoing costs to making the code available, managing it, and providing varous other blender resources, so a donation would not be a waste of money.
Or, alternatively, you could wait until someone else compiles it and makes a binary available for download, or use a free platform like Linux, which doesn't seem to have too much trouble compiling the sources.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Why not use Vim then... syntax highlighting, multi-level undo and all the other goodies, but with the efficient VI key bindings :-)
Actually, I do, generally when I'm on a linux platform. It's close enough to vi to be almost interchangable.
That multi-level undo has a downside, though. It kills a vi idiom: In vi "u" undoes the last change - but a "change" includes a previous undo. So hitting "u" repeatedly first causes the cursor to jump to the latest change, then "flashes" the change, making it even easier to spot. You can also "flash" other areas by making a no-effect change (like inserting no characters). Like a blink comparitor when looking for star patterns.
Best of both worlds would have been if vim had used a different keystroke for multi-level undo (like it added a stroke for multi-level redo), or had a switch to revert to vi behavior.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You can also "flash" other areas by making a no-effect change (like inserting no characters). Like a blink comparitor when looking for star patterns.
/tmp/%, then repeated control-shift-"u". The multiple undo wouldn't break that.
Actually, you can't, since "u" only undoes the last change. I don't know where that came from. (That's what I get for posting when half-asleep. B-( )
There is a way to blink multiple changes that I can't recall just now - I think it's writing the file to
Of course with multi-level undo you don't have to "blink" 'em to find 'em, so it really is an improvement.
But it IS an annoyance. What it really breaks is hammering on "u" to blink the last change while you decide which way you want it. Try that with vim and it merrily unwinds your edit session. Then you have to use control-R - a two-key-one-hand annoyance - to get your changes back.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Unless your music is really weird, you should not have to ever fill in less than half a grid.
Correction. That should be "half a grid unit".
Note that the webpage example I cited did not go down to such a unit. That is because the grid frequency is alterable in that software and I did not have it at a finer setting when I took that screen-shot.
Table-ized A.I.
I am wondering if there is a *seasoned* user of the common commercial 3D animation packages (like Maya and Max) who can comment on Blender's functionality compared to those.
Ignore the interface, I am just asking about the *capabilities* of each once the interface is fully obsorbed.
And each hand has 5 fingers.
If your right hand is on the mouse, your left hand can only hit five keys. It is irrelevant that there are a bunch of keys on the right side of your keyboard, because forcing the user to move his right hand back and forth between the mouse and keyboard in the midst of a task is idiotic. Having more buttons on the mouse allows you to use your right hand more efficiently.
Sounds like you want '. -- move to last change in this file, but without doing an undo.
See also Ctrl-O and Ctrl-I to move back and forth through the stack of significant positions...
> Whoa, first contact!
Nope, 'fraid not, Linux is still primarily used on planet Earth, I'm
afraid.
Our friend here sent a message in Russian (KOI8-R encoding).
-- Aleksey Kliger, explaining a russian posting
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