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.

Comments

Re:Bang!

[Schnapple]

Actually since this is such an anticipated release, I think the site was hammered before the article was finished submitting.

UI.

[garcia]

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.

Re:UI.

[tjwhaynes]

I found a lot of complaints about the UI of the program (see one here [slashdot.org])

But you will also find a ton of people who like the UI just fine. Once you get used to the UI, it is fast, powerful and practical. Blender does have a steep learning curve to begin with, but once you have that over with, the package shows its power.

You might think that the 'vi of 3D modelling' is an insulting term. Others might view it as high praise.

That said, I still prefer Emacs :-)

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Something I hope to see soon

[certron]

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.

Re:Something I hope to see soon

[technix4beos]

The project you speak about is called Verve.

I was lucky enough to attend the conference (two days out of the three), and saw several really Excellent presentations on and about Blender.

The project you speak of was one of them. I won't give away the end-product's name, but know this: The author gave a really in-depth, and well educated explanation for many aspects of both his system, and how Blender can be extended to make use of it.

http://www.quelsolaar.com/connector/index.html

I was extremely excited to be at the conference and see for myself not just the enthusiasm of everyone involved, but a history of Blender, how to extend it, concepts on improving it's interface and featureset, and more, including discussions about the Blender Organization.

Some very good things.

Re:Something I hope to see soon

[certron]

"The project you speak about is called Verve. ...
The project you speak of was one of them. I won't give away the end-product's name, but know this: The author gave a really in-depth, and well educated explanation for many aspects of both his system, and how Blender can be extended to make use of it."

"I apologize publically for spilling any info I shouldn't have about the name... I didn't see that I had already typed the name in my very first sentence, since the textarea box had moved it out of my view. (can we not make this bigger?)"

Was it called Verve or Verse ? I remember surfing through verse.sf.net but all the pretty things aren't coming up now... http://www.quelsolaar.com/technology/verse.html has at least some tiny info. I was impressed with their description of 'avatar in a room, with ball' and how it could be made to work. Metaverse, here we come! or... here comes it! or... uh... Lets go back to admiring the poetry of 'avatar in room, with ball' :-)

The intuitive/sketchpad modeler looks cool, though. Combine that with a networked, update-enabled environment and you have the makings of worldcraft... A very interesting time indeed.

Someone needs to make cheap(er) 3d-vision eyewear...

Re:Something I hope to see soon

[civilizedINTENSITY]

http://www.quelsolaar.com/technology/verse.html
" V E R S E Verse is a network protocol, for three-dimensional, client/server graphic applications, designed to let anyone build and distribute a 3D "world" on the Internet. We use it to create distrobuted work eviorments and enabel multiple people and applications work togeter. While other build one integrated proprietary system we beleave that the future lies in connecting multipel differnt application seamlessly. If you are looking for a plygg in interface this is it. Verse is writen using UDP for low latency and has been optimized for low bandwith. Verse has been ported on a number of platforms and is under the GPL license. Verse can also be used as the basis for games, simulation, VR, computational stearing visualization, Social activitys and Rapid prototyping. You can find more about verse on verse homepage at: verse.sf.net or read Emil brinks exelent paper."

Re:Something I hope to see soon

[glwtta]

While very cool, none of Eskil's projects have anything to do with Blender, at the moment. Though it is possible that Verse will be a basis of "NextGen" Blender (whatever shape that might take), note that this is well into the future, certainly not Blender 3.0

His presentations will be available online, at either his site or the foundation's, quite interesting.

Damn, the whole thing was a bunch of fun though! btw, I am writing this from an internet cafe in Amsterdam, and still trying to wake up from yesterday. :)

Just to emphasize again though - the so called "NextGen Blender" is a very cool idea which is, at best, years and years off. I'd be more excited about the plain old Blender (and Blender 3.0) at the moment.

Re:Bang!

[certron]

"Actually since this is such an anticipated release, I think the site was hammered before the article was finished submitting."

It was. I checked it this morning. Imagine, being slashdotted without assistance from slashdot.org ! The horrors! What [other] force in the universe is capable of such obliterative power?

Great!

[Pig Hogger]

Now, to those who want to "innovate" with Blender, we can say:

Bite my shiny metal license!!!

Oh, wait, that's BLENDER!!! Darn!!!

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[Elbereth]

Bite your tongue! Those who would trade a little freedom for a program that works deserve neither freedom nor a program that works.

Now all we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is some open source drink recipies!

FYI...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Once you get used to the UI

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.

Re:FYI...

[vadim_t]

Heh, that's very funny. I remember I tried an iMac once. I can't do absolutely anything useful with it, and I've been using computers and Windows for years. I see lots of people talking about how intuitive is $GUI. That's a plain lie. Any GUI requires getting used to it. If a really intuitive one is ever made it will work by reading your mind.

Re:FYI...

[JHelgie]

"any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design"

Not if it lets people who KNOW HOW TO USE IT do what they need in a signifantly more efficient manner. As far as I care, all GUI's should be more difficult to use, people are too stupid as it is.

Re:FYI...

[rknop]

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.

Not really. It's only bad design if your goal is to make the program as easy to learn as possible. In the case of Blender, it means that it's a UI optimized so that those who know it can work as fast as possible. Those optimizations may be inconsistent with optimizations that allow somebody to learn it as fast as possible.

The ideal UI would do both. Given where Blender comes from, the "skilled user efficiency" optimizations were far more important. I suspect there will be a lot of resistance to decreasing the efficiency of the UI to skilled users in the name of improving it for newcomers. If the latter can be done without sacrificing the former, then that will be welcome.

-Rob

Re:FYI...

[rash]

Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?
They have been designed with only one goal in mind. Workflow speed.

Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve.

This is becouse the time it takes you to learn the app is made up for in a matter of days when you actually use the app.

You cannot claim that people must understand the app when its about 3d software. This is becouse they are in themselfs very hard apps to use. So the people using them havto be very tech friendly. They should not have any problem learning the ui nomatter how hard it is.

The people that complain about the ui eather havent spent enough time learning it or quite simply doesnt have any buisness learning it in the first place.

If you are just using a 3d app to play with and create some cool graphics you might aswell use poser or bryce.

Blender is a tool designed for fast workflow, to be used in a team environment within a company.

Re:FYI...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Tell that to car manufacturers. I don't know about you, but I wasn't born knowing how to drive a car.

Re:FYI...

[Monkelectric]

Not really ... A modeler is a very complex thing, expecting to be able to use it intuitively is folly.

Can you run complex real systems without any training? Could you drive a car intuitively? Play a saxophone intuitively?

Everything else in the world requires patience, practice and knowledge to operate. Why is it that people think extremely complex machines (computers) should/can be easy enough for any retard to use?

That being said I still hate the blender GUI. I tried in earnest for 3 or 4 hours to use it, didnt make any headway and said "Fuck this, im going back to rhino"

Re:FYI...

[zerblat]

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.

"Steep learning curve" does not make the UI fast. It makes it slow.

It means the interface takes some time to learn. Of course, if you haven't learned it yet and have to check the docs everytime you want to do something it will be slow. If you use the program often enough that you don't forget everything between every usage, spending some time to learn the interface properly is a great investment.

If you only edit text files once or twice a week, MS notepad is all you need. If you spend hours every day editing text, you'll want something more powerful and won't mind spending some time to use it properly. Of course, it would be great if the interface was "intuitive" enough so you wouldn't need to learn it. But as we all know, the only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it's all learned.

So, vi and Blender suck for the casual user but are perfect for anyone who uses them a lot.

Re:FYI...

[Ed Avis]

Please name a GUI that doesn't require people to get used to it.

Re:FYI...

[Tablizer]

It's only bad design if your goal is to make the program as easy to learn as possible. In the case of Blender, it means that it's a UI optimized so that those who know it can work as fast as possible. Those optimizations may be inconsistent with optimizations that allow somebody to learn it as fast as possible.

I am not a heavy Blender user (yet), but I have not seen any operation that is significantly improved by being "odd". Can you point out one, by chance?

Further, the design assumes a middle mouse button, and middle mouse buttons are falling out of favor (because there are already 101 buttons on the keyboard, so why add yet more to the mouse). The keyboard equivs for the 3rd mouse button are horrendus if you don't have a middle button.

Besides, if the UI scares away newbies, then there will be less users and thus less people willing to support and improve it and make add-ons.

Re:FYI...

[PotatoHead]

Your statement is true only if your primary concern is making the app easy for new users.

There is always a clear tradeoff between new users and experienced ones. Others have said below something along the lines of: "Just look at all the 3D apps out there now, each one of them focuses on the experienced user..." They are right. Once you understand the workflow, things are generally fast --which is the way all of these users want things to be anyway longer term.

Interestingly, the MCAD market (for Engineers, not entertaiment or styling) is making this mistake. All the major apps are converting their custom U.I. to one that works for new users. Each and every one of them loses their productivity as a result. Each of them are fighting with their user base. Blender will have the same problem.

One solution is to make *good* documentation with lots of use cases. The Blender folks have done a fair job of this.

The bottom line here is that complex tasks are complex. The software can only go so far to make performing the task easier. Any 3D app that has a very easy UI, also suffers from the inability to do the little complex things that make the app worth using anyway.

Why spend time building the perfect UI, when new feature creep from the fast evolving 3D market will slowly erode your interface anyway.

Personally, I feel the Blender UI is a little out there. It could be a little more standard, but that effort is probably not worth the time. Adding good things to Blender will likely motivate new users to make use of the package given its price and capability.

Re:FYI...

[Tablizer]

A modeler is a very complex thing, expecting to be able to use it intuitively is folly..... Could you drive a car intuitively?

Yes, if you are allowed to make mistakes in the process without dying (such as a holidek).

Blender's UI is like having to drive a car by pushing the radio buttons. Perhaps it is possible to make such an interface work, but everybody is going to complain.

Re:FYI...

[naasking]

Build me a car that you can drive perfectly right away the first time you sit in it. Build me a plane so easy to fly. One size does not fit all my friend.

Re:FYI...

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

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.

Are you saying that the design that is easy for beginners to learn is automatically well-suited to the needs of advanced users? I think this is simply not true -- certainly not in every instance. Sometimes programs are hard to use because they are complex and subtle -- because the task they perform is complex and subtle.

Re:FYI...

[Tablizer]

What is so horrendous about ALT+LMB????

Because there are combinations that involve the middle one.

For example, if you have a middle button (MMB), then the command may be Shift+MMB. Translated through the translation you get:

Shift+Alt+LMB

Two meta-keys at the same time is BAD DESIGN, except for something rare, like rebooting (well, it should be rare in a decent OS).

Re:FYI...

[zangdesign]

Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?

Sorry, sport, but your answer doesn't wash. In-house tools are designed to be exactly that: in-house.

A product released to the general public that expects to have a large following must take into consideration users of all levels of experience when designing the UI.

Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve

You don't try to actually sell your software to a large audience, do you? UI design is absolutely essential to any program, whether it be a graphic-based or text-based.

That is not to say that Blender should be dumbed down for the sake of newbies, but a little more care in designing the UI would have gone a long way to pushing it to the forefront of 3D design software.

Re:FYI...

[MaxVlast]

Whatever is wrong when people complain about control-clicking on a Mac :-)

Re:FYI...

[Theom]

Not if it lets people who KNOW HOW TO USE IT...

Hey Clippy, we finaly found someone who likes you.

Re:FYI...

[rworne]

Actually:

Basically, the only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

- Bruce Ediger

Re:FYI...

[Chris Burke]

Yes, if you are allowed to make mistakes in the process without dying (such as a holidek).

Great. So a UI is "intuitive" in your opinion if you only need technology from a sci-fi program set 400 years in the future in order to make the cost of attempting to use the interface without substantial training bearable. :)

But you're right, the car has a fairly intuitive interface. The reas for that is that, really, the car is a simple device. It turns, it goes, it stops, and correspondingly there are 3 knobs or levers you have to manipulate. Some cars have a 4th thing you can do (change gears), and you'll notice that is the one most people started to get confused about, and they had to get rid of. That's where the boundary lies between "difficult technology" and "simple appliance". Three things. So if your device has to do much more than go, stop, and turn left or right, it's going to be tough designing a truly intuitive interface.

And seeing how people around here drive, I'm inclined to think that three things is a bit too much.

That's why it's going to be tough to find an interface that doesn't "take a while to get used to to" for something like Blender. Which isn't to say the interface is good. I'm just saying the threshold of good should be lower than making it intuitive.

Re:FYI...

[PainKilleR-CE]

Further, the design assumes a middle mouse button, and middle mouse buttons are falling out of favor (because there are already 101 buttons on the keyboard, so why add yet more to the mouse). The keyboard equivs for the 3rd mouse button are horrendus if you don't have a middle button.

Most mice sold today have at least 3 mouse buttons. Mine has 4 + mouse wheel. Given that most of *nix assumes a 3rd mouse button, I fail to see the problem here. It's not like Blender is designed to run on Macs.

Besides, if the UI scares away newbies, then there will be less users and thus less people willing to support and improve it and make add-ons.

How many 3d and CAD packages have you used? Very few are newbie-friendly, and very few people learn to use them without a book or extensive tutorials. That being said, there's certainly room in most 3d software for improvement in the interface. However, something like the 3rd mouse button should be considered far less of a factor in improvement than making it configurable enough for those without a 3rd button to be able to use it (and while we're on it, using 4th and 5th mouse buttons would be a good thing too). When you're using a mouse-intensive application, the only keys that matter are those on the left side of the keyboard, and every mouse button you can add helps.

Re:FYI...

[br0ck]

Please use this abacus to quickly add 387 to 495. It's not intuitive? Well, here a tutorial to help.

As for Blender, I tried it and gave up as well. I think some software has so many features that it becomes difficult to give intuitive ways to quickly perform all appropriate actions.

Re:FYI...

[alienw]

Actually, most of the mice out there have a third button. Most mice nowadays come with a wheel, and the wheel is the third button on most systems.

As for the UI: it needs to be well-documented. You should be able to read the docs, follow through the tutorials, and learn it. That is true for any UI. You can't just sit down behind a wheel of a car for the first time and start driving, you have to learn it first. Yet, I haven't seen people complain about their car's UI.

Re:FYI...

[k_187]

What do you want a cookie? ;)

By the time you are physically able to reach the pedals and what not you've had years of conditioning to know that the big wheel in front of you turns, and the pedal on the right makes you go faster and the one on the left/middle makes you go slower. If you'd never seen a car before, how long would it take to learn what everything does?

Re:FYI...

[antirename]

Actually, I've never seen a 3D modeling program that didn't expect a three-button mouse (I'm an engineer, not an artist BTW, although many 3D programs use the same engines). I don't think making some "shortcut" functions (zoom, rotate, pan, etc) work with the middle mouse button is bad design, it works very well for me; but even that were the case it's still an industry standard.

Re:FYI...

[Tablizer]

Every one I've used has made heavy use of as many buttons as you can throw at it. Besides, these apps are so complicated that every one of those 101-keys already does something.

Does that mean if there are 150 total commands, you want a mouse with 49 buttons???

It sounds like there is a bigger problem to be solved here such that throwing yet more buttons at it only makes the problem worse. IOW, a step-back pondering of UI techniques may be in order.

Re:FYI...

[PigleT]

"Besides, if the UI scares away newbies, then there will be less users and thus less people willing to support and improve it and make add-ons."

I've not got this version of Blender up and running yet so I'm not making a specific comment. However, as we've got onto generalities: newbies don't support and improve projects, they suck support-time from those who could be improving software.

Re:FYI...

[Pseudonym]

Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?

They're designed for fast workflow, relative to the way that house works.

Incidentally, most current in-house tools are packages built on top of a commercial system like Maya or Houdini. The key here is that you can customise such a tool to suit your own workflow. Any system which does not support this runs the risk of being a toy.

Re:FYI...

[iamplasma]

As the saying goes "Better, Cheaper, Faster, pick any two", it's pretty much the same for the interface. Sure, it is "possible" to design an uber-UI which is intuitive and fast to use, but then it would almost surely also be a far more difficult design task, either delaying development or costing much more (or both). Quite simply, you can't have everything all the time, and choosing to optimise for efficiency over usability is a reasonable decision.

Re:FYI...

[cscx]

If you spend hours every day editing text, you'll want something more powerful and won't mind spending some time to use it properly. Of course, it would be great if the interface was "intuitive" enough so you wouldn't need to learn it.

Which is why I use TextPad or NEdit or ne (the latter 2 are open source, the first is $pay$ software).

Re:FYI...

[DrMaurer]

Yeah, you need them.

They give new perspectives, and while many of those are crap, you can never forget the power of the new viewpoint on a problem/issue.

My 3d project now-adays is character creation/animation for a short movie I'm doing. (More like a sitcom episode, about 20 minutes.) Dozens of characters interacting in an environment.

I just don't feel like blender is capable of doing what I want/need. I know I could be wrong on this point, but it's too much hassle now to make me prove it wrong because I think the UI is dumb.

But I'd like it to be.

I've been using 3d editors for a little while, about 4 years, and have yet to actually find one that feels good at all, and I give them time.

So, my issue is that the keepers of the code should work on it to make sure it works as best as possible for as many users as possible. If that includes a variable environment that a user can select, then so be it.

God knows i'd be willing to use a GPL tool. Another reason to ditch Windows. (Next, multi-track sound editing!)

I just have to learn to code, now, to make it the way I want. (Is that good UI design?)

Re:FYI...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Its only "bad design" if you don't use a 3-button mouse. I can't image not having at least a 3-button scroll mouse. Have you considered emulating the middle button? You can configure so that clicking both left and right buttons is accepted as the middle button :-)

Re:FYI...

[mgv]

ust FYI, I figured out to drive a car in less than 5 minutes, well before I was taught. It takes just a few moments and you've got it. Shifting took a bit longer, maybe 10 minuts

Yes, same for me. I figured out how to drive in just a few minutes by casual observation, and in just a few moments I was away and happy. I didn't get to shifting, because I hit a wall first. Mostly because I was too small at the time to see over the dashboard.

Still, I cant complain that the user interface wasn't intuitative.

Michael

Re:FYI...

[Snafoo]

Further, the design assumes a middle mouse button, and middle mouse buttons are falling out of favor

What planet are you living on?

In the PC world, at least, middle-button mice are finally becoming standard. What do you think the scroll wheel does when you press it? Mice, IMO, are heading in the direction of SUVs: Giganticism and feature rot. The latest offerings from MS look like X-box controllers: Extra doo-dads for thumbs, pinkies, tongues... Oh well; at least they put the third button back on. :)

The real trick is figuring out how to squelch the mentally deficient default behaviour given to the third button by the Doze. Really, now; don't I have enough ways of scrolling??

Bizarre!!!

[mark-t]

I click the link, it loads... although there is a distinct lack of interface, I see a directory listing containing several php files but no evident index.htm or index.php type of file. I quickly take a peek at blender3d.com and yes... the link there does go back to blender.org. I then click on the link at blender3d.com to go back to blender.org, and I get a blank screen. I press "back" twice in Mozilla and suddenly I see this:

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?!?!?

Re:Bizarre!!!

[certron]

w00t!

Blessed are the sourcemakers. :-)

ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/blender/blender-so ur ce-2.25b.tar.gz

Re:Bizarre!!!

[sql*kitten]

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.

It would be helpful for Slashdot or OSDN or whoever to offer to mirror stuff that they're planning to link to.

So how's the codebase?

[eddy]

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?

Re:So how's the codebase?

[Tablizer]

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?

If the code is anything like the UI, then "it is great after you get used to it in a few years." :-P

Hmm...

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[zulux]

Study your tools a bit better beofre casting stones at one of them.

What fetures of a "real DBMS" would have helped in this case? Transactions? Rollbacks? Inner-Joins? Sub-selects?

MySQL is a fast psudo-database. It's fast. That's the point.

If MySQL crashed under load, or failed in under load - none of the real ACID dataqbases would have fared better given the same resources.

MySQL is perfect for this sort of suff - data that's not important, served quickly, and just because it doesen't meet the criteria for use in other endevours doesen't make it unsutable for this one.

No longer profitable as payware

[DrugCheese]

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?

Re:No longer profitable as payware

[An Onerous Coward]

Here's the timeline:

January 1 - Microsoft announces that they will open source Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 for the paltry sum of $50,000. Apparently, this is to make up for the money Bill Gates lost when he ran his wallet through the laundry.

February 12 - "The Freedows Project" (sounds like "Fritos") obtains the required $50,000 through generous donations by individuals and random muggings.

February 13 - Microsoft turns over the source code.

February 14 - The Freedows project sues Microsoft for violating the GPL by deliberately obscuring their code. Microsoft counters by explaining that, no, that's the code they really were using. They enter as evidence fifty pages of source code for IE 7.

March 22 - Freedows announces that they've overcome the first project hurdle: Separating out the integrated Solitare code from the rest of the OS.

March 25 - Freedows is forked, and a new project called XFreedows emerges.

March 27 - Freedows forks again after an SMP patch is rejected. The new project is called "Lindows."

March 28 - Lindows is sued by Lindows.

April 1 - Freedows announces that Freedows OS is now running on top of the Linux kernel. Nobody believes them.

April 2, 3, 4, and 5 - Freedows resends the press releases, publishes all sorts of screenshots and demos, bribes CmdrTaco to publish a, "No it wasn't an April Fools Joke" story. Freedows is slashdotted, detonating three servers and killing five. The project is set back a month.

May 15 - A seven day flame war erupts when someone on the Freedows mailing list suggests changing the UI to require "triple clicking" for some functions.

June 1 - XFreedows is integrated back into the Freedows main branch, adding native NVIDIA support, an OpenGL-based 3D GUI, 16-way SMP support, the XFAT file system (a relational database filesystem which supports file sizes up to 300 petabytes and transparent compression), full 32 bit, 64 bit, and 128 bit support, and DRM support that can be disabled with a couple of IFDEFs.

July 15 - IBM "donates" ten million dollars to the Freedows project in what can only be described as a corporate mugging.

August 5 - Solitare is re-integrated into the OS, improving performance 300-fold.

August 7 - Thanks to IBM's generous donation, Freedows can move its CVS server onto a ludicrously powerful server running the Freedows OS.

August 29th - 2:14 a.m. Freedows becomes self-aware.

Ray tracer?

[OuD]

Does Blender have a real ray tracer yet? If not, this would be the feature I would appreciate the most. Why? Example:

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).

Re:Ray tracer?

[WWWWolf]

Does Blender have a real ray tracer yet?

As far as I know (which isn't much, sorry), 2.23 didn't have anything to do with raytracing. If you ask my honest opinion, Blender really needs support for external renderers (Renderman?) - the rendering engine is not always that logical, and (precisely hand-tuned!) environment maps, (nicely arranged!) shadow-only spotlights and (painstakingly manually tuned!) radiosity meshes don't quite cut it...

I agree with you, raytracing would rule. I can't even remember how long I have wanted that...

I did have some random success with the export scripts (to export to Renderman and PoV-Ray), but the colors didn't work in the old scripts and new scripts just bombed.

Hope future will bring help in this respect...

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Can someone explain to the unwise...

[WWWWolf]

What is Blender? Its website doesn't seem to be of much help...

Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.

Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.

I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)

Re:/.ed already

[netsharc]

They made Profit first, 100,000 of it, then they made Blender GPL... actually the original owners had it good..

1. Make Blender non-GPL.
2. Promise to GPL it for 100,000.
3. Get 100,000 == Profit!

of precedent setting

[MadFarmAnimalz]

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?

Re:Err.. not quite

[zulux]

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 /home/mp3 folder:

select files from /home/mp3 where doesent_suck(artist) | mp3_player

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.

Why oh why are you such a snob?

[Camel Pilot]

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.

Re:Why oh why are you such a snob?

[leandrod]

> What makes you so sure that MySQL was the source of the problem?

I take MySQL to be more a symptom than a cause here. And the symptom is being unable to think a system as a whole.

To be more precise, programming bums will fail to see the need to code less and more simply, to do proper systems administration, to use well a real DBMS.

Re:Why oh why are you such a snob?

[Camel Pilot]

The symptom here is the the thinking that all applications that touch data must use a "real" DBMS.

There are plenty of applications where a flat file is sufficient and a database of any sort is overkill and a complication to the implementation.

Moving up a level and there are plenty of applications that do just fine with MySQL. MySQL does have some advantages for web based applications that demand low connection latency - an area where MySQL excels over "real" databases that cost "real" bucks. Also MySQL has a very easy to use command line management client that facilitate remote admin.

If you need transactions and views then consider a database that can provide those features.

In engineering there are few absolutes and most choices are compromises.

Re:Why oh why are you such a snob?

[leandrod]

> There are plenty of applications where a flat file is sufficient and a database of any sort is overkill

Certainly dynamic web sites aren't among them. They call for concurrent data access and updateability, which is a typical DBMS use. Also, a good DBMS will ease the complexity of coding and improve reliability over simple file access.

> MySQL does have some advantages for web based applications that demand low connection latency - an area where MySQL excels over "real" databases that cost "real" bucks. Also MySQL has a very easy to use command line management client that facilitate remote admin.

A real DBMS -- a database is the organised data, not the software to control it -- does not necessarily cost anything, see PostgreSQL and others. And PostgreSQL does have all the advantages of MySQL, including speed and command line management, plus reliability and while requiring far simpler coding and keeping the data more consistent and accessible.

Re:Why oh why are you such a snob?

[johnnyb]

You are missing the point of a database. If you need a database to run application X, you don't need a database at all - it will only slow things down. Relational databases are there in order to consolidate _all_ of a company's data into a single, queryable source, which is *application independent*. The point is that your applications today are _not_ your applications tomorrow, but your data still is. A fully relational database will bring you through all of the hoops necessary to get from point A to point B without thoroughly screwing with your data.

Re:completely offtopic

[damiam]

The guy has an email address. You could use it.

Thank you donators

[InodoroPereyra]

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 :-)

Bitch'n moan about the UI...

[Picass0]

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.

Re:Bitch'n moan about the UI...

[Pseudonym]

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.

More like people who can read Western sheet music bitching about how hard it is to play music notated in MusicTeX or Lilypond.

I used to get paid to use Maya and I find Blender clunky. (But then, I find 3DS Max, which I also got paid to use, clunky too.)

Re:Bitch'n moan about the UI...

[symbolic]

Anyway, I don't think that Blender has this interface because easier interface are just so hard to invent. In fact, I'd say that more thought was invested Blender's keyboard/gesture oriented interface than in most professional tools. They tried to be original. To re-invent the wheel. Unfortunately, they chose to make it square.

I like this analogy. I suppose the question is whether or not Blender will remain in this 'rebel' mode or grow out of it. FWIW, I am by no means a newbie, and it's precisely because of this that certain things about the interface are a pain in the rear. For example...using the alt-j function with the text editor you get a teeny little window that pops up with a with a new hybrid buttonentryfield. You can click and slide back and forth, you can click repeatedly to advance the line number, or you can shift-click, and enter the number manually. If you enter the number manually, then you have to click out of the field for it to 'take', and finally, you can't just hit return or enter, you HAVE to click on the OK button (AFAIK). What ever happened to a simple text entry field? Since you probably know what line you're jumping to, replacing all of this overhead with a simple alt-j/type number/hit return process would make this a much more efficient process.

Here's something else: create a complex rig using armatures and vertex groups. Log the amount of tim you spend hunting through an unsorted list group names to find the one you're looking for. Count how many times you have to shift-click into the name field and scroll back and forth just so that you can be sure that you have the right group selected (the field usually isn't long enough to display the entire name).

It's because of problems like these that I let out a long sigh when ever people try to convince me how 'efficient' the interface is. I often wonder just how much of it they've actually used.

Re:Bitch'n moan about the UI...

[prockcore]

"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."

As someone who used to teach Lightwave classes. I can say that the blender UI is truly abhorant.. and it's not "I just don't know how to use a 3d program".

I'm not talking about "it's too hard to use" I'm talking about "it isn't powerful enough", and therefore it's too hard to do what you want.

In lightwave you can set multiple points to the same Y value (for example) by simply selecting the points, and then using the numeric requestor. Blender has a numeric window, but it only works on 1 point at a time. You can't numerically modify more than one point at a time in blender like you can in Maya and Lightwave.

It's limitations like this that make Blender a big pain in the ass to use.

I've seen people say "Blender is difficult to use because it's powerful" Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Lightwave is soo much easier to use, and it's miles ahead in terms of power.

Hopefully now that Blender is GPL, people can begin to work on that.

BL is BS!

[Makenai]

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

Re:BL is BS!

[WWWWolf]

As I understood it, the code can be used in two forms: 1) Use it under the terms of GPL, in which case if you distribute a modified version, code must be included, or 2) negotiate the license to distribute only the binaries with the Foundation, and pay them to fund the development (and I expect this payment is not that light!).

I fail to see how this "stifles a major part of the GPL". The Blender Foundation releases all of their code under this dual license - People donate them money to do their job and release code under these terms. This license does allow others to take this code and modify it, and choose to either pay up, or be a nice citizen and contribute the code.

And yes, this dual license thing was mentioned a couple of times in past. Loudly. Were you not listening?

Re:BL is BS!

[Chris Johnson]

They can only do that with the code as-is or with purely in-house development added to it. They won't be able to say that about any GPL-sphere additions- if you want to nip this in the bud, do such good work on the GPLed version that it becomes the definitive one and completely leaves the in-house version in the dust.

I concede that it looks like they'll want to release GPLed additions under the BL license to proprietary developers- but really, they can't. Any lawyer would eat them alive for such an infraction. Like it or not, they just forked it into BL and GPL versions. If you don't like BL, make the GPL the one to have.

Re:BL is BS!

[Picass0]

Ton spoke with RMS about this addition to the GPL and Stallman gave it his OK.

Blender foundation has alwys had as one of it's goals to become a viable business again. I imagine that there will be a commercial blender fork someday.

Re:BL is BS!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

They can only do that with the code as-is or with purely in-house development added to it. They won't be able to say that about any GPL-sphere additions- if you want to nip this in the bud, do such good work on the GPLed version that it becomes the definitive one and completely leaves the in-house version in the dust.

On the other hand, if you want to have the best of both worlds, do some really good work in the GPLed branch (carefully avoiding the inclusion of other people's GPLed code in your work). Then offer to license it back to the foundation to also be included in the "in-house" version - for a fee. B-)

Compiling....

[Anonymous Butthead]

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.

Re:Compiling....

[FunkyChild]

p.s. anyone intrested on starting the os x port??

There's been an OS X port for plenty of time now. You can download the free beta here.

Just some quick info...

[sgtsanity]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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No, it isn't.

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[leandrod]

> What fetures of a "real DBMS" would have helped in this case?

All of them, and reliability and scalability too.

The point here is that by using MySQL one must to by coding much that should be done declaratively in and by the DBMS. The whole becomes bigger, slower, less reliable, even if the pseudo-DBMS itself seems faster when seen in isolation.

Re:/.ed already

[paRcat]

They made Profit first, 100,000 of it, then they made Blender GPL... actually the original owners had it good..

um... no.
In fact, the 100,000 was to buy the IP back from the investors in the company. When NaN went bankrupt, the investors had everything... the money got the sources back into the public instead of rotting away on some investment company's backup server.

Music Notation vs Intuative

[Tablizer]

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.)

Re:Music Notation vs Intuative

[BlueGecko]

If I were to guess you play modern and not classical music, and further that you do all composition on the computer, would I be correct? I make those assumption for two reasons:

1. Classical music alternates frequently between very long notes (sometimes held across eight or nine measures) and very quick notes (sixteenths very frequently, occasionally thirty-seconds or faster). Representing both of those notes in a human-readable form, without changing your scale every measure and thereby negating the whole point, would be very difficult. If you try to avoid that by defining the standard measure width by the most cramped measure, you're still in trouble because you'll end up with such long measures that you cannot easily guage the distance of your notes and therefore also negate the value of the system. In other words, you'll have to add other notations to your staff until you negate the benefit which you are proposing.
2. Your solution works great for computer, but I want you to try to tell musicians who notate pieces (which would be any professional musician anywhere and any half-decent music student as well) that they should bring a ruler to practice to ensure their notes are the proper width. There is a major value to our current system, which is I can do it with an unsteady hand and a pencil on sheet music propped in front of me at 45 degrees. With your system I'd have to lay it flat, take out a ruler, figure out how wide the measures were, divide that width by the width of the note I wanted to draw, line that note up with the end of the previous note, and then draw the right length. I fail to see this catching on.

There are other problems with your system too--for example, what happened to rests?--but quite frankly I think the above two complaints are sufficient enough.

Re:Music Notation vs Intuative

[Permission Denied]

Music notiation is an anachronism.

So, you're advocating something akin to guitar tab which displays the lengths of notes. (Disclaimer: I play classical guitar as a hobby and have zero tolerance for tab.)

Tell me this: with tab, how can you tell, just by looking at the score, in which key the piece is played? If your primary purpose in reading music is to reproduce the sounds a composer wrote down, then tab (or your variation of tab) may suffice, but it does not suffice for conveying music. It certainly won't help if you want to try to improvise off the score. It won't help if you want to try to analyze the music, to find patterns, to figure out a composer's "style", etc. How can you tell, by looking at tab, that a composer has moved from one key to another but is still developing the same motif in the new key?

Tab (and variations of it) have been around may years (perhaps even longer than standard notation - this would require some research, but I recall that music for the first string instruments was written using some sort of tab). The reason it's been supplanted by standard musical notation is because standard score is better. It's taken a long time to develop standard notation and it may be difficult for beginners because it's meant to convey a lot of other things which aren't too important when you're trying to figure out how to tap out greensleeves on a keyboard. Learning to read score does, unfortunately, take time, but so does learning music.

I also use vi and would leave any job that required me to code in that hyped-up notepad variant which is called Visual Studio (leave the home row to use the ARROW KEYS!?). I have no idea about any of this 3-D stuff (I understand the math, but that's about it), but I trust that the professionals in the domain have quite different needs than the amateurs.

Last time I said this it started a huuuge flamewar.

As well it should :)

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[leandrod]

> The problem is with the programmers, web designers and db developers

Agreed. But then, when one is a good systems engineer, he chooses a real DBMS in order to avoid too much coding, data inconsistencies and other issues that MySQL fails to address. That is, MySQL here is more of a symptom of shoddy work done with good intentions.

Re:Why???

[WWWWolf]

Why is everyone making such a big deal about Blender? ...

Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).

(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)

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!

(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>

Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).

Extra mirror

[RinkSpringer]

I've put up an extra mirror for you ... here. Enjoy!

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[leandrod]

> /. operates just fine on MySQL. It's hardly ever down.

If you had been here for long enough you would remember that many of the problem /. had in various times were indeed related to either MySQL directly, or to convoluted coding made necessary by its deficiencies.

> It's faster [mysql.com] than most other databases because it's leaner.

It is only faster if you take it as an isolated factor. If you compose it with all the additional coding that it requires, besides lack of scalability and additional system administration work required, it ends up being much slower both to deploy and in performance.

Re:Err.. not quite

[leandrod]

> I just hope that MySQL or our file-systems can rise to the task.

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.

Re:Err.. not quite

[Tablizer]

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-

Re:/.ed already

[cooldev]

While finally having a halfway decent 3D program available for free is a Good Thing, I think this turn of events sets a bad precedent. It disturbs me that the /. crowd thinks this was somehow profitable, a success, or a model to follow in the future.

100,000 is a pathetic amount of money when it comes to software development; it's barely enough to pay one programmer for a year. Whoopteedo. This wasn't profitable; it was an act of charity by the investors that is sending the wrong message to a group of geeks that spends thousands of dollars a year on hardware, but are too cheap and greedy to pay for software.

Re:Why???

[John Hasler]

> Why is everyone making such a big deal about
> Blender?

Everyone isn't (I'm not, for example). Only those who care are. There just happen to be a lot of them, and they care enough to actually do something.

> And going so far as to buy it as a community to
> GPL it?

The community that bought it is the community of those who care. It's their business how they spend their money.

> Why the hell doesn't the community get organized
> and purchase [Bynari's Insight server]?

Why the hell don't you get off your ass and organize it to do so?

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Why the GPL is good

[Salsaman]

Heh...having just got back from the Blender party (yay) I think I can safely say there is not much chance of the developers losing interest :-)

But of course having the code under the GPL is a Good Thing.

why so many mouse buttons?

[Tablizer]

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 :-)

Re:why so many mouse buttons?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Ask yourself, "how many fingers do I have on that hand holding the mouse". Consider that perhaps not all are equally coordinated...but why deny a mode of input that is literally an extension of our hands? I think there should be room for all modes of input, then let the user choose :-)

And validation of the street performer protocol

[NZheretic]

This precedent also represents the potental validation of the many forms of street performer protocol. Open source and Commons preserving Free licensing is growing up.

Quoting a recent article of mine

Horace Greeley (1811-1872), Editor of the New York Tribune in an editorial in 1841 said:

Do not lounge in the cities! There is room and health in the country, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles. Go west, before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory.

In the same way, I urge you to...
Do not lounge on the Microsoft platform! There is room and scope on Linux, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles, Go open, before you are fitted for no life but that of the helpdesk.

But more importantly, by 1871 Horace Greeley also wrote: "This Daniel Boone business is about played out."

In the same way, the last decade's Linux customer base can be seen as the self reliant pioneers. The "Do It Yourself" attitude and habit was learned from a time when "doing for themselves" was the only option. This is no longer the case, there are plenty new settlers and far many more willing to migrate, who are all too willing to pay for hardware, support, customization, collective development and even quality proprietary licensed products.

Custom and default keystrokes in manual

[Tablizer]

(* 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.

Re:Err.. not quite

[Tablizer]

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?

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Why???

[symbolic]

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?

I wasn't aware that Exchange had a 3D modeling/animation/rendering module.

I bitch a lot about Blender. Why, you ask? (or maybe you don't). I do it because I've invested hundreds of hours putting up with the things I hate about it, in order to enjoy the things I like about it. Now that the code is free, hopefully I'll see some of the things that people dislike the most, change for the better.

As for Exchange, wouldn't it make more sense to rally the interest of people who actually use it?

Re:Ray tracer? - POV files

[vik]

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.

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 :v)

Re:/.ed already

[johnnyb]

Actually, it's enough to pay 2 good programmers for one year. I don't know where you get your salary information, but it is no longer the 90s. Programmers now have to work for a living.

Software development also goes much faster when the developers actually spend time programming rather than playing quake.

I agree, the blender package is probably more than 2 programmers could put out in a year, but I think you might be using bad metrics when determining the cost of software development. I.E. - I think you are basing it on overvalued, under-knowledgeable, and lazy programmers. Yes, they may "work" 12 hours a day, but they spend most of it on Slashdot.

Re:Except its bullshit...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

So what we need is two interfaces which run in parallel, without tripping over each others commands. That is, the "learning" menu-assisted interface should indicate the keystrokes, so that as the student becomes adept the keyboard commands become second nature. Thus, a reduced learning curve to get *something* done (i.e., *anything* to work), without impacting the Pros.

Harder than Maya

[EnglishTim]

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.

Re:Harder than Maya

[glwtta]

Hmm... yes, of course for graphic artists (ie the users) this might be the app they use every single day, and for a large portion of that day, for many years to come - might be worth the few weeks effort to learn that gui, if it gives some advantage in productivity. Whether or not the latter is true is a debate onto itself, and I can't really comment since I don't have much experience with 3D modeling; but some people seems to think that is better in that respect.

Re:Harder than Maya

[EnglishTim]

The thing is, in the post production industry you're likely to end up using several packages. If you've been using one whose skills can easily be transferred to another package, it'll put you in a more hireable position.

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[leandrod]

> guess you've never seen the /. code. The whole thing is convoluted.

That is my point. Having a real DBMS makes coding much, much simpler.

> Oracle never releases patches or new versions tho because their code is so "tight" right?

Oracle is a bad example of quality. Try PostgreSQL instead.

> mySQL practically admin's itself. Not everyone has a need for a useless 100K+/year DBA who has TOMES of oracle books to do something that *should* be a simple process.

Who's talking about Oracle? PostgreSQL is as easy to manage as MySQL, but requires less coding and makes much more complex tasks easier for both developer and administrator.

> I would say transactions but MySQL has transactions now

Yes, in a totally unproven, and optional, implementation! While still lacking all kinds of declared integrity constraints, scalability and even sane documentation.

> mySQL is good at the personal/small-medium business level.

Nothing that makes data integrity optional or procedural is good for holding any organisational data...

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[leandrod]

> if you require that much extra coding, then you might need to think about your database approach

Always when dealing with data, application code must check for constraints procedurally. This is extra, uncessarily complex code that is much better, simpler and more consistently done at the DBMS.

> If you rely on things like constraint checks to keep your data straight, you're doing a pretty half assed job to begin with.

Ignore History at your own peril... the relational model for database management was exactly intended to provide declarative, centralised integrity constraints, because doing so in the application, no matter how good the application, is a sure recipe for failure. You don't cover integrity assurance for interactive, direct users of the database, and it is next to impossible to keep track of all integrity constraints and enforce them in all application programs.

Hear hear! Vi has its points...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[leandrod]

> If your code needs foreign key and check constraints

It is not code that requires integrity constraints, but data integrity. Data integrity is a function of the DBMS that is declared. That makes it much simpler, faster, more consistent than if one tries to do that with procedural coding, which ends up not covering up ad hoc use of the database anyway.

I agree

[io333]

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...

Re:I agree

[bogado]

If you are writing your music with a computer, the use of color is quite easy, but if you are used to write your music with your instrument and a pencil, this would actualy made things harder. People on slashdot, including me, are used to use the computer for much of their tasks. But don't forget that there are people who produce better withou a computer, there are acutualy people who preffer to strike out a text in the paper then just pressing del. :-)

Wow...

[nathanh]

Christmas came early this year.

woohoo

Re:Bang!

[glwtta]

I was set there in the Theatrum Anatomicum with the site projected on the screen when the whole thing crumbled five minutes after launch. Why? Simple: PHP + MySQL.

To be fair, it was put together by very few people, in a very short period of time (that money just came in so fast! :) ) it just wasn't a slashdot oriented technology choice.

Re:Bang!

[blibbleblobble]

"Imagine, being slashdotted without assistance from slashdot.org ! The horrors! What [other] force in the universe is capable of such obliterative power?"

PAN DOWN to reveal a monstrous half-completed Death Star[blender.org], its massive superstructure curling away from the completed section like the arms of a giant octopus. Beyond, in benevolent contrast, floats the small, green moon of ENDOR[petswarehouse.com]

Re:Hear hear! Vi has its points...

[tal197]

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.

Why not use Vim then... syntax highlighting, multi-level undo and all the other goodies, but with the efficient VI key bindings :-)

Donate $50.00 and become a member

[FreeUser]

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.

vim

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Re:vim - oops...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

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 /tmp/%, then repeated control-shift-"u". The multiple undo wouldn't break that.

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.

Re:vim - oops...

[tal197]

Of course with multi-level undo you don't have to "blink" 'em to find 'em, so it really is an improvement.

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...