Slashback: Blender, Paly, Dragon

The last Slashback of July brings you updates on the open-source Blender and Diebold's approach to voting security, and a skeptical look at the design origins of the Dragon V CPU, John Poindexter's very own future, and more. Read on for the details.

A cleaner UI would be nice in the next round. Qbertino writes "Blender 2.28 - the first major release after it was GPLd after a $100,000 community source-code buyout in October last year -- is finished. It's now got a wide variety of added features such as Audio Sequencing (as mentioned earlier) and a complete redo of the built-in Python engine for your 3D scripting convenience and import/export empowerment. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris and that other OS :-). See the full changelog here and get the new version binaries here. Cheers to the Blender folks and: Happy Blending!"

Just close the curtain on your way out, citizen. utunga writes "After recent claims that their voting systems were grossly insecure, Diebold has issued a rebuttal which has in turn been panned. One question this raises : Do programmers now have worry that their comments ... such as - 'Reimplemented MMIO functions, as MS is too effing lazy to provide them under CE. Most of this is cribbed from the Wine Project.' - might wind up in the media (or worse, in court) as evidence for one side or the other ?"

Correspondence school? chipace writes "The newly released Dragon-V CPU could have deeper roots in Austin, Texas than in China. The Alchemy Au1500 (AMD) displayed at Comdex 2002 has a lot in common with the new CultureCom Dragon-V cpu (or is it the other way around?). Both have identical MIPS32 cores (16k instruction + 16k data caches), Ethernet MACs, USB 1.1, PCI 2.2, SDRAM controller ... same power consumption. I'm not saying they are pin-compatible... just that this is by no means an original chip (seeing as the Au1500 has been available for over a year). Is the Dragon-V a ground-up development that CultureCom is describing, or is this just another case of a Chinese company doing reverse engineering?"

They can swim out and try, though. Complete Bastard writes "The Australian is reporting today that Aussie corporate Linux users, including AusRegistry, which runs Australia's domain name registry, are also starting to say no to SCO's licensing scheme. After reading the recent /. roundup of corporate ire, it would seem the business world is starting to truly make it's opinions known in this issue..."

The wisdom of the free market. skwang writes "Do you think John Poindexter should keep his job? The head of Pentagon's department responsible for Terrorism Information Awareness (formerly Total Information Awareness) and most recently known for his Policy Analysis Market, which would allow investors to buy future's contracts in middle east events such as the overthrow of King Adbullah of Jordan, has himself a futures contract on Tradesports, as reported by CNN.

Investors can now buy futures contracts to speculate on whether or not Poindexter will keep his job after August 31st. Since Poindexter's contracts are new, they do not represent an accurate indicator of his job security."

Could be too late: Eponymous Coward writes "CNN writes "Retired Adm. John Poindexter, who created a firestorm this week with his plan to create a futures market that would capitalize on predicting terror attacks, will resign in coming weeks from his post at the Pentagon, a senior defense official said Thursday. The official said the research that Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program (TIA) were conducting had become just too 'unorthodox'." Ya think?"

No good deed goes unpunished. Anonymous Coward writes "In regards to the June 25th Article 'WiFi Exposes Sensitive Student Data': The School district has decided to boot all volunteers, the story is here..."

Seems like a harsh way to treat long-time volunteers with expensive skills.

Comments

No good deed goes unpunished???

[winkydink]

Setting up wifi in an insecure way hardly qualifies as an expensive skill.

....an expensive mistake perhaps, but I don't see tons of job ads saying "wanted: bozo who doesn't know how to configure wifi to set up our wireless network"

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[Suppafly]

Setting up wifi in an insecure way hardly qualifies as an expensive skill.

whats funny is that the real article says nothing about Wi-fi it just says the districts policy is that only employees can touch the computers now.

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[vsprintf]

whats funny is that the real article says nothing about Wi-fi it just says the districts policy is that only employees can touch the computers now.

Which means that the servers will now be really secure, since none of the employees have any idea what they do, and they certainly wouldn't touch them. :)

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that there's no mention of the Paly servers in the first article -- the WiFi security hole was in the district offices, and at middle schools, and not at the high school (where the volunteers were administrating computers).

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[A Commentor]

Which means that the servers will now be really secure, since none of the employees have any idea what they do, and they certainly wouldn't touch them. :)

No that means that they won't have any security patches applied, so whatever holes are discovered/post on the internet, will likely exist for a long time on these servers.

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[Anonymous Coward]

pseudo-mod: +2 for great Sarcastic Funny

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[Shardis]

Large university network, who knows if they're the ones that even set it up? There might be some records somewhere, but prob only the Univ and the people that set 'em up know who did it.

*shrugs*

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[RMH101]

the problem is that *anyone* can plug a wireless access point into a live network socket and leak your network. IS don't always know if it's out there - some PHB can go to PC world, pickup a WAP and plug it in for his laptop and there's not a lot we can do about it apart from take them out when we find them...

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[Lumpy]

Setting up wifi in an insecure way hardly qualifies as an expensive skill. ....an expensive mistake perhaps, but I don't see tons of job ads saying "wanted: bozo who doesn't know how to configure wifi to set up our wireless network"

I see that Ad all the time for the IT field... It's just worded differently...

It's usually worded this way..

"Requires, MCSE"

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[rew]

I didn't read the story either, but I understand that one volunteer made the mistake, so all volunteers got booted.

Re:No good deed goes unpunished???

[vsprintf]

Notice the smiley? Umm, that was the point. Boy, I hate being the straight man for people who beat jokes to death for the moderators. ;)

Blender

[Squidgee]

Blender's UI is actually really useful once you get used to it.

The problem is, getting used to it. It's set up for the advanced user (read: keystrokes for EVERYTHING!), not for the newbie-point-and-clicker.

It's kinda like Slack, but in the 3D app land.

Re:Blender

[dan_barrett]

I Agree - it took me a couple of days to get my head around the interface - but after that's it's great!

(Still hard to use without a numeric keypad though, eg in a laptop)

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

Maybe it works for the experienced user, but it's still a stellar example of bad UI design. Tiny buttons with cryptic icons, a GUI interface that works in an irritatingly nonstandard fasion, and so forth. Fixing these would go a long way towards making it accessible to new users, and would not hurt the experienced users one bit. Given that the poor interface is by far the biggest complaint people have about Blender, you would think that some thought would be given to fixing it.

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

UNDO UNDO where the fluck is UNDO

Re:Blender

[ewhac]

It's a single keystroke command: U

Schwab
Who read the Quickstart tutorial.

Re:Blender

[moosesocks]

If it requires a lot of keystrokes to perform basic functions, it really isn't a GUI.

By definition, a GUI enables you to do anything (within reason) by using a mouse

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

separate the "G" from "GUI" and you are left with a UI that is good.

the "G" they have in place of said "GUI" is poor. buttons that don't even have names that maybe do something? when do they do something? how do i get them to do something? like someone else said, small and cryptic buttons.

the keystrokes are very good though, when you can remember them.

Re:Blender

[OverCode@work]

Recently I've learned to write 3ds max plugins, and a good 3/4 of the time I spend is just trying to get around in max. The actual 3d handling code (C++) is really simple to deal with.

Point being, 3d modelling is Hard, and I would expect any reasonably capable 3d modeller to be difficult to learn, even with a well designed UI.

Blender doesn't necessarily have a horrible UI. It's just a targetted one, meant for power users who need fast access to a lot of functionality.
Not to say it couldn't be improved.

-John

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

Maybe it works for the experienced user, but it's still a stellar example of bad UI design. Tiny buttons with cryptic icons, a GUI interface that works in an irritatingly nonstandard fasion, and so forth. Fixing these would go a long way towards making it accessible to new users, and would not hurt the experienced users one bit. Given that the poor interface is by far the biggest complaint people have about Blender, you would think that some thought would be given to fixing it.

The people who complain about Blenders UI wouldn't manage with any 3d application. If you read any of the numerous tutorials on Blender, you can get the hang of the UI in less than a half hour. I'm not saying be efficient and quick, but at least use it without difficulty.

3d modeling applications with more power than TruSpace can't have that user friendly of an interface because of the sheer number of functions it has to have in quick access. If you look at Maya, they have spent tons of time in the UI, and their biggest contribution was the pie menu. Using Maya for an hour, vs. Blender you will notice Blender has faster keystrokes (while Maya is more "usable") but after 10 hours, Blender is more usable.

Their GUI also works in fairly standard fashion, with menus and hotkeys. The button tray at the bottom (default) is easy to see, and after you know what the icons mean (5 minutes of reading) it makes sense. I'm going to reiterate this point: Most people that complain about Blender and it's interface haven't read any of the documentation on it and spent 30 minutes trying to figure it out.

It isn't a mail client, it's a 3d modelling application.

Re:Blender

[dmiller]

The people who complain about Blenders UI wouldn't manage with any 3d application.

Not so. I was able to pick up Maya, 3DS Max and Lightwave and start editing meshes pretty quickly just by playing with the interface. I have read a couple of Blender tutorials and it still seems like too much work.

Re:Blender

[digitalhermit]

Given that the poor interface is by far the biggest complaint people have about Blender, you would think that some thought would be given to fixing it.

Actually, many people praise blender for its user interface. Yes, it is difficult for someone who hasn't read the manual to use, but once you actually read the manual, you'll soon realize that the interface is pretty easy to use. You can get a lot of things done very quickly because of how the mouse and keyboard interact. No, it does not conform to most user interface guidelines, but that's a little irrelevant for a specialized app, don't you think?

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

> By definition, a GUI enables you to do anything (within reason) by using a mouse

Not big on actual definitions, are you?

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

Not so. I was able to pick up Maya, 3DS Max and Lightwave and start editing meshes pretty quickly just by playing with the interface. I have read a couple of Blender tutorials and it still seems like too much work.

I haven't used 3DS much, but my first impression of it was worse than Blender.

I read the Castle tutorial on Blender and felt very comfortable with it. Which tutorials did you read?

Re:Blender

[AndyChrist]

The makers of every other decent 3D app don't think it's irrelevant.

I last used an early version of blender...so my opinion may be dated...but the documentation sucked as badly as the interface. With most 3D apps, you can just look at it and know what you're seeing. With blender, screw actually manipulating objects, just figuring out what's in front of you can be a pain.

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the UI of blender is kind of stinky. The main thing that bugs me is that the button labels don't fit on the buttons - so it is kind of irritating when the first couple letters of the button description are missing.

BUT - like everyone says - once you mess around with the program for more than a couple minutes you start to learn the keystrokes which are EASY and FAST. I just turn the UI buttons off for more editing room.

Re:Blender

[KnightNavro]

I don't know about learning it in a half hour. I've been playing with it for a week and I'm still only up to static modeling. It really could use better documentation. Of course, users experienced in other 3D modeling programs may have an easier time. In any case, this page has been tremendously helpful.

Re:Blender

[dcuny]

• If you read any of the numerous tutorials on Blender, you can get the hang of the UI in less than a half hour.

That depends on what you mean by "get the hang of the UI". Sure, you can figure out that buttons can be pushed and that everything in Blender looks like a button. At least form could fit the function, y'know?

The main problem is that the UI doesn't give you any clue how to perform tasks. For example, might know, for example, that you need to add bones to your mesh. But how to do that?

I know that it can be done, but looking through the menus and tabs, I can't see hide nor hare of anything like a Add Bones option. Once the bones are added, how are they supposed to be parented to the mesh? Again, the UI doesn't give any clue.

Just because you (or any other number of users) can figure out how to do great things in Blender - and Blender is an amazingly powerful program - doesn't mean that it's got a good UI. I could just as easily point to the Persistance of Vision Raytracer and claim that it's got a great user interface, because lots of people can use it and produce great work with it.

It's great that you can memorize a zillion different keystrokes, but I can't. That means I can't use Blender without an Internet connection, so I can download the outdated manual, or search for an outdated tutorial, or head over to the friendly folk on #blenderchat for some help.

• Most people that complain about Blender and it's interface haven't read any of the documentation on it and spent 30 minutes trying to figure it out.

Well, the same goes for most people who use any software. But one of the points of a UI is to expose functionality of the product. And that's something that Blender does terribly, even for someone like me who's been struggling with the UI for a couple years.

There are other Free software programs that support animation, such as Art of Illusion and Anim8or. There are up and coming contenders, such as JPatch and Wings3D that don't yet support animation, but promise to in the near future. As powerful as Blender is, I'm hanging my hopes one one of these less powerful, but more user friendly applications.

(In fairness should note that Ton has recently set up a forum for the improvement of Blender, and one of the main focuses on Blender 2.0 will be an improved user interface.)

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

It really could use better documentation.

That's why they sell books, because they give the software away for free. Kind of forced compensation, but I think it's a great model.

Re:Blender

[digitalhermit]

I last used an early version of blender...so my opinion may be dated...but the documentation sucked as badly as the interface. With most 3D apps, you can just look at it and know what you're seeing. With blender, screw actually manipulating objects, just figuring out what's in front of you can be a pain.

OK, have you used Maya before? Take a look at its interface and try to create a scene without the manual. Try the same thing with any non-trivial modelling program. Sure, the simple applications all let you create a metal sphere on a checkboard, some random landscapes, maybe even extruded text rotating in space, but try doing something a little more advanced and these simple ones become difficult to use. But in Maya some very complex scenes can be done in minutes by an experienced operator. Yes, the blender documentation once needed work but a lot of has been added and clarified.

Re:Blender

[denzombie]

Given that the poor interface is by far the biggest complaint people have about Blender, you would think that some thought would be given to fixing it.
-- Ulch - that meat was tainted! You feel deathly sick.

This coming from someone who's sig is a Nethack warning of impending doom. Nethack's another one where the interface is a challenge to learn but almost invisible after you learn it.

Re:Blender

[afidel]

Not true, 3DS MAX has an easy to learn yet powerfull interface. A friend of mine was using it to make commercials back when I was in college. He had reverse kinematics, extrusion effects, particle effects, etc. All of that was simple enough to do that after watching him for 5 minutes I could have picked it up (though I wouldn't have been anywhere near as good as he was). The coolest thing from my perspective was the way he got compensated for the commercial, a new workstation, 5.1 surround system, 2 Pro VCR's, and a commercial MAX liscense =)

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

You failed to address the relevant point: Blender's UI is needlessly cryptic. Even assuming that you really can pick it up in half an hour like you claim (obviously false; I and many others have spent far more than half an hour trying to learn to use it), there is absolutely no reason to simply ignore the years of research and work on user interfaces. A well-designed interface would be just as powerful of the "power user", and still not be as opaque to the new user.

If you think that having a text entry widget that looks like a button is good user interface design, you're insane.

Re:Blender

[Feztaa]

I have read a couple of Blender tutorials and it still seems like too much work.

Yeah, pressing the tab key is just so hard.

Seriously, get over it. I made the same complaints when i was a blender newbie, and the developers basically just said "shut up, we like it this way".

At this point, I think the pain/cost of making all the expert users retrain themselves is worse than just having the occaisonal new user get used to the way things are.

Re:Blender

[I Want GNU!]

Just a half hour? Proficient in it? I never thought I was interested enough to spend several hours on Blender when I still don't know many other technologies (I recently taught myself Perl and I've learned C++ and Java in high school and college so far...), but 30 minutes?

That I'll do, if you weren't exaggerating. Which book should I read?

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

Well, I can think of two reasons why the comparison isn't particularly great:

1) Nethack's interface may be difficult to learn, but it is not cryptic. The keystroke=command paradigm is kept consistent thoughout the game; the hard part is learning all the commands. There's a difference between the large number of commands in Nethack, and the flouting of user interface standards in Blender. Most of my complaints about the Blender interface would be solved if they had a sane menu system, and followed interface guidelines. I'm well aware of the fact that a 3D modeler is not an inherently easy thing to use, but the interface has no business making things worse.

2) There are actually alternative interfaces available for nethack, should one want to use them.

Point taken, though :)

Re:Blender

[AsmordeanX]

I tired Blender for a few days. I got to the point where I knew most of the commands by key, yet I still hated the UI with a passion. Maybe someone could come along a fix it and leave the classic version in place for those that like it. One of the better apps that I have used is Carrara. Its UI is probably the easiest to understand that I have ever found in a 3D app. Granted the method of creation might not be traditional but at least stuff makes sense and isn't made from an 8x8 pixel icon that acts different if I press left or right or click on the top or right of it.

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

I've looked at blender before and it is a really really amazing product, but the range of choices at any step is paralyzing. I really don't have a clue what to do and there are 1000 choices on screen all the time.

Couldn't a program this complicated have several UI's? Keep the existing UI for power users, but throw in a "Production Wizard" for people who don't use these tools everyday. The wizard could walk through the steps of adding models, adding textures and bones to the models, adding cameras and light sources, then animating everything and producing a finished product?

A Production Wizard would be a high level overview of all the steps you need to do to get from a few models and textures to a finished, recorded movie, ready for distribution.

Re:Blender

[xlark]

Quote:
"still a stellar example of bad UI design"
"accessible to new users"

Are Vi and Emacs stellar examples of bad UI Design then? Neither are perticularly accessable to new users. How do you suggest we go about fixing them?

The problem is making them "more accessible to new users"is that no matter what you say, changing the way an application works on the level of the UI can, and usually will hurt experianced users. No offense to any programmers, but few of them can design good, useable UIs that are still "accessible to new users." I can think of example UI, but I shall bit my tongue for fear of flames.

Re:Blender

[connsmythe96]

With blender, screw actually manipulating objects, just figuring out what's in front of you can be a pain

Exactly. When I first tries blender, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I literally couldn't do ANYTHING or figure out what I was looking at. The icons don't make sense and there are a lot of keystroke functions that don't have icons (important ones even). It wasn't until I looked at a tutorial that I was able to do anything with it. I simply don't have time to learn how to do anything even simple.

Re:Blender

[shadowbearer]

One thing that Blender could/has? benefitted from is tooltips when you have a mouseover on the buttons.

Excuse me, not sure about the window Blender, all I do is the linux version anymore. Have they implemented tooltips "balloons" for the windows versions yet?

SB

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

Are Vi and Emacs stellar examples of bad UI Design then?

I certainly wouldn't cite them as examples of a good UI. They aren't quite as bad as Blender -- at least they're consistent, they don't flout UI standards, and come with comprehensive help; all of which I consider among the worst things Blender misses -- but they're not perfect.

The GUI versions of vim help a lot -- giving new users access to commands that they would otherwise have to guess or search through the help files for. Getting started with vi on a text terminal is rather difficult without a reference, and the more advanced functions are still difficult to find.

This is coming from a vim user. When I first got started, it took me quite some time to learn how to edit a text file usefully, and I still wouldn't call myself an expert. That initial learning curve should be much shorter.

Re:Blender

[shibbydude]

yes - for all in fact, for about 2 years now, since blender 2.23

Re:Blender

[xophos]

Well, when you first touch vi, it's really cryptic, but if you read the first 4 pages of the tutorial, you can do basic text editing in less than 10 minutes. Emacs is even better (for the newbie). When used under X you can do basic text editing instantly.
This does not mean that you have any understanding of the power, that you could be using, if you read the manual. But the learning curve is not very steep to the both of them.
When you first try blender (even after finishing the first tutorial) you can not do basic 3d editing. While that might be a problem of the complexity of the task, other modelers are easyer in the begining.

Re:Blender

[dcuny]

Yes, Blender had tooltips on buttons on all platforms.

Blender is an OpenGL application, and draws it's own widgets and windows, so it has the same look and feel on all platforms.

Blender has implemented a lot of improvements to the interface from the earlier releases. But (as others have pointed out) 3D animation is hard. Many operations are non-trivial, and require a number of steps. A more clear UI would be helpful, but not under these circumstances.

There are also a lot of 'hidden' functions that people don't know about. For example, there are constant requests for Blender to have more Wings3D sort of modelling features. Blender already supports things like face select and extrude along normal but finding out about them is a different matter. (I doubt I can remember what key combination brings up extrude along normal, and I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about finding it from within Blender.)

Anyhoo, I think what Blender needs is good integrated documentation. The Blender team seems hellbent on keeping the download as small as possible, and don't want to include anything that's not necessary with the core download.

Still, integrated help would solve a number of problems:

• Newbies could discover things like U for Undo.
• Intermediate users could find out the order of buttons to press to get radiosity to work.
• Longtime users would never use it, but they'd never see it, either.

Just a thought.

Re:Blender

[makapuf]

wrong. There are simple things in 3D modelling, and those should be simple. See Brice.

I think a good interface (be it a programming language or a GUI) should not ADD complexity to the inherent complexity of a task.

Thus, simple thing should be made simple, repetitive tasks should be quick to do, and numerous other ones should be available without learning/remembering too many ways to do it.

Generally, pick two.

I think blender's UI is good at the last two ones.

Re:Blender

[JanneM]

I don't think that is the kind of problem the previous poster had in mind. Take the example with having a row of tiny buttons with less-than-clear icons on them.

Their functionality - or lack of it - has nothing to do with the problem domain. No matter what the application, they are making it harder to use than would otherwise be the case. They are difficult to see, to distinguish between, and easier to make an accidental "misclick" and select the wrong function.

I fully agree that an UI should be designed for the target user population. A desktop (whether Gnome, KDE, Windows, Mac or whatever) tends to be rather plain an uninnovative, and it must be as the target population is, well, everybody. A smaller, specialized segment, such as Blender users, can motivate a much more specialized, targeted UI as well.

But there are also some things that make using an app harder than it should be, no matter what the target population is (assuming it's at least human, and alive). They are things that stretch the sensory or motor-capabilities of the user too much (like finding the right button, when they are too small and too many, bunched together too tight), or stuff that could be one way or another without loss in functionality, and the "backwards" way is chosen. Those kinds of things would be a pure positive to change, with no downside for anyone.

Re:Blender

[Mac Degger]

Sorry, but Bryce is a wrong example; it's a plything with as much use to a production environment as a "my first sony" is to an audiophile. Sure, it makes pretty pictures, but is it parametric? Is it, at all, any good? No.

And that's why Bryce (to you) has a good UI; it's a toy's UI.

Now I'm not defending Blender's UI, but have a look at 3dsmax, maya and softimage; they're all difficult to learn. Blender however seems to go out of it's way to be hard to learn.

Re:Blender

[Mac Degger]

Yeah, I can use maya, 3dsmax and softimage (and also lightwave, but I hate the UI and the whole modal thing puts me off). Blender's UI still sucks. Live with it. Why do you think people (ie the dev's) are now considering Blenders UI to be an issue they must fix? Please stop trying to defend something which even it's developers know to be crap.

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

UI improvements are in the design stage. These things take time. In fact, if they rushed the design stage, you'd just end up with another bad UI.

Most of the duscussion so far is about making the button's functions (i.e. menu, field, action, etc.) obvious, and just generally cleaning up the GUI visually. But hopefully more broad re-designs will come in the future.

Re:Blender

[Lumpy]

Blender has implemented a lot of improvements to the interface from the earlier releases. But (as others have pointed out) 3D animation is hard. Many operations are non-trivial, and require a number of steps. A more clear UI would be helpful, but not under these circumstances.

I'll give you that on the UI... I really disagree with your comment on the fact that 3d animation is hard.

using Maya or lightwave or blender is a fricking piece of cake. Try 3d rendering/animation in renderman or megapov/povray.

when any of your animations are a 2 hour session of figuring out the trig formulas....

3d animations with blender and it's likes is frcking easy compared to what the rest of us who have been dabbling with 3d anim for over 10 years now.

Re:Blender

[slux]

There are basically two ways to design an UI.

1. You can go for intuitivity and ease of use for everyone. All the widely used operating system GUIs and mainstream applications follow this design philosophy. Examples would be KDE, GNOME, the Windows UI, Microsoft Office, Openoffice.org etc.

2. You can try to make all the functions easily accessible for the experienced user so that a user that knows how to use the program can work his way around as fast as possible. Examples of this design are Blender, Emacs and many other programs that target professionals.

Intuitive GUIs are nice for the beginner or casual user and lower the learning curve for an application, but when the time spent actually using the program will greatly exceed the time spent learning it, designing the UI to be fast (less motions, less time spent pointing with the mouse or tapping key sequences) may be a better option.

That's why not all window managers don't try to be the next GNOME and why some of us like to use the command line.

Re:Blender

[Cessen]

The people who complain about Blenders UI wouldn't manage with any 3d application. If you read any of the numerous tutorials on Blender, you can get the hang of the UI in less than a half hour. I'm not saying be efficient and quick, but at least use it without difficulty.

I've been using Blender for just under 5 years, and have become damned fast at using even its most advanced features.

That said, I think its GUI has significant room for improvement. I do think that there are definite pluses to its GUI design--which should be kept--but there are also many things that should be changed, a few of which actually hinder the power users' speed (having used it for 5 years, I can really see where the bottle-necks in the GUI are; there's not nearly as many as in most apps, but they are there).

The easiest--and one of the more significant--changes that could be made would be a simple visual change in how the GUI elements look. For instance, make menu's have a distinct look from buttons. As it is, everything looks like a button. And changing the visual look of the GUI elements would not hurt the power users (such as myself) one bit. But it would be a godsend for newbies.

To their credit, however, the Blender community is actually working on exactly that (giving all the GUI elements a distinct look).

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

at first I really hated vi. then I needed to edit a file on a sunos server, remotely, from a shit win98 telnet console. the vi ui is great because you can do all your tasks over a serial line without worrying about backspace turning into ^H or up/down turning into ^[[A^[[B . you just press x and k and j. ZZ

and YES YES YES vi is better than emacs your freeking text editor is 40MB! what are you thinking!

Re:Blender

[makapuf]

Bryce has basic functions. It lacks advanced functions. Yes.

Bryce has a simple interface. Yes. That makes simple things simple to do (my first Sony). That's why I didn't say it had advanced functions.

Add extra features to Brice, add a menu for advanced features. Simple things remain simple. Advanced functions are possible. Magic ? No.

Repeat after me : simple functions need to have a simple UI (there are generally only a few).

Sorry, but on my advanced 8-track cassette recorder (and on Ardour 24 tracks pro audio application BTW) I have the same transport buttons (Play, Stop, FFWD, REW) that on my first Sony. Not a P_KEY for playing, with no menu. Go figure.

Re:Blender

[alienw]

Get the book/manual. You have to remember that the company made money selling them.

Re:Blender

[grumbel]

I have to disagree with that, at least partly. The problem with Blenders UI is not getting used to it, the problem is the UI itself. I agree that it isn't fundamentally flawed and there are a lot things that I really really like about it. Being able to simple scroll the button-bar if it doesn't fit on the screen, is much more intuitive and effective than these ugly drop-down menu with the rest of the buttons that kde provides, being able to run in fullscreen is another thing. But having a whole lot of function hidden under secret Ctrl-Alt-somebutton shurtcut does nothing good to the UI, it violates the principell of visibility. Sure there is nothing wrong with having a shortcut, but there should be some context sensitive way to have a look at the currently available functions. Blender also has the problem of often providing no feedback to the user, you press a button or menu entry which doesn't work cause you are in the wrong mode at the moment and Blender gives you zero feedback about what is happening. Emacs has similar problems, but with 'M-x apropos' or 'M-x' in general there is at least always a way to browse through the available functions (still not very context sentitive, but at least it gives error messages in the modline).

Blender UI is not bad, but it could be a whole lot better with a bit more visibility. Luckily it is already getting quite a bit better with the last few releases and turning the tooltips on also helps alot.

Another more serious problem with Blender is the lack of functionality, if you look at Wings3d there are a lot of nice modeling functions that you can't do in Blender without a lot of manual work, which can often make the Blender UI feel not good in some situations, since it simply lacks the functionality.

Re:Blender

[agentk]

it's still a stellar example of bad UI design. Tiny buttons with cryptic icons, a GUI interface that works in an irritatingly nonstandard fasion, and so forth.

Are your statements based on taking an hour and learning how to use Blender, or just dogma?

Re:Blender

[shadowbearer]

I agree about the docs! I've played with Blender for quite a while and didn't know about undo....Thanks.

Now I know why I never saw tooltips - for some reason they were turned off in my preferences (set prefs a long time ago and never changed them).

I just downloaded the latest 2.28 and I am very, very impressed with some of the changes. It's been more than a year and a half since I upgraded. So much to do.

I don't know that 3d anim is *hard* necessarily, it just requires a certain mindset.

SB

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

You failed to address the relevant point: Blender's UI is needlessly cryptic. Even assuming that you really can pick it up in half an hour like you claim (obviously false; I and many others have spent far more than half an hour trying to learn to use it), there is absolutely no reason to simply ignore the years of research and work on user interfaces. A well-designed interface would be just as powerful of the "power user", and still not be as opaque to the new user.

Feel free to try to build a better interface for it. All I'm saying is that it isn't cryptic if you do a bit of research.

This is completely analogous to Windows users saying that Linux is needlessly cryptic, you realize?

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

The easiest--and one of the more significant--changes that could be made would be a simple visual change in how the GUI elements look. For instance, make menu's have a distinct look from buttons. As it is, everything looks like a button. And changing the visual look of the GUI elements would not hurt the power users (such as myself) one bit. But it would be a godsend for newbies.

I would agree with this, but it never really messed with me much. I've only been using Blender for about 6 months, but I haven't had any problems after the first hour figuring out how to do something. If you figure out how the heirarchy of the functions work, most things are pretty easy to find. The one thing that really tripped me up wasn't a UI issue but a procedural one. I was just an idiot though :)

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

That I'll do, if you weren't exaggerating. Which book should I read?

Just go through some of the tutorials. The Castle tutorial explains how to do most basic things you will need for modelling, as well as texturing and lighting. Just play around and keep your finger on the undo.

As a disclaimer, I suck at 3d modelling. It's not a software issue. I've used everything from TruSpace to Maya. I always suck. But I measure my ability as being able to render something that is recognizable as what I'm trying to render from a separate person. I built a crappy little space ship after 30 minutes in Blender, and someone said, "Hey, neat space ship." That's how I measure proficiency :)

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

All I'm saying is that it isn't cryptic if you do a bit of research.

It's not? Have a look at the definition of cryptic:

1. Having a hidden or ambigious meaning; mysterious; baffling
2. Obscure and curt in expression

Pretty much any newbie would agree to either definition (although #2 is generally what people are referring to).

To argue that the UI is not cryptic if you do a bit of reasearch is like saying that an encrypted message isn't cryptic if you have the cypher.

Re:Blender

[orasio]

You have a point with the small buttons, but the whole display can be resized easily. Icons are bad, of course, I would keep the ones used to select the view type, and replace all the others with text labels. And many buttons have text labels, anyway, which is gooooood. The non standard interface is a gooood thing, also, because standard means similar to windows, or similar to 3dStudio, or similar to GTK, which are baaaad.
Interfaces need to be non standard to be good.
In my case, it took many hours to get me comfortable with the UI, and it is easy for me now.
There is a difference between a good and easy interface and one that you can catch easily. For the latter you need to make it similar to something you already now, not necesarily good or easy.
Having to read a manual or experiment for a while has nothing to do with an interface not being easy, it means it is just not familiar to you, and that might be a good thing.

Re:Blender

[ionpro]

This reminds me exactly of the arguments going on 10 years ago, in response to Microsoft's efforts to make the desktop more useable:
"But using a computer is hard! I would expect any interface utilizing the power of my computer to be difficult to learn."

Funny how things change, isn't it? The blender people will come around on the UI eventually. Or it will die. Making something more user friendly never hurts a piece of software, as long as all the original functionality is retained.

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

Interfaces need to be non standard to be good.

I'd believe it if you could name some things that are wrong with a standard interface that Blender does and are actually good. (For that matter, why don't you name some problems with standard interfaces in general?)

I'm not arguing the fact that an experienced user can use the thing efficiently. However, the hours that it took you and everyone else to get comfortable with the UI were a pointless waste, and have served to make many of Blender's target audience turn elsewhere. The greatest power of the GUI is to allow users to quickly understand the interface and transfer skills that they have learned elsewhere. A poor user interface throws all that out the window.

Many of the people here are claiming that the Blender interface is "minimal," and that it "gets out of the way and lets me work." That's bull. An interface that refuses to follow standards isn't getting out of the way; it's actively hindering the user. Minimal doesn't mean backwards, as some people seem to think.

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

This is completely analogous to Windows users saying that Linux is needlessly cryptic, you realize?

No. It isn't. Linux follows well-defined, widely used standards. Blender's interface does the exact opposite. If I sit a Windows user down to a GTK+ application, they feel immediately comfortable. If you sit a user of another 3D modeling application down to Blender, they won't have a clue what to do.

As far as your "it isn't cryptic if you do a bit of research" comment, the AC who responded is spot on. That statement is nonsense. If it's cryptic before you do research, it's still cryptic afterwards.

Fortunately, it sounds like they are working on an improved interface for a later release of Blender. It's rather interesting that even though the hardcore Blender users immediately personally attack anyone who complains about the interface, the developers are willing to acknowledge that there's a problem.

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

No. It isn't. Linux follows well-defined, widely used standards.

UNIX standards? Most Windows people still will feel lost.

Blender's interface does the exact opposite. If I sit a Windows user down to a GTK+ application, they feel immediately comfortable. If you sit a user of another 3D modeling application down to Blender, they won't have a clue what to do.

A proficient user of TruSpace will be mostly lost trying to use Maya3d, or 3DS max. The difference between most GTK+ applications and modelling applications is to big to be a valid comparison.

As far as your "it isn't cryptic if you do a bit of research" comment, the AC who responded is spot on. That statement is nonsense. If it's cryptic before you do research, it's still cryptic afterwards.

I'm just saying that Blender is as cryptic as UNIX is. "ls" - what's that? You read the documentation. Does that mean that "ls" is a cryptic command? Nor do I think that Blender is cryptic.

Fortunately, it sounds like they are working on an improved interface for a later release of Blender. It's rather interesting that even though the hardcore Blender users immediately personally attack anyone who complains about the interface, the developers are willing to acknowledge that there's a problem.

I acknowledge that it could be easier, but it's not nearly as bad as what people think. If they really made the interface that easy to use, the usefulness of Blender would be sacrificied.

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

If they really made the interface that easy to use, the usefulness of Blender would be sacrificied.

You guys keep repeating this without any sort of evidence. How will the usefulness of blender be sacrificed by labeling icons and making text entry widgets that don't look exactly like buttons?

Re:Blender

[Xerithane]

You guys keep repeating this without any sort of evidence. How will the usefulness of blender be sacrificed by labeling icons and making text entry widgets that don't look exactly like buttons?

The icons do have labels if you hover the mouse over them. I'm not quite sure what you are referring to.

I will conceed that the text entry widget is a touch annoying.

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

ah typical open source software :) make it free but then make it hard to use. I thought something like this would happen.

Re:Blender

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh MAN yeah! I was watching this guy once, he was welding with a welder! It was so easy all you have to do is stick the hot melty thing onto metal and it like welds stuff! Course I never really tried it but it was totally EASY!!

Re:Blender

[Cessen]

It's rather interesting that even though the hardcore Blender users immediately personally attack anyone who complains about the interface, the developers are willing to acknowledge that there's a problem.

I believe I can be considered a hard-core Blender user (been using it for ~5 years), but I never attacked anyone. Of course, then again, I am also a developer.

Anyway, being part of the Blender community, I can say that there are plenty of long-time users of Blender that also think that the UI should be improved.

I think the backlash by Blender users to such comments is simply a matter of misinterpretation. When you say, "Blender's UI has several bad design choices and should be improved," they interperete it as something to the effect of, "Blender's UI is inconsistant with existing arbitraryily chosen GUI standards; get rid of Blender's uniqueness for the sake of newbies."

So, in other words, they aren't seeing is as meaning that there are things in Blender's GUI that are simply bad for any GUI, regardless of conformity to other GUI types.

Re:Blender

[aardvarkjoe]

I believe I can be considered a hard-core Blender user (been using it for ~5 years), but I never attacked anyone. Of course, then again, I am also a developer.

You're right, of course, and I apologize. I should have said "some hardcore Blender users," as I was particularly referring to the subset of them that were claiming that anyone who's not an idiot can learn to use the thing in half an hour. I shouldn't generalize like that.

Re:Blender

[AndyChrist]

Unless there's some subtlety to the sticking of things together with hot metal, I'd bet it WOULD be easy to do it poorly. (It's easy to solder poorly) At any rate, while doing it well takes skill, it wouldn't be hard to get the general idea of how it works. THAT IS EXACTLY WHERE BLENDER FAILS.

Cribbed from the Wine Project?

[BrotherPope]

'Reimplemented MMIO functions, as MS is too effing lazy to provide them under CE. Most of this is cribbed from the Wine Project.'

Wine has been under the LGPL for a while now... anyone know more about this 'cribbing'? What exactly was copied, and from what tree?

I haven't heard that the voting system code is available under the LGPL... in fact, I've heard that secret source code is quite important to keep ahead of competitors.

Re:Cribbed from the Wine Project?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm trying to find the source of that MMIO statement. Where did they say that? Don't tell me that's a made up statement falsely attributed to them?

Re:Cribbed from the Wine Project?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey bonehead, since the voting system wasn't distributed to the public they don't have to make the source code available.

What is it with all these freakin' *GPL zealots that don't even understand how the *GPL works?

Re:Cribbed from the Wine Project?

[bfree]

We'll in the worst case, if they did excessively copy from the LGPL wine code then they would still not have to release the source of their system, they would simply have to release the "modified" code from the voting system. If they had "de-libraried" the MMIO functions then they could provide a test case for the GPL but I imagine they would simply re-library it with the blessings of the wine projects and release the source to this library LGPL. The LGPL allows you to hide YOUR code while diclosing what you do with IT'S code.

Re:Cribbed from the Wine Project?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, so all those Election Officials up and down the country are actually just employees of Diebold?

(Well, that explains a lot)

I finally understand what Free software is about

[Dancin_Santa]

I used to think it had something to do with the freedom of developers to use the source, but it really has nothing to do with developers at all.

Rather it is the source code/software itself that is Free. Like you and I are free in that we have laws that prevent someone else from chaining us up in a basement somewhere, Free software cannot be chained up in someone's pet project. According to the license, all Free software must be set free.

Once I understood this, I finally understood what is meant by "Information wants to be Free". Information doesn't want to be locked up, just like you don't want to be locked up.

This personification of information is one of the most backwards and retarded ways of looking at intellectual property I've seen. I really didn't understand how weird it was until I finally understood what the FSF was really saying.

Straight from Vegas..

[acxr is wasted]

Odds Poindexter loses his job before September: 2:1

Should he be fired, odds that this will fix the "problem": 1,000,000,000:1

So can i cash in now?

[Merik]

Poindexter has already lost his job.

Re:So can i cash in now?

[WatertonMan]

The problem with the DARPA project was that it "looked" bad. Personally I think it was a brilliant idea. It is the ultimate distributed analysis and works for the same reason capitalism does. But as cool as it sounded I pretty much knew it would be in trouble.

The problem really isn't Poindexter. All the projects I've heard of sounded very creative and the kind of thinking out of the box they were demanding immediately after 911. The problem is that Poindexter was hopelessly naive regarding the real world conservativism of the American public. (Conservative in the social sense and not the political sense)

Combine that with all his historic enemies due to Iran/Contra and he really should have seen this one coming.

Re:So can i cash in now?

[aminorex]

Oh it didn't just look bad. It was like assassination politics
for middle-eastern jihadis. Place your bets, win big by
fixing the game.

Re:So can i cash in now?

[Mandelbrute]

Combine that with all his historic enemies due to Iran/Contra

Considering that those enemies would be the US taxpayer and all of the military allies of the USA, it is a wonder he every was put in a position of reponsibility ever again.

Then again, I also think letting someone that came from the corrupt Nixon government run the largest defence force in the world is a bit of a bad call - no matter how good a wrestler he used to be.

Re:So can i cash in now?

[Lars T.]

Poor guy. First sells weapons to the fundamentalist Iranians who support/ed terrorists, gets fired and later gets a job fighting terrorism, and gets fired because he wants people to bet on where terrorists strike next.

Wha?

[Chess_the_cat]

The official said the research that Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program (TIA) were conducting had become just too 'unorthodox'." Ya' think? Since when is unorthodox automatically a bad thing? I thought Slashdotters were all about being unorthodox. I also think that a war on terrorism is well-suited to unorthodox strategies and tactics.

Re:Wha?

[nomadic]

Except when "unorthodox" means "horribly invasive of privacy".

Re:Wha?

[JHelgie]

me fucking prostitutes and asking if they know where osama bin laden is hiding is an 'unorthodox' approach to fighting terrorism, just because they use the word, don't get all defensive, they never said unorthodox by itself was bad, well, okay, how about we just say what was said at the end of the article:

"I can't believe that anybody would seriously propose that we trade in death," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said Tuesday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said, "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque."

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota, called the idea "stupid."

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, I think they used unorthodox as a nice way of saying he's an idiot. Without hurting his feelings too much.

Re:Wha?

[aled]

Hey, this is the guy that tried to destroy the electronic evidence of their illegal activities. Call THAT unorthodox.

Do you think John Poindexter should keep his job?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who decided to hire John Poindexter the first place? Was Oliver North involved? I don't recall. I don't recall.

Hey Blender folk, how about an undo!

[Anonymous Coward]

I make lots of mistakes ...

Re:Hey Blender folk, how about an undo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Undo is hard. Since it's open source we'll leave the undo to you, that the way open source works. Do the fun stuff, forget the hard stuff, blaim the user for not being will ing to "help out" with the coding if they complain.

(I got that same exact actual reply from an open source network driver coder when I pointed out that he didn't support multicasting and maybe people might need it)

Re:Hey Blender folk, how about an undo!

[Anonymous Coward]

or how about this one... you RTFM!

do you s4eriously think that a 3D modeling app would be made without an undo function?

well, if you had RTFM, you would know that you can undo your last action by simply pressing 'u' ... I mean, how simple can you get?

You, my good friend, are an Imbecile

Re:Hey Blender folk, how about an undo!

[ishmaelflood]

"do you s4eriously think that a 3D modeling app would be made without an undo function?"

Hmm, check out I-DEAS for an industrial strength 3D package that lacks a genuine undo button. It does have a rollback facility, but that is not the same thing, trust me.

Re:Hey Blender folk, how about an undo!

[Rolman]

Yes, even Maya and Lightwave, in which both I'm slightly profficient, can sometimes be difficult to work with because the undo function doesn't go to the extent you need in some special cases. There are also some functions that are impossible to undo.

Many people working with these type of applications make a good habit of creating incremental versions of their work, so that most of the geometry is kept in different states in old files, ready to use either in case of errors, crashes or even as useful reference for the current work (for example, some old low polygon primitives can help speed up other stages of your work, like fine-tuning the animation), just look at how useful the "history" feature in Maya is.

The undo function is not a magical one, it can't do everything and sometimes the user still needs to be clever and go beyond what the application itself can do.

Somebody said it already but it needs to be stressed: We're not talking about an e-mail client, this is 3D modeling and animation software.

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with you until you used the term 'intellectual property'. Once it's out of your grey-matter, its not really your property anymore.

OMG an overthrow of King Adbullah of Jordan

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't even say this in jest!

Volunteer work does not pay

[Anonymous Coward]

In reference to the Palo Alto story, I have learned to be wary of volunteer work. People just don't appreciate what they don't pay for. If you volunteer to do something, people act like your time is of no value, so they will feel free to waste your time.

Maybe the school district will understand the value of these past volunteer services when they finally have to break down and pay someone. The added bonus is that a paying job will be created. I know volunteer work is full of good intentions, but a side effect is contributing to unemployment.

Re:Volunteer work does not pay

[Gumby]

"I know volunteer work is full of good intentions, but a side effect is contributing to unemployment. "
What?!? Do you have a study which shows this? Did you consider that the money people save via volunteer efforts gets spent somewhere else? And if somebody is volunteering instead of watching TV or reading /., that is a net benefit to the GDP. Higher GDP growth => less unemployment. There is not a fixed pie of work to be split up.

Re:Volunteer work does not pay

[Enucite]

I wouldn't appreciate this either...
I think that may have had some influence on the decision to let them go.

Re:Volunteer work does not pay

[debunk99]

This is one of the more insightful comments that I've seen on slashdot!! While you may not be appreciated while volunteering you certainly don't increase unemployment!

Re:Volunteer work does not pay

[SynKKnyS]

I doubt this would have happened anywhere else. To understand why this happened would be to understand Palo Altans. Just today I was driving down University Avenue towards Stanford and a pedestrian started screaming obscenities at a car because his dog ran out into the road. This sums up the general attitude of Palo Alto quite nicely.

Re:Volunteer work does not pay

[cronik]

If you read the article you would know that the "authorised" people are the idiots who set up the 802.11 bridge. As a former menber of the Paly tech team I can say that we would NEVER be so stupid as to put a physicaly insecure connection onto the otherwise secure administraton network.

Re:Volunteer work does not pay

[Lumpy]

I have learned to be wary of volunteer work. People just don't appreciate what they don't pay for.

really... well then those people were lying when I handed them blankets and food when I volunteer for the red cross help efforts after their home was destroyed last summer.

It seems that you aither have a distorted perception of reality, or you are not doing any volunteering that is producing the effect you desire. You volunteer to help the community as a whole not for pat's on the back.

It was 100,000 EUROS!

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT 100,000 USD.

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying, then, is that if someone breaks into my office and downloads the source to my proprietary programs and then distributes the source on Kazaa, he's only guilty of breaking and entering?

JMP 0000;

[Anonymous Coward]

the dragon chip..

[Suppafly]

When they were first annoucing that the Chinese would be producing the dragon chip, there was a lot of speculation here and other places that it would just be a reverse engineered version of something else.. guess that's what happened.

Re:the dragon chip..

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse engineered a chip? Is this practical? More likely they just copied the design.

Re:the dragon chip..

[etan]

Based on *what*? The cores are identical because the caches are the same size? That seems like a completely uninformed and baseless assertion. Can someone post a URL with specifications?

Re:the dragon chip..

[aminorex]

More likely they just bought the core and incorporated
it into their chip.

Diebold source code...

[Handpaper]

Most of this is cribbed from the Wine Project.
This looks like a job for the FSF. How far are the binaries being distributed? Since they contain GPL code, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a case for source code release, which would open the whole app to peer review (and, if the article is even halfway right, hilarity).

Re:Diebold source code...

[Suppafly]

This looks like a job for the FSF. How far are the binaries being distributed? Since they contain GPL code, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a case for source code release, which would open the whole app to peer review (and, if the article is even halfway right, hilarity).


Since they are distributed to the state, the source code should be available via the freedom to information act or similar laws.

Re:Diebold source code...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they contain GPL code

Except that WINE was originally distributed under an X11 variant (I believe the 2002/02/28 snapshot was the last one under that license), so if the code dates from there no GPL enforcement activity would be useful.

And even if it does, WINE is currently under the LGPL (although most patches are dual X11/LGPL and many are (or at least were when Transgaming was still beating the drum, before they switched to being a console to Windows porting house) fed into ReWind anyways) -- and WINE is not an FSF-owned project (i.e. copyright assignment) so there's no standing for the FSF to pursue anyways.

Re:Diebold source code...

[afidel]

Nope, because they are trade secrets source code to voting systems have been ruled to be off limits to FOIA requests =(

Re:Confusing UI

[AvantLegion]

One could say that a violin has a confusing UI. Does that mean it's broken? No. But it does mean that you need to know what you are doing.

"The violin sucks. It's too confusing."

"Do you read sheet music?"

"Uh, no. Would that help?"

This is a nonsense example.

A more realistic one would be if someone created a violin that operated very differently from all the other violins on the market, and also had "different" sheet music that required lots of re-learning.

That's what a piece of software that ignores industry standards in things like UI is equal to.

Re:Not plausible origin of Dragon Chip

[Anonymous Coward]

Define "higher in quality". Otherwise, you are just a troll.

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a logical conclusion to that particular argument; one which underlies most of the "copyrights are evil" nonsense that gets bandied about on slashdot.

Unfortunately, the /. moderation system makes it remarkably easy to simply ignore points that you disagree with rather than address them in open debate. I don't think you'll ever get a satisfactory response to that.

Stop that

[Anonymous Coward]

blender.org and blender3d.org just died, now I can't get the fscking manual, please be considerate, don't click that link just for the hell of it.

Looking for that secret source... here's where...

[althecat]

This particular bit of secret source is of course no longer particularly secret. See... A Very American Coup... Here at Scoop where we broke this story we are seeking to get the word out about this page which will carry our ongoing work on the subject. Please have a squizz. And if you look carefully you will find the link to where the secret source remains online and downloadable... Finally... online media buffs Check out our appeal to the online independent media related to this story.

Re:Not plausible origin of Dragon Chip

[leandrod]

> Why would they reverse-engineer an AMD chip

The real history here is not the foundry, but the architecture. RISC is simpler, not only to run fast but also to design, manufacture and perhaps reverse engineer.

Hope my comments never get public

[sideshow]

Cause between all the, "Fix this when I'm less drunk"'s and, "This better fucking work GODDAMMIT!"'s I might be out of a job.

Re:Hope my comments never get public

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why I never put comments in my code.

Re:Hope my comments never get public

[Chelloveck]

My favorite was a programmer implementing a really obnoxious feature...

#ifdef CLUSTERFUCK

Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

creating a futures market for terrorism as a way to glean info, should be lauded on Slashdot. It is a geek's solution to an information problem. Having it excoriated in Congress and the media is exactly what happens every time a "Poindexter" stands up and suggests what seems like a great idea to geeks: dumb people just don't get it and the geek gets ostracized. We should salute you, John Poindexter...

Unfortunately, even though Slashdot is a geek site, it isn't that educated, at least when it comes to econ, so probably Poindexter will be ridiculed here too...

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Concerned Onlooker]

The problem I had with it was the potential for abuse. Athletes aren't allowed to bet on games and for the same reason the CIA shouldn't be allowed to "bet" on things that they can have an influence over. Especially when they might be tempted to create even more chaotic and violent situations than they normally do.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Fnord! (look it up, youngbloods)

so you're suggesting that the CIA is already buying life insurance policies, and investing in the stock market, and then rigging the outcomes, but you don't want them making these investments too?

regardless, the world is the way it is. Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, they are or are not already targetted. People who depend on them bear that risk. it is not gambling to wish to make the opposite bet in the market to eliminate that risk from your portfolio: it's called hedging and it's a very safe thing to do and it makes markets more stable.

but, at the same time to be able to glean info about the likelihood of an event, and even trace the "center" of the info: that is sooooo cool. The people who killed this thing will have blood on their hands.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

He should've had the HSX guys set it up for him before floating the idea. Osama Star Bonds, the Korean Nuke IPO of the day, the Teheran Fund, the African Insurgency Fund.... With a flashy interface to draw people in before the pundits strike it might have flown.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

We should salute you, John Poindexter...

Whoah, speak for yourself.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Poindexter's idea should be canned because it won't work.

There are two ways that the market could provide a serious indicator of the future.

One is that Osama bin Laden, or some co-conspirator, will be so greedy he will place the correct bet before the event happens, and that our special algorithms will detect that anomaly in all the trades and react accordingly. This is far fetched enough that we shouldn't be wasting money on it. Can you accurately predict events like Enron and WorldCom by watching insider trading ? No. (There was insider selling, of course. But given all the stock market data and no hindsight, you still can't make accurate *predictions* .)

The other is that numerous experts who normally just gaurd their jobs by telling the bureaucracy what it wants to hear will suddenly trade on what they actually KNOW instead. Thus, we will find out what they really think. This might work in some sense, but you'd have to force the guys to really gamble, limit the market to cut out noise, etc. This is what some of the contractors proposed and Poindexter or someone else as DARPA shot it down in favor of an open market.

I believe what John Poindexter was actually trying to do was neither of the two semi-plausible methods. He actually thought that a market of people essentially all with no real knowledge, (i.e. no Osama's ), betting on each others fads, buying futures contracts hoping more that everyone else would hope on that band wagon and they could re-sell it rather than cash in the contract itself, would somehow produce a view of the future out of the churn of numbers.

It's as rediculous as believing that the mass of investors all reading WSJ and betting on their own inflated sense of insight will produce a market that accurately predicts stock dividends instead of just being a massive transfer of wealth from the foolish to the inside traders. These guys whorship the idea of that churn of numbers and bids; morons betting on things about which they know nothing are not stupid, they "taking the necessary risks" etc etc.

As rediculous as it is, it is plausible that Poindexter really believed that, given the sort of stock market cheerleader girls he hangs out with.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[schnitzi]

I almost posted this exact same thing, but luckily decided to scan the comments first.

Yes, there are problems with the idea, as others pointed out (namely that investors might somehow encourage terrorism). Whether there might be some remedy to these problems is unsure. But, to use a horribly overused cliche, Poindexter was thinking outside the box, and decided to examine the worth of an idea that was effective at predicting other difficult-to-predict events.

It is said in advertising that the average consumer can only remember one sentence about any product. Unfortunately most people, with the help of the media, seem to already have their One Sentence formed about Poindexter, and as such, will treat any new idea of his as misguided.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[autopr0n]

1) bet on assassination of president
2) assassinate president
3) profit!

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Mac Degger]

You didn't read the article well enough: they wanted to put up random possible 'plots' (not things they where certain of being planned in progress by terrorists, not just plausible events, but stuff which is unlikely to downright rediculous) and then have random people bet on what will happen.

And then expect to gain 'intelligence' that way.

If you still don't get why this can't work, look at a casino, at the roulette table.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[dubl-u]

The problem I had with it was the potential for abuse.

Please. The whole point of using a market-driven solution is that markets have been around a long time, so we have a lot of tools to deal with the problems that crop up.

What you're talking about is insider trading. In a political event futures market, the scenario goes like this:

1. A terrorist decides to blow up a landmark. Say, the Eiffel Tower.
2. He goes to the futures market and discovers that the current odds are a million to one against.
3. He starts placing bets. This shifts the odds. To, say, 10,000:1
4. He places more bets. The odds shift to 100:1
5. He blows up the Eiffel tower.
6. Profit!

Except that he is not exactly laughing all the way to the bank because a) the pattern of trading will be, in retrospect, obvious to anybody who looks; b) all of the money is in the hands of the Department of Defense, who just might take an interest in who's getting big payouts, and c) the amount of money in an idea futures market like this will be very small, so even if he gets away with everything, his expenses will outweigh his costs.

As long as the idea futures markets are reasonably open and have a moderately competent regulator, abuse won't be a big problem. And if it is, then it's also self-correcting; sensible people don't bet in rigged games.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked at companies with people like you: it's easy to shoot down new ideas. The question is, can you conceive of how the idea could work, and then can you figure out if the flaws can be overcome.

consider another example: Will the Palestinians stop bombing Israel and accept its right to exist, if certain conditions are met for them? or, if you like, is Israel really serious about giving back the West Bank or are they carefully making sure they never do? Only the Israeli and Palestinian peoples know those answers, but you can't get them by asking. Could a "vote with your pocketbook" market do it? It's an intriguing idea. If you are a geek, you should be intrigued.

Re:Poindexter at the Hellmouth

[Anonymous Coward]

speak, sure, but Whoa, but i'll help you spell it. did you even understand the point being made?

blender question.

[Suppafly]

I haven't used blender and have only dabbled with other 3d programs, so maybe this is obvious, but why does a 3d program need audio sequencing capabilities?

Re:blender question.

[TaoTeCheese]

It's an amazingly useful feature when you need to animate something to sound or music. For example, it makes lip syncing a breeze. 3ds max and maya both do this really well and I'm glad to see it added to blender.

Re:blender question.

[g-san]

The same reason windows needs an integrated exploder browser.

TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION!!!!!

Go blender go!

Seriously, it already has video sequencing, I think they are going for the all in one approach. (which makes my first statement, uh, worry me.)

Besides if you don't like it I think you can recompile with a -DNOAUDIOSEQ option. Try that in that ms rendering package or Maya.

Re:blender question.

[Lord Omlette]

Answered repeatedly in the previous discussion... Supposedly it's because blender started out as an animation sequencer... Kinda hard to sync lip animation and actors' voices w/out audio sequencing stuff.

Don't question the audio sequencing stuff, question the UI. It's a complete laundry list of everything that's wrong w/ software usability today.

Re:blender question.

[Anonymous Coward]

what Microsoft rendering package is Blender competing with?

Re:blender question.

[.com b4 .storm]

I haven't used blender and have only dabbled with other 3d programs, so maybe this is obvious, but why does a 3d program need audio sequencing capabilities?

If you're doing 3D work that will be later integrated into a video, presentation, etc. it helps to be able to synchronize the animation in the 3D app to the sound. For example, if you were doing an educational video about how a car engine works, and you were going to model it in Blender, it might be helpful to synchronize your animated engine to the pre-recorded narration (i.e. "when the ignition switch is turned on...").

Re:blender question.

[Tony]

Don't question the audio sequencing stuff, question the UI. It's a complete laundry list of everything that's wrong w/ software usability today.

Absolutely. The interface is extremely funky (to say the least), completely unintuitive.

That said: the program is very small (though bloating up nicely), and the UI was designed for in-house use, not general distribution. And, once you get used to the interface (after about 4 months of use), it is *very* fast and easy to use.

Like Emacs and vi, though, you have to get used to it before you see the power.

TIA is unconstitional

[linuxislandsucks]

TAI got drained of operating funds because it unconstitional to psy on citizens of the US within USA borders..by either CIA or FBI..

Re:TIA is unconstitional

[ratfynk]

"TAI got drained of operating funds because it unconstitional to psy on citizens of the US within USA borders..by either CIA or FBI."

That is most silly spelling error ever. PSY ops is a real military term. To spy on citizens is nothing new, and is legal, if there is probable cause. The RIAA is doing it, though I hope they will get their weiner whacked when things go to court.

If however the FBI and the CIA has cause to suspect actions that can harm to US citizens are being planned then it is just plain stupid not to try different approaches to prevent these activities. The problem is in the past this has been misused by people with political punch to entrap the little guy, case in point John Delorian. If information gathering is to work then we need to keep it tightly under wraps and scutiny by the government. There have been abuses by government officials in the past J. Edgar is the best example. The accountability of civil servants, which the CIA and FBI are, has always been the problem. Hopefully the days of despotic bureaucrats are over.

Re:Add one more thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was in the last one.

Reverse engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Dragon-V and AMD's chip are so similar, this is a case of industrial espionage, not reverse engineering.

Piondexter should have been canned for TIA not PAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually want to learn more about PAM. As weird as it sounds, we need something better than political intelligence. Can we ever get objective intelligence from self-serving political organizations? Any system that might address this would be welcome, even if it was some evil free-market dead pool.

Re:Add one more thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the story that was reported here in an earlier slashback?

Star Wars Kid is suing the friends who posted...

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Diebold seems reasonable

[Compuser]

Their rebuttal basically says: we have no
software security because we rely on hardware
and procedural security. If a machine is not
meant to be connected to the network and has
only one means of user input which has a limited
number of point and click options then the
underlying software security would indeed seem
irrelevant.

Re:Diebold seems reasonable

[FatRatBastard]

Go read the re-rebuttal. Diebold's claim that there is no connectivity seems to be a bold face lie.

You must be an American.

[Anonymous Coward]

~ a stellar example of bad UI design.

That would be poor UI design, you ignorant Git.

grammar nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

You said:

"Fix this when I'm less drunk"'s and, "This better fucking work GODDAMMIT!"'s

and my concern is this:
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots

Re:Add one more thing...

[bigjnsa500]

Well shit, I just found the story today. My utmost apologize to the slashback community. I hereby expect flamebait to my toes.

Re:Confusing UI-Confused poster.

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's what a piece of software that ignores industry standards in things like UI is equal to."

What industry standards?

BTW An interface for advanced users isn't going to be the same as one for the "point n' drool" crowd. Try using some high-end software sometime.

Re:Confusing UI-Confused poster.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every use a piece of software before?

Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[Psychic Burrito]

I've downloaded Blender and tried to run it: After 40 seconds, a blank window appeared, but nothing else. After 7 minutes, I was tired of waiting, killed the app and trashed it. This is the same experience I had on other machines half a year ago with Blender. I just wanted to fiddle around with it a bit, as I regularly do with randomly downloaded Mac apps, but this App seems to not adhere to the usual standard of "start the app in 15 seconds or less and everything works".

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been able to run blender fine in OSX 10.2.6. I downloaded it from the blender web site not apple though. Runs alright on my G3.

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Set your monitor to thousands of colors. It should work now.

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[Psychic Burrito]

When I do this, random green and pink lines are displayed in the previously white window, but apart from that, it still doesn't work. Has anybody got another idea to try?

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[Anonvmous Coward]

"but this App seems to not adhere to the usual standard of "start the app in 15 seconds or less and everything works"."

It's funny how companies respond to that kind of standard when money is a motivator.

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

i once had a similar issue in windows with blender. turns out i had just upgraded my video card and anti-aliasing was turned on. when i turned it off, everything was fine. not sure how osX handles graphics, but it sounds like the issue is purely "graphical", something with openGL or anti-aliasing. at least that was my problem.

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[managementboy]

Strange my Blender 2.27 opens in less than a second on Linux (RH8)...

Re:Anybody able to run Blender on OS X?

[__aafutm5472]

I unfortunately don't have any other ideas to try, but I can tell you that it does work. I'm running 2.27 under OS X 10.2 on a B&W G3 400 with 512MB of RAM, and it loads quickly (less than 30 seconds), and is quite useable.

What version are you running? I haven't tried 2.28, so it could possibly be broken on OS X at the moment, but 2.27 should work fine.

Also.... A Dumb Internet Trick...

[althecat]

Go to Google, type "ROTK Trailer" into the box and click the "I am feeling lucky" button.

Blender - great success

[myklgrant]

As an avid Blender user I consider Blender to be one of OSS's greatest success stories. Since going GPL the rate of improvement has been rapid (the audio sequencer was wanted for years) and the fact that the community made it happen despite it being considered commercially "dead" is a tribute to the power of open source. Makes you wonder what dead code is out there that can be "rescued" by the OSS community.

Re:Blender - great success

[Anonymous Coward]

"That" is an "excellent" "question."

Re:Piondexter should have been canned for TIA not

[agrippa_cash]

I think that this market could have been very effectively gamed by those very same self-serving agencies. Want extra money in the budget? Buy "V.P. assasination" futures. Similarly, wealthy terrorists could manipulate our "intel" by buying many, many shares of "everything will be fine". The market is fine for some things, but people have an irrational faith in it. It really boggles the mind (and pisses me off because these people are in charge).

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[LineNoiz]

That is a logical conclusion to that particular argument; one which underlies most of the "copyrights are evil" nonsense that gets bandied about on slashdot.

I don't think there are many people that claim "copyrights are evil." No sane person would deny that people deserve to own what they create. The typical /. argument is that perpetual extension of copyright is evil, not copyrights themselves.

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[acxr is wasted]

Yes, unless you work for Microsoft, in which case he'd also be guilty of crimes against humanity. Har, har, har!

Re:Add one more thing...

[bigjnsa500]

Hmmm.. Anonymous... I take that like I do a grain of salt if you don't have the balls to reply with your nic.

Re:Blender-Power users vs newbies.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It isn't a mail client, it's a 3d modelling application."

Agreed. Most of these arguments come from the "everything is an appliance"[1] crowd. If it doesn't have a big red "push me" button, then it's too hard. Thing is for those of us whom "time is money" (and make good amounts too), the Blender interface (much like the wordperfect interface) is right up our alley. Remember our tools are for "work", not for "play".

[1] I'll leave it to the audiance who got that trend started.

Re:Confusing UI-Confused poster.

[Anonymous Coward]

blender, "high-end". ha ha ha ha

But there's more than one means of user input

[phr1]

User input works by the voter putting a smart card into the machine and making selections. A non-cheating voter is supposed to use a smart card provided by the election officials, but a cheating voter can bring her own maliciously programmed card. The security paper described how such a card could be programmed. That is a serious vulnerability. I think they should run a "Black Hat voting" election at DefCon. They would announce in advance that they're going to use Diebold machines to elect the Evil Overlord of the Cracker Universe, with voters encouraged to try to cheat the machines, and the election would be run with the same so-called safeguards as a real election. I bet the results would make Diebold's "rebuttal" look pretty silly.

Poindexter must have played the futures game

[bloosqr]

Poindexter is going to resign!
now (nytimes registration required blah blah)

-bloo

Technical volunteering

[fven]

It can be awkward as an employee, but particularly as a volunteer - where you don't have the rights of an employee. The boss is completely non-technical but wants things done exactly his way despite your protests that it wont work, is insecure, doesn't meet their needs etc.

Using the same blind logic, the boss locks the only people that know the system out of the system (change all root passwds, change locks on doors etc) and then 'make do' with a poorer quality system that they pay more for. Normally in these cases with small schools, there simply isn't the budget to employ a sysadmin and deploy nice (read expensive) network topologies and so people volunteer.

A sad case of biting the mouth that feeds..

[If you didn't read the article] Diebold seems...

[arete]

[If you didn't read the article] Diebold seems reasonable

Their rebuttal said that. But they're using a wireless network to the stations, and sending results over the web.

Whether or not their systems are actually vulnerable, they're clearly lying.

Re:Looking for that secret source... here's where.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem... your Scoop blog/magazine/whatever looks like every other Geocities paranoid-schizophrenic black helicopter conspiracy freak website to me. CAPITALS everywhere, a billion meandering links, and I have to hunt all over the place to find the meat, the verifiable facts, to make my own decision on what's true. I don't want to hear your spin or bleating about how it's all going to hell in a handbasket, I want the facts. See something like fair.org for an example, although I'm not saying they're always right either.

Re:morons planning to attend FUDgeLicker's bawl

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh yeah man, this is Robert. Listen, I noticed that you post this anonymous nonsense every few weeks on Slashdot, with what I presume are supposed to be double-entendres of spelling and/or capitalization that really don't make sense, and I really think things would be better if you just took your medication and came back to the hospi...errr, summer camp, yeah.

Your pal,
Robert a.k.a robbIE

diebold

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so Deibold stole code from WINE, doesn't that make them have to release all of the source under the GPL?

Additionally, I've had the (dis)pleasure of tinkering with a test ATM machine. You think their voting software is insecure? Ha! Makes you scared to put your damn card in any ATM.

The biggest problem with blender.

[Tyler Eaves]

No, not the ui.

The thing I most dislike about blender is the renderer. It just BLOWS. You have to do all kinds of tricks to get decent reflections, shadows and things that POV-Ray has been doing since the day of the Amiga. Now if they could find some way to make a POV-Ray export...

Re:The biggest problem with blender.

[Anonymous Coward]

There already is a pov ray export. Maybe you should spend some time reading the blender pages instead of whining about missing features that exist.

Re:The biggest problem with blender.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a POV-Ray export (at least povanim), and there is also a YAFRAY export (LFexport).

It's a guitar.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not violin. It has strings, but it's played diferently. See, industry standard: human sized instrument with strings, same way apps have buttons and menus.

They did move it to a library

[isn't my name]

Full comment quoted in the article:

"Remove mmio.c from repoditory [sic] since the code has been moved to the DLL. Reimplemented MMIO functions, as MS is too effing lazy to provide them under CE. Most of this is cribbed from the Wine Project."

That means that they have moved it to a library. Perhaps someone DID read the LGPL.

Re:Piondexter should have been canned for TIA not

[Xoid629]

Because the potential for abuse by terrorists themselves, you have to wonder what plans were in place to deal with suspicions transactions in the system. You can imagine anyone buying a lot of shares in any one event automaticaly getting investigated by the FBI... Not that it matters anymore, I just though it was interesting.

They are small capitals... Here is the real oil..

[althecat]

...You have a point though.. and I am under instructions to improve the design and look of this page. In my defence it is the FLAGRANT USE OF CAPITALS when they are inapropriate that is SYMPTOMATIC of the geocities brigade... not the use of capitals per se. In our case we use capitals, small capitals, to denote outside links and stories... I think that stylistically this is not bad. And before you start pushing the P button too hard. The fact is that unless websites like ours had given this story a run - you would not have been discussing this here and now. In fact you would still be paying millions of dollars to these space cowboys to provide you with crap software that probably hasn't been counting your votes correctly. Many of the holes in the software we have found are old... possibly more than a decade old... it is not just the DRE's that have problems. And for those seeking a quick link to the real oil it is here.. Bev Harris: Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines Bev Harris: Electronic Voting Machines Blasted by Scientists, Hacked by Author Bev Harris's Latest - Diebold Rebuttals Don't Stand Up & Sludge Report #154 - Bigger Than Watergate!

Re:Confusing UI-Confused poster.

[gfody]

What industry standards?

not documented standards, more like de facto... but to name a few:

consistency across widgets
intuitive reaction to user-input
what would suprise the user the least (wwstustl)
and of course, keep it simple, stupid (kiss)

Is 'that other OS' Mac OS X?

[Durindana]

Cause the Blender.org folks have a binary download for OS X. I imagine there's folks interested in that version than in Irix and FreeBSD.

Re:Blender-Hand saw vs power drill.

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are other Free software programs that support animation, such as Art of Illusion [sourceforge.net] and Anim8or [anim8or.com]. There are up and coming contenders, such as JPatch [sourceforge.net] and Wings3D [wings3d.com] that don't yet support animation, but promise to in the near future. As powerful as Blender is, I'm hanging my hopes one one of these less powerful, but more user friendly applications.[Emphasis mine]"

You'd thing that a room full of geeks would understand the concept of "tradeoff". (Quickly, Correctly, Cheaply), as well as "target audience".

If you still don't understand what I'm talking about? Then go read "First there was the command line."

"Assassination Politics" predates Poindexter

[phr1]

There was a guy named Jim Bell who wanted to set up betting parlors similar to Poindexter's. You could make anonymous bets like "I love , and I bet $1 million that he'll still be in office in 3 months". Of course that amounts to ordering a hit on that politician, since it invites someone to (anonymously) bet against you, rub out the politician, and collect the $1M in untraceable digital cash.

Bell is now in jail, supposedly for stalking an IRS agent, but the trial was something of a cause celebre for cypherpunks.

Type "Jim Bell" and "Assassination Politics" into Google for more details. Muldrake was the first I know to point out the similarity between Bell's scheme and Poindexter's terror casino.

Re:"Assassination Politics" predates Poindexter

[Mac Degger]

Shit! I read an article (or is that manifesto) he wrote about assasination politics! Used some methode of doubly encrypted public key encryption to ensure privacy....was a clever idea, well thought out but morally just as wrong as the politicians you'd want to use it against.

Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reason

[KagatoLNX]

Seriously, Blender is not for use in "casual 3D". You don't necessarily use it to just make a logo, or render 3D text. Blender is designed to be used to model very high-quality models, paint them, animate them, and generally do things that are both complex and time consuming.

In any program that "simplifies" something, there is a danger of oversimplification. In making the impact of the interface milder, you will dilute your capability to use it for actual work.

Put simply, Blender is a sportscar of an interface. Sure, the Porsche can ride a little rough and be kind of touchy. Heck it's even expensive to maintain. Do you want one for free?

Spend 3 weeks animating a single scene. Fight with 3D Studio MAX or some other overblown UI. Then come back to me and tell me that an interface that is flexible beyond imagination isn't what you need.

Put another way, actually do it for a living an you'll find out why it is that way.

As for "industry standard violins", think electric guitar. Well, it doesn't play like any other guitar--but actually listen to it and you may change your tune.

Apples and Oranges

[sahonen]

POV-Ray is a RAYTRACER.

Blender is a SCANLINE RENDERER.

Blender is designed to be fast more than anything, it was originally written as in-house software for a 3D studio where the deadlines are usually along the lines of yesterday. POV-Ray is designed as a hobbyist's tool, it is nowhere NEAR fast enough to be used in a production environment.

And yes, I have used Blender in a production environment, I used it to make an introductory animation for a live video production. Lots of volumetric lighting and lens flares, rendered with an alpha channel for compositing over live video during production. I designed the animation in a couple days, which is less time than it would have taken POV to RENDER it, not to mention actually design the scene in the first place.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Tyler Eaves]

3DSM can do these effects just fine...

Re:Apples and Oranges

[sahonen]

3DSM costs a couple grand more than Blender, too.

That said, raytracing would be a pretty useful feature for blender, but only optionally, on a per-object or per-light-source basis. Reflection maps and shadow maps have enough of a speed advantage over the raytraced equivalents that it's well-worth the sacrifice in visual quality. Even Pixar tries to stay away from raytracing as much as possible.

I'd also appreciate RenderMan-style shaders. While I have yet to find a material I can't emulate fairly convincingly using Blender's materials, the ugly hacks I've had to do to get them make me think shaders would be a tad easier for some of the stranger materials.

On a side note, I think the GameBlender part of it should be ditched or at least made into a separate program. I used Blender for rendering from the start (even bought a C-key, this was back at version 1.5 or so). When they added gameblender, I was mad, 'cause they started completely neglecting the rendering features, which were what I had used Blender for in the first place. I eventually stopped following Blender, and I imagine several other people who couldn't care less about GameBlender did as well. I wasn't suprised when NaN went bankrupt, that's what they got for abandoning their original audience.

Now that Blender is OSS, hopefully we'll see more features added to the rendering side. I'd jump in and code the features I want myself if I were a programmer. Unfortunately, I'm much too visual to be one, so I gotta sit around and hope someone thinks like me.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Shillo]

> I'd also appreciate RenderMan-style shaders. While I have yet to find a material I can't emulate fairly convincingly using Blender's materials, the ugly hacks I've had to do to get them make me think shaders would be a tad easier for some of the stranger materials.

Renderman export is in Tuhopuu tree already. Somebody also wrote a new connect-the-boxes material editor and is interested into integrating it into Blender (check the forums on blender.org for details).

--

Poindexter's out?

[Lord_Dweomer]

W00T! Break out the champagne and let's party like it's 1984....because it still is, and we still live in a nation that is still taking away our privacy and freedom day by day.

Add one more thing...NIC logic.

[Anonymous Coward]

" Hmmm.. Anonymous... I take that like I do a grain of salt if you don't have the balls to reply with your nic."

I'm obviously not the original AC, but there's really a big logical hole right in the middle of your "show your nic".

First an nick, CANNOT be relied upon as any kind of proof of identity.

Second the presence or absence of a nic is in NO WAY a measure of someone's argument being logical, and consistent.

Third the ONLY thing that a nic allows a person to do is answer this question: "Do I want to pay attention to what this person is saying?"

THAT IS ALL IT DOES. It doesn't reveal the secrets of the universe. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't make the blind see. And it will never tell you the same things that inductive, and deductive reasoning would have told you.

So I can only concluded that since you did reply that your answer was "YES". Now what?

Re:[If you didn't read the article] Diebold seems.

[Xoid629]

Do they though? At one place that was indicated, but then in the referenced link that information seems to be based a single diagram found on the ftp. Later on that linked page, there are descriptions from people who worked with the system of how the voting machines store data on flash cards and the contents are then transfered by a modem connection from a single machine. That connenction would only be hooked up after the actual voting. I'm not saying the wireless thing is definitly wrong, but I would be interested to find out how it's known. Obviouly some people have actually seen these things, and must have some idea how the system works...

Free to a good home:

[Anonymous Coward]

The Palo Alto Unified School District seems to have several thousand "5e" cats in its possession. As this school district is not a vetrinary school, we will be giving these cats away to good homes. First come first served. Take as many as you like.
Contact Cynthia Pino to get your new cat today!

Mod this up

[Sanity]

Absolutely correct - Blender's UI is needlessly cryptic, and resolving these issues would not impede the experienced user if done intelligently. People who think that they need to reinvent years of GUI design expertise just because their particular application is unique simply don't understand GUI design - period.

funny, not interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

that comment wasn't interesting. no, it was hilarious.

not that I mind. my money was on slashdot mismoderations ;-)

(and here I'll test my theory that AC jokes that would get modded up with a username will get modded down as trolls, since this will surely get modded down)

Lousy idea. Here's why

[gad_zuki!]

I don't think this project had any merits at all. The people who have been defending it in the press have been using domestic examples as success stories like the Iowa Electronic Market. Well, considering how small a sample size that is and the nature of the two party system AND the more or less predictable workings of the electoral college, prediciting the president is a lot easier than dealing with dozens of governments, rogue organizations, etc.

Also, these traders would mostly be Americans. Pardon my french here, but most traders I know couldn't find Iraq if I fucking pointed it out to them on a map. Not to mention anyone with any insider info could easily be targeted (as in for being killed) for spilling the beans too early.

The truly scary part is the eventually the government would be making decisions on these "trends" that are more or less expressing the lowest common denominator's opinion. That's hardly informative and a recipe for disaster.

Take a look at the Iowa Electronic Market's current state. There is no clear winner this early in the game and it looks like its doing nothing but reflecting the polls.

I call bullshit laisze-faire ideology on this and good riddance to Poindexter. Really now, if the market noosphere truly was that precognitive then Enron and WorldCom would not have been such a surprise.

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[jefbed]

But aren't these arguments subjective in nature? Ownership and rights are not natural properties; they are not objectively and discretely embodied truths. The following are the true (albeit complicated) properties of ownership and copyright: "association by cause of modification" (true ownership) and "capability to modify" (true rights). This means that if you modify something you NATURALLY become associated with the said object (source code) and, thus, partake of its ownership. This also menas that you have the right to change what you are capable of changing by any means desired. How would you define evil? In your context it appears as evil is defined as restriction and denial of rights. Copyrights restrict and deny rights to those not holding the copyright, violating natural, unchangeable rights. This is therefore a true "evil". (I wont even bother with the counterpoint (copyright holders deserve to own what they create) as it will take many paragraphs to explain and recounter). What is so insane about a different viewpoint? What is the complete reasoning for each your arguments?

PS. Sorry about being so philosophical but objective logic can be rather verbose :)

Re:Not plausible origin of Dragon Chip

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, a mips core with a pretty standard cache size, and an ordinary set of peripherals (all of which can be bought as complete cores). there are dozens (literally) of these implementations, and the chinese could have easily made their own or purchased a premade package (chinese electrical engineers are definitely not in short supply).
this is in no way evidence that anything was stolen from amd.

Improving the scoop blog/magazine/whatever

[althecat]

Dear Anonymous Coward,

I have followed your advice and stuck a set of links to the real oil at the top of the page on my Scoop blog/magazine/whatever.

Re:Improving the scoop blog/magazine/whatever

[utunga]

No, no, no

The AC was complaining that " I have to hunt all over the place to find the meat ". And you've responded by putting even more links at the top.

My opinion is that whats needed is to move the goddamn 'meat' (or at least some sort of Protein, whether it be Animal or Vegetable) towards the of the page so people can start reading.

They didn't come to the page with the intention to immediately jump off to somewhere else - they came to the site with the hope that *here* is the stuff they were looking for on all those other pages, i.e. that somewhere *on that page* is the info they are after. Sometimes people like to feel they have actually arrived, and they can stop hunting.

Of course, some pages are just jump offs to other pages, and maybe the page you just referrred to is one of those, but still I feel like you wanna tease people with a little text and intro and guff before sending them hunting through a long list of text.

Hope you don't mind having this little tet-a-tet in public, but I figure, hey maybe some other AC will jump in and make the conversation interesting.

How retarded can you be...

[Ayanami Rei]

1) CISC chips are a RISC chip with a built-in ROM and microcode decoder. Makes very little difference when compared to adding useful things like caches. The distinction between CISC and RISC in embedded systems is usually a question of instruction cache usage, code size, and/or memory bandwidth.

2) Intel and AMD have many lines of microcontrollers and simple CPUS. In fact, AMD has a much wider line of these low-end programmable devices than Intel, as that has historically been it's forte. (Ever own a GUS sound card?) So I'd say it was probably because AMD had a wider selection of things to model after.

Or maybe AMD security isn't as tight.

There are lots of potential reasons...

Re:How retarded can you be...

[leandrod]

> CISC chips are a RISC chip with a built-in ROM and microcode decoder

Hmm... not. CISC and RISC define the interface. CISC presents a real problem because the decoding of CISC instructions into the internal architecture, usually RISC but also VLIW, takes chip real state and design efforts, thus delaying development, making the final product more expensive and less efficient, and blocking advancement of the whole architecture.

> Intel and AMD

I am not interested in Intel and AMD. What do you offend me for?

Re:How retarded can you be...

[evilviper]

1) Just isn't true. There are huge differences between CISC and RISC, even today. You acknoledge that, but downplay it, as if it's a trivial difference.

Both theory and real-world examples back me up on this...

You could always read: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3997&page= 3

Re:Confusing UI

[cenobita]

So is yours. You're essentially comparing apples and oranges.

Let's take this for example:
I played the flute for many years. Due to similar fingerings on the saxophone, clarinet, oboe, and piccolo, I could technically pick up any one of them and know the notes. However, when you get down to the grit of things, there are variances which make it more difficult than just picking up the instrument and displaying the kind of proficiency I have with a flute. Things such as breath control, positioning of the mouth, the differences between an embouchure and a reed, size and weight, positioning of the keys along the instrument, intonation, and so on and so forth.

3D modeling applications, audio sequencers, and programs which posess a greater scope of functions than say, an email program, are not all created equal simply because they have the same basic function. There are always similarities, but each one has specific ways of doing something which the user must adapt to, practice, and condition themselves into comfortably using. Having prior knowledge of an existing application, let's say XSI or Maya, and then sitting down with Blender, would certainly lend the user a general idea of where to start..However, there will still be those initial growing pains as the user accomodates to it. This is generally accepted even with email clients, as configuration options and features generally differ from one program to another.

I'm not going to argue whether or not Blender's UI is good or bad, but when using 3D programs, you've got to expect a degree of complexity and some bad UI decisions. As others have noted, this is bound to happen, simply because of the massive capabilities of virtually any 3D program.

Service Based Learning

[jefu]

I recently worked at a university which was in the process of determining that no student could graduate without a hefty dose of "service based learning". As it developed, what they meant by that was the idea that the university would require as a graduation requirement that all students volunteer for a term or two at "approved" local organizations.

It was not approved on that cycle, but is still one of the approved ideas in the local power elite and will most likely be pushed through eventually.

A very bad idea indeed - but appealing to those who want to instill the Proper Notions of Goodness and Niceness in students. (Think Political Correctness.)

Re:Service Based Learning

[Cyno]

I don't understand why schools don't just find people jobs and hand them their degrees, for a small fee. We could call it a finder's fee. :)

The CPU is NOT reversed-engineered

[sayfooorrrk]

http://www.idg.com.hk/cw/readstory.asp?aid=2003073 1002

It is made with help of IBM. The core is PowerPC. The new thing is the chinese character generator.

Re:The CPU is NOT reversed-engineered

[Pflipp]

Odd, huh? A character thingy in a CPU?

Re:Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reaso

[MisterFancypants]

Nice rationalization, but Blender's UI sucks because no thought went into it. If any did, where is Undo/Redo? How could an app exist in 2003 without unlimited undo/redo? Its just ridiculous!

Maya Got it Right

[metalhed77]

Maya has an excellent UI from the little I've gotten to play with that a friend showed me. I've been shown the Blender and Max UIs, and they are atrocious. Besides not all advanced users memorize keyboard shortcuts. I've been using Photoshop pretty regularly for 5 years now and only memorize a small number of shortcuts. Sure photoshop is a much simpler program, but still, well written menus can make memorization not so necessary.

The key to a good UI isn't really widgets or anything (although Blender's are crappy) its the logical organization of the programs abilities coupled with the logical presentation of the data the program interacts with. Blender would also benefit greatly from text based, rather than icon based navigation. Or possibly a Icons with their text name right after them. Most of Blender is a collection of silly random unnmaed buttons which I have little care to mouse over.

Re:Maya Got it Right

[Mac Degger]

Sorry, but that way lies obstruction of screen space...and that is something you juct can't do; 3d needs all the screen you have (preferrably multiple monitors...or even better multiple beamers :)).

Also, to become truly proficient in any app, it's a prerequisite that you learn the keyboard shortcuts; if you don't, you cannot be considered proficient. You're also much to slow at using the app if you don't use shortcuts...and if you've ever been in a production environment, you'll know that you need every second you can spare.

Re:Maya Got it Right

[cosmo7]

Also, to become truly proficient in any app, it's a prerequisite that you learn the keyboard shortcuts; if you don't, you cannot be considered proficient.
area man knows all the shortcut keys

Re:Maya Got it Right

[metalhed77]

Maya does have keyboard shortcuts but the mouse interface is really well worked out and you see people using a lot of menus very fast. Including skeleton menus that are created by left / right/ middle clicking in the work pane. Blender is a simple program compared to maya. Maya not only models, it animates and renders too. Maya also is generally more featured than Blender, and as such there is simply a tremendous amount of features to navigate through. Much of it is accessible only by menu purely because accessing it otherwise would require that you use a chinese keyboard to have enough shortcuts :). Yet, through all this, the interface is very intuitive and fast.

Photoshop is the opposite. Photoshop is a very simple program, and the keyboard shortcuts are useful if you're doing a lot of repetitive actions, in which case you can temporarily memorize the shortcuts. But I feel more efficient using mice and menu there. Why? I don't have to reposition my hands, and 95% of what you use (the toolbar) is just a click away, while te other 5% is in menus which are at most 2 levels deep.

Now, keyboard shortcuts while say programming are great. They let you keep your hands on the keyboard. I love ViM and hate repositioning the mouse.

Re:Maya Got it Right

[Anonymous Coward]

Blender is a simple program compared to Maya. Maya not only models, it animates and renders too.

Blender also animates and renders. It's got FK, IK, constraints, morphing, particles, Python scripting... It's not at the same level as Maya, but it competes well function for function.

Re:Maya Got it Right

[Mac Degger]

The point is this; it takes a second or two to do something when clicking through menus...it takes less than a second to use the keyboard shortcut.

Now in any app, there's functions you use a lot. In 3d those would be things like switching from a smoothed+shaded view to a faceted view. Or showing and hiding the edges of a model (or centering the model on your viewscreen, or changing views, or bringing up the selection box, or changing tools [selection, translation, rotation, scaling] or any of many more).

These are tools you use many times each minute. The time saved by using keyboard shortcuts can amount to hours each week (let alone the fact that quickly switching from hidden edges to showing the edges helps the creative process, which is otherwise interrupted by having to go through menus).

So what it breaks down to is this; the most common actions should be the fastest to activate, whereas the more complex should be easily identified, easily accessible and have an intuitive workflow. While Blender does have shortcuts, it just doesn't have the workflow. Maya, as you say, does.

And as for repositioning your hands...that prevents RSI :)

Vote Fraud

[Detritus]

They used these machines in the last few elections that I voted in.

An election worker inserted the card in the machine, not the voter. There were enough people around, keeping an eye on things, that attempting to swap cards would be risky.

There were no reports of fraud or irregularities related to the new machines.

Bender

[Hos]

I'm disappointed: a blender story without
some bonehead doing a tired old Bender
from Futurama gag! (And without some other
bonehead moderating it as funny!) This site
is going downhill in a big way!

Chris

What undo is and how to make it.

[yerricde]

Cocoa models undo like this: Do is a transaction. Undo is a compensating transaction that performs the inverse of do. Multiple undo/redo is a pair of stacks of such transactions.

If you help the developers to improve the document-view-controller structure and abstract changes to the document into transactions, you're one step closer to implementing undo.

someone should take the Diebold Test

[sbwoodside]

Cumberland Times-News (via google news)

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Davis confident in voting process
Administrator challenges report on machines

James Rada
Times-News Staffwriter

CUMBERLAND -- Here's an open offer from Allegany County Elections Administrator Kitty Davis to Aviel Rubin, the lead researcher of a Johns Hopkins University study that found "significant security flaws" in the electronic voting system being used by the county.

"I would challenge him to come and try any of the things he said could be done on my machines and us not be able to tell something is wrong. We wouldn't even need to do all the checks with the election judges," said Davis.

simon

Re:Blender-Power users vs newbies.

[gtada]

Naw. I come from the "more powerful != more complicated ui" crowd. The way Maya is arranged with nodes (Hypergraph), easy key commands (QWERTY), customizable UI (MELscript), and natural UI metaphors (sculpt with Artisan) makes it a superior user experience. It's neatly organized and logical, yet it's a powerful program that enables the artist. I feel closer to the work in Maya; I feel like I'm punching cards in Blender.

And you can defend Blender all you want, but I think that it's safe to say that Maya is more popular despite costing thousands of dollars. Why? Because Maya is much more powerful than Blender and is easier to grasp.

Uhhh finally, you brag that you make good amounts of money... tell me, what 3d production house do you work for using Blender making any kind of decent cash? ;)

Oh rubbish

[Julian Morrison]

"Good UI design" as conventionally taught is overwhelmingly biased towards lusers. For some apps (eg: office suites), this makes sense. They're interchangeable programs used by interchangeable employees.

But, for apps that are extremely "vertical" (heavily used by a very small, elite group of users) a whole different set of design principles is sensible. Essentially: make the common things fast, make the rare things possible, and then get the hell out of the way. Being nicey-nice to the uninitiated does NOT figure on the priority list. RTFM.

Blender, obviously, falls into the latter category.

Heisenberg's uncertany principle

[autopr0n]

I know that a lot of people have been complaining that people complaining about the government terrorism futures market are idiots, because they're just being emotional about something that could theoretically help fight terrorism or whatever But the futures market thing really is a bad Idea, and not because it's 'immoral' but because it can provide direct financial support to terrorists. All the terrorists need to do is bet on their own activities. In fact, it could cause a lot more terrorism as real criminal gangs get into terrorism as a way of more money. Imagine if the resources of a Columbian drug cartel applied to terrorism. Not good. And plus, terrorist's true plans aren't known to that many people. Unless betting could be totally anonymous, no one who actually knew anything would place any bets.

Re:Heisenberg's uncertany principle

[Xeger]

Have a look at the bets offered by tradesports.com, which is a similar market, only for sports instead of terrorism.

All of their bets involve time -- they have a fixed expiration time. The sports-related bets are over at the end of the ganme, and the politics-related bets are all of the nature "Person X will be governor on D date." The datel limitation is because bets must eventually pay off.

In order to make money from their own activities, terrorists would need to place bets of the form "Calamity C will happen on or before date D." They would either need to place these bets themselves, or they would need to choose from a number of bets (targets) provided to them by the Pentagon.

In either case, the terrorists' bet would raise the market asking price of the given event -- this means the "odds" of the event happening, as seen by the price, would rise. All of the other traders, and the Pentagon, would take notice of the higher price.

So...if the terrorists want to make money off of their actions, they need to publish advance notice of every action, complete with a date range.

In the end, a policy analysis market might even save lives. If it became good at predicting disasters, people would monitor it and steer cleer of trouble zones.

Re:Heisenberg's uncertany principle

[dubl-u]

it can provide direct financial support to terrorists

Can you honestly think of no solution to this problem? Hint: in a real market, it's known as insider trading. See my other post if you really can't figure out a way to prevent it.

What Gets Me About The PAL/Poindexter Thing

[Farley Mullet]

So PAL is sufficiently distasteful that it must be shut down, even if decision markets are generally really useful predictors of future events (and the fact that the U.S. intelligence community could probably use the help), while invading other countries based on faulty (or falsified) intelligence and wishful-thinking "domino-theory" premises about mideast relations, and despite the inevitable civilian and military casualties and potential terrorist reprisals is a "Sacred Duty". Blows my mind.

Re:What Gets Me About The PAL/Poindexter Thing

[alleycat0]

Fixing a futures market in a commodity (betting on a loss, then seeing to it that it happens) is a bad thing; fixing a futures market in a terrorist action (betting on a bombing, then seeing to it that it happens!) is *much* worse...

Re:What Gets Me About The PAL/Poindexter Thing

[Farley Mullet]

I think, given the limited size of PAL (only 1000 people would be allowed to register a day, so it'd take almost three years for even a million people to register), and the cost of planning and running a successful terrorist operation, it'd be very difficult, if not impossible, to make a profit blowing things up and killing people.

I think there's an analogy with buying defense industry stocks and voting republican, but I'll shut up now. . .

No, it was stupid

[autopr0n]

The futures market idea is interesting, but it only works when a large number of people have enough information to at least have some opinion.

With terrorists attacks, only a select group of people would have valid information, namely terrorists and people connected to (or monitoring) them.

If a system wasn't totally anonymous, then no sane person 'in the loop' would ever make a bet, because they would be immediately arrested after an attack.

If a system WAS anonymous, then you have much larger problems, mainly a terrorism business model. It's quite simple.

1) Plan a terrorist attack
2) Bet your attack will happen
3) Attack
4) Profit
So now not only do we have insane terrorists trying to do shit, but all kinds of criminals. There are a lot more bad people in the world who love money then love Allah, and a lot of smart ones too, just look at some of the stuff the Columbian drug cartels have done so far, like data mining phone records to find out who had been informing on them since.

Also, in order to sell futures, you need to list the price. This means all the information collected by the system is known to terrorists as well as the government, so terrorists can check to see how well they've been keeping secrets.

In general, letting people profit off death and destruction is a bad idea.

Re:No, it was stupid

[evilviper]

The futures market idea is interesting, but it only works when a large number of people have enough information to at least have some opinion.
With terrorists attacks, only a select group of people would have valid information, namely terrorists and people connected to (or monitoring) them.

Your arguement sounds like it makes sense, but it doesn't quite work like that in the real world. In the real world, the public at large knows what the most vulnerable infrastructure is, and the most likely targets, and the ways to attack them.

Case in point, about two years before the Sept 11th WTC attack, I saw a documentary on hijackings, and a foreign hijackings that crashed the plane into the ocean caused me to think about other posibilities. The obvious conclusion was that crashing a plane into a New York skyscraper would be easy and terribly destructive. I told many people that I knew, how easy doing that would be. I didn't talk about it often, but occasionally bringing it up over 2 years, I ended up discussing it with many people.

Now, that's just one example. just think about what people that work in nuclear power plants, damns, etc, would have to say. I'm sure they know the best ways to attack the places they work, and would have some insightful input into it. Personally, I really don't think this would be the right way to find that information (send a few FBI agents around asking questions, and you'll get even more that way) but the idea that only the terrorists can tell you what would be the best target is really not correct.

In general, letting people profit off death and destruction is a bad idea.

Well, the truth is that we live in a captialistic socity, and there is much money to be made off of death and destruction, although not as directly as this would allow.

Yeah

[autopr0n]

There were no reports of fraud or irregularities related to the new machines.

But how would you ever know? And anyway, if an election offical was corrupt, they could give out fake cards.

Re:Yeah

[Detritus]

That's presuming a level of organization and technical sophistication that is not present in my county. The people who ran the polling place were local registered voters, mostly retired people, who volunteered for the job.

Re:Yeah

[Compuser]

If an election official is corrupt the the
only thing that can prevent election abuse
is independent supervision with broad oversight
powers.
Paper balloting is even worse in this case
because it is easier to manipulate than making
fake smart cards.

Blender on FreeBSD

[Thornae]

For all those impatient FreeBSD users out there who went to the binaries page and saw "Soon" (it's not yet made it into the ports tree), I suggest doing a CVS checkout and build of the core code tree, bf-blender.
There's a FreeBSD targetted build shellscript in the main directory, and it works beautifully. (Caveat - I had to copy one .h file into a different location - can't remember what it was, but it worked fine after that).

Also, if you're interested in the bleeding edge branch of Blender, Tuhopuu (lit. "evil tree" - those wacky dutch, eh?), I've posted on the Blender forums a very basic guide.

Re:Blender - benifits of good GUIs

[Simon]

Well, when you first touch vi, it's really cryptic, but if you read the first 4 pages of the tutorial, you can do basic text editing in less than 10 minutes.

When I pick up pretty much any decent GUI text editor I can do basic text editing in under 10 seconds, and without any tutorial whatsoever.

Not to mention that:

* I will already know where to look for the load/save commands, also what thier shortcuts will be.

* I can immediately see which functions/commands the editor has available (scan the menus).

* I can easily learn the keyboard shortcuts (they're on the menus) without needing any cheatsheet.

* I can generally work out complex functions just by looking at its interface (dialog box).

Good GUIs don't exist purely for the benifit of new users. They exist to make the interaction with the computer 'transparent' and take the mental load of experianced users who have more important things to think about. ('Transparent' here meaning that you can use the program without having to stop and think about its UI.)

--
Simon

Re:Confusing UI

[AvantLegion]

You're missing the point. The point is that even simple functions (someone commented "where the fluck is UNDO?") are unnecessarily difficult to locate. That has nothing to do with the complexity of 3D modeling or the software used for it. That has to do with bad UI design, plain and simple.

The fact is that many other programs accomplish the same difficult tasks that Blender does, without making the simple ones needlessly painful.

The instrument example doesn't hold up extremely well, no. But I was mainly attempting to reply to it - wasn't my choice for an example. But to take another stab at it, many 3D modeling programs have a consistancy in basic UI features that makes things easier. Likewise, your instruments are consistant in many ways. You don't tend to pick up a clarinet and discover that the different fingerings are broken up into quarter-tones.

A consistany, reasonably familiar UI is always desirable. It is how we instantly use many programs that we've never used before, as well as ease the learning of using complex programs. How many word processors have the nice little File menu, Edit menu, etc? Consistancy is a good thing. Programs that don't force me to play detective are good, as are instruments that don't force you to search for a D (somehow lodged right next to A, physical properties of sound be damned).

We're badly oversimplifying the discussion here, but that's OK.

Blender's improvements aren't limited to 2.28

[rivenwanderer]

There's been efforts to improve documentation, most notably the release of the still-slightly-under-construction 2.0 manual online (so no, they're not deliberately designing a hard-to-use program with the intent to make money on manuals). The shortcomings of the renderer are being addressed by exports to POV-Ray, Renderman-compliant programs such as 3Delight, and, (most interestingly in my opinion), Yafray. Check out this gallery--probably 90% of the scenes were exported from Blender. Right now, this is done via a plugin, but the unofficial/experimental builds are starting to have rudimentary raytracer exports built in.

Altogether, I think that Blender is a very attractive choice for the 3D hobbyist--someone who enjoys 3D and graphics but is never going to make a living from it. After all, why shell out $1000+ when a little extra effort can get 95% of the features for free? If you plan to have a career in 3D, or have lots of money, it's probably worth it, but as one who's just in it for the fun, the eye candy, and the challenge of making things work, open source offers me four very decent tools to use together: Blender, Wings3D, Yafray, and The Gimp. All of these work to some degree on Windows, Mac, and Linux, sometimes more. There's never been a better time to get into 3D. And aspiring graphic artists shouldn't turn up their noses at such free tools either. Although you could be more immediately useful to a studio by knowing Maya/Max/Softimage/etc, simply using 3D and graphics programs of any kind will teach you tons that can easily extend to whatever programs you use later.

Re:[If you didn't read the article] Diebold seems.

[Anonymous Coward]

After hearing about the diebold scandle, I've been attempting to get a copy of the Federal Certification report (done by the ITA - Independent Testing Authority). I was able to find someone at the state level cert facility (GA) that seemed to have a clue and was able to answer questions about Diebold.

According to this person, There is no wireless networking and modems are only used to preform an early, unoffical count. The offical count is obtained by removing a PCMCIA card from behind a tamper proof seal and transporting it by hand to a facility where the votes are tallied. Assuming this is true, that portion does not sound to a security risk.

Also according this person the ITA do preform a line by line security Audit. I am still waiting for a copy of the report, so I can't personally confirm that at this time.

-Belial

Re:Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reaso

[Mac Degger]

"Put another way, actually do it for a living an you'll find out why it is that way."

Trust me; if you do, you'll very soon buy maya, 3dsmax or softimage 3d/xsi.

Blenders UI sucks. It is not a sportscar, or if it is, it's been sitting under a midden in the garden for 10 years. The only possible reason you say Blender has a good UI is because you haven't used it to really make something.

Trust me; there's a reason why you don't see Blender in production environments. And there's also a reason why the Blender developers have put the fixing of their UI as a priority for future versions. Stop defending something even the makers see as broken.

bollocks

[RMH101]

so if i don't use the keyboard shortcuts, i'm not proficient? so the disabled guy down the hall can never say he's proficient in, say, dragon dictate? you're confusing speed with skill. is your production environment a japanese game show or something?

Re:[If you didn't read the article] Diebold seems.

[arete]

Potentially whether the votes are transferred using the modem doesn't matter if it allows someone to compromise the machine itself.

I'm not saying "a network is bad" I'm saying a modem with a live wire (or apparently, a live connection) certainly defeats the defense that Diebold is using. Using the modem at any time between a reformat and the removal of the certified card means they need to be thinking about it being hacked from that angle.

sigh... MPU...!

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is rated troll and flamebait, while it is at worst only off-topic.

Re:Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reaso

[dubl-u]

In any program that "simplifies" something, there is a danger of oversimplification. In making the impact of the interface milder, you will dilute your capability to use it for actual work.

This is potentially true, but not necessarily so. There are three basic UI options, and you guys are just arguing about two of them. Respective examples of which are the Unix shell, the original Mac interface, and the NeXT interface (which is the origin of MacOS X).

The shell is great for experts, but completely hostile to novices. The basic Mac interface is great for novices, but really limits experts. The right solution is to make the interface work for both novices and experts, and a find solution for that is having multiple modes of interaction.

Sure, the Porsche can ride a little rough and be kind of touchy. Heck it's even expensive to maintain. Do you want one for free?

You miss something about this magic Porsche. Anytime anybody improves one, yours is magically better: if somebody else puts a stereo in, you get one for free. And most of the people who care about improving them are fellow owners and drivers. Ergo, you want to get as many people as possible to be driving your model of magic Porsche.

A good UI, one that helps novices get started, means a bigger user base. A bigger user base means more code contributions, more people to help you in a pinch, more FAQs and forums and Wikis and tools.

Re:I finally understand what Free software is abou

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends: If you left your door unlocked, then he would only be guilty of trespassing.

ba-da-dum. Thank you, I'll be here all week. Enjoy the buffet.

Re:Blender-Power users vs newbies.

[buysse]

How many of Maya's UI elements that you discuss are patented? Simply implementing the interface that Maya or 3DS uses would likely result in lawsuits.

Nobody is forcing you to use Blender. You have choices. More importantly, you have source. If that's not your skill, pay someone who has the skill to make the changes for you or learn. If you don't want to pay them, pay for the commercial software of your choice.

TANSTAAFL.

Dragon Chip

[betagoat]

It's not a MIPS, it's a PowerPC with standard SoC busses (PLB+OPB), caches, a Chinese language character generator, and a typical collection of peripheral IP blocks, which are licensable from a variety of semiconductor firms.

-=|[betagoat]|=-

Stupidest Idea I ever Heard

[Royster]

First of all, free markets are like a religion to some people. They have faith in them. I don't.

Markets take into account all publically available information, some privately available information and some wild guesses into the market price. There is no way to determine how much information v. how much speculation a market price contains.

At best, you could determine a concensus value for the probability of an event which is a far cry from being able to predict and an even further cry away from being able to *prevent*.

If markets were always right, why did we have the dot-com boom and bust? It seems like the same idiots who were proposing putting Sicial Security funds in the market have moved on to putting intelligence operations in the market. But they are still idiots with an innappropriate amount of faith in markets.

Re:Stupidest Idea I ever Heard

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, free markets are like a religion to some people. They have faith in them. I don't.

Airplanes were like gods to the Cargo Cults (look it up), but so what? to pilots and aero-astros they are predictable machines. All economists, including all of the Nobel prize winners have very strong faith in market economics. Nice to see that you and Lyndon LaRouch e don't.

If markets were always right, why did we have the dot-com boom and bust?

because there is nothing wrong with prices changing as new information is learned. 90% chance of rain tomorrow, and picnic stocks plummet... till it does not actually rain and the few surviving picnics are oversubscribed: this is not a market failure, it's an unavoidable consequence of a stochastic world.

you are using hindsight to say that the market was overvalued, but had monied hordes shown up at e-commerce sites, perhaps the boom would not have been big enough... but noboby knew the outcome in advance.

Blender: Also on Macintosh

[agentk]

Blender also works on Mac OSX.
I go back and forth between my iBook at home and Linux boxes at work all the time.

Blender 2.28 on NetBSD

[jschauma]

While NetBSD is probably not the one referred to as ``that other OS'', it still holds that ``of course it runs [on] NetBSD'': binary packages for blender 2.28 will show up on the mirrors shortly -- pkgsrc has already been updated.

Re:Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reaso

[puppet10]

The problem is all the first time dirvers wanting to rip out the difficult clutch and put in an easier automatic transmission and want to make the steering 'better' so it isn't so hard to use.

If they want to do that, they should just make their own version of the Porche and call it a Toyota or something.

That said there is room for improvement, but that doesn' mean a wholesale change to the UI is needed.

Blender IRC Tutorial

[avel599]

Regarding Blender's UI: here's how you can form your own opinion.

A pretty good IRC Tutorial on Blender had been previously done in Freenode. The IRC Logs are available.

It can get you starting pretty quick, even if you are a total newbie to this kind of thing.

The idea was nuts.

[Red Rocket]

Say someone plunks down a bet that Tony Blair is going to be assassinated. Other people jump on the bandwagon and the price starts skyrocketing. All of a sudden there's this huge financial incentive for somebody, anybody with a stake in the bet, to whack Tony Blair. It creates an incentive to make the things happen that your betting on.
Remember, in Vegas they have cameras and security guards to keep people from stacking the decks and rigging the dice. There's no such restraint out in the real world. People will cheat, lie, steal, and even kill if there is a profit to be made.

Unorthodox

[Red Rocket]

I can see it now,
Martin Sheen lights up a cigarette while a spook tells him,
"His methods have become . . . unsound."

"You want me to terminate him?"

"Terminate . . . with extreme prejudice."

Later, we see Poindexter sitting in the dark, wiping a wet towel over his bald head, asking Martin Sheen,
"Are you an assassin?"

"I'm a soldier."

"You're neither! You're a errand boy. Sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill."

Re:Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reaso

[dubl-u]

The problem is all the first time dirvers wanting to rip out the difficult clutch and put in an easier automatic transmission and want to make the steering 'better' so it isn't so hard to use. [...] That said there is room for improvement, but that doesn' mean a wholesale change to the UI is needed.

I note that both Porsche and Alfa Romeo offer hybrid manual/automatic transmissions. When you want them to act like a manual, they do. When you ask them to be automatic, they are.

So it seems like even in the difficult world of physical objects, there are solutions to this problem. Surely we can do just as well; our raw material is infinitely flexible, after all.

Re:Industrial Interfaces Aren't Pretty For A Reaso

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use a phrase like "trust me" *twice*, and provide no details? It doesn't help your case except to draw in those who aren't paying attention or already have your opinion.

If you have examples, not just assertions, showing how Blender has a 'bad' UI while some other tools have 'good' a UI, give the examples.

Better yet, you have the source...use it.

Well,

[autopr0n]

Obviously you're going to catch people doing things as obvious as that, but the Eiffel tower is still blow'd up.

But do you really think all insider traders are caught? Suppose Martha Stewart had gotten her info from someone at the FDA, who could have told her the tests were 'looking bad'. She could have sold early and been sneakier (for example, she could have deleted her own phone records rather then asking her secretary to do it). For only $40k, she probably didn't think it was that big of a deal.

Catching insider traders is hardly a solved problem.

Besides, if everyone who guesses right gets a visit from the FBI, then no one is going to play the damn game.

Peters' first axiom...

[sean.peters]

Yes, it is difficult for someone who hasn't read the manual to use, but once you actually read the manual, you'll soon realize that the interface is pretty easy to use.

If you have to read the manual, it ain't easy to use.

Sean

Re:Blender-Power users vs newbies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maya and Max= feature BLOAT. I'm sure there are very good reasons that studios use Maya but the real reason they are more popular despite costing thousands is because its the hip thing amongst people who use pirated software. Granted there can be useful features found in these programs not yet available in Blender but to say that Maya is easier to grasp simply because of its popularity is just plain biased bull. I'm constantly baffled that any intelligent person can make the arguement that MAX and MAYA's overloaded UI can be any easier to learn than Blender's. I use Blender (as well as MAX) on a daily basis in a MAX based company and I do just fine thanks.

Re:Blender-Power users vs newbies.

[gtada]

Please. Look at how much Max copies Maya. Don't tell me that copying the UI elements would result in a lawsuit. If that were true, many other open source projects would be in court for UI issues.

The funniest things that I hear are similar to "nobody is forcing you to use Blender." Yeah. I know that cuz I don't use it. I'm just expressing my opinion that its UI needs a lot of work. And sure it's open source, and I could change it to be what I want, but it's not worth the effort.

Re:Blender-Power users vs newbies.

[gtada]

I disagree. You say Maya and Max == feature bloat, but I would say that Blender == feature anemic. To me, feature bloat implies that ill-conceived features were added during development. Maya is a deep program, but the features work WELL. How is that "feature bloat"?

Maya has a lot of power, but Alias|Wavefront has done a great job of organizing the user interface. And if you don't like it, the UI is changeable in MELscript. You could probably make it work like Blender if you really want. ;)

I do think Blender has its place, but I think that for what it can do, the UI makes each task more difficult to do. I'd love to maybe see a branch of Blender with a different UI.

Finally, I sometimes suggest Blender to 3d newbies, but I usually offer it as an alternative. It has a decent feature set, and it's free, but as I said, the UI leaves much to be desired.