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

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

[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

[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

[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:Wha?

[aled]

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

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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

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.