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"

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

[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

[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

[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: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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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:Wha?

[aled]

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

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.

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: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.

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".

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.

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.

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..

"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.

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...

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.

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.