Microsoft Reaches Out To Blender

dmbasso writes "Continuing its strategy to support FOSS application on the Windows platform, Microsoft mailed the Blender developers asking how they could help improve the experience of Blender users on Windows. Groklaw puts it in perspective using Steve Ballmer's own words."

Comments

Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[suso]

First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them anyways.

This is a message directed towards all people who are not familiar with 3d applications. Most 3d applications have historically had interfaces that deviate from the standard application interface. Get over it.

As someone who has been toying with various 3d applications since 1990 and having taken some time to learn Blender recently I can say this. Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive and effcient.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

"Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive" ... that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

here's the thing:

If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not intuitive.

I've used 3D application since the late 80's (started with Sculpt-Animate 4D, and have used *many* applications since), and Blender's interface is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'd say it's worse than ever Caligari (the first version) in that at least with Caligari I could actually navigate.

I tried learning Blender recently, and downloaded a video tutorial. The guy presenting it repeatedly used the word "intuitive" - even going so far as to say something like this:

"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."

If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Prolly because you only have been "toying" you don't understand the difference. Blender is worse than 3dsmax, which is quite a feat given that 3dsmax is a fucking piece of shit of interface compared to Maya or Lightwave.

Enough of that blender bullshit hiding behind the complexity of any 3d packages. Yes, 3D is something inherently complex. Doesn't mean that blender isn't doing it much worse than the competition. Switching between Maya, Lightwave or Cinema 4d is much easier than touching the nightmare that is Blender.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[sortia]

UI preference is subjective, I happen to like 3ds interface! For me coming from a Windows background it was a fairly common looking layout! Sure some advanced/rarely used options are hidden away somewhere obscure, but no more so than other complex software IMO. Its whatever the user is used to!

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

It is intuitive and efficient IF you take some time to learn it. I know people who work with various 3d applications and blender is just too foreign. Learn Maya and you will know how to work with similiar software. Learn blender and you'll know how to work with blender, and only blender.

It's the start that's the problem, but when you learn it - it is more as just "quite intuitive and efficient".

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Trespass]

First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them anyways.

This is a message directed towards all people who are not familiar with 3d applications. Most 3d applications have historically had interfaces that deviate from the standard application interface. Get over it.

As someone who has been toying with various 3d applications since 1990 and having taken some time to learn Blender recently I can say this. Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive and effcient. I'm sure it helps that you can access all the functions from the GUI now instead of having to memorize hotkeys.

Keyboard shortcuts often make for a more efficient workflow, but *having* to use them makes for a much steeper learning curve.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[foobsr]

and Blender's interface is one of the worst I've ever seen

You for sure missed this :)

... cue in 3d version of EMACS vs. vi discussion.

CC.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[suso]

Ok, you know what. I doubt there is any convincing you because like so many other people, you've already made up your mind based on what you've heard.

So don't use the word intuitive then because its probably the wrong word to use when talking about 3d software. Let's say this instead, once you've really spent some time learning Blender's interface, you will start to think that a lot of other 3d user interfaces have it wrong. At least I did. I used Imagine for years and I thought Imagine made a lot of sense, but after using Blender for 3 months and actually spending time to learn it, I'm so much faster at creating objects in Blender than I ever was in Imagine.

I think what has happened, is that the myth that it is hard to use has preceded the application. Blender is not the only software with this problem.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[warlorddagaz]

I have also been learning to use blender recently, and would agree with you on the efficiency front, but not on the intuitive one - it took me ages to find a decent tutorial (I eventually used the noob to pro wikibook), and without one I was stumped. The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it. The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

B.S. With the exception of your mother's nipple, you have never ever used an intuitive interface. There is no such thing. Have you ever seen someone try to "intuit" how to use a mouse without even having seen it being used? "Hello computer?" When you say "intuitive", you merely mean "similar to whatever I'm used to". Frankly, efficiency and discoverability are what you should focus on.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what has happened, is that the myth that it is hard to use has preceded the application. Blender is not the only software with this problem. <cough>Office2007</cough>

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It is intuitive and efficient IF you take some time to learn it.

In the user interface design field, the term "intuitive" is usually used to refer to the subset of usability also referred to as "learnability." Basically, the bigger the learning curve, the less intuitive.

Now poor learnability is not always a bad thing. In many interfaces there is a tradeoff between the learnability and speed and power once the user has overcome the learning curve. For home user applications learnability generally needs to be fairly high at the expense of other types of usability. For professional applications, it is usually less important since as an "expert" the user will take the time to learn the interface and it is more important to be fast and powerful once that has been accomplished.

It's the start that's the problem, but when you learn it - it is more as just "quite intuitive and efficient".

It might be more efficient, but in terms of usability and UI design it is not more intuitive. But that's okay.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, you know what. I doubt there is any convincing you because like so many other people, you've already made up your mind based on what you've heard.

The poster you're replying to states 1) he or she has used a wide variety of 3d applications over the past 20 years, and 2) spent effort trying to learn Blender and found it to be lacking in comparison with those other 3d applications. In response you accuse them of already making up their mind based on what they "heard." Did you just not read their reply?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

It is intuitive and efficient IF you take some time to learn it.

The definition of intuitive is you DON'T need to learn it. There's not thing wrong with an application not being intuitive and requiring learning before using. Intuitive user interfaces often are horrible for the professional to use. You don't need to redefine the word intuitive, just because you like bender's interface.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

It is intuitive and efficient IF you take some time to learn it.

Which is EXACTLY the point the AC up there ^^^ was making. If you have to "take some time to learn it" then it is not intuitive BY DEFINITION. Something simply can't be intuitive AND have a steep learning curve--they're mutually exclusive. That so many people here seem to want to argue this point just shows how very screwed up some within the OSS community can be, and how out of whack interface priorities actually are.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Trespass]

I just don't think most of the people here understand the difference between 'easy to use' and 'easy to learn'. Blender looks like a really interesting tool, but a lot of people have unrealistic expectations for making complex tasks simple. Having used 3ds Max in a production environment for four years, what's 'intuitive' now is far different from what it was when I started.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Mystery00]

I think you're right, although my reasoning is slightly different.

Comparing 3DsMax and Blender: the basis behind why I prefer Blender is that it's faster to use.

Now you might think this is something that's arguable, but no, not quite. Just like you wouldn't try to argue that a person can outrun a car at full speed, you can't argue that using the 3DsMax interface is faster than using Blender's.

More intuitive? Maybe, how intuitive something is depends on who you are, what you know, where you've been, from how high you have been dropped on your head as a kid etc...

Intuitiveness is so vague and different for each person it's not even worth bothering to argue about it.

I got some screenshots here I took a while ago comparing Blender to 3DsMax, now I haven't used Max for as long as I have Blender and there may very well be some hidden functionality I haven't found, or some plugin that oils this rusty old program. Either way this is why Blender is faster than Max (from the perspective I had at the time)

Filling in a polygon face with Max:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v17/mystery/BlenderVSmax/MaxCube.jpg

Filling in a polygon face with Blender:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v17/mystery/BlenderVSmax/BlenderCube.jpg

Which method is faster? (That's version 6 of 3DsMax by the way, I hope the modelling tools in the current version have improved, I wouldn't know, I use Blender =)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[compro01]

that isn't "myth preceded" it's "fact preceded". we've been doing a trial of the thing where i work and after 6 months, we largely chucked it as practically all (about a dozen out of the 2 hundred liked the new interface) the test clients couldn't stand it anymore.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's right. "Intuitive" is the word to describe Blender's interface. It doesn't mean "easy for a beginner", it means that, once you understood how the basics work, you intuitively know how to do the more complex stuff.

Want another FOSS example? Ogre3D's API : it's definitely not easy to learn the basics, but once you know how to create a scene, move objects around and use a listener, you intuitively know what to look for in the API documentation to do whatever it is you want to do. Everything is logical and well laid out.

As a counter example, a non-intuitive interface (again an API), is ActionScript2 (not sure about 3, but I guess it's the same). If you have a condition clause which jumps to another frame/script or stops in case the condition is met, common sense (and your intuition) would say that ANY of instructions after the clause is going to be ignored.

a=1;
if( a==1) { stop(); }
alert("I shouldn't appear if a==1");

will come up with an alert ... now THAT is unintuitive. (excuse me if the actionscript up there is mumbled actionscript.It's more meant as pseudocode.)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Trespass]

I have also been learning to use blender recently, and would agree with you on the efficiency front, but not on the intuitive one - it took me ages to find a decent tutorial (I eventually used the noob to pro wikibook), and without one I was stumped.

The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it.

The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning. This is a very large and often neglected aspect of learning something as complex and just plain *weird* as 3D modeling and animation: Documentation! Say what you will about the 3ds Max interface (I like it for poly modeling) but the documentation and tutorials are some of the best I've seen for a good introduction to 3D. I found Blender daunting when I last tried it because there really was a shortage of available tutorials and other documentation.

Good documentation will carry a mediocre interface better than poor documentation will carry a great interface.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who cut their teeth on Blender and is now learning Maya, I find it's lack of hotkeys disturbing.

Instead of memorizing hotkeys, i have to memorize cryptic icons and magically shifting menus.

After 6 months of working with Maya i've found i prefer Blender for almost everything.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[dmbasso]

Actually, the point is: if you learn a small subset of Blender's commands, all the rest is pretty intuitive to deduce, because all share the same concepts. The hard part is to learn the initial concepts, after that all commands follow the same logic and are natural to invoke, and that's the reason for the great productivity boost.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Actually, the point is: if you learn a small subset of Blender's commands, all the rest is pretty intuitive to deduce, because all share the same concepts.

This is called "consistent" not "intuitive".

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Trespass]

As someone who cut their teeth on Blender and is now learning Maya, I find it's lack of hotkeys disturbing.

Instead of memorizing hotkeys, i have to memorize cryptic icons and magically shifting menus.

After 6 months of working with Maya i've found i prefer Blender for almost everything. Ugh, that goddamn hotbox. >

I've found a recurring theme with animators generally liking Maya and modelers who have experience with other packages not liking it much for polygonal modeling. Maybe once the industry matures more we'll see a greater consistency in interfaces (or at least the ability to properly customize them).

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[morcego]

If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".

Of course I do. You need a hell of a lot of intuition to be able to use it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[maxwell demon]

However the discussion in this thread is about the use of the word "intuitive", which doesn't mean "easy to use". It doesn't even mean "easy to learn" (if an application uses "foo" to mean "yes" and "bar" to mean "no" on its buttons, that's relatively easy to learn, and certainly as easy to use as "yes"/"no", but it's by no means intuitive). An intuitive interface means you can correctly guess most common operations without consulting the manual or online help.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[billcopc]

You know what else is intuitive like the Blender UI ?

American English.

It makes perfect sense, once you learn all the double-entendres, transient jargon and collective ignorance that pervades all digital and print media. There really is no other language on the planet that gyrates anywhere near as much as English.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ok, you know what. I doubt there is any convincing you because like so many other people, you've already made up your mind based on what you've heard."

Well, you can take your sour grapes, but I made up my mind after I USED THE DAMN SOFTWARE. I hadn't heard anything about Blender's UI beforehand. What you have is my experience. I realize you have an emotional attachment to Blender, and you truly want it to be as wonderful as you believe it is - but you're only fooling yourself.

"So don't use the word intuitive"

I guess I have to remind you that *you* are the one who used the word "intuitive"?

"its probably the wrong word to use when talking about 3d software"

No, it's the wrong word to use when talking about *Blender*. I've encountered a couple of 3d packages that were intuitive (Lightwave 3 is one. I just sat down and started working with it.)

"I used Imagine for years and I thought Imagine made a lot of sense"

I also used Imagine for years (before I discovered LW.) It does some things well, others not so much. It's better than Caligari, not as good as LW.

"I think what has happened, is that the myth that it is hard to use has preceded the application."

No, what has happened is that Blender got a reputation for being difficult to use because it is.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Rary]

"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."

If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".

I've never used Blender and can't comment on whether or not its UI is intuitive. I intend only to reply to your comments about the meaning of "intuitive".

To an extent, I agree with you. However, being "intuitive" doesn't necessarily only mean that it's immediately obvious how to use it. Sometimes your initial perception of the basic UI concept doesn't match that of the developers, but once you shift your perception accordingly, then it become intuitive.

Basically, you may encounter a UI that makes no sense to you. Then you learn how it works, but each time you go to do an action, you have to stop and think about how to do it, and rely on memorized steps. This is not an intuitive interface.

On the other hand, you may encounter a UI that makes no sense to you, but once you grasp the UI's concept, you find that you don't have to rely on memorized steps, they just make sense based on your new understanding of the UI concept. That's a UI that has become intuitive.

In other words, it's intuitive to a person who understands the concept. All you have to do is learn the concept.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Now you might think this is something that's arguable, but no, not quite. Just like you wouldn't try to argue that a person can outrun a car at full speed, you can't argue that using the 3DsMax interface is faster than using Blender's.

But in some cases a person can outrun a car at full speed. For example, in a muddy pond, full speed might be less than 1 mph for a car. You present one example of one workflow, which is fine by itself; but that just demonstrates that Blender is faster for that one task, not for general use or for the use cases of a given individual. So while Blender might be faster in either of these cases, it is not "proved" by your example. A much more extensive usability test utilizing a larger sample is usually what would be required to be accepted within the scientific community that studies human-machine interfaces.

More intuitive? Maybe, how intuitive something is depends on who you are, what you know, where you've been, from how high you have been dropped on your head as a kid etc... Intuitiveness is so vague and different for each person it's not even worth bothering to argue about it.

The term "intuitive" has a specific meaning in terms of usability testing. It refers to how quickly a user can learn to perform given workflows without outside instruction. It is also sometimes called "learnability" or "learning curve". It is, however, only one aspect of usability and generally not a critically important one for most professional applications. For people who plan to use some software all day, every day, focusing on making tasks faster is usually more important than making them easier to learn.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[mad.frog]

If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not intuitive. When people use "intuitive" for a user interface they usually mean "you only need it explained once; you don't continue to curse the confusion after that".

Which is a useful goal, but not at all what "intuitive" means.

The only truly intuitive user interface I can think of offhand is the nipple.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[geminidomino]

There really is no other language on the planet that gyrates anywhere near as much as English. Did you have to use the word "gyrates?" I've been trying NOT to think overmuch about last night's "House"

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[dmbasso]

Things are intuitive only if their behavior is consistent. Reinforcement-learning is the basis of intuition.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Abcd1234]

So very true. And I'm sure Blender is incredibly efficient. What it's *definitely* not is discoverable (at least in my limited experience).

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

You will never find an application like Blender 'intuitive' because you are bias by your own experience. Intuitive to you means "exactly the same as the application you know best".

> I've used 3D application since the late 80's

Completely disqualifies you from commenting on whether or not an interface is genuinely intuitive. I don't think you really know what intuitive really means.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[CastrTroy]

Anybody who thinks that Blender is too complicated should probably read up on expert interfaces. Doing 3D modelling is not something you can pick up in a couple hours, or learn in a week even. Expert interfaces are fine on tools like Blender where you would expect the user to be able to devote a large amount of time to learning how the tool works, as long as the time spent learning the tool allows them to do the actual tasks more quickly. Blender is like the CLI. It's not entirely obvious from just messing around how to use it effectively, but to the experienced user, it can be quite powerful.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[montibbalt]

Maybe YOU can't figure it out with video tutorials. Blender does have a slight learning curve if you've used another 3D application since it's so different, but just like high school chemistry, you reach a certain point where you just "get it." Unfortunately, also just like high school chemistry, no one seems to care enough to learn. I've been using Blender for a while and I think 3DS Max has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen. Honestly, what the hell IS that?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[644bd346996]

You're construing "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as MS Paint". By that standard, any 3d tool that is intuitive will also be horribly hard to use and inefficient.

The steep initial learning curve for Blender comes from getting in the right mindset for using a 3d modeling tool. Once you have sufficiently relinquished the mindset that applies to 2d drawing tools, learning more about Blender's functionality is easy, natural, and yes, intuitive.

To put it another way, Blender's UI is internally consistent, but it is by nature not consistent with much of anything else, because everything else is about 2d stuff (except games, which run in full screen anyways).

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[mhall119]

a=1;
if( a==1) { stop(); }
alert("I shouldn't appear if a==1");
will come up with an alert ... now THAT is unintuitive. As a developer, that is exactly the outcome I would expect. "stop();" is a method call, processing should return to the rest of the code when it finishes. Since the alert() is outside the if(a==1) block, I would expect it to be executed after the stop() is called. Just because your animation stopped, doesn't mean your code execution stopped too.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[mean pun]

Since this topic drift seems to be inevitable anyway, let me go with the flow...

I don't doubt that Blender is a helpful and powerful tool if you use it daily, but the user interface has a learning curve like the cliffs of Dover. As a veteran user of PovRay and a raft of other 3D tools I am more than happy with the array of tools Blender offers to create, bend, sculpt, distort, warp, arrange, and otherwise mangle 3D objects, so at an abstract level it is quite clear what to do to create 3D objects. In that sense I am even willing to grant that Blender is `intuitive'.

However, HOWEVER, the Blender user interface is totally unhelpful in explaining how to use these tools. Blender throws at the user a collection of panels and buttons and windows that is different from what anyone else is doing, and requires you learn a vast number of keystrokes, slang terms, magical pixels to click or drag, and all that with little or no handholding. Where are the tooltips, popup menus, help windows, or even just nods to standard user interfaces? And can you please make some of these magical areas to click or drag a little more obvious and a little larger, please? Optionally then?

You could argue that editors like vi and Emacs do exactly the same: they require you to learn magical keystrokes with little or no handholding. However, there you can get by with a limited set of magic that let you do your thing, although perhaps not in the most efficient way. Precisely because 3D editing is so difficult, that is not possible in Blender. You have to learn quite a lot of the Blender magic to do anything meaningful.

I've tried to learn Blender at least three times, and one time I even bought a book to learn it. Every time I gave up in disgust because I just didn't have the time to learn all that magic and got disgusted by the unhelpful Blender UI that clearly has no time at all for newcomers. Every time I decided that I was better off spending my time writing PovRay code. (And $DEITY knows PovRay has its own interesting collection of quirks, weird limitations, and cranky developers.)

In short: yes, in one sense Blender is intuitive. However, at another level it is just a impenetrable jumble of buttons and dials that is more complicated to use than an airplane.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[joggle]

I've used all sorts of applications on many platforms but have never encountered one where I couldn't hardly do jack without looking in tutorials until I ran into Blender (well, and vi of course). Even in 3D Studio Max I was able to do very nifty materials and mappings before I looked in the help section. I couldn't do hardly anything at all in Blender though and still can't believe people call that program's interface 'intuitive'. Even old versions of the Gimp have a better interface than that.

The only program I've ever used that could give Blender a run for its money for an interface that simply cannot be used on your first exposure to the program is old versions of Pro/E (a sophisticated and horribly expensive CAD program originally written for UNIX).

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[haystor]

Why would you limit emacs to three dimensions?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just like programming books/algorithm books etc. where the writer writes something like "and now its obvious" or "we can easily see that".

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[joeedh]

>> First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the
>> interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them
>> anyways.

Eh, how does the interface relate to this story? I mean, that was guarenteed to start Yet Another Slashdot Blender UI Flame Fest.

And for you blender UI haters (for the thousandth time) blender's UI is designed to be fast and easy to use, not easy to learn (and it is consistent with itself, yes, just not with other apps). Back when the UI was initially designed, a hotkey-based app was one of the fastest ways to work (pie/radial/marking menus hadn't become popular yet, for that matter they arn't popular now). However it's not particularly easy to learn such an app, especially back before we had header menus so users could at least find the function in the menu and see it's associated hotkey. There's also been significant technical difficulties with the UI code (though there's a project ongoing now to fix that, and hopefully allow much UI improvement).

Maya, (as an example of an app people find easy to learn and fast to use once they learn how to configure it) uses marking menus (basically pie menus) to replace the need to memorize tons of hotkeys. Hotkeys have the advantage of settling into your muscle memory; normals menus do not, nor do icons, but pie menus work fairly well for this. So instead of having tons of hotkeys, you put things into pie menus, which makes the user interface much more discoverable (if done right) and intuitive, especially if users can build their own menus and assign them to custom hotkeys.

Other then the marking menus, I personally think maya's UI is not well designed (it's customizable in the ways as I'd like, for example). However from what I can tell, the marking menus combined with what customizability is there works really well for people. Pie menus have been investigated for use in blender in the past, and will probably be considered again as part of the 2.5 event/ui refactor project.

Joe

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[elrous0]

Yeah, good luck on that with Blender. I had to consult the Blender manual to figure out how to save a file.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Russ Nelson]

"intuitive" in the computer context means "familiar". Or so said Jef Rasking.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[mysticgoat]

"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."

If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".

My trajectory in 3D modeling has been from POV-Ray to Blender. My trajectory in computer interfaces has been from FORTRAN and COBOL on Hollerith cards through CPM, DOS, Win3.x, WinXP, and now (finally something sensible) Ubuntu.

From my perspective, Blender's interface IS INDEED intuitive. In the same way that Microsoft products are intuitive. Where to end a session you press the "Start" button, and to ensure a session remains active and unchanged during your BRB you use the Shutdown dialog, and you use one Explorer or maybe the other one for everything from file system operations to internet access. Page formating obviously belongs on the "File" menu, since otherwise you might confuse it with formating paragraphs or characters, and the list goes on, ad nauseum.

So Blender isn't all that easy to learn. So what? It is easy to use. Once learned, the process of using its tools become as intuitive as a watercolorist's use of brushes.

Most of the learning curve in 3D modeling has more to do with the non-intuitive nature of the subject than with any aspect of the interface. It doesn't make any intuitive sense to treat the material as a completely separate entity from the model, and don't get me started with the absurdities of today's lighting mechanisms. But that is the way that 3D modeling is done. To make something that looks realistic, you've got to go through a large but probably finite set of absurdly non-intuitive steps. An intuitive interface isn't going to make a wit of difference in learning how to get from cubes and spheres to realistic naturescapes.

"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, you'll find it really supports effective work habits." —That's what the guy should have said. It's possible that he was dain bramaged by overexposure to intuitive operating systems when he was young. I'm seeing a lot of that around me these days.

Hey! Get off my lawn!

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[sconeu]

Shouldn't that be GNU/three dimensions?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[mikael_j]

No hotkeys in Maya?! One of the first things I learned about Maya when I took a full semester-long course in 3D modelling and animation was that if you couldn't find a hotkey for some task (which was quite rare) then you created your own hotkey.

/Mikael

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I'm reading everyone correctly we just need Microsoft to write us some good documentation?

Maybe they could use a nice, open, xml based format like docx.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[gwait]

Download Google Sketchup, and you can pick up its basic 3D modelling in an hour. It's by far the easiest 3D modeller I've ever played around with.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Jason Earl]

You've clearly never seen how much time and effort new mothers put into teaching their babies to breast feed. It's difficult enough that most hospitals offer classes.

I know, I was surprised too.

So much for intuitive interfaces.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Blender has really good documentation on it's shortcuts. In the help section there is an option to open a complete list of every shortcut and what that specific shortcut does under certain circumstances. Blender truly is all about shortcuts and extrude.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[bluefoxlucid]

If it doesn't have nipples it's not intuitive.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[molarmass192]

High school chemistry was fine, a cake walk even, it's ORGANIC chemistry that eventually blew my friggen mind.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[hob42]

I've encountered a couple of 3d packages that were intuitive (Lightwave 3 is one. I just sat down and started working with it.) Alan Hastings is personally responsible for wasting uncounted days - no, make that months - of my childhood. When I was 10 years old, we got our VT 0.9 system, after years of hype. I'd previously been intimidated by Imagine, but without anyone telling me what to do (my dad was as clueless as I when it came to 3D) or reading any manuals (sans pictures in the pre-release printing) I quickly began to model space ships, stage epic space battles, and render animations looooong into the night (to be later single-framed to 3/4" SP, the hardest part of the whole process).

Dunno if it's worth noting that LW didn't conform to standard interface rules either, even on the Amiga, which is where this particular thread started.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Atriqus]

Nope, the third dimension is under the BSD License. I'm sure there's some deeper meaning to that phrase, but luckily I couldn't care less.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[carlmenezes]

My test for an intuitive interface is simple: If I find that I need to do something that I don't know how to do yet, I use my understanding of the interface so far and see if what I think I need to do is what gets the job done. If it does, I consider the interface intuitive. Of course, I'm very familiar with using computers in general so I do consider my simple test to be valid.

I personally believe that interfaces that try to do the same thing can be made intuitive by simply being consistent : knowledge used/learnt on one interface becomes immediately useful on the other. Good examples : the most basic spreadsheet cell manipulations, the "x" button meaning close window, the right-click menu, basic browser layout - everyone knows how to use the address bar.

Anything can become intuitive if you take the time to learn it. However, how much are you going to force your users to learn? Aren't there enough different interfaces already? Sometimes there is a need for a different interface, but definitely not in in Blender's case. I can start up Maya, 3dStudio Max and Lightwave to name a few and have a model of a sculpted vase in a matter of minutes. It takes me about half an hour in Blender simply because the interface does not make sense! Its more a matter of memorizing the interface than understanding it.

Please Blender devs...I love open source, I want to use Blender for my casual 3D modeling and I have tried for years to understand Blender and retain that understanding. However, every time I need to do something new, I end up spending an hour or so searching on the Web or moving through tutorial videos just to figure out what I need. Please do something about it. I know I'm not alone.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

The only truly intuitive user interface I can think of offhand is the nipple.

If you weren't a linux user you'd know of one more ;)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Mystery00]

You're right that an extensive study and comparison of the two applications would have to be carried out to actually prove/disprove that Blender has a faster workflow; my example was just to drive a point and shouldn't be looked at as proof.

The main point though that unlike intuitiveness efficiency and speed are things that can be quantified with a proper study and submitted as proof. Such as measuring the speed of a moving car compared to that of a person. While you're right that this depends on the situation I think the "muddy pond" example is just nitpicking.

Especially since professional applications are mostly out to do a job defined by fairly specific criteria and do it well.

It refers to how quickly a user can learn to perform given workflows without outside instruction. It is also sometimes called "learnability" or "learning curve". As I've stated before, this is something that varies from person to person. While one individual can pick up 3DsMax faster than Blender, another would not have a problem with either.

Also as someone else has pointed out when you pick up on how an application works from a few examples you are suddenly able to comprehend the entire application's inner working better than you did at first glance.

Perhaps "intuitive" has a specific meaning in usability testing but it's still an evolving and varying entity in practice.

In fact most of the things that you find easy to use now, you have been trained to find intuitive over the course of your computer education.

Although you can argue that to make something intuitive you have to view it from the perception of a majority, I think it's obvious by this endless flamewar regarding interfaces that there is no such thing.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[geoffrobinson]

They catch on pretty quickly. But yeah, I was surprised by the need for classes too. Lactation nurse! If you ever meet a male lactation nurse, I hope they've undergone a background check.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Spy der Mann]

And I wonder, why the heck don't blender devs start copying other programs' user interfaces?

Let me guess, maybe because Blender devs have NEVER learned to use other programs?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you've never had children? All children have to learn how to use the nipple. It's not uncommon at all that babies never learn how to use it and have to be fed from a bottle.

Can we please stop pretending that babies know exactly what to do the first time they see/feel a breast? So just as babies need to learn their tasks, we have to learn ours. Good thing babies are quick learners, their lives depend on it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[nschubach]

Being a programmer, I find many instances of this type of thing. Your post made me remember the many times I've tried to learn 3D programming (OpenGL or DirectX.) There is a "language" to go with the technology that you have to wrap your head around first. Words like occlusion, voxel, vector (different than a C vector), Stencil Buffer, Tessellation... I could go on. Either way, it would be like telling someone to drive a taxi in Bangladesh if they only spoke English. It might be intuitive to the people living there, but the person you asked to do it wouldn't have a clue where anything was or how to get there.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[OptimusPaul]

I'm of the opinion that 3D software in general is non-intuitive. Blender took me a long time to figure out. But then I learned Maya, which also took a long time, and now I have forgotten how to use blender. I would hope that 3D apps would at least be similar in how you interact with them. I used to say that Blender is difficult because so many functions are accesed using special key combos or mouse clicks, but I have come to realize that this is just the nature of 3D. Adapting our 2D tools to it just doesn't really make for an intuitive experience.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[falconwolf]

I had to consult the Blender manual to figure out how to save a file.

Is this an online or offline manual? I've been looking for a printed manual or book, for Blender and for CinePaint, as printed material is easier for me.

Falcon

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[NimbleSquirrel]

Does anyone know of a replacement UI project for Blender? Something like Gimpshop is for Gimp? A Blended Maya perhaps? ;)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[baggins2001]

The guy presenting it repeatedly used the word "intuitive" - even going so far as to say something like this: "The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."

This is a lesson Open Source learned from MS. Repeat an untruth until it is perceived as the truth.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, good luck on that with Blender. I had to consult the Blender manual to figure out how to save a file.

You obviously didn't read the chapter in Blenders manual about how to say negative things about Blender without ridiculing yourself.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Bastardchyld]

I have nipples, can I attend those classes?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Things are intuitive only if their behavior is consistent. Reinforcement-learning is the basis of intuition.

I don't think so. We're hard wired to respond to certain stimulus we've never before encountered. More importantly, something is intuitive when it is similar to something we've already experienced (preferably a lot). This is different from being similar to other aspects of the same program (consistent).

For example, the tapedeck audio recoding software is intuitive to most users in that it is excessively similar to using one of those old tape recorders. The first time a person uses it, they are likely to be able to intuit how to record something. This has nothing to do with them having used other features of the software and it being consistent with them, because they haven't used any other features yet.

Consistent is having similar controls or workflows for different aspects of the program. Intuitive is being easily learnable, whether because it is similar to things we've learned in other aspects of our lives or other software or for other reasons entirely.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Brigadier]

There is a big difference with 'toying with various 3d applications' and using them for a living. When working professionally with a modeling program having some type of consistency in the interface helps modelers adapt much easier.

If you have a design shop which insists on using some odd ball application it means you have to spend significant resources training employees on this system.

Having used everything 'professionally' from Maya, to Houdinia, to Revit to 3D Studio, I can say first hand blender was a pain in the butt to learn, and this is coming from a Linux junkie.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[aeoo]

"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive." Actually this is right. Intuition is a conditioned phenomenon. What is or is not considered intuitive depends on your prior experience and training.

I've used 3D application since the late 80's What you are saying is that you should never have to retrain your intuition.

You shouldn't have to learn. You've learned everything you want to learn back in the 80's and you want to stay that way. That's what you are saying.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[wootest]

It's interesting to compare this to Microsoft's own research and actual usage data backing the entire redesign effort, which showed several real problems and which led the work.

I'm not all that in love with most other parts of Office 2007, especially not the underlying politics and company guiding the OOXML bullshit and anything-open-has-cooties thinking. But I have read up on how the redesign happened, point by point, and I can't fault them for not doing their homework.

It's a solid piece of engineering and craftsmanship (if you remove the horrendous branding like the "Office button"), but it's hard to judge the merits of the interface based on the first iteration of it, plagued by lack of customization and immense culture shock in anyone who sees it. The application of the interface to the programs might not have worked so well in practice as they thought it would in theory, but I think it's also fairly clear that "stay the course" would not have worked that well for that long.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[thtrgremlin]

Agreed, if you saying what I think you saying. People that gripe about Blenders interface are not people that know it; it is all people, imho, that took one look at the simple boxy interface and giant menus, and maybe clicked on the cube with the left mouse button to discover nothing happens, and were immediately turned off, if not outright upset. That was my reaction. Once I finally took the time to learn it (years later after seeing demo videos) other people would watch me work in Blender and would be like WHAT!?! How do you do that? and I would say It is easy, but you must at least watch the interface tutorials (youtube's super3boy tutorials are great for starters, mind you he sounds 12 years old.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Maxo-Texas]

It may be that your prior learning for 20 years is blocking you from seeing how easy Blender is.

Some fantastic procedural programmers just never get the object oriented model for example.

There was another post in this thread where the poster said that after several months, it was faster in Blender.

I know I struggled with Openoffice for a couple years before suddenly "getting it" and now it seems easier than Word.

Or ... Blender may just stuck as bad as GIMP. :)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[falconwolf]

Blender's UI is internally consistent, but it is by nature not consistent with much of anything else, because everything else is about 2d stuff

Lightwave, Maya, and 3D Max are 2D? There are no 3D apps besides Blender?

Falcon

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[thtrgremlin]

that bugged me too. I think it actually says in the documentation "everything is designed to assume you know what you are doing". How am I supposed to do anything if I need to already know it to do anything? Oh yeah, read the manual. I will admit that needing to read the documentation to save resulted in a long sigh. It was worse for rendering movies... but I'll admit that once I knew it, it was easy to remember, and beats the hell out of "Are you sure" or "didn't you forget to..." dialog boxes all over the damn place with "other software" (not necessarily 3d apps).

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone on this site used to sign:

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple"

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

You equate intuitive with instinctive. This is doubly stupid:
- it obviously doesn't apply to anything even remotely related any technology of any kind, not even throwing a stone, never mind computers;
- it's redundant.

Fortunately, there are other definitions of the word which happen to be useful in the context of computers, much to the chagrin of obtuse UI nazis. Surprisingly enough, intuitive is what is "knowable by intuition". Intuition in turn is "the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference".

You did realise, did you, that the "Hello computer" line was a joke? So in 1986 it was obvious to most people that talking to the "object" was the wrong thing to do? Intuitively, maybe?

I find it especially funny that you specifically choose a definition of intuitive that is not the one used when talking about UI design, and then put forward specifically UI concepts such as "discoverability". Make up your mind.

As for blender, it is without a shadow of a doubt the least intuitive program I ever used. Worse, while it is the only one for which I read tutorials and so on, I am no better off trying to even guess how to do something "close but not quite the same". And judging by the comments every time the subject is brought up, I'm part of a rather large crowd. Unlike, say, Gimp, which is a annoying (or so I'm told) if you're used to Photoshop, but perfectly usable by anyone with "normal GUI apps" experience, Blender is pretty much unusable regardless of your experience, unless that includes... Blender.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[joggle]

I've been using Blender for a while and I think 3DS Max has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen. Honestly, what the hell IS that? I'd love to challenge a Blender expert on doing some animations vs. doing it with 3D Studio Max (in a timed race and also the quality of the output). I don't know why so many people have a hard time with 3D Studio Max. I love the way you build materials with it, how you can edit motion parameter curves, the ease of its scripting language, etc. Even programming C++ plugins for it isn't too difficult IMO. Unfortunately 3DS Max is expensive! I haven't used it in quite a while because I can't afford $3500 for a hobby program and don't want to use an illegal version of it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[init100]

As a developer, that is exactly the outcome I would expect. "stop();" is a method call, processing should return to the rest of the code when it finishes.

I guess you never heard of the exit() or abort() standard C library functions. Even though the normal semantics of a function is to return and continue execution when finished, those do not.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[falconwolf]

If you have to "take some time to learn it" then it is not intuitive BY DEFINITION. Something simply can't be intuitive AND have a steep learning curve--they're mutually exclusive. That so many people here seem to want to argue this point just shows how very screwed up some within the OSS community can be, and how out of whack interface priorities actually are.

There really isn't anything, except breathing, that is intuitive. Even babies have to be taught to breastfeed.

Falcon

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Ticklemonster]

Bingo. I have used the unrealed 3d mapping to make maps and all kinds of shapes for a few years, and am spoiled by it's simplicity. I can't begin to wrap my head around blender, wings, or any of the others. I just wish there were a way to EASILY AND EFFECTIVELY (I've tried but always come up short) use unrealed (from utgoty) to make stuff, then export it easily to a format that can be used by blender or others to finish stuff up. OR, I wish the others were ... "intuitive".

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Jason Earl]

I happen to know that in Utah you have to have just delivered a baby to be eligible for these classes.

The rules might be different if you live somewhere else.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[styrotech]

First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them anyways.

Yeah, nice going. Now the first zillion comments on this story are about the interface rather than the actual story.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[drew]

Well, yes and no... After all, the classes are for the mothers, not the babies. The impression that I've gotten from the classes so far is that it's usually the mothers that don't know what to do, not the babies. If the mothers do their part right, the baby doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it.

Of course it's easy for me to say that now after talking to a nurse and watching a couple of videos at the hospital. Its going to be a few months yet before I can really say that from first hand experience.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[flewp]

I'm a Maya and modo user here (well, primarily, I also use Silo and Mudbox). I really dislike Maya for modeling, I can model much more efficiently in modo - even though I have my UI's setup very much the same (consistent hotkeys/pie menus/hotboxes between the two). For what it's worth, modo and Maya both have very configurable UIs. And the OP is wrong about the lack of hotkeys in Maya. I have no idea what he means about magically shifting menus either... unless maybe he means how switching from different modes (animation, modeling, etc) gives different menus, in which case he doesn't understand the concept.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[springbox]

I wanted to mod you insightful but comments don't go up to 11

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[PitaBred]

It is a toy. It's a very nice toy, but Sketchup is still just a toy when compared to things like Blender, Maya or Max.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[jacquesm]

unless 'drew' is some new female name that I have not previously been aware of I think you'll have to forget that first hand experience...

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Intuition, n.
1. an immediate cognition of an object not inferred or determined by a previous cognition of the same object.
2. any object or truth so discerned.
3. pure, untaught, noninferential knowledge.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Jason Earl]

The classes (from what my wife tells me) teach the mothers how to teach their babies to nurse. My wife also insists that our second and third children were harder to teach than our first child. If it were really about teaching the mother that would hardly be the case.

Apparently "latching on" correctly is a learned skill in most children.

Besides, even if the classes were for the mothers and not for the babies that still shows that the nipple isn't particularly intuitive. My wife is intelligent, well-educated, and she's had breasts for years. If the nipple is so "intuitive" why would she need training on how to feed babies with it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[springbox]

I thought Maya was "professional grade" software. I found it incredibly easy to use and learn.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[AeroIllini]

This is a legitimate gripe, and one I had similar frustrations with when learning Blender. However, this has been largely fixed in the more recent versions of the software, which is updated and expanded and made better faster than any other piece of software I've seen.

The Blender devs add more features, bugfixes, consistency, and general coolness in six months than most programs get to in several years. The problem is that the codebase they're working from was mostly just an internal tool for one company, and they are overcoming that specificity as they grow and improve the software, a bit at a time. It literally gets better every single day.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[PitaBred]

Unfortunately 3DS Max is expensive! I haven't used it in quite a while because I can't afford $3500 for a hobby program and don't want to use an illegal version of it.

Which really seems like a great reason for you to learn Blender.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[AeroIllini]

In short: yes, in one sense Blender is intuitive. However, at another level it is just a impenetrable jumble of buttons and dials that is more complicated to use than an airplane. Any highly complex, powerful, sophisticated tool is going to have a learning curve in order to use it effectively. Pilots don't go to Driver's Ed to get their licenses, and 3D artists don't start cranking out complex characters in a week.

If you want something to be easy, you buy a commercial ticket and let someone else fly. If you want power and control, you go to school for six months and log hundreds of hours of flight to get your own license.

Tools like this are so powerful, they're difficult to dumb down. Get over your "I'm smart enough to just figure it out without the manual!" elitism and learn to use the tool effectively. Yes, it's work. Once you know the interface, Blender lets you model, rig, and animate faster than anything any other 3D program can offer. But only once you've put in a sufficient amount of time learning to use the tool effectively.

If you want hand-holding, go use something else. I hear Google SketchUp even lets you texture your meshes.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[EllynGeek]

If you don't want to get crabbed at, then don't use words like "intuitive" when what you're talking about is the polar opposite of intuitive.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Thoughts from Englan]

So you've never heard of Drew Barrymore ?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is EXACTLY the point the AC up there ^^^ was making. If you have to "take some time to learn it" then it is not intuitive BY DEFINITION. Something simply can't be intuitive AND have a steep learning curve--they're mutually exclusive. That so many people here seem to want to argue this point just shows how very screwed up some within the OSS community can be, and how out of whack interface priorities actually are. well said,but to be fair it's not just OSS folks who'll spend all day arguing over a definition to get it to mean what they want it to mean...

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[AmberBlackCat]

I breastfed all of my daughters. None of them needed an instructional video.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[geekoid]

Nope, the babies learn to.

The no to open there mouth, but latching on can be a challenge.

Granted it is a very easy interface and they catch on quick.

I studied it after My wife had trouble nursing, and used what I learned in some lectures I have given.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, reading and writing isn't intuitive, either, since it takes 12 years of schooling to learn. So obviously by your logic, reading and writing are useless. Why don't you quit writing and reading on the Internet and FUCK OFF YOU WORTHLESS TROLL???

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[joggle]

I check on Blender about once per year. Once I'm satisfied that I'll be able to do what I would like to do in Blender and that it doesn't take long for someone familiar with Blender to do a complex task (as can be determined by the number of steps in a tutorial) then I'll dive in. So far that hasn't happened though--namely, I want to be able to do good cloth simulations, character animations (bipedal and with morph targets), complex textures including realistic skin and hair, etc. Something like 3Ds Max's Video Post would pretty much be a necessity too. Some specific tutorials I've looked at I determined that I could do with far fewer steps in 3Ds Max and I have yet to find an impressive organic animation done with Blender. I don't plan on making money with this, but if I'm going to sink time into it I want results at least as good as what I did back in college in the late 90s/early 2000s. I wasn't able to do cloth animations back in college but it is certainly possible with the current version of 3Ds Max so I want that too (I would have if I could have back then).

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Overly Critical Guy]

I love these Blender fanboys who refuse to accept any criticism and insist that their jumbled interfaces are somehow faster to use than the easier alternatives.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Overly Critical Guy]

If it takes time to learn it, it's not intuitive and efficient. You can learn anything if you take the time to do so.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Sj0]

Wow! Are you a super-intelligent alien squid?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[JackieBrown]

Lightwave?

For $895 - $995 it should be able to make what I want based on what I'm thinking.

http://shop.newtek.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=7

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Sj0]

I've written editors where everything was a completely unintuitive mix of awkward states and keyboard commands that make sense only if you were there when they were coded and you know which hand was laying where at the time.

I rewrote the editor to use a simple mouse interface with menus, dialog boxes, and scroll bars.

The first editor was way faster to use. It was insanely fast. You could do anything in a single keystroke. The problem was, I needed to check the documentation in order to do anything other than the 3 functions I'd memorized.

The second editor, on the other hand I can pick up with 0 training, 0 manual, 0 anything. It just works, and it's immediately apparent how to do stuff I want.

The first one was NOT intuitive. The second one was. Speed be damned. I spent a couple days learning how to use Blender, and it's closer to the first editor I made than any program I've ever used.

Now, for software that's actually fairly intuitive after a learning curve, I love AutoCAD. I use it at work, and while it's easy to use for a beginner (The basic tools are all buttons), the keyboard interface, a command line, is actually sane and so a user who knows what he or she wants to do can do it very quickly.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[gwait]

Sketchup is a good example of how easy a 3D modeling tool should be. You can make complex and precise 3D models in it quite easily, with very little learning time.

Dismissing it as a toy is a rather weak argument.
In fact, calling it a toy is far from the insult you intended, it's actually a lot of fun to use, because it is so easy. Calling it a toy is a compliment.

Consider the modeling tool subset of Blender that is available in Sketchup. The Sketchup tools are far easier to learn than the Blender equivalents.

If the free sketchup version offered model export as a feature, I think a lot of people would use it as the modeler for their pet rendering projects.

No question: Blender offers a powerful tool set, and from the many comments here - once you learn the interface, it can do many cool things,
and I think that's fantastic in an open source free project.

Easy to learn and intuitive? No.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Sj0]

It's only NATURAL to have to press more than one key to switch modes. It's completely intuitive that creating arbitrary shapes be part of the right-click menu but mode switching isn't.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[RobertM1968]

I agree 100%. After playing with various 3D packages, I've found all of the interfaces are different. And all of them have a "learning curve" of some sort to figure out how to do certain things.

Blender is no different. It's interface is different (like all the rest)... but once learned, is a very pleasant interface to work with. Different isnt always a bad thing.

After slightly under two weeks playing with Blender - and an Enterprise Mesh from "TallGuy", I have rendered these scenes at:

http://www.startrekphase2media.com/The_Enterprise.html

The images are based off various animation sequences I have been playing around with (you can see a frame from the standard "opening credits" orbit scene, a frame from the older/early TOS leaving orbit scene, as well as some new stills from other sequences I am playing with).

My point is, for someone (me) who hasnt played with 3D software in years and just started with Blender under 2 weeks ago, even though I couldnt find (in my memory) a similar 3D interface, I found that Blender's was a comfortable place to work - once I gave it a few days of solid use and effort. If you compare the Enterprise in my renderings to TallGuy's, you will already notice some subtle and not-so-subtle changes - not bad for (at the time) a week in to using Blender and working on a pretty complex mesh...

(As a side note, you can find TallGuy's BlogSpot here: http://tallguyproductions.blogspot.com/)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[snoggeramus]

My mother has TWO nipples, you insensitive sod!

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[ozmanjusri]

I had to consult the Blender manual to figure out how to save a file.

It's under the File/Save menu, the same as a billion other applications.

If you struggled with that, I'm not surprised you had trouble with using the rest of Blender.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[ozmanjusri]

I use both Sketchup and Blender.

Neither is a toy, but you run into Sketchup's limitations far faster than you do Blender's.

It's the same with most of the intuitive tools. Bryce, for example, is one of the easiest and most intuitive 3D tools available, and allows you to create some stunning renders and animations. If there's something you want to do that's outside the scope of it's toolset though, forget it.

By contrast, if you can imagine it, Blender can model and render it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[joeedh]

What do you mean by consistency? I mean the modeler UI is fairly consistent, though the way tools are accessed is a little convoluted (something that's being fixed as part of the event/ui refactor project). BTW, no blender dev really advocates replacing professional software with blender, that's not really it's purpose (yet ;) ). Joe

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Rary]

For example, the tapedeck audio recoding software is intuitive to most users in that it is excessively similar to using one of those old tape recorders.

In other words, the interface on the hardware tape deck is consistent with the interface on the software tape deck.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, I got modded "Insightful". I'd like to add that this insight into the meaning of "intuitive" mostly came from chapter 6-1 of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface . He even mentions makes the Scotty reference. Now, go out and read that book already. Seriously.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[uniquegeek]

People use two definitions of "intuitive".

One is "the way I learned to do it by doing it multiple times or seeing it all the time"

Two is "a natural way to learn, or a natural interface".

They're not necessarily the same. People usually mean definition #1, but it's inaccurate. If you use definition #1, it can be difficult to unlearn bad habits and re-learn new ones, even though they may be better.

If you need an analogy, think of the different keyboard styles and layouts.

Same analogy can be applied even to thought and methods, not just physical devices.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

You really think most people would have intuited how to use a mouse without much difficulty? The Scotty joke is funny because we realize it's probably true. If you're never seen anything like it, the mouse's use will be completely cryptic and difficult to figure out. And the evidence--from actual life--disagrees with you. Read The Humane Interface (chapter 6-1). Let me quote the relevant section:

...The reaction of an intelligent Finnish educator who had never seen a Macintosh but was otherwise computer literate was typical: She picked up the mouse....her next move was to turn the mouse over and to try rolling the ball. Nothing happened. She shook the mouse, and then she held the mouse in one hand and clicked the button with the other. No effect. Eventually, she succeeded in operating the game by holding the mouse in her right hand, rolling the ball on the bottom with her fingers, and clicking the button with her left hand. These experiments make the point that an interface's ease of use and speed of learning are not connected with the imagined properties of intuitiveness and naturalness. The mouse is very easy to learn: All I had to do, with any of the test subjects, was to put the mouse on the desk, move it, and click on something. In five to ten seconds, they learned how to use the mouse. That's fast and easy, but it is neither intuitive nor natural. No artifact is.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I wouldn't call software intuitive if I have to re-learn the interface every time I take a couple month's break in using it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[TeraCo]

Granted, but stop() certainly isn't a standard terminating function. I wouldn't expect stop() to automatically terminate anymore than I'd expect whoa_nelly() to automatically terminate.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[dave1791]

"The steep initial learning curve for Blender comes from getting in the right mindset for using a 3d modeling tool.""You're construing "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as MS Paint".

I don't know about the GP, but I construe "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as every other app on my OS" so that I don't have to learn things unrelated to my application. Every app and every OS has its collection of learned skills. For example, on Windows a user can expect that any application will respond to cntrl-z with a "revert last edit", cntrl-y with a "redo what you just undid", cntrl-c with copy, cntrl-x with cut and cntrl-v with paste. Those get tossed out the window with Blender, so you have to learn EVERYTHING the blender way. Forcing people to jump through hoops to learn how to copy/paste or undo in Blender makes the interface cognitively heavier than it should be because you are not only learning the mindset of a 3D tool, but you are learning the mindset of behaviors that are normally related to the OS.

This "everything works in its own way" and not following the OS interface guidelines is something from the stone age of computing. If I sit down to MS Office on a Mac, I expect it to follow the Mac UI paradigms. If I then go to Windows, I expect it to follow the windows paradigms. Now to be fair, I can load Blender up on Ubuntu and it will work exactly the same as on Windows (where I tried to learn it), but I consider that a mis-prioritization on the Blender devs' part.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[MoogMan]

Exactly the same with GIMP[1] - once you get used to the interface, you know where everything is so it may seem 'intuitive' to you. The fact that you had to 'get used' to the interface indeed implies it's not intuitive.

[1] And some comparative non-FOSS apps too - Photoshop, Maya.

Would it be fair to say that all complex design (3D or 2D) apps have crappy interfaces? If so, that would be rather ironic.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[SanityInAnarchy]

If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not discoverable. Fixed it for you.

But that's really bickering over semantics -- the real question here is whether it's usable. Discoverability is orthogonal to usability -- it's better if you can have both, but I would trade discoverability for long-term usability any day.

But I like bickering over sematics:

Intuitive \In*tu"i*tive\, a. [Cf. F. intuitif.]
          [1913 Webster]
          1. Seeing clearly; as, an intuitive view; intuitive vision.
                [1913 Webster]

          2. Knowing, or perceiving, by intuition; capable of knowing
                without deduction or reasoning.
                [1913 Webster] Note: It says "capable of knowing", not "capable of learning" -- and it also says "without deduction or reasoning", not "without training".

Simple example: I find that middle-click to paste is intuitive, as are multiple desktops on a spinning cube -- they make sense without having to reason about them. But to someone raised on Windows, that's not going to be at all what you expect -- no one wakes up expecting that their nice, comfortable 2D workspace is actually just one face of a cube, and they can use the other faces, too.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually used Blender, but I really do prefer the Gimp UI to Photoshop.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[mibus]

You really shouldn't complain about that... It's a very expensive niche overall, and the prices are still much cheaper than they used to be.

XSI - http://softimage.com/products/xsi/pricing.aspx
3dsmax / Maya - http://store.autodesk.com/store/adsk/DisplaySubCategoryProductListPage/categoryID.10101800

Blender's popularity is no doubt partially because of its 'affordability' :)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[jacquesm]

touche, although this particular 'drew' seems to be married to somebody named 'kim' and looks quite male in his pictures :)

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Aladrin]

You're wrong. I've done amateur 3D stuff for years and I wanted to switch to Blender. I've spent hours and hours trying to get stuff done in it, but it's just not intuitive at all. I had -no- problem using the other 3D apps I used in the past, but Blender was impossible without finding tutorials. And even then, I forgot how to do it before the next time I used it.

The people that gripe about Blender's interface are those who understand that it's wrong. Maybe not completely wrong, but wrong enough that it's impossible to just pick up and use. I'd even go so far as to say it's the -only- app I've ever met that I wasn't able to just use within a week. It's -that- unintuitive.

It's a shame, really, because from what I know of the app, it's really powerful and well done. I know I'll end up going back to it next time I need to do 3D stuff, but I'll be forced to re-learn everything that I need to do what I want to. It just shouldn't be that hard.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Aladrin]

First, let's define 'intuitive':

http://dictionary.die.net/intuitive
intuitive
          adj 1: spontaneously derived from or prompted by a natural
                        tendency; "an intuitive revulsion"
          2: obtained through intuition rather than from reasoning or
                observation [syn: nonrational, visceral]

What part of that suggests that learning it first is involved? Note that it specifically says that reasoning and observation are -not- involved.

Now let's ignore that and use your definition anyhow, since the computer world uses it more like you've defined than the actual word means.

Blender's UI takes extensive training to learn and requires memorized steps for everything. In most 3D apps, you can apply a texture to an object very easily. It's under a menu item or on a panel that is clearly labeled for texturing. On Blender, it's hidden away under some obscure panels and (if I remember correctly) you need to visit 3 different poorly-labeled panels to import and apply a texture.

I'll give you that once you grasp the conceptual idea in a certain UI that the -rest- of the UI seems intuitive. But you can't apply the label 'intuitive' to a UI that has a new concept that must be taught. Once the general populace has learned that concept, UIs created after that point can barely be labeled intuitive. To be truly intuitive, the concept must be grasped immediately upon seeing the UI. That is an interface that is truly intuitive.

If Blender has a concept, nobody has ever found it and wrote about it, though.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Aladrin]

As far as 'good' and 'mediocre' go, I agree with you. However, a truly great and intuitive interface wouldn't need documentation hardly at all. It would be so easy to use, and everything so obvious that nobody would ever look at the documentation.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[neumayr]

In the strictest sense of the word "intuitive", you're right of course.
But argueing that way gets us nowhere - "intuitive", in how it's used when talking about human-computer interfaces, means pretty much this:

"similar to whatever I'm used to" Modern software most of the time goes out of its way to provide an interface that's as close as possible to what people are used to - and with good reason. Because, like you said, computer interaction is not intuitive, people have learned a particular interface paradigm, and to deviate from that standard would mean people won't know how to use it. That limits exposure, and in a usually market driven software world, that's a bad thing.
Blender's market driven too, Blender Foundation wants as many people to use its software as possible, even when they get no immediate benefits, they get more developers, in some cases funding by selling books/tutorials/DVDs, and, most importantly I guess, public attention.
So, instead of using up so much text to explain the concept of conservative software interfaces, lets' just stick to "intuitive", shall we?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Rary]

If we use the word by its strict dictionary definition, then there cannot possibly be an intuitive software user interface. If you take a person who has never used a computer in their life and has no idea how it works, and sit them down in front of a computer running any software application, they will not intuitively know what to do. They will have to experiment with it, learn what it does (ex. "Oh, it seems that if I move this mouse-shaped device, the arrow on the screen moves accordingly. Now what happens when I press buttons..."), and only then will they start to figure out how to do things.

There has to be a frame of reference. Your frame of reference for so-called "intuitive" software is the other software you've previously used. Anything you ever encounter that seems intuitive is only so because of your previous experiences. That's why people frequently state that the only truly intuitive user interface is the nipple -- and even that's debatable, as some babies take some coaching to figure that one out.

Blender's UI takes extensive training to learn and requires memorized steps for everything.

As I said, I have no experience with Blender and wasn't defending it.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[CastrTroy]

Sounds to me like a lot of the web development frameworks out there. Using ASP.Net, and VS.Net, you can get a lot of stuff done and turn out a really quick project as long as you don't need to do anything they didn't anticipate. Once you need to go outside the box a little, it can be a real pain. If you stick to the basics, and just ignore all the special controls they've thrown in, and take a more PHP type approach to programming, then it may take you longer for some things, but it will be much easier to do a lot of other things.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[zippthorne]

Blender will never suck as bad as GIMP; the developers are really trying. At least..they don't go out of their way to say things like, "No, you don't really want that." Instead they work hand-in-hand with various open-movie projects, and try to add features that are needed.

If the blender devs were doing GIMP, you'd have had CMYK and 16 bit per channel colors and 90% of the popular gripes a decade ago. Some of it would be hidden under a cryptic button on an initially non-intuitive dialog, but after months of using it, you'd swear that that was in the appropriate place.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[zippthorne]

Oh, come on now. Just about every music player functions like "tapedeck" but without the godawful "real device" skin. It's almost a 1:1 map with whatever winamp everyone was using in '99.

Tape players are easy to learn because there are only five functions. A monkey could figure it out by mashing keys, even without labels.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen someone try to "intuit" how to use a mouse without even having seen it being used?

Why of course! I even jotted it down, in form of a short list:

Intuitive use of computer mouse comprises of several simple steps:

1. 1. grab mouse firmly in your dominant hand
2. 2. while holding mouse, slam it repeatedly several times onto desk
3. 3. try to pull the cord from computer
4. 4. put the mouse, or its edges into your mouth and try to soak it with saliva to see if it melts into some flavory juice
5. 5. since it obviously apparently doesn't work (or doesn't work anything interesting), hurl it away, step up onto keyboard and hug the screen

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

3ds Max is intuitive. All its controls are similar to what we expect to see in all CAD programs and have expected to see for years. Since I was a child of maybe six years old I have been using AutoCad and similar programs that have the exact same interface.

Blender is arcane and confusing to me. It is quite literally easier for me to create a 3d model in raw C using openGL vertex arrays than it is for me to learn to literally sculpt a cube in whatever magical, bizarre ways Blender expects.

Mod parent up.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

In other words, the interface on the hardware tape deck is consistent with the interface on the software tape deck.

You could say that, but in so doing you have to introduce a second interface with which it is consistent, in order for it to make sense. Since absolutely everything is consistent with thousands of other things, referring to a UI as "consistent" but not naming what it is consistent with, makes no sense. Thus in terms of UI design, "consistent" refers to consistent within the interface, not with some other random interface. Being "consistent" with other user interfaces that people understand and are familiar with is one way of being "intuitive" and is referred to as such to avoid just the type of confusion you're trying to introduce to defend your mistake.

Making a button bright red, while the rest of a UI is a neutral color will work even if the user has never used a user interface that uses such a technique. We're hard wired to respond to it and our blood pressure goes up when we see it. This is intuitive, but need not be consistent with anything. Thus intuitive and consistent are not synonyms in this usage.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[644bd346996]

Oddly enough, Undo/Redo in blender uses control-z and control-y, same as in in most other apps. Things get a little more muddled when it comes to the copy command, because there are so many things you may want to copy (geometry, texture info, etc), but control-c does bring up a menu to choose what you want to copy.

It's obvious that you have never tried to use Blender. You should. The user interface is not full of gratuitous differences, as you seem to think. It simply doesn't sacrifice much usability for the sake of conformity.

The copy command is a great example - there's no way to simplify things down to a single copy operation, so the user interface doesn't try. If they did try to pick a single copy to bind to control-c, then there would be lots of people who disagree with their pick, and new users would have no way of knowing which copy operation they are getting when they use the familiar control-c.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Rary]

Actually, I was being a little facetious, because you seem to be arguing semantics.

You see, what you said was:

...something is intuitive when it is similar to something we've already experienced (preferably a lot). This is different from being similar to other aspects of the same program (consistent).

This really isn't different. If something is similar to something you've already experienced, then it is intuitive. On that we seem to agree. But then you seem to make the odd distinction that if something is similar to something you've already experienced elsewhere in the same application, then it's something completely different, which you label as "consistent" and therefore not "intuitive".

I'm saying that consistency makes it intuitive. I think the other poster was saying the same thing.

Basically, a user interface is intuitive only within a certain frame of reference. If you have no prior exposure to computers or software at all, then you have no frame of reference for any software UI, and it will therefore likely not be intuitive. If you understand the basics of computer usage (what a mouse does, how to click on buttons, what the "X" button on a window does, etc.), then you have a frame of reference to work with, and any UI that uses these concepts will likely be intuitive to you. If the software UI is designed the same as the UI of a physical device with which you're familiar (ie. tapedeck), then you have a frame of reference to work with and will likely find that interface intuitive as well.

There are many things that help to create a frame of reference. It could be consistency within the interface, it could be a consistent interface between different implementations of the same functionality (ex. a physical tape deck vs. a software tape deck), or it could simply be a similarity to something else with which you're familiar that is analogous to the relevant functionality.

Consistency within a UI and consistency between UIs are both valid ways to establish a frame of reference to make an interface intuitive.

Thus intuitive and consistent are not synonyms in this usage.

No, they're not synonyms. One enables the other.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[lifebouy]

Er? Now I'm curious. Your clients couldn't stand the interface?

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[vuffi_raa]

If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not intuitive. I totally agree- I normally use cinema4d though I have in the past been a maya and 3d studio max user since the early 90's and the blender UI is just horrible- it is another case of a decent piece of open source software that could compete with commercial software *if* you could get someone to help redesign the UI.
this is the biggest problem with darn near all open source software- if people are to really start taking it seriously- you need to get developers to start partnering with ui and graphic designers and not just act like the UI of a piece of software is not neccesary or useful to the enduser of the app.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[dave1791]

"It's obvious that you have never tried to use Blender"

I've actually used it quite a bit as I dabbled in 3D modeling for a while - nothing fancy, just unanimated objects for modding games - and no, those cntrl commands did not work for me. I eventually gave up trying to learn Blender when I grew disgusted with the video tutorials constantly telling me to just use the blender specific keyboard shortcuts "because they were better". wtf???

The problem I see in Blender is that whereas I often hear artists complaining about its UI, I also hear its advocates essentially say that once you spend enough time learning it and drinking the kool-aid, you will understand. You can make the same argument about CLI, or even better hand editing your Collada files. Nothing gives you the precise control of writing the file yourself.

The product I work on in my day job has a similar problem. Our users (financial analysts) are only using a fraction of the capability the program offers. It is deeply complex and requires extensive training to make full use of it. This flies in the face of the fact that people - our analysts included - sastisfice when using software and usually won't bother to do the training. We have a serious problem in the fact that our tools are more powerful than our competitors, but theirs are easier to use. You can bumble along using theirs, but you can't with ours. In a contextual interview the other day, I had someone flat out tell me that you had to be a "math genius" to do calculations on our platform.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[thtrgremlin]

??? You say that I am wrong, but then repeat exactly what I said from the other side. If you learn the software, in which I am saying is NOT intuitive, it is productive and easy to use AFTER you take the time to learn it. A lot of software, in my opinion, will go to great lengths to make an interface that is dual purpose tutorial / utility, which is terribly annoying once you have figured what you want. Blender is designed to maximize productivity and utility at a full sacrifice for the consideration of the difficulty of learning the software.

And honestly, is the documentation so terrible, or just not filling an unnecessarily large portion of the interface at all times?

Know what really annoys me? All these damn decals and warning labels all over the interior of a car that tell you what not to do. Yes, it was informative the first time, but do I really need it branded everywhere I look? Couldn't they just add this stuff to the license test? It is one thing to have an oil light, and another to have a voice coming on every time you start the car explaining the dangers of letting the car go too long without an oil change irrelevant to the last time it was checked. Most new cars seem to be right in the middle with that junk right now. BLEH!

That reminds me... THANK YOU Blender Foundation for keeping the Documentation and Tutorials where they should be, on the web site!

IMHO :)

How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[neokushan]

That's easy, release the source.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blender for Windows is closed source?

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[neokushan]

I meant the source to windows.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get the "Praying Mantis" to stay the fsck away from blender?

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[jrothwell97]

Really? Looking at how awful and ugly some OSS user interfaces are (see Pidgin as a prime example, or KDE4 - yuck!) I can see why M$ wouldn't be seen dead letting the open-source community fiddle with the Windows interface. True, things like the glassy window borders are pointless, but at least it's mostly aesthetically pleasing, and a lot cleaner and more intuitive than anything written in Qt.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Amouth]

what's wrong with Pidgin's interface? only problem i have had is that they need someoen to go through and relayout the options/prefrence area's. other than that it is quite nice - very clean and straight forward.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this is a matter of taste but Pidgin ugly? As opposed to Windows Live Messenger? Puh-leeze! Messengers interface is a bloated POS. I don't think Pidgin is perfect but it sure as hell looks better than what MS has to offer.

And Pidgin is a GTK app, so I assume it'd look a bit ugly in KDE (I wouldn't know as I haven't used KDE since 2000 but I do know what QT apps look a bit odd in Gnome).

And Gnome by the way is a lot cleaner than Windows. That was one of the things I really missed when I had to use Windows for a while because my hardware sucked and didn't come with free drivers.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[jrothwell97]

True, GNOME is quite nice, and WLM is rather bloated, but at least it doesn't have text overflowing out of text labels or badly-proportioned icons.

The problem isn't with Pidgin's look, it's Pidgin's layout. It's totally awful, disobeying just about every UI convention out there. True, it has improved lately, but it still sucks.

A major problem with almost every FOSS UI is that, by default, it uses Bitstream Vera or DejaVu Sans as their system fonts. Both are awful and spindly at low sizes and messy and sprawling when blown up. The first thing I do with any new system is to swap such abominations for FreeSans.

There are a few decent KDE apps, such as konsole and ktechlab, but mostly, they suck. That's why M$ might be deterred from taking advice from certain FOSS developers when it comes to UIs. They've made a good choice with Blender, because that's very good, but don't expect this to become commonplace if certain FOSS UIs continue to suck as much as they do.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[HappySmileMan]

I like how you make a joke, it's modded insightful instead of funny, and once you explain the joke you're modded troll

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[NotBorg]

Microsoft doesn't get it. Most people don't get how open source projects work.

Open source projects improve (or are influenced most) by getting patches accepted to the project.

Microsoft is full of developers, developers, developers. Why not just submit some patches that improve blender's performance on Windows?

Google did that with Wine. They wanted Picasa to work in Wine. Guess what they did. They threw money and patches at it.

Take a look at the kernel and how it has changed because companies wanted it to do something and submitted patches. That's how it works.

Microsoft is a software company that somehow can't figure out how to submit a patch. Sad. Patch up or shut up.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[neokushan]

Yeah, it's funny that...they probably think I'm some big FOSS advocate that hates windows and everything about it, when in reality I've never managed to grasp Linux and actually use Vista...

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Facetious]

I've never managed to grasp Linux and actually use Vista...

C'mere, you poor man (I assume). You need a hug. Seriously, though. I am curious as to what you mean by "grasp." Do you mean philosophy, command line tools, user interface, or something else entirely?

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[neokushan]

Well, over the years I've tried to give it a go in various respects. Going back to Mandriva before it was even called Mandriva, every time I tried to install it, there was always ONE vital component that it simply didn't support.
Wireless card comes to mind, SATA drivers, etc.
Every time it was always a different driver, so installing didn't work. Then I discovered live CD's (Knoppix) and that was great!...except it wasn't entirely useful to me, I'd need to install applications to use it properly (and installing applications? I'm sure it's INCREDIBLY simple with this app-get thing I've heard so much about, but I'll be damned if I could find the bloody thing) so the LiveCD wasn't really useful for anything other than playing around going "ooo, !Windows!".
Then Ubuntu came along and I almost managed to use it, except it took me nearly half an hour to figure out how to mount a drive, then I found out it only had Read-NTFS support, which was a tad useless to me (Sorry, I know I shouldn't be using that filesystem, but on windows it's a choice between that or FAT32...) so I invariably ended up rebooting back into Windows.
I've had a few other brushes with Linux, we had to use SuSe Linux for a Uni application and much fun was had trying to simply swap a file onto a USB drive (It recognised it fine, in fact the plug-and-play system worked better than I could have imagined, it just point blank refused to copy any files off of it, regardless of the filesystem used), plus the sheer differences with Linux confused me, such as how double clicking the application bar made it disappear instead of maximising it (I know, this is my fault for not getting used to a new UI and there are probably ways to make it act more like windows, but deadlines were approaching and it caused much frustration, putting me off of Linux a bit more).
Then came PS2Linux. I don't know if it was just our setup, but it occasionally just plain liked to screw up, to the point where it seemed to crash everything except the command line. Ahh, the command line, probably Linux's greatest asset, but by God I had no idea where to even begin with that one.
I will get around to Linux SOME day, I don't feel anything compelling me to use windows for everyday stuff (except gaming), but despite the fact that I know my way around a windows system quite well, I feel like a complete n00b any time I touch Linux and that's what's putting me off the most.
Next time I give it a go, I'll probably do it through a Virtual PC until I get confident enough to properly install it. I've got plenty of partitions set up and ready for the time that does actually happen.

Apologies for the length, but I hope that's answered your question.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Facetious]

No need to apologize. Your post reminds me of my own transition (from Windows to Linux) at times. Certainly, things have come a long way. One thing that helped me when I still dual-booted was to create a FAT32 partition and map "My Documents" or whatever to that. That way I could work on my, uh, work when booted into either OS. Good luck with future attempts!

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Blakey Rat]

I hate the annoying dialog when it loses connection to an IM service. Would be nice if I could just re-connect in a single click, like almost every other IM program on earth.

That said, it's not a bad interface, it's just not that exceptional either. For an open source project, I'd say it's above average.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You'd think Microsoft would know that OSS developers are at least 50 IQ points above them, but then they pull this sort of thing.

Allow me to make a Risk analogy:

"Hey, let's form an alliance! I'll position all my troops around your countries as defense while you launch a full scale assault elsewhere! It'll be fun!"

We all know about devious corporate scheming, but it's like they don't even expect people to see through this shallow plan.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[ZeroFactorial]

No one can say Microshaft doesn't support OSS.

Their devious plan is about as open as it gets.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[rhizome]

Microsoft is full of developers, developers, developers. Why not just submit some patches that improve blender's performance on Windows?

Because maybe MS' approaching Blender is more about anti-trust than Windows itself? Is Blender used in education at all? Methinks if the recent antitrust brouhaha in Europe over interoperability gains any steam, Microsoft is going to work in advance to keep those charges from propagating to the U.S. Perhaps Blender is the first step since it can also provide a supply of XBox developers and thus cover both of Microsoft's platforms.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[eggnoglatte]

Actually, all Microsoft bashing aside, they are doing exactly the right thing in this instance. They are not interested in getting involved with the development of blender itself - that is not their business, nor their expertise. They ARE interested in satisfying their customers by offering help to third party developers, in this case the FOSS blender community, help with the system integration. So, if blender developers experienced that certain system calls are not as fast on Windows as they ought to be, or that they had to work around certain idiosyncrasies of the OS, then this is a good mechanism for blender folks to provide input. Let's hope they are farsighted enough to make use of it.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[flewp]

When I lose connection, I can reconnect in a single click. At the bottom of your buddy list, it says "reconnect" and then also maybe "cancel" or something along those lines. Just hit "reconnect" and well, you'll be reconnected.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[robot_love]

Sorry to jump in on your thread, but these experiences echo my own so closely I wanted to say something. Every 6 months or so I try and install Linux and always end up back with Windows for some reason or another. I like the concepts of Linux and FOSS, but just can't seem to get Linux to do what I need it to do. Oh well. In a few months I'll buy a new hard drive and I'll try dual booting again (never had much luck with getting GRUB to work and have lost SO much data (read: porn and music) to it over the years) but I remain confident that one of these days I'll get the thing to work!

Anyways, just wanted to say that I imagine there's a lot of us who would like to use Linux but can't for one reason or another, and I imagine that as time goes by, we'll slowly all convert over as our particular problems are solved. Encouraging, but frustrating, if you know what I mean?

Cheers all.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[paganizer]

wait a sec. Did I just read that you thought the Blender interface was good? it's infamously terrible; The only people I've seen defend it in any way are people who started out using 3D applications with it, and even they will usually admit it made it hard for them when they tried to use any other software.
It's great that it's open source, and I believe people when they say it's powerful, but speaking as someone who has made money doing graphics in the past, and is hurting for money currently, if someone offered me a 100k a year job contingent on me using Blender as primary tool....well, I'd take it, but I'd start hunting for a modder kid to take my output developed in a real 3D application and convert it into Blender for 30K/year; every time I try to use it I get a headache.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Bob-taro]

Anyways, just wanted to say that I imagine there's a lot of us who would like to use Linux but can't for one reason or another, and I imagine that as time goes by, we'll slowly all convert over as our particular problems are solved.

You hit on what I think is a big problem for Linux popularity. While Linux is ahead of Windows in some respects, it's always playing catch up in terms of hardware support and application programs. In the end, it's the latter that defines what the end user can "do". I currently have an XP / Ubuntu dual boot system. The main reason I boot up Ubuntu is to show people the nifty compiz desktop effects, but when I need to do actual work, I usually wind up back in Windows, because that's where all my programs are. Wine is great, but it's not perfect, and I currently prefer XP + cygwin to Ubuntu + Wine.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Facetious]

I hope you do try again. I prefer your attitude to that of those who try once, run into a problem, assume such will be the case forevermore, then declare such all over /. I do find the developmental pace of FOSS projects to be simply astounding. Issues that are here today are often gone tomorrow. Good luck on your next attempt.

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[Blakey Rat]

No it doesn't. It has a bar that says "you've been disconnected from X", and when you click it you get a dialog box that asks it you want to reconnect to X.

You're thinking of every other IM program ever made ever, which will reconnect with a single click. For some idiotic reason, Pidgin has a confirmation dialog there.

For once, this is actually on-topic

[WaltBusterkeys]

Will it Blend?

Re:For once, this is actually on-topic

[Joe The Dragon]

Vista gives the blender a BSOD

Re:For once, this is actually on-topic

[corsec67]

Probably. It could also burn pretty well, since burning a CD isn't that hard.

Re:For once, this is actually on-topic

[thewiz]

I think we need to ask BlendTec if Ballmer will blend.

I'm gonna fucking...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm gonna fucking kill yo... err... how can I help your project?

My first thought ....

[Archangel Michael]

Does Microsoft blend?

Re:My first thought ....

[bostonsoxfan]

How do you get 79,000 microsoft employees into a bowl. A blendtec 3000 How do you get them out? Nachos.

Re:My first thought ....

[jberryman]

"Don't breathe the dust: it's pure evil!"

Re:My first thought ....

[Anonymous Coward]

it may blend but it will never run Linux.

Re:My first thought ....

[mSparks43]

A simple 'release windows under GPL' answer should suffice I think.

Makes me think of cowboys...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every year they heat up their branding irons and "reach out" to the cows.

Irony, much?

[Tenebrousedge]

FTA:

Specifically, Microsoft is slowly shifting toward a more open standards based approach to its file formats. The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards. That pretty much says it all, here.

Re:Irony, much?

[griffjon]

What was parent marked as troll? I think the quote pulled is spot-on; MS wants to redefine "open," and will not stop at pretty obvious bribery and underhanded tactics to do it, such as the OOXML debacle. "The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we[Microsoft] are moving towards."

Thanks for your battle plan, MS! It's too bad the Blender folks didn't pull a reverse-409 style scam and draw out a new round of Halloween-style Documents.

Re:Irony, much?

[TrekkieGod]

Specifically, Microsoft is slowly shifting toward a more open standards based approach to its file formats. The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards. That pretty much says it all, here.

As someone who really prefers open software to proprietary software whenever I can help it, I have to say that I really have no hatred for Open XML. I have no illusion that Open XML is anything other than an attempt by Microsoft to maintain Office market control in the face of increasing government regulations demanding open formats. However, no matter how you spin it, Open XML is better than the older binary blobs. In the whole spectrum of openness, this is a good thing (tm).

Sure, ODF would be better, but Office moving from binary blob to clearly defined standard with a clear "promise not to sue" people who violate the patents in order to implement Open XML is a win for everyone. Not as big of a win as you might want, but it is a win.

And as far as Blender goes, before I read the article I thought that Microsoft were going to try to convince Blender devs to move to .Net on the interface or something that would make it less cross-platform. Instead, they want to help Blender devs implement file formats used in Windows. Microsoft gains something because their file formats will be more utilized elsewhere, Blender gains the ability to import / export to more file formats (which is always a good thing). As long as they don't default to saving to proprietary formats, everyone involved wins again.

Re:Irony, much?

[FishWithAHammer]

claims about the content of the specification

Oh god yes. Mod parent up, he's spot-on. The Open XML specification is arguably more implementable than the ODF spec; there are numerous cases in ODF where fairly vital information (cryptography comes to mind) is left up to the implementor, and incompatible versions exist.

Re:Irony, much?

[rhizome]

The Open XML specification is arguably more implementable than the ODF spec; there are numerous cases in ODF where fairly vital information (cryptography comes to mind) is left up to the implementor, and incompatible versions exist.

Does ODF have a time-limited "Covenant Not To Sue" for patents contained in the spec?

Re:Irony, much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent and GP down. FishWithAHammer is a known Microsoft shill.

Re:Irony, much?

[codemachine]

OOXML is definitely better than the old blobs. But it should've never become an ISO standard either. Only massive corruption allowed that to happen.

With Blender, as long as those MS file import/export filters work on all platforms that Blender does, sure, go ahead and add support for these file formats. But if the filters use some library only available on a Windows system, then Blender ends up with functionality that only works on the Windows platform. This is great for MS, but maybe not so good for the entire Blender project.

As someone on the mailing list pointed out, the original email from MS is pretty vague as to what they're looking to help with. There would need to be more discussion before the Blender folks could figure out whether this offer to help is something they want to pursue. Hopefully the help isn't turned down before that part happens. Better to look at the technical merits and other factors involved first, instead of just making assumptions it is a bad idea because it involves Microsoft.

There is good reason to be suspicious, but dismissing them outright before knowing the details just widens the gulf between FOSS and MS, and gives them little incentive to even try working with the community.

Re:Irony, much?

[codemachine]

There is some truth to that. ODF 1.0 had some rough edges where things aren't specified as fully as they need to be. The later drafts help to fix these problems. Even with the poorly defined parts of ODF 1.0, people were able to look at the OpenOffice.org code and just take the motto "do it like OpenOffice does". This is obviously not ideal for an ISO standard, and does need to get fixed. But open source did provide a nice workaround here, since there was at least one reference implementation available to look at on top of the spec itself.

OOXML is very bad for doing its own thing where it could instead be using existing XML standards. I think this makes ODF a better starting point for creating an open XML format for documents than OOXML. From a technical standpoint, ODF has many advantages over OOXML due to a cleaner design. And where it has weaknesses, they are much more likely to be fixed.

OOXML also has no actual implementations yet. The company that pushed the standard may never actually implement it themselves, let alone anyone else. Interop is likely going to be a nightmare. The standard is so large that there are bound to be many rough edges where interpretations differ. And in this case, there is no reference implementation to use. You could try looking at Office 2007 documents, but they aren't actually standard OOXML either. Worse yet, most office suits will want to handle Office 2007 files with the same filter, so the code will need to deal with multiple variants of this "standard".

So I agree that ODF does need to be cleaned up. We need to make sure compatibility is actually being delivered. I think the promises and hype from the ODF camp are greater than the reality right now. But it is pretty premature to say that OOXML doesn't have compatibility issues, given there are no implementations yet. Though neither is perfect, I have much more hope for ODF than I do OOXML.

Re:Irony, much?

[mrchaotica]

Office moving from binary blob to clearly defined standard...

Holy shit, they are?! So they decided not to go with OOXML, after all?

Re:Irony, much?

[FishWithAHammer]

I am? Woah, this is news.

Re:Irony, much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Telling people to think for themselves gets moderated as trolling now?

Re:Irony, much?

[prockcore]

OOXML also has no actual implementations yet.

neither does HTML4, but that doesn't prevent us from using it.

"support FOSS application"?????

[sm62704]

"Continuing its strategy to fight against FOSS application on the Windows platform, Microsoft mailed the Blender developers asking how they could help improve the user experience on Windows so they could laugh at it. Groklaw puts it in perspective using Steve Ballmer's own words."

There, fixed it for you. Microsoft doesn't want "open sores" (as microsoft shills used to call it), which Ballmer once likened to cancer, on their operating system.

If they could make Windows so it only ran Microsoft programs without losing any Windows sales, they would.

-mcgrew

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[sgt scrub]

I think most of your post is tongue and cheek but...

Back in the day when 3d applications were on Digital, Mac, and Irix machines microsoft focused on getting them ported to NT. This did a good job of killing Digital, Irix, and Apple. Getting Blender, IMHO the 3d tool with the most rapidly growing community, to run "best" on Windows would help thwart adoption of Linux. Not just adoption by users but adoption by hardware makers. If you can keep hardware makers focused on building for your platform, users will not leave.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[harrkev]

Balmer's play may backfire. Read the Groklaw post. It is about trying to outsmart Linux by making sure that "open sores" runs wonderfully on Windows, so nobody needs Linux.

The problem is that, once people start using OO, Firefox, etc., they will eventually realize that they can run that exact same software on a free OS.

The shock of changing the OS and the office suite is a lot. However, if you can transition one little piece at a time, Windows is in trouble.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually 3D programs were never that much on Digital machines. Mostly Amigas. The most successful 3D program in broadcast TV was LightSpeed made ONLY for Amiga. It got Ported to Mac and PC when the Amiga died.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day when 3d applications were on Digital, Mac, and Irix machines microsoft focused on getting them ported to NT. And therefore opened them up to use by more people, rather than only those who could afford those closed, extremely expensive systems.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

You hit the nail on the head. MS needs the whole software ecology. It's all about network effects: maybe you only need a word processor, but someone you do business with needs CAD, and therefore runs Windows plus MS Office apps. Their MS Office will write it's own idiosyncratic files (nobody said Office must write OOXML, remember, even if it is 'open', which it isn't), and you will need Office to properly interoperate. Or your boss will think you do.

I don't need any proprietary application to do anything these days - except CAD. Which means I continue running Windows. Hate it, but I don't have any choice.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[nuzak]

> Read the Groklaw post.

I'd really rather not. It's an even worse echo chamber than slashdot. Ballmer's letter is just raw meat to the crowd of screaming sychophants.

I mean, I got a bitter chuckle out of the OOXML reference too, but I don't let that tear away all objective thought with regard to the letter -- my first impression of which is "Blender just got some serious recognition". I'm sure Groklaw is full of oh-so-clever analysis about how MS is out to get Blender, because we all know how serious they are about making 3D modeling apps...

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[FishWithAHammer]

The problem is that, once people start using OO, Firefox, etc., they will eventually realize that they can run that exact same software on a free OS.

Woo, they can run their office suite and web browser on a free OS. Except--wait! They aren't paying for Windows, they're getting it with a new computer. So they're already using it on a free OS--free to them; your GNUtard insistence on splitting hairs when it comes to definitions doesn't matter to Joe User. He just thinks you sound like some nutcase.

I use FOSS software every day, run a Linux machine, and I'm still calling your suggestion stupid. Linux will gain appreciable market share on the desktop until it can seamlessly run everything Windows can. Everything. That includes games running whatever the newest version of DirectX happens to be at the given time. And it needs to do so flawlessly or users will go "this sucks, I quit" because they don't give two shits about "but it's Free, rms said so!".

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The problem is that, once people start using OO, Firefox, etc., they will eventually realize that they can run that exact same software on a free OS. The shock of changing the OS and the office suite is a lot. However, if you can transition one little piece at a time, Windows is in trouble.

The thing is, MS is only actively supporting OSS projects they don't have a competitor for. They are actively sabotaging projects they do compete with, including Firefox and OO.org. MS is making the fairly safe bet that people being able to use Blender on Linux and Windows won't allow many people at all to switch to Linux, since most will still need IE or MS Office or will be locked in by other software or services or formats.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Free as in free but not free as in pain free. Your wonderfully free OS won't make it to the desktop for one good reason, lack of usability and spare me the river of tears.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[ceoyoyo]

Wouldn't that be ironic if Microsoft got a clue and killed Linux by tasking a bunch of developers to write code for open source apps that make them run better on Windows.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[HermMunster]

Bury thy head in the sand.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[HermMunster]

Incorrect, the price of windows is included in the price of the computer. Hence they are paying for it, period!

Also, they pay when the have an existing computer that they upgrade to the latest.

So, stop spreading Microsoft mist over the eyes of the general public.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[CastrTroy]

It's only a matter of time before Windows becomes too high of a percentage of the cost of a PC for it to offered for free. When you are talking about a sub-$100 computer, the cost of a $25 windows license (big discount) starts to become pretty noticeable.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[MMC Monster]

Just as a couple data points, that is how my freinds & family and I changed over. Firefox and openoffice.org were step one. Ubuntu or Mac OSX were step two.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Getting Blender, IMHO the 3d tool with the most rapidly growing community, to run "best" on Windows would help thwart adoption of Linux. Not just adoption by users but adoption by hardware makers. If you can keep hardware makers focused on building for your platform, users will not leave. Ermm... is the marketshare of people purchasing hardware for 3d rendering high enough to show up on anybody's radar, Microsoft's or otherwise? I work in 3D for a living and never got the impression that it even made up 1 whole percent of the computer market.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[FishWithAHammer]

It's only a matter of time before Windows becomes too high of a percentage of the cost of a PC for it to offered for free. When you are talking about a sub-$100 computer, the cost of a $25 windows license (big discount) starts to become pretty noticeable.

I don't disagree. But Microsoft can, and likely will, continue to cut OEM licensing costs. Linux may get some traction there, and some competition would be nice, but I'm not betting on it.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[FishWithAHammer]

Incorrect, the price of windows is included in the price of the computer. Hence they are paying for it, period!

You know that. I know that. Joe Average doesn't know that, and doesn't care. It's free to him, and you won't convince him otherwise.

Also, they pay when the have an existing computer that they upgrade to the latest.

Very few people do that and you know it. Windows upgrades happen primarily via hardware upgrades.

So, stop spreading Microsoft mist over the eyes of the general public.

Oh, please. Someone disagrees with you and he's spreading FUD (or "mist", which must be the polite form)? Grow up.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most of your post is tongue and cheek but... Terrible grammer and spelling on slashdot is one thing, but incorrectly using an idoim is just the nail of the coffin.
For the record:

Tongue-in-cheek is a term used to refer to humor in which a statement, or an entire fictional work, is not meant to be taken seriously, but its lack of seriousness is subtle From wikipedia

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[falconwolf]

Linux will not gain appreciable market share on the desktop until it can seamlessly run everything Windows can.

Is the above what you meant?

Falcon

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already quite easy to load up on Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gimp on Windows to try them out. I know people who have switched to Open Office because of the PDF export option (missing in MSOffice). Then a step or two and you're running full linux... Options exist now with "WUBI" to run inside windows, to dual boot (automatic resizing of windows partition), or do a clean slate. My path was OO/Firefox on Windows, resurect and install Kubuntu.com on an old computer that had been retired (half the hardware Mhz of the primary but still faster than Windows), then a reformatted drive on my main machine to install Kubuntu. That was four years ago.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[domatic]

But Microsoft can, and likely will, continue to cut OEM licensing costs.

Indeed they can but that kicks their current business model in the balls. MS is accustomed to receiving a 20-100 dollar premium on every PC sold. They can temporarily push Linux out by dropping the price to $5 or $10 but this tactic will not suffice to entirely drive out Linux. If we're talking about $100 PCs being sold in blister packs at Wal-Mart, even $5 or $10 represents a significant raw materials cost.

Linux based systems will have no artificial limitations mandated for inexpensive new PC categories but MS will insist on all kinds. They'll either cripple the "UMPC Editions" or mandate what can and can't be built into hardware eligible for those licenses. MS themselves can create the situation where it is the cheap Linux PC that does more than the not as cheap Windows PC.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[HermMunster]

I'm afraid they do know that or they'd be more inclined to swap it out. I know it because I own and operate a small computer store and deal with customers every day. They know they are paying for the OS.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just runningthe same apps on a free OS but getting everthing updated at once.
On vista, login, Adobe needs and update, Java needs and update, 20 minutes later iTunes needs an update (you want Safari with that?), then launch Firefox, oh that needs to be updated too... and so on, then the Windows updates finus and want you to restart - arrghhh!
My Suse system, hmm update icon flashing, let me see, well I can upgrade to Firefox 2.0.14, Amarok, Openoffice 2.4, and all the other shared componets patches, while I am still using the apps, still fully functional. Then it's done. No reboots, the apps just start the new version when I lunch them. The app that don't update - gizmoproject - come on, get in the repostitories already gizmo!

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[FishWithAHammer]

MS themselves can create the situation where it is the cheap Linux PC that does more than the not as cheap Windows PC.

But there's the thing: it's still a Windows PC, and thus familiar. Linux is strange and weird and different to your average user, and the price difference isn't that much. Heck, look at Apple--they could turn around and double their prices across the board and there's a large core of users who'd just pay it because they're familiar with and comfortable with OS X.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[domatic]

You're partially missing my point. On a product that will make 5 or 6 bucks of profit per unit sold, MS causes pain to the manufacturer at any price point. As the "race to the bottom" continues and these things become commodities like Casio watches, a bit of superficial familiarity isn't going to matter that much. MS will be put in a position where they don't dictate the price or featureset. If they do try to dictate the price, Linux starts squeezing right back in because being forced off some of these devices for a year or three won't hurt it the way it would hurt a corporate product. Sure, people may want familiar XP from Mama Microsoft. But that isn't a powerful enough effect to let MS dictate terms and prices in a cheap commodity market.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Linux based systems will have no artificial limitations mandated for inexpensive new PC categories but MS will insist on all kinds. They'll either cripple the "UMPC Editions" or mandate what can and can't be built into hardware eligible for those licenses

And due to mass market realities, those same hardware limitations will be there for Linux, too. Any version that has more capability with cost more than the savings from using Linux. Look at the XP version of the Asus Eee - it has a smaller SSD (15GB, IIRC) than the otherwise identical Linux version (20GB, IIRC), so is priced less than the Linux version. Guess which version will sell more?

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[zippthorne]

Nope. Not even by Alanis' standards. A well-known plan succeeding once more is not, in any way, ironic.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[CastrTroy]

They could, but they could also increase their market share by selling low end equipment. They don't seem to be interested in doing that. The Mac Mini is their lowest cost machine, and even that is twice the price of the cheapest Dell, and is Non-upgradable. It's not without it's features though. It's a nice quiet efficient computer, that would serve most home users quite well. Apple could keep their core user base and charge whatever they want. But if they want to expand to the masses, they need a low end product. Which is why the Nano and Shuffle lines of their iPod are selling so well.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[sgt scrub]

well. first, it isn't just 3d rendering. blender's functionality runs from one end of the graphics world to the other. second, 1 percent of people do not equal 1 percent of machines. 3d rendering is done on computer farms. microsoft doesn't sell "a" copy of the os to do rendering. they sell thousands of "licenses" to a company to do rendering.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[sgt scrub]

or to run on windows so people wouldn't even try to run it on something else.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[ceoyoyo]

Microsoft has killed Linux by contributing to open source before??

Definition 3a of ironic, from Merriam-Webster: "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result"

It seems reasonable that contributing freely, under the letter and spirit of the rules, to open source projects would strengthen open source in general. If this is not the case, particularly if the actual effect is the opposite, then then the situation is ironic.

If you're thinking about Novell, Microsoft didn't contribute any open code. MS just formed an alliance.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

w3d rendering is done on computer farms. microsoft doesn't sell "a" copy of the os to do rendering. they sell thousands of "licenses" to a company to do rendering. As I said before, I work in 3d. I'm aware of the various uses of 3d apps. (Incidentally, the variety of what can be done in 3d is one of the reasons none of the companies making the software to do it has hit a home run with the UI. Each app has a different working philosophy behind it aimed at a specialization. Yadda yadda yadda.) I still have doubts that it represents a huge number of machines in comparison to all the machines out there. Don't forget that Microsoft sells tons of licenses to companies with huge network infrastructures. In the United States, if you start heading outside of California, you'll find there are very few render farms but there are lots and lots corps out there using lots and lots of machines. Marketshare wise, it's not very big.

Re:"support FOSS application"?????

[FishWithAHammer]

They could, but they could also increase their market share by selling low end equipment. Well, yes, but that's not my point. Most people strongly resist change and will pay a premium not to change.

Dumb corporation directive

[Anonymous Coward]

Big corporation are dumb as bricks. Some executive at Microsoft probably sent a directive out saying something like "contact all large opensource projects and find out what file formats they use and persuade them to use our new *open* file format." The folks getting these emails like the Blender group is sort of scratching their heads going, "huh?"

Re:Dumb corporation directive

[Alwin Henseler]

"contact all large opensource projects and find out what file formats they use and persuade them to use our new *open* file format." Well it may just be the other way around: provide better support for (3rd party!) closed formats on a Windows version of Blender (and if possible, only there). How? Let me guess - cut a deal with such a 3rd party and have them provide detailed format specs (privately to Microsoft), and code up a closed-source binary blob only useable by a Windows version of Blender?

Result: people might have better experience working with those formats when they use Blender on Windows. -> That would make it more attractive to use Windows as underlying platform (if support for those file formats matter to you).

In other words: give a competitive advantage to using Windows, make it less attractive to move to a FOSS operating system.

Re:Dumb corporation directive

[forkazoo]

Well it may just be the other way around: provide better support for (3rd party!) closed formats on a Windows version of Blender (and if possible, only there). How? Let me guess - cut a deal with such a 3rd party and have them provide detailed format specs (privately to Microsoft), and code up a closed-source binary blob only useable by a Windows version of Blender?

My gut reaction was similar. Something like, "how can we get you to use DirectShow API's and such to have some additional file formats transparently supported only on Windows." MS can provide support, so that Blender can deal with system installed codecs, and ASF files, WMF images and Zune content, and whatever else that is pretty easy on Windows, but would be hard to support on other platforms. The more users start posting tutorial scenes with textures and whatnot that are only read by the Windows version of Blender, the more the community is tied to the Windows platform. Possibly even Direct3D API's for dealing with things like ".x" D3D mesh files for geometry.

Frankly, I'm surprised Apple hasn't been way out in front with this. They have QuickTime, which is a set of API's that can be insanely useful for dealing with a whole bunch of different sorts of media content. But, they really only cater to the walled garden of "real" Mac developers. It's a poorly documented API, with terrible sample code. It is also not that hard to use for adding movie support to your own code. I am currently using it on Windows, using OpenGL to display and composite a bunch of layers of video. A good solid API cleanup (which has sort of been happening in fits and starts for years) and a massive documentation and outreach improvement (which seems nowhere in sight) could turn it into something that zillions of programmers use if that have a multimedia program that runs on Mac (or Windows).

Re:Dumb corporation directive

[falconwolf]

cut a deal with such a 3rd party and have them provide detailed format specs (privately to Microsoft)

Aren't the format specs already available? Doesn't the GPL, and Blender is GPLed, require this?

and code up a closed-source binary blob only useable by a Windows version of Blender?

Then Blender will fork, with the MS certified version reaching a plateau while the other versions will improve. And the MS version will require a compleat rewrite of the code, or it might be sued out of existent by breaking the GPL.

Result: people might have better experience working with those formats when they use Blender on Windows. -> That would make it more attractive to use Windows as underlying platform (if support for those file formats matter to you).

Results: hardly anyone will use MS's certified version.

Falcon

Ton only posts a part of the message he recieved

[kop]

Did you notice that Ton only quotes a part of the message he received?

The millions of euro's they promise him for joining the dark side are never mentioned......

And he tells Microsoft...

[sokoban]

"Bite my shiny, metal ass."

Re:And he tells Microsoft...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuts!

Re:And he tells Microsoft...

[phtpht]

Blite my shiny, metal ass.

Re:And he tells Microsoft...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mark it as spam.

Don't Read The Article

[JamesRose]

It's crap, s/he found letter from ballmer, and then published it with snide remarks every few lines. Quite frankly it adds nothing to the arguement against windows. This really does give a really poor show of the people in the open source community, it's poorly thought out and no different from the knee jerk reaction against anything microsoft.
Blender got an e-mail from MS, how about we hear something from blender or MS, not some anonymous blogger.

Re:Don't Read The Article

[synthesizerpatel]

This is a perfect example of:

News is information someone doesn't want you to know.

Everything else is advertising.

Re:Don't Read The Article

[MrMista_B]

Why hello there, Mr. Ballmer. :)

Re:Don't Read The Article

[fuego451]

how about we hear something from blender

Will this do?

I would not touch that with a barge pole. MS XML is an example that they are not moving on that issue, or they would support ODF, not using dirty tactics to force an half-backed non open standard.

They have an history to use one OSS group against another too.

Blender is in a position where we do not depend on any MS backed format, so I think we should be very careful to stay neutral in those areas.

and

Personally I don't see why specific attention should be given to proprietary Microsoft file formats. If they continue to avoid truly open standards and their own file formats provide a sub-optimal experience for Windows users, then it is not the open source community that has a problem imho.

I don't see Microsoft making it easy for Mac, Sun, Linux etc users to use their "file formats, which are not open or not fully open". Any multi platform application which has support for Windows specific file formats is going to end up with a fragmented community as data then becomes platform specific even if the application isn't.

Do we want to help Microsoft lock more users data to their platform, or do we want to encourage Microsoft to truly move towards open standards?

That's just the first two comments.

Re:Don't Read The Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assumptions are incorrect. It was made available to the Blender community by the recipient for discussion, and later published to the community at large. And you were "modded 4, Insightful". Shame on you, Slashdot modders.

Re:Don't Read The Article

[HalAtWork]

Yeah, I would also like to say that the snide and snarky tone of groklaw articles annoys me. I like the idea behind the site, I like that it is in most ways constructive, but it doesn't need to read like an indignant child wrote it.

Made me think of Futurama

[VampireByte]

Did anyone else read this as "Bender" at first?

Re:Made me think of Futurama

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can bite my shiny metal ass!

Re:Made me think of Futurama

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

FOSS on Windows

[wizardforce]

This has been said before but it's in Microsoft's best interest to support FOSS primarily on the Windows platform rather than watch FOSS grow anyway on other OSes.

Re:FOSS on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

That was already seen with Inkscape release being delayed because of Windows specific bugs. That sucked big time, even though I use it more on Windows than on Linux.

Re:FOSS on Windows

[shutdown -p now]

Microsoft is, indeed, trying to win over the more visible FOSS products by ensuring that they run better under Windows. One good example is PHP (for all my dislike of it, it is an extremely popular and widely-deployed OSS product). If you read MSDN blogs, you know that IIS team specifically had "make PHP run as fast as possible" as one of their goals for IIS7; furthermore, Microsoft has hired the developer of the Phalanger project, which is a compatible implementation of PHP that runs on top of .NET (and is quite a bit faster because of that) - once again, one of the stated goals of the project is to run as many existing PHP apps as possible, such as phpBB and even MediaWiki. They distribute it under MS-SSPL, which is somewhere between GPL and BSDL (you can make derivative works, you do not have to redistribute source code if you do, but if you do include the code, it also has to be licensed under SSPL) - that's pretty liberal if you ask me.

Of course, this isn't some kind of altruism, just business. If Microsoft can covert a large part of existing PHP installations over to Win2008, they will substantially increase their market share in the Internet server segment. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have similar things in mind with respect to Blender, Firefox, or any other popular OSS product out there.

It's a trap!

[hairykrishna]

Get the axe.

Re:It's a trap!

[maxwell demon]

Ok, but how can a text editor help?

Re:It's a trap!

[geminidomino]

I think you're mixing movie quotes.

"It's a trap!" -- Princess Leia/Admiral Ackbar

"It's a trick. Get an axe." -- Ash

Re:It's a trap!

[hairykrishna]

I was indeed. Insufficient caffeine is what I'll blame...

Interesting example

[ArIck]

I dont know if it is sad or funny that when speaking about open source they were talking about if file systems had any problem.... lets not talk about API or anything trivial like that but hey this file system seems to be really meddling with creating a better UI and experience in Windows.

And OOXML.. seriously! Like how about they just release the stndards of OOXML to begin with!

And so it begins

[Nursie]

"Microsoft is slowly shifting toward a more open standards based approach to its file formats. The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards."

So you're moving towards bribery and pollution of international standards bodies and open mockery of the idea of open and standard formats?

Sorry, but after that I would have told him where he could shove it.

Re:And so it begins

[nurb432]

Well, they apparently cant innovate and keep producing products people really dont want ( but settle for, its the advantage of being a monopoly ) , so what other choice do they have?

Re:And so it begins

[Corwn of Amber]

http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/

Solve security, for one.

Re:And so it begins

[nurb432]

Copy others, for one.

Following suit is not innovation. MIght be incremental improvements which is nice, but not innovation which we sorely need in the IT field..

Re:And so it begins

[Corwn of Amber]

Yeah, right. Where have you ever found an OS that, for one thing, uses a "trusted" toolchain? And combines that with design-everything-by-contract? And so on and so forth. Go read up on it and reply with more than a cliché in four words and one line of adlib on same.

Re:And so it begins

[Nursie]

"Solve" is a bit of a strong word, but this does seem like a novel approach.

Re:And so it begins

[Corwn of Amber]

Well, they built a platform they wanted to prove secure. I've read their hiring requirements for Singularity and was awed. They do mean to solve security at the OS level. It's basically "This can't be broken. And we can prove it." Trusted toolchain + design everything by contract + check every transaction for consistency against contract requirements = you do the math.

That's the basic idea. Moreover, they've sealed the memory areas with 20-foot-thick concrete. Then run tiny, brightly-illuminated transparent tubes between the cement blocks, so as to check everything that passes through those exclusive comm channels.

It's HARDCORE security.

I've read their hiring requirements, and, you know what? Even Linus and Theo de Raadt don't qualify, they haven't published enough papers in peer-reviewed journals about computer security science. (Not taking mailing lists into account, since those don't require a PhD to begin to write in them.)

So they basically hire the most respected OS designers in the world. I know this is slashdot, but since I've read what Singularity is, I'm willing to believe that they've solved security as we know it.

There might be other flaws, yes. But... designing malware for such a platform requires to outthink the smartest OS designers on the planet. When it was just Windows code-monkeys, that was easy, any Russian kid could, but then?

Re:And so it begins

[nurb432]

If you really did your research you would find that all those ideas are others and have been in academic research for decades..

Give them credit for trying to implement, ok, but don't give them credit for anything original.

Dear Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

We in the F/OSS community are currently investigating how we can provide an enhanced experience for users of F/OSS on your "Windows" operating system. Obviously F/OSS developers should not have to rewrite code to run under your non-standardised platform. Therefore we suggest colinux, the linux kernel running as a windows service as a sensible route. Your users, developers and the F/OSS community look forward to working with you to improve NT support for colinux.

captcha: monopoly

It is not going to happen.

[dysmey]

From what I have read of the original posts on the Blender site, it looks like the Blender project will tell Microsoft to go away.

After the OOXML fiasco — Microsoft must truly be deluded to think this is a good example of their openness policy — it is only right that the Blender project, knowing what would happen to them in the end, should reject Microsoft.

Re:It is not going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they should turn them away. Why should they?

They should tell something like: "Give us money on the promise that Code remains GPL, always)"

How else are they going to help anyway? I am assuming they are not going to give their own programmers for Blender.

Re:It is not going to happen.

[hesiod]

> "Give us money on the promise that Code remains GPL, always)"

Never believe promises when dealing with a company like MS. Require signed legal documents, reviewed by a very good lawyer.

Re:It is not going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

That was kind of a given, when I said that. People don't even trust their spouses, and here they are talking business.

Re:It is not going to happen.

[Anomalyst]

What makes you think MS is afraid of a breach of contract suit from a penny ante organization like the Blender folks? Even IF they were found guilty and IF the punishment were more than a token slap on the wrist, any awards for damages would be paid out of petty cash.

Re:It is not going to happen.

[hesiod]

And if you didn't have that contract? You wouldn't get even that "small" amount of money.

Re:It is not going to happen.

[mgiuca]

I would recommend the Software Freedom Law Center*.

*Not from first-hand experience or anything. Just reputation.

Natural progression

[Dancindan84]

1. Get your "Open" standard recognised
2. Get other companies to use your standard
3. ????
4. Profit

But in all seriousness, this is the next logical progression for the OOXML beast. They wouldn't have gone to the trouble of ramrodding OOXML through the standards process if they weren't going to try and leverage it somehow outside of being able to say they have an open standard. Using OOXML would cripple a multi-platform application, but that's not their problem. They've -always- tried to force people into their rut and they've been quite successful at it in the past. I just don't think they "get" that developers aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot by using OOXML.

Re:Natural progression

[Anonymous Coward]

No question marks are necessary for 3.

3. Emend the "standard" in your own program in an incompatible way, and try to push that version as the "de facto standard".

Re:Natural progression

[Atriqus]

Actually, ???? in itself is pretty spot on for once.

By creating all of these faux-open standards, they hope some projects will mistakingly try to use them. Some won't, creating a divide in which programs support which formats. Through this confusion, Microsoft will look like the only guys with a stable plan.

Re:Natural progression

[UnderCoverPenguin]

They wouldn't have gone to the trouble of ramrodding OOXML through the standards process if they weren't going to try and leverage it somehow outside of being able to say they have an open standard

Oh they will leverage this in as many ways as they can, starting with telling all those pesky governments that have "open standards only for documents" policies and say "Our formats are open standards - see, the ISO says so."

Who's vulnerable?

[ichbineinneuben]

Which FOSS projects are most vulnerable to this approach? A list of those approached would be interesting.

Have about opening the MS formats

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that gets to me is how can a *proprietary* company ask an *open source* community to help make the *open source* work better on the *proprietary platform*. I mean doesn't that strike people as... stupid? Why not the proprietary company just... *read* the source code for themselves? Don't they have enough money to *hire* developers to work on blender? Why do they think that people who provide their own free time should work to support their *proprietary* platform, which by their own business model is built on charging people for the privilege of using their OS?

What, it's ok for MS to charge people to use their software, but it's not ok to expect MS to shell out some money for other people's software? MS wants the software for free?!?!

Re:Have about opening the MS formats

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't know what you do for a living but software development goes far beyond code.

Re:Have about opening the MS formats

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The thing that gets to me is how can a *proprietary* company ask an *open source* community to help make the *open source* work better on the *proprietary platform*. I mean doesn't that strike people as... stupid? Not as stupid as... say... hiring a bunch of guys to pore over the code and try to come up with guesses as to what problems they may have encountered.

Why do they think that people who provide their own free time should work to support their *proprietary* platform... Umm.. yeah.. why would they think that? I couldn't fathom that at all. I mean, these dudes are writing code, not getting paid for it, trying to make something work... Hmm... I agree, I can't figure out why somebody would even bother offering feedback as to how MS could do things better. Nope, that makes no sense at all, not in this crazy black and white world.

What, it's ok for MS to charge people to use their software, but it's not ok to expect MS to shell out some money for other people's software? Strictly speaking, if somebody's offering a product without charge, then it shouldn't matter whether it's Microsoft, Apple, or Darth Vader. But that's beside the point. I don't blame anybody one iota for being cautious considering Microsoft's embrace/extinguish behaviour in the past. The project should be protected. It's as simple as that, really. Whether or not Open Source developers should take advantage of benefits some proprietary systems offer is an entirely different discussion that should not be limited to this context. Microsoft asked for feedback and that was reasonable to do. (Plus it didn't mean having a bunch of guys on their payroll sifting through code first!)

How the sleep at night?

[Van Cutter Romney]

FTFA:

"Specifically, Microsoft is slowly shifting toward a more open standards based approach to its file formats. The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards."

I mean when they say that, does the person at the other end of the phone put the line on mute and roll over laughing for a few minutes? Or when they're composing the email, does the writer actually believe what he (or she) is saying? How does the person who wrote this actually sleep at night?

Re:How the sleep at night?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does the person who wrote this actually sleep at night?

On a huge pile of cash my friend. A huge pile.

Like They Never Did with SoftImage

[wandazulu]

They should have done something similar with SoftImage for the time they actually *owned* the company. SoftImage on Windows was a terrible, horrible experience, they clearly simply got it compiled onto Windows and that was it.

I was at an animation shop for awhile where we had both the Windows and SGI version of 3.7 and the Windows version *ran* faster, but crashed a whole lot more. Finally the two guys begged for anything, even Indys, to get their work done.

Finally they sold SoftImage to, was it Avid? I can't remember now. It was clear to us, anyway, that Microsoft simply wanted to show that NT could compete with SGI in heavy-duty graphics work, but they did a terrible, terrible job of it.

That said, both Max and Maya work pretty well (I know, Max was always a Windows-only product), but neither were ever owned by the company who actually wrote the OS.

Re:Like They Never Did with SoftImage

[Kernel Corndog]

Rather than prove that NT could just compete, they wanted a 3D content creation market for windows. So yes they bought Softimage, ported it, then dumped it when it found a buyer. Since windows and x86 hardware were much cheaper than SGI workstations, Alias knew it had to port Maya as well (2.0 I think was the first version for windows) And the rest is in the history books.

So while the ports were initially terrible, the mission was just to get the ball rolling. Thankfully the movie studios hated it too and started asking for Linux when it started becoming viable, and I do think the initial thanks for that go to nvidia.

Re:Like They Never Did with SoftImage

[prockcore]

At least when MS bought SoftImage, they continued to release the Linux and Irix versions. (Which we all thought was funny.. MS selling linux software).

When Apple bought Shake, they immediately canceled the windows version, and currently sell the OSX version for $499 and the Linux version for $4999. Seriously.. the Linux version costs 10 times as much as the OSX version.

Apple did the same thing when they bought Logic.

Blender for Windows Already Pretty Good

[zippthorne]

Better than linux, in fact. At least, to this dabbler. I've tried it under my chosen linux distro (Ubuntu) and when I want to do anything more than rotating the starter-cube, I reboot into windows.

Granted that could be because my (now ancient) Radeon 9600 XT is not very well supported in Ubuntu, and the interface is a bit sluggish there on my machine compared to XP, even for non- complicated3dgraphicsfiddlingtasks, like web browsing. So I'm not ready to blame the blender team for its usability under linux on my computer. Especially as render-times are quite similar.

Re:Blender for Windows Already Pretty Good

[grumbel]

Hm, could you explain a little more what is different between Blender under Windows and Blender under Linux? I was under the impression that its pretty much the same thing, since it has all its own GUI components and doesn't really make much if any use of OS specific features.

Re:Blender for Windows Already Pretty Good

[LetterRip]

Hm, could you explain a little more what is different between Blender under Windows and Blender under Linux? I was under the impression that its pretty much the same thing, since it has all its own GUI components and doesn't really make much if any use of OS specific features. They should be the same - but there might be performance differences based on your graphics card driver (they vary in bugginess across platform), how it was compiled (what optimizations were used), etc. One user recently reported double the general performance on Ubuntu 64 as compared to Windows XP on the same hardware, others have reported results that are the reverse. Our developer base uses a wide variety of OSes and hardware.

LetterRip

Re:Blender for Windows Already Pretty Good

[zippthorne]

There is no difference.. except that on the same machine, under windows I can create more complicated scenes than I can manipulate under linux.*

*They'll load, but they'll be so stutteringly slow that it is impossible to work with. Smaller scenes work fine. It's just that the limit of usability is smaller for me under linux.

I really don't think it's a blender issue per se.

Bite my shiny metal.... Oops!

[Nick Driver]

Anyone else glance at the subject and first thought it said "Microsoft Reaches Out To Bender"?

mod parent up

[Dekortage]

Exactly so. If Microsoft really wants to improve the software... then commit your own programmers to the project and put your improvements back into the community.

Re:mod parent up

[rcallan]

Microsoft isn't even asking, they're telling: "A good user experience of Blender on Windows is good for your project/community and good for Microsoft." One suggestion would be to stop telling them what is good for their project.

Another would be to send someone who has a reputation of contributing to their project, or to open source in general, as the wording there is very business-partnership-like which is an immediate turn-off to most people, or as said by parent, they could actually start paying someone to contribute to the project. If they were serious about it, they would shut their mouths for a year and quietly start a program where employees can spend 5 hours a week working on an open source project and get paid to do it (this will never happen).

This sounds a lot more like "making them an offer they can't refuse" than an honest attempt to contribute.

Re:mod parent up

[Phroggy]

Exactly so. If Microsoft really wants to improve the software... then commit your own programmers to the project and put your improvements back into the community.

So let's say Microsoft committed its own programmers to the project. What would be the best use of those programmers' time? Don't you suppose the best way to find the answer to that question would be to ASK?

Also, improving the application isn't the only thing Microsoft is asking about here. They're also asking, how can we improve our OS to make it easier for you guys to get your application to work the way you want?

Re:mod parent up

[Dekortage]

Well, let's look at the snippet from Microsoft's letter:

A good user experience of Blender on Windows is good for your project/community and good for Microsoft. What we are trying to understand is what file formats, which are not open or not fully open, are impeding the optimal experience with your community. If this is an important issue to your users then it also accrues to the experience in Windows. I would like to know what feedback you might have received regarding the files your users most often import and those they might be having a sub-optimal experience with. Please also include in that list any Microsoft files that you might have trouble with.

Suppose you are not Microsoft, but you were interested in this topic. What would you do? You would join the community, read the forums, look at the source code. You would e-mail the support lists with your question, instead of just specific programmers. "Hi, I'm new to this project, but I'm a really experienced Windows programmer and would like to help make Blender work better under Windows, do you have any auggestions?" That's how open source works. They should have approached this differently.

I agree that they might possibly be asking about improving the OS, but that seems to be a stretch -- are they really going to patch Windows just so Blender can work better?

Re:mod parent up

[Kalriath]

I agree that they might possibly be asking about improving the OS, but that seems to be a stretch -- are they really going to patch Windows just so Blender can work better?

They did for SimCity 2000, why not?

Microsoft reaches out to Bender

[lelitsch]

I really have to pay more attention when reading Slashdot headlines.

Re:Microsoft reaches out to Bender

[Alzheimers]

Actually, I thought it said "Microsoft reaches IN to Blender"

My first reaction was...ooh, that's gonna hurt.

They don't really need Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually.. Microsoft doesn't do anything that nearly competes with Blender. The should just add support for OpenNURBS (which is already free anyways).

Re:They don't really need Microsoft

[LetterRip]

Actually.. Microsoft doesn't do anything that nearly competes with Blender. The should just add support for OpenNURBS (which is already free anyways). MS just purchased Caligari which makes Truespace, a (low end) competitor in the 3D market. So they do in fact compete with us directly.

LetterRip

The FA says . . .

[rfc11fan]

"Please also include in that list any Microsoft files that you might have trouble with."

3-word answer: "All of them."

OOPS!! My bias is showing!!!

Does MS understand what Blender is?

[Dracos]

Based on the snip that Ton posted, I get the impression that MS doesn't comprehend what Blender is, or how it works. File formats? That's low on the list of Blender's issues with Windows. Never mind that OOXML's status as an ISO standard is debatable.

If MS wants to support Blender (and lots of other FOSS software) on Windows, they need to put real effort into supporting OpenGL. FOSS developers don't generally bother with supporting DirectX and OpenGL, and most of the time supporting Windows at all is an afterthought.

But, MS won't do it because that would make it easier for games to be developed for Windows and anything else.

Re:Does MS understand what Blender is?

[Shotgun]

So that should be the reply. Plain. Simple. and Polite.

"Sir, we could really use some help with beefing up the OpenGL support on Windows."

If you say, "F-off", then they go back to the EU judges and say, "Gee, sir! We offered them help, but they gave us the back of their hand."

But, if you publicly ask for help, and they turn you down after making an open offer....

Re:Does MS understand what Blender is?

[Medgur]

It's easy, then.

The Blender devs should respond with a trite
"Please stop blocking the OpenGL 3.0 standards process so we can move forward with our work."

Re:Does MS understand what Blender is?

[edraven]

Obviously MS sent out a form letter. Other teams should expect to receive the same letter.

Re:Does MS understand what Blender is?

[backwardMechanic]

Exactly. If enough FOSS projects say they need better OpenGL support, it gets harder for MS to say they are supporting open source without actually doing something. Maybe projects receiving these mails should club together and co-ordinate their response? Focus attention on a small number of important issues?

Re:Does MS understand what Blender is?

[nuzak]

> "Please stop blocking the OpenGL 3.0 standards process so we can move forward with our work."

Microsoft isn't even a member of Khronos. How are they blocking anything?

how i look at it

[FudRucker]

you can dress a pig up in fine clothes and jewelry but underneath it all is still a stinking filthy pig...

Re:how i look at it

[hesiod]

Hey, when I take my pig out for a night on the town she is very clean, and a little perfume covers up the smell quite nicely, thank-you-very-much!

How about...

[Marsala]

Not making it a fscking mission to get your Blender work (sorry, "assets") into XNA's Content Pipeline?

That seems like a good place to start. :)

Re:How about...

[LetterRip]

Not making it a fscking mission to get your Blender work (sorry, "assets") into XNA's Content Pipeline? Give specifics on issues you are having - are you using the FBX exporter, the Direct X exporter, or the Collada exporter? (I'd recommend the FBX exporter since I've heard it works best currently).

email me details... LetterRip AT gmail DOT com and it is something that I'll see if Ton can email their representative about.

LetterRip

Re:How about...

[TheSoepkip]

What problems do you have with it? Apart from some issues I had due to some user errors (origins at the wrong places primarily) and some useless warnings, it's been not that hard on me. But then again I'm only exporting animations with a skeleton and models.

MS philosophy towards "openess" in a nutshell

[Anonymous Coward]

Transcribed from the Iowa State anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft.
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Weslorinon, Ben Fatbi
Cc: Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Window specific.

It seem unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open .

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

That's MS's philosopy about "open" standards in 1999, and it's their philosphy in 2008.

Re:MS philosophy towards "openess" in a nutshell

[labnet]

I recently heard an insightful comment about the USA on Radio National (ABC Australia)
The USA was founded on the principal of 'freedom for the individual'. This shows with the USA's weak social welfare systems, and business culture of domination at all cost.
On the other hand in Europe, and to less extent the commonwealth countries, the attitude is more focused on a collective balance of both the individual and the community.
I have found this especially so in negotiations with European companies. They genuinely want you to succeed as they know thats good for them and the common good.
Perhaps this deep American culture of the individual is the core Micosofts (ie Gates & Ballmer) selfish and destructive behaviour.

Re:Don't Read The Article:Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, PJ on groklaw is an anonymous blogger alright...who gets nearly as many hits as this site, due to very good content.
That you, Balmie? Of course you don't want to be convicted BY YOUR OWN STATEMENTS. Especially not by someone who has a very good reputation for telling the precise, carefully researched truth, for year after year, right?
Troll!

Intuitive interface doesn't mean usable

[Anonymous Coward]

So I've attempted to learn Blender on several occasions (did all the tutorials, worked with it for a couple of weeks). Primarily to make nifty 3D models for use in robotic simulations.

However, each time I just come away frustrated. Dragging around verticies on boxes just doesn't cut it when I want to create even the simplest of geometries.

Perhaps I'm too used to 3D CAD programs, where I can actually specify dimensions. Nowadays when I need a model, I draw it up in Solidworks and export the vrml.

Fool me once...

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] no different from the knee jerk reaction against anything microsoft. I've read similar comments trying to make it look like it's not valid to be suspiscious of MS and the people who are, are just a bunch of haters. Well, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

If some weird guy on the street always punches you in the face when you walk past him, do you not assume he will do it this time too? Does that make you a weird-guy-walking-around-on-the-street-punching-people-hater?

There's a reason people dislike Microsoft.

You're crazy!

[alexhmit01]

MS normally reaches out to developers through the paid developer channels. As a result, OSS developers were ignored by Microsoft. Microsoft creates a new position to reach out to them, and contacts them saying, "How can we help? Is there a file format problem? We're working on making our file formats more open, is there something that we can speed up that would help," and you all make snide remarks.

If file formats are not a problem, than a simple, "We're fine for now, but when the issue comes up, I will pass your contact information on to developer with trouble, here's my vCard, let's keep in touch," would be fine.

Microsoft isn't passing any judgment here. Windows competes with Linux in the marketplace, Blender is an application that runs on Windows and Linux, the company that makes Windows reaches out offering to help because they want Blender to run really well on Windows.

It's not about Microsoft WANTING the software for free, the Blender guys GIVE the software away for free, to Microsoft and everyone else. This is simply Microsoft realizing that their competition with Linux and other Open Source PROJECTS doesn't mean that other applications should be supported as well as other third party developers. I'm sure that Microsoft gives Adobe support because they want Adobe products to run as well or better on Windows as Mac OS X, now they are offering support to Blender.

The Blender guys may not need/want that support, but this is Microsoft "getting it," and Slashdot users NOT "getting it." The software marketplace is not proprietary vs. open source, it's not non-Free vs. free, it's product area by product area. I find it unlikely that Microsoft would offer support to the Open Office guys, because OO running better on Windows hurts their market leading Microsoft Office product, but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in, they can offer them support.

I would expect MS to be willing to support The Gimp writers as that program gets better, because Microsoft is indifferent between users running Windows/Photoshop and Windows/Gimp, and would like EITHER scenario better than OSX/Photoshop, OSX/Gimp, or Linux/Gimp.

Re:You're crazy!

[Anonymous Coward]

The devil will be wearing snow boots the day Microsoft really helps out the Open Source community. Microsoft = lock in. You are very naive if you think otherwise. Look at how much Microsoft helped Sun with Java.

Re:You're crazy!

[falconwolf]

The Blender guys may not need/want that support, but this is Microsoft "getting it," and Slashdot users NOT "getting it."

I'm not saying it is or it isn't the case here but Microsoft has a history of embracing, extending, and extinguishing.

I find it unlikely that Microsoft would offer support to the Open Office guys, because OO running better on Windows hurts their market leading Microsoft Office product, but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in, they can offer them support.

Until Microsoft releases a competitor.

Falcon

Re:You're crazy!

[yorugua]

Windows competes with Linux in the marketplace, Blender is an application that runs on Windows and Linux, the company that makes Windows reaches out offering to help because they want Blender to run really well on Windows.

I think you are wrong exactly there. They don't care about Blender running on Windows. They ultimately care about Linux not being a choice for you to run Blender on, because the "hype" is that it runs better on Windows (which means $$ for MS, not that it is wrong, but that's is just what they want buy not making Linux a choice). If they want to make Blender run better on Windows, they could simply volunteer M$ developer time to the Blender project, and maybe write some GPLvx/BSD code in the meantime.

Let me show you another examle where I think you are wrong:

I find it unlikely that Microsoft would offer support to the Open Office guys, because OO running better on Windows hurts their market leading Microsoft Office product, but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in, they can offer them support.

They could offer OO file compatibility help. It might hurt their MS OO offer. But wait... what if because of MS help to Blender, now OO has plenty of BSD/GPLvx code to deal with "MS file formats"? Haven't MS thought of that, or would they impose some other "licensing" scheme to the code (so that it can not be ported back to Linux sometime down the road?)

The again, as you say, "but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in, they can offer them support", or better yet, let me rephrase it for you: "but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in directly, M$ can pretend to offer them support to look nice and at the same time the end result is hurting another competing product (Linux?) while we look nice".

Re:You're crazy!

[prockcore]

You mean like when Microsoft worked directly with the samba folks?

Re:You're crazy!

[prockcore]

Until Microsoft releases a competitor.

Look at how MS helped mozilla... and they definitely have a competitor.

!GPL != EVIL

[jellomizer]

Yes Microsoft is trying to get a say in what they think Open Source Should be and it is not the GPL. No big suprise here. There are a lot of people (myself included) that don't care for the GPL and even less so for the GPL/3 Yet I am a fan of the ideas open source, but not the Full GPL Version.
Microsoft goal is to make money. <- See that period
With software with a large name such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple... GNU Open source will not be profitible for them because their competitive advantage is having a nitch in a market OS's, Publising, Office Tools... That isn't easilly replaceable, the GNU Version of open source is in conflect with their Competitive advantage, so duh. They don't want GPL around. But they do see the value of open source however they need to protect their own asse(tt)s. If they support Open Source projects that are more friendly to protecting thier Cometive advantage then they will at the expense of GPL.
Now if you guys keep taking a hard line on this nothing will change, If you guys open up a bit and allow Microsoft to embrace open source to some extent then we all gain some more freedoms. Over time if they see that being more open doesn't effect their competive edge and their money they will gradually get more open. But if you go I WANT IT ALL NOW approch. Then you will get nothing.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[chromatic]

Now if you guys keep taking a hard line on this nothing will change... if you go I WANT IT ALL NOW approch. Then you will get nothing.

Are you suggesting that nothing has improved since the formation of the FSF in 1985?

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

With software with a large name such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple... GNU Open source will not be profitible for them because their competitive advantage is having a nitch in a market

Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market. Apple, for example regularly contributes to numerous GPL projects. They are the primary sponsor of (and copyright and trademark holder for) CUPS, for example. They are one of the largest (if not the largest) contributor to Webkit (LGPL). There are lots of other examples of GPL or very GPL-like licensed software from Apple, but those are two of the most widely used on other platforms. Make no mistake. Apple is making money by contributing to these projects because it makes their OS X based Macintosh computers better, while getting free contributions of code from others and being interoperable with them more easily.

They don't want GPL around. But they do see the value of open source however they need to protect their own asse(tt)s.

I disagree. Many large companies see the value of GPL software and are happy it exists as a way to make them money (or save them money). They do not, want to license all their code (especially their core competency) as GPL since they can make more money with other licensing models, but they do certainly recognize the value it provides them.

Now if you guys keep taking a hard line on this nothing will change, If you guys open up a bit and allow Microsoft to embrace open source to some extent then we all gain some more freedoms.

Microsoft embracing will lead to more freedoms eh? I think maybe you missed their embrace, extent, extinguish strategy, which they have successfully applied to kill many projects, thus reducing freedom. I'm not saying there is no place for MS in GPL software, only that it would be idiotic not to be very, very careful with such dealings and recognize that neither antitrust law nor the GPL is sufficient to protect user freedoms in the face of MS's criminal actions.

Over time if they see that being more open doesn't effect their competive edge and their money they will gradually get more open.

The danger is this allows MS to avoid having to compete with OSS, until they decide it is the right time to move, at which point it does not stop them from artificially breaking the GPL products and moving people to their own, closed source ones.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[jellomizer]

Yes.

It was Linux that promoted Open Source to the masses not the FSF. Even though they would want to take credit for it. The fact that Linus chose the GNU license which allowed its growth. If Linus used the BSD licesnse then the BSD License would get all the press.

Linux sucess was the fact that it was a free(as in beer)/stable Unix Clone with a good development support structure. It was a Free OS without the danger of Old Unix code that was close enough to Unix to be useful and it was stable enough to give PC's a first taist of good Multi-Tasking and its timing with the rise in the popularity of the internet. Big companies went GPL not because of FSF but because they wanted to get in the ground floor with Linux (IBM for example) After getting creamed by Microsoft killing it OS/2 platform wanted to still fight and Linux was the best choice. So they had to go GPL to make legal changes to Linux to work better with their stuff.

FSF just went and took credit and telling people to put GNU in front of Linux's name, just so they can get some creds off the Linus and other developers work.

Granted the GPL License did allow developers feel comfortable about writting code for Linux to expand it but for the most part giving money to the FSF is just paying people to Whine more vs. getting real jobs.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[jellomizer]

Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market.

Or an other Open Source License can do the same. (I am not saying Shared Source is a good solution) but there are other open source licenses that can give the same effect, you mentioned LGPL which has less restriction then the GPL to allow better compatibility with BDS license code. But it is not GPL.

Many large companies see the value of GPL software and are happy it exists as a way to make them money (or save them money). They do not, want to license all their code (especially their core competency) as GPL since they can make more money with other licensing models

They can use other licenses to get that same effect. And for companies like Microsoft these other license will not work for them yet. GPL version of Office Professional for free! How many suckers will buy that, very few. and microsoft years of development cost for that version go down the drain. It is far more difficult if your product is well known and everyone knows how to use it, to make profit off of GPL Code.

Microsoft embracing will lead to more freedoms eh?
People keep mentioning the "embrace, extent, extinguish strategy" yet lately microsoft has been mostly unsucessful at this. Why would they keep on following a unsucessful stradigy. Microsoft isn't as powerful as it once was. People are less afraid to say no I don't like your product and Ill use a competitor. And when they make a product people will more often now take a wait and see. If this still worked with microsoft Google will be out. As well the PlayStation 3 would be Dead. Not a tight competitor.
There is a concept of Take what you can get. Sometimes asking for more you will get more, but on other hand if you ask too much you will get nothing. Right now microsoft wants to give you 0% freedom they are willing to give you 10% freedom but you stand for 100% freedom so microsoft cant make the deal so you end up with 0%

The danger is this allows MS to avoid having to compete with OSS
So Competition is only good if you are competing against Microsoft not the other way around or products not with license models. If MS can come up with a competive License that attracts developers then that pushes FSS to make a license that will do the same. It is a feaking license not a moral stance or act of god, in the grand scheme of things weither a Product is GPL or not doesn't really matter much.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[IgnoramusMaximus]

If Linus used the BSD licesnse then the BSD License would get all the press.

You got it completely backwards.

It is the GPL license which induced a lot of people to contribute to the Linux kernel instead of a BSD-licensed ... BSD system, which predates Linux by decades.

The fact that because the BSD license did not guarantee that one's contribution will not end up being sold back to the contributor by some greedy fuck, is what turned a majority of contributors away from BSD and other similar licenses. It is why a vast majority of FOSS is licensed under the GPL.

Linux sucess was the fact that it was a free(as in beer)/stable Unix Clone with a good development support structure.

See above. If it were not for GPL, a "most recent" Linux kernel would be still a version 0.6 curiosum found in cob-web covered corners of Usenet and the most widely known Linux-alike system would be BSD with a fraction of a following of today's Linux. It is the GPL which made all the difference. And we have an empirical proof for that: BSD and its forks.

FSF just went and took credit and telling people to put GNU in front of Linux's name, just so they can get some creds off the Linus and other developers work.

Skipping for the moment the fact that the Linux kernel is developed using the GNU toolchain and that no Linux system can even boot without a whole core set of GNU libraries and tools, it is the GPL which allowed for the growth of Linux. If linux were to be re-licensed to MIT or BSD today, probably (judging by their words on LKML) 80% kernel developers would drop out of the project instantaneously.

Granted the GPL License did allow developers feel comfortable about writting code for Linux to expand it but for the most part giving money to the FSF is just paying people to Whine more vs. getting real jobs.

Yes! How dare these bastards stop you from taking their shit and selling it for your profit! I mean the chutzpa they have! Lazy unemployed beggars all!

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[chromatic]

Linux sucess was the fact that it was a free(as in beer)/stable Unix Clone with a good development support structure.

Nearly everyone I know who used or administered Solaris, for example, used the GNU tools.

Also, Linux is just a kernel. Without a userland (or at least a C runtime library), you can't use it for general-purpose devices.

If you have a GNU/Linux system, remove every project created or maintained by the GNU project. Then reboot. When you have it working, you can call it whatever you want, I suppose.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[IgnoramusMaximus]

If you have a GNU/Linux system, remove every project created or maintained by the GNU project. Then reboot. When you have it working, you can call it whatever you want, I suppose.

You forgot that these anti-GPL jerks are also compiling their stuff with GCC. You should add "compile with a non-GNU compiler" to your requirement list!

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[mrslacker]

Skipping for the moment the fact that the Linux kernel is developed using the GNU toolchain and that no Linux system can even boot without a whole core set of GNU libraries and tools

Whoa, let's hold back the rant there. There are quite a number of embedded Linux systems (generally busybox based) which run with no GNU libraries or tools whatsoever, and plenty which run with only a few.

Sure, they were almost certainly _created_ using them, but the resulting system does not require them to run,

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[IgnoramusMaximus]

There are quite a number of embedded Linux systems (generally busybox based) which run with no GNU libraries or tools whatsoever, and plenty which run with only a few.

Err.... BusyBox is licensed under GPL and is either statically or dynamically linked against libc6 or one of its derivatives such as uLibc (also GPL). What was your point exactly?

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[mrslacker]

Thanks for pointing out how important it is not to rush into your comments.

Just because something is GPL doesn't automatically mean that GNU made it.

As I said, many embedded Linux systems contain _no_ GNU tools or libraries. This is nothing to do with BSD, but it _is_ a common misconception, even if it's not what you meant to say.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Linux would be nothing without GNU tools.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Just because something is GPL doesn't automatically mean that GNU made it.

The GPL license is an integral part of the GNU project, it was specifically designed for it. All GPL code has a relationship (a license called the GNU Public License = GPL, you did notice the word GNU in it?) to the GNU project. If you are using GPL, you are using GNU derived, or inspired work. Period.

As I said, many embedded Linux systems contain _no_ GNU tools or libraries. This is nothing to do with BSD, but it _is_ a common misconception, even if it's not what you meant to say.

The GPL license itself is a product of FSF/GNU. The GNU project proper is only a fraction of a larger, GNU derived, body of GPL licensed code.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market.

Or an other Open Source License can do the same.

True. Different licenses are ideal for different uses and companies tend to pick the ones that best fit their needs. Apple did not release their zeroconf implementation under the GPL, because that was too restrictive for other implementors compared to the BSD-like license they used. They could have insured more code would return to them as usable by using the GPL, but they cared more about getting the code out there and in use and promoting the protocol than they did about free dev work from others.

you mentioned LGPL which has less restriction then the GPL to allow better compatibility with BDS license code.

I assume you mean BSD? I guess it doesn't matter. The LGPL is less restricted than the GPL in that it allows linking to/from other code regardless of the license (closed, BSD, etc.).

They can use other licenses to get that same effect.

See my example above. They can't use other licenses to get the same effect unless the license is so similar to the GPL so as to be practically identical. Each license is ideal for a use, and most companies use a variety of them depending upon their needs and desires.

And for companies like Microsoft these other license will not work for them yet.

MS contributing to say, Blender, which is a GPL product will work just as well for MS as it will for Apple or RedHat. MS can use the GPL (and in fact has).

GPL version of Office Professional for free! How many suckers will buy that, very few. and microsoft years of development cost for that version go down the drain.

MS is unlikely to GPL Office anytime soon because it is not a license that will maximize their profit for that product. It is one of their core competencies. The GPL is ideal for making money or saving money by sharing development of items outside your competency/value. Office is one of MS's core competencies. If the market matures and GPL alternatives take over, however, MS could very well open source office as a way to retain market share and insure profits from products to which they have tied it. As for who would use it, plenty of enterprises and OEMs would bundle it and the enterprises would likely even pay MS for support and services.

People keep mentioning the "embrace, extent, extinguish strategy" yet lately microsoft has been mostly unsucessful at this.

Their ongoing extinguishing of Web technologies seems to be going strong and is one of their strongest lock-ins at this point. Their attempt to embrace PDF was stopped by the courts (or threat thereof because Adobe was smart about it). For companies and projects who haven't wised up though, it works just fine.

Microsoft isn't as powerful as it once was.

MS has lost very little market share in their core markets and has dominated several new markets in recent years while putting a huge dent in others. They're close to 50% of the server OS market, which would have been unthinkable 5 years ago. By my count, they're more powerful than ever.

. People are less afraid to say no I don't like your product and Ill use a competitor.

Umm, yeah and who is doing this? What markets are MS losing market share in? Note: this applies to paying markets not ones they use as incentives for other markets.

And when they make a product people will more often now take a wait and see. If this still worked with microsoft Google will be out.

MS has never dominated the online advertising market, but they have been working at it. It generally takes about four to six years to make a real dent by leveraging their other monopolies.

As well the

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[init100]

They don't want GPL around.

Now if you guys keep taking a hard line on this nothing will change, If you guys open up a bit and allow Microsoft to embrace open source to some extent then we all gain some more freedoms.

Sorry, but that does not compute. So if we let Microsoft devalue the GPL, we get more freedoms? But of course, you seem to hate the GPL. I guess that you'd rather go to work for Microsoft than touch GPL software with a ten-foot pole. Pretty telling how much you value freedom if you ask me.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[Anonymous Coward]

> If you are using GPL, you are using GNU derived, or inspired work. Period.

Ergo, if you use the BSD license, your work is copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California. Semicolon.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[Metrol]

(a license called the GNU Public License = GPL, you did notice the word GNU in it?)

I noticed you put that in there. In reality, it is the General Public License. Using the GPL does not in any way mean you are using GNU derived work. You would be using a license created by the GNU project however. There is a not so subtle difference between the two.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[IgnoramusMaximus]

In reality, it is the General Public License.

LOL. Do you actually read the stuff you link to? From your own link (the first line of the article): "The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) ..."

Using the GPL does not in any way mean you are using GNU derived work. You would be using a license created by the GNU project however. There is a not so subtle difference between the two.

Really? Skipping for the moment the whole ideology of the GPL, an actual text of the license is included in each GPL-licensed project (or is supposed to anyway).

The "subtle" difference is that you got caught in your own sophistry and are now attempting to slither from under it, complete with pretending that the links you post somehow support your argument while in fact they help demolish it. And that is neglecting the fact that the original poster I replied to correctly saw GPL as synonymous with GNU.

The very availability of a vast majority of GPL licensed code is a direct result of the existence of the GPL itself and thus the GNU project. In the absence of this project the code would have never been made public as the developers would never choose another license with less protections of their contributions (assuming no GNU-ideologically-alike project taking GNU's place)

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[jellomizer]

Is it the tools or the license. Try to seporate the two. The License really doesn't do anything at all. Is is just kinda a quazy Legal/Gentelmen agreement on your rights of use on the tool.

Wait for MS hand to enter, then turn it on!

[Anonymous Coward]

With some good timing, we might be able to start an open-source project concerning recipes for MS body parts similar to that Open Beer project.

If you have to learn it, it's not intuitive.

[MrMista_B]

If you have to take time to learn it, it's not intuitive.

In the direction of...

[alexhmit01]

Is OOXML "really open?" Absolutely not. Did MS Engineering produce a "more open" file format than the previous monstrosity, absolutely. There are definitely poorly defined chunks of OOXML that require reverse engineering to master, but the previous file formats required reverse engineering for EVERYTHING. Now, MS's business unit decided to corrupt a standards process to push their nonsense through, and that should be condemned, but we shouldn't deny reality, and that reality is that OOXML is in the direction of more open file formats.

Re:In the direction of...

[FishWithAHammer]

There are definitely poorly defined chunks of OOXML that require reverse engineering to master, but the previous file formats required reverse engineering for EVERYTHING.

Examples of required, non-deprecated bits of OOXML that are poorly defined? (Hint: "render X like Office 97" aren't required and are deprecated, and their hinting can be ignored without display difficulties.)

There are more holes in ODF than OOXML. I'm not terribly fond of OOXML, but frankly they got it more right than ODF has.

Re:In the direction of...

[codemachine]

Yeah, there are legitimate problems with OOXML and ODF from a technical standpoint. OOXML on paper isn't necessarily a horrible example of an open format. And it is too early to say whether the way it is implemented will be open and interoperable.

I think the bigger problem is the ISO process that saw OOXML get fast tracked as a standard, despite not being even close to meeting the requirements for it. What was supposed to be a technical forum was turned into a pissing match between IBM/Sun and MS. The voting process was so corrupt as to be useless. Microsoft deserves the majority (though not the entirely) of the blame for that.

Referencing OOXML as the way MS is moving towards does tend to bring to mind the corruption of ISO more than the file format itself, even though I'm sure that it wasn't what the MS guy actually intended to say when he sent his email.

Re:In the direction of...

[fritsd]

OOXML on paper isn't necessarily a horrible example of an open format.

Um.. I disagree: Save the poor trees!

Note that ODF (the stack to the right) is already a large standard, and the two standards are supposed to cover exactly the same thing. Which would you prefer to implement?

Re:In the direction of...

[FishWithAHammer]

I think the bigger problem is the ISO process that saw OOXML get fast tracked as a standard, despite not being even close to meeting the requirements for it. What was supposed to be a technical forum was turned into a pissing match between IBM/Sun and MS. The voting process was so corrupt as to be useless. Microsoft deserves the majority (though not the entirely) of the blame for that.

I agree, but that isn't the point. The grandparent made a claim, and I haven't seen it backed up.

Re:In the direction of...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...but we shouldn't deny reality, and that reality is that OOXML is in the direction of more open file formats.

In a vacuum .doc -> .docx is a step towards a more openness of file formats.

In context of the software market, however, MS was obviously not interested in making their format more open, but were afraid of adoption of ODF and so set out to create a competing format that was not as open, but could be marketed as such in the hopes of tricking some people into not moving as far towards openness. The very fact that MS was invited to participate and snubbed the standards body and waited until ODF was version 1.0 and implemented by dozens of other companies before coming out with OOXML, speaks to their intent. They don't want openness, but they are willing to provide a small amount if it can prevent people from moving even further that way. It is also probably criminal abuse of their monopoly against other software companies and projects. While I see your point, I don't see that criminally attacking fair trade with regard to those adopting truly open standards can be seen as move towards openness, regardless of how it might seem ignoring what has been happening in the industry.

Re:In the direction of...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Examples of required, non-deprecated bits of OOXML that are poorly defined? (Hint: "render X like Office 97" aren't required and are deprecated, and their hinting can be ignored without display difficulties.)

If it results in file incompatibility or rendering differences in between documents from MSWord and those opened by other programs, then it doesn't matter if it is listed as "deprecated" or "optional" or "monkey poo." It still is preventing the interoperability truly open standards are designed to remove.

There are more holes in ODF than OOXML. I'm not terribly fond of OOXML, but frankly they got it more right than ODF has.

ODF has a working, open source reference implementation. While the standard as written has a few snags, it's not like developers can't and don't just look to see how OO.org and Workplace did it if there is any question about making sure things are interoperable. OOXML doesn't even have a complete closed source implementation that can be blackbox tested for interoperability. Sorry, OOXML is late to the game and severely lacking in real world ability to seamlessly exchange interoperable documents.

Re:In the direction of...

[codemachine]

Well, I didn't say it was as good as ODF on paper. OOXML reimplements a bunch of things that could be done with existing XML standards. ODF saves many pages by not reinventing the wheel. And also by not worrying about compatibility with past formats (which is probably the single biggest design difference between the two).

The OOXML standard itself, while bloated and faulty in many ways, is not the actual issue to a lot of people. It wouldn't be the first time we had to work with a bloated and slightly ugly standard in the IT world. The ISO process that fast tracked it to ratification is where there are bigger issues.

Of course OOXML wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for ODF, so the format itself and the process it has gone through are pretty difficult to separate. We all know MS isn't really that interested in the technical specification itself either. It is all about competing with ODF, confusing the marketplace with purposefully similar names, and pollution of the term "open" and "ISO standard". This was spurred by government's requiring ODF, not by the technical needs of MS.

Simple answer

[AlgorithMan]

how they could help improve the experience of Blender users on Windows.

by migrating them to linux...

Simple interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Since 3D studio version 3 , I never found an interface which allowed me to do what I wanted easily, including slapping material. Now even 3D studio max sucks (*cough* well... not that I paid for it anyway *cough*).

Try Maya

[Serapth]

I have had varying experience with almost every major application released in the past decade and hands down Maya was the quickest to learn and most logically laid out. You just sorta work with it, and the interface is consistent across the board, which makes learning it alot easier. Plus the introduction of QWERT for Select, Transform, Rotate, Scale, Repeat last was simply brilliant and is now being copied by 3DS Max and Softimage. Ditto for the 3d manipulators for transforming/scaling/rotating on a give axis was simply brilliant and again, has been cloned by most other applications. Where it gets truly brilliant though is in having the same controls while in the UI, the timeline, the hypergraph, etc...

Blender is not intuitive, anything but. The iconic interface is confused and the interface is inconsistent. Of the various 3D apps I have had exposure to, only pre-XSI Softimage and Houdini are worse then Blender. Cinema 4D is brilliant for some things, as is Lightwave. Max is a nice app, but getting loaded down with blaot over the years. Again Maya is the best of the best IMHO, while straight modelers like Silo and Modo are pretty nice.

Re:Try Maya

[Trespass]

As far as bloat goes, Max 2008 is actually a faster than 2009. I don't miss the instability of the older versions at all. I probably won't mess with Maya in the near future. Most of what I do is game environmental art and I don't see much advantage for my sort of work. We'll probably see a greater cross-pollination of features with each successive version of the bigger packages. Mountain to Mohammed and all that.

Re:Try Maya

[MidnightBrewer]

Reminds me of Vertigo, which I used in 1993, before Softimage 3 came along. Vertigo had great rendering and shading abilities, but its modeling system was horrendously difficult to learn and lacked decent macro abilities that we take for granted now (stretch, bend, etc.) In a way, a lot like Blender.

It's not that Blender's interface is a bad idea, it's just that much better paradigms have emerged in the past decade and it could stand to learn from them. It seems to be a foible of the FOSS movement, where "our way or the highway" is the motto and developers are unshakably convinced of how incredibly clever their way of doing things is, and telling anybody who disagrees that if they don't like it, they can write their own. (Certainly, you can't make everybody happy all of the time, but you can certainly learn from others once in a while, too).

Re:Try Maya

[Anonymous Coward]

I absolutely agree, in fact I wrote a paper using Blender as an example of a GUI which was horrific.
The learning curve of a new product is important to it's success, how many people do you know are going spend a lot of time learning Blender's GUI when you can't transfer your 'skill' to another similar program or your trying to transfer from something like 3DS Max or Maya to Blender? Each to their own I suppose but if it were being sold I doubt that it would have anywhere as near as a market penetration as it does now.

Re:Try Maya

[zarthrag]

XSI? Are you kidding? That interface was clearly made to be intuitive! Once you learn the basics of how to navigate, I can do advanced things in XSI MUCH faster than in Maya or 3DS, for a fraction of the price! The scripting is spot on, though the API is quite confusing. But the UI does have it's quirks (don't they all?) - but I learned it AND made a rigged/animated 3D human model in less than a week. Good luck "learning" maya to that level as quickly.

Still Bitter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just let it go, Darl!

Re:Still Bitter?

[nuzak]

And sometimes they post here.

I rest my case.

Re:Still Bitter?

[Anonymous Coward]

OH! What a devastatingly sharp rejoinder! I'm wounded, Darl. WOUNDED!

And trying to score some cheap karma points from the MS fanbois/pj bashers, and the ever realiable RAGE AGAINST THE /. HIVEMIND contingent. Well, you got in the thread a little late for that Darl.

You're so pathetic, it makes one cringe with embarrassment for you.

Reaching out with gripping hands

[Captain Spam]

Yes, I agree, going on their track record and recent statements by Ballmer himself, Microsoft is "reaching out" to Blender, much in the same way that step one to strangling someone is reaching out your hands...

XNA

[nuzak]

I suspect this has everything to do with having XNA able to import Blender formats, and nothing more. Why this warranted the involvement of the CEO, however, I have no idea.

Why don't they do like everyone else

[beemishboy]

It seems like they are trying for some corporate outreach street cred. Why don't they just allow people on MS staff to commit like every other company that contributes to OSS? It seems like they are trying something sneaky or they just don't get OSS or both.

That's easy.

[Qbertino]

That's easy: Pay 3-5 devs to get renderman on to Blender. RenderMan im*and* export. I'd actually add extra wondows-specific compliler directives to the Blender source just for that.
All File format problems solved for all platforms and the last showstopper for using Blender in Hollywood pipelines removed.

But we all know that ain't going to happen, so basically it's a waste of time.

Oh, Ash!

[the_fat_kid]

how about:
"good, bad, I'm the guy with the source code"

I mean, if we are going to start butchering Evil Dead lines...

Gates-Balmer eyeball smoothie

[cyrus0]

I thought the title was implying something much more entertaining, drat.

This isn't about helping the "community"

[alexhmit01]

Microsoft offered ZERO help to the "open source community." They offered help to the Blender Project to get Blender to run better on Windows. They created a position to reach out to them, because their NORMAL developer channels don't include the free software guys. Microsoft doesn't care about the Open Source community, they care about Microsoft. Microsoft makes money selling Windows and Office. If helping Blender helps them sell Windows and/or Office, they will help Blender. If it does not, they will not help Blender.

Microsoft vs. Sun was obvious, Sun was stupid. Microsoft wanted to sell Windows, that meant making sure that Java apps ran best on Windows. Microsoft wants to sell Windows, so that means making Java apps that run on windows run best (or only) on Windows. Sun wanted to make Windows irrelevant with Java apps. In what universe were Microsoft and Sun's business interests aligned?

There is no "open source community." There are software projects released under Open Source Licenses, and their are "open source projects" that have community developers. There are also corporate projects and University projects that are released under "open source licenses." The only "community" angle is that code under the BSD/MIT licenses are available to everyone, and code under the GPL is available to everyone.

Microsoft doesn't care if you are a corporation or a "community," they care if your software helps them sell software (in which case they help you), or hurts them selling software (in which case they try to crush you). With open source projects, their existing channels don't work for either help/crush, so they have a new position for helping... I'm sure they have another department for crushing competitive open source projects, but that departments send out nastygrams from Legal or FUD from PR, not emails of help from the liaison office.

Re:This isn't about helping the "community"

[Anonymous Coward]

don't bother trying to point out the obvious to these lemmings. they're so caught up on the entire open source mantra that they can't see how this could be good business for microsoft. as such they're going to miss out on opportunities that microsoft presents while crying "poor open source" with their face in their hands.

it's really no different than the kind of asshats who see the world as bloods versus crips and can't get their heads around the concept of people getting along to help everyone involved.

Re:This isn't about helping the "community"

[Anonymous Coward]

MS interest is only in their interest, period. They don't want people using another platform just to use something like Blender. And while they are at it, lets use Microsoft's file formats to further divide the multi platform capabilities of Blender thus ensuring lock-in.

If you think MS is being "cooperative" and "friendly", I have a bridge I want to sell you.

read SUN-TZU quotes.

[freeasinrealale]

Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer. - attributed to SUN-TSU. A quick web search of his (SUN-TZU) quotes reads like a litany of BALLMER/M$ tactics.

Re:read SUN-TZU quotes.

[edraven]

You may find a copy of Sun-Tzu's "Art of War" at your local Barnes and Noble... in the business section.

Microsoft has proven...

[a4r6]

time and time again that they don't do anything out of the kindness of their collective heart.
Just the fact that they mentioned OOXML as a step towards openness is revealing.

"Our battle is product to product, Windows versus Linux, Office versus OpenOffice."

This is a case of Windows vs Linux. I'm sure if Microsoft could somehow push the Blender developers into making use of some MS proprietary formats in ONLY the Windows version, they'd be pissing themselves with glee.

Re:Try Maya Just pretend you're in a big machine

[davidsyes]

called...

"TRON"

Microsoft trying to wheedle Blender team

[positiveexperience]

Microsoft is searching new UI patterns for it's next windoze.

It takes time, effort and resources to find efficient ways to organize information missives into clear and useful UI framework.

Blender team developed good and in some way innovative UI, sure you may doubt that it's hard to use -- i agree, you have to learn first (recall your first emacs or vi experience) -- but that's only because of inertia we stuck in, and that inertia comes from Windoze UI.

So, basically, Microsoft trying to wheedle Blender team.

MS should realize

[Anonymous Coward]

that the FOSS community does not want them meddling in their affairs, or offering their "help". They want them to go away.

Not Supporting, they are Subverting

[HermMunster]

Sheesh, who wrote the lead into this story? They sound the baboon taken by Microsoft's orgy of gorillas.

Microsoft has never ever supported open standards and no amount of OOXML will ever support that fact.

Microsoft's attempt is to subvert the true meaning of open source and to beguile and lie to those not smart enough to understand the real reason behind open source.

Microsoft's offerings have been nothing but opened source and that is a universe away from Open Source concepts.

Microsoft is run by a bunch of nuts if they think that we can't see that this is nothing more than their:

embrace, extend, extinguish

tactic.

Their demise won't come soon enough.

In the end open source will meet or exceed any closed source offering. This means that all features, concepts, capabilities will be equal to or better than in the closed source world. What this will relegate Windows to, and there's nothing wrong with it, is a gaming console type application. You'll only use it when and if you want to play games.

The transition to open source is inevitable. The world is far too large and there are too many people that know about how Microsoft does business. Big named companies are now involved. They know how to diffuse the obfuscated veil that Microsoft is draping over the eyes of the average fanboy worshiping at the feet of the criminal monopolist.

They could pay for some user interface work.

[argent]

I mean, I've used some crude user interfaces before, but it's rare to find one that looks as polished as Blender's but is quite as actively hostile to use. When I started working with Blender the only thing I could figure out was that the guy who designed the UI really really hated people and wanted to cause as much pain for his users as possible.

reaching out???

[markana]

Microsoft reaching out to the Blender guys is like Darth Vader reaching out to a subordinate who displeases him...

ultimately with the same result.

Does Ballmer really want the answer

[spitzak]

The answer is a list of rather simple things, but it is not what they want to hear or expect to hear (I think they expect to hear demands for open source):

#1: Fix filenames and filesystem so they match Unix. This means you use the forward slash. Refuse to "microsoft certify" any software that will not accept a pasted or typed filename with a forward slash in it, and change all the OS api that returns filenames to return forward slashes (probably with a registry setting) and again refuse to "microsoft certify" software that fails when this setting is on. And get rid of the damn drive letters (just make "/A:/" be the same as "A:/") and support UTF-8 encoding of the filenames at all times (probably by changing the "a" version of the win32 api to be hard-coded to UTF-8).

#2: Support OpenGL, meaning that by default you get at least what Mesa provides. Supporting OpenGL 1.4 only is not acceptable.

#3: Support C99 standard functions and don't make your compiler spew a lot of bogus "warnings" that you put in there to try to encourage people to change to your windows-specific functions. Remove the underscores you stuck on lots of the functions so that portable useful code cannot be written.

Re:Does Ballmer really want the answer

[Creepy]

#1: Fix filenames and filesystem so they match Unix. This means you use the forward slash. Refuse to "microsoft certify" any software that will not accept a pasted or typed filename with a forward slash in it, and change all the OS api that returns filenames to return forward slashes (probably with a registry setting) and again refuse to "microsoft certify" software that fails when this setting is on. And get rid of the damn drive letters (just make "/A:/" be the same as "A:/") and support UTF-8 encoding of the filenames at all times (probably by changing the "a" version of the win32 api to be hard-coded to UTF-8). C code interprets '/' as '\', so you can type C:/mydirectory/myfile as a string type and it works fine (using \ is actually bad - you need \\). Supporting Drive letters doesn't really add that much extra work, and switching this now would probably be more of a problem for users, especially those that are moderate users and know enough to get into the DOS prompt. Really, what the OS should do is support either - a space is always required before a switch anyway, so I don't see any loss in adding support for, say, D:/mydir/myfile /? vs D:\mydir\myfile /? (or even \?).

#2: Support OpenGL, meaning that by default you get at least what Mesa provides. Supporting OpenGL 1.4 only is not acceptable. This is really a non-issue these days - the software driver is too slow for modern hardware functions and the hardware manufacturers supply the hardware driver.

#3: Support C99 standard functions and don't make your compiler spew a lot of bogus "warnings" that you put in there to try to encourage people to change to your windows-specific functions. Remove the underscores you stuck on lots of the functions so that portable useful code cannot be written. MS gives an excuse that C99 string functions are not protected from buffer attacks (which is true) and their version is (which I know nothing about). I heard there is an easy workaround (aside from rewriting all functions like wsprintf to _wsprintf, but I don't remember what it is.

Personally, I'd like to see C finally standardize some sizes - wchar_t being of ambiguous size drives me nuts. Porting Linux to BSD almost always gives wchar_t errors because Linux people tend to assume it's 16 bit and some BSD people 32 bit (like MacOS X and FreeBSD), others 16 (and I've heard proposals of 128).

Re:Does Ballmer really want the answer

[spitzak]

The Win32 api certainly does accept forward slashes just fine. The problem is appliations and clueless programmers that don't think files ever contain forward slashes. Generally you cannot cut & paste or drag & drop or type in a filename with forward slashes into many applications, and operation system calls like getcwd cannot return strings with forward slashes without them crashing. What I want Microsoft to do is insist that the programs should all accept and work with these, or they don't get the "windows certified" label or something. I am really sick and tired of having to add tons of code to decide whether a piece of text is a filename or not and disabling all possibilities of quoting when it is. I am pretty certain there are plenty of programmers inside Microsoft who would like to fix this as well.

For drive letters, the current syntax would certainly continue to work. I just want an alternative syntax so that "/" can start an unambiguous filename. This would allow the disk structure to be duplicated on a Unix machine so that software can go back & forth. Best suggestion I have heard is to have "/A:/" be the same as "A:/". It would be really nice if readdir() of "/" list these.

MS is just being assholes about the C99 stuff. First of all they ignored the BSD strlcpy and strlcat, which are quite proper solutions. Their "standard" is strcpy_s which *throws an exception* when the buffer overflows. That is just ludricous, what it means is that programs will throw exceptions and cause a DOS rather than just truncating. Really what they are trying to do is force everybody to use Windows-specific calls. Adding underscores to a random set of C99 functions that are safe, especially snprintf, is the real giveaway that they just want to make it impossible to port code.

The C people should realize that we want "N bits" and really don't give a damn about any other considerations. I think C should support "int:22 x" to mean an integer that holds at least 22 bits, with a further guarantee that any power of 2 greater or equal to 8 means *exactly* that many bits. This typedef stuff is nonsense. And both Windows and posix should stop declaring a new foo_t type for every integer in the world, it really does help to know that two of them are the same size and the standards should enforce this by using the same type.

Re:Does Ballmer really want the answer

[mgiuca]

This is way off the topic of Blender, but hella interesting.

The point the parent raised about MSVC spewing those warnings is totally valid. I hadn't thought about it this way, but they are encouraging non-portable code.

Sure there are a handful of security issues you have to watch out for in a few standard C library functions (such as strcpy). Read the man pages. They explain all the issues.
(And there are some you shouldn't use at all - like gets, and sprintf, and scanf with a %s format).

But you can always work around these issues in a portable manner (usually by ensuring you allocate enough space before throwing strings at memory!) Having a "magic bullet secure version" of a function isn't going to help very much as you're always going to be able to shoot yourself in the foot in a language with arbitrary pointer access.

MS "fixes" the issue in the typical way, by adding proprietary extensions.

Just look at this list:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235384(VS.80).aspx
They've taken it upon themselves to "deprecate" a whole bunch of POSIX functions (albeit mostly low-level things), and provided their own _-prefixed versions which seem to be no different. And added "secure" versions of a bunch of standard functions.

With regards to standardized sizes, well we have them in C99. You just need to #include <stdint.h>, and then you get access to all of the (u)int(n)_t types.

eg. int32_t, uint8_t, int16_t, etc.
See here.

Though you wanted wchar_t standardised .. I don't think they did that. My guess is if you wanted to do proper Unicode in C you might just use a uint32_t (for UTF-32) or uint16_ts (for UTF-16), and write your own unicode "is" functions - or use a proper unicode library (I haven't).

Re:Does Ballmer really want the answer

[shutdown -p now]

The Win32 api certainly does accept forward slashes just fine. The problem is appliations and clueless programmers that don't think files ever contain forward slashes. Generally you cannot cut & paste or drag & drop or type in a filename with forward slashes into many applications, and operation system calls like getcwd cannot return strings with forward slashes without them crashing. What I want Microsoft to do is insist that the programs should all accept and work with these, or they don't get the "windows certified" label or something. I am really sick and tired of having to add tons of code to decide whether a piece of text is a filename or not and disabling all possibilities of quoting when it is.

See, backslash is the standard path separator for Windows. It has been there for ages, and it's going to remain. It's not hard to handle it either, and if you want a premade portable solution to OS paths - just use boost::filesystem (or whatever the analog is for your language/framework). It's really not hard.

MS is just being assholes about the C99 stuff. First of all they ignored the BSD strlcpy and strlcat, which are quite proper solutions.

Regarding C99, MS guys have said time and again that nobody (who pays money) really cares. C++ TR1 was more important than that, and they've implemented it now (minus the C99 bits). C++0x is going to be important, and they're working on it. But how many C99-only projects you know? Yeah, right...

Also, what C99 has to do with strlcpy/strlcat? And, while we're at it, what standard do they belong to, and who else supports them?

. Their "standard" is strcpy_s which *throws an exception* when the buffer overflows. That is just ludricous, what it means is that programs will throw exceptions and cause a DOS rather than just truncating. Really what they are trying to do is force everybody to use Windows-specific calls. Adding underscores to a random set of C99 functions that are safe, especially snprintf, is the real giveaway that they just want to make it impossible to port code.

Just so you'd know, the *_s functions MS provides are not some completely proprietary extension. They're being standardized as TR 24731 "Extensions to the C Library Part I: Bounds-checking interfaces" to ISO C. It is developed as any proper ISO standard (and unlike OOXML). You can see the draft for yourself, as well as the rationale.

Also note that these functions do not throw exceptions! They invoke a constraint violation handler which can be set via set_constraint_handler_s(). If you do not want your program to terminate, then you can write your own handler, and explicitly forbid termination from there - in that case, you'll get the typical truncating behavior. However, it has been long held that violating a contract should not go lightly - it is a bug, and trying to recover it (by e.g. truncating) merely sweeps it under the rug, quite likely resulting in a later failure, or, worse, silent incorrect behavior. Personally, I don't see any valid reason whatsoever to rely on truncation in strcpy - it's means you're silently accepting a data loss at some cutoff point. The proper way is to measure the length of the source string first, and allocate the buffer of the right size (possibly on stack with heap fallback above a certain size for performance).

The C people should realize that we want "N bits" and really don't give a damn about any other considerations

You can try to tell that to the guys at comp.std.c or comp.lang.c.moderated. We'll see how many of "we" actually want that sort of thing; so far, the vast majority finds stdint.h and typedefs more than adequate. If you really want 22-bit ints, you're always free to use bit fields.

Re:Does Ballmer really want the answer

[spitzak]

use boost::filesystem (or whatever the analog is for your language/framework). It's really not hard.

Any interface that requires me to treat filenames differently from other string data is TOTALLY unacceptable. Try writing a real program some day, such as one that implements an interpreted language where users may want to store a filename into a string variable.

Furthermore, the Win32 api accepts BOTH forward and backward slash. I am quite able to write portable programs using it. My problem is that any communication to other programs, which is by far the area where I don't want to worry about "is this a filename?" is where it breaks. This is not really Microsoft's fault, it is clueless programmers writing applications. But Microsoft could help by insisiting the programs accept filenames in both versions.

I don't care if the _s functions are written by some standards organization. On the Linux side I really don't care what Theo says (he obviously has some problem with code that was written for BSD as his objections, and yours, are stupid). To the vast majority of people it is obvious that strlcpy is the right solution. strlcpy do the *right* thing: truncation is NOT a problem if all useful values are shorter than the truncation (such as when the buffer is compared to a list of tokens and no token is longer than the buffer, or when the OS has a limit such that the truncated value could not possibly name a file anyway). If you want to do something "properly" then use std string in C++. Also strlcpy returns the length of the buffer you need, so you can allocate it, this can result in MAJOR time savings if the majority of your work can be done in automatic arrays on the stack, with malloc only called in the rare too-long cases, no other solution provides this.

I do think everybody wants "how big is this value" to be part of the syntax. It makes no sense that it be in a header file. You might as well design a programming language where the actual conversion into machine instructions is contained in header files. That would be clever, but it would not be a "compiler".

Re:Does Ballmer really want the answer

[shutdown -p now]

Try writing a real program some day, such as one that implements an interpreted language where users may want to store a filename into a string variable.

I've wrote quite a few "real programs", but somehow none of them implemented an interpreted language, much less one which users used to manipulate filenames. Anyway, what is the problem there? For the purpose of scripts, give users strings if they really want them.

Tolkien clearly wrote Microsoft's history

[kiehlster]

I can't help but compare Microsoft with Morgoth. They craft their words so finely that people inept or otherwise follow their invalid "open" point of view and push off the guidance of the other Valar. But deep down all they care about is their coveting of those beautiful Silmarils and nurturing the putrid race of Orcs.

Re:Tolkien clearly wrote Microsoft's history

[Danzigism]

totally! and Linux is like Tom Bombadil.. Master of the Wood..

Same old deva ju

[AnalogDiehard]

M$ "reached out" to JAVA developers way back when, look how well that turned out.

GPL is an Open Source Business's Moneymaking Tool

[Bruce Perens]

I have a start-up company making Open Source software. GPL3, and Affero GPL3, are my money-making tools. They filter the good guys who want to share their development, from the guys who just want some software and don't plan on sharing anything. The first party is happy with GPL3 and Affero GPL3. The other folks are happy with a commercial license, and I am happy with their money.

GPL is a capitalist tool! :-) Sounds funny, but it really is. Hey, it worked for MySQL, they sold their company for 1.1 Billion!

So, please don't tell me that the GPL is anti-profit.

Bruce

It's a trap

[stox]

Microsoft seems to be doing a lot of talking about open source these days, but outside of what they have been required to do by law, their efforts have a hollow ring to them. They don't really want to support open source, what they do want is to bring the productivity of open source products to the windows platform only.

Noooooooooo!

[nurb432]

Don't let them get involved, it will only serve to spell the eventual death sentence for one of OSS's star children.

Microsoft ( understandably ) can only have nefarious intent here.

Re:Noooooooooo!

[shish]

one of OSS's star children

Blender wasn't an open source child, it was bought out by open source when the company creating it went bust~

Don't punish people who use Blender on Windows...

[NimbleSquirrel]

MS want to help Blender run better on Windows, but only Windows. This isn't anything new: it is just a new generation of their 'embrace, extend (and extinguish)' mantra. They want to get open source projects running better on Windows than Linux, and I can just imagine their revival of the 'Get the Facts' website if they do. But It isn't going to happen.

What I see is that this is going to cause a backlash *against* Blender development for Windows. For those people that do use Blender on Windows, I hope that this doesn't happen. Don't punish the users for MS's interference.

If MS wants to help open source projects, than that is a good thing, but only as long as that support is open (ie. if they share their jewels, they share them with the world, not hidden behind NDAs), and that the projects get to choose how that support is used.

Wrong Goal.

[willeyhill]

The goal is to waste developer time on Windows and create debate and animosity about it. This is well documented behavior. They won't provide real help.

Re:Wrong Goal.

[dedazo]

Ah twitter, you always end up giving yourself away. I guess it's scary that I can spot one of your posts a mile away, even when you go commando.

The goal is to waste developer time on Windows

Blender already runs on Windows, so I fail to see how this is even relevant.

create debate and animosity about it.

Sweet Jesus, what does this even mean?

Re:Wrong Goal.

[Kalriath]

That's completely wrong. Microsoft's goal is to get as many developers as possible on Windows including by making it fast and easy (though if you touch the API, it really isn't easy) because developers and third party applications is what keeps people using Windows. An operating system is nothing without decent apps.

MS working on a deal with Dreamworks ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it thinkable that M$ is working on a deal with dreamworks to switch them back to Windows and needs certain Linux centric tools to run on windows ?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-826047.html?tag=btxcsim

Don't know if Dreamworks is actively using Blender or other FOSS apps. But it is interesting that a major player in the animation business is choosing Linux and M$ now is trying to get a better grip on at least one of the major FOSS animation projects.

If only I could have replied for them

[baggins2001]

Dear MS,
With regards to helping improve Blender experience on Windows.
Publishing a SP that doesn't crash the users computers, would be a good start.

Re:If only I could have replied for them

[baggins2001]

I see they give MS public relations personnel moderation points now.

It isn't intuitive, it's productive!

[thtrgremlin]

I am not going to bother to find the quote, but what made me take the time to learn Blender, or finally overcome what had appeared to be a wretched interface was an explanation in the documentation that stated that it wasn't designed to be easy to learn, it was designed to be easy to use! "No, we are not going to change the interface to make it easier to learn, but we swear once you understand it, you will wish all your applications worked like Blender".

This told me that even if it didn't make sense to me right away, that didn't make it inferior. This also said they put a LOT of effort into making an interface the right way! Productive! Same reason I prefer Linux in general.

3D Studio Max is great, and it does lots of hand holding through the whole experience... great tutorials, but I never got very far. I am not saying Blender is better (necessarly), it just didn't work for me. When I finally gave Blender a chance some months ago, it began with about a week of following video tutorials on YouTube (I spent my entire spring break with a friend learning blender / reading documentation / watching videos). During and shortly after that week I quickly found it easy to imagine what I wanted to create and type it all out in shortcuts very quickly. My only limit has been my imagination. I still get screwed up every once in a while neglecting to check which mode I am in, but my own mistake. It has also given me a medium to master my Python skills, though that hasn't gone quite as quickly.

Microsoft, stay the hell away from Blender!!! Too many good projects have DIED because of Microsoft involvement. I am so glad the Blender Foundation keeps an open mind, and knows better than to deal with those rats. Note to Novell: HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!

intuitive interfaces

[falconwolf]

The only truly intuitive user interface I can think of offhand is the nipple.

Nipples, at least human nipples aren't intuitive either. Birth units in hospitals have to teach mothers to teach babies to breastfeed.

Falcon

Open != Easy Modifiable

[Ilan Volow]

There's seems to be this pervasive myth in the Open Source community that "just because code is open means that it's easily modifiable and understandable" and that all you have to do is "just read the source".

If you have a project with millions of lines of code, a zillion layers of abstraction (many of which do not have clear boundaries with respect to one another other), sparse comments, lots of complex stuff going, and more than a few code cowboys who tried to prove just how clever they were (to the detriment of code understandability), it's going to take you years "just reading the source" without any help at all to get to the point where you can make reliable and effective changes to the project.

It makes far more sense to ask a project's "Lore Master" to guide you to certain entry points where you need to make a few specific changes than to spend years "just reading the code" to become a "Lore Master" yourself to make those few changes.

What about Netware?

[thtrgremlin]

Hey, at least Novell Netware... ha ha ha lol, I can't even finish typing that. Nevermind

Keep Off!

[authority69]

Microsoft can kindly keep it's hands off my blender ... and my toaster for that matter ... they run NetBSD just fine.

Re:Keep Off!

[Danzigism]

damn right! NetBSD > *

Losing Battle

[p0tat03]

MS has no real hope of winning the 3D software industry over at this point, short of a total refactoring of Windows.

Practically every major 3D software package out there has a Windows version - one that is strictly limited to hobbyists, not industrial and production use. I worked at a 3D tools developer not so long ago, and the impression I got was that the majority of production use was on Linux and OS X (moreso Linux, surprisingly).

Why? Because renderers are built to run on 'nix farms, and artist tools need to interface with all of this "back end" infrastructure. These artist guys don't really need to know how the OS works, so the intricacies (and often usability problems) of Linux are a non-issue, since the user is unlikely to even leave the 3D software at any point.

Until MS can make Windows run so lean that we start running render farms on them, they will always be a very minor, strictly hobbyist platform for 3D apps. Toolchain is king in all production companies, and interfacing all this 'nix backend with Windows is just not worth the trouble. Especially when the alternative costs you nothing, both in terms of lost productivity or money.

Now, if Adobe ported Photoshop and After Effects to Linux, Apple would lose out badly in this market segment. Many people I know run OS X in a production environment ONLY because they want their compositing app, 3D app, and image editor running simultaneously.

Response...

[Quetzo]

Dear Microsoft: It's all everyone else's fault.

- Bender

Not this again

[dedazo]

Very good. Now go back to the case's email archive (or any other source you prefer) and show us how they made ACPI specific to Windows, or what patents they hold that prevent people from using it in other operating systems.

You can make the case that you've managed to prove alleged intent (you haven't, but we'll roll with it). Now prove they actually did what is implied on that email.

Many years ago Bruce Perens posted on USENET something about how ESR had allegedly threatened to kill him over some stupid disagreement. If I post that in a discussion about open source, everyone's first reaction would be to claim that it is irrelevant, since Perens is still alive and Raymond is not in jail, wouldn't it?

For this (which gets trotted out every other week) to be meaningful you need to also show that they did indeed do something evil, not just that they were talking about it.

There are a lot of bad things you can lay at Microsoft's feet. This is not one of them (unless you're twitter and you think repetition somehow engenders truth). Concentrate on those, and stop making crap up.

Re:Not this again

[Anonymous Coward]

how they made ACPI specific to Windows, or what patents they hold that prevent people from using it in other operating systems.

Riddle me this, why are there so many buggy BIOSes out there that implode under basic ACPI operations like finding out whether it is plugged in or not (my Core Duo minitower insists to Linux that it is on battery power), or requesting standby from the "wrong CPU" (for that instant, new rule next boot), yet Windows seems to manage to operate fairly smoothly despite all of these quirks that Linux runs into?

Leaving power management aside, what about all the other BIOS features out there that work just fine on windows but crash and burn on Linux? I can't count the number of systems where I've had to manually disable APIC because of some drive controller or network card built into the motherboard was unable to cope with the motherboard's APIC interrupts, yet Windows just seems to "know".

Could it be because there is documentation of each of these little gotchas and bugs floating around somewhere where we can't see?

Re:*Do* punish people who use Blender on Windows.

[IdeaMan]

What I see is that this is going to cause a backlash *against* Blender development for Windows. Brilliant! We need a few more truly awesome Linux only applications and games. Even better would be an application that could not possibly run on Windows with decent performance because of several Windows architecture shortcomings.

I've run Redhat, Debian, and Gentoo, but right now I've been running just windows because I'm so lazy. If a killer game came out that had awesome gameplay and say raytraced graphics, it would force me to get off the stick and install Linux again. That and a sweet IDE in combination with a really comprehensive well documented and easy to use set of libraries would be enough to get me developing stuff in Linux.

One of the problems I have now that I'm older is that it's not fun anymore to whip up a little program to do something. Back in the day on Turbo C the program was compiled and running before you could get your finger off of the run button. Nowadays the environments I've used are dog slow and not well integrated, so getting a quick little draw graphics type app running is too much like work.

It's a trick...

[SunCrushr]

... get an axe.

"Art of War" is gutenberg.org/etext/132

[Anomalyst]

You may find a copy of Sun-Tzu's "Art of War" at your local [bookstore]

Since it has been out of copyright for a couple thousand years, it is far cheaper to get it from Project Gutenberg, though a small donation wouldn't hurt. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/132
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20594 Audio book

They want developers who use Blender to use Win32

[John Anonymous]

The groklaw article is spot on.

Plus, I think Microsoft would like developers of other products (e.g., games) who use Blender to prefer to do so on Windows instead of other platforms.

"How can we help getting our proprietary file formats, which your 'customers' use in creating their games, better integrated in Blender?"

"How can we help Blender look more like other Windows applications?"

"How can we splinter the FOSS community...? Let's see if one little email can create a fork of a FOSS application we don't compete with!"

"We love 'open source', for serious!"

If they were serious about helping Open Source applications, they'd be submitting patches.

Actually, it is for most babies

[WindBourne]

The simple fact is that most babies start suckling right away. After all, they were doing it in the womb. Though some kids need to be encouraged. Both of my kids took to it right away. The problem is that sometimes the mother has to help and more importantly, they have to take care of their body. Apparently a cracked nipple is very painful. And from what I saw, that was learned, not intuitive. In addition, a couple of my ex's who had children said that they for them, there were no issues at all until teeth developed. The funny thing is that apparently most mothers encourage the children to bite down a bit to help the flow, so when the teeth come, well....

All I can say is that my kids got by with more than I have. :)

Depends on your expertise

[nurb432]

I think if you are an actual 3D designer with some real experience ( and no, dabbling on the weekends doesn't count ), it makes quite a bit of sense, as does Truespace.

Much as photoshop might be confusing to a person that normally does spreadsheets and charts/graphs. It would be just as meaningless for him to complain the PS interface is not intuitive. ( to him )

Great job of killing eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This did a good job of killing Digital, Irix, and Apple

Wow, they sure did do a Great Job killing Apple.

The shock of changing the OS and the office suite

[falconwolf]

is a lot. However, if you can transition one little piece at a time, Windows is in trouble.

I don't think it's much of a shock to change the OS and the Office Suite used, it's not such a big deal. First off when most entities, whether people or businesses, get new computers more than likely the new system will have both a new OS, usually a new version of Windows, and a new version of MS Office. Secondly more entities are switch from MS Windows, to either Linux or OS X. For those who disagree with this, while the market itself is growing Macs and Linux are growing faster. After buying and using Windows since NT4 and 95 came out, about 20 months ago I switched to Linux and last summer I got the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on. For my office suite I use the native Mac port of OO.org, NeoOffice. It took me all of a week or two to adjust. Of course, just as I didn't use MS Office much, I don't use NeoOffice that much.

Falcon

Re:*Do* punish people who use Blender on Windows.

[NimbleSquirrel]

Unfortunately you won't be finding killer games on Linux anytime soon, but there are multiple issues stopping it.

Windows is the dominant desktop OS in the world today. It is a sad fact, but true. It costs a lot of money for studios to support multiple OSes. It simply isn't worth it for them to code games for the small market share of Linux. It is hard to get good games on Macs too, for much the same reason.

Graphics card drivers on Linux are not good. Typically drivers for graphics cards lag behind the drivers for the same cards under Windows. This is improving slowly, but until Nvidia and ATI release source code that won't change in a hurry. Even then, most recent games use DirectX over OpenGL, so until Linux can start magically supporting DirectX (9 or 10) don't expect to see the Crysis on Linux. In saying that, Wine has made some inroads in running DirectX.

It is not like the only thing holding the Linux gaming market back are the people porting projects like Blender to Windows.

paging for Windows

[falconwolf]

Incorrect, the price of windows is included in the price of the computer. Hence they are paying for it, period!

However they don't see the cost of an OS, it's not like computers have a price sticker with all the costs of different things the computer comes with like new cars do. "Hey, there no cost for Windows". Now if they see a PC configured with the same hardware but without an OS, or with Linux preinstalled, then they can see they are paying for Windows, and MS Office.

Also, they pay when the have an existing computer that they upgrade to the latest.

Upgrading the OS on a computer is about the only tyme users see a price for Windows. But most people don't upgrade their OS, instead they'll just buy a new computer.

Falcon

Re:"Intuitive"

[absurdist]

I ran the tech shop at the California Museum of Science and Industry in the late 80's/early 90s. We had a new exhibits curator who had just come from a university background who wanted us to change all the exhibits in his hall to Macs because the interface was "Intuitive." That was his big buzzword. So much so he rewrote one of the exhibits as a HyperCard (yes, I'm showing my age) stack as a test program.

Well, this was right after the Rodney King riots. We had no one visiting the Museum but National Guard troops who were using our parking lot as a staging area. Well, one day, several of the techs and I happened to be in the hall with this curator when a soldier came in and sat down in front of his exhibit. The curator made a point of pointing him out to us and saying "See? Now you'll see how intuitive the Mac interface is."

So, the soldier dolled the pointer over the start icon. And waited.

The curator looked puzzled, then leaned over to the soldier and said "You have to click on it to start it."

The soldier looked VERY confused, but dutifully leaned forward to the monitor, and in a loud voice, said "CLICK!"

The moral: One man's intuitive is another's WTF?!?!

(BTW, Once we stopped laughing, "intuitive" became the buzzword around the tech shop. I don't remember that particular curator using it again, however. And Mac fans, no, I'm not bashing Macs. Just saying.)

Yes this again

[jyx]

Bruce Perens wasn't the head of a multi billion dollar company being accused (and eventually convicted) of monopolistic behavior.

That email (if accurate) has Mr Gates "wondering" if something could be done to lock down an open technology to their own proprietary product, with the abuse of the patent system being a valid option.

MS has done plenty of good things, and plenty of bad things. I think this email is a perfectly valid demonstration of the later. Remember, companies are not "people" and are not bound by the same laws/subject to the same punishments as us and as a consequence, tend to be behave in a sociopathic manner. To me, this letter does suggest something dodgey in the state of Redmond.

Perhaps a better response to the parent post would have been to include some of the emails from the case's archive that show condemnation/concern of monopolistic behavior by the company executives/managers.

philosophy of the founding of the USA

[falconwolf]

The USA was founded on the principal of 'freedom for the individual'. This shows with the USA's weak social welfare systems, and business culture of domination at all cost.

Freedom for the individual, not for business. Thomas Jefferson, the writer and one of the signers of the "Declaration of Independence" and the third President of the USA, even wrote a warning about corporations and the corporate aristocracy: "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."

Falcon

It's a trick ...

[Johnny00]

Get an Axe! I don't want them breaking Blender on OS X. :-D

open source licenses

[falconwolf]

code under the BSD/MIT licenses are available to everyone

I don't know about the MIT license but BSD source code can be closed depending on the specific license as there's more than one license, Microsoft has done it itself. The big thing BSD licenses require is proper attribution of the programmers that contributed code.

This is why in general I prefer BSD licenses over the GPL, while the GPL provides more freedom for users of software the BSD offers more freedom for programmers.

Falcon

the meaning of the word 'intuitive'

[Rob Y.]

"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."

If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".

Not quite. Intuitive doesn't simply mean "follows the conventions you're used to". It's more like "works in a way that makes sense for the function it's performing". That's not to say that each application should change the way buttons work - there's a lot to be said for conventions, especially if you want your users to be able to discover how your app works on their own (to 'intuit' how it works, if you will). But something like, say, vi, which follows no conventions to speak of, is plenty intuitive to use once you know it.

Okay. Better example. When I started using PuTty on Windows, I hated that it always copied to the clipboard whenever you blocked some text. What was so hard about right-click/copy? Now that I'm used to it, I hate having to explicitly copy in other apps. Which is more 'intuitive'?

FOSS apps on MS Windows

[UnderCoverPenguin]

In my observation, a lot of FOSS apps are better supported on Windows than any other platform. Inkscape is one example. I like it alot, but to keep up with the latest, I have to compile it myself, which for Inkscape requires updating a lot of build tools each time.

Is The D.O.J. Ruling That Far Behind Us?

[Anonymous Coward]

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

That was Microsoft's 'platform' 10 years ago and it still is today.

Embrace Blender and offer to make them a better Windows citizen, 'extend' their file format support and extinguish them with minor tweaks, license changes and the like further down the road.

Which Microsoft are you talking about?

[alexhmit01]

Apparently you are discussing Slashdot Microsoft, the borg like all powerful and sinister company that dominates the computer industry and crushes innovation.

I was thinking about the Microsoft that my friend worked at a few years ago, where the culture was so entrenched with "eating their own dog food" that few in the company were exposed to anything else that is going on in the computer world. The vaporware/FUD style of killing competition that Slashdot Microsoft does was generally a result of marketing not understanding engineering, making engineering look bad.

But I was also talking about MSFT, the lackluster performing stock that has failed to deliver share holder value in years. That Microsoft has two profitable product lines (three considering Windows Server separate from Windows), and keeps reinvesting profits into unprofitable lines that make less and less sense. The founder whose killer instincts led it to crush the competition leveraging each business has left to go fight diseases in Africa, and his replacement is his college drinking buddy that looks like a big fat baffoon mostly mocked as a chair thrower.

Your Microsoft conspiracy makes sense... but the incompetence theory makes sense as well. They could have meant well, decided on an open standard, had marketing gum up the process and declare everything a lock down to avoid FUD/anti-trust issues, that surfaced with their exciting new standard that they were stunned that nobody wanted.

Microsoft crushed Netscape by making the product free and paying people to give it away. In return they were rewarded with an expensive to maintain piece of software and an Internet division that can't make money even with the lock-in. They aren't evil super geniuses, they are relatively bright programmers led by Bill Gates's less intelligent cronies.

Re:Which Microsoft are you talking about?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Apparently you are discussing Slashdot Microsoft, the borg like all powerful and sinister company that dominates the computer industry and crushes innovation.

I'm discussing Microsoft from the perspective of someone who has to work in the computing industry and has a good generally understanding of the negative affects of monopolies. Why is it that the Web is using outrageously complicated work arounds in order to perform really common functions? Oh yeah, because MS controls the lions share of the Web because of their abusive tying of Windows and IE. As a result the entire Web is stuck using half implemented six to ten year old versions of standards.

I could present a dozen other examples of how innovation has ground to a halt. It has been over a decade since the first OS implemented a spell checker that worked in all the programs instead of making them all implement it separately. What percentage of users have that capability today? What one company has dominated the desktop OS field and felt it unimportant to implement as a innovation?

I was thinking about the Microsoft that my friend worked at a few years ago, where the culture was so entrenched with "eating their own dog food" that few in the company were exposed to anything else that is going on in the computer world.

Please. I've worked with lots of former MS employees, from people who were recruited out of college and had little exposure to other technologies from MS, to people who were senior engineers and know more about UNIX than I ever will.

The vaporware/FUD style of killing competition that Slashdot Microsoft does was generally a result of marketing not understanding engineering, making engineering look bad.

Enough internal communications from MS has been exposed at this point that it is clear monopoly abuse is their business strategy and they don't care if that slows innovation in the industry or results in worse products getting into the hands of consumers, so long as it makes them more money.

But I was also talking about MSFT, the lackluster performing stock that has failed to deliver share holder value in years.

MS's stock has been doing fine. Their growth is slowing because their business model of explosive growth via monopoly abuse now takes longer because they're going after bigger, less connected markets.

The founder whose killer instincts led it to crush the competition leveraging each business has left to go fight diseases in Africa, and his replacement is his college drinking buddy that looks like a big fat baffoon mostly mocked as a chair thrower.

Who cares. They haven't stopped breaking the law. They haven't changed their strategy at all to date.

Your Microsoft conspiracy makes sense... but the incompetence theory makes sense as well. They could have meant well, decided on an open standard, had marketing gum up the process and declare everything a lock down to avoid FUD/anti-trust issues, that surfaced with their exciting new standard that they were stunned that nobody wanted.

Anyone who has gone to law school would be able to tell them their introduction of OOXML after ODF came into use, was likely to cause them legal problems. MS has more lawyers on staff than pretty much anyone. MS has demonstrated again and again that breaking the law, reducing choice, slowing innovation, and hurting consumers are all perfectly acceptable to them, so long as their is a business case for it. There is no way you can claim MS is ignorant of their antitrust abuses at this stage in the game. They've been convicted again and again. They paid half a billion dollars settling out a huge lawsuit about a very similar abuse with MS Office to avoid it being declared a monopoly. There is no way they could be ignorant of the illegality of their actions and their are memos about how they were counting on the affects of said actions to make things harder for

Re:Which Microsoft are you talking about?

[alexhmit01]

Apparently you are discussing Slashdot Microsoft, the borg like all powerful and sinister company that dominates the computer industry and crushes innovation.

I'm discussing Microsoft from the perspective of someone who has to work in the computing industry and has a good generally understanding of the negative affects of monopolies. Why is it that the Web is using outrageously complicated work arounds in order to perform really common functions? Oh yeah, because MS controls the lions share of the Web because of their abusive tying of Windows and IE. As a result the entire Web is stuck using half implemented six to ten year old versions of standards.

I could present a dozen other examples of how innovation has ground to a halt. It has been over a decade since the first OS implemented a spell checker that worked in all the programs instead of making them all implement it separately. What percentage of users have that capability today? What one company has dominated the desktop OS field and felt it unimportant to implement as a innovation?

How about some examples that are less than 5 years old? The Monopoly Microsoft (1995 - DOJ settlement in 2001) was a vicious, dangerous company that destroyed companies with FUD and vaporware and crippled the industry. My content has been that recent Microsoft has been a lackluster company that has been destroying shareholder value from incompetence and ego-driven processes, and the company is generally vulnerable to group think and tunnel vision. Your examples are historical, Microsoft's monopoly isn't new, and it's a monopoly on the decline. Look at the failure to push Vista through, and the growth of OS X in the past 5 years. Microsoft is still the market leader, but their "monopoly" status has been seriously undermined in the consumer space by OS X, and Linux's server side growth stopped the ascendancy of NT Server that was going to kill the server market from the bottom up. Plenty of small businesses use little NAS systems for storage that are powered by Linux, and XPe is given away for almost free to keep Microsoft in the game.

The desktop is their strongest monopoly, has almost no growth, failed to push this upgrade cycle, and is losing steam. Linux desktops are doing well in non-US markets. Windows is less innovative than NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP/OS X, no question, and IE is a drag on the web, but those are historical examples... they also crushed much better encyclopedia's during their growth there. XBox 360 is getting beaten by little Wii, and their many pushes into the living room have been major failures.

Microsoft crushed Netscape by making the product free and paying people to give it away. In return they were rewarded with an expensive to maintain piece of software and an Internet division that can't make money even with the lock-in.

I take it you never took an economics course? MS dumps money into developing both Windows and IE. Whenever someone pays for Windows, part of that money goes to developing IE. Because of their actions with regard to IE, a lot more people have to buy Windows, because the Web coupled with a different (cheaper) OS is not a valid option. It is a very good way to make money, aside from it being illegal and even that has not been a significant problem since it has still made them money, even counting all the settlements and lobbying dollars they had to spend.

I hope you are much less of an asshole in real life than online, you missed the point of my argument. Their tying/dumping strategy (technically not dumping because software has a marginal cost of near 0). You assert that IE has made them money through their illegal actions. I suggest that their illegal actions hurt Netscape (which was later settled with AOL who bought Netscape), but I don't believe that it made Microsoft significant money OR hurt consumers. Before their dumping, Netscape wa

Anti 3DS-Max rant

[jabjoe]

I've heard people here say nice things about 3DSMax, and I must inform them that 3DSMax is a very bad peice of software. Sure as a interface it seams ok for knocking things together, but you'll hit a wall at some point, and it will really hurt. I am amazed this CAD package with a mountain of hacks on it is respected by anyone.

It's tech sucks very very very very badly. Get hold of the debug source (not complete source code, but quite a bit, much of it dated 1994). It sucks terribly. In the sdk, you are given the memory of objects directly, up casting and down casting every where (we just talking of (*) casting pointers, and people make mistakes.......). You seen the NULL function call error? Because of a bad upcast somewhere (in biped I think). Dealing with a editable mesh is different then dealling with a editable poly, dealing with a biped is completely different then dealing with a transform hierarchy, dealling with a xref object you must deference it first, ensuring it has a value (crash I've seen in Max). All the interface stuff is hard coded Win32. Defining parameter blocks is like a text book way of how it shouldn't be done. The scene graph is awful, no plug system for connections. From what source I've seen I can only feel sorry for a developer that has to work with it. I feel sorry for me when I have to use the sdk (just headers of the source they let you see, not a proper sdk).

3DSMax is terrible for animation houses because: * it's complete lack of referencing of heirarchies. (Referencing is a must for large work, or rig update requires changing of n files). * biped is a biped, try and do something more then that and your heading for trouble. (People do horrific things like bult together two bipeds trying to do what they should just use better software for). * toolies have a nightmare supporting you.

We have finally dropped it for main stream animation because of years of nightmares supporting it while the maya teams breaze along.

Not looked at Blender, don't do computer art anymore and we don't use it here, but it can't be worse. As it's open source, if/when it reaches critical mass, it will leave Maya and XSI behind (can't have not left 3DSMax behind) as armies of toolies fix bugs and add features.

Rant over, I feel much better now.

Microsoft reaches out to The Gimp

[Metorical]

Can we rewrite your entire user interface for you?

(sorry blatant flamebait but after the Blender intuitive thread going on I couldn't resist)

The rest of the story

[ch-chuck]

M$ft reaches out to Blender - the Blender community recoils in horror, like a child clutching a doll when a notorious toy snatcher reaches out. "Let go, my pretty - the doll wants to be with MEEE!!!!".

I have an idea

[HouseArrest420]

If Microsoft wants to make blender more "productive" in a windows environment....I have one thing to say

STOP GIMPING OPENGL IN WINDOWS YOU FUCKING MONEY HUNGRY BITCHES!!!

sorry if that makes me sound anti MS....I'm not, I actually dual boot and love both windows and linux (probably more so linux though). It's just I've used blender now for about 3 years in freelance work. I find myself using blender mostly in linux because I get anywhere between 200-1000 more FPS for my 3d view in linux, and yeah I know those FPS aren't really visible, but when I start getting into complex scenes those overkill fps' spell the difference between 10fps and 40fps.

Re:I have an idea

[HouseArrest420]

let me elaborate-never, while actually working have I seen these numbers, these numbers were derived using the current open project's benchmark file (Peach is the current project)

it's about drawing resources away from blender

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's partially about drawing resources away from blender. If MS can sucker blender into sharecropping for Windows, then that's not just free/cheap labor to advance the Bill Cult, it's also taking those same resources away from other platforms.

Also, the Bill Cult (is it a religion or just organized crime) is trying to move in on and replace OpenGL.

Doesn't everyone reach out to a blender?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least that's where I discard all the Windows and Office CDs I encounter. I don't want to cut my hands by manually breaking them, after all.

I am just saving Microsoft a step. Really.

Look at how MS helped mozilla

[falconwolf]

I didn't know MS did help Mozilla.

Falcon

Re:*Do* punish people who use Blender on Windows.

[IdeaMan]

We actually don't need to port DX9 to Windows.

Let's make our own platform that's easier to use than DX9. Games are the one market that aren't minor upgrades of last years code. A lot of games are written from scratch. Combine a CD bootable distribution with a really easy to use and powerful gaming library and a couple of gaming companies could get a lot of people familiar with Linux.

Gamers are fickle. We're always after teh new shiny. Wouldn't take that much to get us dual booting. Heck a lot of us have several boxes and we could run Linux full time on one of em.