Mono wasn't ported by Microsoft, and I'm guessing that Microsoft will eventually shut down (via legal means) the VB port. While C# is partially an open standard, which is why Mono can create a C# compiler with no issues, VB is completely closed.
Novell owns Mono, and Microsoft owns Novell. All the.NET code is once again back in Microsoft's hands, and what self-respecting monopoly wouldn't want that?
It's all true. Norton Internet Security is the most annoying malware I've yet seen on my computer. I really need to get a popup blocker to block its annoying yellow popups.
The most frustrating thing is every day I turn on my Windows machine (fortunately that isn't often), Norton cheerfully pops up to tell me "I am not protected from 1 rapidly spreading threat" (the implication being that I need to re-subscribe, since my subscription wore off). It tells me this every freaking day. What is this threat?
It's a rapidly-spreading email attachment. It goes by any number of names, all ending in ".exe". If I were to accidentally download this attachment, save it to my hard drive, and open the file, it could take control of my computer. Therefore I must be continually reminded each day until I buy a new version of Norton to help protect me from doing something like that.
Fortunately this isn't true. Only a small percentage of machines are susceptible to this malicious attack. Everyone else is kindly asked to buy a brand new machine (all of which come with the virus pre-installed).
1. Metric conversions are all decimal. This makes it a hell of a lot easier in a society which primarily uses decimal numbers. 2. The names of metric units are highly standardised, employing the milli/centi/kilo/mega/etc prefixes for simple name-to-quantity translation. 3. All the SI units are designed relative to one another. For instance, 1 cm^3 is equal to 1 ml. 1 J is equal to 1 kg m^2/s^2. Imperial units have arbitrary conversions. 4. Metric is based more often than not on scientific constants, while imperial is based on arbitrary measurements. 5. Metric is standard in most developed countries (outside the US).
The service that you get when you buy a record is the experience of listening to that album whenever you want. Why shouldn't the artist get paid by each person who receives this service?
I think we're walking a delicate line here. The difference being, as with all copyable media, that there is a difference.
With traditional services (plumbing, garbage collection, live performances), there is a one-time service with a one-time benefit.
I think services like architecture are in the middle - along with creating commissioned work - it's a one-time service which is technically a copyable creation (such as blueprints), but which are really only useful to one person and therefore have a one-time benefit as well.
And then you enter the crazy world of bytes where you have the creation of a work being a one-time service with an arbitrarily-large benefit.
And when you're looking at a one-time service with a many-time benefit, you can look at it from two angles. You can do what the parent did and look at it from the benefitter's perspective. That is, you benefit many times, therefore the service is perpetual and deserves continual payment like a service.
The other way of looking at it is looking at it from the creator's perspective. That is, you did actually only do the creative work one time, therefore the service is a single service and deserves a single payment.
There's no real way to settle it, because when you look at it, the "entity" doing the actual perpetual work is the CD-ROM burner (or whatever is being used to copy the data) - and that is cheap/free labour. So we have this social divide, and it's just unfair that the plumber performs one service and gets paid once, while the artist performs one service and gets paid infiniditum.
Of course, traditionally things like this have balanced themselves out somewhat, because it's much cheaper to buy a CD than it is to get a plumber to fix your toilet - the reason being the artist is making cheap copies. It's great for consumers because it means that copyable things are much cheaper (as opposed to everyone who wanted to listen to music having to pay to go to the opera, for example). But pity the poor plumber.
Our trade agreements are not free either. Both are loaded with protections for business in the form of restrictions in copyright, intellectual property, and patent laws.
That's how these "cartels" infect the other countries with anti-circumvention laws - by placing them inside trade agreements. It's "change your copyright laws to suit ours, or we don't trade."
There is another organism which follows this same pattern... do you know what it is? A virus!
Exactly - emacs has its own rules. vi has its own rules. Apple and Windows have slightly different rules to each other anyway. Blender is just its own set of rules, and it works.
Because if I want to burn 500 copies of Linux to CDs, why should I have to pay 500 music levies?
Because paying a levy automatically assumes you're a pirate. It says "hey, man, we're OK with you being a pirate". But you're branded a pirate nonetheless and you pay a price for being a pirate.
Because if you buy CDs in Canada, pay your levy, then download American music, the RIAA is still going to be daggers at you (not sure if they can do anything across the border, but still).
And most importantly, here is a repository of video tutorials, which I learned off. You want to go down to "Contributed Tutorials" and start from the top of that list. It's very slow - it takes the first 2 tutes just to explain moving around the interface. As has been discussed many times in this topic, the interface is crazy and unfamiliar, but well worth learning.
It's not different "just because". It's different because if you take the time (a few hours tops) to learn it, you get more efficient workflow. The first day I used Blender, I started at about 4 in the afternoon. By that night, I was just amazed at how quickly I was hopping around the interface, using keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything.
Once again: The Blender philosophy is not to copy other software so that people can easily switch. It's creating something good from the ground up, hoping that people will take the time to learn it instead of instantly dismissing it for not being a sheep.
That's why each of the jargons you mention has a picture, description, and in most cases, video, on the changelog page.
Most of these features are surprisingly easy for anybody who knows their way around Blender to try out in about a minute. Watch the videos closely to see what buttons they press (or just look for a tutorial). For soft body for example, it takes about 5 buttons to get a cloth to realistically fall over another object.
Blender's got a great interface. Obviously it's "out there" and about as non-standard as you can get.
And yes, there is a great advantage to conventions and interface standards. If a program is going to follow interface standards, then it's quite bad if Ctrl+S is not the save key, for example.
But if a program is so radical that it says "OK, stop. We're throwing away the entire interface convention", then sure, it's going to have a steep learning curve. But given that a user has the time committment to learn the new interface (let's face it: a couple of hours tops), that new interface will be streamlined to maximum efficiency for that particular application.
Once you've gotten used to it and all of its keyboard shortcuts, you'll be amazed at the speed you can jump around. It really works.
Also the GUI interface is brilliant. There are so unbelievably many toolwindows all over the place (and sometimes it's hard to find them), but they're organised so well, and the overall design of being able to zoom in and out around the GUI itself works great (allowing you to organise the GUI however you like).
I particularly like how whenever you download people's example.blend files, they arrange the GUI inside that file so you can see all the important windows open.
What about the game where you want to play through an adventure, to see an epic story unfold, of great heroes and villains, of empires rising and falling, historic alliances being forged and dark threats coming to destroy the world?
Oh I forgot... they left all of that behind in WC3, before they sold out.
Yeah my MIDI cable is serial and I don't have any active computers with serial ports;) I'll dig out an old computer one of these days and give it a go.
Yeah it has a standard (I assume) MIDI-to-serial cable. So it should work. I don't know what the Windows drivers are for since it doesn't upload samples to the computer. But in Windows IIRC the drivers were needed to get MIDI programs to recognise it (but perhaps I could have installed a generic driver).
Pity my newer computers don't have serial so I can't try it out without digging up the oldies.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all true. Norton Internet Security is the most annoying malware I've yet seen on my computer. I really need to get a popup blocker to block its annoying yellow popups.
The most frustrating thing is every day I turn on my Windows machine (fortunately that isn't often), Norton cheerfully pops up to tell me "I am not protected from 1 rapidly spreading threat" (the implication being that I need to re-subscribe, since my subscription wore off). It tells me this every freaking day. What is this threat?
It's a rapidly-spreading email attachment. It goes by any number of names, all ending in ".exe". If I were to accidentally download this attachment, save it to my hard drive, and open the file, it could take control of my computer. Therefore I must be continually reminded each day until I buy a new version of Norton to help protect me from doing something like that.
Give me a break.
1. Metric conversions are all decimal. This makes it a hell of a lot easier in a society which primarily uses decimal numbers.
2. The names of metric units are highly standardised, employing the milli/centi/kilo/mega/etc prefixes for simple name-to-quantity translation.
3. All the SI units are designed relative to one another. For instance, 1 cm^3 is equal to 1 ml. 1 J is equal to 1 kg m^2/s^2. Imperial units have arbitrary conversions.
4. Metric is based more often than not on scientific constants, while imperial is based on arbitrary measurements.
5. Metric is standard in most developed countries (outside the US).
This isn't about Americans using non-standards. It's about them forcing it on the rest of the world.
With traditional services (plumbing, garbage collection, live performances), there is a one-time service with a one-time benefit.
I think services like architecture are in the middle - along with creating commissioned work - it's a one-time service which is technically a copyable creation (such as blueprints), but which are really only useful to one person and therefore have a one-time benefit as well.
And then you enter the crazy world of bytes where you have the creation of a work being a one-time service with an arbitrarily-large benefit.
And when you're looking at a one-time service with a many-time benefit, you can look at it from two angles. You can do what the parent did and look at it from the benefitter's perspective. That is, you benefit many times, therefore the service is perpetual and deserves continual payment like a service.
The other way of looking at it is looking at it from the creator's perspective. That is, you did actually only do the creative work one time, therefore the service is a single service and deserves a single payment.
There's no real way to settle it, because when you look at it, the "entity" doing the actual perpetual work is the CD-ROM burner (or whatever is being used to copy the data) - and that is cheap/free labour. So we have this social divide, and it's just unfair that the plumber performs one service and gets paid once, while the artist performs one service and gets paid infiniditum.
Of course, traditionally things like this have balanced themselves out somewhat, because it's much cheaper to buy a CD than it is to get a plumber to fix your toilet - the reason being the artist is making cheap copies. It's great for consumers because it means that copyable things are much cheaper (as opposed to everyone who wanted to listen to music having to pay to go to the opera, for example). But pity the poor plumber.
(Am I making sense? It's 5:30 AM...)
There is another organism which follows this same pattern
It's refreshing to see a new pun "Light bulbs get the flick".
In the Australian media today they've all been making "globe" puns such as "saving the globe by turning them off". Shameful!
Exactly - emacs has its own rules. vi has its own rules. Apple and Windows have slightly different rules to each other anyway. Blender is just its own set of rules, and it works.
Oh yeah you're right. I never liked the young guy. He always seemed a bit ... what's the word ... emo?
In fact that whole movie was so weird and confusing. I liked certain parts of it, but not the overall story.
Because if I want to burn 500 copies of Linux to CDs, why should I have to pay 500 music levies?
Because paying a levy automatically assumes you're a pirate. It says "hey, man, we're OK with you being a pirate". But you're branded a pirate nonetheless and you pay a price for being a pirate.
Because if you buy CDs in Canada, pay your levy, then download American music, the RIAA is still going to be daggers at you (not sure if they can do anything across the border, but still).
Someone get the tranquilizers...
Lol.
Emo is the old dude in the official Blender movie, Elephant's Dream.
Here is a list of wikibooks on Blender, including:
- Here is a good wikibook about learning blender.
- Here is the definitive list of Blender tutorials.
And most importantly, here is a repository of video tutorials, which I learned off. You want to go down to "Contributed Tutorials" and start from the top of that list. It's very slow - it takes the first 2 tutes just to explain moving around the interface. As has been discussed many times in this topic, the interface is crazy and unfamiliar, but well worth learning.It's not different "just because". It's different because if you take the time (a few hours tops) to learn it, you get more efficient workflow. The first day I used Blender, I started at about 4 in the afternoon. By that night, I was just amazed at how quickly I was hopping around the interface, using keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything.
Once again: The Blender philosophy is not to copy other software so that people can easily switch. It's creating something good from the ground up, hoping that people will take the time to learn it instead of instantly dismissing it for not being a sheep.
That's why each of the jargons you mention has a picture, description, and in most cases, video, on the changelog page.
Most of these features are surprisingly easy for anybody who knows their way around Blender to try out in about a minute. Watch the videos closely to see what buttons they press (or just look for a tutorial). For soft body for example, it takes about 5 buttons to get a cloth to realistically fall over another object.
Haha, I feel exactly the same.
:)
Luckily my brother is an ace with Blender. I'm going to get him to make some realtime animations and export them so I can make a 3D game
Well it will look like Blender, not fugly Aero, so it will help ease the pain of using Vista.
Blender's got a great interface. Obviously it's "out there" and about as non-standard as you can get.
.blend files, they arrange the GUI inside that file so you can see all the important windows open.
And yes, there is a great advantage to conventions and interface standards. If a program is going to follow interface standards, then it's quite bad if Ctrl+S is not the save key, for example.
But if a program is so radical that it says "OK, stop. We're throwing away the entire interface convention", then sure, it's going to have a steep learning curve. But given that a user has the time committment to learn the new interface (let's face it: a couple of hours tops), that new interface will be streamlined to maximum efficiency for that particular application.
Once you've gotten used to it and all of its keyboard shortcuts, you'll be amazed at the speed you can jump around. It really works.
Also the GUI interface is brilliant. There are so unbelievably many toolwindows all over the place (and sometimes it's hard to find them), but they're organised so well, and the overall design of being able to zoom in and out around the GUI itself works great (allowing you to organise the GUI however you like).
I particularly like how whenever you download people's example
What about the game where you want to play through an adventure, to see an epic story unfold, of great heroes and villains, of empires rising and falling, historic alliances being forged and dark threats coming to destroy the world?
Oh I forgot... they left all of that behind in WC3, before they sold out.
Thanks!
Yeah my MIDI cable is serial and I don't have any active computers with serial ports ;) I'll dig out an old computer one of these days and give it a go.
Yeah it has a standard (I assume) MIDI-to-serial cable. So it should work. I don't know what the Windows drivers are for since it doesn't upload samples to the computer. But in Windows IIRC the drivers were needed to get MIDI programs to recognise it (but perhaps I could have installed a generic driver).
Pity my newer computers don't have serial so I can't try it out without digging up the oldies.