Blender' UI is there to point you at the keyboard
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New Blender Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree, Blender's UI could use a lot of work. gmax/3ds max have a much better UI. I've spent lots of time under both Blender and gmax, and Blender's UI makes it very hard to do anything well and quickly. Since then, I've kept Blender off of my computer...
Then you are cutting yourself off from a very powerful tool. The Blender UI is simply a training aid to get you up to speed on the keyboard shortcuts. Once you realise that Blender is built around one hand on the keyboard firing up functions and the mouse in the 3D view to do the editing, you'll find that it is fast. However, like many powerful utilities, you must get up the learning slope to be productive with Blender.
It should also be pointed out that the Blender UI continues to be cleaned up and made more consistent over each release, so if you haven't seen it since 2.32, you are in for a surprise.
Okay - the subject is probably overkill. Standards change all the time. Or rather, standards gain extensions and new features all the time. I work with DRDA (a database networking protocol to encapsulate data passed from client to server and back) and it is constantly being added to to cope with new situations and requirements. That's not to say it's a bad standard - the core is solid and does (mostly) what database people need it to do. When we need it to do something new, we make proposals. The DRDA review board takes a look at it. Other people who use DRDA get an opportunity to make changes or block it entirely. We make changes to the proposal and it goes around again. Eventually, once consensus is reached, it gets formally written up and becomes a part of the next iteration of the DRDA standard.
When a standard stops evolving, it is because people no longer need it to do something new. That can be for entirely good reasons (it does everything one could conceivable need) but it does mean that that standard has reached it's natural limits.
ODF continues to evolve because people keep needing documents to do new stuff. Collaboration, equations, macros, formulas are all areas of change. A good standard recognizes that change will happen and builds that change right into the core structure. ODF has an extensions mechanism for precisely this reason. You will still be able to open an ODF version 1.2 document with an editor that only supports ODF version 1.0. Any features that are not supported by the ODF 1.0 editor won't be usable, visible or editable but that won't stop you getting at the rest of the data.
Bird flu currently seems much deadlier, as more than half of the humans infected have died.
Be careful - I'd think about rewording that to "Bird flu currently seems much deadlier, as more than half of the humans known to be infected have died". We really don't have a good idea of how many people have been infected - we have a biased sample of the worst cases being reported (it doesn't get much worse than being dead).
That's not to say that Avian Flu isn't deadly - it is. It kills a significant fraction of the infected population. I suspect that the mortality rate is closer to 10% than 60% though when it gets exposed to a wider audience. I just hope we have an effective treatment (vaccine or medication) by that point.
IIRC (correct me if i'm wrong), but i think OpenOffice can only handle the word-processor part of Open XML, not the rest of it (spreadsheet, presentation, etc).
OpenOffice.org is a complete office suite, comprising Word Processor (Writer), Presentations (Impress), Spreadsheets (Calc) and Vector Graphics/Diagrams (Draw). The Open Document Format (ODF) is able to encapsulate all these document types.
Whether the Office Open XML (OOXML) to ODF convertor can handle all of these transformations, I don't know. I'm not holding my breath for a complete converter from OOXML to ODF either - 6000+ pages of OOXML spec is going to be hard to read, let alone code all the different options into it. At least with ODF, they kept it around 700 pages.
Bias-free semiconductors never really took off. That whooshing sound was the noise of this joke whizzing over the heads of the moderators... Clearly, they are without potential.
If from the beginning people didn't pirate windows, home computer use of windows would have been MUCH less. These people would then have not demanded windows for their work computers. I remember it the other way around, when 3.1 came out we practically had to force it on our users. The home pirating began when users were required to submit things in Word and Excel format and they needed to access these documents from home. Before that most people that had computers seemed perfectly content with Lotus and Wordperfect and if not they got a Mac.
It's actually a logical progression.
Work forces the employee to use Windows.
Therefore the employee needs Windows at home.
Therefore the employee takes the Windows install discs home and installs it, because they aren't going to pay for something that Work forces on them.
The rest of it is just inevitability. Employee gets used to all the quirks of Windows through time at work. Employee then expects every application to work along the same lines as Windows, having spent time learning the Windows-way.
That's the double-edged nature of only using one operating system and one set of apps - switching becomes much harder because the user is only aware of one way of doing things. Everything else is different enough to cause initial friction and only the persistent user will work through that learning stage again.
Costco only buys things it can get in large batches at a good price... the Wii isn't there, and it took nearly six months for the DS Lite to show up there; XBox 360 took a while, too. Note that Costco's website (http://www.costco.ca/en-CA/Common/Category.aspx?c at=20561&eCat=BCCA|20428|20561&whse=BCCA&topnav=) lists Wii and PS3, but both are "sold out"... I should've checked the local one to see how many they had in stock.
So, in Canada at least, Sony is already dumping PS3s onto wholesaler warehouse stores.
It's usual to find overstocked or end-of-line stuff there.
Costco's not driven by low-end stuff - it's not playing in the Walmart marketplace. It's demographics are weighted to the middle-earning-bracket. I'd say that Sony is delighted that Costco is stocking the PS3 - the people shopping in there are more likely to purchase something in this price bracket. Costco's marketplace is driven by cheap storage costs and bulk purchases of mid-range items. It does not deal in end-of-line stuff unless it getting a major price cut on it and I don't see the Costco price for the PS3 on the site right now.
After all, Sony is interested in selling as many PS3's as possible at it's current manufacturing supply cost (i.e. the price that the retailers pay, not to be confused with the MSRP). All the time that places are selling out of PS3's, Sony is going to be happy. Right now, the PS3 is (one of?) the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market and has a small PS3 game library. Once the sales start to slow, look to Sony for price cuts to continue the selling. The interesting point will be this summer - if the PS3 sees a number (at least five) of must-have games in time for the summer vacations and a price drop of US$100, I suspect that the PS3 will reach parity with the number of XBox 360 systems.
I must be mad making predictions:-) Be interesting to see how they play out.
Cheers,
End of June, I expect. An iPhone or iPod sized device with that screen that I can put my own apps on? Sold.
Err - no you won't. Apple has already affirmed that you will not be able to put your own applications on the iPhone. Only Apple-supplied/licensed applications will be allowed on the phone, partly because of the possibilities of screwing up the cell-phone network with a badly behaved application.
And that is what customers want... Purdy shiney flashey!
No offence, but what's wrong with this? People generally care about the aesthetics of the things they use every day. Well polished things are generally made better, and any degree of interface simplicity when compounded over millions of repetitions adds greatly to productivity.
[snip]
Window's interface has been a bottleneck to productivity for years. That thing's a sewer of random accumulated refuse, and any movement to clean it up is a positive development.
People are drawn to flashy interfaces. If that interface happens to be a beautifully streamlined, productive interface, so much the better but it doesn't have to be that way. Witness the ever-marching stream of faked flashy interfaces (probably running Flash!) on CSI - people seem to believe that that actually represents the cutting edge of scientific software.
Install Beryl or Looking Glass on a laptop and use it for presentations at a conference. You can absolutely guaranteed that there will be a queue of people asking about it after your talk. That it really does very little to improve productivity is totally irrelevant - it looks cool.
Interface design for maximum productivity seems (to me) to revolve around two concepts - discoverability and consistency. You must be able to figure out how something works by using the interface and once you have solved a problem once, you should be able to use that knowledge in all similar situations. Using the 3D capabilities may or may not aid in that interface. Will Vista be an improvement in UI from a productivity perspective? Only time will tell.
Perhaps -- I honestly don't remember the details now, except that I wrestled with it for an hour or two before having one of those "hang on, my time's worth more than this" moments and chucking in a cheap graphics card that *was* supported:-). (And yes, Ubuntu 5.10 does work -- that's what it's running now.)
It's not really critical to know the chipset if you have a working solution:-) I fought with XFree86 for years fixing up configuration issues for various colleagues and friends - a lot of problems come down to incorrect drivers and monitors with messed up EDID settings. Xorg initially changed a few paths around and some naming conventions. It's most likely the xorg.conf that Ubuntu set up would work if copied to an equivalent FC4.
A year or so back, I tried upgrading a Red Hat 9 machine to the latest Fedora. The video chipset, perfectly functional under RH9, wasn't supported by Fedora.
Between RH9 and FC4, XFree86 was taken out back and shot. Xorg replaced it. Now Xorg took a snapshot of XFree86 before the license changes hit so you'd expect that all the chipsets that XFree86 4.3rc2 had would be supported. So now I'm curious. What chipset do you have?
Almost all the Linux distros have moved to Xorg a long time ago, so if FC4 is busted for you and, say, Ubuntu 5.10 works (being about the same age), it's probably down to a configuration problem.
It's been the mantra for ages. Corporations spend money on anything that may be beneficial to them so it's hardly surprising that they fund their own research. However, rather than looking at where the corporations are spending their money, it might help to look at WHY they are spending this money.
Oil extraction (not just consumption) produces greenhouse gases. Oil extraction from oil sands is particularly difficult and burns a lot of energy, producing a lot of carbon dioxide. If governments start taxing CO2 production or any equivalent scheme (environmental damage tax, etc), the oil industries are going to be hit at both ends of their financials - once in production and once again in sales. It's going to dent those profit margins. Of course, that means that the oil price will rise again but that too is not necessarily beneficial to the Oil companies. As oil prices rise, competing energy technologies that are currently too expensive become more reasonable. The real nightmare for the Oil companies is to become a minor player compared to other technologies, be it solar, wind or nuclear. So they'll spend any amount of money to ensure that governments hesitate as long as possible because fundamentally, the status quo supports their dominance in the energy markets.
It takes many thousands of years for even uncommon languages to disappear. And if they were even remotely similar to our own, they can be deciphered without any advanced knowledge. So, I'd be worried about the long-term chances of a complex language like Chinese to be preserved, but anything with Latin roots, that uses a small alphabet should do fine.
A thousand years for a language to disappear? All it takes is a generation who doesn't speak it and it might as well be considered gone. A language is often two interdepenent parts - spoken and written. Often - but not always. You could take the shining example of the Canadian approach to the First Nations peoples in the last century, where students were forced to learn exclusively in English, rather than their native tongue. An entire generation suddenly loses contact with the language of their parents. That would be devastating enough for, say, french speakers. Now consider that most of the First Nations languages and dialects have no written form. Needless to say, in hindsight apologies have been made but it certainly wiped out dialects that had survived centuries until then.
I think the corollary in IT is also important. Any physical media which is not used for a generation of technology (maybe less than 10 years) quickly becomes difficult to read as the machinery required to read it fails. Wait thirty years and it will cost you many times over to retrieve that information. The only hope for a lot of old data is to constantly move it onto the ubiquitous storage of the day, time after time. Anything missed will, sooner rather than later, be lost.
He was talking about an induction hob - ie there is no element to stay hot. Your gas stove, however, will heat up all the ironwork around the burner that holds your pans in place, so there is still a risk of burning.
Except that nice glass top on your induction hob stove also gets very hot during prolonged cooking and can also burn you. As far as safety goes, always assume the stove to be hot. That way, you might keep your fingerprints!
Much less expensive to use a flat bed scanner that has back illumination.
I bought an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner a couple of years ago. It comes with negative frames to hold the negatives at the correct distance off the glass, including the 4"x5" negative size you require. I don't know about newer models - this one has worked well enough for me.
That said, you will have to be prepared to spend the time to calibrate the scanner if you want to do professional-level colour work. For old negatives, your chances of getting a colour target for calibration on the same negative material is probably zero and you will have to do it by eye. However, I assume that your old negatives are black and white, so any calibration is pretty arbitrary!
Be VERY careful about dust. Clean your scanner glass plate carefully with non-scratch lint free cloths. I use a liquid lens cleaner to keep it near perfect - your local camera store will have appropriate supplies. A dust cover is also a good idea and don't keep your scanner in a bedroom - matresses spread dust around like it's going out of fashion. A blow-brush like the ones you would use for cleaning an SLR camera is also a good idea to blow the dust off the negatives. When you are scanning at 1600 or 3200 dpi, a small dust mote is a huge blot on your image.
Lastly, the Epson scanners are pretty much perfectly supported on Linux by the SANE software. That's the main reason I purchased this model. Epson gets some serious props for documenting and supporting Linux on it's devices.
If you are a small game developer, looking to develope a product for PROFIT, then the Linux PS3 is not an option. Where as, XNA and Xbox Live, it is quite easy - so long as you are OK with only selling on Xbox Live, and Microsoft gives you the licence to sell on Xbox Live.
You have a lot of good points - XNA is (probably) a good set of tools for producing games for the XBox. Any commercial game developer who exclusively targets the Linux on PS3 is probably going to run out of money sooner rather than later.
Nothing a developer produces via XNA is going to be aimed at anything other than the XBox platform (unless someone provides a porting route to Windows/x86). That isn't the case for a game written using cross-platform libraries for Linux. Assuming that such a game has modest requirements, there is little to stop that game being made available[1] for Linux x86, Linux x86-64, Linux PPC, Linux on Sharp Zaurus, Linux on GP2X, Linux PS3, etc. Now extend that to any software category - on Linux, you have lots of options. My main point was that comparing XNA/XBox to Linux/PS3 is, at best, disingenuous and misleading because it is comparing a game development toolkit for one platform to a general OS environment with apps, utilities and development tools.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
[1] I work on writing portable code for multiple architectures - it's not hard to write code that works everywhere IF you wrap all the platform-specific parts up separately.
With modern packaging systems, there's occasionally a dependency that is just automatically marked and installed, but mostly it just becomes impossible to install something -- and I fear to install from source as in option 2 above, for I may break the packaging system. A package depends on packages X, Y, and Z, each of which have ten dependencies, and most of which conflict with others, or are reported as "won't be installed" but no reason is given. If I find a way to force it, it doesn't work, or it breaks other packages, or most likely it breaks the packaging system.
If you are running a distro (say Fedora Core 6) against potentially inconsistent repositories (say ATRPMs), then you need a package manager that is smarter than APT or YUM. I've used Smart Package Manager to solve these complex problems for a while. It's not perfect - it may hang if you attempt to upgrade an entire release using it - but it is capable of downgrading parts of your system to match up unusual RPMs. Of course, if you stick "odd" RPMs into your system, you will have to remove them before attempting to upgrading to, say, Fedora Core 7 if you wish to retain your sanity. Package dependencies are a simple mechanism to tell you what a particular package needs. Working out all the kinks requires some pretty good graph code.
I've run RPM-based and DEB-based systems for many years. I've never hesitated to install from source if there is no RPM available for a particular package. You only break your packaging system if you overwrite the libraries under RPM/DEB control with newer ones. Almost all source packages install into/usr/local by default and will not (normally) conflict with anything you have installed from your distro. If you wish to be really paranoid or you know that there will be problems, you can always install into an entirely separate directory tree (such as/opt).I do this for 2.3.x development versions of the GIMP, for example, where the development libraries *might* conflict with the installed GIMP 2.2 ones.
Of course, you can be smarter too - you can go the next step and actually build packages for your system. Many packages have.spec files around. Similar instructions are available for DEB packages too. checkinstall can be used to tag files from a source install, making it easier to pull the files out too.
I don't doubt for a second that Microsoft has put considerable time, energy and work into making XNA a decent development platform for games on the XBOX 360. Generally, their development tools are pretty reasonable (as long as you don't need to interface them into anything non-Microsoft). So it wouldn't surprise me if XNA actually does what it claims - allows you to make games!
It is interesting to see the Microsoft PR get out there and compare XNA on XBOX360 to Linux on PS3. Of course, if you are going to make this comparison, you had better play up your strengths (easy game creation) and ignore there rest (full operating system, full development suite, lots of libraries available). Restricted to game development, the comparison is probably fair - for the fledging game developer who already has an XBOX 360, XNA probably allows them to put a game together fairly easily, certainly compared with taking a huge and diverse tool kit like a Linux install.
What this PR totally ignores is that XNA allows you to make games. Linux allows you to do whatever you want to do. If you are into game development on Linux and you want something to create games, then a port of Blender to the PS3 and the Blender Game Engine would probably be of most use to you. Or you could use the SDL libraries to get a start on some 2D stuff. Or you could play around with the Quake 1/2/3 source code and try and use that. Or wait for the GP2X games to get ported over. Or you could build a multimedia box. Or a fortune reader!
So, the comparison XNA/XBOX 360 is better than Linux/PS3 is deeply flawed. It may be true (for now) from one angle. It just isn't the whole story.
As a final thought, you can play GTA3 in "classic" mode, with a top-down view, i wander how fps's might fare with a top-down view, you'd need vertical autoaim and sniping would be troublesome but it's not the giant leap you might think it is.
For those of you who wonder how a FPS might play in top down, the one that springs immediately to mind is the awesome Alien Swarm mod for UT2k4. This was a team-based top-down FPS shooter, Marines Vs Aliens style. Of course, there is now a chase-cam-style third-person sequel in the works although the News page appears to be a little quiet.
I am more interested to see if the ODF have addressed the usability issues which were raised.
ODF (Open Document) does not have usability issues. Period. It is a document format, nothing more. Now if you are talking about OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, KOffice, the next version of Wordperfect or any of the word processes/document systems that support ODF, then you might have a point. All the talk of ODF having usability issues is just the sound of FUD smacking the media around. Accessibility for the disabled should ultimately be superior with the ODF format because it is a completely open, machine readable format and therefore should be easily transformed into what ever media is required for disabled access (Large Print, audio - speech and speech recognition, braille, etc.).
My point is that no business that isn't in the IT business can afford to re-install all of their operating systems on all of their machines every 6 months (like they'd have to with Ubuntu).
Which would be valid if you were talking about Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). Businesses interested in long term planning and stability would be using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) for precisely this reason - a five year guarantee of support matters in business. It will be interesting to see if that does get extended for some customers. My experience is that businesses will often pay their vendor to get support past the normal End-of-Life date for a product.
It looks interesting, but I wonder if it can be pressure sensetive
Well, given it works by accoustic localization, the answer is probably 'no'.
But it could be impact sensitive fairly easily. You might need to calibrate the surface to establish an even impact response across the entire area. This would be interesting for experimental musical implementations. You could switch instruments fairly easily too - I often practice piano on the edge of my desk and who hasn't dragged out the pencils and played out the drum solo to music?:-)
Someone suggested pairing this up to a projector. You could project an image of a keyboard (QWERTY/Piano/whatever) or drum kit onto the surface as appropriate. The only weakness is that any sort of drag-like behaviour might prove tricky. Maybe if you had an active signal generator which you could cause your hand to reflect the signals in some fashion, such changes could be detected by the acoustic pickups. Yet another step on the road to the Minority Report style interfaces.
If you liked the original Scorched Earth, then Scorched 3D takes the original and sticks it into the modern era. Best of all, it's free, runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc., has hot-seat multiplayer and networked multiplayer and looks gorgeous. Oh - and there are modifications, so if you feel the need for planet-cracking weaponary, you can try the Apocalypse mod.
The comment about rain scrubbing is utterly nonsensical. It shows no time component and is irrelevant because rain doesn't fall evenly over every square meter of the planet.
Even more importantly, rain only falls in the lowest parts of the atmosphere. Anything above 40,000 feet won't ever see a drop of rain until it falls to lower altitudes. So expecting rain to clean the entire atmosphere is, at best, a slow process.
... when it is already available in most 3D design packages?
If you have used a 3D package (Blender, Maya, etc.) the first time you texture a model is probably done with a procedural texture. If you have special needs for a texture, then you might start thinking about UV mapping or projection mapping. If you just need rock, grass, water, wood or skin, reach for the procedural materials first and worry about overlays later.
Now there is a gap to be filled between the material properties available in a 3D editor and the rendering of the world in a game engine but it's hardly a wide one to fill. For an open source package like Blender, the gap is narrowed further by the ability to see precisely how the materials are calculated in the editor. I suspect that there already exist such capabilities in the high-end 3D graphics toolkits.
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Then you are cutting yourself off from a very powerful tool. The Blender UI is simply a training aid to get you up to speed on the keyboard shortcuts. Once you realise that Blender is built around one hand on the keyboard firing up functions and the mouse in the 3D view to do the editing, you'll find that it is fast. However, like many powerful utilities, you must get up the learning slope to be productive with Blender.
It should also be pointed out that the Blender UI continues to be cleaned up and made more consistent over each release, so if you haven't seen it since 2.32, you are in for a surprise.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Okay - the subject is probably overkill. Standards change all the time. Or rather, standards gain extensions and new features all the time. I work with DRDA (a database networking protocol to encapsulate data passed from client to server and back) and it is constantly being added to to cope with new situations and requirements. That's not to say it's a bad standard - the core is solid and does (mostly) what database people need it to do. When we need it to do something new, we make proposals. The DRDA review board takes a look at it. Other people who use DRDA get an opportunity to make changes or block it entirely. We make changes to the proposal and it goes around again. Eventually, once consensus is reached, it gets formally written up and becomes a part of the next iteration of the DRDA standard.
When a standard stops evolving, it is because people no longer need it to do something new. That can be for entirely good reasons (it does everything one could conceivable need) but it does mean that that standard has reached it's natural limits.
ODF continues to evolve because people keep needing documents to do new stuff. Collaboration, equations, macros, formulas are all areas of change. A good standard recognizes that change will happen and builds that change right into the core structure. ODF has an extensions mechanism for precisely this reason. You will still be able to open an ODF version 1.2 document with an editor that only supports ODF version 1.0. Any features that are not supported by the ODF 1.0 editor won't be usable, visible or editable but that won't stop you getting at the rest of the data.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Be careful - I'd think about rewording that to "Bird flu currently seems much deadlier, as more than half of the humans known to be infected have died". We really don't have a good idea of how many people have been infected - we have a biased sample of the worst cases being reported (it doesn't get much worse than being dead).
That's not to say that Avian Flu isn't deadly - it is. It kills a significant fraction of the infected population. I suspect that the mortality rate is closer to 10% than 60% though when it gets exposed to a wider audience. I just hope we have an effective treatment (vaccine or medication) by that point.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
OpenOffice.org is a complete office suite, comprising Word Processor (Writer), Presentations (Impress), Spreadsheets (Calc) and Vector Graphics/Diagrams (Draw). The Open Document Format (ODF) is able to encapsulate all these document types.
Whether the Office Open XML (OOXML) to ODF convertor can handle all of these transformations, I don't know. I'm not holding my breath for a complete converter from OOXML to ODF either - 6000+ pages of OOXML spec is going to be hard to read, let alone code all the different options into it. At least with ODF, they kept it around 700 pages.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It's actually a logical progression.
The rest of it is just inevitability. Employee gets used to all the quirks of Windows through time at work. Employee then expects every application to work along the same lines as Windows, having spent time learning the Windows-way.
That's the double-edged nature of only using one operating system and one set of apps - switching becomes much harder because the user is only aware of one way of doing things. Everything else is different enough to cause initial friction and only the persistent user will work through that learning stage again.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
So, in Canada at least, Sony is already dumping PS3s onto wholesaler warehouse stores.
It's usual to find overstocked or end-of-line stuff there.
Costco's not driven by low-end stuff - it's not playing in the Walmart marketplace. It's demographics are weighted to the middle-earning-bracket. I'd say that Sony is delighted that Costco is stocking the PS3 - the people shopping in there are more likely to purchase something in this price bracket. Costco's marketplace is driven by cheap storage costs and bulk purchases of mid-range items. It does not deal in end-of-line stuff unless it getting a major price cut on it and I don't see the Costco price for the PS3 on the site right now.
After all, Sony is interested in selling as many PS3's as possible at it's current manufacturing supply cost (i.e. the price that the retailers pay, not to be confused with the MSRP). All the time that places are selling out of PS3's, Sony is going to be happy. Right now, the PS3 is (one of?) the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market and has a small PS3 game library. Once the sales start to slow, look to Sony for price cuts to continue the selling. The interesting point will be this summer - if the PS3 sees a number (at least five) of must-have games in time for the summer vacations and a price drop of US$100, I suspect that the PS3 will reach parity with the number of XBox 360 systems.
I must be mad making predictions :-) Be interesting to see how they play out.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Err - no you won't. Apple has already affirmed that you will not be able to put your own applications on the iPhone. Only Apple-supplied/licensed applications will be allowed on the phone, partly because of the possibilities of screwing up the cell-phone network with a badly behaved application.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
No offence, but what's wrong with this? People generally care about the aesthetics of the things they use every day. Well polished things are generally made better, and any degree of interface simplicity when compounded over millions of repetitions adds greatly to productivity.
[snip]
Window's interface has been a bottleneck to productivity for years. That thing's a sewer of random accumulated refuse, and any movement to clean it up is a positive development.
People are drawn to flashy interfaces. If that interface happens to be a beautifully streamlined, productive interface, so much the better but it doesn't have to be that way. Witness the ever-marching stream of faked flashy interfaces (probably running Flash!) on CSI - people seem to believe that that actually represents the cutting edge of scientific software.
Install Beryl or Looking Glass on a laptop and use it for presentations at a conference. You can absolutely guaranteed that there will be a queue of people asking about it after your talk. That it really does very little to improve productivity is totally irrelevant - it looks cool.
Interface design for maximum productivity seems (to me) to revolve around two concepts - discoverability and consistency. You must be able to figure out how something works by using the interface and once you have solved a problem once, you should be able to use that knowledge in all similar situations. Using the 3D capabilities may or may not aid in that interface. Will Vista be an improvement in UI from a productivity perspective? Only time will tell.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Perhaps -- I honestly don't remember the details now, except that I wrestled with it for an hour or two before having one of those "hang on, my time's worth more than this" moments and chucking in a cheap graphics card that *was* supported :-). (And yes, Ubuntu 5.10 does work -- that's what it's running now.)
It's not really critical to know the chipset if you have a working solution :-) I fought with XFree86 for years fixing up configuration issues for various colleagues and friends - a lot of problems come down to incorrect drivers and monitors with messed up EDID settings. Xorg initially changed a few paths around and some naming conventions. It's most likely the xorg.conf that Ubuntu set up would work if copied to an equivalent FC4.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
A year or so back, I tried upgrading a Red Hat 9 machine to the latest Fedora. The video chipset, perfectly functional under RH9, wasn't supported by Fedora.
Between RH9 and FC4, XFree86 was taken out back and shot. Xorg replaced it. Now Xorg took a snapshot of XFree86 before the license changes hit so you'd expect that all the chipsets that XFree86 4.3rc2 had would be supported. So now I'm curious. What chipset do you have?
Almost all the Linux distros have moved to Xorg a long time ago, so if FC4 is busted for you and, say, Ubuntu 5.10 works (being about the same age), it's probably down to a configuration problem.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Follow the money.
It's been the mantra for ages. Corporations spend money on anything that may be beneficial to them so it's hardly surprising that they fund their own research. However, rather than looking at where the corporations are spending their money, it might help to look at WHY they are spending this money.
Oil extraction (not just consumption) produces greenhouse gases. Oil extraction from oil sands is particularly difficult and burns a lot of energy, producing a lot of carbon dioxide. If governments start taxing CO2 production or any equivalent scheme (environmental damage tax, etc), the oil industries are going to be hit at both ends of their financials - once in production and once again in sales. It's going to dent those profit margins. Of course, that means that the oil price will rise again but that too is not necessarily beneficial to the Oil companies. As oil prices rise, competing energy technologies that are currently too expensive become more reasonable. The real nightmare for the Oil companies is to become a minor player compared to other technologies, be it solar, wind or nuclear. So they'll spend any amount of money to ensure that governments hesitate as long as possible because fundamentally, the status quo supports their dominance in the energy markets.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It takes many thousands of years for even uncommon languages to disappear. And if they were even remotely similar to our own, they can be deciphered without any advanced knowledge. So, I'd be worried about the long-term chances of a complex language like Chinese to be preserved, but anything with Latin roots, that uses a small alphabet should do fine.
A thousand years for a language to disappear? All it takes is a generation who doesn't speak it and it might as well be considered gone. A language is often two interdepenent parts - spoken and written. Often - but not always. You could take the shining example of the Canadian approach to the First Nations peoples in the last century, where students were forced to learn exclusively in English, rather than their native tongue. An entire generation suddenly loses contact with the language of their parents. That would be devastating enough for, say, french speakers. Now consider that most of the First Nations languages and dialects have no written form. Needless to say, in hindsight apologies have been made but it certainly wiped out dialects that had survived centuries until then.
I think the corollary in IT is also important. Any physical media which is not used for a generation of technology (maybe less than 10 years) quickly becomes difficult to read as the machinery required to read it fails. Wait thirty years and it will cost you many times over to retrieve that information. The only hope for a lot of old data is to constantly move it onto the ubiquitous storage of the day, time after time. Anything missed will, sooner rather than later, be lost.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
He was talking about an induction hob - ie there is no element to stay hot. Your gas stove, however, will heat up all the ironwork around the burner that holds your pans in place, so there is still a risk of burning.
Except that nice glass top on your induction hob stove also gets very hot during prolonged cooking and can also burn you. As far as safety goes, always assume the stove to be hot. That way, you might keep your fingerprints!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Much less expensive to use a flat bed scanner that has back illumination.
I bought an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner a couple of years ago. It comes with negative frames to hold the negatives at the correct distance off the glass, including the 4"x5" negative size you require. I don't know about newer models - this one has worked well enough for me.
That said, you will have to be prepared to spend the time to calibrate the scanner if you want to do professional-level colour work. For old negatives, your chances of getting a colour target for calibration on the same negative material is probably zero and you will have to do it by eye. However, I assume that your old negatives are black and white, so any calibration is pretty arbitrary!
Be VERY careful about dust. Clean your scanner glass plate carefully with non-scratch lint free cloths. I use a liquid lens cleaner to keep it near perfect - your local camera store will have appropriate supplies. A dust cover is also a good idea and don't keep your scanner in a bedroom - matresses spread dust around like it's going out of fashion. A blow-brush like the ones you would use for cleaning an SLR camera is also a good idea to blow the dust off the negatives. When you are scanning at 1600 or 3200 dpi, a small dust mote is a huge blot on your image.
Lastly, the Epson scanners are pretty much perfectly supported on Linux by the SANE software. That's the main reason I purchased this model. Epson gets some serious props for documenting and supporting Linux on it's devices.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If you are a small game developer, looking to develope a product for PROFIT, then the Linux PS3 is not an option. Where as, XNA and Xbox Live, it is quite easy - so long as you are OK with only selling on Xbox Live, and Microsoft gives you the licence to sell on Xbox Live.
You have a lot of good points - XNA is (probably) a good set of tools for producing games for the XBox. Any commercial game developer who exclusively targets the Linux on PS3 is probably going to run out of money sooner rather than later.
Nothing a developer produces via XNA is going to be aimed at anything other than the XBox platform (unless someone provides a porting route to Windows/x86). That isn't the case for a game written using cross-platform libraries for Linux. Assuming that such a game has modest requirements, there is little to stop that game being made available[1] for Linux x86, Linux x86-64, Linux PPC, Linux on Sharp Zaurus, Linux on GP2X, Linux PS3, etc. Now extend that to any software category - on Linux, you have lots of options. My main point was that comparing XNA/XBox to Linux/PS3 is, at best, disingenuous and misleading because it is comparing a game development toolkit for one platform to a general OS environment with apps, utilities and development tools.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
[1] I work on writing portable code for multiple architectures - it's not hard to write code that works everywhere IF you wrap all the platform-specific parts up separately.
With modern packaging systems, there's occasionally a dependency that is just automatically marked and installed, but mostly it just becomes impossible to install something -- and I fear to install from source as in option 2 above, for I may break the packaging system. A package depends on packages X, Y, and Z, each of which have ten dependencies, and most of which conflict with others, or are reported as "won't be installed" but no reason is given. If I find a way to force it, it doesn't work, or it breaks other packages, or most likely it breaks the packaging system.
If you are running a distro (say Fedora Core 6) against potentially inconsistent repositories (say ATRPMs), then you need a package manager that is smarter than APT or YUM. I've used Smart Package Manager to solve these complex problems for a while. It's not perfect - it may hang if you attempt to upgrade an entire release using it - but it is capable of downgrading parts of your system to match up unusual RPMs. Of course, if you stick "odd" RPMs into your system, you will have to remove them before attempting to upgrading to, say, Fedora Core 7 if you wish to retain your sanity. Package dependencies are a simple mechanism to tell you what a particular package needs. Working out all the kinks requires some pretty good graph code.
I've run RPM-based and DEB-based systems for many years. I've never hesitated to install from source if there is no RPM available for a particular package. You only break your packaging system if you overwrite the libraries under RPM/DEB control with newer ones. Almost all source packages install into /usr/local by default and will not (normally) conflict with anything you have installed from your distro. If you wish to be really paranoid or you know that there will be problems, you can always install into an entirely separate directory tree (such as /opt).I do this for 2.3.x development versions of the GIMP, for example, where the development libraries *might* conflict with the installed GIMP 2.2 ones.
Of course, you can be smarter too - you can go the next step and actually build packages for your system. Many packages have .spec files around. Similar instructions are available for DEB packages too. checkinstall can be used to tag files from a source install, making it easier to pull the files out too.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It is interesting to see the Microsoft PR get out there and compare XNA on XBOX360 to Linux on PS3. Of course, if you are going to make this comparison, you had better play up your strengths (easy game creation) and ignore there rest (full operating system, full development suite, lots of libraries available). Restricted to game development, the comparison is probably fair - for the fledging game developer who already has an XBOX 360, XNA probably allows them to put a game together fairly easily, certainly compared with taking a huge and diverse tool kit like a Linux install.
What this PR totally ignores is that XNA allows you to make games. Linux allows you to do whatever you want to do. If you are into game development on Linux and you want something to create games, then a port of Blender to the PS3 and the Blender Game Engine would probably be of most use to you. Or you could use the SDL libraries to get a start on some 2D stuff. Or you could play around with the Quake 1/2/3 source code and try and use that. Or wait for the GP2X games to get ported over. Or you could build a multimedia box. Or a fortune reader!
So, the comparison XNA/XBOX 360 is better than Linux/PS3 is deeply flawed. It may be true (for now) from one angle. It just isn't the whole story.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
For those of you who wonder how a FPS might play in top down, the one that springs immediately to mind is the awesome Alien Swarm mod for UT2k4. This was a team-based top-down FPS shooter, Marines Vs Aliens style. Of course, there is now a chase-cam-style third-person sequel in the works although the News page appears to be a little quiet.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
ODF (Open Document) does not have usability issues. Period. It is a document format, nothing more. Now if you are talking about OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, KOffice, the next version of Wordperfect or any of the word processes/document systems that support ODF, then you might have a point. All the talk of ODF having usability issues is just the sound of FUD smacking the media around. Accessibility for the disabled should ultimately be superior with the ODF format because it is a completely open, machine readable format and therefore should be easily transformed into what ever media is required for disabled access (Large Print, audio - speech and speech recognition, braille, etc.).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Which would be valid if you were talking about Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). Businesses interested in long term planning and stability would be using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) for precisely this reason - a five year guarantee of support matters in business. It will be interesting to see if that does get extended for some customers. My experience is that businesses will often pay their vendor to get support past the normal End-of-Life date for a product.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Well, given it works by accoustic localization, the answer is probably 'no'.
But it could be impact sensitive fairly easily. You might need to calibrate the surface to establish an even impact response across the entire area. This would be interesting for experimental musical implementations. You could switch instruments fairly easily too - I often practice piano on the edge of my desk and who hasn't dragged out the pencils and played out the drum solo to music? :-)
Someone suggested pairing this up to a projector. You could project an image of a keyboard (QWERTY/Piano/whatever) or drum kit onto the surface as appropriate. The only weakness is that any sort of drag-like behaviour might prove tricky. Maybe if you had an active signal generator which you could cause your hand to reflect the signals in some fashion, such changes could be detected by the acoustic pickups. Yet another step on the road to the Minority Report style interfaces.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If you liked the original Scorched Earth, then Scorched 3D takes the original and sticks it into the modern era. Best of all, it's free, runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc., has hot-seat multiplayer and networked multiplayer and looks gorgeous. Oh - and there are modifications, so if you feel the need for planet-cracking weaponary, you can try the Apocalypse mod.
Scorched 3D
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Even more importantly, rain only falls in the lowest parts of the atmosphere. Anything above 40,000 feet won't ever see a drop of rain until it falls to lower altitudes. So expecting rain to clean the entire atmosphere is, at best, a slow process.
If you have used a 3D package (Blender, Maya, etc.) the first time you texture a model is probably done with a procedural texture. If you have special needs for a texture, then you might start thinking about UV mapping or projection mapping. If you just need rock, grass, water, wood or skin, reach for the procedural materials first and worry about overlays later.
Now there is a gap to be filled between the material properties available in a 3D editor and the rendering of the world in a game engine but it's hardly a wide one to fill. For an open source package like Blender, the gap is narrowed further by the ability to see precisely how the materials are calculated in the editor. I suspect that there already exist such capabilities in the high-end 3D graphics toolkits.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes