Age old AutoCAD user myself here. But I have to disagree, command line is not required if you have good menu accelerators. Smart menus keep most items in the left hand. Alt+F,S isn't really much more difficult than Ctrl+S to save. But neither is as hard as QSAVE now is it?
In my Cream interface for Vim, just about everything is handled this way. Usually, the only time you have to hop over to right hand keys is for the last item through the menu tree or for something rarely used.
The bottom line is that good interface must be designed, and that well-designed GUIs are easier to learn and faster to use than a command line, for both experienced users and newbies. (The AutoCAD command line is only fast because you can right-click to enter.)
This is just a stall tactic. There will be several more edge-of-the-brink reprieves until the congress/general public are totally confused and the regular new outlets stop reporting. Then it will be as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, but only one person will have heard it.
Paul is making a strawman argument... he is saying that baptism is in vain if Christ is still dead.
In the previous paragraph he discusses that all things are under Christ's authority. Then the v.29 paragraph begins with the quote, basically saying that believers baptize on behalf of the alive Christ who was raised, who still rules and will rule. Just a verse later he points out the foolishness of this belief if Christ wasn't raised/isn't alive, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"
Insightful comments, I've rarely heard the argument made so well. You obviously ARE a writer. ("Renting the right to access your documents", great way to put it.)
Great post. The world is full of people who simply want to give money and forget (Live Aid, BandAid, etc.), but the $100 laptop is a committed (and self-sacrificing) effort to help people help themselves.
My point is that people need to get involved sooner in the process.
I can certainly agree with this, although sometimes it is difficult for everyone to understand what is happening until it is too late.
I appreciate and understand (and believe) in your academic response, but the laws in the United States don't back up your utopian complex organism.
Not in smaller population areas, but definitely in established cities where people better understand the complexity. Setbacks were developed in New York during the 1920's for just such a reason. Unfortunately, here in the U.S., we sometimes have to create a horrible situation before a community passes laws preventing it in the future. It is a better situation when everyone wants to work and live together, but worse when outside investors can put up real estate that they never see.
I was simply stating that when a Planning Commission is faced with approval of a development plan and the plan meets all codes and is in agreement with the Comprehensive Plan, they MUST approve it. Anything else is arbitrary and the courts say so.
This is true in principle, but in reality the political lives of a city's governors is always at stake. And no developer can afford to go through the law suit process. If a developer/owner makes a community angry enough, he will destroy his investment. There are always options for the community, such as strict enforcement of parking regulations, modifications to traffic patterns, etc. I've been on both sides, and the best path is cooperation and consensus.
Since I am in the same boat as you, philosophically, I can rectify this situation by getting people like our neighbor in the above scenario to get involved BEFORE the owner of the adjacent parcel applies for a building permit. Put into law a zoning ordinance based upon real quality of life issues, and put into law things that protect neighbors with enough mustar to pass through the US courts (and the pocket lined developers).
In your role, I would agree these are good goals. However stipulating "good" merely through legislative efforts is both weak (ineffective) and avoiding of the central problem: Individuals should live in the communities they own, and own the communities they live in. Many developmental monstrosities are created by investors and developers who do not live in the beasts they create. It is a fundamental violation of the Golden Rule. When a project is out of touch with the rest of the community, it is sure to fail. This has been documented as a central problem in urban blight, and is also directly responsible in most of the cases where a community is in discord with a particular development.
So the problem isn't zoning, it's ownership and an individual's responsibility in his community.
To the claim that I'm backing up developers, that's a farce.
Point taken, I was not trying to make this a personal affront. But your comments were easy enough to polarize in order for me to make the other side of the argument.
I'm for infill development, though. I'm for urban growth boundaries and density that supports nodes sufficient for mass transit, reducing our dependence on automobiles.
I'm a LEED® AP, but am not convinced that comprimising quality of life is sustainable. You might check out William McDonough's Cradle To Cradle, essentially we must not force the appearance of sustainability in place of the real thing. Density for the sake of density just repeats the same mistake made in Le Corbusier's Garden City, and results in another round of Pruitt Igoes.
If we argue only on grounds of capitalism, your point of view is exactly where we end up. However, it has been shown since the Minoan period that cities (really any community) are very complex organisms that depend on us all living together and respecting each other, outside the bounds of simple property ownership.
Who owns the clean air we breath? Sunlight? Are you entitled to cast shadows on my property? How about make noise in the middle of the night that carries past your property lines? Can you conduct business on your property that encourages more traffic in my neighborhood?
These are all issues beyond fee simple, but ones that have generated laws in developed places where citizens demanded a quality of life against the rights of the individual property owner as you say. This gross over-simplification produces very poor urban conditions, but you should know that being a city planner. The rotted out cores of many old cities have only sprung new growth through cooperative efforts that restrict the freedoms you espouse and that re-emphasize community rights and the public good.
Frankly, I'm pretty disappointed that someone with your perspective is a city planner. There is already enough force on the private-developer side to push through all sorts of ugliness. It is the public representative's responsibility to balance this force, not encourage it or evaulate it with the same simple monetary formula it's proponents use.
You can tell that this prank is becoming part of the cultural when even SlashDot runs a story about it, several days in advance. (BTW, I can't even remember how long ago it has now been since hearing about ITAPD on NPR... and it's been a re-occuring calendar event for me for three or four years now.)
I have to agree with simplicity. I "upgraded" from a Palm m105 to a used m500 not so long ago, and it is all I need to stay organized. Between the Todo list, Memo Pad (notes), Calendar, and Address book, I've been able to continue rolling my data along since about 1997 or so. (I originally started out with DayTimer Address book before moving to their full-blown version.)
I get alarms when things are due, I can take notes at a meeting (with a folding keyboard), always have someplace to dump thoughts such as gift ideas and long term goals, have access to over 1200 address entries and phone numbers, can enter events many years in the future or reoccuring events to remember, and have immediate access to it all anywhere in the world and at my desktop in case I want to cut/paste. It's almost like a personal wiki/blog.
It is tempting to want to buy the latest and greatest, but until I can get a PDA that supports a GUI version of Vim, I'm not going to find anything more useful than a basic PDA available for very little money on eBay.
The new SlashDot skin fonts are way too small. The site looks like a rookie implementation where testing was only done on Internet Explorer on a laptop screen. (IE has an errant default font size that is larger than spec, lower res users prefer smaller font sizes.)
However, given that this site is supposed to be by and for the technically sophisticated, I would have expected that at least somebody would have opened it in Firefox on a 1600x1200 screen before making it live.
You can solve the whole problem with a simple dynamic CSS mechanism:
include("PHPClientSniffer.php");// as found in http://cream.sourceforge.net/beta/ $is = new sniffer; if ($is->NAME == "IE") { $font_size_large = "small"; $font_size_medium = "x-small"; $font_size_small = "xx-small"; $font_size_xsmall = "xxx-small"; $font_size_xxsmall = "xxx-small"; } else { $font_size_large = "large"; $font_size_medium = "medium"; $font_size_small = "small"; $font_size_xsmall = "x-small"; $font_size_xxsmall = "xx-small"; }
Then, in your stylesheet (css.php), do:
P,BR { font-size: small;// redundant with below, for static viewing <?php echo "font-size: $font_size_small" ?>; }
And, yes, I know that delivering content based on user agent is a hack and defies the whole point of CSS, but if web designers insist on forcing font sizes, at least acknowledge that we don't all use broken browsers.
Re:I just can't get the hang of vim
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 1
Cream is easy to start, you just type "cream" at the command line.
Or if you are using GNOME/Linux or Windows you just click on the Cream icon.
This the fundamental the problem with the Existentialism: Truth is relative. Thus, there ends up being none. But standards, values, morality... truth, are the only fence between here and total anarchy.
Hear, hear, you are right on the money. I'm an architect (of buildings) and there is no way I want to navigate computer information systems the same way I navigate 3D (real) space. Google Maps is a great example. It is a facinating tool, not because it makes my trip any quicker but because I can virtually visit the place without actually having to do the work in getting there. I enter an address and am instantly shown the address. Navigation tools change the scope of view or change the type of information I see about the place, but it doesn't require me to get there from where I am.
I also think the conversational voice commands are spot on. Your detractors complain we can't talk 8 hours a day, but as one *option* of interface, I would use it in a moment. Of course, this would require I work in my own office to avoid conflicting nearby conversations. Or maybe from home...
The only value AutoDesk sees in OSS is the way they can tie their proprietary CAD/GIS software into it. They don't want to do the work, but they want to charge you to use it. They would rather give away a clearly definable service to stay in control rather than loose the advantage to someone like, say, Google. They are trying to avoid someone else taking the lead as seen in SketchUp's Google Map linking.
You are correct in that fully capable software is a long time off, but there has to be some short cut to a basic CAD for Linux. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but surely the market will soon support solutions derived from an existing renderer (Blender), 2D CAD (QCAD), existing 3D (Cycas, arcad, ICAADS, OpenCascade) or a CAD/CAM (VariCAD) before AutoDesk can turn their ship around. It doesn't even have to be OS/FS, although I would think a FS system could eventually take the market.
The chances of AutoDesk embracing open source or anything like it is about as likely as their chief business cooperative, Microsoft.
Everyone who is familiar with AutoCAD knows that AutoDesk is quick to embed any latest Microsoft technology and does everything in their power to de-stabilize their existing user base. Between file version issues and various Desktop modules, AutoCAD has become a house of cards that can now be replaced only by their recent Revit purchase. (Of course, before the purchase, they promised the user base that Desktop was the future--pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.) The entire product line has become an upgrade train, and since all their mid-range competitors have been squashed, no one can get off.
This is quite sad because AutoCAD used to work on Unix. Much of the infrastructure still exists. (The archaic double-backslash or single forward slash path separators, for example.) Fortunately, the situation is so bad that there are many competing efforts to topple them. It will take some time, but an Open Source alternative could be derived from an emulator solution (IntelliCAD), a ground-up project (PythonCAD), a "ported" Apple solution, or an existing mature product (Cycas).
But I am certain the title of this article is completely upside-down.
CAD is hardly niche. AutoDesk (makers of AutoCAD) made $1 billion in profits last year.
Take the US Construction industry, 4.8 percent of the U.S. GDP. That's $1.1 trillion. Now figure that most architectural firms I know (I'm an architect) have a copy for every intern, drafter and architect they have. That's a ballpark of 113,000 people. The same then goes for the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, civil, landscape architect, and survey design professions. Also, most owners have a facilities department, they all use AutoCAD. Nearly all larger contractors have a copy, as well as most smaller specialty shops like cabinet makers, hardware manufacturers, etc. Throw in all the units at colleges and universities for the students in these professions to use. This is just the construction industry! We haven't even counted industries like automotive (not just cars, think parts), transportation, aerospace, electronics, toys, pharmaceutical equipment, and whatever else I forgot.
Free Software versions are not around, but there is a huge market for CAD software. It's not easy, it's not shiney...and it's not niche.
What you can't do is then turn around and say "because we don't have a good explanation, God did it."
I agree with this and I'm a Creationist.
Both sides in this argument are usually guilty of ignoring scientific evidence in favor of their religious convictions. Remember, the church originally disagreed with the scientists about the whole heliocentricity issue. Now that we know the church was wrong, we can see that their problem was not their faith but that they stubbornly overlooked truth in favor of a personalized and errant concept about reality. After all, the modern Christian will readily agree that the earth not being at the center is in fact a strengthening argument for God's sovereignty as explained in the Bible. We are not the center of importance in this universe, he is. Although the science was pointing to a reality, human arrogance closed the door to truth.
The same holds true on the other side. There are plenty of holes, gaps and weaknesses in Evolutionary theory. Any real scientist will admit to these, it is hard enough to prove a basic scientific fact, let alone an entire concept of origination.
The fun in science is finding fact. However, these long winded flamewars between Evolutionists and Creationists are nothing more than religious arguments, both sides. It is their lack of facts that enables the same old debates to persist.
As a Creationist I'm as interested in understanding where my science is wrong as I am in knowing where the holes are in the opposing viewpoint. But aren't either of these just debate pointers? I'm convinced the core is a faith/belief/worldview discussion. After all, nobody wants to believe the earth is the center of the universe or that Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man were legitimate fossils. In the end the theories melt away and the truth remains.
Solidworks looks like a mechanical design application, and ProEngineer an industrial design CAD. Neither appear to have any effort directed at the architecture/construction industry that I could see.
Slashdot Mirror
Age old AutoCAD user myself here. But I have to disagree, command line is not required if you have good menu accelerators. Smart menus keep most items in the left hand. Alt+F,S isn't really much more difficult than Ctrl+S to save. But neither is as hard as QSAVE now is it?
In my Cream interface for Vim, just about everything is handled this way. Usually, the only time you have to hop over to right hand keys is for the last item through the menu tree or for something rarely used.
The bottom line is that good interface must be designed, and that well-designed GUIs are easier to learn and faster to use than a command line, for both experienced users and newbies. (The AutoCAD command line is only fast because you can right-click to enter.)
Uh, it's supposed to be 103F here tomorrow.
This is just a stall tactic. There will be several more edge-of-the-brink reprieves until the congress/general public are totally confused and the regular new outlets stop reporting. Then it will be as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, but only one person will have heard it.
Paul is making a strawman argument... he is saying that baptism is in vain if Christ is still dead.
In the previous paragraph he discusses that all things are under Christ's authority. Then the v.29 paragraph begins with the quote, basically saying that believers baptize on behalf of the alive Christ who was raised, who still rules and will rule. Just a verse later he points out the foolishness of this belief if Christ wasn't raised/isn't alive, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"
Try Cream for Vim for clipboard smoothness:
Wrong analogy: Microevolution is to walking as macroevolution is to flying.
Or apples to oranges. (Not just bigger apples.)
Insightful comments, I've rarely heard the argument made so well. You obviously ARE a writer. ("Renting the right to access your documents", great way to put it.)
Great post. The world is full of people who simply want to give money and forget (Live Aid, BandAid, etc.), but the $100 laptop is a committed (and self-sacrificing) effort to help people help themselves.
For a shave much better than a safety razor, check out this article:
How to get that perfect shave
which points to this site:
ClassicShaving.com
I can certainly agree with this, although sometimes it is difficult for everyone to understand what is happening until it is too late.
Not in smaller population areas, but definitely in established cities where people better understand the complexity. Setbacks were developed in New York during the 1920's for just such a reason. Unfortunately, here in the U.S., we sometimes have to create a horrible situation before a community passes laws preventing it in the future. It is a better situation when everyone wants to work and live together, but worse when outside investors can put up real estate that they never see.
This is true in principle, but in reality the political lives of a city's governors is always at stake. And no developer can afford to go through the law suit process. If a developer/owner makes a community angry enough, he will destroy his investment. There are always options for the community, such as strict enforcement of parking regulations, modifications to traffic patterns, etc. I've been on both sides, and the best path is cooperation and consensus.
In your role, I would agree these are good goals. However stipulating "good" merely through legislative efforts is both weak (ineffective) and avoiding of the central problem: Individuals should live in the communities they own, and own the communities they live in. Many developmental monstrosities are created by investors and developers who do not live in the beasts they create. It is a fundamental violation of the Golden Rule. When a project is out of touch with the rest of the community, it is sure to fail. This has been documented as a central problem in urban blight, and is also directly responsible in most of the cases where a community is in discord with a particular development.
So the problem isn't zoning, it's ownership and an individual's responsibility in his community.
Point taken, I was not trying to make this a personal affront. But your comments were easy enough to polarize in order for me to make the other side of the argument.
I'm a LEED® AP, but am not convinced that comprimising quality of life is sustainable. You might check out William McDonough's Cradle To Cradle, essentially we must not force the appearance of sustainability in place of the real thing. Density for the sake of density just repeats the same mistake made in Le Corbusier's Garden City, and results in another round of Pruitt Igoes.
Disclaimer: I am an architect.
If we argue only on grounds of capitalism, your point of view is exactly where we end up. However, it has been shown since the Minoan period that cities (really any community) are very complex organisms that depend on us all living together and respecting each other, outside the bounds of simple property ownership.
Who owns the clean air we breath? Sunlight? Are you entitled to cast shadows on my property? How about make noise in the middle of the night that carries past your property lines? Can you conduct business on your property that encourages more traffic in my neighborhood?
These are all issues beyond fee simple, but ones that have generated laws in developed places where citizens demanded a quality of life against the rights of the individual property owner as you say. This gross over-simplification produces very poor urban conditions, but you should know that being a city planner. The rotted out cores of many old cities have only sprung new growth through cooperative efforts that restrict the freedoms you espouse and that re-emphasize community rights and the public good.
Frankly, I'm pretty disappointed that someone with your perspective is a city planner. There is already enough force on the private-developer side to push through all sorts of ugliness. It is the public representative's responsibility to balance this force, not encourage it or evaulate it with the same simple monetary formula it's proponents use.
You can tell that this prank is becoming part of the cultural when even SlashDot runs a story about it, several days in advance. (BTW, I can't even remember how long ago it has now been since hearing about ITAPD on NPR... and it's been a re-occuring calendar event for me for three or four years now.)
I have to agree with simplicity. I "upgraded" from a Palm m105 to a used m500 not so long ago, and it is all I need to stay organized. Between the Todo list, Memo Pad (notes), Calendar, and Address book, I've been able to continue rolling my data along since about 1997 or so. (I originally started out with DayTimer Address book before moving to their full-blown version.)
I get alarms when things are due, I can take notes at a meeting (with a folding keyboard), always have someplace to dump thoughts such as gift ideas and long term goals, have access to over 1200 address entries and phone numbers, can enter events many years in the future or reoccuring events to remember, and have immediate access to it all anywhere in the world and at my desktop in case I want to cut/paste. It's almost like a personal wiki/blog.
It is tempting to want to buy the latest and greatest, but until I can get a PDA that supports a GUI version of Vim, I'm not going to find anything more useful than a basic PDA available for very little money on eBay.
The new SlashDot skin fonts are way too small. The site looks like a rookie implementation where testing was only done on Internet Explorer on a laptop screen. (IE has an errant default font size that is larger than spec, lower res users prefer smaller font sizes.)
However, given that this site is supposed to be by and for the technically sophisticated, I would have expected that at least somebody would have opened it in Firefox on a 1600x1200 screen before making it live.
You can solve the whole problem with a simple dynamic CSS mechanism:
Then, in your stylesheet (css.php), do:
And, yes, I know that delivering content based on user agent is a hack and defies the whole point of CSS, but if web designers insist on forcing font sizes, at least acknowledge that we don't all use broken browsers.
Cream is easy to start, you just type "cream" at the command line.
Or if you are using GNOME/Linux or Windows you just click on the Cream icon.
It doesn't start from within Vim.
This the fundamental the problem with the Existentialism: Truth is relative. Thus, there ends up being none. But standards, values, morality... truth, are the only fence between here and total anarchy.
They forgot one: Vim.
Hear, hear, you are right on the money. I'm an architect (of buildings) and there is no way I want to navigate computer information systems the same way I navigate 3D (real) space. Google Maps is a great example. It is a facinating tool, not because it makes my trip any quicker but because I can virtually visit the place without actually having to do the work in getting there. I enter an address and am instantly shown the address. Navigation tools change the scope of view or change the type of information I see about the place, but it doesn't require me to get there from where I am.
I also think the conversational voice commands are spot on. Your detractors complain we can't talk 8 hours a day, but as one *option* of interface, I would use it in a moment. Of course, this would require I work in my own office to avoid conflicting nearby conversations. Or maybe from home...
The only value AutoDesk sees in OSS is the way they can tie their proprietary CAD/GIS software into it. They don't want to do the work, but they want to charge you to use it. They would rather give away a clearly definable service to stay in control rather than loose the advantage to someone like, say, Google. They are trying to avoid someone else taking the lead as seen in SketchUp's Google Map linking.
You are correct in that fully capable software is a long time off, but there has to be some short cut to a basic CAD for Linux. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but surely the market will soon support solutions derived from an existing renderer (Blender), 2D CAD (QCAD), existing 3D (Cycas, arcad, ICAADS, OpenCascade) or a CAD/CAM (VariCAD) before AutoDesk can turn their ship around. It doesn't even have to be OS/FS, although I would think a FS system could eventually take the market.
The chances of AutoDesk embracing open source or anything like it is about as likely as their chief business cooperative, Microsoft.
Everyone who is familiar with AutoCAD knows that AutoDesk is quick to embed any latest Microsoft technology and does everything in their power to de-stabilize their existing user base. Between file version issues and various Desktop modules, AutoCAD has become a house of cards that can now be replaced only by their recent Revit purchase. (Of course, before the purchase, they promised the user base that Desktop was the future--pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.) The entire product line has become an upgrade train, and since all their mid-range competitors have been squashed, no one can get off.
This is quite sad because AutoCAD used to work on Unix. Much of the infrastructure still exists. (The archaic double-backslash or single forward slash path separators, for example.) Fortunately, the situation is so bad that there are many competing efforts to topple them. It will take some time, but an Open Source alternative could be derived from an emulator solution (IntelliCAD), a ground-up project (PythonCAD), a "ported" Apple solution, or an existing mature product (Cycas).
But I am certain the title of this article is completely upside-down.
CAD is hardly niche. AutoDesk (makers of AutoCAD) made $1 billion in profits last year.
Take the US Construction industry, 4.8 percent of the U.S. GDP. That's $1.1 trillion. Now figure that most architectural firms I know (I'm an architect) have a copy for every intern, drafter and architect they have. That's a ballpark of 113,000 people. The same then goes for the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, civil, landscape architect, and survey design professions. Also, most owners have a facilities department, they all use AutoCAD. Nearly all larger contractors have a copy, as well as most smaller specialty shops like cabinet makers, hardware manufacturers, etc. Throw in all the units at colleges and universities for the students in these professions to use. This is just the construction industry! We haven't even counted industries like automotive (not just cars, think parts), transportation, aerospace, electronics, toys, pharmaceutical equipment, and whatever else I forgot.
Free Software versions are not around, but there is a huge market for CAD software. It's not easy, it's not shiney...and it's not niche.
Google is your friend:
I agree with this and I'm a Creationist.
Both sides in this argument are usually guilty of ignoring scientific evidence in favor of their religious convictions. Remember, the church originally disagreed with the scientists about the whole heliocentricity issue. Now that we know the church was wrong, we can see that their problem was not their faith but that they stubbornly overlooked truth in favor of a personalized and errant concept about reality. After all, the modern Christian will readily agree that the earth not being at the center is in fact a strengthening argument for God's sovereignty as explained in the Bible. We are not the center of importance in this universe, he is. Although the science was pointing to a reality, human arrogance closed the door to truth.
The same holds true on the other side. There are plenty of holes, gaps and weaknesses in Evolutionary theory. Any real scientist will admit to these, it is hard enough to prove a basic scientific fact, let alone an entire concept of origination.
The fun in science is finding fact. However, these long winded flamewars between Evolutionists and Creationists are nothing more than religious arguments, both sides. It is their lack of facts that enables the same old debates to persist.
As a Creationist I'm as interested in understanding where my science is wrong as I am in knowing where the holes are in the opposing viewpoint. But aren't either of these just debate pointers? I'm convinced the core is a faith/belief/worldview discussion. After all, nobody wants to believe the earth is the center of the universe or that Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man were legitimate fossils. In the end the theories melt away and the truth remains.
Solidworks looks like a mechanical design application, and ProEngineer an industrial design CAD. Neither appear to have any effort directed at the architecture/construction industry that I could see.