Search for what, exactly? What if you don't know what the "whatever" is?
Part of program name or the short or long description.
A few weeks ago, I was thinking of doing something for this graphics design course. I'm too damn lazy to wake up at 8 in the morning, drag myself to the Mac class at the university and do this in Indesign. =)
"They want the course work in PDF format, and the only condition was that it should not be made in MSWord (what an enlightened idea), and TeX is a neat but not exactly easy tool for design, what else?"
apt-cache search searches from package names *and* descriptions, so my task of finding a desktop publishing app would be easy, *provided* the program was not embarassed to call itself a desktop publishing or design program...
So I did "apt-cache search publishing", and it printed, among other things, scribus - a free software desktop publishing program, I checked it out, and it seemed to be just what I was looking for - even though I may still need to go do this in Indesign, but this seems to be pretty good already. =)
Not by any means, but it does have a couple of things that come to mind, and some that sound familiar...
Besides, some features you list (such as fur) are something that should be implemented in the render end rather than the modeling end... and if Blender ever gets that Renderman output thing I dreamed of, it will be there. One day.
NURBS are there, and also lattice deforms too (I know they're there, I've used them myself =) Particles likewise (though the UI for them is admittedly a bit cryptic). UV mapping, yep (since 1.8, I think). IK - sounds familiar, but not sure. And I'm not sure what you mean with "SubD" (not used other 3D apps that much), and the only web page I found quickly seemed to talk of stuff that's similar to Blender's subsufs, so maybe it's there...
I didn't think so. Here's $2,000 kid, go buy yourself a real 3d app.
Thanks for $2000! I think I'll use this for something that's more important for a poor student like me - pasta, tuna, and microwave pizzas - and program-wise use stuff like Blender that gives much more bang per price and has all features I need. =)
Nope, first step is to make Blender as good as Maya or at least 3DSM. And this should not be particularily easy...
(Warning: this is a very predictable reply and I'm very much aware of the fact. I also know it's probably not doing any good. True, life is quite often pointless and predictable.)
Modelling-wise, Blender Rules. Period. That's as far as I'm going when discussing matters of taste - those who don't understand Blender can never see what's so good about it, so it's useless to argue.
Erm, having a human to draw the picture would most likely make a non-photorealistic rendering - Making photorealistic drawings is pretty hard. It is possible, of course (some time messing with airbrushes and stuff)...
There's an easier way, of course: If you want a human to make a photorealistic picture, you tell them take a photograph! O, sancta simplicitas! =)
My point is that since you cannot check what was available from the Library of Alexandria, how can you conclude it was a "misunderstanding"?
The Library of Alexandria is pretty old, knowing that the ancient Egyptians were pretty ancient, too, but surely not they had been around to make maps 14 million years ago when the Antarctic was without the ice cap last time. I mean, according to our common knowledge, that was just a little bit before the humankind came down from the trees. (I thought it was somewhere around 4 million years ago, but the scientists were embarassed to call them "homo whatever" until we came out of beta test around 2 million years ago.)
Let's not talk about Piri Reis yet, but get back to Buache first. Some people saw Buache's map, drew their own conclusions from it without thinking what the map actually is, and thus ended up with pretty trippy results. People looked at the map, thought they saw something that supported their own strange theories, and used the map as a proof.
The same can be said about Piri Reis map: It's an old map, people took one look at it, and immediately drew wild conclusions. "Hey! Antarctic without ice!" and then someone who bothered to look at the map for more than a few minutes noted, "That's not Antarctic... the guy ran out of paper so he continued the South American coast sideways."
...but I coded a program to display "Hello World!" in assembly, including its own routine to display the text, and it's 45 bytes too, and I'm just an assembly newbie. Of course, this is for Commodore 64, an architecture that only needs a two-byte program header (load address)... =)
PCs these days need way huge file headers... but I suppose it's worth it. =)
Did someone mention "subglacial Antarctica"? Care to give me modern maps of that?
...
Most of these conclusions drawn from old maps are just misunderstandings. People see things that, due to coincidence, look vaguely like modern things and think it's a "historical anomaly". Always ask yourself: which is more likely - an undocumented, wholly unnoticed cataclysmic change in Earth within the period of written history, or a misunderstanding of facts?
Philippe Buache's map from 1739, that you mention, didn't really show "Antarctica without ice". I don't know why people came to that conclusion - there is an "inner sea" in the map, but it's clearly labelled a "conjecture", and the notes on the edges of the map talk of icebergs and glaciers and stuff, which doesn't sound too convincing to me! And on top of that, I'd clearly doubt the skill of any mapmaker who mark New Zealand and Tasmania as part of Antarctica =)
I wrote a summary of the map discussion to E2 the day I heard of this (An "anomalous" map would be spooky enough to keep me up 'til early in the morning, huh?) - and you can check out a good site that has a lot of scans and zooms and translations. Here's even more stuff.And more.
Re:here's what browser needs to me to use it
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
correcting a URL when I accidentally type in www,cnn,com instead of www.cnn.com
This probably isn't there because it'd probably not work properly at times.
The "auto-correction" in Mozilla already does work a bit "too well". When I say "localhost", and for some reason the OS screws up the connection to my local Apache, I bloody well don't want it to open www.localhost.com, as it sometimes seems to do!
If I see one more checkboard or curved mirror surface on "art" generated by a raytracing program I _will_ kill someone.
Checkerboards and mirror-spheres and teapots? That's, like, ancient history - these days, the advances in modeler UIs have made things so much easier, and these days, the thing to do is a Sphere Over Water. (At least that's what Bryce users seem to love.)
But it's still nice to see that Blender and Moonlight|3D folks are cooperating - for example, they bothuse the slogan "render your imagination", which is one of the best slogans I've seen on a 3D program, to be honest (thought it looked better on blender site where I first saw it).
I point you to http://www.wings3d.com my friend it seams you have been missing out. Far superior modeller to Blender.
Yeah, I have heard of Wings3D. I haven't tried it yet, though - probably because it was written in some obscure language I had never even heard of and I couldn't find prebuilt binaries. =)
The gallery looks pretty nice, though. Looks like it may have something that's as nice as Blender's s-mesh + proportional editing...
I also heard of Ayam, which seemed nice, but finding the "Requires Some Intimate Knowledge Of Renderman, Your Renderer and Available Shaders" sticker on the manual cover isn't always reassuring. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm a modeling guy, not someone with very good grasp on stuff behind the scenes - I can understand sliders ("This is a material that looks like plastic, use this widget to control shininess"), but not the raw reality ("Pick this somewhat well named shader called 'plastic' and define values for these n vaguely named parameters that are probably defined in a Book somewhere, go look it up").
However will be the first with decent animation capabilities.
Yeah, something none of the other renderers have: Excellent animation stuff.
I guess he meant "PoV-Ray isn't Free Software". I have downloaded PoV as source code from years ago.
Well, if Debian sticks it in non-free, it's probably neither Free Software or Open Source. To avoid annoying the OSS and RMS, let's just say "Incompatible with DFSG." =)
I'm very well aware that PoV's source is available, and they would reconsider relicensing the source if they only could find all contributors (I heard something about total rewrite of some core code to make this easier...)
Damn those Amigas are cool... They can survive a slashdotting!
If you think that's cool, remember the time someone posted a link to a webserver running on a Commodore 64. That thing just kept serving stuff for a while at an acceptable rate. Yeah, not all night long, but for an amazingly long time. I think what brought it to halt was the link to the CGI script =)
Why is everyone making such a big deal about Blender?...
Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).
(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)
Why not join together as a community and purchase something better like a mail/calendaring server that could compete with exchange? This would be FAR more beneficial to the community and the world!
(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>
Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).
Re:BL is BS!
on
Blender Is GPL
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· Score: 5, Informative
As I understood it, the code can be used in two forms: 1) Use it under the terms of GPL, in which case if you distribute a modified version, code must be included, or 2) negotiate the license to distribute only the binaries with the Foundation, and pay them to fund the development (and I expect this payment is not that light!).
I fail to see how this "stifles a major part of the GPL". The Blender Foundation releases all of their code under this dual license - People donate them money to do their job and release code under these terms. This license does allow others to take this code and modify it, and choose to either pay up, or be a nice citizen and contribute the code.
And yes, this dual license thing was mentioned a couple of times in past. Loudly. Were you not listening?
Re:Ray tracer?
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Does Blender have a real ray tracer yet?
As far as I know (which isn't much, sorry), 2.23 didn't have anything to do with raytracing. If you ask my honest opinion, Blender really needs support for external renderers (Renderman?) - the rendering engine is not always that logical, and (precisely hand-tuned!) environment maps, (nicely arranged!) shadow-only spotlights and (painstakingly manually tuned!) radiosity meshes don't quite cut it...
I agree with you, raytracing would rule. I can't even remember how long I have wanted that...
I did have some random success with the export scripts (to export to Renderman and PoV-Ray), but the colors didn't work in the old scripts and new scripts just bombed.
Hope future will bring help in this respect...
Re:Can someone explain to the unwise...
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What is Blender? Its website doesn't seem to be of much help...
Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.
Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.
I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)
The worst design flaw is that the IBM4732 doesn't have a block of thermite sitting on top that destroys the hardware in case of tampering.
And this is supposed to be discussion about tampering of X-Box, which is a consumer device.
I can see the grim future when they try to put physical destruction mechanism on a consumer product. "This game console provides you years and years and years of amazing, rad fun, but please, do not even sneeze at it, or the bomb we put in it to make it tamper-proof will probably go off, rendering on average three blocks unlivable. And we don't mean memory blocks, we mean city blocks."
Here we're talking about tamper-proof hardware, but in a way, it turns into completely off-topic direction without actually going into completely off-topic direction. =)
Real people used stuff like jmp $fce2 for the first, but the latter was a little bit more complex because of the blue part: lda #$06 ; sta $d020 ; sta $d021 ; hlt (of course, hlt is an undocumented opcode, and since C64 boots in less than a second from ROM, it hardly is as frustrating as the bluescreen in Windows).
I enjoyed the film, found it interesting, but it did not "blow me away", like it seems to do for everyone else...
Yeah, personally, I thought the movie was neat, but the graphic novel was about zillion times better. Especially the end. I've never seen more amazing, beautiful and shocking way to waste paper, ever. Apart of technological advances, Finland still gets tons of money of our paper industry. =D All kidding aside, I really loved the comics but the movie was a little bit of a disappointment.
I even seem to remember pressed CDs being distributed with trojans.
I can't remember pressed CDs with trojans/viruses but that has undoubtedly happened at some points... because I can remember software distributed on floppies having viruses, and history (especially history like this) has the tendency to repeat itself every now and then =)
Uh, I don't know very much on how DVDs actually work, but I've messed with VideoCDs, and judging how the VCD/DVD player software works, my idea probably isn't far from the truth...
I guess that on DVD, there's video streams and audio streams (in different formats, if required); these are then multiplexed together, so it's actually just one huge file.
In order for the file to be played, it's demultiplexed. Suppose you have a DVD with two sound tracks; You play it once, you get the picture data and first sound track, play the second time, you get the second soundtrack. Re-encode and multiplex, and voila, you have a functionally equivalent file.
And "non-linear" content can be reduced to a state machine. This is how the menus in VideoCDs work: The menus are actually small MPEG segments that play, after which you can push a button to start another segment or a video stream. One state to other, all you need is the video segments and a state transition diagram describing how the menus work. DVDs actually have a full programming language in them, so they can be reduced to code, data and virtual machine.
*everything* can be reproduced, if only you can see with the eyes of the people who created the thing! Of course, that's probably something they would like to prevent, but this is what we get with "open standards" like DVD that can be figured out by even non-experts...
Slashdot Mirror
Part of program name or the short or long description.
A few weeks ago, I was thinking of doing something for this graphics design course. I'm too damn lazy to wake up at 8 in the morning, drag myself to the Mac class at the university and do this in Indesign. =)
"They want the course work in PDF format, and the only condition was that it should not be made in MSWord (what an enlightened idea), and TeX is a neat but not exactly easy tool for design, what else?"
apt-cache search searches from package names *and* descriptions, so my task of finding a desktop publishing app would be easy, *provided* the program was not embarassed to call itself a desktop publishing or design program...
So I did "apt-cache search publishing", and it printed, among other things, scribus - a free software desktop publishing program, I checked it out, and it seemed to be just what I was looking for - even though I may still need to go do this in Indesign, but this seems to be pretty good already. =)
Not by any means, but it does have a couple of things that come to mind, and some that sound familiar...
Besides, some features you list (such as fur) are something that should be implemented in the render end rather than the modeling end... and if Blender ever gets that Renderman output thing I dreamed of, it will be there. One day.
NURBS are there, and also lattice deforms too (I know they're there, I've used them myself =) Particles likewise (though the UI for them is admittedly a bit cryptic). UV mapping, yep (since 1.8, I think). IK - sounds familiar, but not sure. And I'm not sure what you mean with "SubD" (not used other 3D apps that much), and the only web page I found quickly seemed to talk of stuff that's similar to Blender's subsufs, so maybe it's there...
Thanks for $2000! I think I'll use this for something that's more important for a poor student like me - pasta, tuna, and microwave pizzas - and program-wise use stuff like Blender that gives much more bang per price and has all features I need. =)
(Warning: this is a very predictable reply and I'm very much aware of the fact. I also know it's probably not doing any good. True, life is quite often pointless and predictable.)
Modelling-wise, Blender Rules. Period. That's as far as I'm going when discussing matters of taste - those who don't understand Blender can never see what's so good about it, so it's useless to argue.
Erm, having a human to draw the picture would most likely make a non-photorealistic rendering - Making photorealistic drawings is pretty hard. It is possible, of course (some time messing with airbrushes and stuff)...
There's an easier way, of course: If you want a human to make a photorealistic picture, you tell them take a photograph! O, sancta simplicitas! =)
The Library of Alexandria is pretty old, knowing that the ancient Egyptians were pretty ancient, too, but surely not they had been around to make maps 14 million years ago when the Antarctic was without the ice cap last time. I mean, according to our common knowledge, that was just a little bit before the humankind came down from the trees. (I thought it was somewhere around 4 million years ago, but the scientists were embarassed to call them "homo whatever" until we came out of beta test around 2 million years ago.)
Let's not talk about Piri Reis yet, but get back to Buache first. Some people saw Buache's map, drew their own conclusions from it without thinking what the map actually is, and thus ended up with pretty trippy results. People looked at the map, thought they saw something that supported their own strange theories, and used the map as a proof.
The same can be said about Piri Reis map: It's an old map, people took one look at it, and immediately drew wild conclusions. "Hey! Antarctic without ice!" and then someone who bothered to look at the map for more than a few minutes noted, "That's not Antarctic... the guy ran out of paper so he continued the South American coast sideways."
...but I coded a program to display "Hello World!" in assembly, including its own routine to display the text, and it's 45 bytes too, and I'm just an assembly newbie. Of course, this is for Commodore 64, an architecture that only needs a two-byte program header (load address)... =)
PCs these days need way huge file headers... but I suppose it's worth it. =)
Did someone mention "subglacial Antarctica"? Care to give me modern maps of that?
...
Most of these conclusions drawn from old maps are just misunderstandings. People see things that, due to coincidence, look vaguely like modern things and think it's a "historical anomaly". Always ask yourself: which is more likely - an undocumented, wholly unnoticed cataclysmic change in Earth within the period of written history, or a misunderstanding of facts?
Philippe Buache's map from 1739, that you mention, didn't really show "Antarctica without ice". I don't know why people came to that conclusion - there is an "inner sea" in the map, but it's clearly labelled a "conjecture", and the notes on the edges of the map talk of icebergs and glaciers and stuff, which doesn't sound too convincing to me! And on top of that, I'd clearly doubt the skill of any mapmaker who mark New Zealand and Tasmania as part of Antarctica =)
I wrote a summary of the map discussion to E2 the day I heard of this (An "anomalous" map would be spooky enough to keep me up 'til early in the morning, huh?) - and you can check out a good site that has a lot of scans and zooms and translations. Here's even more stuff. And more.
This probably isn't there because it'd probably not work properly at times.
The "auto-correction" in Mozilla already does work a bit "too well". When I say "localhost", and for some reason the OS screws up the connection to my local Apache, I bloody well don't want it to open www.localhost.com, as it sometimes seems to do!
Checkerboards and mirror-spheres and teapots? That's, like, ancient history - these days, the advances in modeler UIs have made things so much easier, and these days, the thing to do is a Sphere Over Water. (At least that's what Bryce users seem to love.)
Yeah, I have heard of Wings3D. I haven't tried it yet, though - probably because it was written in some obscure language I had never even heard of and I couldn't find prebuilt binaries. =)
The gallery looks pretty nice, though. Looks like it may have something that's as nice as Blender's s-mesh + proportional editing...
I also heard of Ayam, which seemed nice, but finding the "Requires Some Intimate Knowledge Of Renderman, Your Renderer and Available Shaders" sticker on the manual cover isn't always reassuring. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm a modeling guy, not someone with very good grasp on stuff behind the scenes - I can understand sliders ("This is a material that looks like plastic, use this widget to control shininess"), but not the raw reality ("Pick this somewhat well named shader called 'plastic' and define values for these n vaguely named parameters that are probably defined in a Book somewhere, go look it up").
Yeah, something none of the other renderers have: Excellent animation stuff.
Well, if Debian sticks it in non-free, it's probably neither Free Software or Open Source. To avoid annoying the OSS and RMS, let's just say "Incompatible with DFSG." =)
I'm very well aware that PoV's source is available, and they would reconsider relicensing the source if they only could find all contributors (I heard something about total rewrite of some core code to make this easier...)
If you think that's cool, remember the time someone posted a link to a webserver running on a Commodore 64. That thing just kept serving stuff for a while at an acceptable rate. Yeah, not all night long, but for an amazingly long time. I think what brought it to halt was the link to the CGI script =)
Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).
(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)
(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>
Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).
As I understood it, the code can be used in two forms: 1) Use it under the terms of GPL, in which case if you distribute a modified version, code must be included, or 2) negotiate the license to distribute only the binaries with the Foundation, and pay them to fund the development (and I expect this payment is not that light!).
I fail to see how this "stifles a major part of the GPL". The Blender Foundation releases all of their code under this dual license - People donate them money to do their job and release code under these terms. This license does allow others to take this code and modify it, and choose to either pay up, or be a nice citizen and contribute the code.
And yes, this dual license thing was mentioned a couple of times in past. Loudly. Were you not listening?
As far as I know (which isn't much, sorry), 2.23 didn't have anything to do with raytracing. If you ask my honest opinion, Blender really needs support for external renderers (Renderman?) - the rendering engine is not always that logical, and (precisely hand-tuned!) environment maps, (nicely arranged!) shadow-only spotlights and (painstakingly manually tuned!) radiosity meshes don't quite cut it...
I agree with you, raytracing would rule. I can't even remember how long I have wanted that...
I did have some random success with the export scripts (to export to Renderman and PoV-Ray), but the colors didn't work in the old scripts and new scripts just bombed.
Hope future will bring help in this respect...
Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.
Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.
I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)
And this is supposed to be discussion about tampering of X-Box, which is a consumer device.
I can see the grim future when they try to put physical destruction mechanism on a consumer product. "This game console provides you years and years and years of amazing, rad fun, but please, do not even sneeze at it, or the bomb we put in it to make it tamper-proof will probably go off, rendering on average three blocks unlivable. And we don't mean memory blocks, we mean city blocks."
Here we're talking about tamper-proof hardware, but in a way, it turns into completely off-topic direction without actually going into completely off-topic direction. =)
Argh, get this CISC rubbish out of my sight!
Real people used stuff like jmp $fce2 for the first, but the latter was a little bit more complex because of the blue part: lda #$06 ; sta $d020 ; sta $d021 ; hlt (of course, hlt is an undocumented opcode, and since C64 boots in less than a second from ROM, it hardly is as frustrating as the bluescreen in Windows).
=)
Yeah, personally, I thought the movie was neat, but the graphic novel was about zillion times better. Especially the end. I've never seen more amazing, beautiful and shocking way to waste paper, ever. Apart of technological advances, Finland still gets tons of money of our paper industry. =D All kidding aside, I really loved the comics but the movie was a little bit of a disappointment.
Ah, my apologies. Since getting to this world is somewhat challenging, I've never seen it personally, so I was just guessing =)
The site says the way to get to -2 is to go to the end of level -1...
This would probably be interesting, except that I heard that level -1 is endless. How am I supposed to get to the end of level -1 then? =/
I can't remember pressed CDs with trojans/viruses but that has undoubtedly happened at some points... because I can remember software distributed on floppies having viruses, and history (especially history like this) has the tendency to repeat itself every now and then =)
::nods::
I often miss the points, particularly in middle of the night. =) Sorry...
Uh, I don't know very much on how DVDs actually work, but I've messed with VideoCDs, and judging how the VCD/DVD player software works, my idea probably isn't far from the truth...
I guess that on DVD, there's video streams and audio streams (in different formats, if required); these are then multiplexed together, so it's actually just one huge file.
In order for the file to be played, it's demultiplexed. Suppose you have a DVD with two sound tracks; You play it once, you get the picture data and first sound track, play the second time, you get the second soundtrack. Re-encode and multiplex, and voila, you have a functionally equivalent file.
And "non-linear" content can be reduced to a state machine. This is how the menus in VideoCDs work: The menus are actually small MPEG segments that play, after which you can push a button to start another segment or a video stream. One state to other, all you need is the video segments and a state transition diagram describing how the menus work. DVDs actually have a full programming language in them, so they can be reduced to code, data and virtual machine.
*everything* can be reproduced, if only you can see with the eyes of the people who created the thing! Of course, that's probably something they would like to prevent, but this is what we get with "open standards" like DVD that can be figured out by even non-experts...