the most humane way to kill a goat is *not* to cut its throat. The most humane way to kill a goat (or any animal for that matter) without chemicals is to shoot it. At best with a powerfull but silenced firearm - as not to scare the animal while its sensory functions remain intact for a few seconds after the fact.
Anyway, please refrain from cutting throats of live beings, wether they're animals or whatnot. Thanks.
Just ask. Think it through, determine your goal for each conversation and visualize how a detailed contract would look that gives you equity and with which you're happy. Determine, for your self, what you're willing to bargain and what not. Establish your real position and your position as it perceived by others, maybe by having a few unsuspicious conversations throughout the team, and then move forward. If your position is good, you may even have some leverage. 'I want in. Give me some equity or I'll bail.' can be very convincing if you really are indispensable.
And Captain Obvious say, of course: When it comes to signing, consult a lawyer first.
1st of all: Quit picking on Miguel. You may not share the same opinion as he on bigger issues, as do I, but treating him the way the majority here does is primitive. He deserves all respect and professional merit you can give. Unless you are Linus Torwalds, RMS or someone other of the rare few on which who's work his work is based on, you are not entitled to picking a fight with him or destructively ragging about his decisions and/or motives. The others actually aren't either, but at least they have a track record to back up their ego. He's done considerable contributions to the cause of FOSS, more than most of humanity anyway and way more than anybody of the wannabees here on slashdot could ever dream of accomplishing, so suck up any stupid and/or ignorant and/or snide remarks you may have ready and just STFU. Thanks.
2nd: Mono may be a controversy in broader issues, but that's not to say it's not a good project. As for the product itself and products based of it: I know at least one that is a game changer and a major leap forward in its industry, that is based entirely on Mono and wouldn't be possible without it ( http://www.unity3d.com/ ). Cudos to Miguel and the Mono team for making it possible. I know for sure that the other large x-plattform around, Java, would have been beyond pointless as a foundation for realising this and would have failed miserably. Mono and Monodevelop are cool cross-plattform toolkits, and as far as I can tell they get the job done. Who can say that about their pet FOSS project?
I would've stuck with a BB if it weren't for two things:
1) I could only use my BB flatrate with an extra push data option that added to my allready steep premium for a HSDPA/UMTS data flatrate. This sucks. They should've offered a lesser security option for push email or a switch-off option all together so people who aren't corporate users could use their BBs as any other smartphone user. They didn't and instead had carriers buy the full BB server package and pass the price on to their customers, naturally. Thus making the BB a less-than-optimal option for private opinion-leading 'pro-sumer' mobile customers. Bad marketing move, imho.
2) BBs Browser sucks. End of story. I don't expect magic from a low-power Java Micro device, but the BB browser is 14 years behind. They should've licenced Opera Mini, made it their prime BB browser and be done with it.
However, the BBs have a tone of upsides which i've come to like and seriously miss on my brand new android device: The BBs, especially the line with the S2 batteries (current cheapo curve models for instance), had a lot going for them. Keyboards being one thing. Typing on a touchscreen is a serious PITA compared to the keyboard on my BB 8130, despite the Desire HD being like twice the size and weight. I actually had to buy a capacitive rubbery stylus sort of thing to be able to type at acceptable speeds with an acceptable error rate. Definitely a step backwards compared to the BB.
BBs batteries last for ages. You can go an entire workweek on a single charge, and if that's not enough you can swap batteries without any hassle, as the battery compartments on the BBs are built to be opened frequently, other than those cheap plastic covers on many of the android devices. The BBs are also the only devices with seperate battery chargers as a regular periferal option. Something that AFAIK all other hardware vendors have been laking ever since. Which I can't understand and is totally beyond me.
If the two things mentioned above had been fixed I would've stuck with the Blackberry line for my smartphone/pda needs going forward. I don't need no super-big screen if it is used well, and I'll give a portion of the screen for a usable keyboard any time. I suspect it's the same with a solid share of smartphone users.... There's your BB market right there. I've just switched to an HTC Desire HD Android 2.3 device 8 weeks ago. The calendar is kinda so-so, not as good as the BBs calendar which ist 5 years older and uses a screen less than half the size. The contacts app on android though just plain *sucks* big time compared to any BB I've ever used.
Bottom line: RIM should focus on improving the user experience on their keyboard driven devices wile keeping the size and the energy consumption as low as ever. Moving to QNX and a C/C++ driven userspace would enable that easyly and still offer enough room for an update to the UI experience. The market is large enough for people who like keyboards, long battery runtimes and universal smartphones that cost 200$ or less. Leave the 450$+ space to the touchdevice crows that likes to charge every 8 hours and lug 1Ghz Snapdragon computers around.
I hereby cancel my membership in Art. - Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys said it best when people kept fighting over what constituted Art and what didn't. Curiously enough, today it's the academic crowd that's defending him and the non-academics shaking their heads in bedazzlement. I'd say SF authors and their likes should do the same as Beuys. Don't bother and be happy that you gain better attention and sell more than the average lit-writer. I recall Neal Stevenson wrote a nice piece on this subject, it might be somewhere on his website. Steven King has spoken up on this issues at times aswell.... As you may expect, he isn't taken for granted by the lit crowd either.
If literature critics only define themselves by not writing or speaking about SF, Fantasy or other genres i.e. Star Trek and Star Wars are the same thing - they have spaceships in them., then let them do it. It doesn't hurt anyone. I recall people thinking Pina Bausch was crazy and yet some people thinking she's the worst thing that happended to modern dance. Yet that didn't stop her from going to 'some nutcase doing dance choreographies somewhere in the Ruhr area' to 'best coreographer ever' in the time of her life. The same will happen with todays SF in a few decades of time.
1st of all: Blenders UI has been OpenGL accelerated from day one. It has allways been one of the fastest GUIs in existance. Way faster and more responsive than any other 3D Tool UI anyway. The GP is talking bullshit on this one.
2nd: Blender has neverbeen particularly difficult to use for any 3D Kit with a simular set of features. In fact, it's UI design (non-overlapping, customizable, document/task based configuration, etc.) has served as a benchmark for quite a few recent creative tool UIs in the industry (Modo 3D, latest CS releases by Adobe, etc.)
3rd: The UI has been updated, yes. But it's more an evolution than a complete redo, from a user standpoint anyway imho. Simply because Blenders UI has allready been pretty good for quite some time now.... Allthough the arcitecture actually is a complete redo. Python driven, new Icons and new panels. However "OMG I'M USING IT! IT FINALLY WORKS!" is way overboard, exaggerated nonsense. Blender has been a kick-ass pro-level 3D Tool for approx. 7 years now. And yes, that also goes for its usability. Anybody not familiar with other professional 3D Toolkits and the learning whoes associated with this field, please stay out of this on this issue. Thanks.
4th: There is no mention of the new tools and features, which are actually worth mentioning. F.E. a particle system that rivals that of Lightwave (the industry leader in this field) with particle path editing and other goodies, Smoke and Volumetrics rendering, NLA with an extra new NLA UI, etc. This has Blender closing in on competing programms even further and will shake up the industry once again.... Can't wait till they finally get full Renderman compatibility. That will kick some serious shit.... Anyway, Kudos to the Blender team for this great release.
As for the GP: Mostly Rubbish or stuff that no one wants to hear. "OMG I'm running Blender on XYZ with 2 Gigs of RAM. UNBELIEVALBE!"... Idiot.
If gaming is their primary use, then tablet is doomed because the general purpose computers, game consoles and portable game consoles are all much, much better for playing games.
If by doomed you mean selling 15 million units within 9 months since release (Apples iPad 1), then count me in on the 'doomed' thing.... And please don't forget that gaming also was the main reason PCs took of back in the day.
Smokers and fat people die earlyer, actually putting less pressure on medicare in long terms. If you tax the consumables (alcohol, tabaco and junk food) you can probably get the best effect, imho.
I mean, now you're overdoing it. How about some fact checking here, folks? No chinese official in his right mind would simply cut and block a phonecall mid-sentence just because someone uses the word "protest"... [NO CARRIER]
The iPad and the infrastructure it's integrated with is purpose built to deliver in all 7 of the above mentioned fields. Which is why it sold 15 Million units in the first 9 months since its release. 15 Million f*cking units. You may want to ponder that number for a minute and compare it to other sales in the industry. It's this sort of conceptual purity that has Apple kicking everybody else in the entire industry in the balls.
Mind you, I'm not buying, and for good reasons too, but compared to Apples 'Post-PC' Devices the rest of the industry appears to be 5 years behind. You have to hand it to Steve Jobs and his crew for contiuneing in pushing the envelope in the innovation department. And no, your 200$ Laptop can not beat a 500$ tabet. Not in the game the tabet was built for.
No, that would be far from the truth. HTML is more widespread at the moment.
HTML isn't a programming language. Nor does it have a unified VM.
HTML5 + Canvas + Video tag. There you go.
Proves once again: You, as every other person here ragging on Flash, do not know what you are talking about nore have you spent 3 minutes thinking about the subject. And I'm not being offensive here, I'm just stating the facts as they are. There is no way that HTML5 + Canvas + Whatever can deliver the functionality of a unfied ubiquitous VM. Show me how to do this with any other technology in a feasable way and in such a way that it runs in all modern browsers hassle free. That includes the version of Chrome running on my HTC Desire HD. Which, btw., runs afore linked example without any problems aswell. And, btw., that example is from 1999. In words: It's from Nineteen-F*CKING-Ninety-Nine! And it still runs without a hitch on the newest version of Flash.
If you've managed to do that, then try this or this, or this , or, or...
Bottom line: You don't know what you are talking about. Seriously. Now you and the others can go ahead and mod this comment into the ground aswell if you so desire to embrace congnitive dissonance and supress the facts as they are.
1) Flash is by far the most ubiquitous end-user plattform in existance.
2) For a little more than a decade competitors have tried to dethrone Flash. And even the most promising of those failed miserably due to pure and utter incompetence in delivering what people want and rich client developers need. (Java Media Framework and JavaFX anyone?)
3) Compared to it's penetration and availability, Flash actually is one of the safest plattforms out there. Which is why it's so popular. Duh. Or are you telling me that Firefox would have less security problems if it had a 97.5% worldwide installbase?... Didn't think so. And that 97.5% is a conservative estimate for Flash, btw.
So all of you know-all Flash bashers STFU and come up with a viable FOSS alternative. And no, this isn't an alternative. It's a joke, emphasising that the GNU frontline fighters for freedom are good at building compilers, maintaining ancient editors and doing evagelism, but totally suck at delivering anything usable that tend to computing with a mouse and a GUI.
Bottom line: How about you guys stop living in your dreamworld and start thinking about what makes Flash so popular and what it would actually take to build a competitor that doesn't fall flat on it's face. Then you'd probably notice that there actually still is quite a bit of work to be done in the field before FOSS can catch up.
Apple did a tremendous job in the last decade in kicking some serious ass in the industry where ass-kicking was in dire need. Ever since Steve Jobs made the bold and very smart move to Unix I have allways been favourable to them. The fist iMac was the first PC ever not requiring a Monitor adjustment and setup - something most novices were not capable of. My first Mac was a later generation iBook G4 - the cheapest subnotebook available at the time. It played along perfectly with my otherwise entirely Linux driven setup. And its in regular use to this very day, chugging along on the last PPC version of Tiger. With Apache, Samba, the entire GNU Stack and yet some OSS goodies pre-installed and configured. There are a lot more positive things I could detail that they've done - like breaking the carrier grip on cellphones and the software they run or comming up with the best possible DRM compromise at the time and convincing the industry that that is the maximum possible.
The latest developments however don't get my approval at all. The iPad is the sweet looking end of a very ugly solid vertical distribution-and-access lock-in cortesy to apple. The device looks cool, no doubt, but it is factually a step backwards in technology as it effectively is not a turing complete computer anymore. I just talked to a guy at our local apple vendor about this: It apparently isn't possible to install your own software on this thing without having a 99$/year developer subscription with apple. If I have to do that, then this is in effect not a turing complete device and thus factually no computer anymore. It's a neat computer driven consumer device - but that's all.
What I'm wondering is how far Apple will be able to go with this until people notice that they are a new sort of old IBM and start switching to more open devices. If Apple continues building them neat enough, maybe never? Who knows. I for one can say that I am not buying, unless Im paid insane or at least solid amounts of money for developing for the iPad. I might by yet another M*cBook, but as for these oh-so-neat 'Post-PC-Devices', as they are called, I'm going to test the waters with a far more open and thus truely turing complete solution. My new HTC Desire HD btw is an awesome such device. Definitely the iPhone killer.... FYI: I'm writing this on a Mac.
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way.
As I (and others) have said time and time again, Blender is *not* more difficult to use than any other full-blown 3D Toolkit.
It occured to me just the other day, while reflecting on this recent wikileaks incedent and the previous one, on the gouvernments trying to stop the stuff from spreading and their futile attempts at doing so: Wikileaks and the socialogical processes tied to its concept are yet another big step forward into the age of cyberpunk.
National borders fuzzying up, borders between cultures tilting from the vertical lines between landscapes into the horizontal layers of societies stacked with the metropolitain areas of the world, the rapidly dimishing importance of a production society and the vastly growing importance of knowledge and contacts. Subculture groups nobody in 'mainstream' has ever heard of gaining political power and significance within weeks or even days, anonymous individuals and rag-tag tribes rapidly forming doing something with a solid political and international impact and disbanding inmediately after. Think about it: Wikileaks is no real-world Nation, yet their actions have a measurable impact on politics. You can't even pinpoint the people controlling it. Assange is just a figurehead that can be replaced by anonymous at a moments notice.
It is called the Age of Cyberpunk, and it is dawning as we speak. And no matter what the powers that be do to try and stop it, it is gaining momentum and tracktion day by day. Interesting times indeed.
Wrong. No. 1 danger to net freedom is the increasing amount of its users that don't understand its nature and thus fall into the lock-in trap of corporations. The problem here is that you can force people who can't drive and want to to make a drivers licence, but sadly no one is forcing them to learn about computers if they constantly confuse G**gle with the Web.
There is one A320 that completely disappeared from the face of the earth a decade or so ago. Airbus tracks all its planes and said A320 was never found. Apparently somewhere downstream China bought it, tore it apart supposedly to rebuild it with their own tools. I'd expect them to do the same with the A380.
The image shown in TFA is fake. An exceptionally bad one btw., I'd do a much better job. The car shown further down the linktrail is a small model with a second class model paint job. It's photographed at an angle as to hide the fact. The model probably _is_ printed with a 3D printer and painted afterwards. I doubt one could print entire bodyparts of a car with rapid prototyping without running into serious size, stability and/or cost issues. Printing negative moulds for small parts, or the small parts themselves might be feasable, but full scale bodywork is done at a fraction of the cost and way more faster and stable with molds, fiberglass compound and a spraygun.
Bottom line: Crappy fake article with false claims (aka lies) about a bullshit press release about some crappy fake vaporware product that will never see the light posted after near non-existant reviewing by a slashdot editor. So generally business as usual. Nothing to see here, move along.
People need to be aware that Facebook is hardly anything more than a modern version of Geocities without the ability for it's users to violate the Geneva Convention with exceptionally bad Webdesign. It adds in a little tools that enable linking and conecting for total webdev-n00bs and makes it attractive to use your real name and real contact data, as it has amassed users in ways never seen before. Mostly due to the aforementioned n00by-friendlyness.
Whenever I search someone online, their Facebook entiry pops up first, if they have one. That should hint where Facebook is headed.
Bottom line: If it's on Facebook, it's public. In more ways even than it would be if you'd post it on some obscure website that hasn't been scanned by the searchbots yet. If you behave accordingly, you won't be too surprised whenever something like this happens.
I kinda get the point. Mozilla is a grand ole FOSS project that unites all camps of the FOSS community. No BSD vs. Linux or KDE vs. Gnome infighting, because *EVERYONE" uses FF at some point. However, having Mozilla stirring up the Office area would be a waste. There is one thing, one very pressing thing that needs to be tackled that everyone, including multi-billion dollar corporations, have failed to go after in any meaningful way. What we need and what we have been needing for the last decade is a viable usable fully featured open source rich client environment. In plain text, we need a FOSS Flash competitor that is actually up to the task. One that does everything Flash does, only better, minus the flaws. All have failed. JMF, Curl, WildTangent, JavaFX, XULRunner/Prism (basically a dead Mozilla Project) and so on.... No one out there has managed to pull through with this. The most promising horse, Java, actually built for what Flash is used for nowadays, failed time and time again to deliver in this field.
We need a dedicated crew to finally get their stuff together and build a future-safe performant and powerfull rich client VM. This would be something the Mozilla crew could really test their skills on. I would so love to see that.
You are on the highway headed strait to Nervous Breakdown City if you think that keeping track of all those devices and methods you've mentioned is going to be possible throughout your life. I recommend you take a timeout and get into Zen Buddism or Stoicism. A very good example of the basic principles of those applied to modern life you can find here, an article on low information diet by author Tim Ferriss.
I've been into computers and modern information technology since 24 years and have come back to reducing the material goods I own and the stuff I worry about to the amount that I had when I started studying. 99% of the people I meet in everyday life continously bite off more than they can chew, raking away upwards of 11 hours per day with studies, work, yoga, jogging, carousing with buddies every odd night, gym, mingling with dozens of art and media projects at a time, networking, family and tending to their S.O., etc.... and you my friend sound a bit like one of the lot.
Mind you, I do keep notes of everyday things - in one single book that I carry around with me. All goes in there, aside from some notes I take on my blackberry and less than a handfull of textfiles on Google Apps and my PC when I haven't got the book on me. I spread my to-do lists that way too, which keeps the items on them below 20 at all times - a strategy I highly recommend to *anyone*, as long 2-do lists don't get done. I've had that blank spiralbind artscetch notebook for 6 years now and I expect it to fill up within the next two years or so. Then all get a new one. Makes maybe a dozen notebooks for my entire life, which actually is a reasonable amount if you ask me. They also serve as a sort of diary, which I've come to like.
Digital Life wise I use google apps for a few online notes and Git to version and sync my Workfiles, Music and Fotos across my MacMini and my Ubuntu Laptop. I do have a delicious account, but if I'm honest, I hardly revisit more than 5 Links of more than 200 any more than twice a year - and even then it's only out of curiosity about what was so important back then. I too have upwards of 60 software projekts that I started throughout the last decade and have never finished, most of which I archived away last year. I still have 10 or so lying around in my 'Work' folder and i've dragged around more webdomains than I will ever be able to handle ever since the first dot-com bubble. I expect to get two or three of my personal projects on the road within the next 2 years if I'm lucky, and by now I'm smart enough to know that they'll only gain critical mass if I stick with those from there on out.... Or do you think the Kernel or the Blender 3D Toolkit would've come this far if Linus Torwalds or Ton Roosendahl would be switching projects every odd month and caring about every fart on their facebook network?
No Sir. There is a lot of productivity advice out there and a bucket load of Lifehacks you can use to trick your life and yourself into getting things done, but the first move is to reduce the things you want to handle to that handfull that you really care about to see them through even if things get rough or you lose your job or switch careers. If you don't do that, no amount of tooling, portable computers and scheduling strategies will be able to get you on track because you yourself are the bottleneck.
Slashdot Mirror
the most humane way to kill a goat is *not* to cut its throat.
The most humane way to kill a goat (or any animal for that matter) without chemicals is to shoot it.
At best with a powerfull but silenced firearm - as not to scare the animal while its
sensory functions remain intact for a few seconds after the fact.
Anyway, please refrain from cutting throats of live beings, wether they're animals or whatnot.
Thanks.
Just ask. Think it through, determine your goal for each conversation and visualize how a detailed contract would look that gives you equity and with which you're happy. Determine, for your self, what you're willing to bargain and what not. Establish your real position and your position as it perceived by others, maybe by having a few unsuspicious conversations throughout the team, and then move forward. If your position is good, you may even have some leverage. 'I want in. Give me some equity or I'll bail.' can be very convincing if you really are indispensable.
And Captain Obvious say, of course: When it comes to signing, consult a lawyer first.
1st of all:
Quit picking on Miguel. You may not share the same opinion as he on bigger issues, as do I, but treating him the way the majority here does is primitive. He deserves all respect and professional merit you can give. Unless you are Linus Torwalds, RMS or someone other of the rare few on which who's work his work is based on, you are not entitled to picking a fight with him or destructively ragging about his decisions and/or motives. The others actually aren't either, but at least they have a track record to back up their ego.
He's done considerable contributions to the cause of FOSS, more than most of humanity anyway and way more than anybody of the wannabees here on slashdot could ever dream of accomplishing, so suck up any stupid and/or ignorant and/or snide remarks you may have ready and just STFU. Thanks.
2nd: Mono may be a controversy in broader issues, but that's not to say it's not a good project. As for the product itself and products based of it: I know at least one that is a game changer and a major leap forward in its industry, that is based entirely on Mono and wouldn't be possible without it ( http://www.unity3d.com/ ). Cudos to Miguel and the Mono team for making it possible. I know for sure that the other large x-plattform around, Java, would have been beyond pointless as a foundation for realising this and would have failed miserably. Mono and Monodevelop are cool cross-plattform toolkits, and as far as I can tell they get the job done.
Who can say that about their pet FOSS project?
I would've stuck with a BB if it weren't for two things:
1) I could only use my BB flatrate with an extra push data option that added to my allready steep premium for a HSDPA/UMTS data flatrate. This sucks. They should've offered a lesser security option for push email or a switch-off option all together so people who aren't corporate users could use their BBs as any other smartphone user. They didn't and instead had carriers buy the full BB server package and pass the price on to their customers, naturally. Thus making the BB a less-than-optimal option for private opinion-leading 'pro-sumer' mobile customers. Bad marketing move, imho.
2) BBs Browser sucks. End of story. I don't expect magic from a low-power Java Micro device, but the BB browser is 14 years behind. They should've licenced Opera Mini, made it their prime BB browser and be done with it.
However, the BBs have a tone of upsides which i've come to like and seriously miss on my brand new android device:
The BBs, especially the line with the S2 batteries (current cheapo curve models for instance), had a lot going for them. Keyboards being one thing. Typing on a touchscreen is a serious PITA compared to the keyboard on my BB 8130, despite the Desire HD being like twice the size and weight. I actually had to buy a capacitive rubbery stylus sort of thing to be able to type at acceptable speeds with an acceptable error rate. Definitely a step backwards compared to the BB.
BBs batteries last for ages. You can go an entire workweek on a single charge, and if that's not enough you can swap batteries without any hassle, as the battery compartments on the BBs are built to be opened frequently, other than those cheap plastic covers on many of the android devices. The BBs are also the only devices with seperate battery chargers as a regular periferal option. Something that AFAIK all other hardware vendors have been laking ever since. Which I can't understand and is totally beyond me.
If the two things mentioned above had been fixed I would've stuck with the Blackberry line for my smartphone/pda needs going forward. I don't need no super-big screen if it is used well, and I'll give a portion of the screen for a usable keyboard any time. I suspect it's the same with a solid share of smartphone users. ... There's your BB market right there.
I've just switched to an HTC Desire HD Android 2.3 device 8 weeks ago. The calendar is kinda so-so, not as good as the BBs calendar which ist 5 years older and uses a screen less than half the size. The contacts app on android though just plain *sucks* big time compared to any BB I've ever used.
Bottom line: RIM should focus on improving the user experience on their keyboard driven devices wile keeping the size and the energy consumption as low as ever. Moving to QNX and a C/C++ driven userspace would enable that easyly and still offer enough room for an update to the UI experience. The market is large enough for people who like keyboards, long battery runtimes and universal smartphones that cost 200$ or less. Leave the 450$+ space to the touchdevice crows that likes to charge every 8 hours and lug 1Ghz Snapdragon computers around.
My 2 cents.
I hereby cancel my membership in Art. - Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys said it best when people kept fighting over what constituted Art and what didn't. Curiously enough, today it's the academic crowd that's defending him and the non-academics shaking their heads in bedazzlement. ... As you may expect, he isn't taken for granted by the lit crowd either.
I'd say SF authors and their likes should do the same as Beuys. Don't bother and be happy that you gain better attention and sell more than the average lit-writer.
I recall Neal Stevenson wrote a nice piece on this subject, it might be somewhere on his website. Steven King has spoken up on this issues at times aswell.
If literature critics only define themselves by not writing or speaking about SF, Fantasy or other genres i.e. Star Trek and Star Wars are the same thing - they have spaceships in them., then let them do it. It doesn't hurt anyone. I recall people thinking Pina Bausch was crazy and yet some people thinking she's the worst thing that happended to modern dance. Yet that didn't stop her from going to 'some nutcase doing dance choreographies somewhere in the Ruhr area' to 'best coreographer ever' in the time of her life. The same will happen with todays SF in a few decades of time.
1st of all: Blenders UI has been OpenGL accelerated from day one. It has allways been one of the fastest GUIs in existance. Way faster and more responsive than any other 3D Tool UI anyway. The GP is talking bullshit on this one.
2nd: Blender has never been particularly difficult to use for any 3D Kit with a simular set of features. In fact, it's UI design (non-overlapping, customizable, document/task based configuration, etc.) has served as a benchmark for quite a few recent creative tool UIs in the industry (Modo 3D, latest CS releases by Adobe, etc.)
3rd: The UI has been updated, yes. But it's more an evolution than a complete redo, from a user standpoint anyway imho. Simply because Blenders UI has allready been pretty good for quite some time now. ... Allthough the arcitecture actually is a complete redo. Python driven, new Icons and new panels. However "OMG I'M USING IT! IT FINALLY WORKS!" is way overboard, exaggerated nonsense. Blender has been a kick-ass pro-level 3D Tool for approx. 7 years now. And yes, that also goes for its usability. Anybody not familiar with other professional 3D Toolkits and the learning whoes associated with this field, please stay out of this on this issue. Thanks.
4th: There is no mention of the new tools and features, which are actually worth mentioning. F.E. a particle system that rivals that of Lightwave (the industry leader in this field) with particle path editing and other goodies, Smoke and Volumetrics rendering, NLA with an extra new NLA UI, etc. This has Blender closing in on competing programms even further and will shake up the industry once again. ... Can't wait till they finally get full Renderman compatibility. That will kick some serious shit. ... Anyway, Kudos to the Blender team for this great release.
As for the GP: Mostly Rubbish or stuff that no one wants to hear. "OMG I'm running Blender on XYZ with 2 Gigs of RAM. UNBELIEVALBE!" ... Idiot.
If gaming is their primary use, then tablet is doomed because the general purpose computers, game consoles and portable game consoles are all much, much better for playing games.
If by doomed you mean selling 15 million units within 9 months since release (Apples iPad 1), then count me in on the 'doomed' thing. ...
And please don't forget that gaming also was the main reason PCs took of back in the day.
Smokers and fat people die earlyer, actually putting less pressure on medicare in long terms. If you tax the consumables (alcohol, tabaco and junk food) you can probably get the best effect, imho.
I mean, now you're overdoing it. How about some fact checking here, folks? No chinese official in his right mind would simply cut and block a phonecall mid-sentence just because someone uses the word "protest" ... [NO CARRIER]
Weight, size, form-factor, ease-of-use, time-to-boot, battery runtime, fully-integrated vertical zero-fuss end-to-end content and application delivery pipeline.
The iPad and the infrastructure it's integrated with is purpose built to deliver in all 7 of the above mentioned fields. Which is why it sold 15 Million units in the first 9 months since its release. 15 Million f*cking units. You may want to ponder that number for a minute and compare it to other sales in the industry. It's this sort of conceptual purity that has Apple kicking everybody else in the entire industry in the balls.
Mind you, I'm not buying, and for good reasons too, but compared to Apples 'Post-PC' Devices the rest of the industry appears to be 5 years behind. You have to hand it to Steve Jobs and his crew for contiuneing in pushing the envelope in the innovation department. And no, your 200$ Laptop can not beat a 500$ tabet. Not in the game the tabet was built for.
It's from the days when Java was all the hype and goes something like this:
"Java is a new language that combines the clean concise and easy syntax of C with the blazing speed of Smalltalk."
Can't remember from whom it is but it definitely is the best quote on Java I've heard so far. :-)
No, that would be far from the truth. HTML is more widespread at the moment.
HTML isn't a programming language. Nor does it have a unified VM.
HTML5 + Canvas + Video tag. There you go.
Proves once again: You, as every other person here ragging on Flash, do not know what you are talking about nore have you spent 3 minutes thinking about the subject. And I'm not being offensive here, I'm just stating the facts as they are.
There is no way that HTML5 + Canvas + Whatever can deliver the functionality of a unfied ubiquitous VM. Show me how to do this with any other technology in a feasable way and in such a way that it runs in all modern browsers hassle free. That includes the version of Chrome running on my HTC Desire HD. Which, btw., runs afore linked example without any problems aswell.
And, btw., that example is from 1999. In words: It's from Nineteen-F*CKING-Ninety-Nine!
And it still runs without a hitch on the newest version of Flash.
If you've managed to do that, then try this or this, or this , or, or ...
Bottom line:
You don't know what you are talking about. Seriously. Now you and the others can go ahead and mod this comment into the ground aswell if you so desire to embrace congnitive dissonance and supress the facts as they are.
The usual "Ragging on Flash" roundup rolling in.
Let's look at the facts:
1) Flash is by far the most ubiquitous end-user plattform in existance.
2) For a little more than a decade competitors have tried to dethrone Flash. And even the most promising of those failed miserably due to pure and utter incompetence in delivering what people want and rich client developers need. (Java Media Framework and JavaFX anyone?)
3) Compared to it's penetration and availability, Flash actually is one of the safest plattforms out there. Which is why it's so popular. Duh. Or are you telling me that Firefox would have less security problems if it had a 97.5% worldwide installbase? ... Didn't think so. And that 97.5% is a conservative estimate for Flash, btw.
So all of you know-all Flash bashers STFU and come up with a viable FOSS alternative. And no, this isn't an alternative. It's a joke, emphasising that the GNU frontline fighters for freedom are good at building compilers, maintaining ancient editors and doing evagelism, but totally suck at delivering anything usable that tend to computing with a mouse and a GUI.
Bottom line:
How about you guys stop living in your dreamworld and start thinking about what makes Flash so popular and what it would actually take to build a competitor that doesn't fall flat on it's face. Then you'd probably notice that there actually still is quite a bit of work to be done in the field before FOSS can catch up.
Apple did a tremendous job in the last decade in kicking some serious ass in the industry where ass-kicking was in dire need. Ever since Steve Jobs made the bold and very smart move to Unix I have allways been favourable to them. The fist iMac was the first PC ever not requiring a Monitor adjustment and setup - something most novices were not capable of. My first Mac was a later generation iBook G4 - the cheapest subnotebook available at the time. It played along perfectly with my otherwise entirely Linux driven setup. And its in regular use to this very day, chugging along on the last PPC version of Tiger. With Apache, Samba, the entire GNU Stack and yet some OSS goodies pre-installed and configured. There are a lot more positive things I could detail that they've done - like breaking the carrier grip on cellphones and the software they run or comming up with the best possible DRM compromise at the time and convincing the industry that that is the maximum possible.
The latest developments however don't get my approval at all. The iPad is the sweet looking end of a very ugly solid vertical distribution-and-access lock-in cortesy to apple. The device looks cool, no doubt, but it is factually a step backwards in technology as it effectively is not a turing complete computer anymore. I just talked to a guy at our local apple vendor about this: It apparently isn't possible to install your own software on this thing without having a 99$/year developer subscription with apple. If I have to do that, then this is in effect not a turing complete device and thus factually no computer anymore. It's a neat computer driven consumer device - but that's all.
What I'm wondering is how far Apple will be able to go with this until people notice that they are a new sort of old IBM and start switching to more open devices. If Apple continues building them neat enough, maybe never? Who knows. ... FYI: I'm writing this on a Mac.
I for one can say that I am not buying, unless Im paid insane or at least solid amounts of money for developing for the iPad. I might by yet another M*cBook, but as for these oh-so-neat 'Post-PC-Devices', as they are called, I'm going to test the waters with a far more open and thus truely turing complete solution. My new HTC Desire HD btw is an awesome such device. Definitely the iPhone killer.
*TaDum* *Crash* *Thud*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Try the fish.
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way.
As I (and others) have said time and time again, Blender is *not* more difficult to use than any other full-blown 3D Toolkit.
It occured to me just the other day, while reflecting on this recent wikileaks incedent and the previous one, on the gouvernments trying to stop the stuff from spreading and their futile attempts at doing so: Wikileaks and the socialogical processes tied to its concept are yet another big step forward into the age of cyberpunk.
National borders fuzzying up, borders between cultures tilting from the vertical lines between landscapes into the horizontal layers of societies stacked with the metropolitain areas of the world, the rapidly dimishing importance of a production society and the vastly growing importance of knowledge and contacts. Subculture groups nobody in 'mainstream' has ever heard of gaining political power and significance within weeks or even days, anonymous individuals and rag-tag tribes rapidly forming doing something with a solid political and international impact and disbanding inmediately after. Think about it: Wikileaks is no real-world Nation, yet their actions have a measurable impact on politics. You can't even pinpoint the people controlling it. Assange is just a figurehead that can be replaced by anonymous at a moments notice.
It is called the Age of Cyberpunk, and it is dawning as we speak. And no matter what the powers that be do to try and stop it, it is gaining momentum and tracktion day by day. Interesting times indeed.
... like 'Enlightenment 17 Final released'.
After all, it's only been in development for, what, 9 years or so? :-)
That better be one helluva desktop enviroment when they declare final release.
Wrong. No. 1 danger to net freedom is the increasing amount of its users that don't understand its nature and thus fall into the lock-in trap of corporations. The problem here is that you can force people who can't drive and want to to make a drivers licence, but sadly no one is forcing them to learn about computers if they constantly confuse G**gle with the Web.
There is one A320 that completely disappeared from the face of the earth a decade or so ago. Airbus tracks all its planes and said A320 was never found. Apparently somewhere downstream China bought it, tore it apart supposedly to rebuild it with their own tools. I'd expect them to do the same with the A380.
Very few other sci-fi themes contained the qualities contained within Raumpatrouille, Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon5, Firefly and others,
fixed that for you
The image shown in TFA is fake. An exceptionally bad one btw., I'd do a much better job.
The car shown further down the linktrail is a small model with a second class model paint job. It's photographed at an angle as to hide the fact. The model probably _is_ printed with a 3D printer and painted afterwards. I doubt one could print entire bodyparts of a car with rapid prototyping without running into serious size, stability and/or cost issues. Printing negative moulds for small parts, or the small parts themselves might be feasable, but full scale bodywork is done at a fraction of the cost and way more faster and stable with molds, fiberglass compound and a spraygun.
Bottom line: Crappy fake article with false claims (aka lies) about a bullshit press release about some crappy fake vaporware product that will never see the light posted after near non-existant reviewing by a slashdot editor. So generally business as usual. Nothing to see here, move along.
People need to be aware that Facebook is hardly anything more than a modern version of Geocities without the ability for it's users to violate the Geneva Convention with exceptionally bad Webdesign. It adds in a little tools that enable linking and conecting for total webdev-n00bs and makes it attractive to use your real name and real contact data, as it has amassed users in ways never seen before. Mostly due to the aforementioned n00by-friendlyness.
Whenever I search someone online, their Facebook entiry pops up first, if they have one. That should hint where Facebook is headed.
Bottom line: If it's on Facebook, it's public. In more ways even than it would be if you'd post it on some obscure website that hasn't been scanned by the searchbots yet. If you behave accordingly, you won't be too surprised whenever something like this happens.
I kinda get the point. Mozilla is a grand ole FOSS project that unites all camps of the FOSS community. No BSD vs. Linux or KDE vs. Gnome infighting, because *EVERYONE" uses FF at some point. .... No one out there has managed to pull through with this. The most promising horse, Java, actually built for what Flash is used for nowadays, failed time and time again to deliver in this field.
However, having Mozilla stirring up the Office area would be a waste. There is one thing, one very pressing thing that needs to be tackled that everyone, including multi-billion dollar corporations, have failed to go after in any meaningful way. What we need and what we have been needing for the last decade is a viable usable fully featured open source rich client environment. In plain text, we need a FOSS Flash competitor that is actually up to the task. One that does everything Flash does, only better, minus the flaws. All have failed. JMF, Curl, WildTangent, JavaFX, XULRunner/Prism (basically a dead Mozilla Project) and so on
We need a dedicated crew to finally get their stuff together and build a future-safe performant and powerfull rich client VM. This would be something the Mozilla crew could really test their skills on. I would so love to see that.
You are on the highway headed strait to Nervous Breakdown City if you think that keeping track of all those devices and methods you've mentioned is going to be possible throughout your life. I recommend you take a timeout and get into Zen Buddism or Stoicism. A very good example of the basic principles of those applied to modern life you can find here, an article on low information diet by author Tim Ferriss.
I've been into computers and modern information technology since 24 years and have come back to reducing the material goods I own and the stuff I worry about to the amount that I had when I started studying. 99% of the people I meet in everyday life continously bite off more than they can chew, raking away upwards of 11 hours per day with studies, work, yoga, jogging, carousing with buddies every odd night, gym, mingling with dozens of art and media projects at a time, networking, family and tending to their S.O., etc. ... and you my friend sound a bit like one of the lot.
Mind you, I do keep notes of everyday things - in one single book that I carry around with me. All goes in there, aside from some notes I take on my blackberry and less than a handfull of textfiles on Google Apps and my PC when I haven't got the book on me. I spread my to-do lists that way too, which keeps the items on them below 20 at all times - a strategy I highly recommend to *anyone*, as long 2-do lists don't get done. I've had that blank spiralbind artscetch notebook for 6 years now and I expect it to fill up within the next two years or so. Then all get a new one. Makes maybe a dozen notebooks for my entire life, which actually is a reasonable amount if you ask me. They also serve as a sort of diary, which I've come to like.
Digital Life wise I use google apps for a few online notes and Git to version and sync my Workfiles, Music and Fotos across my MacMini and my Ubuntu Laptop. I do have a delicious account, but if I'm honest, I hardly revisit more than 5 Links of more than 200 any more than twice a year - and even then it's only out of curiosity about what was so important back then. I too have upwards of 60 software projekts that I started throughout the last decade and have never finished, most of which I archived away last year. I still have 10 or so lying around in my 'Work' folder and i've dragged around more webdomains than I will ever be able to handle ever since the first dot-com bubble. I expect to get two or three of my personal projects on the road within the next 2 years if I'm lucky, and by now I'm smart enough to know that they'll only gain critical mass if I stick with those from there on out. ... Or do you think the Kernel or the Blender 3D Toolkit would've come this far if Linus Torwalds or Ton Roosendahl would be switching projects every odd month and caring about every fart on their facebook network?
No Sir. There is a lot of productivity advice out there and a bucket load of Lifehacks you can use to trick your life and yourself into getting things done, but the first move is to reduce the things you want to handle to that handfull that you really care about to see them through even if things get rough or you lose your job or switch careers. If you don't do that, no amount of tooling, portable computers and scheduling strategies will be able to get you on track because you yourself are the bottleneck.
My 2 cents.