"Why stick with a company that has a potentially uncertain future, when you can go and start doing whatever you want (founding various cool companies that might be even better), or simply go do charity work."
Because the terms of the purchase almost certainly included clauses such as the stock not being tradable for 5 years, and that the employees agreed to remain for 3 years or such.
Coverity scanner only checks for programming errors. Ie things that cause crashes, etc.
However as others have pointed out they are comparing mission critical software to non mission critical software. What should have been done (as has also been pointed out) is to cluster by usage case or software field. So databases to databases, browsers to browsers, generic office usage to generic office usage, etc.
We have had an excellent forum that has a reasonable sized user base, an extremely diverse set of viewpoints (Your standard variety of mild to hard core democrats, republicans, libertarians, but also views from communists, fascists, etc.), and consitently high quality posts.
There are rules that people are expected to follow regarding respecting those you are discussing with. While there are occasional flame wars (and people are suspended from posting for a brief period of time when it gets out of hand), it doesn't require anything particular draconian. Requiring respect in a public discussion is not censorship.
"As a final note, maybe its worth it, as in one of their major markets (japan), and hell, in europe, they really are only competing against the PS3 unless some major things change with the 360. Being in a country with US like tastes (finding game cube games here in australia is hard, EB is about all that stock them these days), it is frustrating..."
The 360 got an exlusive on FIFA - so yes a major change is likely in the European market.
"The point is, that "Fair Use" has a lot to do with how much of a copyrighted work you can copy and for what purposes. It does not give you carte blanche to copy an entire work if it's only for your benefit. Russia, I believe, does have such rules, but not the U.S."
I believe that copying for backup purposes, has been found to be fair use, as with time shifting, and likely space shifting. His arguement was that he wanted to get a backup copy from a source other than directly from his original.
"Asusteks notebooks have a larger hdd, better video card, smaller ff, are lighter, have better optical media options, etc etc etc than the equivilant macbook."
"That's probably the most complicated thing they could possibly do, just because of the blender interface. They should stick to something really simple. That KPL suggestion was pretty good. The old standby Logo isn't bad either."
The age range is 10-13, not 5-7. We have a number of individuals in the 10-13 range who have self taught themselves Blender and the game engine. If you use the Blender cheat sheet, you can learn the important parts of the interface in a few minutes. Or if in a class it can be taught relatively quickly.
Teach them the basics of python then turn them loose in Blender 3D. They can do game scripting, it is a real language, and they can use the logic buttons for things that they don't need or want to program.
Also there is predone games of a wide variety of types that they can play with, take apart, and rebuild into their own.
"Personally, I think that it is time that someone focuses on generating an open source java framework that is designed around splitting a game engine into its smaller components (Graphics, Physics, Scripting and AI); this would allow for smaller (more focused) open source projects to exist which (should) produce higher quality results."
There are good opensource component C++ frameworks - there is Ogre 3D for graphics (or Crystalspace 3D); Bullet engine for physics (or ODE); Python for Scripting (Or Ruby; Or Lua); there are sound and input libraries; really the only big piece missing is the AI and a good networking library.
I would think that the number of cameras needed can be greatly reduced by using better research and algorithms. There is quite a bit of research that has largely been ignored by most mocap software which I expect can greatly reduce the markers and cameras needed for good quality motion capture
1) there is the research on animation from doing a series of figure drawing poses - the algorithm provides a set of poses that the user picks as being correct (a single figure drawing is ambiguos since there are multiple poses that can meet the required joint locations) this takes into account natural joint angles as well which generally brings the pose space to about 10 poses
2) research using kinetics for interpolation - take the subjects mass and the individual is constrained by how fast they can change direction and need for dynamic balance, etc.
3)motion capture from silhouette
I would think that combining multiple methods - while being a bit more processor intensive could result in much superior results for much cheaper than using a large number of cameras.
There is also a mailing list apparently dedicated to open source motion capture and creating free/home brew mocap setups.
"Along those same premises, let's say, hypothetically, that I had a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop on one of my PC's. I'm not a graphics professional, and have little use for it beyond making my own wallpaper. Are we to assume that I would actually pay the $699 price tag for this software? HELL NO."
The problem with this reasoning, is that had you not 'hypothetically' pirated Adobe Photoshop, instead of purchasing photoshop, you probably would have purchased a cheap tool that met your needs, or used a legally free equivalent. So your piracy doesn't hurt Adobe, but it very much does hurt Adobes low end competitors by denying them the sale and/or marketshare that would otherwise be theirs.
Only if you would have gone completely without software that does the functionality that you desire (wallpaper making, or basic image retouching) have you 'harmed' no one with your action.
Similiarly the pirating of Windows and Office, etc. very rarely harm Microsoft but instead harm their competitors that offer similar functionality and a significant price discount.
good post some things though I think you might be mistaken,
"Then again, whith a feature list beforehand the parallel development of Blender would've gone quicker and features would've even been there before they where requested."
They had a partial feature list beforehand, and for instance, much of the animation coding work happened before the Orange team gathered. They ended up having a bigger list of desires than was anticipated I think though:) Ton was coding an insane amount of time and there were useful and needed features coded by others, but there are still wish lists and polishing features, and things that didn't get finished. For the next project they will be starting with software that already meets all of the critical needs for the modeling, materials, rigging, weighting, animation, rendering, and compositing - so it will be much more 'nice to haves' instead of items critical for success.
"7) AFAIK they where rendering in production which took away some time. Usually you outsource that or another dept. does it. I don't think they used renderplanet, which, if not, they should have."
Rendering was done on a render farm that was in the US. The render farm was controlled via IRC online by Toni (technical director? - not sure what his offiicial designation was, he did misc scripting work, and handled the renderer stuff and other tasks).
"8) All OSS Tools. Thats the single largest obstacle. The OSS tools are impressive, but OSS NLE and Compositing is just plain no match at all for, let's say, Apple Shake or Digital Fusion."
A big part of the coding was getting blenders NLE and compositing tools up to the needed capabilities. Blender has now a very solid basis for NLE and Compositing.
"9) The benefits of compositing only became aware at the beginning of the project and key personell didn't have enough playing time to try things out, imho."
Ton was aware of the benefits of compositing at Siggraph after talking with some of his fellow open source panelists (I recall panelists from Dreamworks, IL&M, and Digital Domain, not sure who all he discussed it with though). Basically they told him that compositing with multipass renderers was the only way to go for work destined for the big screen. He just didn't have time to code the compositing till well into the movie since various improvements to the animating (improved rigging, weight painting, curve interpolation, etc), scene management (groups system, and other things), and materials tools (first layer based then switched to node based materials) and rendering were needed first.
"The music and voice acting was recorded and composed by Jan Morgenstern using 100% propriatory software. The production team decided to avoid using open source software as otherwise it would have meant the film would have been made using just open source tools."
It is true that Jan used proprietary software. The purpose of Orange was to prove the capability of opensource for the 3D content creation. While it would have been nice to use open source tools for the sound it just wasn't deemed feasible (Jan did investigate the various open source audio tools for suitability). Also the orchestral scores that were done, there are not any open sound libraries that could be used for doing orchestral scores.
Personally I would love a project to create an open/free orchestral sampling library then it might be feasible to do the sound using only open source tools in the future.
"I am not sure if anyone is having such painful experience, but few good advice on Cinelerra and Hydrogen on Fedora Core is welcome."
An alternative to consider would be Blender to 2.42 when it comes out. With the addition of ffmpeg for greater input and output flexibility, and its improved memory handling for video it is now a fairly capable video editor (see documentation on the sequencer).
There are all sorts of cool things that could be done as projects, pretty much any siggraph paper, any computer graphics research, etc. would make a good candidate.
Try http://www.pandora.com/ it is absolutely amazing for discovering new music. Not really a replacement for this feature from Napster, but quite complementary.
"Trust me. The free programs may be able to convert formats, but they usually lose important information (textures, etc) and can't actually edit the changed file very well. What good is it to convert the file format if you can't change the file?"
Blender can handle 3DS, OBJ, and a number of other model formts fine without loss of the type of information that sketchup exports (some sketchup users use Blender to render currently since Blender is superior to sketchup for rendering tools).
www.blender.org - it can use logic blocks that you visually connect or python scripting for game logic - easy. It is GPL licensed - open source. It is fully 3D game engine - graphics (including GLSL if you use python); physics; sound; armature system; logic system; etc. So there are options for all three.
If I were google I'd start getting openoffice as much publicity as possible, and other things that compete directly with Microsofts bread and butter. Find microsofts worst nightmare for each niche, opensource it and heavily support and distribute it.
[QUOTE]Movilink (Sony+other studios) - couldn't be given away.[/QUOTE]
Well I personally love it, but admittedly am only using it because it is being given away on General Mills cereal boxes:)
It is fast, works great, superb customer support (only tried via chat, but response was quick and resolution satisfactory). I just wish they had more movies at the reasonable price (.99 or 2.00 for specials) instead of trying to get 5.99 for everything. Also it would be cool if they had an all you can watch model like netflix.
Slashdot Mirror
"Not for MS but for MS's competitors. Can't really claim MS is a monopoly anymore if there's 100 million systems running a non-MS OS."
A monopoly is defined based on a per country basis not a global basis. AT&T was a monopoly only in the US, Standard Oil was a monopoly only in the US.
LetterRip
"Why stick with a company that has a potentially uncertain future, when you can go and start doing whatever you want (founding various cool companies that might be even better), or simply go do charity work."
Because the terms of the purchase almost certainly included clauses such as the stock not being tradable for 5 years, and that the employees agreed to remain for 3 years or such.
LetterRip
Coverity scanner only checks for programming errors. Ie things that cause crashes, etc.
However as others have pointed out they are comparing mission critical software to non mission critical software. What should have been done (as has also been pointed out) is to cluster by usage case or software field. So databases to databases, browsers to browsers, generic office usage to generic office usage, etc.
LetterRip
We have had an excellent forum that has a reasonable sized user base, an extremely diverse set of viewpoints (Your standard variety of mild to hard core democrats, republicans, libertarians, but also views from communists, fascists, etc.), and consitently high quality posts.
There are rules that people are expected to follow regarding respecting those you are discussing with. While there are occasional flame wars (and people are suspended from posting for a brief period of time when it gets out of hand), it doesn't require anything particular draconian. Requiring respect in a public discussion is not censorship.
ornery.org for those interested.
LetterRip
"As a final note, maybe its worth it, as in one of their major markets (japan), and hell, in europe, they really are only competing against the PS3 unless some major things change with the 360. Being in a country with US like tastes (finding game cube games here in australia is hard, EB is about all that stock them these days), it is frustrating..."
The 360 got an exlusive on FIFA - so yes a major change is likely in the European market.
LetterRip
ben
"The point is, that "Fair Use" has a lot to do with how much of a copyrighted work you can copy and for what purposes. It does not give you carte blanche to copy an entire work if it's only for your benefit. Russia, I believe, does have such rules, but not the U.S."
I believe that copying for backup purposes, has been found to be fair use, as with time shifting, and likely space shifting. His arguement was that he wanted to get a backup copy from a source other than directly from his original.
LetterRip
Hi,
"Asusteks notebooks have a larger hdd, better video card, smaller ff, are lighter, have better optical media options, etc etc etc than the equivilant macbook."
could you point out your source for prices?
http://store.agearnotebooks.com/asusz62fc.html
It ends up higher than the cheapest mac notebook after being configured similarly.
LetterRip
"That's probably the most complicated thing they could possibly do, just because of the blender interface. They should stick to something really simple. That KPL suggestion was pretty good. The old standby Logo isn't bad either."
The age range is 10-13, not 5-7. We have a number of individuals in the 10-13 range who have self taught themselves Blender and the game engine. If you use the Blender cheat sheet, you can learn the important parts of the interface in a few minutes. Or if in a class it can be taught relatively quickly.
LetterRip
Teach them the basics of python then turn them loose in Blender 3D. They can do game scripting, it is a real language, and they can use the logic buttons for things that they don't need or want to program.
Also there is predone games of a wide variety of types that they can play with, take apart, and rebuild into their own.
LetterRip
"Personally, I think that it is time that someone focuses on generating an open source java framework that is designed around splitting a game engine into its smaller components (Graphics, Physics, Scripting and AI); this would allow for smaller (more focused) open source projects to exist which (should) produce higher quality results."
There are good opensource component C++ frameworks - there is Ogre 3D for graphics (or Crystalspace 3D); Bullet engine for physics (or ODE); Python for Scripting (Or Ruby; Or Lua); there are sound and input libraries; really the only big piece missing is the AI and a good networking library.
LetterRip
I would think that the number of cameras needed can be greatly reduced by using better research and algorithms. There is quite a bit of research that has largely been ignored by most mocap software which I expect can greatly reduce the markers and cameras needed for good quality motion capture
e /
1) there is the research on animation from doing a series of figure drawing poses - the algorithm provides a set of poses that the user picks as being correct (a single figure drawing is ambiguos since there are multiple poses that can meet the required joint locations) this takes into account natural joint angles as well which generally brings the pose space to about 10 poses
2) research using kinetics for interpolation - take the subjects mass and the individual is constrained by how fast they can change direction and need for dynamic balance, etc.
3)motion capture from silhouette
I would think that combining multiple methods - while being a bit more processor intensive could result in much superior results for much cheaper than using a large number of cameras.
There is also a mailing list apparently dedicated to open source motion capture and creating free/home brew mocap setups.
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/motioncaptur
LetterRip
Why wouldn't a game vendor instead use OpenGL and ensure that the game works with XP also?
LetterRip
"Along those same premises, let's say, hypothetically, that I had a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop on one of my PC's. I'm not a graphics professional, and have little use for it beyond making my own wallpaper. Are we to assume that I would actually pay the $699 price tag for this software? HELL NO."
The problem with this reasoning, is that had you not 'hypothetically' pirated Adobe Photoshop, instead of purchasing photoshop, you probably would have purchased a cheap tool that met your needs, or used a legally free equivalent. So your piracy doesn't hurt Adobe, but it very much does hurt Adobes low end competitors by denying them the sale and/or marketshare that would otherwise be theirs.
Only if you would have gone completely without software that does the functionality that you desire (wallpaper making, or basic image retouching) have you 'harmed' no one with your action.
Similiarly the pirating of Windows and Office, etc. very rarely harm Microsoft but instead harm their competitors that offer similar functionality and a significant price discount.
LetterRip
Qbertino,
:) Ton was coding an insane amount of time and there were useful and needed features coded by others, but there are still wish lists and polishing features, and things that didn't get finished. For the next project they will be starting with software that already meets all of the critical needs for the modeling, materials, rigging, weighting, animation, rendering, and compositing - so it will be much more 'nice to haves' instead of items critical for success.
good post some things though I think you might be mistaken,
"Then again, whith a feature list beforehand the parallel development of Blender would've gone quicker and features would've even been there before they where requested."
They had a partial feature list beforehand, and for instance, much of the animation coding work happened before the Orange team gathered. They ended up having a bigger list of desires than was anticipated I think though
"7) AFAIK they where rendering in production which took away some time. Usually you outsource that or another dept. does it. I don't think they used renderplanet, which, if not, they should have."
Rendering was done on a render farm that was in the US. The render farm was controlled via IRC online by Toni (technical director? - not sure what his offiicial designation was, he did misc scripting work, and handled the renderer stuff and other tasks).
"8) All OSS Tools. Thats the single largest obstacle. The OSS tools are impressive, but OSS NLE and Compositing is just plain no match at all for, let's say, Apple Shake or Digital Fusion."
A big part of the coding was getting blenders NLE and compositing tools up to the needed capabilities. Blender has now a very solid basis for NLE and Compositing.
"9) The benefits of compositing only became aware at the beginning of the project and key personell didn't have enough playing time to try things out, imho."
Ton was aware of the benefits of compositing at Siggraph after talking with some of his fellow open source panelists (I recall panelists from Dreamworks, IL&M, and Digital Domain, not sure who all he discussed it with though). Basically they told him that compositing with multipass renderers was the only way to go for work destined for the big screen. He just didn't have time to code the compositing till well into the movie since various improvements to the animating (improved rigging, weight painting, curve interpolation, etc), scene management (groups system, and other things), and materials tools (first layer based then switched to node based materials) and rendering were needed first.
LetterRip
For those who didn't see it the first link here are the movies again, hope you enjoy it
http://orange.blender.org/
LetterRip
That price is for the two DVDs containing all of the content used to make the movie also, not just the movie.
You can use the textures, models, rigs, etc. and use them in your own creation, use them to learn etc.
LetterRip
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but...
"The music and voice acting was recorded and composed by Jan Morgenstern using 100% propriatory software. The production team decided to avoid using open source software as otherwise it would have meant the film would have been made using just open source tools."
It is true that Jan used proprietary software. The purpose of Orange was to prove the capability of opensource for the 3D content creation. While it would have been nice to use open source tools for the sound it just wasn't deemed feasible (Jan did investigate the various open source audio tools for suitability). Also the orchestral scores that were done, there are not any open sound libraries that could be used for doing orchestral scores.
Personally I would love a project to create an open/free orchestral sampling library then it might be feasible to do the sound using only open source tools in the future.
LetterRip
"But wait, the BitTorrent tracker they're using is hosting a copyrighted DVD-R of the movie "The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).""
The 1934 version is public domain, the copyright is expired.
LetterRip
"I am not sure if anyone is having such painful experience, but few good advice on Cinelerra and Hydrogen on Fedora Core is welcome."
An alternative to consider would be Blender to 2.42 when it comes out. With the addition of ffmpeg for greater input and output flexibility, and its improved memory handling for video it is now a fairly capable video editor (see documentation on the sequencer).
LetterRip
Don't forget Blender! http://www.blender.org/
There are all sorts of cool things that could be done as projects, pretty much any siggraph paper, any computer graphics research, etc. would make a good candidate.
LetterRip
Well since I love it so, I'll pimp it bit :)
Try http://www.pandora.com/ it is absolutely amazing for discovering new music. Not really a replacement for this feature from Napster, but quite complementary.
LetterRip
"Trust me. The free programs may be able to convert formats, but they usually lose important information (textures, etc) and can't actually edit the changed file very well. What good is it to convert the file format if you can't change the file?"
Blender can handle 3DS, OBJ, and a number of other model formts fine without loss of the type of information that sketchup exports (some sketchup users use Blender to render currently since Blender is superior to sketchup for rendering tools).
LetterRip
"Simple, Open Source, 3D Game Engine
You get any two."
www.blender.org - it can use logic blocks that you visually connect or python scripting for game logic - easy. It is GPL licensed - open source. It is fully 3D game engine - graphics (including GLSL if you use python); physics; sound; armature system; logic system; etc. So there are options for all three.
If I were google I'd start getting openoffice as much publicity as possible, and other things that compete directly with Microsofts bread and butter. Find microsofts worst nightmare for each niche, opensource it and heavily support and distribute it.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]Movilink (Sony+other studios) - couldn't be given away.[/QUOTE]
:)
Well I personally love it, but admittedly am only using it because it is being given away on General Mills cereal boxes
It is fast, works great, superb customer support (only tried via chat, but response was quick and resolution satisfactory). I just wish they had more movies at the reasonable price (.99 or 2.00 for specials) instead of trying to get 5.99 for everything. Also it would be cool if they had an all you can watch model like netflix.
LetterRip