While I agree that the idea of the open source movie is intriguing and do-able, I'm not sure that just being able to get your hands on a quality 3D package for free is enough to threaten the Pixars and Dreamworks of the world.
I'm a 3D artist that works in the architectural market, and I use one of the most expensive packages out there (3ds max). I haven't had a chance to play with Blender yet, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. The thing is, in the big picture of what it takes to put together even a short film, the cost of the 3D software is a drop in the bucket. The real cost comes in the production time. At the end of the day, if animation is your lifeblood, the hours you put in had better have a dollar cost assigned to them - otherwise your kids aren't gonna be eating.
If you're running a WETA-style large scale renderfarm, you've probably got a buck or two tied up in hardware, too.
To me one of the best things Blender does is to provide a pro-quality tool to the masses. Once you learn the basic concepts, switching packages wouldn't be that big a deal. If you told me I had to switch to maya/blender/lightwave/softimage/cinema4d, I'd bitch and moan about it for a few weeks, but like a codemonkey switching languages, I'd pick it up a whole lot faster than if I'd started out cold.
Not that having a good, free option will keep your average 15 year old videogame designer wannabee from just digging up a cracked version of the flavor of the week 3D package.. .
Even though the apps I use every day at work aren't ported to it, I'd love to have a powerbook. Same story.
There are a couple of things about this that stink of Apple propaganda to me - first of all, even if a million users worldwide switched from PC to Mac - that's still a fairly small percentage of the overall set of computer users in the world. Additionally, these mac articles never even address the fact that there might be people out there (like my parents) who bought a first generation iMac, and are now in the market for a new computer, and will probably buy a PC.
Slashdot readers shall make no guidelines respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
That's how it reads, isn't it?
Who needs wallpaper when you can just fight back?
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Maybe I'm the only one who ran across http://www.evilscheme.org/defcon/ this little gem , but this seems like a very good low-budget option for striking back at your friendly neighborhood wi-fi swipers.
Police are reporting that one of the suspects, Douglas "Duke" Nukem, had, in his words, been trying to get his hands on some source code like this "FOREVER".
I have absolutely no expertise in interface design, and almost as little REAL expertise in hard-core technology, but I am a designer by profession; I'm a Landscape Architect - mostly designing neighborhoods, resorts, and other places where we live out our day to day lives.
One challenge we face in the design projects I'm involved with that I'm fairly certain translates to the kind of design Brown talks about is the "lowest common denominator" problem. We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand.
The general populace tends to be slow to accept radical changes to familiar things like the way a suburban street or a park feels. They have an expectation that has built up over several years, and things that are different (and often much, much better) seem strange, and are sometimes rejected outright. We fear change. Change is bad. The same is often true for things like community zoning boards (made up of average Joe, average Bill, and average Jane).
Its an interesting problem, and the major challenge for us is to keep our designs current and progressive without succumbing to the temptation to just arbitrarily "dumb down" our work.
To me, today, in the age of gigahertz, this little memory of my commodore still brings a smile to my face.
Boot the C-128, and the clock speed was 1 mHz.
From a command prompt, you type;
FAST
And it goes to a whopping 2 mHz. Overclock that baby!!! Of course, most of the time I was using my C-128 for anything besides BBS's, the first thing I did upon turning it on was to hold down the C= (commodore) key to get it to boot into C-64 mode so I could play the bevy of illegal software I had downloaded from the BBS's.
Good old days. When the owners manual actually taught you how to write programs.
I was one of the (supposedly) talented and gifted kids in 4th grade, 1984. So we got to take a "computers" class. This amounted to driving us over to the one place they had some computers, and teaching us how to do Apple ][+ lo-res graphics. For those that haven't done this, it generally amounts to drawing out a grid of pixels, then writing a BASIC program to draw a 40x40 pixel, 16 color (or was it 8 color) picture.
In retrospect, this seems dork-like, but boy was it cool at the time. More than that, I think it laid the cornerstone for me to go on to what I do today, which is high-end computer-generated architectural renderings and animation. Humble beginnings to a fun life. But I'll always be thankful I was taught how to make something pretty (kinda) by typing
hlin 0,30 at 3
It took away my fear of computers. Today, when people I know in life wonder at how I can sit down and just pick up an application and use it, I tell them that its because I got started early, and got past the fear.
How about cutting expenses to lower the deficit? Has anyone ever thought about that option?
But then all the people, corporations, and organizations that have gotten used to all the "free money" might actually have to find a way to subsist on their own. Remember, the way baseline budgeting is done in Washington, if you leave spending at the same level for next year, thats considered a "cut".
Seeing that makes me ask the question, why are they choosing a high end single P4 as their "fastest PC"?
Wouldn't it be a more fair comparison to throw a PC dually against the Mac dually? I'd like to see either a dual Athlon MP or dual Xeon run the same benchmarks, or, put up one G4 chip against one Intel/AMD chip. I think the disparity you see in those benchmark figures would be even more substantial, especially given the fact that most, if not all, of Adobe's apps are multi-threaded. Not only that, it'd be more representative of the "fastest" workstation on each platform.
I've been using Photoshop for . ..um . . . about eight years now. Initially, all I used it on was a Mac, because quite frankly, Photoshop for Windows in 1995 was a gross, nasty piece of software.
For reasons mostly related to my profession (Landscape Architect, at the time), I switched to a PC, and began the task of using Photoshop in a Windows environment. At the time, version 3.0 or so was getting better, but still pretty nasty. Now we're up to 7.0, and it is a remarkably better piece of software. I love it. I now do 3D work and image editing, and Photoshop work probably comprises 25% of my time. I'm extremely happy with it, as I am with the copies of Premiere, Pagemaker, and Illustrator that I use in the course of my work, as well.
That being said, I have never been able to escape the notion that it has seemed that Adobe has never quite gotten the knack of porting the software over to the PC. Granted, it runs like a champ, but just little things . ..things I'm not even sure I can call to mind - the way menus lay out, the lack of some standardized interface items (like a save button) . ..have always left me feeling like the PC version of Photoshop and other Adobe apps are kind of afterthoughts - that Adobe must view the Mac version as the REAL version, and the Windows version as the weaker sister.
I fight this battle with my cluster of close friends, most of whom are designer types, about once every three months. I think I've finally got them convinced that you CAN run Photoshop and Illustrator on a PC. For years, they assumed that you couldn't. But that opens up a whole different can of worms that I'm not even going go get into. Use what you want.
So, I'd say this is a surprising development, given my experience with Adobe software over the years.
How long do I have before the BSA shows up at my door if I make the arguement that I was FORCED to use all those ..um..demonstration copies..of microsoft software because of the high cost?
Its a precious Rimbaldi artifact. Its part of a weapon! Send in Jennifer Garner and the CIA goon squad. A little spandex, a red wig, and it will be ours!
Silly, that will come in the insightful comments to follow, mainly from those who didn't bother to read the article, but saw the M$ word, and went w00t w00t w00t w00t with more of the same canned rhetoric.
Thankfully, those people don't consitute the majority (or so I hope).
I realize I'll get modded as flamebait for saying this, but as someone who WAS a Mac user, and has, for the last few years, been extremely happy with Windows, I'm not sure I'd make the statement that moving from from Windows to Macintosh is arbitrarily an upgrade. For many people, it may be an appropriate switch or change based on personal preference, but upgrade has some connotations that I'm not sure everyone here would agree with.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that the idea of the open source movie is intriguing and do-able, I'm not sure that just being able to get your hands on a quality 3D package for free is enough to threaten the Pixars and Dreamworks of the world.
.. .
I'm a 3D artist that works in the architectural market, and I use one of the most expensive packages out there (3ds max). I haven't had a chance to play with Blender yet, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. The thing is, in the big picture of what it takes to put together even a short film, the cost of the 3D software is a drop in the bucket. The real cost comes in the production time. At the end of the day, if animation is your lifeblood, the hours you put in had better have a dollar cost assigned to them - otherwise your kids aren't gonna be eating.
If you're running a WETA-style large scale renderfarm, you've probably got a buck or two tied up in hardware, too.
To me one of the best things Blender does is to provide a pro-quality tool to the masses. Once you learn the basic concepts, switching packages wouldn't be that big a deal. If you told me I had to switch to maya/blender/lightwave/softimage/cinema4d, I'd bitch and moan about it for a few weeks, but like a codemonkey switching languages, I'd pick it up a whole lot faster than if I'd started out cold.
Not that having a good, free option will keep your average 15 year old videogame designer wannabee from just digging up a cracked version of the flavor of the week 3D package
This is nothing new, at least in the music industry. Look what happened to Spinal Tap's "Smell The Glove" cover.
Even though the apps I use every day at work aren't ported to it, I'd love to have a powerbook. Same story.
There are a couple of things about this that stink of Apple propaganda to me - first of all, even if a million users worldwide switched from PC to Mac - that's still a fairly small percentage of the overall set of computer users in the world. Additionally, these mac articles never even address the fact that there might be people out there (like my parents) who bought a first generation iMac, and are now in the market for a new computer, and will probably buy a PC.
The switch works in both directions.
Amendment I
Slashdot readers shall make no guidelines respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
That's how it reads, isn't it?
Maybe I'm the only one who ran across http://www.evilscheme.org/defcon/ this little gem , but this seems like a very good low-budget option for striking back at your friendly neighborhood wi-fi swipers.
Police are reporting that one of the suspects, Douglas "Duke" Nukem, had, in his words, been trying to get his hands on some source code like this "FOREVER".
which they refer to as "microchipping your pet"
Hmm. Wouldn't a better name for RFID'ing your pet be be "The Mark on the Beast"?
I have absolutely no expertise in interface design, and almost as little REAL expertise in hard-core technology, but I am a designer by profession; I'm a Landscape Architect - mostly designing neighborhoods, resorts, and other places where we live out our day to day lives.
One challenge we face in the design projects I'm involved with that I'm fairly certain translates to the kind of design Brown talks about is the "lowest common denominator" problem. We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand.
The general populace tends to be slow to accept radical changes to familiar things like the way a suburban street or a park feels. They have an expectation that has built up over several years, and things that are different (and often much, much better) seem strange, and are sometimes rejected outright. We fear change. Change is bad. The same is often true for things like community zoning boards (made up of average Joe, average Bill, and average Jane).
Its an interesting problem, and the major challenge for us is to keep our designs current and progressive without succumbing to the temptation to just arbitrarily "dumb down" our work.
Science imitating science imitating life?
. . . built-in X11
Ok, so it has built-in X11. But does it have a built-in X10 Camera???
Screw Tic-Tac-Toe, I'm gonna go play Global Thermonuclear War.
Sincerely,
W.O.P.R.
Wouldn't that be "Unicies" instead of Unixes?
Or is it Uni (prounounced you-nigh)?
All these plurals confuse me.
I vote for Unixi.
To me, today, in the age of gigahertz, this little memory of my commodore still brings a smile to my face.
Boot the C-128, and the clock speed was 1 mHz.
From a command prompt, you type;
FAST
And it goes to a whopping 2 mHz. Overclock that baby!!! Of course, most of the time I was using my C-128 for anything besides BBS's, the first thing I did upon turning it on was to hold down the C= (commodore) key to get it to boot into C-64 mode so I could play the bevy of illegal software I had downloaded from the BBS's.
Good old days. When the owners manual actually taught you how to write programs.
I was one of the (supposedly) talented and gifted kids in 4th grade, 1984. So we got to take a "computers" class. This amounted to driving us over to the one place they had some computers, and teaching us how to do Apple ][+ lo-res graphics. For those that haven't done this, it generally amounts to drawing out a grid of pixels, then writing a BASIC program to draw a 40x40 pixel, 16 color (or was it 8 color) picture.
In retrospect, this seems dork-like, but boy was it cool at the time. More than that, I think it laid the cornerstone for me to go on to what I do today, which is high-end computer-generated architectural renderings and animation. Humble beginnings to a fun life. But I'll always be thankful I was taught how to make something pretty (kinda) by typing
hlin 0,30 at 3
It took away my fear of computers. Today, when people I know in life wonder at how I can sit down and just pick up an application and use it, I tell them that its because I got started early, and got past the fear.
Thank you, wedge-shaped beige computer.
Great. A kilogram is getting smaller? That means I'm getting fatter!!
Good thing the pound is nice and stable . . I couldn't stand for my quarter-pounders to get any smaller!!
What? Noone told me!! When did Doom IV come out? Oops, gotta go out and buy a new computer to run it!
How about cutting expenses to lower the deficit? Has anyone ever thought about that option?
But then all the people, corporations, and organizations that have gotten used to all the "free money" might actually have to find a way to subsist on their own. Remember, the way baseline budgeting is done in Washington, if you leave spending at the same level for next year, thats considered a "cut".
Seeing that makes me ask the question, why are they choosing a high end single P4 as their "fastest PC"?
Wouldn't it be a more fair comparison to throw a PC dually against the Mac dually? I'd like to see either a dual Athlon MP or dual Xeon run the same benchmarks, or, put up one G4 chip against one Intel/AMD chip. I think the disparity you see in those benchmark figures would be even more substantial, especially given the fact that most, if not all, of Adobe's apps are multi-threaded. Not only that, it'd be more representative of the "fastest" workstation on each platform.
Once you go dually, you'll never go back.
I've been using Photoshop for . . .um . . . about eight years now. Initially, all I used it on was a Mac, because quite frankly, Photoshop for Windows in 1995 was a gross, nasty piece of software.
.things I'm not even sure I can call to mind - the way menus lay out, the lack of some standardized interface items (like a save button) . . .have always left me feeling like the PC version of Photoshop and other Adobe apps are kind of afterthoughts - that Adobe must view the Mac version as the REAL version, and the Windows version as the weaker sister.
For reasons mostly related to my profession (Landscape Architect, at the time), I switched to a PC, and began the task of using Photoshop in a Windows environment. At the time, version 3.0 or so was getting better, but still pretty nasty. Now we're up to 7.0, and it is a remarkably better piece of software. I love it. I now do 3D work and image editing, and Photoshop work probably comprises 25% of my time. I'm extremely happy with it, as I am with the copies of Premiere, Pagemaker, and Illustrator that I use in the course of my work, as well.
That being said, I have never been able to escape the notion that it has seemed that Adobe has never quite gotten the knack of porting the software over to the PC. Granted, it runs like a champ, but just little things . .
I fight this battle with my cluster of close friends, most of whom are designer types, about once every three months. I think I've finally got them convinced that you CAN run Photoshop and Illustrator on a PC. For years, they assumed that you couldn't. But that opens up a whole different can of worms that I'm not even going go get into. Use what you want.
So, I'd say this is a surprising development, given my experience with Adobe software over the years.
That news could seriously impact my habit of printing and obsessively compulsively filing hard copies of every Slashdot story I read.
How long do I have before the BSA shows up at my door if I make the arguement that I was FORCED to use all those . .um ..demonstration copies ..of microsoft software because of the high cost?
Yeah. Forced. Arm twisting and the whole deal.
It can't be!! It is!!
Its a precious Rimbaldi artifact. Its part of a weapon! Send in Jennifer Garner and the CIA goon squad. A little spandex, a red wig, and it will be ours!
Silly, that will come in the insightful comments to follow, mainly from those who didn't bother to read the article, but saw the M$ word, and went w00t w00t w00t w00t with more of the same canned rhetoric.
Thankfully, those people don't consitute the majority (or so I hope).
but don't forget to punch out the notch on the other side of the disk. Surely you have your notch puncher handy, don't you?
I realize I'll get modded as flamebait for saying this, but as someone who WAS a Mac user, and has, for the last few years, been extremely happy with Windows, I'm not sure I'd make the statement that moving from from Windows to Macintosh is arbitrarily an upgrade. For many people, it may be an appropriate switch or change based on personal preference, but upgrade has some connotations that I'm not sure everyone here would agree with.