Time to pimp MY favorite 2D package.....
Being interested in traditionl animation, I found PlasticAnimationPaper http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/ to be very good. Their product(an advanced virtual lighttable) is available on Linux and they recently reviewed their pricing policy making the entry package very affordable.
Of course, you don't get Moho's tweening, but then again, it is a traditional 2D cel animation package...
Worth having a look if you are into traditional animation
-/Most end-users won't care about this technology. For them, Hypervisor is more of interest (whoa! no more dual booting, dude!!)
-/The functionality is more relevant to businesses who have no issue with custom kernels.....but then why not go for something supported/enterprise-grade?
-/It's the crappy freeware version intended to sell the upscale enterprise version. Why put something intentionally crippled in the kernel?
-/ There are several similar technologies being worked at. What makes this entry-version freeware so important?
Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm all for this type of software (even if not as full featured as the commercial package, I would still like to express a lot of gratitude for releasing this). I just think that the people who want to play around with this, will have no problem applying the patch to their kernel. I see NO reason to include this in the kernel.
So, you'd rather become cannon fodder for Ragnarok than sit at the right hand side of the Almighty for ever, and ever, and ever..... OK, Ragnarok it is then!
Blender, as already stated elsewhere in these threads, is a bit the Gimp/OpenOffice/Linux of the 3D world, meaning free, capable, evolving, but in no way equal to their closed source, commercial top predators (that would be Photoshop, MS Office 12, MS Vista). Of course this does NOT mean that they a worthless projects! They ARE growing, getting better and being used more and more. At a certain moment, they will simply be "good enough". For a lot of real world use, GIMP, OpenOffice and Linux are already there (how many of you actually BUY the commercial packages because the FLOSS packages cannot handle something you absolutely need? Pirating SW does not count...). Now, Blender might not actually be quite there yet, but if the recent spurt of activity can be maintained (Blender recently got softbodies, a hair system, a fluid system to name just three and is doing wonderfull stuff in the animation area), in a year's time I think we'll start seeing more and more stuff produced in Blender (hobby and student stuff, indy pre-vis etc. One has to start somewhere...). You should try it out (Test Builds in the blender.org forum area). The interface has greatly improved over the last couple of years as well so that old horse should stop being flogged.
What's wrong with that? Do you think Microsoft just slapped a couple of XP-CDs in their demo systems, did a quick 5-minute install and left it at that??
From the article: "...it was within their rights to do what they did, and no one should begrudge them for it..."
Now, while I agree with the first part, I certainly don't with the second! Just because it is legal does not make it right!
While Apple should indeed not 'bend over' and provide beatifull diff patches that seamlessly upgrade KHTML, SOME effort could have been made as thanks for the effort saved in not having to start from scratch. We certainly CAN and DO begrudge them this 'take all you can, give nothing back'- attitude.
Are they within their rights? Sure!
Are they doing the decent thing? Nope... so we carry a grudge
Great! So now you can have real PABX functionality at home (SOHO)
But how does it scale?
How many people can actually have working phones on a system? Is it just the Hardware which needs to scale or are there limitations to Asterisk itself?
If I could play with this at work, how many guys could I conceivably hook up to this (using just SIP calls, no external connections needed) What would be the number of concurrent calls?
Is there any info on that (yeah, I know it's "@Home" but just wondered...)
I've been aware of Astersk for ages, but having a 'self-intalling' PBX does lower the bar quite a bit.
How come nobody is bitching about the ever increasing reliance on Java? Lots of Java apps come bundled with OOo v2.0b bundled like the Mediaplayer (Just read the posts at the end of the article)
An OpenOffice that will end up requiring Java is no longer an OpenOffice but a JavaOffice and thus not portable to other alternate OSes like the *BSD and such and hence NOT EVEN FREE SOFTWARE!! Do we want to trade MS Office for Sun Office ? No difference in view of their close partnership if you ask me...
God, you people can be such bastards....
Here is a guy, single handedly building a full, self-hosted, VB-like development environment on Linux as a gift to the community and all you people do is shit all over his project.
Why Basic? Why QT? Why MDI? Why funny pictures on the main page? Why not.NET?
Python is better! Realbasic is better! Mono is better!
It's open source for crying out loud!! Don't like MDI? Change it! (after all it is self hosting)
Think REALBasic is better? Fine, go buy that then!
Prefer Mono's VB? OK, sit around and wait a bit longer. Don't like the site's informal look? Where is your mockup of a better one then?
Let's face it. The only reason you're all bitching (most of you anyways..) is that you're too THICK to change any of it! I'm reading the developer forum and I see no patches coming in from any of you offering SDI, GTK+,.NET compatibility, Python plug-ins etc.
Bunch of ingrates....
You could have a look at Kbasic (http://www.kbasic.org/1/index)
There is a non-functional preview for Windows (nada for Linux though...)
OK, so it won't be free but he price is tempting
Benoit's Gambas IDE is a very nice program indeed. Seeing it reach maturity is very satisfying indeed.
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet...
Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual. Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
My guess is the 'single Linux image' that did it.
Compare it to running a single treaded process on the NEC Earth simulator and then saying "See, it's not all that fast, is it?"
Mainframes do not have blistering fast CPUs. They do have very bg pipes
My biggest laugh came with the "Harry Potter" statement. It again makes clear that SCOscum want everyobody to think that "their" UNIX V is the "real thing". Unfortunately for them, they are just another Dmitry Yemets, but going one further and claiming that they now own the student-in-magical-school-flies-around-and-plays-b all-game and everybody needs to worship them while all the while it is the UNIX standard/Posix that is the real Harry Potter/Rawlings!
Difficult proposition.... but what's in a name. What exactly does Novell mean? The creation of a new Linux Single Desktop (LSD) to replace both Gnome AND KDE? Can't see that happen...
Now, there is a lot of small stuff that is/can be pushed in the Linux Standard Base: extend LSB to include thumbnails, bookmarks, Menu entries, mail repositories and all the small things that are so annoying when dealing with multiple apps with same functionality on 2 desktops. The switch to OOo formats in Gnome Office and KOffice will also make things a lot easier.
Next to that, there are major changes afoot in both environments that would already 'unify' them to a greater extend: DBUS adoption, single MultiMedia layer (GStreamer or NMM, as long as there is only one).
Where there will NEVER be convergence is toolkits. No way you can bring together the LGPLed GTK et al and the GPL/Proprietary Qt toolkits. So maybe we will end up with two visually different UIs using the same 'stuff' underneath.
Don't forget.... there is a new 600-page book coming out end of this month. This has the new GUI but not the Raytracing part. There is also a Japanese book currently in print. Details on Blender.org
Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond in some shops or simply downloaded as a PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface)
There is also a newer documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content. Of course, there is also a truckload of tutorials available on the Net
Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others
internationalisation
way better meta ball implementation
knife tool
raytracer (reflections&shadows)
completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
a newer, better Python API and plenty of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)
These are just my favorites. There is tons of other stuff as well. In the coming weeks/months, we'll see
Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
If your first encounter with Blender's non-standard GUI made you trow up your hands in disgust, you should consider to try it again.
Don't forget.... there is a new 600-page book coming out end of this month. This has the new GUI but not the Raytracing part. There is also a Japanese book currently in print. Details on Blender.org
Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond or simply downloaded as PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface)
There is also a documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content.
Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others
internationalisation
way better meta ball implementation
knife tool
raytracer (reflections&shadows)
completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
a newer, better Python API and a truckload of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see
Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
They themselves say something along the lines of Mozaic begat Netscape which begat Mozilla... Corrrect, but as far as I remember, each change meant another logo and another name!! These guys, whatever there motives, simply ripped of the LinuxGazette name and artwork! Fork the Gazette? Sure! Keep the form factor? No problem! Tell people to switch allegiance? OK. But hey, call it Linux Newspaper or so and get your own logo!
I agree mostly. Closed, proprietary SW should NOT be discriminated against viz-a-viz OSS.
The focus point should be on open, fully documented and implementable formats to prevent lock-in to the closed proprietary SW.
Brazil (or any organization for that matter) should mandate use of eg OpenOffice format. Everybody can implement this (lots of OSS projects are doing this already) Who knows, a MS-Office suite doctored to PREVENT it saving in proprietary formats (just OO.org, RTF, HTML, text, PDF...)might still be the best solution...
HDTV means digital broadcast. Right?
The broadcast flag will prevent the ordinary consumer from maken digital copies of transmitted digital content. Right?
The main question for me is: Will it still be possible to 'tape' the shows, films,.. in an analog fashion same as I can on current standard TV sets? If that's the case I don't see any problem.I can time shift now and will lose nothing (except for an INCREASE in quality of the taped content) in the future.
Of course, if they force HDTV makers from removing any analog copying capability, they effectively STEAL my timeshifting capability and I'll probably say f*ck that to HDTV. I'll just settle for the latest analog Plasma TV. After all, most stuff on TV is crap anyway and the current crop of Widescreen TVs will do very nicely for the 10-20 years to come.
Re:The best trial version of Linux available
on
Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
For your Games-loving friend, the Morphix game.ISO might be a better choice....
Hmmm.... don't totally agree. OK, this scenario MIGHT happen.
However, plugging a supported USB cam in Mandrake will automount the camera on the desktop and any of the installed camera apps will work with it.
Of course, I'm stuck with a piece of unsupported PC CAM 300 crap which only works as webcam using a Googled Sunplus driver...
The people who will use CrossOver Office in a professional environment most probably already HAVE Office (and IE6, Outlook, Notes, Photoshop...)!! So, you can see it as protecting the existing software investments.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to pimp MY favorite 2D package..... Being interested in traditionl animation, I found PlasticAnimationPaper http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/ to be very good. Their product(an advanced virtual lighttable) is available on Linux and they recently reviewed their pricing policy making the entry package very affordable. Of course, you don't get Moho's tweening, but then again, it is a traditional 2D cel animation package... Worth having a look if you are into traditional animation
Waaaw...
You bought it a couple of times? You must LOVE that movie....
This shouldn't be in the kernel.
-/Most end-users won't care about this technology. For them, Hypervisor is more of interest (whoa! no more dual booting, dude!!)
-/The functionality is more relevant to businesses who have no issue with custom kernels.....but then why not go for something supported/enterprise-grade?
-/It's the crappy freeware version intended to sell the upscale enterprise version. Why put something intentionally crippled in the kernel?
-/ There are several similar technologies being worked at. What makes this entry-version freeware so important?
Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm all for this type of software (even if not as full featured as the commercial package, I would still like to express a lot of gratitude for releasing this). I just think that the people who want to play around with this, will have no problem applying the patch to their kernel. I see NO reason to include this in the kernel.
So, you'd rather become cannon fodder for Ragnarok than sit at the right hand side of the Almighty for ever, and ever, and ever..... OK, Ragnarok it is then!
Blender, as already stated elsewhere in these threads, is a bit the Gimp/OpenOffice/Linux of the 3D world, meaning free, capable, evolving, but in no way equal to their closed source, commercial top predators (that would be Photoshop, MS Office 12, MS Vista). Of course this does NOT mean that they a worthless projects! They ARE growing, getting better and being used more and more.
At a certain moment, they will simply be "good enough". For a lot of real world use, GIMP, OpenOffice and Linux are already there (how many of you actually BUY the commercial packages because the FLOSS packages cannot handle something you absolutely need? Pirating SW does not count...). Now, Blender might not actually be quite there yet, but if the recent spurt of activity can be maintained (Blender recently got softbodies, a hair system, a fluid system to name just three and is doing wonderfull stuff in the animation area), in a year's time I think we'll start seeing more and more stuff produced in Blender (hobby and student stuff, indy pre-vis etc. One has to start somewhere...). You should try it out (Test Builds in the blender.org forum area). The interface has greatly improved over the last couple of years as well so that old horse should stop being flogged.
What's wrong with that? Do you think Microsoft just slapped a couple of XP-CDs in their demo systems, did a quick 5-minute install and left it at that??
From the article: "...it was within their rights to do what they did, and no one should begrudge them for it..."
Now, while I agree with the first part, I certainly don't with the second! Just because it is legal does not make it right!
While Apple should indeed not 'bend over' and provide beatifull diff patches that seamlessly upgrade KHTML, SOME effort could have been made as thanks for the effort saved in not having to start from scratch. We certainly CAN and DO begrudge them this 'take all you can, give nothing back'- attitude.
Are they within their rights? Sure!Are they doing the decent thing? Nope
Great! So now you can have real PABX functionality at home (SOHO) But how does it scale? How many people can actually have working phones on a system? Is it just the Hardware which needs to scale or are there limitations to Asterisk itself? If I could play with this at work, how many guys could I conceivably hook up to this (using just SIP calls, no external connections needed) What would be the number of concurrent calls? Is there any info on that (yeah, I know it's "@Home" but just wondered...) I've been aware of Astersk for ages, but having a 'self-intalling' PBX does lower the bar quite a bit.
How come nobody is bitching about the ever increasing reliance on Java? Lots of Java apps come bundled with OOo v2.0b bundled like the Mediaplayer (Just read the posts at the end of the article)
An OpenOffice that will end up requiring Java is no longer an OpenOffice but a JavaOffice and thus not portable to other alternate OSes like the *BSD and such and hence NOT EVEN FREE SOFTWARE!!
Do we want to trade MS Office for Sun Office ? No difference in view of their close partnership if you ask me...
God, you people can be such bastards.... .NET? .NET compatibility, Python plug-ins etc.
Here is a guy, single handedly building a full, self-hosted, VB-like development environment on Linux as a gift to the community and all you people do is shit all over his project.
Why Basic? Why QT? Why MDI? Why funny pictures on the main page? Why not
Python is better! Realbasic is better! Mono is better!
It's open source for crying out loud!! Don't like MDI? Change it! (after all it is self hosting) Think REALBasic is better? Fine, go buy that then! Prefer Mono's VB? OK, sit around and wait a bit longer. Don't like the site's informal look? Where is your mockup of a better one then?
Let's face it. The only reason you're all bitching (most of you anyways..) is that you're too THICK to change any of it! I'm reading the developer forum and I see no patches coming in from any of you offering SDI, GTK+,
Bunch of ingrates....
You could have a look at Kbasic (http://www.kbasic.org/1/index) There is a non-functional preview for Windows (nada for Linux though...) OK, so it won't be free but he price is tempting
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet... Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual.
Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
HBasic http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/ also seemed nice but seems to have run in a wall sometime in the last year...
For the Basic affectionados (sans Visual), there is of course the venerable XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/ and X11-Basic http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/ tools but these are frozen in time and not really in the same league.
My guess is the 'single Linux image' that did it. Compare it to running a single treaded process on the NEC Earth simulator and then saying "See, it's not all that fast, is it?" Mainframes do not have blistering fast CPUs. They do have very bg pipes
My biggest laugh came with the "Harry Potter" statement. It again makes clear that SCOscum want everyobody to think that "their" UNIX V is the "real thing". Unfortunately for them, they are just another Dmitry Yemets, but going one further and claiming that they now own the student-in-magical-school-flies-around-and-plays-b all-game and everybody needs to worship them while all the while it is the UNIX standard/Posix that is the real Harry Potter/Rawlings!
What exactly does Novell mean? The creation of a new Linux Single Desktop (LSD) to replace both Gnome AND KDE?
Can't see that happen...
Now, there is a lot of small stuff that is/can be pushed in the Linux Standard Base: extend LSB to include thumbnails, bookmarks, Menu entries, mail repositories and all the small things that are so annoying when dealing with multiple apps with same functionality on 2 desktops.
The switch to OOo formats in Gnome Office and KOffice will also make things a lot easier.
Next to that, there are major changes afoot in both environments that would already 'unify' them to a greater extend: DBUS adoption, single MultiMedia layer (GStreamer or NMM, as long as there is only one).
Where there will NEVER be convergence is toolkits. No way you can bring together the LGPLed GTK et al and the GPL/Proprietary Qt toolkits. So maybe we will end up with two visually different UIs using the same 'stuff' underneath.
But then again, what do I know...
Although a bit tongue-in-cheek, this 'summary' does indeed contain most of the Windows droid's comments in human readable form. Great read!
Number 10 convinced me! Yiiiii-haaa
Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond in some shops or simply downloaded as a PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a newer documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content. Of course, there is also a truckload of tutorials available on the Net
Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others
These are just my favorites. There is tons of other stuff as well.
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see
And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
If your first encounter with Blender's non-standard GUI made you trow up your hands in disgust, you should consider to try it again.
Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond or simply downloaded as PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content.
Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see
And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
Hmmmm....
I'd say bad form from the forkers...
They themselves say something along the lines of
Mozaic begat Netscape which begat Mozilla...
Corrrect, but as far as I remember, each change meant another logo and another name!!
These guys, whatever there motives, simply ripped of the LinuxGazette name and artwork!
Fork the Gazette? Sure! Keep the form factor? No problem! Tell people to switch allegiance? OK. But hey, call it Linux Newspaper or so and get your own logo!
I agree mostly. Closed, proprietary SW should NOT be discriminated against viz-a-viz OSS. The focus point should be on open, fully documented and implementable formats to prevent lock-in to the closed proprietary SW. Brazil (or any organization for that matter) should mandate use of eg OpenOffice format. Everybody can implement this (lots of OSS projects are doing this already) Who knows, a MS-Office suite doctored to PREVENT it saving in proprietary formats (just OO.org, RTF, HTML, text, PDF...)might still be the best solution...
HDTV means digital broadcast. Right? The broadcast flag will prevent the ordinary consumer from maken digital copies of transmitted digital content. Right? The main question for me is: Will it still be possible to 'tape' the shows, films,.. in an analog fashion same as I can on current standard TV sets? If that's the case I don't see any problem.I can time shift now and will lose nothing (except for an INCREASE in quality of the taped content) in the future. Of course, if they force HDTV makers from removing any analog copying capability, they effectively STEAL my timeshifting capability and I'll probably say f*ck that to HDTV. I'll just settle for the latest analog Plasma TV. After all, most stuff on TV is crap anyway and the current crop of Widescreen TVs will do very nicely for the 10-20 years to come.
For your Games-loving friend, the Morphix game .ISO might be a better choice....
Hmmm.... don't totally agree. OK, this scenario MIGHT happen. However, plugging a supported USB cam in Mandrake will automount the camera on the desktop and any of the installed camera apps will work with it. Of course, I'm stuck with a piece of unsupported PC CAM 300 crap which only works as webcam using a Googled Sunplus driver...
The people who will use CrossOver Office in a professional environment most probably already HAVE Office (and IE6, Outlook, Notes, Photoshop...)!! So, you can see it as protecting the existing software investments.