A trend around here is to buy/sell textbooks through online listings. The prices hover right in the middle of the prices bookstores charge you for it used, and the amount they'll buy it back for. Also (having been burned several times by the new edition problem), these are great places to sell an old edition of a textbook, as many classes really don't depend on the new version.
However, I think that electronic formats are picking up momentum, but not from the publishing companies. This semester, I only purchased 1 textbook; all other classes use only lecture notes or materials online! I've found that more and more instructors/professors are relying on their own notes, instead of finding a textbook that only partially covers the course topics.
"Secondly, there is apple.slashdot.org It even uses Apple's disgusting aqua theme."
Wow. A catagory of Slashdot devoted to Apple. I mean, they don't have enough users to warrent a whole section with a theme! Next thing you know, there'll be a section for BSD. I mean, it's dead!
Slashdot should really allow you to only look at the sections you want to, like in the settings or something.
"Yes, I am English, and yes, it is true, our teeth, compared to yours, are all wiggly and stained. Man, I swear I can spot an American tourist over here as soon as they open thier mouth. From a mile off, on a sunny day."
Not me! My teeth are as yellow and nasty as any Englishman. Plus, I can put on a nice, generic British accent to fit right in.
However, it seems you can tell a Slashdotter by how much of their life revolves around Lord of the Rings.
DRM is the virus!! We have to get to the central hub of the internet to shut it down!!! Where's Al Gore? He's the only one who has the passcodes to shut down the internet!!!
PayPal is quite safe. I've used it a few times in conjunction with eBay, etc., although not recently - I've run into a cashflow problem and had to curb my impulse buying habits:o).
The problem(s) with PayPal come from not knowing who you're sending your money to; anybody can get a PayPal account, so some less scrupulous folks may try and get you to donate to their "cause." The upshot: don't give your money to just anybody...
Give it to Wikipedia! The money will go to good use! That's my $.03 (and yes, my opinion is worth more than yours:o) ).
IIRC, not a lick of ray tracing has was used in "Finding Nemo." Only a handful of scenes in all of the Pixar films have employed ray tracing. It just takes too long to get an image that's good enough. On the other hand, Blue Sky's "Ice Age" was entirely ray traced.
The REYES algorithm (the scanline algorithm that has been the "backbone" of Renderman since its creation) is incredibly fast, but with great results. A G5 at Pixar's booth at the SIGGRAPH conference last summer was rendering a frame of "Finding Nemo" for all to see - I couldn't imagine how long it would take a ray tracer (with that complex of a lighting scheme) to finish this.
More importantly, ray tracing capabilities are new to Renderman's 11th release (the current one). Anyone who was "ray tracing in Renderman" a few years ago was lying to you. Again at the SIGGRAPH conference, Pixar was presenting the new ray tracing-based features of Renderman. They looked cool and all, but not the focus of the package. Heck, even to quote the very page you linked to:
Techniques that long-time RenderMan users have learned and refined will continue to be useful and effective - think of Release 11's new ray tracing features as an important addition to your bag of tricks.
This is all incredibly off topic. Renderman is not even in competition with Blender; they're two entirely different beasts. My point is that ray tracing, especially in the context of production, is not all that important. However, I'm very pleased that Blender is maturing as well as it is. Although this particular feature isn't too useful to me - I've never touched Maya 5's new mentalray capabilities, either - I'm excited that it will bring more people (and attention) to the only good animation package I can afford to use at home.
A few years back, when I worked at a certain electronics retailer, we had trouble with a couple of the eMachines catching fire (well, smoking at least - it's still not a good sign) during a storm, even though they were hooked up to industrial grade surge protectors.
Now, I no longer shop retail (and I don't buy eMachines), so I really don't know anything.
Hahaha... I just saw this troll in English yesterday.
But seriously, your grammar sucks, and half the words didn't translate prperly. Did you put this into babbelfish yourself, or was a whole network of trolls responsible?
OK, I'm done feeding the trolls. *hand slap*
One on-topic note - in the screenshots, why isn't Terminal (even just the window name) translated?
I had used a version of StarOffice on Windows 2000 a few years back, and found it to be somewhat slow and occasionally counterintuitive.
However, for ~6 months I have been using OpenOffice on my Windows XP box. I was prompted again to make the switch because I desired a German dictionary as well for the spell checker. It's a lot speedier than I remember StarOffice to be (and I'm still running on the same machine).
I have kept around MS Office at my wife's insistance, but I do all my work in OOo, especially because I work frequently on Linux at school/work (and am using it more frequently at home, too). I love the pdf exporter, and my documents (albeit, never very complex) have imported just fine.
If a doctor on call was to go to a theater that blocked his/her cell phone or pager from working, I'd wager he/she would quickly be out of a job and a medical license.
Do you really think that cell phone jammers wouldn't be an issue if everyone was responsible with their phones (not that that would be possible; you can't get everyone to be responsible and considerate)?
If only we could get everyone to be responsible with their firearms...
Slashdot Mirror
The real reasons for this squabble go back to '01 when IBM released Eclipse after inviting every company except Sun to join the project.
Why do you think it's called Eclipse? They're blocking out the Sun.
A trend around here is to buy/sell textbooks through online listings. The prices hover right in the middle of the prices bookstores charge you for it used, and the amount they'll buy it back for. Also (having been burned several times by the new edition problem), these are great places to sell an old edition of a textbook, as many classes really don't depend on the new version.
However, I think that electronic formats are picking up momentum, but not from the publishing companies. This semester, I only purchased 1 textbook; all other classes use only lecture notes or materials online! I've found that more and more instructors/professors are relying on their own notes, instead of finding a textbook that only partially covers the course topics.
"Secondly, there is apple.slashdot.org It even uses Apple's disgusting aqua theme."
Wow. A catagory of Slashdot devoted to Apple. I mean, they don't have enough users to warrent a whole section with a theme! Next thing you know, there'll be a section for BSD. I mean, it's dead!
Slashdot should really allow you to only look at the sections you want to, like in the settings or something.
"Yes, I am English, and yes, it is true, our teeth, compared to yours, are all wiggly and stained. Man, I swear I can spot an American tourist over here as soon as they open thier mouth. From a mile off, on a sunny day."
Not me! My teeth are as yellow and nasty as any Englishman. Plus, I can put on a nice, generic British accent to fit right in.
However, it seems you can tell a Slashdotter by how much of their life revolves around Lord of the Rings.
The coffee is hot, and I shouldn't pour it in my lap? Dammit!
Could be "Knighted CE."
...and here comes the gratuitous SpongeBob reference:
"Everything is chrome in the future!"
Rob
There are millions of them...and they're really cheap. They are a great thing for people to hack on and port YourMommaOS on for fun.
What about Dreamcast? You can pick one up for $30, and it's still a very capable machine.
Oh wait... It says right here "Compatable with Windows CE." So much for that idea...
DRM is the virus!! We have to get to the central hub of the internet to shut it down!!! Where's Al Gore? He's the only one who has the passcodes to shut down the internet!!!
PayPal is quite safe. I've used it a few times in conjunction with eBay, etc., although not recently - I've run into a cashflow problem and had to curb my impulse buying habits :o).
:o) ).
The problem(s) with PayPal come from not knowing who you're sending your money to; anybody can get a PayPal account, so some less scrupulous folks may try and get you to donate to their "cause." The upshot: don't give your money to just anybody...
Give it to Wikipedia! The money will go to good use! That's my $.03 (and yes, my opinion is worth more than yours
The REYES algorithm (the scanline algorithm that has been the "backbone" of Renderman since its creation) is incredibly fast, but with great results. A G5 at Pixar's booth at the SIGGRAPH conference last summer was rendering a frame of "Finding Nemo" for all to see - I couldn't imagine how long it would take a ray tracer (with that complex of a lighting scheme) to finish this.
More importantly, ray tracing capabilities are new to Renderman's 11th release (the current one). Anyone who was "ray tracing in Renderman" a few years ago was lying to you. Again at the SIGGRAPH conference, Pixar was presenting the new ray tracing-based features of Renderman. They looked cool and all, but not the focus of the package. Heck, even to quote the very page you linked to:
This is all incredibly off topic. Renderman is not even in competition with Blender; they're two entirely different beasts. My point is that ray tracing, especially in the context of production, is not all that important. However, I'm very pleased that Blender is maturing as well as it is. Although this particular feature isn't too useful to me - I've never touched Maya 5's new mentalray capabilities, either - I'm excited that it will bring more people (and attention) to the only good animation package I can afford to use at home.
A few years back, when I worked at a certain electronics retailer, we had trouble with a couple of the eMachines catching fire (well, smoking at least - it's still not a good sign) during a storm, even though they were hooked up to industrial grade surge protectors.
Now, I no longer shop retail (and I don't buy eMachines), so I really don't know anything.
Hahaha... I just saw this troll in English yesterday.
But seriously, your grammar sucks, and half the words didn't translate prperly. Did you put this into babbelfish yourself, or was a whole network of trolls responsible?
OK, I'm done feeding the trolls. *hand slap*
One on-topic note - in the screenshots, why isn't Terminal (even just the window name) translated?
I had used a version of StarOffice on Windows 2000 a few years back, and found it to be somewhat slow and occasionally counterintuitive.
However, for ~6 months I have been using OpenOffice on my Windows XP box. I was prompted again to make the switch because I desired a German dictionary as well for the spell checker. It's a lot speedier than I remember StarOffice to be (and I'm still running on the same machine).
I have kept around MS Office at my wife's insistance, but I do all my work in OOo, especially because I work frequently on Linux at school/work (and am using it more frequently at home, too). I love the pdf exporter, and my documents (albeit, never very complex) have imported just fine.
If a doctor on call was to go to a theater that blocked his/her cell phone or pager from working, I'd wager he/she would quickly be out of a job and a medical license.
Do you really think that cell phone jammers wouldn't be an issue if everyone was responsible with their phones (not that that would be possible; you can't get everyone to be responsible and considerate)?
If only we could get everyone to be responsible with their firearms...