There is a bar in my town that has motion sensitive lights in the bathroom. It's nice to be able to walk into the bathrom and instantly get light - but it invariably goes off before you finish returning your beer to the water cycle.
Which leaves you waving your hands in the air like a Naughty By Nature fan while trying to keep your waist still enough to avoid calling in the mop guy. But, I'm going to put one in my hall and closet now...
The only thing in my company holding us back from Open Source software or even purchasing Mac's IS AutoCAD Totally agree. I check every 3 or 4 months to see if anything is available.
Oh geeze, I completly forgot the preferences and plotstyle issues of upgrading.
When they decided to move the preferences directory from/acad/support to/documents & settings/user name/acad/Acad vCrap/r16.0/enu/support - boy that was just great. Now instead of telling users "put it in your support folder" I get to explain how to turn on hidden directories, what a hidden directory is, what the documents & settings folder does, how it knows what their user name is, blah, blah, blah. Not to mention that I now can't just TYPE IN the directory anymore.
And why, in the name of Jesus Zombie Christ, did they remove express tools from the installation? Oh, it's on the CD, but I have to do it manually for every user the IT guy forgets to install it for. Oh, and we don't do batch plot anymore we call it publish now - which doesn't plot multiple sets anymore either and is pretty much useless. You can thank us by buying the latest version in 6 months.
Bah humbug.
My ACAD rep is also my plotter rep. I hear from that guy twice a month...
Sure, if you're designing a plastics mold body, you're likely to do that in 3D. If you're designing the cooling system, air system, ventilation system, and electrical system that the mold body is going to be placed in - you're not going to do that in 3D. It's just retarded...
It's never really been an open format. Binary based files, with no file format information can't really be called open. AutoCAD compatable programs either saved to DXF, or reversed engineered the DWG format.
Actually, that was only the default interface for R11. The entire program was command based at the time, with only a screen menu that you had to turn on. The powerful part of the program at the time was the LISP interpreter that would allow you to program new commands as well. If you worked with it 40 hours a week, it was incredibly powerful - just not very easy for n00bs (which we didn't call that back then) to pick up.
I'd just like to rant for awhile about AutoDesk. I hope no one minds...
I've been a draftsman/designer for 12 years now. In the consulting engineering industry (for commercial, residential, & industrial building design) it is the defacto program. Even companies that standardise with other CAD programs, they have a copy of AutoCAD somewhere just to work with everyone else.
I started out on AutoCAD r10 running on DOS, and I'm currently using AutoCAD Arch Desktop 2004. I've been involved with the program from the level of an individual draftsman, to a CAD manager working with over 100 other CAD operators. I can honestly say, that while AutoCAD's interface (keyboard based) is one of the fastest interfaces around - the file format has always been AutoDesk's most problematic issue.
In AutoCAD 2004, the only file format it will open are the 2000 and 2004 DWG file format. An absolutely useless number of file formats for a company who has had a NEW FORMAT EVERY FREAKING VERSION. What's more, the only other format that AutoCAD opens, is the old DXF format (thank goodness for that at least).
AutoDesk has a horrible habit of pretending that it is the only CAD software in the world. In addition to it's own short term memory about previous DWG formats (thanks for making my old CAD files unopenable assholes), it has no clue how to open a Microstation file, or any other of the other competing formats out there.
Yes, I know you can download a drawing file converter for old ACAD files, but this should have been included in ACAD itself - and the file converter still doesn't open DGN files.
Microstation on the other hand, has changed it's file format ONCE in 10 versions. Not only will it open up the old file format, it also opens up EVERY AutoCAD format as well. I currently use Microstation to convert my old DWG's to new DWG's because MStation does a better job of it than Autodesk's downloadable converter. Hell, the free Bentley DWF-style reader opens up every format as well - something that AutoDesk's viewer can't even do for it's own native format.
DWG files have a long history of becomeing corrupted, often to the point of being unable to be recovered. Do you have a corrupted DWG file that AutoCAD can't recover? Open it in Microstation, and it will recover the file for you instead.
The fact is, AutoCAD is the dominant CAD software for two reasons only. #1, the interface is faster for old-school users (though I must say, a properly set-up system with a trained MStation user is only about 5% slower). #2, since AutoCAD 2004 doesn't open up R14 ACAD files - and can't save down to R14 either - people with R14 are forced to upgrade against their wishes. As if there has been a good reason to upgrade besides mouse wheel support since R13...
Basically, I hate AutoDesk even though I use their product. They do not care a wit about their customers, the industry, or even producing a reasonable product. Even today, 1/4 of the time I save a drawing I LOSE DATA. Nothing like finishing up a design, clicking save to go home, and losing 2 hours of work in the process. I'm sure that AutoDesk would love to say that their new TrueDWG initiative will save me from these worries, but I've had this problem with DWG's (made 100% by me, in AutoCAD) since I first started using the product.
Instead of working with customers to create a truly open file format and competing based upon a superior interface and support - they instead choose compete through vendor lock-in. It's the same as if MS produced a new version of Office every 2 years that didn't open up any other format on earth including the previous version. Oh wait, that's what they do too.. they can both kiss my butt.
It doesn't say anything bad about the OSS community. The OOo developers have done a wonderful job working out how to read the old Office binary files. In fact, I use OOo at work to open up legacy lotus docs and convert them to excel for the rest of the office. It's the only way that we can read many of these files, since Office itself doesn't handle it. But, however good the designs were, they didn't have the MS source code for the file formats, and can only make good engineering guesses. I have the utmost confidence that the current OSS effort to display MS new XML based Office formats are wonderful, but having the format designers release the code themselves, it can only help OOo's rendering.
Not a slight to the OSS community at all. Just a statement of reality.
The one thing that really sucks about Christianity 3.2, is how much latitude the dungeon masters have. I stopped playing when I realized that each DM kept intrepreting the rulebook differently.
Sometimes my +3 holy water worked on demons, sometimes it was outlawed. When I was playing in Utah and used my Healing Kit, I was kicked out of the game for using the kit instead of using a priest spell. What finally did it though, was when I was rolling to determine attack strength and lost 3 turns for gambling. What a bother...like a Half Elf Archer can use a priest spell in the first place...
Slashdot always seems to miss the point when Open Source leaders talk about adding polish to their product. This is the leader for Ubuntu and he wouldn't make such a statement without realizing some of the other problems that Linux has before being desktop viable for the masses. So let's be rational about his motivations...
Could he simply be saying that Ubuntu would love for UI designers to be a part of their team?
This isn't an unreasonable assumption, nor a bad motive. Most of the posts with high mod rating don't make a graphics person feel very welcome, which is really defeating the purpose here. His basic statement is 'we at Ubuntu feel graphics are a respectable contribution for our community'. The Slashdot community could learn from this.
Actually there is now the first porn film that has been shot entirely in HD. Island Fever 3 was done this way - and is being advertized as a huge improvement. According to the site it is released in HD VOD.
The problem is, why make a film in HD when 99% of your customers still don't have HD TV's, nor a player that will accept the media. I figure most of the money the porn industry makes is in video sales (who has actually been to a XXX theater?) so until the product is available, you're going to see a few high profile titles in HD VOD, and not much else.
How many times have you broken a JC and had the shards scratch the stupid CD? Ok, maybe you aren't as clumsy as I am but it happens to me all of the time.
Next time I have to move (in two weeks, arggg) I'll be sure to put my dishes into a glass case. Hey, if the box was any stronger I would break the plates inside...
Another way CDs can become damaged is simple oxidation of the recording layer.
But really all we are talking about is a possible manufacturing improvement in the mostly matured plastic film market. I would expect a number of these products to come out as different companies fight for market share. Until we get new polymers for the actual base material of the entire CD, this really isn't much different than that current press-on protector.
I'll just keep etching my stone tablets until then...
Also, I'd be happy if they simply replaced that super crappy plastic they use for the stupid CD cases. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make a case that was more fragile than it's contents should be drawn and quartered.
Ok, I'm not too surprised by the idea (though having a country that does this where you would actually trust the doctors is a bit new) it does raise a question in me that I haven't really asked myself before.
What exactly is cause of the price difference? One would thing that the cost of supplies (heart, blood, needles, sutures, etc) wouldn't be that much different. Certainly the salary of the doctors and nurses there would cause some of it, but surely not all of it. We're talking including airfare and a trip to the Taj in with the bill...
Has anyone seen a good site that breaks down where the money for a standard procedure actually goes? The difference just seems too large to just be caused by simple labor prices.
Actually, according to MozillaZine the fix has been fixed in the 1.0 code tree, but hasn't been merged into the existing builds yet. I would expect a fix before 1.0 goes gold.
I like how we "suddenly grew a conscience". It's not like when they were invented they proved to be highly useful, and then after decades of use we noticed a problem.
No, we knew it would cause a hole in the ozone from day one, but kept going at it to make a buck. Take that you fsckin Europeans!
In other news, the man who invented asbestos is currently under trial for attempting to give everyone cancer. He is expected to use the "we made it to stop fires and it took awhile for the cancer to show up" defense. He is also expected to make a comment later along the lines of "fsck the world, we got'z an economy to think about".
A wise man doesn't attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance.
Of course his last sentence was funny, so I'm just bitchin' about nothing.
Why does it have to make it stronger against viruses only? Perhaps you live in a world where all code executes as you want it to execute as opposed to how it is written. In my world, code runs the way it was written to run.
Perhaps you work for Diebold?
You: The code works if it's used like it's supposed to Me: Umm, what is someone tries to use it differently? You: That's impossible! It's only supposed to run this one way!
To me, ANYTHING that results in better code is a good thing.
Virus writers should be dragged out in the street and... well, whatever.
And be given hundreds of thousands of dollars. People living today only see viruses for the trouble that they cause. It works like natural selection though, making the overall system stronger and more resilant in the long-run. Let's face it, no company of any size is going to go through every single line of code and audit it for security if their isn't sufficient motivation to. Now that the virus is out, wait for a few of the slower Fortune 500 IT managers to let it slip by and you'll you have either a massive effort by Microsoft to fix the issue, or you'll have a massive switch to Open Source. Either way, we all win.
I mean we all backup regularly and use Lynx anyway, right?
Really, it proved to me the usefullness of having online music as an advertisement for physical media. I've been using it for a number of months to get copies of all of the CD's I already have (it's actually easier than ripping my own CD's, what with the scratches my CD's tend to collect) and I've already bought 4 CD's that I never would have bought otherwise. Why did I buy them? I felt bad about a great artist only getting a few cents so I tracked down the band's website and bought it from there. I already had the song, so shipping time wasn't really an issue.
This is what distributers need to understand. They aren't adding any value to the song itself, they are only an encoding and bandwidth service. Once they get passed the idea that the distributer needs to make all the money...heh, that'll never happen. Go Russia! Show us what freedom really is!
(I actually talk about my thoughts on the legality of all of this on my blog. Do a Yahoo search, I'm near the top - but God please, not all at once:)
Exactly. However I think we can do one better too. Not only do we all have programs that we use, there are also programs that we don't use, but tried. I'm sure there aren't many Roxio users on/. and we all know why.
It would be good to, not only post the programs you use, but also the programs that you don't use and why. I'm gonna work on putting this together in a forum for my blog. Could be useful at least...
Slashdot Mirror
There is a bar in my town that has motion sensitive lights in the bathroom. It's nice to be able to walk into the bathrom and instantly get light - but it invariably goes off before you finish returning your beer to the water cycle.
Which leaves you waving your hands in the air like a Naughty By Nature fan while trying to keep your waist still enough to avoid calling in the mop guy. But, I'm going to put one in my hall and closet now...
Oh geeze, I completly forgot the preferences and plotstyle issues of upgrading.
/acad/support to /documents & settings/user name/acad/Acad vCrap/r16.0/enu/support - boy that was just great. Now instead of telling users "put it in your support folder" I get to explain how to turn on hidden directories, what a hidden directory is, what the documents & settings folder does, how it knows what their user name is, blah, blah, blah. Not to mention that I now can't just TYPE IN the directory anymore.
When they decided to move the preferences directory from
And why, in the name of Jesus Zombie Christ, did they remove express tools from the installation? Oh, it's on the CD, but I have to do it manually for every user the IT guy forgets to install it for. Oh, and we don't do batch plot anymore we call it publish now - which doesn't plot multiple sets anymore either and is pretty much useless. You can thank us by buying the latest version in 6 months.
Bah humbug.
My ACAD rep is also my plotter rep. I hear from that guy twice a month...
Sure, if you're designing a plastics mold body, you're likely to do that in 3D. If you're designing the cooling system, air system, ventilation system, and electrical system that the mold body is going to be placed in - you're not going to do that in 3D. It's just retarded...
It's never really been an open format. Binary based files, with no file format information can't really be called open. AutoCAD compatable programs either saved to DXF, or reversed engineered the DWG format.
Actually, that was only the default interface for R11. The entire program was command based at the time, with only a screen menu that you had to turn on. The powerful part of the program at the time was the LISP interpreter that would allow you to program new commands as well. If you worked with it 40 hours a week, it was incredibly powerful - just not very easy for n00bs (which we didn't call that back then) to pick up.
I'd just like to rant for awhile about AutoDesk. I hope no one minds...
I've been a draftsman/designer for 12 years now. In the consulting engineering industry (for commercial, residential, & industrial building design) it is the defacto program. Even companies that standardise with other CAD programs, they have a copy of AutoCAD somewhere just to work with everyone else.
I started out on AutoCAD r10 running on DOS, and I'm currently using AutoCAD Arch Desktop 2004. I've been involved with the program from the level of an individual draftsman, to a CAD manager working with over 100 other CAD operators. I can honestly say, that while AutoCAD's interface (keyboard based) is one of the fastest interfaces around - the file format has always been AutoDesk's most problematic issue.
In AutoCAD 2004, the only file format it will open are the 2000 and 2004 DWG file format. An absolutely useless number of file formats for a company who has had a NEW FORMAT EVERY FREAKING VERSION. What's more, the only other format that AutoCAD opens, is the old DXF format (thank goodness for that at least).
AutoDesk has a horrible habit of pretending that it is the only CAD software in the world. In addition to it's own short term memory about previous DWG formats (thanks for making my old CAD files unopenable assholes), it has no clue how to open a Microstation file, or any other of the other competing formats out there.
Yes, I know you can download a drawing file converter for old ACAD files, but this should have been included in ACAD itself - and the file converter still doesn't open DGN files.
Microstation on the other hand, has changed it's file format ONCE in 10 versions. Not only will it open up the old file format, it also opens up EVERY AutoCAD format as well. I currently use Microstation to convert my old DWG's to new DWG's because MStation does a better job of it than Autodesk's downloadable converter. Hell, the free Bentley DWF-style reader opens up every format as well - something that AutoDesk's viewer can't even do for it's own native format.
DWG files have a long history of becomeing corrupted, often to the point of being unable to be recovered. Do you have a corrupted DWG file that AutoCAD can't recover? Open it in Microstation, and it will recover the file for you instead.
The fact is, AutoCAD is the dominant CAD software for two reasons only. #1, the interface is faster for old-school users (though I must say, a properly set-up system with a trained MStation user is only about 5% slower). #2, since AutoCAD 2004 doesn't open up R14 ACAD files - and can't save down to R14 either - people with R14 are forced to upgrade against their wishes. As if there has been a good reason to upgrade besides mouse wheel support since R13...
Basically, I hate AutoDesk even though I use their product. They do not care a wit about their customers, the industry, or even producing a reasonable product. Even today, 1/4 of the time I save a drawing I LOSE DATA. Nothing like finishing up a design, clicking save to go home, and losing 2 hours of work in the process. I'm sure that AutoDesk would love to say that their new TrueDWG initiative will save me from these worries, but I've had this problem with DWG's (made 100% by me, in AutoCAD) since I first started using the product.
Instead of working with customers to create a truly open file format and competing based upon a superior interface and support - they instead choose compete through vendor lock-in. It's the same as if MS produced a new version of Office every 2 years that didn't open up any other format on earth including the previous version. Oh wait, that's what they do too.. they can both kiss my butt.
It doesn't say anything bad about the OSS community. The OOo developers have done a wonderful job working out how to read the old Office binary files. In fact, I use OOo at work to open up legacy lotus docs and convert them to excel for the rest of the office. It's the only way that we can read many of these files, since Office itself doesn't handle it. But, however good the designs were, they didn't have the MS source code for the file formats, and can only make good engineering guesses. I have the utmost confidence that the current OSS effort to display MS new XML based Office formats are wonderful, but having the format designers release the code themselves, it can only help OOo's rendering.
Not a slight to the OSS community at all. Just a statement of reality.
The one thing that really sucks about Christianity 3.2, is how much latitude the dungeon masters have. I stopped playing when I realized that each DM kept intrepreting the rulebook differently.
Sometimes my +3 holy water worked on demons, sometimes it was outlawed. When I was playing in Utah and used my Healing Kit, I was kicked out of the game for using the kit instead of using a priest spell. What finally did it though, was when I was rolling to determine attack strength and lost 3 turns for gambling. What a bother...like a Half Elf Archer can use a priest spell in the first place...
Maybe the MMORPG version will be better.
Slashdot always seems to miss the point when Open Source leaders talk about adding polish to their product. This is the leader for Ubuntu and he wouldn't make such a statement without realizing some of the other problems that Linux has before being desktop viable for the masses. So let's be rational about his motivations...
Could he simply be saying that Ubuntu would love for UI designers to be a part of their team?
This isn't an unreasonable assumption, nor a bad motive. Most of the posts with high mod rating don't make a graphics person feel very welcome, which is really defeating the purpose here. His basic statement is 'we at Ubuntu feel graphics are a respectable contribution for our community'. The Slashdot community could learn from this.
Actually there is now the first porn film that has been shot entirely in HD. Island Fever 3 was done this way - and is being advertized as a huge improvement. According to the site it is released in HD VOD.
The problem is, why make a film in HD when 99% of your customers still don't have HD TV's, nor a player that will accept the media. I figure most of the money the porn industry makes is in video sales (who has actually been to a XXX theater?) so until the product is available, you're going to see a few high profile titles in HD VOD, and not much else.
But the 12 year old is ok?
Sunbird works as a standalone and as an extension for Thunderbird and FireFox...
Still, it needs a few more revisions before it's really ready.
That doesn't make any sense...
How many times have you broken a JC and had the shards scratch the stupid CD? Ok, maybe you aren't as clumsy as I am but it happens to me all of the time.
Next time I have to move (in two weeks, arggg) I'll be sure to put my dishes into a glass case. Hey, if the box was any stronger I would break the plates inside...
Another way CDs can become damaged is simple oxidation of the recording layer.
But really all we are talking about is a possible manufacturing improvement in the mostly matured plastic film market. I would expect a number of these products to come out as different companies fight for market share. Until we get new polymers for the actual base material of the entire CD, this really isn't much different than that current press-on protector.
I'll just keep etching my stone tablets until then...
Also, I'd be happy if they simply replaced that super crappy plastic they use for the stupid CD cases. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make a case that was more fragile than it's contents should be drawn and quartered.
Ok, I'm not too surprised by the idea (though having a country that does this where you would actually trust the doctors is a bit new) it does raise a question in me that I haven't really asked myself before.
What exactly is cause of the price difference? One would thing that the cost of supplies (heart, blood, needles, sutures, etc) wouldn't be that much different. Certainly the salary of the doctors and nurses there would cause some of it, but surely not all of it. We're talking including airfare and a trip to the Taj in with the bill...
Has anyone seen a good site that breaks down where the money for a standard procedure actually goes? The difference just seems too large to just be caused by simple labor prices.
No way. I hated that stupid pixie.
Actually, according to MozillaZine the fix has been fixed in the 1.0 code tree, but hasn't been merged into the existing builds yet. I would expect a fix before 1.0 goes gold.
I like how we "suddenly grew a conscience". It's not like when they were invented they proved to be highly useful, and then after decades of use we noticed a problem.
No, we knew it would cause a hole in the ozone from day one, but kept going at it to make a buck. Take that you fsckin Europeans!
In other news, the man who invented asbestos is currently under trial for attempting to give everyone cancer. He is expected to use the "we made it to stop fires and it took awhile for the cancer to show up" defense. He is also expected to make a comment later along the lines of "fsck the world, we got'z an economy to think about".
A wise man doesn't attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance.
Of course his last sentence was funny, so I'm just bitchin' about nothing.
Why does it have to make it stronger against viruses only? Perhaps you live in a world where all code executes as you want it to execute as opposed to how it is written. In my world, code runs the way it was written to run.
Perhaps you work for Diebold?
You: The code works if it's used like it's supposed to
Me: Umm, what is someone tries to use it differently?
You: That's impossible! It's only supposed to run this one way!
To me, ANYTHING that results in better code is a good thing.
Well yeah, but that would look self serving :)
Virus writers should be dragged out in the street and... well, whatever.
And be given hundreds of thousands of dollars. People living today only see viruses for the trouble that they cause. It works like natural selection though, making the overall system stronger and more resilant in the long-run. Let's face it, no company of any size is going to go through every single line of code and audit it for security if their isn't sufficient motivation to. Now that the virus is out, wait for a few of the slower Fortune 500 IT managers to let it slip by and you'll you have either a massive effort by Microsoft to fix the issue, or you'll have a massive switch to Open Source. Either way, we all win.I mean we all backup regularly and use Lynx anyway, right?
What a great site.
:)
Really, it proved to me the usefullness of having online music as an advertisement for physical media. I've been using it for a number of months to get copies of all of the CD's I already have (it's actually easier than ripping my own CD's, what with the scratches my CD's tend to collect) and I've already bought 4 CD's that I never would have bought otherwise. Why did I buy them? I felt bad about a great artist only getting a few cents so I tracked down the band's website and bought it from there. I already had the song, so shipping time wasn't really an issue.
This is what distributers need to understand. They aren't adding any value to the song itself, they are only an encoding and bandwidth service. Once they get passed the idea that the distributer needs to make all the money...heh, that'll never happen. Go Russia! Show us what freedom really is!
(I actually talk about my thoughts on the legality of all of this on my blog. Do a Yahoo search, I'm near the top - but God please, not all at once
Exactly. However I think we can do one better too. Not only do we all have programs that we use, there are also programs that we don't use, but tried. I'm sure there aren't many Roxio users on /. and we all know why.
It would be good to, not only post the programs you use, but also the programs that you don't use and why. I'm gonna work on putting this together in a forum for my blog. Could be useful at least...
Carbon fiber crash bumpers are nice, but don't really help you when you get t-boned.