Category Pointers

Blender 2.43 is out.

BlenderThe latest version of the premier open source 3d modelling application is here. Read the release notes, watch the feature videos and get it from blender.org! This version adds several interesting new features, such as Mesh Sculpting and Retopo tools. It also has numerous improvements in the renderer, particle system, animation system and compositing. Finally it seems so much faster on my PowerPC G5 hardware.

Peer Reviewed School Textbooks.

Here's an idea. Ignore the part where Jobs rants on teacher job security and how this drives the quality of applicants down; What's truly interesting is the opinion also expressed by others in the past: the replacement of textbooks by electronic, online, peer-reviewed information sources, offering up-to-date, widely accepted material to students. Something like Wikipedia (perhaps limited in scope and moderated) replacing what are obsolete and often partial textbooks.

Royal v Sarkozy

It's a few months before France votes again for its President, the first time after the 2002 election, when, to everyone's surprise, the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round, only to lose in the second to the incumbent, Jacques Chirac. The BBC features a point-by-point comparison of the differing policies and approaches proposed by the two main candidates. From their appearances on French media, they both seem to have some good ideas in their programme albeit for very different reasons. On the charisma front, however, Royal is certainly lagging behind Sarkozy, both in her rhetoric and in her perceived knowledge of the issues, despite Sarkozy's sometimes extreme comments (racaille anyone?) and his appeal to the far-right.

This might be a repeat of 2005

The next version of Mac OS X, Leopard (10.5) and the 'missing' January software updates (iLife and iWork) will probably be out by late March or April, according to ThinkSecret. Since iLife and iWork weren't released in January it's reasonable to expect that they'll be released alongside the new OS. That's good news for all of us waiting for Leopard to come out before shelling out for a Mac laptop. One with a proper display that is.

Adium 1.0

AdiumX

After many months of development and many more β releases, Adium 1.0 was released today! It's got loads of fixes and improvements and it's based on libgaim 2.0. Yay.

I dare anybody to [hack into] once a month on the Windows machine.

Absolute BullErrr, right. Despite his --- numerous --- amazingly bad evaluations (e.g. the importance of the 'net in the mid-1990s), his volatile opinions on important matters (e.g. patents), lack of ethics and piss-poor software, Bill Gates has time and again proven to be an important thinker when it comes to technology and its importance in society. It's a shame to see he's lost it. In this latest interview in Newsweek it's actually surprising to see how he can be so off-base. While there's no doubt that Apple is king in catchy marketing and shameless exaggeration of its value and its products' {importance, features} in its marketing campaigns, Microsoft is no spring chicken either ('Get the Facts' campaign anyone?). Its funny how Gates tries to engage in the pompous reality skewing and typical polemic that his once-ideologically-charged-turned-loser-turned-mighty-tech-salesman rival, the mercurial Steve Jobs, is famous for. Unfortunately for him Gates lacks the 'Charisma +834' rating that Jobs seems to possess. :)

Flickr! Wants! Yahoo! IDs!

Today Flickr! started requiring Yahoo! accounts. Some of its users got pissed off. What if a couple of years down the road Flickr started asking for money? Many early internet services were inherently distributed services based on open protocols. I like that. It's a guarantee for independence. In the '90s the slow home connections and the rapid commercialisation of the net instituted the client-server model for 'net services' and consigned the distributed model that services such as email, dns and, indeed, the www to history. Suddenly everything was centralised. The trend continues today under the banner of 'net applications'. Flickr, Gmail, Youtube are just examples of this. In a time when always-on extremely fast broadband connections are (gradually) becoming the norm, perhaps it's time to decentralise once again.

Microsoft attempts to patent core-BlueJ functionality

...And the patent jokes never end. BlueJ, a free educational Java IDE primarily aimed at students, has contained some innovative debugging features for many years. Features that the largest software developer in the world, Microsoft, blatantly copied (without any attribution) a few years ago in its expensive commercial Visual Studio IDE. But copying was not enough for Microsoft; it would really like to patent them as its own, despite the fact that BlueJ has had them for about 10 years. Ah, let's all cry in unison: 'prior art'. Some of the comments on the linked page are very interesting. [Update: The Reg reports that the patent application has been withdrawn.]