On the download page there is a bunch of demo scenes that you can simply open and render to see all of the gears and knobs turning and watch your CPUs light up.
887 karma · joined May 18, 2013
Yes they did. And there arguments were deemed insufficient by the majority of there peers and fellow citizens.
> We still don't know the plan.
Its a fair point. But In order to negotiate 'the plan' which will include various bilateral trade agreements and so on the PM has to have the authority to trigger article 50. And I believe the PM has to indeed trigger article 50 before the government can negotiate such agreements if they wanted to be perfectly legal about things. I seriously doubt that this would have passed if the insiders did not have a fairly material plan. I doubt that its entirely worked out but thats to be expected. And Its certainly not going to be released to the public at this point. That would compleatly undermine there negotiating position.
That is probably part of the argument that was made to require a parliamentary vote. Which is conceivably a fair judgement.
But on the other hand what is the purpose of having a referendum to leave the EU if it is not intended to be enacted in law? It would be rather nonsensical to hold referendums that have no effect and could be discarded at will.
Nevertheless, as we saw the substantial majority voted to honor the referendum and a fairly small minority did not. That leads me to believe that the overwhelming sentiment is to honor the democratic vote and the will of the people.
The risk of denying the democratic majority is the risk of the 'tyranny of elite minority'. Its hard to decide which is the true injustice in an abstract fashion. Its very much a question of context and specifics.
Yes, and also his stance on TPP moved many Unions and there members to vote for him. He has already made good on that and scrapped TPP. A move that was applauded by Berny Sanders the Unions and many on the left.
The unions have been fighting TPP for many years and Trump scrapped it on his first week in office.
> My comment was addressing why politicians might override an electorate
I think in the in the current case a referendum was a fairly standard democratic procedure that everyone agreed on. No one questioned weather or not there should have been a referendum in the first place. Some people are just upset that there side lost.
So again in the current context there is little evidence of a 'tyrannical majority'.
I'm not saying that your points are not valid in the abstract. But in the current discussion of article 50 and Brexit I do not see much evidence that the process or result could credibly called into question.
If your claim is that article 50 is tyrannical then the Treaty of Lisbon itself should be changed to remove article 50. Barring that, I don't think there is legal standing to try and prevent article 50 from being triggered. It was put to a popular vote and the PM is respecting the will of the citizenry.
Non-goals:
unlimited scrollback buffer (done by dvtm)you can watch the first video.
"A Closer Look at the Godot Game Engine"
It will always turn into a flame war because most of these threads are either posted by activists, or they attract activists. Activists are not interested in a 'conversation', they post to win control of the thread by calling in a brigade to out post and down vote the other side.
Anyone can put together a brigade of a few hundred people in a matter of minutes on reddit or irc.
You have two options in this environment. You can have a politically neutral technology focused board and remove the incentive for activists. Or you let them run a muck and turn your board into a signal booster for there activism and destroy the commuinity.
> If you're a VC cut ties from members of your class that actively destroy free speech and rant about the coming dystopia.
This is just pants on fire hysteria. Its destructive to productive communities where it takes a lot of silent toil and concentration by a varied group of people to get anything done. Programming is not political activism. Neither is starting a technology company. Neither is starting an open source project.
Software development is not exhibitionism. You can not have a few drinks and show up with a sign and snappy chant and build a database or compiler. You can not get a game engine working marching through the streets.
All of these Social issues have nothing to do with programming or computer science. Its just a obnoxious divisive distraction by people who looking for followers.
The establishment left in the US has been a supporter of Corporate Globalization for many years. And the left in general has replaced class policy with race and gender ideology.
So you have a situation now in the US where liberal millionaires and billionaires protest against the middle and working class and call them racist, etc for voting for populist policy that protect there economic interests by reforming free trade treaties like TPP and NAFTA, immigration limits, lower taxes, repairing infrastructure and so on, (ie much of Trumps campaign platform).
The outrage is from those who have been consumed by this identity politics and the corporate globalism that sustains it. They have forgotten what economic solidarity is and there policy has little or no recognition of class. Identity and Race are placed above all else.
Yes, and now would be a good time to admit that the reason why that is the case is because the Gimp project and development model are unproductive and failing when compared to other projects who do not have any problem attracting new people or resources.
The Gimp project needs to dismantle itself and take some time to think about how it can build a more productive and sustainable model that attracts developers based on the successful examples that other projects have.
Begging for coins into your Patreon is not part of building a large, productive and sustainable project. Its more of the same misguided and shortsighted mismanagement that has brought Gimp to its current sorry state.
Krita has a very refined process for development donations. They collect donations through a Professional funding site not a personal Patreon account and there is a clear time frame for development and a clear set of features that will be 'Finished' at the end of the development cycle.
They have successfully delivered with this model and the people who gave them money got what they paid for and will more then likely fund them again and other projects.
Can you say the same for gimp? No, someone might give some money to a Gimp developers Patreon making all sorts of promises that never get finished. The person who gave that money will probably never contribute again.
Thats a big problem for every OSS graphics project now. We have to give people who are willing to put down the money what they expected to get or they will stop funding.
Its important that the most professional, serious projects get promoted and funded to serve as a model for other projects to follow. And to grow the amount of users that feel comfortable giving there money.
You can see the same sort of professionalism with Blender and Natron development. And they also are producing quality software. If the project is fallowing this professional model then they deserve to be promoted IMO. But simply putting a bunch of promises on a personal Patreon and asking for money will do more harm then good to the larger OSS graphics community.
After more then a decade of failed and failing software development and funding modes that tried to shoehorn artist driven intuitive graphics applications into a development model that tangentially works for lone wolf kernel device driver hackers we have started to overcome the damage and move in a positive direction with Krita, Natron, Blender Foundation etc.
The Gimp project and development model has not produced a productive environment or a compelling product for any of the groups I mentioned. That has been the case for many years. After a lot of hard work other projects have managed to formulate better more productive models to develop OSS graphics programs and find funding to do so. The artists are happier because they get better more competitive software and they are willing to fund its development. The programmers are happier because they have a clear direction and understanding of who there users are and where the software needs to go. And the researchers are happier because they see a community who is interested in and welcoming of new and useful graphics algorithms and research.
None of this has happened because of the Gimp. It has happened in spite of the Gimp project sucking most of the air out of the room for many years and contributing nothing to the OSS graphics community as a whole.
If you care about fostering the growth of OSS Graphics software and a community of talented Artists that feel comfortable and productive using OSS software then you need to promote the people and the projects that are making that happen.
The gimp project needs to take a break and perhaps hand the reigns over to a new group with a different vision. The current project and its structure, soliciting money form the Artist community into developers private patreon accounts with vague promises to make Gimp great again is not helping Gimp or the OSS graphics community.
A lot of people would like to work on a established project rather then bootstrap a new one. And many could not do that anyways because of NDA terms.
The climate is getting better but only because there is a new crop of applications that sprung up in the last few years that has more interest and understanding of who the graphics community is and how it works. And seems more interested in contributions by people who have highly specialized and deep expertise in graphics.
My general sense is that it has been more fruitful for people to work on specific projects privately or in there professional environment that solve there problems and then release those projects as OSS. Rather then try to wrangle the politics and project structure of some of the older established open source software.
It would be unreasonable to expect from unpaid volunteers if they has no ambition to do such work. Which is why I suggest that if you want to see advanced features and professional quality graphics software with a predictable cycle of development then you support the projects that actually try to create such programs.
Krita has a regular development cycle, a clear set of priorities and goals and funded development efforts that clearly lays out what features and improvement are going to be achieved with your hard earned money.
That has been an ENORMOUSLY successful improvement for both the programmers who can now get paid to work on there projects and the artists that now get quality continuously updated graphics software.
If Gimp or any other project deserve funding they have to step up and show the discipline and commitment to there project that successful projects like Krita have. I do not see that at this time so my recommendation is to support the projects that I listed in the OP.
> edit
As far as performance is concerned OpenCL or Cuda is not going to save you if your cpu bound memory architecture is not carefully thought for performance. This has always been a major problem for gimp for a long time. The higher bit depth and resolutions that are used now only exacerbate the situation. A general use case now could easily have tens of gigabytes worth of data that the user wants to manipulate delete and expand in real time. I have never seen this addressed in a serious proposal.
My concern is with Professional quality tools for artists. These tools already exist on Linux but they are predominately closed source. If Linux and OSS is going to be an option for Artists then the tools have to meet the same high quality standards that other professions that use Linux expect. But in graphics this is not the case and has not been the case for many years.
The best way to encourage the momentum for better tools is to support those projects that take the quality of there software seriously and have some urgency. The projects I have mentioned previously have demonstrated that they have that focus.
The Gimp has been 'transitioning to GEGL' for how many years now? Something like six or seven years. And getting the data structures in place is only part of the challenge. How fast is this going to be for users? If the speed is to slow for users to efficiently get there work done at an intuitive pace then you have still failed.
From the initial GEGL integration attempts I saw the whole thing was hacked together with no clear thought to performance. And the performance was indeed quite abysmal.
I will say that the Gimp 'core rewrite' has been a project in development since the early 2000's. I have never seen a clear design document explaining what this new core is suppose to achieve and for what uses Gimp expects to be used by professional level Artists workflows.
The last development that I was paying attention to was the decision to switch to GEGL for there core compositing and pixel engine. But it looked like it would simply be easier and probably better to start from scratch and build an entirely new software build around a 32bit image architecture rather then try and retrofit there 8bit custom build compositing system.
I will also note that they decided to invest there limited resources into upgrading the gui from GTK2 to GTK3 rather then focus that energy on the core. That shows rather skewed priority focus for a software that has some serious issues.
The Gimp project has been quite abrasive to the graphics research and software development communities for many years. The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics.
There has been a lot of goodwill that has been squandered by the Gimp developers to the point that I seriously doubt that anyone with the skills or the time to work on OSS graphics is willing to invest any time in the project.
Any further development of Gimp will more then likely be an upgrade to the latest version of the GTK+ toolkit slapped on top of the same outdated 8bit early 1990's architecture fallowed by praise by people who have little experience or interest in graphics at any serious level.
A four or eight year Detente between the United States and Russia combined with an integration of Eurasian defence strategy could see a dramatic obsolescence of an organisation that is no longer politically relevant nor operationally capable to fulfill its mandate.
Currently both of those trends are moving forward.
I share your enthusiasm tho. It will probably introduce parallel code into everyday C++ projects faster then new special purpose parallel programming primitives will.
The source code was then releases by NaN under some licencing scheme. Only after a fund raising drive to buy the code for something like a few hundred thousand dollars from NaN and re-release it under an OSS licence did Blender become open source.
Its important to understand that Animation Studios hire the majority of Computer Graphics researchers, Programmers and Artists. Without the commercial Animation industry there would be a small fraction of the research and innovation that we have today. And also a fraction of the innovative open source Computer Graphics projects that we have.
Open source projects like Open SubDiv (Pixar), Ptex (Disney), Open VDM (Dreamworks), and many others are all projects that are created by Animation Studios and would not be possible without the funding and expertise that these studios have.
A smarter way is to use python for automation. There are lots of graphics libraries and bindings to do what ever you want.