I agree Solo. I was under the impression we were talking about a plane w/o a propulsion method. But thinking of it in terms of a jet sucking in air, plus the conveyor belt underneath it, than that changes everything.

Still though, the speed of the aircraft in relation to the ground is not important, which is precisely why the excercise works. The plane can sit still as long as it has enough lift. So its engines are strong enough to suck in the amount of air required to give it loft. Once its wings have enough air flowing over them (under), the aircraft will lift up off the conveyor belt and should then move forward.

So if you've ever seen a bird soar, but in place, its the same idea. I saw a crow floating perfectly still with its wings out, not moving because it found a spot where the wind was flowing steadily at the same speed. It was hitting a freeway berm and the wind headed upwards. So the crow could float on the air w/o having to flap its wings or move forward. So the crow and the ground were moving the same speed, it was the wind that was moving.

Its an interesting question for sure. More complex than I had understood the first time I read it (obviously).

I saw the 2 mythbusters guys on TV last night on Dave Letterman (late night TV show). It was interesting. They also have an open call for volunteers to help hold mirrors in September if you are in the San Francisco area.

Chris

That was my understanding too. Though I thought I read in another unrelated thread that it is possible for a software to enable large memory handling (over the 3-4gb barrier) if it is only 32 bit software running on a 64 bit OS.

I whish I knew more about all this. I did upgrade my comp to Vista 64 bit with 8gb ram. Its nice and I can run lots of stuff at the same time without a hitch. I can be doing detailed renders in 3dsmax and still work hard in photoshop and sketchup. Its really nice

Chris

Just to clarify, its not about the speed relative to the ground at all. As in a wind tunnel, the ground and the aircraft move at the same speed - zero, while the air is what is moving. The plane only gets lift in relation to the wind speed coming towards it.

Not like a glider really, no. Lift is gained by air rushing towards the plane's wing, and getting pushed underneath it. Thus creating a bed of air that is so dense it can support the weight of the aircraft essentially. But it is the air rushing towards the wing that is important, not the ground speed or relation to any other object. So the plane could sit perfectly still and have a huge amount of air blown towards it and it could lift off that way. That is a wind tunnel, which works.

Chris

Yeah, sorry to hijack the thread for a few turns there Mike. I also read an article showing that they appear to not even exist. Who knows, those machines that were delivered might be a part of the hoax too. Or maybe they are something hacked together by a guy just to make it look legit and actually sent out to real customers. Its a silly thing. I hate Mac.

Chris

The guy who runs the website used to work for Google. His name is Brad Seiler of Chicago. He went to Harvard for an undergraduate degree. If you read his blog, its seems enlightening...... He also made some web application for mortgage companies in the middle of the mortgage and real estate heyday<sp?>.

http://www.bradseiler.com/index.php

Chris

Just in the earlier days (I don't know whats under the hood now) but they were running scsi drives that were faster, early adoption of firewire, and also digital video outputs. I guess thats what I was thinking of. They could adopt these standards faster because they didn't have to worry standard case dimension specifications, new board compatibilty with older boards. That is my understanding.

(This is my opinion and my understanding of a complex situation)

That was what hurt apple from the get-go though was that their product was on lockdown, not as open for other developers to make. Less competition means higher prices. So PC's took off because there was a lot of market competition for the internal bits and pieces. A person has always been able to go buy the baords and pieces to make a PC "from scratch". No one can do that with a Mac. That hurts the Mac to not have techy geeks building their Mac product for a small profit. PC's are always behind the Mac in technology though, but that is because they fought to have open market standards so everyone could develop for the PC, thus slowing down their ability to adopt new hardware protocols. But Mac could speed along with technology because they didn't have to coordinate such standards to the same extent that the PC has decided to do. So Mac has always been more stable, more technologically advanced in many respects, and even cooler looking because its only them desinging the things. Of course, they are also significantly more expensive.

All hail the PC!

Gotcha!, yes that makes perfect sense. Indeed that only works as long as it stays online at the betaforum.

Chris

The crossreferences don't work exactly right in the archived forums either though. They used to be hosted at forums.sketchup.com. Now they are on betaforum.sketchup.com. So any time you are reading through and find a link to forums.sketchup.com/...../..., you'll need to replace "forums" with "betaforum". But that is also how it would work in the archive at google groups, now that people know where to find the old sketchup forum based archive. I hope that makes sense. Truly those old archives are amazing, wherever you look through them at.

Chris

I thought I'd point out that the old forums were also all moved to the google pro groups. I hate the groups, and its a pain to browse through there for me, but if in case the old forums link ever do disappear , the whole forum was archived into the groups (at least I think the whole forum was). For example, this is the first post (i think) to the gallery forum in the old forum:

http://betaforum.sketchup.com/showthread.php?t=44732

Here is its equivalent in the groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/pro-gallery/browse_thread/thread/8a45fe8f94d4cf88?hl=en

Chris

This reminded me of a great article from "The Onion" I read yesterday. Its about looking for the next bubble for us Americans to invest in. It can be found here.

(www.theonion.com)

Chris

If you're unfamiliar with the Onion, it is a completely satirical newspaper. None of it is true per se, its just based on contemporary issues, but blown out of proportion. All quotes and names are false, but it is amazing how accurate all the false information is

Here you go Paris, the Cintiq. Its the same idea as a tablet PC, but it is made by Wacom, who make drawing tablets. So its really geared for drawing and art. And if anyone doesn't have something for me for my birthday (in December) yet.....hint hint. PM me and I'll give you my shipping address

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(www.wacom.com)

Chris

Ahh but Phil, you said:

Doing drawings by hand is pleasurable, enjoyable, there is an ephemeral feedback between the media and the user.

This is only true when one has acquired an ability to draw/sketch/paint by hand. For some of us the learning curve is considerably steeper than it is for others. It has taken me 29 years to get to a point where every once in a while I feel "pleasure" while drawing by hand. Whereas I had that feelin early in my pre-teens doing ansi art for BBS's in the days before AOL had tapped in to this new thing called the internet. My ansi art was very popular and I got quite good at because I had an eye for color and composition, but it didn't require that I needed to be able to hold my hand still and draw a straight a line (which I still can't do!). So my point is, hand drawing doesn't give everyone pleasure - for some, its quite painful really.

That being said, the better I've gotten in 3d and photoshop, the more I've been wanting to develop some true hand drawing skills and that is why I work on it quite regularly now. I am finally getting better, and now that I'm getting better, it is finally becoming faster than 3d modeling for rough conceptualization to a certain extent. And some nights after I've put the little girls in bed, when the stars are aligned just, I sit down and watercolor and I am pleased with the results

Chris

PS: My current avatar is a plein air watercolor I'm proud of! I've even started my own little art blog just to chronicle my successes and failures (the links in my signature below). I try to post a lot of my stuff, good and bad, so hopefully in a few years time I'll be able to see the progress I've made in my hand-art skillz Anyhow interesting conversation and I think it all boils down to what one enjoys, but its not necessarily true that everyone finds joy in hand drawing - yet!

ok, sorry for the double post. Here is some more info:

Lee Anderson said:
"I had the same problem and fixed it by removing the SketchUp preferences file named com.AtLast.SketchUp.plist, best found with Spotlight. The file will be rebuilt the next time that you run SketchUp, though some preferences will be lost."

"The path of the OS X file (the .plist) is Users/Username/Library/Preferences, where Username represents your user name."

Hope that helps?

I see it is actually a .plist

Hopefully someone who uses a Mac will chime in with a more definite answer, but you can also try "trashing the plist" or p.list or something like that. I hope that makes sense to you. Its just a default answer I've seen given many times when the 3ds exporter has acted up on other people's Macs. Try it and let me know if it works,

Chris

I see that I am already logged in when I click on the link. So can you enable the always logged in mode or something? If you're logged in when you click the link, it should take you right to the spreadsheet. Or maybe log in, and then paste the link into your browser that you logged-in in. See if that works,

Chris

I heard from a few different Google employees at Basecamp that Jim Holman is still around. Each said they had run in to him a few times in the Boulder area over the last year. I was hoping he was going to make a cameo appearance at the Basecamp, but he did not.

Chris

Is this on a PC (Vista or XP) or on a Mac? I have not heard this twist on 3ds exporting issues before.

Can you export to other filetypes correctly? How about .dae or .obj?

Chris