It's always sad to hear that someone you once had dealings with has passed away- even if you didn't necessarily agree with them.

RIP Honolulu

I'd be interested to know how the Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset weighs up, as I was thinking about getting a Macbook Air with an Intel i7 processor. Interestingly, the previous graphic chipset in the Air was the Nvidia GeForce 320M, which although is more of a gaming chipset, is no slouch either (or I am told).

You bow out easily Pete! I'd love to see a book by you on rendering, because my book would be quite basic. You could do a master's guide to rendering in SketchUp. The trick with making books is to make them better than the previous efforts, even if the subject has already been done to death.

@thomthom said:

@solo said:

Mike,

I have contemplated doing one, however with the amount of SU books out at the moment it looks like everything has been covered over and over again.

How about SketchUp and rendering?

I have a book on rendering planned.

I vote for Autocad. It was a dog. I doubt that it has improved much.

AND when is Autocad LT for Mac coming to Britain? How long do we have to wait??

Cheers Dale!

@idahoj said:

Einstein, His Life and Universe", wrote a synopsis of that article on page 504:

"In it, he argued that unrestrained capitalism produced great disparities of wealth, cycles of boom and depression, and festering levels of unemployment. The system encouraged selfishness instead of cooperation, and acquiring wealth rather than serving others. People were educated for careers rather than for the love of work and creativity. And political parties became corrupted by political contributions from owners of great capital."

Hey! That's England TODAY!

There's nothing wrong with the fundamental principle behind capitalism, it's just that the capitalist system that we currently live in is wrong. The question is, "what do we do about it"?

But hey! Relax for today, because Man City beat the scum (Man United) 6-1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15325536.stm

@dale said:

(although the email I received called it "CtachUp", minor blip).

I should add that in my research for this book, I found a high proportion of people that used SketchUp suffered from mild to severe forms of dyslexia. Many were also gifted with autism. SketchUp is a brilliant tool for children with autism. You should have a look at all the research done by Google and Project Spectrum in the USA. It's quite wonderful!

Tom

I've got Windows 7 on my Mac too. It a good operating system, much better than XP (but of not as good, as OSX of course!)

8 gigs is plenty, but if someone is happy to pay for you to go to 16 gigs, go for it!

However, watch out for the damn Shockwave Flash plug in. It has a memory leak in it, and if you have a lot of ram, it will eat it if you are running a browser (like Safari or Firefox). Therefore it's wise to get the "Click to Flash" plugin installed to halt Flash in its tracks.

I'm pleased your office colleagues had a good experience. I had a very similar experience too. They thought the computer was a hard drive!!! There was complete disbelief when I had it up and running!

Tom

It's great to see my book up in lights too! Thanks for all the great input team!!

Tom

@solo said:

As a socialist liberal I do not believe we (America) has reason to be in any war/conflict. I'm against our involvement in Libya.

There is a lot of hypocrisy in all of this, Will we defend the people of Yemen, Bahrain, what about Zimbabwe?

I was against Bush for what he did as I am now opposing Obama for the same reasons.

As a Marxist, I agree. However I don't condone the final assassination of Gaddafi either. I think that was wrong. He should have been arrested and then tried by a neutral court. The Americans (and British) were wrong to invade Iraq, but they acted correctly when they found Saddam down a hole and then arrested him. But they should never have handed him over to the resurgence. The Americans were also hypocritical when they found and then assassinated Bin Laden. They should have simply arrested him too.

America still has the death penalty, and were wrong to carry out two state executions recently- even if the accused had committed terrible criminal acts. Arab nations are often seen or described as brutalistic by the west, but the west can be just as brutal, but in a different way (see recent torture footage of Iraqis by both the British and the Americans), and I think as westerners, many of us find that hard to grasp or see.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

You know the great thing about Macs are that you can link them all together (including your old G5), and the networked result turns them into a super-cpu!

Have fun with your new tool. I know you will!

If you're paranoid about the i5 processor, you could always try a Hackintosh instead!
(this article is quite 'old' )

Redirecting to https://lifehacker.com/how-to-build-a-hackintosh-mini-for-a-less-expensive-fa-5815715

(lifehacker.com)

The Greeks on the other hand have got every reason to be angry. And further more, that anger is concentrated at the people who have screwed Greece over, their government!

On the other side of the Atlantic though....... Nice to see Obama siding with the Wall Street protesters. Blaming the bankers lets Obama and his other Washington cronies- both democrat and republican, off the hook.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-plans-to-turn-anti-wall-street-anger-on-mitt-romney-republicans/2011/10/14/gIQAZfiwkL_story.html

@mike lucey said:

@tfdesign said:

.... current leaders (hung parliament, because so few came out to vote), are both ex-Etonians. They have practically no grasp on reality at all.

This is so true Tom but in order for these privileged to get into power they need votes and in their case (UK) they must be relying on 'not so privileged' voters.

You do know that Tony Blair was elected as leader of the Labour party by the 'block vote' system? Meaning 1 vote= 20,000 votes!!!! Talk about corrupt!! The 1 vote coming from the Chairman of the Co-op here in Britain... lifelong supporters of the Labour Party. And then that idiot took us into Iraq for no reason, after WMD that didn't exist.

The Con-Lib alliance got in by the skin of their teeth in 2010. The last general election turnout was one of the lowest for years.

@solo said:

Lack of Democracy fuels these protests.The Wall Street crooks get away with stealing billions and our government is doing NOTHING about it, even talking about laxing regulations. The 1% elite keeps us in endless wars, unpayable debt while they are getting richer. The virtual slave labor imports and open borders helped to kill our jobs, our 401 Ks have been robbed (it was all planned) , our crooked and corrupted politicians created financial bubbles that ruined us. It looks that our politicians are not taking the protests seriously enough until there is bloodshed. Then, it may be too late.

I think you're half way there, but I also think that you are forgetting the middle classes. I think they are just as guilty in many ways. (read my other post).

@mike lucey said:

The cure? Buy local until a 'balance' is brought back to commerce! The whole economic World is out of balance and nothing will keep spinning unless its balanced.

"The cure"? I disagree. I think that sentiment is far too simplistic. We are far better off in the west precisely because we have been able to trade with poorer countries and take advantage of those workers in 'sweatshops'. If we 'go local', we'll end up in exactly the same place that William Morris found himself in when he tried to mass produce hand made things by craftsmen. ie, hand made materials and wallpaper could only be afforded by the wealthy, whereas the less wealthy put up with poorly produced products.

I am wearing a high quality t-shirt made by GAP, produced in the 3rd world. My t-shirts cost about £8 each, and I have several of them. Some poor sod has had to produce these t-shirts for me. But you know what, although they have been paid next to nothing, they are at least receiving something. I know it's not much, but it is 'something', and this may be the lifeline that's keeping someone alive elsewhere. Withdraw that little bit and what's the alternative? Poverty and prostitution?

On the other hand, all of my trousers are made by a skate company called "Road", and all their garments say "conscience" on them. ie "All of our garments have been made by people who have been paid a decent wage". I assume they're made in Britain? Road Clothing don't say. But wouldn't that be great if the same philosophy could be applied in the 3rd world? Perhaps? But then we may open the same can of worms that I hinted upon in my first paragraph, because Road Jeans come in at about £70 a pair. For the average working class family, that's an awful lot of money for a pair of trousers (they are good- and comfy- last for ages!)

A well known example to help illustrate the above perhaps would be the "Fairtrade" organisation. I have no doubts that Fairtrade set out with good intentions, but here we are now, a worldwide corporation who are hard promoting a green agenda. Fairtrade do not promote the idea of automation, preferring more 'natural' and 'organic' principles of farming, and Fairtrade now are absolutely everywhere. This is all very well, and great PR for the west as we sip organic cafe-latte's and chomp on our Cadbury's Dairy Milk bars and have a nice warm feeling about where it comes from. But in south America children and whole families work their fingers to the bone for pittance, because can't bear the idea of allowing them to use any kind of mass production farming methods or machinery that may either 'harm the planet' or release 'dangerous' greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Really, Fairtrade should be encouraging all of their workers to create mass plantations, which are fully automated. The wealth generated would help feed and educate the workers and their children, as well as fund libraries and hospitals etc. But it's not happening, and the affluent west would prefer to return to a dream world where horses pull carts through cobbled streets- very romantic, but there are people in poor countries still doing just that, who desperately want to get out of that because manual labour on a large scale is just so plain hard!

Okay. I got you. But that also applies to PC's too.

Avoid anything that says Intel GMA etc!

The NVidia or ATi ones are the best

@gaieus said:

I am not on Mac so cannot be trusted

Quite right!

@gaieus said:

but integrated Intel chipsets are well known to be problematic with SU.

This is of course utter nonsense, and seems to be a current theme from those who use Windows machines (mostly everyone on SketchUcation ).

Mac Minis are very small, and although they contain Intel i5 processors, they'll never be as powerful as a top of the range PowerMac with 16 cores and 32gigs of RAM.

Now to build a steel-clad fort to fend off the oncoming siege from windows fanbois hurling ninja-style killer copies of Windows 7 at me.

Csaba's beaten me to it!