The stupidest part of this is that the filtering systems just about always completely fail to block what they claim to block - and do block things that they shouldn't.

When I installed stuff for my brother-in-laws family I refused to activate any blocking for them after demonstrating that it made it impossible to get information on little things like, oh, breast cancer. Given four nieces in the family - who are all fairly likely to have, y'know, breasts, I though a little exposure to nekkid people having fun was a little less harmful than dying of ignorance. Now it may be true that filtering is a bit smarter these days but… nah, ain't gonna happen.

@rv1974 said:

[flash=560,345:ct4kzvyq]http://www.youtube.com/v/HNMq8XS4LhE&feature=youtu.be[/flash:ct4kzvyq]

As we used to joke, it's what yer wellies are for….

@dave r said:

Tim, yes, I just move the viewport by dragging it or using the cursor keys. Sometimes it requires changing the size of the viewport slightly, too.

Hmph. Tried that - it can certainly have an effect, not always nice.

@dave r said:

I'd be in favor of the unicode fractions if they existed for all fractions. I would like to be able to have superscript/subscript though. I don't want it to be like MS Word where common fractions like ¼ show one way and 1/16 shows as all large numbers unless you go back and edit them.

Fair point. I'm reasonably sure unicode only does up to 8ths. Which is dumb considering how many code points there are to play with.

So Google-guys? Please check your maths on the transforms between SU space and LO space. Bet you'll find that the order is not optimising for accuracy. Been there, done that, crashed the spaceship.

@dave r said:

I have found that by moving the view port slightly on the page I can eliminate the problem.

Hmm, interesting - I can't seem to get any change at all. Just to be clear, how are you moving the viewport? I just selected it and moved it around both by cursor key and dragging. No beneficial effect for me

Oh, for the record, iMac 24", OS X 10.6.8, SU 8pro, LO 3.whatever-the-latest.

And as for the dimension text - yeah, lots of improvements could be made. Automatically using ¼ type unicode fractions would be a nice start.

I've been adding LO dimensions to some of my drawings and something is Definitely Not Happy.

My example is a page with about 20 views of the same model/scene where a bunch of components are laid out 'flat'. Each view shows one component. Some of the views look ok but a number of them have the dimensions offset from the actual drawing points that they're supposed to be dimensioning. The actual dimension values are OK.
The attached PDF shows the problem; take note of views 16/19/20 where it is pretty obvious, but also in view 5 at high magnification you can see the effect in the small.

Not really a nice effect.

LayoutDimensioningProblem.pdf

Just had this problem myself. The original file probably got started in LO 1.0 or thereabouts but I've been editing it continuously for what, 100 years? Seems like it anyway.
Whilst doing a lot of editing on a particular page the rest of the document quietly disappeared; no bugsplat or other notification. All that happened was that what I tried to move to different page it did nothing. The page list was still there.

Fortunately TimeMachine saved me and I was able to copy/paste the still-there worked on page contents to the recovered file.

I have the damaged file should anyone want it.

@dave r said:

you can import them into SketchUp and then add them to a LayOut document which you then save as a Scrapbook.

[Bang. Bang. Bang] That's my head banging on my desk.

And of course you can do hybrid components; import stuff drawn in SU, explode them and then edit the resulting LO lines before saving as a scrapbook.

I don't see any options for importing external models (like dxf files) as LO vector objects, which sounds like what you need. You could insert image files for some things I suppose but that's not really what you want, is it.

Since the scrapbook files are simply xml documents a suitably skilled person could write a routine to take dxf like files and create scrapbooks from them. Don't ask me though.

@unknownuser said:

I don't think his point was to suggest that the students were like nazis in any political or moral sense.

You're kidding, right? This is <i>Glenn Beck</i> we're talking about.

@unknownuser said:

I think he was just commenting about the disturbing nature of having any sort of political camp for children.

You mean like religion camps? Or Tea Party camps? (http://thelastword.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/15/6867750-tea-party-camp-every-childs-dream)

The event in question in Norway was a gathering for teenagers, like a teen leadership meeting. Sort of like most political parties have at times as a way to try to interest about-to-go-to-college kids. I realise (having lived there) that anything to the left of Genghis Khan is seen as <b>ohmogodlordsaveuscommielibrulsatanism</b> in the US but really, most European left-ish parties are pretty bland "the country is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people not a few rich corporations" types. Y'know, quite like a lot of bits in the US declaration of independence, the constitution and other writings dating back a fair while.

@chrisglasier said:

not owned by anyone,

not controlled by anyone,

highly resilient, has never stopped working for any reason,

free of patent or copyright restrictions on its enabling software (html/javascript),

...

Another point is that server farm owners have the power to determine what technology is available - ever think about who decided to stop floppy disk drives?

Err… what?
Not owned by anyone? The assorted (and not terribly large) group of ISPs, telcos, cable corp.s etc own the entire infrastructure. The hardware underlying the net is incredibly concentrated. The original peer mesh idea has been pretty much subsumed by centralised ownership and control with very little protection from the ravages of corporate malfeasance, greed, corruption or indeed govt. interference. The happy old claim that 'the net interprets censorship as an error and routes around it' doesn't really work too well any more.

Free of copyright or patent restrictions on the enabling technology? Unlikely. There's a lot more to the net than html and javascript, most of it with many patents involved. Like, for example the basic ideas of commerce on the net. There was a large case not too long ago that cost a number of big companies a billion or so to settle.

And really? Server farm owners have the power to stop people using floppy drives? Ugg? Now that's a non sequitur if ever I saw one.

The thing to worry about would be companies that rely on a single storage device/location. Important data - including your own - should not be in a single place. The best backup plan possible would be to compress and encrypt your important documents, label them as 'BritneySpearsPorn00001.mpeg' and put it out as a torrent. You could pretty well guarantee that it would still be out there somewhere when the universe grows cold!

That's quite enough. We've all had ample.

I just wish that north america had adopted a sensible plug/socket design like the UK. Having just built a house I have been quite horrified at how flimsy and tacky the electrical stuff is. On the other hand, I wish the UK would adopt the decidedly more civilised plumbing standards...

@edson said:

[
2. graphic cards on mac cannot be interacted with. there is no control panel to access them.

Really?
System Preferences > Display.
I see a list of display resolutions available, ranging from 640x480 through 1280x800 up to the iMac's native 1920x1200. OK, you can't individually set the scanline front porch on a Mac but really, when would you want to?

…and just to include us Maconauts, the Character Viewer and Keyboard Viewer apps can be added to the menubar from the SystemPreferences|Keyboard pane - tick the 'Show Keyboard & Character viewer in menubar' checkbox.

You can get all sorts of interesting characters.

Ever head of the 'Z notation schema composition' symbol? - ⨟ - Nor me.
Asterism - ⁂
Degree - °
Plusminus - ±
Diameter - ⌀
Blank symbol - ␢ (but it's not blank!)

See http://baxil.livejournal.com/193207.html for the best song ever about tech support. Audio at http://www.prometheus-music.com/audio/techsupt.mp3 - recorded at a Filk con I was attending. Frickin hilarious.

If you haven't already done so, pop over to the FineHomeBuilding website and do some reading over there. Lots of good stuff.

@mike lucey said:

Sure you have no Irish blood in you?

Well, I'm British - which means I'm English, Welsh, Irish, Scot, French, German, Hungarian, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc etc etc etc etc. To be British means to be heir to and descended from pretty much every nationality imaginable. We've stolen half the world and given most of it back at various times, we've mixed and molested in every time and place possible. Hell, even our language stalks other languages and mugs them in dark alleys in order to rummage through their pockets for spare grammar.

Any fool that tries to blather on about 'pure bred British' or worse yet, 'pure bred English' is just that - a blathering fool; and usually a damnable racist as well.

So yes; I have some Irish blood in me! Not to mention an Irish/French wife born in England while I happen to be Welsh born.

@mike lucey said:

So you settled for just the glass paperweight then Now if that was an Irish accent holder he probably would have got a 'lot' more along with the paperweight

Well it was in public. And the lady stallholder was a bit old for my tastes. T'was not always that way...

@jim57 said:

Dave, with all respect, try it yourself with a rounded edge or dimensioning a turning, something where the end comes to a round then a flat.

OK, I thought I'd try this - I've had plenty of irritations with LO dimensioning in the past.

I used SU to draw a 4" square and then made ½" corner by using the arc tool and making tangent arcs. Delete the scrap corners, save and send to LO.

I had no trouble at all with getting clean 4" dimensions in LO. I even tried using raster and vector rendering just in case that made a difference.

What do you do that might be different and explain where the problem lies?

Not too sure about the Irish thing but in the years I worked in silicon valley I concluded that a good BBC English accent was worth:-
about $10000 on your salary
about 50 points on your perceived IQ
about 2" (work it out)

On one memorable occasion I was walking with friends around a craft fair and a lady stall-holder notice my accent, called out "I love that accent!" and somehow my mouth replied (my brain had nothing to do with it) "Enough to give me one of those fabulous paperweights?" - upon which she handed me gorgeous glass paperweight probably worth $100 or so. Still got it.

If you can beat that with an Irish accent then have lots of fun!

Bees, whilst cool little buggers, are far from the only vectors of pollination in the plant world. Just for starters there are whole taxonomic families of plant that are wind pollinated. Like grasses, for instance. Grasses are important since they include quite a lot of rather important crops. Many, many other insect species pollinate. Many bees other than honey bees pollinate.

The odds of the commercial honey bee hive problem being caused by a simple, single, cause are quite low. Life just isn't like that no matter what headline writers and pundits would like us to believe.