• Improved integration with the 3D warehouse
• Improved handling of overlapping lines on a surface (edges automatically split other edges where they cross)
• New smart / dynamic components that will readjust themselves when they are scaled (rather than stretching or distorting. For example, you can create a dynamic ladder or stair component that will adjust the number of treads as you make it taller or shorter.

Learn more about what’s new in SketchUp 7 or watch the video below.

Most programs are now close to 1GB in size which might mean extremly long download times depending on your internet connection.

IT happens to all of us: the moment when one finds out that more megapixels and better photographs aren’t always the same thing. To be disabused of the Megapixel Myth — this decade’s analog of the Megahertz Myth — can lead to an existential buyer’s crisis in miniature.

Disbelief, at first, gives way to a sort of embarrassing self-questioning: You mean, 15 megapixels isn’t three times better than 5 megapixels? This year’s model isn’t better than last year’s? I spent all that money upgrading — for nothing?

…there is more to a digital camera’s sensor than resolution. Understanding some of the basics may just convince you that, at least this year, buying last year’s model is a smart move.

Anyone in the market for a new digital camera should read this article.   Read the full article at nytimes.com

(note: as of 7:43AM EDT there is no link to download from Mozilla’s website)

Bamboo does have loads of green potential. But as is usually the case when it comes to crops, much depends on how the bamboo is managed, harvested, and ultimately made into flooring. Many producers assume that consumers won’t pay attention to such behind-the-scenes details and will be dazzled by smooth-talking salesman who toss around words like “sustainability” and “sequestration.”

…bamboo’s environmental edge can evaporate if the stuff is heedlessly grown. Given the recent vogue for bamboo among Western consumers, producers in Asia (specifically China’s Hunan Province) have been aggressive with their planting, often at the expense of old woodlands and their attendant ecosystems. To goose their yields, these plantations employ plenty of fertilizers and pesticides, thereby negating one of bamboo’s primary advantages.

read the full article here

The build blog has an interesting post that shows use of 3D analysis / cut away drawings in other fields to allow everyone immediately understand of these complex relationships.

I wonder if BIM will help us produce more legible construction docs or only provide more of the same (slightly more coordinated) construction docs.

Derided by critics as pie in the sky, the train would use magnetic levitation technology to carry passengers from Disneyland to Las Vegas in well under two hours, traveling at speeds of up to 300 mph. It would be the first MagLev system in the U.S. The money is the largest cash infusion in the project’s nearly 20-year history. It will pay for environmental studies for the first leg of the project.