I sell a closed source educational software product and I've seen the insides of a lot of schools. I know that any teacher or school IT coordinator is going to hate to see their known infrastructure replaced at the whim of the state legislature by something they had no say in.
You need to be talking to the people in the schools first, not the people making the laws. Odds are you can find some problems that Open Source software can help with and a few IT coordinators who are on board with it. Then evangalize your local success, highlighting money saved and better student performance, and you'll start opening up a lot more people's minds to open source software.
But top-down through the politicians is not the way to go (case in point).
If you really want to change the landscape, though, find a way to actually fund open source educational software development. It's a shame that we don't have something like a PBS for educational software. I'd much rather write software that everyone can have for free.
The wide-screen iMac specs page gives the native resolution of the 17" iMac as 1440x900. This is a 16:10 display ratio, which is about as close as any monitor I know of gets to the Golden Ratio, (1 + sqrt(5)/2), or approximately 1.618.
Clearly Apple is trying to channel Pyramid Power to sell more computers.
I don't think so. The 2.0 proposal was brought up at the September 2001 OpenGL ARB meeting -- about five months ago. And the OpenGL 2.0 White Paper has been since at least November. While this stuff is important, there's nothing new about it. (Good thing, too; good standards take time.)
Larger cities have no way of building such infrastructure and already have subways which can carry far more people than this system. It is a good replacement for light rails suitable for the sprawling suburbs, but since taking one means you won't have access to your car it probably will never take off.
The best solution is really robotic cars. We should enact legislation so that all new roads built have some sort of simple radio emitters in them to help guide the robotic cars. Then we can all read slashdot on our wireless neighboor LANs while we ride to work every day.
If you've got kids, check out GollyGee Blocks. It's a 3D building blocks program designed for elementary school kids; think KidPix + Legos or 3D Studio Max for 8 year olds. We sell it direct to schools, so you won't find it retail -- but it's just as good and at $25 the price can't be beat. It's for Mac OS 8-9 and Windows and doesn't need a 3D card.
The only reason this story is getting printed is because Steven Spielberg's AI movie is coming out soon, and his studio is trying to drum up interest in the subject. Sort of like how stories about the possibility of asteroids hitting the earth were popular several weeks before Armaggedon & Deep Impact came out.
(Not that the company isn't real or working hard on the area, but just take this with a grain of salt...)
I saw this at E3 and was pretty impressed. It looks like the learning curve isn't too steep and would be great for those of us who do a lot of creative things on our computers. The main reason I won't get it is that I don't like where they've put the backspace: you have to hold down the spacebar and press the escape key. But then there's a big Num Lock key in the upper right, where you might expect a backspace key to be. I understand that they wanted to keep the whole hold-down-space thing going, but backspace is used frequently enough (and num lock infrequently enough) that they could've done this better.
Maybe I'll get it anyways, and just figure out how to remap my keys.
The article's author says "I confess that this psychographic niche -- the Christian, free-software-writing, Emily Dickinson-identifying raver on the attack sub -- was new to me", but in fact Cornell has been turning these types out for years.
I've done some stuff using Inventor in the past, here's a non-marketing person's overview. Open Inventor is a high-level 3D graphics API which sits on top of OpenGL. With Open Inventor a programmer can work with objects, materials and cameras in a scene graph framework rather than having to deal with polygons, color/texture/lighting/material calls, and transformation matrices in their own data structure. A scene graph is a big tree which contains everything in the scene, well suited for hierarchical models.
Open Inventor is great at rapidly creating interactive 3D applications. By 'interactive' I mean things where the user can get in and pick objects, move them around, etc. Open Inventor takes care of all the rendering and events for you and so it's pretty easy to get something up and running. Performance is good but not Inventor's main thrust -- so it'd be better to write something like a model or level editor in inventor than a first-person shooter.
I've seen Inventor used to create an architectural modeler with great effect; the author was really able to focus on the interface and not spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel for his underlying data structure. We considered using Inventor for the project that eventually became my children's 3D building blocks program, but there were licensing issues and we didn't think the performance would be there by the time we wanted to release it. If I were starting again today, I might reconsider.
The FCC should be renting the airwaves, not selling them. Instead they sell them off and never get rights back to them... Of course, the cost would be passed along to consumers, but all of our taxes would be lower, and people will complain about paying $1 more in taxes a lot more quickly than $1 more for mobile phone service.
In some ways this book is nothing new; the same old "don't be evil" message that's been used since Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People and even then it probably wasn't new. In other ways this book has a lot to say.
It seems to me that the book overlooks the whole race of former-frat-boys who have turned into suits and say things like "killer differentiator app". These people actually think the way marketing people tell them to with TV ads, and frankly I don't think the internet is changing them -- they're just trying to make a buck off of it by starting "pure-play B2B" internet startups.
Legos with a mouse is *hard*
on
Lego CAD
·
· Score: 2
Legos in real life are great. Snapping two lego bricks together is very natural and they're not that hard to pick up. Positioning them with a mouse is another story.
If you've tried Gryphon Bricks, ZOI Blocks, Lego Creator or even leocad you can easily tell how clumsy it is to put lego pieces together with the mouse. It's not like a 2D paint program where you just point and click. Instead you point, click, move the arrow keys, click on something else, drag the mouse for a while and then maybe it's in the right spot.
It's a pretty difficult problem, of course, since there's an inherent ambiguity when a 2D mouse coordinate is projected into a 3D world. I worry that this CAD program would be so clumsy it will turn kids off of CAD because they'd rather just use the legos. A cooler product in my mind is Cybones, which uses pieces that aren't so tedious to build with on a computer. And it's more colorful, too.
You must applaud the authors for getting the minimum system specs right, though; most elementary schools don't have the kind of boxes slashdot readers do.
You're right, games are a lot of hard work, and big companies really do dominate the scene. There's a lot of lip service given to independent developers in the industry, but that's about it. But I think that the barrier for entry into the game industry is lower than ever.
First off, if you don't have a budget, you keep that in mind when you start your game. Skip the FMV and motion capture and design something you can write on a budget. Don't draw 500MB of textures, just make a few good ones and wring 'em for all they're worth. Above all, concentrate on gameplay, because in the end that's what'll keep people coming back to you.
And when your game is done, publish it yourself if you can't get publishers interested. The internet is perfect for that, there are plenty of places which will take care of selling it for you. For a price of course, but the margins are actually much higher online than in retail. Marketing the product online is up to you.
People in the industry frequently tell others looking to get into it that you have to 'pay your dues', and they're right. If you just want to get into the industry, you can get a job as a coder working on someone else's project and you've got a few titles under your belt you can get the green light to work on one of your own. If you've got a game that you've got to make yourself before anything else, then it's going to require a lot of time working for free in your basement. Which sacrifice you want to make is up to you.
The skills to write a game are pretty much the standard software engineering skills. Games are getting more complex, but technology is getting faster, and balancing the two is half the battle in making a great game. Look at Carmack's history: DOOM and Quake had scan-line renderers which he hand-tuned in assembler, but QIII just throws polygons to the 3D card (and it's corresponding hand-tuned driver). So instead of spending time getting a poly on the screen he spends the time figuring out how to make it look cool. Figuring out where to spend your time is an engineering call, and it's the same if you're writing a database or a first-person shooter.
Of course, if all the games out there were things people put together in a few hours after dinner, we wouldn't be paying $40 for them. They take a long time and lots of hard work, and so if you're going to revolutionize the industry you're going to need some financial backing so you can work full time on it for at least a year. And even Carmack doesn't code alone, and he's got a ton of artists helping out too. So you're not going to revolutionize the industry by yourself, but there's no reason you can't provide the vision to revolutionize it with a team.
How about a GNU patent license? Something which lets you do anything with the patent provided it stays free. Two good license clauses come to mind: * Freely licensable to anyone who doesn't hold any patents * Freely licensable to anyone who holds patents that are also under the GNU patent license I'm not sure what to do about licensing to parties with non-GNU licensed patents; maybe only allow using the patent for endeavors which do not rely on non-GNU licensed patents.
First off, read the book (RTFB?). McConnell addresses most of your concerns. Secondly, what makes you think that a licensed software engineer wouldn't write open source software? When licensing does become common practice, I would expect that IBM, Red Hat and other large open source companies would employ licensed software engineers to work on their products. My company believes there is a place for both commercial and open source software in the world, and we also are committed to fostering an environment where mature software engineering practices are the norm. I don't see any reason why we can't apply those practices to both are open and closed source products.
Slashdot Mirror
I sell a closed source educational software product and I've seen the insides of a lot of schools. I know that any teacher or school IT coordinator is going to hate to see their known infrastructure replaced at the whim of the state legislature by something they had no say in.
You need to be talking to the people in the schools first, not the people making the laws. Odds are you can find some problems that Open Source software can help with and a few IT coordinators who are on board with it. Then evangalize your local success, highlighting money saved and better student performance, and you'll start opening up a lot more people's minds to open source software.
But top-down through the politicians is not the way to go (case in point).
If you really want to change the landscape, though, find a way to actually fund open source educational software development. It's a shame that we don't have something like a PBS for educational software. I'd much rather write software that everyone can have for free.
The wide-screen iMac specs page gives the native
resolution of the 17" iMac as 1440x900. This is a 16:10 display ratio, which is about as
close as any monitor I know of gets to the
Golden Ratio, (1 + sqrt(5)/2), or approximately 1.618.
Clearly Apple is trying to channel Pyramid Power
to sell more computers.
I don't think so. The 2.0 proposal was brought up at the September 2001 OpenGL ARB meeting -- about five months ago. And the OpenGL 2.0 White Paper has been since at least November. While this stuff is important, there's nothing new about it. (Good thing, too; good standards take time.)
Larger cities have no way of building such infrastructure and already have subways which can carry far more people than this system. It is a good replacement for light rails suitable for the sprawling suburbs, but since taking one means you won't have access to your car it probably will never take off.
The best solution is really robotic cars. We should enact legislation so that all new roads built have some sort of simple radio emitters in them to help guide the robotic cars. Then we can all read slashdot on our wireless neighboor LANs while we ride to work every day.
And here's a review from somebody who didn't write it.
3D building blocks on the computer. No violence, no dancing bears, just plain building.
Trident drivers suck under Windows (at least for OpenGL), frankly the XFree86 people are doing a better job on their own anyways.
The band Barcelona has an entertaining song about password security entitled "I Have the Password to Your Shell Account". Find it at http://www.barcelonadc.com/frame.asp?p=sounds.
(Not that the company isn't real or working hard on the area, but just take this with a grain of salt...)
I saw this at E3 and was pretty impressed. It looks like the learning curve isn't too steep and would be great for those of us who do a lot of creative things on our computers. The main reason I won't get it is that I don't like where they've put the backspace: you have to hold down the spacebar and press the escape key. But then there's a big Num Lock key in the upper right, where you might expect a backspace key to be. I understand that they wanted to keep the whole hold-down-space thing going, but backspace is used frequently enough (and num lock infrequently enough) that they could've done this better.
Maybe I'll get it anyways, and just figure out how to remap my keys.
oh well.
The article's author says "I confess that this psychographic niche -- the Christian, free-software-writing, Emily Dickinson-identifying raver on the attack sub -- was new to me", but in fact Cornell has been turning these types out for years.
Open Inventor is great at rapidly creating interactive 3D applications. By 'interactive' I mean things where the user can get in and pick objects, move them around, etc. Open Inventor takes care of all the rendering and events for you and so it's pretty easy to get something up and running. Performance is good but not Inventor's main thrust -- so it'd be better to write something like a model or level editor in inventor than a first-person shooter.
I've seen Inventor used to create an architectural modeler with great effect; the author was really able to focus on the interface and not spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel for his underlying data structure. We considered using Inventor for the project that eventually became my children's 3D building blocks program, but there were licensing issues and we didn't think the performance would be there by the time we wanted to release it. If I were starting again today, I might reconsider.
As long as it's Sylvester Stallone doing the judging, I think everything will be fine.
The FCC should be renting the airwaves, not selling them. Instead they sell them off and never get rights back to them... Of course, the cost would be passed along to consumers, but all of our taxes would be lower, and people will complain about paying $1 more in taxes a lot more quickly than $1 more for mobile phone service.
In some ways this book is nothing new; the same old "don't be evil" message that's been used since Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People and even then it probably wasn't new. In other ways this book has a lot to say.
It seems to me that the book overlooks the whole race of former-frat-boys who have turned into suits and say things like "killer differentiator app". These people actually think the way marketing people tell them to with TV ads, and frankly I don't think the internet is changing them -- they're just trying to make a buck off of it by starting "pure-play B2B" internet startups.
There's a good webcast & transcript of an event that Locke & Weinberger spoke at here in DC:
http://www.netpreneur.org/e vents/cluetrain/default.html
If you've tried Gryphon Bricks, ZOI Blocks, Lego Creator or even leocad you can easily tell how clumsy it is to put lego pieces together with the mouse. It's not like a 2D paint program where you just point and click. Instead you point, click, move the arrow keys, click on something else, drag the mouse for a while and then maybe it's in the right spot.
It's a pretty difficult problem, of course, since there's an inherent ambiguity when a 2D mouse coordinate is projected into a 3D world. I worry that this CAD program would be so clumsy it will turn kids off of CAD because they'd rather just use the legos. A cooler product in my mind is Cybones, which uses pieces that aren't so tedious to build with on a computer. And it's more colorful, too.
You must applaud the authors for getting the minimum system specs right, though; most elementary schools don't have the kind of boxes slashdot readers do.
Shameless plug: check out my 3D modeler for kids!
It's cool to see that the solutions go from only hardware to mostly software.
Do you think there is a market for children's software that runs on Linux?
You're right, games are a lot of hard work, and big companies really do dominate the scene. There's a lot of lip service given to independent developers in the industry, but that's about it. But I think that the barrier for entry into the game industry is lower than ever.
First off, if you don't have a budget, you keep that in mind when you start your game. Skip the FMV and motion capture and design something you can write on a budget. Don't draw 500MB of textures, just make a few good ones and wring 'em for all they're worth. Above all, concentrate on gameplay, because in the end that's what'll keep people coming back to you.
And when your game is done, publish it yourself if you can't get publishers interested. The internet is perfect for that, there are plenty of places which will take care of selling it for you. For a price of course, but the margins are actually much higher online than in retail. Marketing the product online is up to you.
People in the industry frequently tell others looking to get into it that you have to 'pay your dues', and they're right. If you just want to get into the industry, you can get a job as a coder working on someone else's project and you've got a few titles under your belt you can get the green light to work on one of your own. If you've got a game that you've got to make yourself before anything else, then it's going to require a lot of time working for free in your basement. Which sacrifice you want to make is up to you.
JB
The skills to write a game are pretty much the standard software engineering skills. Games are getting more complex, but technology is getting faster, and balancing the two is half the battle in making a great game. Look at Carmack's history: DOOM and Quake had scan-line renderers which he hand-tuned in assembler, but QIII just throws polygons to the 3D card (and it's corresponding hand-tuned driver). So instead of spending time getting a poly on the screen he spends the time figuring out how to make it look cool. Figuring out where to spend your time is an engineering call, and it's the same if you're writing a database or a first-person shooter.
Of course, if all the games out there were things people put together in a few hours after dinner, we wouldn't be paying $40 for them. They take a long time and lots of hard work, and so if you're going to revolutionize the industry you're going to need some financial backing so you can work full time on it for at least a year. And even Carmack doesn't code alone, and he's got a ton of artists helping out too. So you're not going to revolutionize the industry by yourself, but there's no reason you can't provide the vision to revolutionize it with a team.
JB
Forgive me for being EE instead of CS, but how does a journaling file system differ from a regular file system? Why should I use it?
How about a GNU patent license? Something which lets you do anything with the patent provided it stays free. Two good license clauses come to mind: * Freely licensable to anyone who doesn't hold any patents * Freely licensable to anyone who holds patents that are also under the GNU patent license I'm not sure what to do about licensing to parties with non-GNU licensed patents; maybe only allow using the patent for endeavors which do not rely on non-GNU licensed patents.
First off, read the book (RTFB?). McConnell addresses most of your concerns. Secondly, what makes you think that a licensed software engineer wouldn't write open source software? When licensing does become common practice, I would expect that IBM, Red Hat and other large open source companies would employ licensed software engineers to work on their products. My company believes there is a place for both commercial and open source software in the world, and we also are committed to fostering an environment where mature software engineering practices are the norm. I don't see any reason why we can't apply those practices to both are open and closed source products.