The problem I have with the current state of homebrew console developement and open source game developement is, that the game developement pipeline, i.e. the pipeline for developing (and deploying) anything beyond a non-trivial CLI or GUI app is a huge fuss, even compared to the old days of the Commodore and Atari plattorms. The bizar mess even the most humble modders and hobby gamedevs have to go through to develop across FOSS platforms (BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, whatever) is a slap in the face to anybody who wants to bring game innovations to FOSS. And the modders *are* the forefront of game innovation - that's a fact.
Open Source / Homebrew needs a proper working one-stop zero-fuss developement pipeline for non-trivial grapical and multimedia apps. And I am *not* talking about the latest and greatest in 3D GFX and effects. I'm talking about a simple, OpenGL & Sound supporting IDE + compiler + generator + x-plattform OpenGL and sound support. Not even video would be required. Give me a MonoDevelop or a KDevelop or Erics python IDE from which I can compile and deploy for an standardised x-plattform multimedia enviroment (video is not even needed) and I'll be on my way to develop the first game for all these devices including the regular Linux desktop. The problem is that it isn't even possible to get consistent coherent information on how to develop for these things. The only half-way resonable tool I can find for these is some shoddy closed-source windows-only GL Basic IDE that looks like it came from 1989.
What the f*ck do I have to worry about compiling my toolkit when l'll be busy for well over a year building the libs and components for my game. Constantly compiling against moving targets in Linux's equivalent of DLL hell? No sir. Get your shit together and build a multimedia enviroment and pipeline that stays consistent for a few years - than we can talk business.
As long as the absolute minimum in this regard isn't delivered the modders will stay with Windows, their free (beer) Steam Engine and Softimage licences.... And I will continue to develop Games in Flash. I can hardly believe I'm writing this, but x-plattform multimedia deployment - even to FOSS - isn't half the hassle with those Adobe crooks than it is with FOSS tools, kits and pipelines. That's the bitter truth.
Is the money enough to continue making your own rules? Take it. You're little company could be the next Google or the next Boo.com. You'll never know. But you do know how much money they are offering right now. If it's enough (some mean two-digit million sum of euros or so) to basically retire for the rest of your life and you have a family and/or other non-related interests that wouldn't be affected by a non-compete: Take the money. You owe it to the people who depend on you. Statistics say that you'll more likely to fail on your own than succeed. If you're doing software and/or services, do some good and do a Mark Shuttleworth. Take money, do FOSS for the rest of your life. That's somewhere along the line of what I would do anyway. If you're doing hardware: Take the money even more so! Hardware is way more difficult, and much easyer to botch.
I know the problem: You've finally gained critical mass and just have become independant on your own terms for the first time in your life and along comes a huge corp with deep pockets and tempts you. That's a big stab at ones pride - I can feel the conflict you have. Never the less: Game the situation at the best of your abilities. Take the huge wad of cash they're offering, negotiate a bigger one if possible and avoid all NDAs and non-competes that enable them to come after you in 3 months and take away what they paid you for it.
Once you have the money use it to do good and fun stuff and live your private life like you would if you hadn't gotten the deal - then you'll live happyly ever after.
This is in the news here since two days ago and basically backfired big time allready, with even the police union turning to the CDU and saying 'totally hairbrained stupid idea'. Particularly hilarious is the reaction of one of those supporting the programm in an spiegel-online interview from yesterday (it's in the last fourth of the video - in German though - but you can catch the tone nonetheless). The guy loses his cool the instant he is asked about it, having been bugged the entire day about it. Very funny indeed and the comentary of the video doesn't stint on snide and whitty remarks on this political botch either.
What's the big fat hairy deal? Correct me if I'm wrong, but with SSDs access times out of the ms and in the ns range SATA is the bottleneck for those aswell. As it has been with throughput ever since we've had upwards of 5K RPM disks and upwards of 8MB cache on the controllers. Which was around 2002 IIRC.
In fact, it's actually the strangest thing to connect a SSD via SATA in the first place. A waste of power, space, time and complexity. Throughput wise anyway. An entirely different diskbus is long overdue. USB 3 could maybe be a candidate, no? One piece of outdated legacy less - allways a good thing imho. I personally thought of skipping SATA entirely and using internal USB 2 instead, back in the day when SATA was the hottest new thing.
That's your job. Bash CLI, the CLI toolkit, CLI Emacs, key-based ssh and a well-maintained, well-documented pack of own scripts in your favourite interpreted PL are just what it takes to do this sort of thing. No fancy bling-bling required or wanted. It would make your worse, not easyer in the long run.
Sorry, I'm basically hitting into the same wedge about 50 other people have hit here allready, but I can't help it:
The opt-out option is there for spammers to clean up their lists from dead addresses - not to leave you alone. Don't opt out from spam, as you simply can't - otherwise it wouldn't be half the spam it ususally is and spammers would actually be nice people and not the assholes they are in reality.
As with everything else on the Interweb (ads, popups, email-proposals from nigeria, system warnings in your browser looking kinda sorta fake, etc.) basic brain usage is also required for dealing with spam. Don't skip that, ever. And another advice: Suck up the flak you're getting right now, take it with humor and file it under 'lessons learned'... you idiot.:-)
The correct running technique - which can vary from runner to runner - is much more important than the type of shoes. Some running shoe brands claim that their shoes encourage and help do the right technique, but it really boils down to doing it by yourself.
The only point I see in running shoes is an certain amount of cushoning, since we tend to run on concrete quite a lot, allthough our type of pavements have only been around in recent history.
It's safe to say that most of the running shoes available are mostly snakeoil.
We have similar situations all over the world and in Germany too. Legislatory and Courts not understanding the concepts in Network technology and that they require a whole new different approach and perspective for reasonable legislation and judgement. At the same time IT is growing so fast and becoming a central part of our lives that the people affected are a significant political force. I think this is sort of a generation problem too. What I find interesting is that more and more the effect of IT on our lives - and thus on politics aswell - is growing stronger and stronger. I hope this party gains traction in sweden and isn't just a fad.
I program in PDP-11 assembly, which is then translated into C, compiled into Java bytecode, and executed on a JVM. I call it Assemblacava, and it's the wave of the future.
Dude, that is *so* 2008! I programm in Sharp 1403H Opcode which is piped into an optimized generator for x86 opcode which is written in eLisp and even runs on my old slightly rigged m105 Palm without a hitch - very cool!. Sharp 1403H Opcode where the future and money is. Get with the proramm!
Oh, and btw., the portables that run it natively have upwards of 300 hours of battery life and are way smaller than these bulky netbooks from last year. Now who's gonna beat that? Hah!
Read this sort of thing along the lines of: "Since you're now low on dough and high on time, we're giving you our stuff for free so you dare not move to open source in general and Blender in specific to refocus your skills there, because that little Project is closing in on us in leaps and bounds and frankly is scaring the living piss out of us."
I sold my Lightwave 8.5 Licence (+ books 'n stuff) and forfeighted the right for cheap upgrades of this very neat Hollywood Grade 3D Kit because Blender has gotten so good, there are only very few features missing that LW has, and quite a few that LW (or any other closed source kit) doesn't have. Oh, and btw., Blender 2.5 is coming closer with a complete architectural redo that will boost its developement even further. The 3D market is tough as it is and Blender is a scaring thing to watch for SideFX, AutoDesk, NewTek and the likes, you can believe that. The 3D tool market allways was tough, but these days its even more so - wouldn't wanna swap with any of those companies still asking upwards of 3000 Euros for their software.
Get a cheap, small, fanless, onboard everything system with external UPS and underclock it. Install DOS direktly or try running the software of DosBox on a slim Linux variant in order to cover for the larger RAM space today Comps have. MiniITX sounds like a safe bet. I have an underclocked AMD box (1 GHz instead of 1.6 GHz) in my line of computers and it runs very stable and is way faster than anything from 15 years ago.
Crappy Website built with a crappy 50$ template in a very crappy manner. Tacky template music. Boilerplate pictures of some office building somewhere in the about section. Crappy pictures of crappy boxes with what looks like your standard Mini-ITX package in them and way overpriced purchase options to buy them. Bets are ten to one that this is a scam and you won't even see any hardware at all if you fall for it. Nothing to see here, move along. How this even gets any attention at all on/. - let alone the buzz in the comments right now - is beyond me.
Gaming, up to this point, has pretty much been a safe haven from the evolving inet, web and media industry turmoil. That is changing right now, as we speak.
I've been doing regular webdev for a living the last 9 years and since 8 months ago I have a gig at a large global player browsergame company with a job I'd never dreamt of getting or even dreamt of being able to do profitably.
The groth rate our company is experiencing now is totally bizar (something like upwards of 350%!) and this phenomenon is part of the equation. I suspect that a lot of the late web users - those who came to private computing soley through and because of the web (like my spouse) just a few years ago and can't help but constantly confuse Google with the internet - are responible for large parts of this trend. They couldn't install a piece of software (or a game for that matter) if their life depended on it, but they can find a website again (if the google results haven't changed... *sigh*) and log in and continue to play a browsergame. This is where the critical mass is at today and I'm at it's epicenter right now, having howned my PHP, Flash & AS3 skills in the last few years.... 'Guess for once I got lucky.
Add in FOSS gaming closing in on critical mass and the 3D devpipeline getting cheaper by the day (or being comletely free [beer]) and most inovation coming from modders rather than companies anyway nowadays and you understand that gaming as we know it is a thing of the past. Any company not recognizing that will go the way of the dodo. That's a fact.
... you can put the same on your White Wind. Go to a copyshop that also has those cut-plotters and get a set of decal lettering cut out in black saying "I'm his new Netbook and help him pick up chicks." That should fix both the 'manly' and 'whitty reply' part in one stroke. And it's quite funny aswell.
After all, this is the country - 'The land of the free' *chuckle* - that had an 11-year-old boy chained and dragged out of his home for putting his little girl on the pott. The case cause an outrage in the western world, and rightfully so.
I started for an academic run two years ago, at the age of 37, as yet another cornerstone of a second career in IT. If it hadn't been for me needing to rake in money with freelance projects for my daughter and spouse at the side I wouldn't have quit after a semester like I did. Allthough I do have 22 years of programming experience and 4.5 years of real freelance experience and, despite studying arts, did not piss away my 20ties but did lot's of projects at the side, so I can handle the lack of a defree fairly well when facong employers or customers.
My take on your situation: If you've got no one depending on you and can afford the tight budget and/or dept for the next few years go for a degree. The renewed learning experience is fun and you'll be superiour to any group dynamics your early twen commrades still fall for - which is a huge plus. Nothing is stopping you from doing related projects on the side once you've gotten through the first two tough 'weed-em-out' semesters and a degree never can hurt. You can allways drop out if the opportunity asks for it and you can calculate the risk of doing so.
Praise be to God! Seriously, the religious overtones of this webapp (and the author) makes me shudder.
Kasper Scarhoj gave up the lead for Typo3 around 2 years ago. He's still a respected member of the community - and for good reasons too - but he does not lead Typo3 anymore. And his confessional overtones - as irritating they may be at times - are actually quite bearable and not that common either. His podcast actually is quite entertaining and informative.
In Germany and the other German speaking parts of Europe you'd have a hard time with Drupal too - but for entirely different reasons. Here Typo3 pratically owns the portal, intranet and CMS market. That's right. The FOSS Project Typo3 is the market leader for portal software in Germany and neighbours. The secondary market for soltions based on and built around Typo3 is way beyond critical mass and has been growing since around 2001. You have 3rd party vendors, "Typo3 Agencies" (an actual generic term - no joke!), a f*cking regular quarterly Typo3 magazine and hosters specialised on Typo3 with all the bells and wistles. Amazon.de scores around fourty (40!) hits for German books and training DVDs on Typo3 and Typo3 specific subjects. And if you're looking for a job as a web professional, it's more or less a safe bet to get into a little Typo3 & TypoScript - you'll get a gig in no time. Or at least a project or two to make ends meet. Even during this downtime there are serious job-offerings for this sort of thing.
Now if only T3 wouldn't be such a bizar behemoth operating system of a PHP CMS, I'd be really happy. But since it's open source, I guess there's not that much to moan about.
I'm a Joomla guy btw. I've seen the fucked up appmodel reverse enginered of a T3-DB of Typo3 4.0 and thus will not look at T3 again until the entire redo is finished in Version 5.0.:-)
Bottom line: MS and other proprietary vendors are a minority in this field in Germany and still businesses are thriving around the prime software solution which is FOSS. I don't see why this shouldn't happen other places aswell. It's not like German businesses are particularly known for their recklessnes or their lack of sense of quality.
Making web apps is the easiest programming you could do.
You're totally wrong. Webapps is easyer than other solutions because it enables available free software (Apache/PHP/JS/Firefox/MySQL, etc.) to leverage closed-source clients, aka the Microsuck Windoze monopoly. It's an endless stack of hacks on top of each other (RIAs being the pinnacle of them) to enable ease of deployment over am IT landscape that has been bastardized mostly because of big money interests in the IT industry. An open free PC with a unified open free OS would be much easyer to develop for. We wouldn't need WebApps the way we do today.
The monotheistic confessions and - among other things - their concept of heaven and hell is built on fear. It is actually those with the least spiritual lifestyle and with the most guilt weighing in on their concience that do the most praying, preaching, missioning, curch services and such. Monotheistic convessions thrive on deranged societies in dire need of moralin and the easiest way it is provided is via a monotheistic convession that tells you no matter how hypocritic your life is, you'll allways get by if you just do what the priest/mullah/holy book or your temples rules say.
It is these religions that also build the highest and most elaborate temples and do/have done the most killing of non/un-believers today and in the past. It is therefore entirely normal that people who have the least connection to spiritual concepts are those who pray the most, go to services and mass the most and, naturally, get the creeps much more intense than somebody who doesn't feel the urge to turn to a institutionalised join-our-club-otherwise-burn-in-hell spiritual insurance policy sham in the first place.
The fear and doubtfull turn to these monotheistic confessions as a remedy for their soulfelt miseries - that they turn to doctors as much as possible when dying fits the picture just fine.
My Sharp PC 1403H has 200+ hrs uptime on two buttoncells under full load. It's predecessor (my very first computer, bought back in 1986) has the same specs but only 4KB RAM instead of 32. I have yet to find a portable computer that can beat it's uptime off the grid. The Palm m105 with folding keyboard came the closest, but still was 160+ hrs short with it's mere 40 hrs battery time under load.
Does this baby have that potential? That would actually make it interesting, even today.
So Sennheiser (which I personally consider notably shitty in comparsion, especially their 'low-end' models) will be at the top again, with some bizar scheme that costs 1500$ and brings whatever minor improvement then can muster. They'll probably be more comfortable the first 4 weeks or something like that. Sony's current model of the CD line will - as usual - still come in second or third in all meaningfull audiophile 'Top Ten' Lists of headphones. And they cost less than 100 last I checked. Sony CD490 - to date unmatched as far as I'm concerned. If only I could get some repair kit for the cushions...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I have with the current state of homebrew console developement and open source game developement is, that the game developement pipeline, i.e. the pipeline for developing (and deploying) anything beyond a non-trivial CLI or GUI app is a huge fuss, even compared to the old days of the Commodore and Atari plattorms. The bizar mess even the most humble modders and hobby gamedevs have to go through to develop across FOSS platforms (BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, whatever) is a slap in the face to anybody who wants to bring game innovations to FOSS. And the modders *are* the forefront of game innovation - that's a fact.
Open Source / Homebrew needs a proper working one-stop zero-fuss developement pipeline for non-trivial grapical and multimedia apps. And I am *not* talking about the latest and greatest in 3D GFX and effects. I'm talking about a simple, OpenGL & Sound supporting IDE + compiler + generator + x-plattform OpenGL and sound support. Not even video would be required.
Give me a MonoDevelop or a KDevelop or Erics python IDE from which I can compile and deploy for an standardised x-plattform multimedia enviroment (video is not even needed) and I'll be on my way to develop the first game for all these devices including the regular Linux desktop. The problem is that it isn't even possible to get consistent coherent information on how to develop for these things. The only half-way resonable tool I can find for these is some shoddy closed-source windows-only GL Basic IDE that looks like it came from 1989.
What the f*ck do I have to worry about compiling my toolkit when l'll be busy for well over a year building the libs and components for my game. Constantly compiling against moving targets in Linux's equivalent of DLL hell? No sir. Get your shit together and build a multimedia enviroment and pipeline that stays consistent for a few years - than we can talk business.
As long as the absolute minimum in this regard isn't delivered the modders will stay with Windows, their free (beer) Steam Engine and Softimage licences. ... And I will continue to develop Games in Flash. I can hardly believe I'm writing this, but x-plattform multimedia deployment - even to FOSS - isn't half the hassle with those Adobe crooks than it is with FOSS tools, kits and pipelines. That's the bitter truth.
"Throwed up all over monitor."
Thanks.
Is the money enough to continue making your own rules? Take it. You're little company could be the next Google or the next Boo.com. You'll never know. But you do know how much money they are offering right now. If it's enough (some mean two-digit million sum of euros or so) to basically retire for the rest of your life and you have a family and/or other non-related interests that wouldn't be affected by a non-compete: Take the money. You owe it to the people who depend on you. Statistics say that you'll more likely to fail on your own than succeed. If you're doing software and/or services, do some good and do a Mark Shuttleworth. Take money, do FOSS for the rest of your life. That's somewhere along the line of what I would do anyway.
If you're doing hardware: Take the money even more so! Hardware is way more difficult, and much easyer to botch.
I know the problem: You've finally gained critical mass and just have become independant on your own terms for the first time in your life and along comes a huge corp with deep pockets and tempts you. That's a big stab at ones pride - I can feel the conflict you have. Never the less: Game the situation at the best of your abilities. Take the huge wad of cash they're offering, negotiate a bigger one if possible and avoid all NDAs and non-competes that enable them to come after you in 3 months and take away what they paid you for it.
Once you have the money use it to do good and fun stuff and live your private life like you would if you hadn't gotten the deal - then you'll live happyly ever after.
My 2 Eurocents.
This is in the news here since two days ago and basically backfired big time allready, with even the police union turning to the CDU and saying 'totally hairbrained stupid idea'. Particularly hilarious is the reaction of one of those supporting the programm in an spiegel-online interview from yesterday (it's in the last fourth of the video - in German though - but you can catch the tone nonetheless). The guy loses his cool the instant he is asked about it, having been bugged the entire day about it. Very funny indeed and the comentary of the video doesn't stint on snide and whitty remarks on this political botch either.
What's the big fat hairy deal? Correct me if I'm wrong, but with SSDs access times out of the ms and in the ns range SATA is the bottleneck for those aswell. As it has been with throughput ever since we've had upwards of 5K RPM disks and upwards of 8MB cache on the controllers. Which was around 2002 IIRC.
In fact, it's actually the strangest thing to connect a SSD via SATA in the first place. A waste of power, space, time and complexity. Throughput wise anyway. An entirely different diskbus is long overdue. USB 3 could maybe be a candidate, no? One piece of outdated legacy less - allways a good thing imho. I personally thought of skipping SATA entirely and using internal USB 2 instead, back in the day when SATA was the hottest new thing.
... build, run and manage business applications". ...
I'm sorry I didn't read any further. And I was to fast in closing the tabs to copy/paste the URLs. Go look yourself if you're really interested.
That's your job. Bash CLI, the CLI toolkit, CLI Emacs, key-based ssh and a well-maintained, well-documented pack of own scripts in your favourite interpreted PL are just what it takes to do this sort of thing. No fancy bling-bling required or wanted. It would make your worse, not easyer in the long run.
Sorry, I'm basically hitting into the same wedge about 50 other people have hit here allready, but I can't help it:
The opt-out option is there for spammers to clean up their lists from dead addresses - not to leave you alone. Don't opt out from spam, as you simply can't - otherwise it wouldn't be half the spam it ususally is and spammers would actually be nice people and not the assholes they are in reality.
As with everything else on the Interweb (ads, popups, email-proposals from nigeria, system warnings in your browser looking kinda sorta fake, etc.) basic brain usage is also required for dealing with spam. Don't skip that, ever. And another advice: Suck up the flak you're getting right now, take it with humor and file it under 'lessons learned' ... you idiot. :-)
The correct running technique - which can vary from runner to runner - is much more important than the type of shoes. Some running shoe brands claim that their shoes encourage and help do the right technique, but it really boils down to doing it by yourself.
The only point I see in running shoes is an certain amount of cushoning, since we tend to run on concrete quite a lot, allthough our type of pavements have only been around in recent history.
It's safe to say that most of the running shoes available are mostly snakeoil.
We have similar situations all over the world and in Germany too. Legislatory and Courts not understanding the concepts in Network technology and that they require a whole new different approach and perspective for reasonable legislation and judgement. At the same time IT is growing so fast and becoming a central part of our lives that the people affected are a significant political force. I think this is sort of a generation problem too. What I find interesting is that more and more the effect of IT on our lives - and thus on politics aswell - is growing stronger and stronger. I hope this party gains traction in sweden and isn't just a fad.
Har Har!
I program in PDP-11 assembly, which is then translated into C, compiled into Java bytecode, and executed on a JVM. I call it Assemblacava, and it's the wave of the future.
Dude, that is *so* 2008! I programm in Sharp 1403H Opcode which is piped into an optimized generator for x86 opcode which is written in eLisp and even runs on my old slightly rigged m105 Palm without a hitch - very cool!. Sharp 1403H Opcode where the future and money is. Get with the proramm!
Oh, and btw., the portables that run it natively have upwards of 300 hours of battery life and are way smaller than these bulky netbooks from last year. Now who's gonna beat that? Hah!
Read this sort of thing along the lines of: "Since you're now low on dough and high on time, we're giving you our stuff for free so you dare not move to open source in general and Blender in specific to refocus your skills there, because that little Project is closing in on us in leaps and bounds and frankly is scaring the living piss out of us."
I sold my Lightwave 8.5 Licence (+ books 'n stuff) and forfeighted the right for cheap upgrades of this very neat Hollywood Grade 3D Kit because Blender has gotten so good, there are only very few features missing that LW has, and quite a few that LW (or any other closed source kit) doesn't have. Oh, and btw., Blender 2.5 is coming closer with a complete architectural redo that will boost its developement even further. The 3D market is tough as it is and Blender is a scaring thing to watch for SideFX, AutoDesk, NewTek and the likes, you can believe that. The 3D tool market allways was tough, but these days its even more so - wouldn't wanna swap with any of those companies still asking upwards of 3000 Euros for their software.
Get a cheap, small, fanless, onboard everything system with external UPS and underclock it. Install DOS direktly or try running the software of DosBox on a slim Linux variant in order to cover for the larger RAM space today Comps have. MiniITX sounds like a safe bet. I have an underclocked AMD box (1 GHz instead of 1.6 GHz) in my line of computers and it runs very stable and is way faster than anything from 15 years ago.
Crappy Website built with a crappy 50$ template in a very crappy manner. Tacky template music. Boilerplate pictures of some office building somewhere in the about section. Crappy pictures of crappy boxes with what looks like your standard Mini-ITX package in them and way overpriced purchase options to buy them. Bets are ten to one that this is a scam and you won't even see any hardware at all if you fall for it. /. - let alone the buzz in the comments right now - is beyond me.
Nothing to see here, move along. How this even gets any attention at all on
Gaming, up to this point, has pretty much been a safe haven from the evolving inet, web and media industry turmoil. That is changing right now, as we speak.
I've been doing regular webdev for a living the last 9 years and since 8 months ago I have a gig at a large global player browsergame company with a job I'd never dreamt of getting or even dreamt of being able to do profitably.
The groth rate our company is experiencing now is totally bizar (something like upwards of 350%!) and this phenomenon is part of the equation. I suspect that a lot of the late web users - those who came to private computing soley through and because of the web (like my spouse) just a few years ago and can't help but constantly confuse Google with the internet - are responible for large parts of this trend. They couldn't install a piece of software (or a game for that matter) if their life depended on it, but they can find a website again (if the google results haven't changed ... *sigh*) and log in and continue to play a browsergame. This is where the critical mass is at today and I'm at it's epicenter right now, having howned my PHP, Flash & AS3 skills in the last few years. ... 'Guess for once I got lucky.
Add in FOSS gaming closing in on critical mass and the 3D devpipeline getting cheaper by the day (or being comletely free [beer]) and most inovation coming from modders rather than companies anyway nowadays and you understand that gaming as we know it is a thing of the past. Any company not recognizing that will go the way of the dodo. That's a fact.
My 2 Eurocents.
... you can put the same on your White Wind. Go to a copyshop that also has those cut-plotters and get a set of decal lettering cut out in black saying "I'm his new Netbook and help him pick up chicks." That should fix both the 'manly' and 'whitty reply' part in one stroke. And it's quite funny aswell.
After all, this is the country - 'The land of the free' *chuckle* - that had an 11-year-old boy chained and dragged out of his home for putting his little girl on the pott. The case cause an outrage in the western world, and rightfully so.
I started for an academic run two years ago, at the age of 37, as yet another cornerstone of a second career in IT. If it hadn't been for me needing to rake in money with freelance projects for my daughter and spouse at the side I wouldn't have quit after a semester like I did. Allthough I do have 22 years of programming experience and 4.5 years of real freelance experience and, despite studying arts, did not piss away my 20ties but did lot's of projects at the side, so I can handle the lack of a defree fairly well when facong employers or customers.
My take on your situation: If you've got no one depending on you and can afford the tight budget and/or dept for the next few years go for a degree. The renewed learning experience is fun and you'll be superiour to any group dynamics your early twen commrades still fall for - which is a huge plus. Nothing is stopping you from doing related projects on the side once you've gotten through the first two tough 'weed-em-out' semesters and a degree never can hurt. You can allways drop out if the opportunity asks for it and you can calculate the risk of doing so.
My two Eurocents.
Praise be to God! Seriously, the religious overtones of this webapp (and the author) makes me shudder.
Kasper Scarhoj gave up the lead for Typo3 around 2 years ago. He's still a respected member of the community - and for good reasons too - but he does not lead Typo3 anymore. And his confessional overtones - as irritating they may be at times - are actually quite bearable and not that common either. His podcast actually is quite entertaining and informative.
In Germany and the other German speaking parts of Europe you'd have a hard time with Drupal too - but for entirely different reasons. Here Typo3 pratically owns the portal, intranet and CMS market. That's right. The FOSS Project Typo3 is the market leader for portal software in Germany and neighbours. The secondary market for soltions based on and built around Typo3 is way beyond critical mass and has been growing since around 2001. You have 3rd party vendors, "Typo3 Agencies" (an actual generic term - no joke!), a f*cking regular quarterly Typo3 magazine and hosters specialised on Typo3 with all the bells and wistles. Amazon.de scores around fourty (40!) hits for German books and training DVDs on Typo3 and Typo3 specific subjects. And if you're looking for a job as a web professional, it's more or less a safe bet to get into a little Typo3 & TypoScript - you'll get a gig in no time. Or at least a project or two to make ends meet. Even during this downtime there are serious job-offerings for this sort of thing.
Now if only T3 wouldn't be such a bizar behemoth operating system of a PHP CMS, I'd be really happy. But since it's open source, I guess there's not that much to moan about.
I'm a Joomla guy btw. I've seen the fucked up appmodel reverse enginered of a T3-DB of Typo3 4.0 and thus will not look at T3 again until the entire redo is finished in Version 5.0. :-)
Bottom line: MS and other proprietary vendors are a minority in this field in Germany and still businesses are thriving around the prime software solution which is FOSS. I don't see why this shouldn't happen other places aswell. It's not like German businesses are particularly known for their recklessnes or their lack of sense of quality.
Making web apps is the easiest programming you could do.
You're totally wrong. Webapps is easyer than other solutions because it enables available free software (Apache/PHP/JS/Firefox/MySQL, etc.) to leverage closed-source clients, aka the Microsuck Windoze monopoly. It's an endless stack of hacks on top of each other (RIAs being the pinnacle of them) to enable ease of deployment over am IT landscape that has been bastardized mostly because of big money interests in the IT industry. An open free PC with a unified open free OS would be much easyer to develop for. We wouldn't need WebApps the way we do today.
The monotheistic confessions and - among other things - their concept of heaven and hell is built on fear. It is actually those with the least spiritual lifestyle and with the most guilt weighing in on their concience that do the most praying, preaching, missioning, curch services and such. Monotheistic convessions thrive on deranged societies in dire need of moralin and the easiest way it is provided is via a monotheistic convession that tells you no matter how hypocritic your life is, you'll allways get by if you just do what the priest/mullah/holy book or your temples rules say.
It is these religions that also build the highest and most elaborate temples and do/have done the most killing of non/un-believers today and in the past. It is therefore entirely normal that people who have the least connection to spiritual concepts are those who pray the most, go to services and mass the most and, naturally, get the creeps much more intense than somebody who doesn't feel the urge to turn to a institutionalised join-our-club-otherwise-burn-in-hell spiritual insurance policy sham in the first place.
The fear and doubtfull turn to these monotheistic confessions as a remedy for their soulfelt miseries - that they turn to doctors as much as possible when dying fits the picture just fine.
My Sharp PC 1403H has 200+ hrs uptime on two buttoncells under full load. It's predecessor (my very first computer, bought back in 1986) has the same specs but only 4KB RAM instead of 32. I have yet to find a portable computer that can beat it's uptime off the grid. The Palm m105 with folding keyboard came the closest, but still was 160+ hrs short with it's mere 40 hrs battery time under load.
Does this baby have that potential? That would actually make it interesting, even today.
So Sennheiser (which I personally consider notably shitty in comparsion, especially their 'low-end' models) will be at the top again, with some bizar scheme that costs 1500$ and brings whatever minor improvement then can muster. They'll probably be more comfortable the first 4 weeks or something like that. Sony's current model of the CD line will - as usual - still come in second or third in all meaningfull audiophile 'Top Ten' Lists of headphones. And they cost less than 100 last I checked. ...
Sony CD490 - to date unmatched as far as I'm concerned. If only I could get some repair kit for the cushions