If I'm offered stock options especially in lieu of a bigger paycheque I run. Stock options in my book are a pure headache and nothing else. They are only worth anything if your corp is publicly traded which means that the company is run by stockholders who only care about share value. Which means that they usually suck badly as places to work.
I'd rather work for a privately owned company who are doing well and are respected enough in their field to be a good name on a resume, rather than a stain like some of the defunct dotcoms. An experience in a cool company is worth more than any amount of stock. Take QSSL for example, now that would be a very nice place to have on a resume and they're still privately owned
[Yeah, right like QSSL would actually hire you... Ed.]
This topic interests me quite a lot. I however, would prefer to venture into making games for handheld stuff and GameBoyColor/GameBoyAdvance. Is it as difficult to enter that market? What is the cost of the SDK (esp. for the GameBoyAdvance)?
Anybody in the know? Do you have to talk to Nintendo directly or speak with publishers first?
I wish we had a Open Source based handheld gaming platform. It would likely have more of a chance for success than Indrema since GameBoy style games can still be developed by individual developers in their spare time. I'm sure an Open Source gaming handheld would prove popular among a crowd like this.
I thought it would be natural to use spread spectrum for this kind of device. Data rates are really low so the chip code could be extremely long. That would be quite secure for most purposes... No?
in C++ Builder?! Yay! I'll buy it for sure. Having been tortured with MFC for a number of years I can't wait to ditch it altogether. In fact I've been coding windows only apps in QT for a while now because it's so good.
Re:Possibly for somethings, not all though.
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 2
But where are things going? I think more and more interfaces are built around documents, foremost HTML, XML, and DOM. That's true even for UI "screens" that are never transported through HTTP. It's both a look and an approach to programming. Foremost, it means that UIs aren't designed anymore by programmatically or visually placing widgets in particular locations. Instead, UIs are authored.
Just what we need! Even more sluggishness in the UI department just like exemplified by the slowest UI on the planet: Mozilla/XUL. Whatever happened to the concept of runtime efficiency in software development?
I've used fltk for three and a half years. It's a widget toolkit for a product I used to be involved in developing. FLTK is nice and simple but its architecture is flawed in a couple of ways. Foremostly its keyboard event handling system makes decent keyboard support problematic (FLTK doesn't have a notion of keyboard focus). Also they use way too many static variables to ever have a chance of making the code thread safe. FLTK is excellent for smaller apps but I wouldn't pick it up again for development of anything substantial. Having said that it's still an impressive effort and Bill Siptzak is a bloody genius.
No it's not subjective. It's an easily quantified measurement. Let's battle it out on a feature count (let's skip the bug count(s) for now even though my bet is that looking into it would put QT even further ahead). Let's treat each platform supported as a single feature. Each complex widget is a feature. Each non-trivial toolkit element (eg. alpha channel, AA fonts) is a feature. Wanna have a go at it?
Re:What QT has that gtk doesn't
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 2
I elected a toolkit for my project roughly a year ago and I gave thought to gtk--. At the time it was sorely incomplete (half of the widgets weren't wrapped) and was buggy. There was at least several memory leaks that purify traced to gtk--. For all the gtk promotion and qt bashing I still have to encounter a single post that disproves my assertion that QT is the most advanced and complete cross platform library in existence.
Re:What QT has that gtk doesn't
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 2
Language bindings? I don't care to be honest. QT binds to the one language I like and that's good enough for me. Can't do C++? Fine don't use it. Just stop posting irrelevant stuff in a QT thread.
I enjoy the fact that QT doesn't compromise the beauty of the API by trying to stretch across too many languages. Different programming languages require different design approaches. There is no good software design that is completely language neutral. GTK tries to be OO very hard but it's implemented in a procedural language. Hence it's ugly. GTK promissed to be cross-language and look at the sorry state of its C++ bindings. A cross platform toolkit that is also cross language can't be done without horrendous sacrifices to the readibility of the API. I'd rather have the pragmatic compromise that QT offers.
Re:QT is the best gui toolkit out there
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 2
I have a problem with wxWindows approach to provision of cross platform portability. wxWindows wraps native widgets which sounds pretty exciting (you get the real stuff) but it has many drawbacks. The first problem with such toolkits is that you're limited to the lowest common denominator of widgets. If you're writing a cross platform motif/win32 app and want to use a windows widget that doesn't exist in motif you're out of luck with wxWin as a wrapper. This can obviously be resolved by having a hybrid toolkit that uses native widgets when it can and resorts to drawing widgets when it has to. I've never seen the hybrid approach done right though.
The other problem with wrapping is that it makes deriving new widgets based on those in your toolkit tricky and buggy. because your base widget has several implementations it's often problematic to derive a new one that is free of bugs and behaves the same way on all platforms of interest. This is the main concern I have with wrapper toolkits.
What QT has that gtk doesn't
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 2
Font antialiasing, real table (spreadsheet) widget, internationalization, clean API, proper keyboard focus handling. If you don't think the above list is of dubious merit you are a slashdot moron too.
I didn't say that GTK was going away. It's all the GTK gnomes (such as yourself) that always have to post some moronic GTK plug in every QT thread that inspired the initial post.
QT is the best gui toolkit out there
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 5
And Slashdot is a lame forum. Actually it's slashdot's readership that's lame (99% of it anyway).
Qt is unparalleled if you're looking for developing cross platform applications. The class hierarchy is sensibly laid out, the widget are feature complete out of the box and simple to extend if you have to, it sports full internationalization including rtl based languages under all platforms, it is almost as fast as native toolkits, allows for a very good emulation of look and feel of various platforms, uses the signal slot mechanism, offers full proper keyboard focus handling, offers a choice of gui builders, offers clean unambigious API. QT is so astonishingly good it makes all other cross platform toolkits look bleak. I challenge all the morons here to name ONE toolkit that has all the features of QT. The rule is you're only allowed to mention existing features. Not 'planned features' or 'anticipated features' cuz there's a lot of them in GTK. But it ain't there yet.
Those who had to write anything bigger than a single dialog based utility come to appreciate its power. But there are not a lot of them hanging out on slashdot.
Sorry to nitpick but CTP is not Sid's creation. It was the bastardisation that Activision created when they managed to magically acquire the rights to the title as a result of a dubious lawsuit. CivIII will be the real sequel.
Then spread the FUD about the upcoming recession. Prices will plummet and we'll get all the cheap gear we could possibly handle.
I'm not sure if adjusting your pricing to demand levels makes any sense when the economy is perceived as slowing down or stagnant... Or am I oversimplifying?
The US economy grew by more than 2% pa (GDP growth) over the last quarter. Only moronic stupid dotcoms with no business plan can call that a recession. The economy is growing from strength to strength! Just goes to show how much all those stupid dotcoms really contributed to the economic growth if such a massive shakeout has had so little impact on the country's GDP growth.
Actually it seems that IT jobs made their way to the shortage occupations list in the UK. This changes the situation quite dramatically as the whole process of proving there are no suitable EU candidates is not necessary. I stand corrected. My info on these issues is getting a bit dated now (>3 years).
Hmm.. Didn't know they put IT skills on the shortage list. That definitely wasn't the case when I was there. This does make things a lot easier for us nerds. I stand corrected.
Anyways I still recommend Canada. I never understood really why I was paying $2 per litre of petrol, but I digress...
You're not correct. I've been through the process and it is not nearly as easy as you project. With solid experience and an enthusiastic company I still got my work permit refused first time round. The process is long, uncertain and daunting. It was easier for a couple of years 1998, 1999 but according to many people I keep in touch with OLS is hardening up again. You could have been one of the very few lucky ones whose applications seem to have been stamped approved right away due to a clerical error but that's an exception rather than a rule. See my post below about just how tough it can get for a UK employer to hire an overseas worker.
I used to work for a UK company as an overseas worker. Getting your papers sorted is v. tough. The British Overseas Labour Service is very backwards and they do take their time. The whole system is simply designed to discourage from endavours such as yours and mine. Once you're done with OLS then you have to battle the Home Office. You see getting a work permit doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna get the visa! So you apply to Home Office and you wait some more. If you're lucky you'll get through and will be permitted to work there for one to three years. During that time you can't change employment or even positions within the same company. If you're laid off you have to go through the entire process once again with a different company. All that paperwork you've been fighting for so fiercely is declared void the moment you or your employer decide to end the employment agreement. It doesn't matter if you apply to a British or an American company. They know all too well just how hard getting a work permit can get. I was lucky enough that my employer wanted me so badly that they pursued the matter for eons before the OLS finally gave in and granted us the work permit.
The law in the EU essantially states that an overseas employee may only be granted a work permit if and only if there is no suitable candidate within the entire EU(!) being able and willing to fill the position in question. Proving this means that the employer must publish the job advert in a EU-wide newspaper/magazine, interview all candidates yourself including and then state the reason for selecting yourself over and above every other candidate. Also it's not enough to say that you're the best of the bunch. Your prospective employer must explain why nobody else was suitable for the job. What it means is that usually only highly specialised positions stand a chance of being filled by foreigners. Forget it if you're a sysadmin or a run of the mill codemonkey.
If you don't feel like going through this kind of trauma and humiliation go to another country which actually has a real immigration policy. You can apply even if you don't have a job lined up beforehand. And yes it's quite a bit different from the US of A.
CPU: Intel Celeron 366 or higher, 32-64MB SDRAM, Integrated video chip, internal hard drive, 3d feature list: perspective corrected texture mapping, bilinear and anisotropic mip-mapping, gourad shading, alpha-blending, fogging, z-buffer, support for glx 1.3 and Mesa, DRI.
The stuff about "frozen foods" isn't a miss! I lived in Poland where traditional cooking is still widely practiced and believe me, compared to Poles American people cannot cook anymore. Also when I go to the mall I see instant microwaveable becon on sale. I think he got that one right on. Processed, microwavable foods are on the rise while traditional cooking is dying out. Even though it's not how we like things to turn out it's becoming reality. Soon those precooked meals will be just as good as home made ones (they're not there yet though). Then home cooking as a day to day practice will disappear altogether.
I remember when Jeremy Clarkson on BBC showed the "vision of the future" ad from 1950 made by General Motors. The ad was portraying a typical mid-class british car of 2000. The thing was a hover vehicle with a slick body shape, voice controlled guages and an "auto-pilot" that only required to be told a destination. Then that marvel of engineering would zip through the streets at 250 mph doing some 400 miles to an ultracheap gallon of natural gas and dissipating no real fumes to speak of....
Then Jeremy showed us the latest and greatest vauxhall corsa. I burst out laughing.
you are going to live in a capitalist society (which most of us don't really have a choice)
I'm sure fixing you with immigration papers for Cuba or better yet North Korea shouldn't be too challenging. Yup. You have a choice. All it takes is just one trip to your nearest North Korean embassy.
I just realised the preversity of this idea. Imagine if all OSS developers headed to N. Korea and started writing software from within there (esp. proprietary software) the country would quickly become richer by several orders of magnitude. Funny idea.
Re:Why KDE won't be on the standard X desktop.
on
Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 2
There is one main reason that MS-Windows won't become the "standard user desktop" (meaning running on everyone's computer).
Once again it's licencing. You can't develop proprietary software with MS-Windwos without paying Microsoft for a licence. With the central bits of both OS/2 and Rexx available under the IBM licence rather than the Microsoft licence it is much more appealing to the existing big players in the PC world who will want to continue to produce proprietary products, along with their open contributions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather work for a privately owned company who are doing well and are respected enough in their field to be a good name on a resume, rather than a stain like some of the defunct dotcoms. An experience in a cool company is worth more than any amount of stock. Take QSSL for example, now that would be a very nice place to have on a resume and they're still privately owned [Yeah, right like QSSL would actually hire you... Ed.]
I wish we had a Open Source based handheld gaming platform. It would likely have more of a chance for success than Indrema since GameBoy style games can still be developed by individual developers in their spare time. I'm sure an Open Source gaming handheld would prove popular among a crowd like this.
I thought it would be natural to use spread spectrum for this kind of device. Data rates are really low so the chip code could be extremely long. That would be quite secure for most purposes... No?
in C++ Builder?! Yay! I'll buy it for sure. Having been tortured with MFC for a number of years I can't wait to ditch it altogether. In fact I've been coding windows only apps in QT for a while now because it's so good.
Just what we need! Even more sluggishness in the UI department just like exemplified by the slowest UI on the planet: Mozilla/XUL. Whatever happened to the concept of runtime efficiency in software development?
I've used fltk for three and a half years. It's a widget toolkit for a product I used to be involved in developing. FLTK is nice and simple but its architecture is flawed in a couple of ways. Foremostly its keyboard event handling system makes decent keyboard support problematic (FLTK doesn't have a notion of keyboard focus). Also they use way too many static variables to ever have a chance of making the code thread safe. FLTK is excellent for smaller apps but I wouldn't pick it up again for development of anything substantial. Having said that it's still an impressive effort and Bill Siptzak is a bloody genius.
No it's not subjective. It's an easily quantified measurement. Let's battle it out on a feature count (let's skip the bug count(s) for now even though my bet is that looking into it would put QT even further ahead). Let's treat each platform supported as a single feature. Each complex widget is a feature. Each non-trivial toolkit element (eg. alpha channel, AA fonts) is a feature. Wanna have a go at it?
I elected a toolkit for my project roughly a year ago and I gave thought to gtk--. At the time it was sorely incomplete (half of the widgets weren't wrapped) and was buggy. There was at least several memory leaks that purify traced to gtk--. For all the gtk promotion and qt bashing I still have to encounter a single post that disproves my assertion that QT is the most advanced and complete cross platform library in existence.
I enjoy the fact that QT doesn't compromise the beauty of the API by trying to stretch across too many languages. Different programming languages require different design approaches. There is no good software design that is completely language neutral. GTK tries to be OO very hard but it's implemented in a procedural language. Hence it's ugly. GTK promissed to be cross-language and look at the sorry state of its C++ bindings. A cross platform toolkit that is also cross language can't be done without horrendous sacrifices to the readibility of the API. I'd rather have the pragmatic compromise that QT offers.
The other problem with wrapping is that it makes deriving new widgets based on those in your toolkit tricky and buggy. because your base widget has several implementations it's often problematic to derive a new one that is free of bugs and behaves the same way on all platforms of interest. This is the main concern I have with wrapper toolkits.
I didn't say that GTK was going away. It's all the GTK gnomes (such as yourself) that always have to post some moronic GTK plug in every QT thread that inspired the initial post.
Qt is unparalleled if you're looking for developing cross platform applications. The class hierarchy is sensibly laid out, the widget are feature complete out of the box and simple to extend if you have to, it sports full internationalization including rtl based languages under all platforms, it is almost as fast as native toolkits, allows for a very good emulation of look and feel of various platforms, uses the signal slot mechanism, offers full proper keyboard focus handling, offers a choice of gui builders, offers clean unambigious API. QT is so astonishingly good it makes all other cross platform toolkits look bleak. I challenge all the morons here to name ONE toolkit that has all the features of QT. The rule is you're only allowed to mention existing features. Not 'planned features' or 'anticipated features' cuz there's a lot of them in GTK. But it ain't there yet.
Those who had to write anything bigger than a single dialog based utility come to appreciate its power. But there are not a lot of them hanging out on slashdot.
Sorry to nitpick but CTP is not Sid's creation. It was the bastardisation that Activision created when they managed to magically acquire the rights to the title as a result of a dubious lawsuit. CivIII will be the real sequel.
I'm not sure if adjusting your pricing to demand levels makes any sense when the economy is perceived as slowing down or stagnant... Or am I oversimplifying?
The US economy grew by more than 2% pa (GDP growth) over the last quarter. Only moronic stupid dotcoms with no business plan can call that a recession. The economy is growing from strength to strength! Just goes to show how much all those stupid dotcoms really contributed to the economic growth if such a massive shakeout has had so little impact on the country's GDP growth.
Just like I said. I stand corrected on this matter. Apologies.
Actually it seems that IT jobs made their way to the shortage occupations list in the UK. This changes the situation quite dramatically as the whole process of proving there are no suitable EU candidates is not necessary. I stand corrected. My info on these issues is getting a bit dated now (>3 years).
Anyways I still recommend Canada. I never understood really why I was paying $2 per litre of petrol, but I digress...
You're not correct. I've been through the process and it is not nearly as easy as you project. With solid experience and an enthusiastic company I still got my work permit refused first time round. The process is long, uncertain and daunting. It was easier for a couple of years 1998, 1999 but according to many people I keep in touch with OLS is hardening up again. You could have been one of the very few lucky ones whose applications seem to have been stamped approved right away due to a clerical error but that's an exception rather than a rule. See my post below about just how tough it can get for a UK employer to hire an overseas worker.
If you don't feel like going through this kind of trauma and humiliation go to another country which actually has a real immigration policy. You can apply even if you don't have a job lined up beforehand. And yes it's quite a bit different from the US of A.
Hope this helps.
Can an enlighten 3D guru comment on these?
btw. specs here (pdf format).
The stuff about "frozen foods" isn't a miss! I lived in Poland where traditional cooking is still widely practiced and believe me, compared to Poles American people cannot cook anymore. Also when I go to the mall I see instant microwaveable becon on sale. I think he got that one right on. Processed, microwavable foods are on the rise while traditional cooking is dying out. Even though it's not how we like things to turn out it's becoming reality. Soon those precooked meals will be just as good as home made ones (they're not there yet though). Then home cooking as a day to day practice will disappear altogether.
Then Jeremy showed us the latest and greatest vauxhall corsa. I burst out laughing.
I'm sure fixing you with immigration papers for Cuba or better yet North Korea shouldn't be too challenging. Yup. You have a choice. All it takes is just one trip to your nearest North Korean embassy.
I just realised the preversity of this idea. Imagine if all OSS developers headed to N. Korea and started writing software from within there (esp. proprietary software) the country would quickly become richer by several orders of magnitude. Funny idea.
Once again it's licencing. You can't develop proprietary software with MS-Windwos without paying Microsoft for a licence. With the central bits of both OS/2 and Rexx available under the IBM licence rather than the Microsoft licence it is much more appealing to the existing big players in the PC world who will want to continue to produce proprietary products, along with their open contributions.