Don't emphasize the bad luck aspect. What else have you been doing other than job hunting? Chances are you have been productive, at least some of the time. Maybe you've had time to do some study or research about something that interested you. Focus on any and all positive life experience you've chalked up. Don't take a defensive attitude about it. I think the significance of gaps on a resume are way overplayed.
The differences between the three, in my opinion are largely determined by the level of responsibility associated with each and your personal goals. Creating a corp or sole proprietorship (Independent Contractor) is something you should do if you intend to run a functional company (having some actual purpose, possibly hiring people, to create a working "machine" that performs a service or sells a product in exchange for money; money that you are personally responsible for tax-wise). To go with a W-2 option is to join an already established "machine" that will deduct money from your base salary on behalf of Uncle Sam. Not a bad option if the salary is good and the machine looks well-oiled to you.
As far as actual costs, I think your estimate on corp-to-corp ($100) is ambitiously low. Expect to invest about 500-600 if you have an accountant or lawyer do all the filings and advise you. (If you want to do ALL of the footwork and paperwork yourself, then it would probably actually cost around 100 bucks.) I personally found it easier to deal with an accountant, because learning about all that filing stuff would make my head explode. The accountant is one of your most valuable resources in a corporation.
When you factor in insurance and everything, figure ~$1000/yr to keep the corp ticking.
The sole proprietorship option is good if you want to get going in a pinch. The thing to remember if you go this route is to SAVE MONEY FOR TAXES!! When you have cold hard untaxed dollars coming in, it's very hard to resist the urge to pimp out. Tax deposits should be made early/made often.
So, I don't think there is Best Choice on an absolute scale. It depends on which option best fits in with your future plans. And I hope some of the ramblings here help put things into perspective.
It would have been more apropos to use a JSP, not a servlet in this comparison. It it typically considered bad practive to embed HTML code in a Java Servlet. Servlet are used for business logic and communicating with backend systems. When it's time to render the presentation, use a JSP:
<%
String title = "My First Script";
String greeting = "Welcome to my first script.";
%>
<html>
<head>
<title><%= title %></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><%= title %></h1>
<p><%= greeting %></p>
</body>
</html>
There is also a game called xscorch. Website at http://chaos2.org/xscorch/ (currently appears to be down). While not 3D, this one has network play in development.
How about DocBook? It's cross-platform and it is structure based, not presentation based. From a docbook source, you can render to various presentation formats (html, ps, rtf).
The only problem I have been having with it is finding a nice authoring tool.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't emphasize the bad luck aspect. What else have you been doing other than job hunting? Chances are you have been productive, at least some of the time. Maybe you've had time to do some study or research about something that interested you. Focus on any and all positive life experience you've chalked up. Don't take a defensive attitude about it. I think the significance of gaps on a resume are way overplayed.
The differences between the three, in my opinion are largely determined by the level of responsibility associated with each and your personal goals. Creating a corp or sole proprietorship (Independent Contractor) is something you should do if you intend to run a functional company (having some actual purpose, possibly hiring people, to create a working "machine" that performs a service or sells a product in exchange for money; money that you are personally responsible for tax-wise). To go with a W-2 option is to join an already established "machine" that will deduct money from your base salary on behalf of Uncle Sam. Not a bad option if the salary is good and the machine looks well-oiled to you.
As far as actual costs, I think your estimate on corp-to-corp ($100) is ambitiously low. Expect to invest about 500-600 if you have an accountant or lawyer do all the filings and advise you. (If you want to do ALL of the footwork and paperwork yourself, then it would probably actually cost around 100 bucks.) I personally found it easier to deal with an accountant, because learning about all that filing stuff would make my head explode. The accountant is one of your most valuable resources in a corporation.
When you factor in insurance and everything, figure ~$1000/yr to keep the corp ticking.
The sole proprietorship option is good if you want to get going in a pinch. The thing to remember if you go this route is to SAVE MONEY FOR TAXES!! When you have cold hard untaxed dollars coming in, it's very hard to resist the urge to pimp out. Tax deposits should be made early/made often.
So, I don't think there is Best Choice on an absolute scale. It depends on which option best fits in with your future plans. And I hope some of the ramblings here help put things into perspective.
It would have been more apropos to use a JSP, not a servlet in this comparison. It it typically considered bad practive to embed HTML code in a Java Servlet. Servlet are used for business logic and communicating with backend systems. When it's time to render the presentation, use a JSP:
<%
String title = "My First Script";
String greeting = "Welcome to my first script.";
%>
<html>
<head>
<title><%= title %></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><%= title %></h1>
<p><%= greeting %></p>
</body>
</html>
There is also a game called xscorch. Website at http://chaos2.org/xscorch/ (currently appears to be down). While not 3D, this one has network play in development.
How about DocBook? It's cross-platform and it is structure based, not presentation based. From a docbook source, you can render to various presentation formats (html, ps, rtf). The only problem I have been having with it is finding a nice authoring tool.