The Env3D engine (http://env3d.org) is an open-source education focused 3d engine. It is made for learning Java at the first year university level, but has been successfully used in high schools as well. Since it is focused on education, it abstracts away many of the technical details of traditional 3d engines. It currently creates web applets and applications that run on PCs (windows, osx, and linux), but the plan is to have applications deploy on andriod also in the near future.
Full lessons and demo programs can be found on the env3d website.
There are some resources out there designed to attract the "gaming generation" into computer programming - it also happens to be a professional interest of mine (I teach primarily first year computer science).
Perhaps the most famous would be Alice (http://alice.org) - a drag and drop 3D programming environment. Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) is a 2D drag and drop environment Greenfoot (http://www.greenfoot.org) is a 2D Java programming environment Env3D (http://env3d.sourceforge.net) is a 3D Java programming environment (Disclaimer: I am the author of this tool) - It makes programming in 3D very straight forward, especially for beginners.
I have a 2 year old and a newborn at home. I also grew up with video games and love playing them as a hobby. Time is definitely a precious commodity: Do I spend 2 hours playing games by myself or spend it with my kids? Or better yet, getting some much needed sleep since the baby wakes up every 2 hours.
I think they need to make good games that can be played at 15 minutes intervals, or games that can be played with the rest of the family. I am very interested at the Wii at the moment as it has lots of potential.
I can't wait until I can play video games with my 2 year old:)
The FTA talks about the rise of ajax based books as if it were a diss to Java. Ajax actually hides the back-end implementation from the front end so it really doesn't matter what you use as long as it spits out XML. Java is just as good a language as any to implement the backend.
I'm not a Java fan boy or anything, but uninformed article based on hype really kills me.
About 6 years ago, I graduated with a MS in CS and I was really disappointed in the job situation. I wanted to get into a position where I can be challenged and use my skills to their maximum potential. Instead, most senior jobs in industry require lots of experience in specific technologies and most jobs in research require Ph.D.'s
I ended up taking a teaching position at a community college teaching first and second year CS. At the same time, I try to improve my own technology related skills by taking up some contracts.
After teaching for a while, I switched to work for a large software company where they value academic skills. The company is really nice but since I wasn't at the research end of things, the projects were uninteresting at best.
I am currently back at my teaching position and take on only interesting projects in my spare time. I found this to be most satisifying as I get to do different things all the time (dealing with students, developing courses, experiment with technology, etc.)
Especially for the health care industry. What's stopping the nurses from giving poor quality service? In fact, in all areas in life, you usually get what you pay for.
This is like going to the cheapest doctor in town, or buying the cheapest car you can find, or eating the cheapest quality meat and vegatable. Whatever happened to a balance between quality and price???
My main question is: how practical is this car? You have to pay over 13,000 for something that only seat one. What if you have to fit wife, kids, and dogs into your car?
I personally would only consider an electric car if it comes in a wagon.
The Athlon XP line is actually very competitively priced against the celeron. For example the XP2500+ is $125.00 Canadian compared to the Celeron 2.6Ghz which is $120.00 Canadian. The only difference between the XP and the Celeron is that the XP is WAY faster in many areas (e.g. gaming). So is this new budget line going to decrease performance in order to "compete" with the celeron?
The answer is no, cygwin does not running EVERYTHING as root. You can sync the cygwin passwd file with the windows account on the local machine and you can have windows level security in a *nix like environment.
Cygwin is one of those really valuable tools that I use day in and day out. I installed cygwin on a windows server and now I have the best of both worlds. I can ssh into my windows machine and run windows commands as well as unix ones.
Actually, not only are robots forbidden to form their own boy bands, they would actively seek and destory the entire teenage pop music scene - by virtue of the second part of the first law.
The three laws:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
While the overall structure of mainframes (OS, programming languages, etc.) have not changed much over the last 40 years, the actual guts of these computers have actually improved with the times (disk, computing capacity, etc.). Mainframes are much more suited for data warehouse and batch process applications then today's more "sexy" multi-tier architectures. The only downside to mainframe computing would be cost.
I personally don't think mainframes will be gone... ever.
Actually, if you RTFA, you'll noticed that someone else said the above, not Carly or anyone from the high tech firms.
Re:A few software fashions that are doing too well
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I think you are over critical of OO. Sure if you are doing anything in the systems area, OO may not be the answer for you. However, OO abstraction is so much more than "fancy structs". OO, if use effectively, can help us create highly complex software systems that are highly adaptable, reusable, and understandable. Using design patterns (only as needed of course), one can communicate a design with a much more concise description. Properly design inheritance and composition relationships can help a piece of software acheive better longevity.
OO is really a natural progression to structured programming. Sure it may not be the "Silver Bullet" but it certainly is a big step.
I'd say RTFA, but the article is just a very plain website with very little information. However, if you look into it, all the transactions are actually SAVED so you don't have to worry about losing data in the middle of the day (i.e. a journaled file system). The daily serialization is just a snapshot of the system so you don't have to start from the beginning every time you restore the system.
Just because MIT students who had one Java course previous to his software engineering class could not understand how to use Java properly to build webapges, doesn't mean Java is bad for web applications.
I also teach a second year software engineering course using Java to write web applications. My approach, however, is very much different to MIT. I actually took the time to run tutorials on how to write a proper application using servlets and jsps IN CLASS! That's the only way, imo, to teach these "beginners" how to write programs properly.
The MIT approach (as well as most large universities) is to let the students learn the tools themselves while they cover the theory in class. This sounds all good on paper since theory is the "essence" of computer science while being able to compile and run a program is more of an "accident". I believe, however, that since the "accidents" are what is keeping eveyone employed, we have to teach the proper way to code using CLASS time. Espeically in an introductory SOFTWARE ENGINEERING class.
Anyway, with support from the right IDE, programming web applications using servlets and jsps (a subset of J2EE) is pretty easy even for second year students. BTW, our students also had only one other course in Java.
I have written a paper on my experience and it is here
All you need is a good schedule and a change of habits. Schedule a workout before work, or during lunch. Bike to work instead of driving. Use the stairs instead of the elevator. Instead of 10 beers a day, try 1 to 2 beers.
It seems like Microsoft is trying to change their image from industry bully to industry team player. I have just been to an academic presentation of.NET and I must admit that MS studio.NET is very easy to learn and use, as well as being standards based.
The problem that I see with Microsoft is their attitude of Windows being the only operating system. The entire.NET platform is built around Windows and the "Write in any language, run on windows" idea is not very attractive at least to me.
You may argue that MS has already ported.NET to other OS (the rotor project). However, rotor is not meant to be used in production, which makes it rather useless in real life.
If you look at the Java camp, however, things aren't that great either. The tools are generally not as well integrated and Sun is trying too hard to control Java.
So, in conclusion, I'm not sure which is better. For now, I am staying with Java for my courses. But the battle is far from over:)
Slashdot Mirror
Full lessons and demo programs can be found on the env3d website.
There are some resources out there designed to attract the "gaming generation" into computer programming - it also happens to be a professional interest of mine (I teach primarily first year computer science).
Perhaps the most famous would be Alice (http://alice.org) - a drag and drop 3D programming environment.
Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) is a 2D drag and drop environment
Greenfoot (http://www.greenfoot.org) is a 2D Java programming environment
Env3D (http://env3d.sourceforge.net) is a 3D Java programming environment (Disclaimer: I am the author of this tool) - It makes programming in 3D very straight forward, especially for beginners.
Have fun!
I have a 2 year old and a newborn at home. I also grew up with video games and love playing them as a hobby. Time is definitely a precious commodity: Do I spend 2 hours playing games by myself or spend it with my kids? Or better yet, getting some much needed sleep since the baby wakes up every 2 hours.
:)
I think they need to make good games that can be played at 15 minutes intervals, or games that can be played with the rest of the family. I am very interested at the Wii at the moment as it has lots of potential.
I can't wait until I can play video games with my 2 year old
The FTA talks about the rise of ajax based books as if it were a diss to Java. Ajax actually hides the back-end implementation from the front end so it really doesn't matter what you use as long as it spits out XML. Java is just as good a language as any to implement the backend.
I'm not a Java fan boy or anything, but uninformed article based on hype really kills me.
About 6 years ago, I graduated with a MS in CS and I was really disappointed in the job situation. I wanted to get into a position where I can be challenged and use my skills to their maximum potential. Instead, most senior jobs in industry require lots of experience in specific technologies and most jobs in research require Ph.D.'s
I ended up taking a teaching position at a community college teaching first and second year CS. At the same time, I try to improve my own technology related skills by taking up some contracts.
After teaching for a while, I switched to work for a large software company where they value academic skills. The company is really nice but since I wasn't at the research end of things, the projects were uninteresting at best.
I am currently back at my teaching position and take on only interesting projects in my spare time. I found this to be most satisifying as I get to do different things all the time (dealing with students, developing courses, experiment with technology, etc.)
Hope this helps
Especially for the health care industry. What's stopping the nurses from giving poor quality service? In fact, in all areas in life, you usually get what you pay for.
This is like going to the cheapest doctor in town, or buying the cheapest car you can find, or eating the cheapest quality meat and vegatable. Whatever happened to a balance between quality and price???
If a bank branch can be patented, maybe MacDonald's can patent fast food chain stores. If you ask me, this whole patent thing is really stupid.
My main question is: how practical is this car? You have to pay over 13,000 for something that only seat one. What if you have to fit wife, kids, and dogs into your car?
I personally would only consider an electric car if it comes in a wagon.
The Athlon XP line is actually very competitively priced against the celeron. For example the XP2500+ is $125.00 Canadian compared to the Celeron 2.6Ghz which is $120.00 Canadian. The only difference between the XP and the Celeron is that the XP is WAY faster in many areas (e.g. gaming). So is this new budget line going to decrease performance in order to "compete" with the celeron?
The answer is no, cygwin does not running EVERYTHING as root. You can sync the cygwin passwd file with the windows account on the local machine and you can have windows level security in a *nix like environment.
Cygwin is one of those really valuable tools that I use day in and day out. I installed cygwin on a windows server and now I have the best of both worlds. I can ssh into my windows machine and run windows commands as well as unix ones.
1) Kill badger
2) Installs linux
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!!
Somebody has to do it.
Actually, not only are robots forbidden to form their own boy bands, they would actively seek and destory the entire teenage pop music scene - by virtue of the second part of the first law.
The three laws:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
While the overall structure of mainframes (OS, programming languages, etc.) have not changed much over the last 40 years, the actual guts of these computers have actually improved with the times (disk, computing capacity, etc.). Mainframes are much more suited for data warehouse and batch process applications then today's more "sexy" multi-tier architectures. The only downside to mainframe computing would be cost.
I personally don't think mainframes will be gone... ever.
Actually, if you RTFA, you'll noticed that someone else said the above, not Carly or anyone from the high tech firms.
I think you are over critical of OO. Sure if you are doing anything in the systems area, OO may not be the answer for you. However, OO abstraction is so much more than "fancy structs". OO, if use effectively, can help us create highly complex software systems that are highly adaptable, reusable, and understandable. Using design patterns (only as needed of course), one can communicate a design with a much more concise description. Properly design inheritance and composition relationships can help a piece of software acheive better longevity.
OO is really a natural progression to structured programming. Sure it may not be the "Silver Bullet" but it certainly is a big step.
I'd say RTFA, but the article is just a very plain website with very little information. However, if you look into it, all the transactions are actually SAVED so you don't have to worry about losing data in the middle of the day (i.e. a journaled file system). The daily serialization is just a snapshot of the system so you don't have to start from the beginning every time you restore the system.
Just because MIT students who had one Java course previous to his software engineering class could not understand how to use Java properly to build webapges, doesn't mean Java is bad for web applications.
I also teach a second year software engineering course using Java to write web applications. My approach, however, is very much different to MIT. I actually took the time to run tutorials on how to write a proper application using servlets and jsps IN CLASS! That's the only way, imo, to teach these "beginners" how to write programs properly.
The MIT approach (as well as most large universities) is to let the students learn the tools themselves while they cover the theory in class. This sounds all good on paper since theory is the "essence" of computer science while being able to compile and run a program is more of an "accident". I believe, however, that since the "accidents" are what is keeping eveyone employed, we have to teach the proper way to code using CLASS time. Espeically in an introductory SOFTWARE ENGINEERING class.
Anyway, with support from the right IDE, programming web applications using servlets and jsps (a subset of J2EE) is pretty easy even for second year students. BTW, our students also had only one other course in Java.
I have written a paper on my experience and it is here
Cheers
All you need is a good schedule and a change of habits. Schedule a workout before work, or during lunch. Bike to work instead of driving. Use the stairs instead of the elevator. Instead of 10 beers a day, try 1 to 2 beers.
Good luck
Seven days in a week? That may be the reason why they used 7 bits.
Maybe we should also allow constant monitoring of individuals to ensure the safety of everyone.
It always surprise me how 1984 is so relevant in today's society.
All modern computers come with web browsers, so they can learn to program in JavaScript.
So we are spending our hard earned dollars to fund a research on how to give change back.
They are making real progress in improving mandkind... maybe one day we'll get this magic coin that can represent everything under 10 cents...
I teach a course on technology and reading /. is part of my job :)
It seems like Microsoft is trying to change their image from industry bully to industry team player. I have just been to an academic presentation of .NET and I must admit that MS studio .NET is very easy to learn and use, as well as being standards based.
.NET platform is built around Windows and the "Write in any language, run on windows" idea is not very attractive at least to me.
.NET to other OS (the rotor project). However, rotor is not meant to be used in production, which makes it rather useless in real life.
:)
The problem that I see with Microsoft is their attitude of Windows being the only operating system. The entire
You may argue that MS has already ported
If you look at the Java camp, however, things aren't that great either. The tools are generally not as well integrated and Sun is trying too hard to control Java.
So, in conclusion, I'm not sure which is better. For now, I am staying with Java for my courses. But the battle is far from over
What about inheritance? If you design your system to take advantage of interitance, you cannot consider the database side of things until afterwards.