One of the first things that I noticed is that the poster asks about both 2D drawing/manipulation and 3D modeling. While it's true that both are 3D art, I would highly suggest not lumping these together into the same group. 2D and 3D are are hightly seperate (thought often complementary) skills, and should be learned seperately. I would suggest teaching 2D art first, and then have a second class to do 3D modeling, perhaps with an introduction at the beginning on creating textures and such.
For 2D artwork, GIMP is a pretty solid program that should do everything a beginning student would need, and features that should work to teach students most of the initial concepts they'll need to work with 2D computer artwork, such as dealing with transparency, layers, brush types, filters and plugins, scaling, rotating images, adjusting brightness/contrast/balance, etc. The only problem with using GIMP is that photoshop is pretty industry standard, and it works differently than GIMP. This shouldn't be a problem though if you stick to teaching concepts that are applicable with any digital art program.
For 3D artwork, I've heard a lot of good things about blender, but I've never used it personally. If you are using Macs and Windows PCs, then look into the maya personal learning edition. I'm not sure if the license on it would allow a school to use it on all their machines for teaching, but I would venture to guess that it would, or that they would allow it if you talked to them. The only problem with this is that Maya, along with just about any other 3D modeling software, has a really complicated UI and might just be too much to try to teach.
I'm a CIS student, about ready to graduate. I'd already been programming for several years before I started school (and never allowed my school to interfere with my education), and I've spent a lot of time helping my fellow students, and here is some advice based on what i've seen. Learn to love whitespaces. I don't know how many times i've seen people try to cram their code down as small as possible by removing every possible whitespace. A few extra spaces can really help you catch mistakes when your using a lot of nested parenthesies. ( ( (th) ( (i)(s) ) ) is much easier to read than (((th)(i)(s))) if your trying to make sure you don't screw up your parenthesies. DO NOT comment every line. Seriously. Comments are a good thing, but when you comment every single cin and cout, every single bracee and function call, then it can make it a lot harder to find what you are looking for. A good rule of thumb I tell people is to comment every line you have to think about for more than 30 seconds, comment every function and class, and comment every block of code that you have to spend more than 2 minutes pondering over. Learn to use your editor. Whatever IDE or editor you decide to use, learn to use it well. Learn to use the debugger specifically, but also get used to the environment. I don't know how many people I've helped who's problem was not with their code, but with an improperly configured IDE. READ Error messages. This sounds obvious, but I swear people don't read them, or don't think about what they could mean. I think a lot of this comes from programmign classes that teach people to memorize syntax, without giving them an understanding of what's going on at the machine level, or what the compiler is actually doing. If you miracously fix something, understand why. Students seem like they can not resist randomly moving code around, and sometimes this does fix things. If this happens, take some time to understand what you moved and why it might have fixed the problem Take Breaks. This one applies to everyone. I've seen a lot of good programmers go crazy over simple problems simply because they are too stressed out to think clearly. If you start to feel stressed, tired, or your mind starts to wander, then step away from the computer, have a cigarette or a cup of coffee, take a walk, and get your mind away from the problem for a bit. Even if you have a deadline, a 15 minute break can often save an hour of frustration at the computer.
I don't really see this as a bad thing. The way I see it, making it hard for younger kids to buy violent games without parent's permission means that it's (hopefully) less likely that external preassures will end up causing fewer quality mature games to be made.
I remember when I was younger I got any game that I wanted (well, not as many as I wanted, but without regard to content), just as I got to watch any movies that I wanted. Instead of simply now allowing me to view certain content, my mother would sit down with me while I played the game and would explain the difference between the game and real life.
One of my good friends was not allowed to play any violent games (nothing with blood, no fighting games, basically he was allowed to play sonic and sports games) untill he was 18. His parent's were not around much to sit down with him and play games.
This system basically just re-enforces the two situations.
Of course there will still be parents who will buy their kids the latest GTA or Mortal Kombat without really knowing what is in the game, but it should at least give parents a little bit of an edge.
When I was a kid, as I'm sure is true of most slashdotters, games were primarily targeted at kids. Mortal Kombat is about the only game I can remember being released when I was still fairly young that was very violent. We didn't have Resident Evil or Grand Theft Auto. Back then, it wasn't such a big deal. Now days however, 18+ year old gamers make up the majority of gamers, and games are targetted thusly, and it presents a much larger problem.
Anyway, I've lost my train of thought, maybe someone will finish my rant in a reply.
It's really about the performance. Your correct in that anyone can build a system with the equivilent storage space cheaper.
I have a few TB of storage on my own network, and it's great for archving stuff, but it would be crap for trying to use this for storage on a high load server, that's the situation that these will be useful in, a good amount of storage with good performance, from a well known vendor. Especially for cases where a business already owns an IBM server, and want to ensure compatibility and keep a single vendor.
The government doesn't seem to realize that without pornography, they will have no driving force behind technology.
Granted I don't know much about the chineese government or economy, but don't they have something that somewhat resembles a free market, at least enough that this could actually have an effect.
On a side note, I wonder what effect this will have on society and on sex crimes.
A lot of people would have the public believe that wide availability of pornographic material leads to an increase of sex crimes, but I would venture to guess that it actually cuts down on the number of sex crimes by offering an alternate, quasi legal, and more or less harmless outlet for sexuality.
Reading back over my question, I think that I should have clarified a bit more exactly what experience I have and the specific areas I'm looking to go into.
From the way I wrote the question it looks like I'm basically trying to strike out with no real experience, or specific skills.
My main experience is with developing graphics, both using software like Maya, and writing graphics engines with OpenGL/C. I have a solid foundation in math and physics, enough to be able to write graphic simulations various events with a solid physics simulation. Other general experience I have is largely rooted in Linux, I've contributed to more than a few open source applications, and even written a few patches to the kernel (none of which were ever accepted into the offical tree, largely due to the fact that they were pretty obscure and better suited to patches). I only know a handful of languages, (C/C++, Java, x86 assembly, perl) but I know them inside and out. I don't have a lot of networking experience, but I do have enough that I could quickly get up to speed on any network related problems that might present themselves in various projects.
Most of my contracting experiences have been small jobs with small businesses, but they are well beyond the $50 to $100 area. Right now I'm working on a project worth over $50,000, which hopefull will be enough to live on while paying for all those things I need to start off the business.
My question sounded like it was asking what I need to know for my work, but really what I was trying to ask was, what's the best way to sell the my business as an independent contractor?
I've seen a lot of comments that basically say it's not possible, at least not for a 20 year old fresh out of school, which may be possible, but I'd much rather try to acheive my dreams now, before I have a family to support, a mortgage to pay, etc. Anyway, just a bit of clarification, this was my first ask slashdot, and I probably should have been a litle more clear.
Thanks for all the advice.
Don't think that a day goes by when I don't ask myself this very question. The answer is really that I let my family push me into going to a crappy school (DeVry) and get a degree in what they thought sounded best.
I'd like to second this question. Currently I own a handfull of Linux boxes and a 900mz G3 iBook (640mb ram, 40gb hard drive, airport (not extreme)). My job requires me to do quite a bit of Photoshop, as well as running a few 3D applications. The primary 3D application I use is avilable on Linux, but Photoshop simply won't perform acceptably under Wine, since I can't seem to get my Wacom tablet to work properly (tried the Linux Wacom project several times, not sure if it's a problem with their drivers or user error, but best case scenario I can't get absolute positioning and preassure or tilt to work, and worst case scenario X crashes).
The thing is, once the "gee-wiz, purdy" factor of OS X wore off, I found myself really wishing that I could be as productive with it as I am with KDE. I've considered installing one of the Linux PPC distros, but it seems that they are a little odd, last time I looked at linux on PPC I noticed that there were some peculiarities with booting, and partitioning and things like that. How easy is it to dual boot with OS X and Linux on PPC, or how well does Mac-on-Linux work?
I'm the head artist for the brood D20 Modern series Year of the Zombie, and we are releasing all of our books as both PDF and Dead Tree versions. PDF is really where most of the gaming books are headed. One nice thing that this allows is for companies to sell short campaigns for a few bucks each as PDFs, which is nice because they are often short enough to be resonalbly printed off by the DM, but it would not be reasonable to do a full print run for the books.
The nice thing about this setup is that it allows startup companies to sell their work without having to go through all the trouble of getting publishers to publish a book, and it allows established companies to put out short books.
PDF versions of books also are nice for people who run MUDs or games on IRC, where it is often more convenient to have a pdf on the computer.
While these are not the types of materials that one would want to get for reading on a PDA on long flights, there are many advantages of having electronic distributions of gaming text.
[obligitory self-whoring]
Year of the zombie should be released soon, anyone interested in zombie themed D20 modern games should check it out
[/obligitory self-whoring]
Here is an idea for a license sun could use.... (please forgive the lack of requisite legalese, I'm sure sun's lawyers could obfuscate it quite well)
Java is owned by sun, and sun is going to allow you to have access to the Java standard, so you can make your own implementation. If you do make your own implementation though, then you have to make sure that it's compatible with our version of Java, that is to say, you can add features, but you have to make sure that any program written to run with our version of Java also runs on your version. For a price, you can pay us to ensure compatibility, and only after this can you use the term Java in your application, or claim "Java Compatible". Oh, and none of this applies to Microsoft, screw you guys.
it seems to me like there are two major user mindsets when it comes to interacting with the GUI. The first are people who like a clean interface, that is to say, everything has it's place, stays in it's place, in a logical structure, and is there to go get when you need it (the OS X/Gnome approach), and there is the second approach, where the user wants as much condenced information as possible availabe with as few clicks as possible (the KDE, and to a lesser extent, Windows way). It seems to me that the former is always easier to learn, because there is less information to absorb at a time.
One of my biggest complaints about OS X, and to a lesser extent, GNOME, is that it takes so many clicks to do anything. Whereas with KDE (my preferred desktop), I can shove as many buttons, applets, widgets and shortcuts onto my desktop as my screen resolution will allow.
In the end, I think which one a person prefers is based largely on how much they like to tweek their desktop. I (and I know I'm not alone here), will often spend a few hours a week just changing my desktop look and feel, I totally re-theme KDE at least once a week, and I'm constantly playing with minor tweeks. People who just want to get work done seem to be more content with a nice looking GUI that they can set up once, then let be and get work done.
I agree that for a corperate desktop, Gnome is probably better, simply because businesses don't want users to spend hours of time they could be doing productive work playing with screen savers, window decorations, and what the "maximise/minimise/close" icons look like. For home desktops though, people (especially clueless users like aunt tilly and grandma marge) love to play around with the look and feel of their desktop. In this case I think that after the initial learning curve, KDE will win out.
All that aside, I do think that KDE still needs some UI refinement. My biggest complaint is that the options in the Kontrol Center seem to be disorganized, and broken up into subcategories just for the sake of filling up a list. I'm not saying there should be less options, just that I think they should start over on the control center and see if they can't make it a little more logically structured.
Since you've said that your department has experience with both C++ and Java, have you thought about using the Java Native Interface. JNI basically allows you to use some native methods that you can write in C++ in your java application. Sun has some good good articles on their website about it, and after spending a couple hours with it, it's pretty easy.
This will allow you to make use of a lot of pre-existing C++ code, and to write code in C++ when it turns out to be better at a particular problem, while still using Java for the majority of your application.
I've used JNI extensively for graphics applications (which are heavy on math), where it's either much faster in C++ (yes yes, java is much faster than it used to be, but sometimes much faster still isn't quite fast enough), or just much easier to solve a given problem in C++, even though Java is the best choice for most of the application.
Actually, I paid sony from 1 playstation2 unit. In the end when it didn't work, after exchanging for a new unit, they did refund my money to me. While I was unhappy with the quality of the hardware, I didn't feel like I was mistreated, and if they are able to redesign the system so that there are not so many manufacturing / hardware flaws, then I would happily buy another one.
I've owned 3 PS2's, all of them have had problems, I sent my first one (one of the originals that Sony admitted to having problems with), and got one of the second generation ones, sent it in for repair 4 times before they switched it out for a third one, after having to send it in several times for repairs I finally just decided to go with a gamecube, which has served me faithfully for 2 years now.
There are still a lot of PS2 games that I have missed out on though, being a huge RPG fan, and Star Ocean has had me considering trying a 4th PS2. I haven't though because other people I know have not had any better luck with their PS2s, and I don't want to get burned again. If these things are going to be redesigned and manufactured differently, then I might consider getting one.
BTW - anyone know what the backwards compatibility features of the PS3 are supposed to be? If it'll play PS1 and PS2 games then I might just wait to get a PS3, but if it'll only play PS2 games then I'll shell out for a PS2 so I can play my PS1 games on it, since I have a huge collection of great PS1 games, and ePSX on Linux might as well be an XBox emulator, it has microsoft-esque stability:P
Not sure what model it is (in the other room, don't want to get up and walk) but I have a gravis game pad that has the same problem, but there is a small button in the middle with a green LED that toggles the controller between analog 8 way direction and a standard, non-analog 4-way d-pad.
I've always found the pad to be pretty nice, though it's a little on the bulky side.
While I have to admit that I have only a fairly rudamentry understanding of the theory behind all this, it's great to see that progress is bringing us all the closer to realizing a quantom computer.
As I understand it, what this is saying is that they have not discovered a way to have error correction in a quantom network. AFAIK this quantom network is not referring to a network of computers as we would think of it today, but is basically saying that in a network of entangled particles, or a network of qbits, we now have a way to verify the integrity of the data we read.
When they say teleport, I'm quite sure they are not talking about Faster than light speed communication or anything, but rather that they have a way to use the enganglment to transmit the data of the quantom states.
Taking a huge leap given my limited understanding of the subject, it seems like what they have done is basically entangled the particles so that there is a parity qbit in order to varify that nothing was fouled up.
Mod parent up!
censorship is subjugation of the people through enforced ignorance. The fact is that if we say it's ok to ban Harry Potter, or Jane Has 2 Mommies, or The Anarchist Cookbook, then we are setting a dangerous precedent.
To introduce another analogy, it would be like saying it's legal to drive 100mph through a residential area as long as there is nobody around to run over, and no other cars to hit. Sure that might not put anybody in danger (except perhaps the drivers), but as soon as it's ok to do it sometimes, people are going to start doing it all the time.
Give the censors an inch, and they take a mile.
gah, hate to reply to myself, should have used preview.... forgot a chunk of what I was going to say
You also have to consider that this hardware is designed specifically for games. Standard pc hardware is very general in nature, but console hardware is not standard PC hardware, it's put together to be able to perform in exactly the ways where games need performance.
mod parent up
The reason that you can do more with consoles than you can with PC games, even though consoles tend to have lower specs is that when you know what hardware the program will be running on you can do a lot more optimization.
When you have a single hardware configuration and the time to learn exaclty how it performs under what circumstances you can squeeze a lot more performance out of that hardware.
Another reasont that we don't see the same performance out of modern PC applications (game or otherwise) is that as hardware progresses, optimization gives way to higher level languages, coding styles, etc. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but if every application was optimized as much as console applications are (and if it were even possible given the variety of hardware), you'd be able to run $your_favorite_os, $your_favorite_office_suite, $your_favorite_media_player, and $your_favorite_web_browser all at the same time quite comfortably on a 300mz machien with 64 megs of ram.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the first things that I noticed is that the poster asks about both 2D drawing/manipulation and 3D modeling. While it's true that both are 3D art, I would highly suggest not lumping these together into the same group. 2D and 3D are are hightly seperate (thought often complementary) skills, and should be learned seperately. I would suggest teaching 2D art first, and then have a second class to do 3D modeling, perhaps with an introduction at the beginning on creating textures and such.
For 2D artwork, GIMP is a pretty solid program that should do everything a beginning student would need, and features that should work to teach students most of the initial concepts they'll need to work with 2D computer artwork, such as dealing with transparency, layers, brush types, filters and plugins, scaling, rotating images, adjusting brightness/contrast/balance, etc. The only problem with using GIMP is that photoshop is pretty industry standard, and it works differently than GIMP. This shouldn't be a problem though if you stick to teaching concepts that are applicable with any digital art program.
For 3D artwork, I've heard a lot of good things about blender, but I've never used it personally. If you are using Macs and Windows PCs, then look into the maya personal learning edition. I'm not sure if the license on it would allow a school to use it on all their machines for teaching, but I would venture to guess that it would, or that they would allow it if you talked to them. The only problem with this is that Maya, along with just about any other 3D modeling software, has a really complicated UI and might just be too much to try to teach.
I'm a CIS student, about ready to graduate. I'd already been programming for several years before I started school (and never allowed my school to interfere with my education), and I've spent a lot of time helping my fellow students, and here is some advice based on what i've seen.
Learn to love whitespaces. I don't know how many times i've seen people try to cram their code down as small as possible by removing every possible whitespace. A few extra spaces can really help you catch mistakes when your using a lot of nested parenthesies. ( ( (th) ( (i)(s) ) ) is much easier to read than (((th)(i)(s))) if your trying to make sure you don't screw up your parenthesies.
DO NOT comment every line. Seriously. Comments are a good thing, but when you comment every single cin and cout, every single bracee and function call, then it can make it a lot harder to find what you are looking for. A good rule of thumb I tell people is to comment every line you have to think about for more than 30 seconds, comment every function and class, and comment every block of code that you have to spend more than 2 minutes pondering over.
Learn to use your editor. Whatever IDE or editor you decide to use, learn to use it well. Learn to use the debugger specifically, but also get used to the environment. I don't know how many people I've helped who's problem was not with their code, but with an improperly configured IDE.
READ Error messages. This sounds obvious, but I swear people don't read them, or don't think about what they could mean. I think a lot of this comes from programmign classes that teach people to memorize syntax, without giving them an understanding of what's going on at the machine level, or what the compiler is actually doing.
If you miracously fix something, understand why. Students seem like they can not resist randomly moving code around, and sometimes this does fix things. If this happens, take some time to understand what you moved and why it might have fixed the problem
Take Breaks. This one applies to everyone. I've seen a lot of good programmers go crazy over simple problems simply because they are too stressed out to think clearly. If you start to feel stressed, tired, or your mind starts to wander, then step away from the computer, have a cigarette or a cup of coffee, take a walk, and get your mind away from the problem for a bit. Even if you have a deadline, a 15 minute break can often save an hour of frustration at the computer.
Where's the mountain dew!?
I don't really see this as a bad thing. The way I see it, making it hard for younger kids to buy violent games without parent's permission means that it's (hopefully) less likely that external preassures will end up causing fewer quality mature games to be made.
I remember when I was younger I got any game that I wanted (well, not as many as I wanted, but without regard to content), just as I got to watch any movies that I wanted. Instead of simply now allowing me to view certain content, my mother would sit down with me while I played the game and would explain the difference between the game and real life.
One of my good friends was not allowed to play any violent games (nothing with blood, no fighting games, basically he was allowed to play sonic and sports games) untill he was 18. His parent's were not around much to sit down with him and play games.
This system basically just re-enforces the two situations.
Of course there will still be parents who will buy their kids the latest GTA or Mortal Kombat without really knowing what is in the game, but it should at least give parents a little bit of an edge.
When I was a kid, as I'm sure is true of most slashdotters, games were primarily targeted at kids. Mortal Kombat is about the only game I can remember being released when I was still fairly young that was very violent. We didn't have Resident Evil or Grand Theft Auto. Back then, it wasn't such a big deal. Now days however, 18+ year old gamers make up the majority of gamers, and games are targetted thusly, and it presents a much larger problem.
Anyway, I've lost my train of thought, maybe someone will finish my rant in a reply.
It's really about the performance. Your correct in that anyone can build a system with the equivilent storage space cheaper.
I have a few TB of storage on my own network, and it's great for archving stuff, but it would be crap for trying to use this for storage on a high load server, that's the situation that these will be useful in, a good amount of storage with good performance, from a well known vendor. Especially for cases where a business already owns an IBM server, and want to ensure compatibility and keep a single vendor.
The government doesn't seem to realize that without pornography, they will have no driving force behind technology.
Granted I don't know much about the chineese government or economy, but don't they have something that somewhat resembles a free market, at least enough that this could actually have an effect.
On a side note, I wonder what effect this will have on society and on sex crimes.
A lot of people would have the public believe that wide availability of pornographic material leads to an increase of sex crimes, but I would venture to guess that it actually cuts down on the number of sex crimes by offering an alternate, quasi legal, and more or less harmless outlet for sexuality.
Reading back over my question, I think that I should have clarified a bit more exactly what experience I have and the specific areas I'm looking to go into.
From the way I wrote the question it looks like I'm basically trying to strike out with no real experience, or specific skills.
My main experience is with developing graphics, both using software like Maya, and writing graphics engines with OpenGL/C. I have a solid foundation in math and physics, enough to be able to write graphic simulations various events with a solid physics simulation. Other general experience I have is largely rooted in Linux, I've contributed to more than a few open source applications, and even written a few patches to the kernel (none of which were ever accepted into the offical tree, largely due to the fact that they were pretty obscure and better suited to patches). I only know a handful of languages, (C/C++, Java, x86 assembly, perl) but I know them inside and out. I don't have a lot of networking experience, but I do have enough that I could quickly get up to speed on any network related problems that might present themselves in various projects.
Most of my contracting experiences have been small jobs with small businesses, but they are well beyond the $50 to $100 area. Right now I'm working on a project worth over $50,000, which hopefull will be enough to live on while paying for all those things I need to start off the business.
My question sounded like it was asking what I need to know for my work, but really what I was trying to ask was, what's the best way to sell the my business as an independent contractor?
I've seen a lot of comments that basically say it's not possible, at least not for a 20 year old fresh out of school, which may be possible, but I'd much rather try to acheive my dreams now, before I have a family to support, a mortgage to pay, etc. Anyway, just a bit of clarification, this was my first ask slashdot, and I probably should have been a litle more clear.
Thanks for all the advice.
Don't think that a day goes by when I don't ask myself this very question. The answer is really that I let my family push me into going to a crappy school (DeVry) and get a degree in what they thought sounded best.
I'd like to second this question. Currently I own a handfull of Linux boxes and a 900mz G3 iBook (640mb ram, 40gb hard drive, airport (not extreme)). My job requires me to do quite a bit of Photoshop, as well as running a few 3D applications. The primary 3D application I use is avilable on Linux, but Photoshop simply won't perform acceptably under Wine, since I can't seem to get my Wacom tablet to work properly (tried the Linux Wacom project several times, not sure if it's a problem with their drivers or user error, but best case scenario I can't get absolute positioning and preassure or tilt to work, and worst case scenario X crashes).
The thing is, once the "gee-wiz, purdy" factor of OS X wore off, I found myself really wishing that I could be as productive with it as I am with KDE. I've considered installing one of the Linux PPC distros, but it seems that they are a little odd, last time I looked at linux on PPC I noticed that there were some peculiarities with booting, and partitioning and things like that. How easy is it to dual boot with OS X and Linux on PPC, or how well does Mac-on-Linux work?
I'm the head artist for the brood D20 Modern series Year of the Zombie, and we are releasing all of our books as both PDF and Dead Tree versions. PDF is really where most of the gaming books are headed. One nice thing that this allows is for companies to sell short campaigns for a few bucks each as PDFs, which is nice because they are often short enough to be resonalbly printed off by the DM, but it would not be reasonable to do a full print run for the books.
The nice thing about this setup is that it allows startup companies to sell their work without having to go through all the trouble of getting publishers to publish a book, and it allows established companies to put out short books.
PDF versions of books also are nice for people who run MUDs or games on IRC, where it is often more convenient to have a pdf on the computer.
While these are not the types of materials that one would want to get for reading on a PDA on long flights, there are many advantages of having electronic distributions of gaming text. [obligitory self-whoring]
Year of the zombie should be released soon, anyone interested in zombie themed D20 modern games should check it out
[/obligitory self-whoring]
Here is an idea for a license sun could use.... (please forgive the lack of requisite legalese, I'm sure sun's lawyers could obfuscate it quite well)
Java is owned by sun, and sun is going to allow you to have access to the Java standard, so you can make your own implementation. If you do make your own implementation though, then you have to make sure that it's compatible with our version of Java, that is to say, you can add features, but you have to make sure that any program written to run with our version of Java also runs on your version. For a price, you can pay us to ensure compatibility, and only after this can you use the term Java in your application, or claim "Java Compatible". Oh, and none of this applies to Microsoft, screw you guys.
Let's combine all these into a single acronym...
Spam Harnessing Internet Technology (SHIT).
it seems to me like there are two major user mindsets when it comes to interacting with the GUI. The first are people who like a clean interface, that is to say, everything has it's place, stays in it's place, in a logical structure, and is there to go get when you need it (the OS X/Gnome approach), and there is the second approach, where the user wants as much condenced information as possible availabe with as few clicks as possible (the KDE, and to a lesser extent, Windows way). It seems to me that the former is always easier to learn, because there is less information to absorb at a time.
One of my biggest complaints about OS X, and to a lesser extent, GNOME, is that it takes so many clicks to do anything. Whereas with KDE (my preferred desktop), I can shove as many buttons, applets, widgets and shortcuts onto my desktop as my screen resolution will allow.
In the end, I think which one a person prefers is based largely on how much they like to tweek their desktop. I (and I know I'm not alone here), will often spend a few hours a week just changing my desktop look and feel, I totally re-theme KDE at least once a week, and I'm constantly playing with minor tweeks. People who just want to get work done seem to be more content with a nice looking GUI that they can set up once, then let be and get work done.
I agree that for a corperate desktop, Gnome is probably better, simply because businesses don't want users to spend hours of time they could be doing productive work playing with screen savers, window decorations, and what the "maximise/minimise/close" icons look like. For home desktops though, people (especially clueless users like aunt tilly and grandma marge) love to play around with the look and feel of their desktop. In this case I think that after the initial learning curve, KDE will win out.
All that aside, I do think that KDE still needs some UI refinement. My biggest complaint is that the options in the Kontrol Center seem to be disorganized, and broken up into subcategories just for the sake of filling up a list. I'm not saying there should be less options, just that I think they should start over on the control center and see if they can't make it a little more logically structured.
Since you've said that your department has experience with both C++ and Java, have you thought about using the Java Native Interface. JNI basically allows you to use some native methods that you can write in C++ in your java application. Sun has some good good articles on their website about it, and after spending a couple hours with it, it's pretty easy.
This will allow you to make use of a lot of pre-existing C++ code, and to write code in C++ when it turns out to be better at a particular problem, while still using Java for the majority of your application.
I've used JNI extensively for graphics applications (which are heavy on math), where it's either much faster in C++ (yes yes, java is much faster than it used to be, but sometimes much faster still isn't quite fast enough), or just much easier to solve a given problem in C++, even though Java is the best choice for most of the application.
Actually, I paid sony from 1 playstation2 unit. In the end when it didn't work, after exchanging for a new unit, they did refund my money to me. While I was unhappy with the quality of the hardware, I didn't feel like I was mistreated, and if they are able to redesign the system so that there are not so many manufacturing / hardware flaws, then I would happily buy another one.
yeah, that's how I went from playstation2:1 to playstation2:2, and from playstation 2:2 to playstation2:3.
I've owned 3 PS2's, all of them have had problems, I sent my first one (one of the originals that Sony admitted to having problems with), and got one of the second generation ones, sent it in for repair 4 times before they switched it out for a third one, after having to send it in several times for repairs I finally just decided to go with a gamecube, which has served me faithfully for 2 years now. :P
There are still a lot of PS2 games that I have missed out on though, being a huge RPG fan, and Star Ocean has had me considering trying a 4th PS2. I haven't though because other people I know have not had any better luck with their PS2s, and I don't want to get burned again. If these things are going to be redesigned and manufactured differently, then I might consider getting one.
BTW - anyone know what the backwards compatibility features of the PS3 are supposed to be? If it'll play PS1 and PS2 games then I might just wait to get a PS3, but if it'll only play PS2 games then I'll shell out for a PS2 so I can play my PS1 games on it, since I have a huge collection of great PS1 games, and ePSX on Linux might as well be an XBox emulator, it has microsoft-esque stability
Not sure what model it is (in the other room, don't want to get up and walk) but I have a gravis game pad that has the same problem, but there is a small button in the middle with a green LED that toggles the controller between analog 8 way direction and a standard, non-analog 4-way d-pad.
I've always found the pad to be pretty nice, though it's a little on the bulky side.
mod parent up!
The AC hit one of the biggest problems right on the nose.
While I have to admit that I have only a fairly rudamentry understanding of the theory behind all this, it's great to see that progress is bringing us all the closer to realizing a quantom computer.
As I understand it, what this is saying is that they have not discovered a way to have error correction in a quantom network. AFAIK this quantom network is not referring to a network of computers as we would think of it today, but is basically saying that in a network of entangled particles, or a network of qbits, we now have a way to verify the integrity of the data we read.
When they say teleport, I'm quite sure they are not talking about Faster than light speed communication or anything, but rather that they have a way to use the enganglment to transmit the data of the quantom states.
Taking a huge leap given my limited understanding of the subject, it seems like what they have done is basically entangled the particles so that there is a parity qbit in order to varify that nothing was fouled up.
That's windows on your machine sir, please hand in your geek license.
Mod parent up!
censorship is subjugation of the people through enforced ignorance. The fact is that if we say it's ok to ban Harry Potter, or Jane Has 2 Mommies, or The Anarchist Cookbook, then we are setting a dangerous precedent.
To introduce another analogy, it would be like saying it's legal to drive 100mph through a residential area as long as there is nobody around to run over, and no other cars to hit. Sure that might not put anybody in danger (except perhaps the drivers), but as soon as it's ok to do it sometimes, people are going to start doing it all the time.
Give the censors an inch, and they take a mile.
gah, hate to reply to myself, should have used preview.... forgot a chunk of what I was going to say
You also have to consider that this hardware is designed specifically for games. Standard pc hardware is very general in nature, but console hardware is not standard PC hardware, it's put together to be able to perform in exactly the ways where games need performance.
mod parent up
The reason that you can do more with consoles than you can with PC games, even though consoles tend to have lower specs is that when you know what hardware the program will be running on you can do a lot more optimization.
When you have a single hardware configuration and the time to learn exaclty how it performs under what circumstances you can squeeze a lot more performance out of that hardware.
Another reasont that we don't see the same performance out of modern PC applications (game or otherwise) is that as hardware progresses, optimization gives way to higher level languages, coding styles, etc. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but if every application was optimized as much as console applications are (and if it were even possible given the variety of hardware), you'd be able to run $your_favorite_os, $your_favorite_office_suite, $your_favorite_media_player, and $your_favorite_web_browser all at the same time quite comfortably on a 300mz machien with 64 megs of ram.
I propose the name IMoogle
Kupo!