I second that with Flash. Being an intergrated hybrid illustration/animation tool, it'd be the easiest to teach fine arts students with.

You can easily make a lot of games just relying on "gotoAndStop();", "gotoAndPlay();" and just button click events for code

Why do most slashdot geeks always think "3D" when thinking game development these days? Most of the fun casual games available today are in 2d.

Plus, you don't have to do any coding to do animation and sprite objects in Flash. There's a reason there's so many amateur Flash games on the web today. It's the friendliest environment for non-coder art-oriented people.

wtf... Am I in the right website here? Is this Slashdot? Where's the rabid Flash bashing? It's like I stepped into a bizarro parallel universe!

Testing for slower systems & lower CPU has become a big problem w/ us right now, especially since access to older "obsolete" machines is very very difficult now.

How do you guys do this? I mean with the only off the shelf PCs available running over 1GHz these days, how do you test for a 200-500MHz platform these days? Personally, I used nested VMs running a la Russian Dolls or matrix within a matrix within a matrix for you geeks who don't know what a VMs are. I was running Puppy Linux & DamnSmallLinux inside Ubuntu inside WinXP

Virtualbox is very idiot friendly compared to VMWare and rockses sockses :)

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http://gamersgate.com/ is another good alternative to GOG and Direct2Drive. The nice thing is that they're having a *massive* summer sale right now :) Like GOG, it's re-download all you want.

That being said, mobile developers would be a heck of a lot happier if Android devices would run J2ME/JavaME apps out of the box instead of needing to port & recompile apps for Android/Dalvik.

How much would it cost for Google to pay Oracle a license to bundle the JavaME VM on Android? If anything, hopefully that's one thing that comes out of this as porting for different platforms is a $%@#$^. The less steps needed, the better.

But hasn't Java been doing a good enough job splintering and fragmenting the platform with J2EE, J2SE, J2ME MIDP 1.0/2.0/3.0, JavaFX on its own?

Adam Savage's talk on the 2008 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference on why Mythbusters was forced to not do the "how easy it is to hack RFID tags" episode is very, very interesting.

Weight gain is a common side effect for *many* anti-depressants. Increased appetite and hunger is common.

There are already a bunch of touchscreen netbooks out there. Check out the: ASUS T101MT, HP Mini 5102, Gigabyte Touchnote T1028M, and MSI Wind U150 nebooks.

The article Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) by Cory Doctorow is a good read.

Steve Jobs is deliberately destroying the web and trying to remold it as he sees fit. He would rather that content creators only build native iOS apps that work only for iDevices rather than use already-existing channels & platforms that work perfectly fine.

His war on interpreted code/runtimes and (WORA) Write-Once-Run-Anywhere is a big headache for content creators everywhere.