If 720p (1366x768) and a 15" screen is acceptable, $1500 is more than triple what you should be paying. Treat the machine as a commodity, expect it to get dropped/lost/etc. Set it up with automatic backups (e.g. Crashplan, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc.) and good encryption for when it's lost/stolen (if it's a single-user machine this may be easier since there are no cross-account encryption issues for backups) and save the money to get a better machine in a year or two. If you want CPU but don't care about graphics, get an Intel chip; if you're going to be playing games on an inexpensive laptop get an AMD A4 or A6 processor for the built-in graphics (comparable graphics on Intel requires an added graphics card).

As far as the sites go, I sent a nastygram over to Asus not too long ago noting that since clearly Marketing had completely subdued anyone with technical knowledge, I was sure that any laptop from them would continue to look mahvelous even after components started to fail. I also criticized the complete lack of any way to search by specifications other than manually opening each product's page.

First, if your boss thinks the programming is "monkey work" then you're already in trouble right there.

With only two of you total, and only one person even potentially capable of reviewing outsourced work, you personally are going to spend all of your time attempting to integrate not-quite-compatible or not-quite-complete or worst not-quite-right pieces that you get from outside. If what you're outsourcing is self-contained pieces you may have more luck, but even there unless you're simply contracting some things out to a small group of outside folks then you're going to see a lot of variation. Finding qualified contractors is always an issue, particularly if you're in the financial constraints I suspect based on the shift from a team to two people.

I can't speak well to the domestic vs. international outsourcing question, but I will say that A) your boss who's outsourcing the monkey work is going to want to put it out as cheap as possible and B) if you're outsourcing UI/content/etc. then there's going to be a lot of cultural stuff that may be subtly wrong in ways that will hurt your products.

Without knowing more about your business this may seem presumptuous, but are you focusing on the right thing? Do you have a good framework for building educational titles/apps/games/etc.? If so, can you improve it further so you can outsource development of complete packages using your framework? Who are your customers, and are they the right customers for what you have and can build?

In this case they're showing graphs of values from two separate runs. This is fine, there's no error information to be shown, it's not aggregated numbers as in a poll, etc. I'm just suggesting that if their results are that variable (even assuming the two graphs shown are extremes) then aggregated data (with standard deviations shown) might be more useful.

In the two sample runs they show, the Innovator does well in one and the "Milker" with multiple redundant apps does well in the other. The "Optimizer" who improves their best app comes in second in both, and I'd wonder if that holds over a larger set of simulations.

I suspect that what might be more interesting is the standard deviation of ending positions over many runs.

I tend to post with a consistent pseudonym that I've been using since before I registered the matching domain back in the late '90s. There's no real mystery there and it's easy to trace back to my real name, it's just more convenient sometimes (and on some sites I provide both). I also tend to not be all that controversial or interested in hiding my opinions, and I try not to be insulting - even if I think someone online is being an idiot, there's no shortage of people who will be chomping at the bit to go after said idiots, and I feel no need to add myself to the crowd.

In my younger days I considered setting up accounts with my "porn star name" of first pet + first street, but I decided that "Princess Heather" was likely to be interpreted by many in incorrect and inappropriate ways.

I believe this has ended, but at one point Pegasus Mail was supported largely by the sale of manuals.

You don't give nearly enough detail here for people to be able to help much. Are you talking about an app for mobile devices where it'll cost a few dollars, business software for small/midsize companies, or (potentially) enterprise-level business software?

For an app, you could make it open source but sell it for a buck or two - most app purchasers will happily just get it through the relevant app store; those who will care about the open source nature will hopefully be willing to throw an (insignificant) couple of bucks to you particularly if you mention that (and the convenience of getting it that way vs. downloading/loading separately); those who could purchase but are too cheap to part with less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee are the ones who're probably more likely to pirate anyway. The biggest danger here is someone else lifting your code, rebranding and selling it themselves. (e.g. JMRI and Jacobsen v. Katzer)

For small business software, is it a turnkey app or something that requires setup? I have no great suggestions for turnkey apps unless you're offering customization/extension to clients; otherwise you're selling setup, configuration, support. Your business model here is that some of your customers COULD do this (or hire someone else to do it), but it's worth their time to have you do it. Further, whether sales of support are viable depends on the software and what it does.

For enterprise-scale, your selling point is that it will cost less for them to purchase the software and services from you than to dedicate resources to learn it. If learning, configuration, etc. are going to take someone a month plus some problems for users while things get straightened out, the cost in staff time is huge - a skilled IT person could easily be $10k/month with benefits, and if there are 500 users that lose 2 hours of productivity each for a month or two, you could be looking at six figures of total cost to do it in-house instead of getting the professional services from you to do it up front.

I used to work on software that sold (installed & configured) for $70-100k and higher. At one point early on I looked at what we were doing/selling and thought "Why are companies paying for this? We're not doing anything revolutionary here!" but it didn't take long to realize that while our larger customers COULD build something comparable in-house, it could well take a skilled programmer a year to do so assuming they had one available and idle. Basically, it was worth it for our customers to use our product instead of doing it themselves, and even at the prices we were charging the ROI was such that I wouldn't be surprised if we actually fudged numbers to make it look *worse* in some cases (I wasn't in sales, but I always thought going in and claiming a 3-6 month break-even ROI would be questionable as in "are you saying that our processes are THAT bad?")

I was going to post that, but it's hard to beat it coming from the original developer.

On a possibly-not-approved-by-said-developer note, if you want to play it you can find ways to do so that involve Atari ST emulators and bootleg content. The actual title of the game was "Sundog: Frozen Legacy"

But I've used Google Latitude's history to look back when I did a bad job of tracking which clients I was at and for exactly how long.

As at least one other person has suggested, do this in Javascript. Processing power shouldn't be an issue - consider a "swarm" or "hive" screensaver running on a 386 with a tiny fraction of the power of a modern PC.

You have two separate areas to work on, three if you actually want it to look good (graphic design is its own thing): the physics/calculations, the animation, and making the animation not look like crap. For the animation/graphics, HTML5's Canvas may be your friend but I don't have the experience with it to say for sure.

For the physics side, you can either dig into some matrix algebra as someone mentioned (my time doing that is 20+ years old, can't help you much) or just code a routine to calculate the effect of a force (gravity of one of your objects) at a given point in space. Something like GetVectorInfluence(ObstacleMass, ObstaclePosition, PelletPosition) returning (acceleration, angle). At each stepping point you'll call that routine once for each obstacle, then sum the resulting vectors to determine where the point is going. You can start with one and shift to the other later if it turns out to be more efficient. Start out by doing that, working with an arbitrary space and recording the position of the moving item at each tick. Then graph out your results and see if you get the kind of lines you expect. I don't know if there's any reason to bother with excluding distant points from your calculations unless your total number of objects is huge - you may find that the math to include/exclude is more processor intensive than just doing the calculation and getting a near-zero result for distant objects.

I can't help much with the graphics, but it's basically doing a real-time chart instead of logging positions and rendering it later.

The graphic design may be as much headache as everything else, but as I tell people "As a graphic designer, I'm a great programmer." There is frequently little overlap in these skillsets.