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Comment Re:university does not = job skills tech needs app (Score 1) 375

by tsalaroth (#39065245) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Tech Manufacturers With Better Labor Practices?

My roommate has a CS degree. He had to work off his loans doing "landscaping" (mowing lawns, trimming trees) for 6 years, never really saving anything, just basically overpaying on his loans. Now he's back in school, getting a degree in english for teaching. He already has prospects with that career path. He still has none with a CS degree because he couldn't find a job within 1 year of graduating.

I guess what I'm saying is, McDonald's is just an example, there's LOTS of people with technical degrees that are NOT working in their field.

Comment Good luck (Score 1) 1521

by tsalaroth (#37206520) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

Good luck, Rob. I've not ever really addressed you directly, but watched from afar. You made something big, and that's all that matters, right?

I'll try to remember to add you on LinkedIn tonight. I'm pretty sure we'll be hiring all kind of positions in 3 months, and I'm pretty sure your resume would probably knock HR's socks off, here.

--
Michael
Botnet

Submission + - Vengeful programmer gets two years in prison (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Putting a finishing punch on what was a nasty online retribution attack, a federal court in New Jersey has sentenced a former programmer to two years in prison, plus three years of supervised release for building a botnet-based virus that infected about 100,000 PCs and attacked a number of media outlets such as Rolling Stone and Radar."

Submission + - LHC record luminosity (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by germancarrillo
germancarrillo writes: the LHC just broke it's record of instantaneous luminosity. Colliding protons at 7TeV with an instantaneous luminosity of 2.5x10^32 cm^-2^-1.
Seems that this year physicists will have some hints about the "Higgs or not to Higgs" dilemma.
Open Source

Submission + - Open source Kimono Lanterns to the rescue

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The devastation in Japan is heart rending and compels each of one of us to contribute to help improve the situation. Similar thoughts have been running through developers at Freaklabs . At the hackerspace they are involved with, a solar rechargeable lantern was designed for garden and patio use. Called the Kimono Lantern, today they are able to put it to better use. Donating the complete design to the open source hardware community, they are indeed standing true to the commitments of the Open Source community.
Software

Submission + - A Car You Can Drive With Your Thoughts (ieee.org)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "German researchers have demonstrated a car that can be driven with brain power alone [http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/braindriver-a-mind-controlled-car]. In a video, a driver wears a EEG head cap, which records brain activity. Software converts the neural signals into steering and acceleration commands, feeding the data into the car's drive-by-wire system. The brain-car interface, which the researchers call the "BrainDriver," is far from being commercially viable. But it could one day allow disabled and paralyzed people to gain more mobility. It could also, the researchers say, help people control autonomous vehicles, like a future driverless cab; just by thinking, passengers would tell the cab where to go."
Book Reviews

Submission + - Inkscape for Web Designers (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
JR0cket
JR0cket writes: "Inkscape is an open source 2D drawing tool that helps you create graphic designs, from simple buttons and logos to full blown posters and web page designs. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw and gives you a vector based graphics tool that uses the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Inkscape is easy to use, although learning the tricks that make designing a web site look great are more involved.

The Inkscape 0.48 Essentails for Web designers is specifically focused on helping you to create your first web site designs and does a great job of getting you started. Most if not all the techniques covered are relevant to creating other graphic works too, so its useful as a general Inkscape tutorial.

Overview of the book

I should say up front that If you are a web designer by trade you will know all the design aspects covered in the book, although the book will help you apply that knowledge in the latest version of Inkscape (version .048).

For those wanting to get into graphic design or start creating their own works, the book is quite a useful starting point to learn about a few important design concerns. Also, if you are a developer who works with graphic designers, you will find interest in understanding how graphic designs are created. No technical skills are really required except the basics of using desktop software with a modern graphical user interface. With no prior design knowledge, I was able to use Inkscape to do some basic posters, using the book has helped me do more involved designs and uses the more advanced features of Inkscape.

Inkscape is open source software and is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) and there are many examples of works create with Inkscape under the creative commons licences — eg SpreadUbuntu.org

While the focus on the book is Inkscape for web design, all the techniques are useful if you want to create advertising posters, desktop wallpapers, company logos, single page comics, etc. The only limitation to using Inkscape, apart from your creativity and imagination, is that it only does a single page graphic in each inkscape window, but each graphic can be saved as individual images and made into a document using Scribus or OpenOffice / LibreOffice as Inkscape can save your designs using standard image formats (png, jpeg, svg, etc.)

The book content is nice and clean, with content on pages nicely spaced out making the book really easy to read and follow, so no need to be daunted by the 316 page count.

As the book progresses it assumes you have read earlier chapters so does not repeat exact details, for example the exact steps to create drop shadows is shown only once, keeping the book nice and to the point. You will therefore get the most out of the book by following along with the exercises in Inkscape.

So the book covers simple design techniques useful for any graphic design, along with lots of good ideas on how to design and enhancing your website, from site layouts, templates to animations.

The book in more detail

An important starting point in the book is the overview of vector graphics and how they differ from raster graphics (eg. vector graphics scale uniformly and you dont get blur when scaling images). This concisely sets the scene as to why vector graphics are better for web design — flexibility, quality and small file sizes.

The Inkscape install guidance is nothing more than download and install but this is probably all you need. There are a few hints for Mac Users to help them out. There are packages available for Ubuntu and Debian based distributions in their respective distribution repositories. A Microsoft Windows installer is also available from the downloads section of the Inkscape website

The tour of the Inkscape user interface is very detailed with a good indication of what you can do with all the controls that make up Inkscape. There are just about enough drawings provided as examples, although I would have liked a few more images to make the tour a little clearer. I recommend you read the Inkscape tour in dual page view if you are reading the ebook (pdf) version.

The design concepts in the book start with web site layouts in chapter 2, steadily building each of the design aspects onto the site layout (images, text, patterns, icons, buttons and logos, site maps). The book covers four basic design principles of Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, Contrast and suggests reading The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice by Robin Williams for more detailed study.

You are walked through step by step construction of a basic web page design — including header, footer, sidebar, content, navigation. Using guides, grids and aligning techniques to manage your web page layout. Pulling all the design work together to create a store-front for a website. Its pretty hard to go wrong following these steps. The book use the same web design jargon you get in industry and any jargon used is explained well enough.

When you have created your web page design, you are shown how to slice up that design and export it as a series of image files (png) for use in the HTML code of the actual web page. This is the same basic process as used in industry.

Throughout the book there are specific chapters on working with images, styling text, creating logos and buttons, using patterns for background images and more details on creating flow diagrams such as for creating web site maps.

Each chapter again builds on the previous information to give you an easy to follow guide and provides examples of why the design techniques covered here are important along with approaches to create the most suitable designs for your clients.

There is nice coverage of how to use Inkscape and GIMP in collaboration to create your own animations for your website. The animations are relatively simple but effective, scrolling text and a sailing boat on the sea, showning you the technique in more than enough detail for any website design using animated GIF images.

Getting a little more technical at the end of the book, though still easy to follow, it covers the XML structures that Inkscape uses to hold your graphic designs. These XML structures let you tweak your designs using Inkscapes XML editor. There is also a reference section on the various plugins available for Inkscape, mentioning specifically Agave for colour palette management and Export to PDF CMYK for color separation for the CMYK standard. There is also a section on how to create your own custom page templates.

Conclusion

Inkscape 0.48 essentials for Web Designers is a great book to get started with Inkscape, especially if you are designing your own site. For example, If you have installed wordpress and want to create some custom themes, then this book would be very helpful to make your site stand out from the crowd.

There is an Inkscape Illustrators Cookbook out in April 2011 that seems more general compared to web developers book but as mentioned before, all the concepts presented in the web developers book are relevant for creating other graphic designs.

The book never attempts to teach you all about design, that would require a much larger book. There is enough design information in here to get you started on a good path and give you a good steer in the right direction. The coverage of Inkscape is very detailed and will help you get the most out of the tool, whether you are using it for web development or other graphical design activities.

This book makes a nice addition to the online resources available for Inkscape and with its tutorial style is a good contrast to other Inkscape books available which may contain more reference material but are more general in nature.

About the reviewer

John coaches Lean Agile practices, organises London technical communities and is an OSS advocate (since running Debian in 1995). @JR0cket"
Intel

Submission + - Microsoft Bans Its Own License (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo writes: The rules for Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace appear to mean that even Microsoft's own MS-RL open source license is banned. "Windows Phone Marketplace Application Provider Agreement defines in section 1l an "Excluded License":

"oeExcluded License" means any license requiring, as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of the software subject to the license, that the software or other software combined and/or distributed with it be (i) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (iii) redistributable at no charge.

That includes, remarkably, Microsoft's own OSI-approved Microsoft Reciprocal License and possibly even the Microsoft Public License, according to one legal expert.

TFA also asserts that Nokia should worry about it. And, by-the-way, Intel's CEO is on the opinion that Nokia should have gone Android instead of MS... in the light of the above, I tend to agree.
Idle

Submission + - Flying parking meters (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Flying cars may be 10 years or more away, as they have been for longer than fusion power has, but the (ab-)normally quiet town of St.Johns, Newfoundland, has evidently plans for the future and this winter has been trialling parking meters for their expected fleets (flocks?) of flying cars. Or something.
(Well, it made me laugh when I saw it on the telly!)
Google

Submission + - Intel CEO: Nokia should have gone with Android (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "Intel's CEO Paul Otellini has said Nokia made a mistake choosing Windows Phone 7, and should have gone with Android — but admitted the money on offer may have been too much to ignore. "I wouldn't have made the decision he made, I would probably have gone to Android if I were him," he said. "MeeGo would have been the best strategy but he concluded he couldn't afford it." Otellini said some closed mobile platforms will "certainly survive," but said open systems will "win" in the end."

Submission + - CCP teases WoD Online at The Grand Masquerade (kotaku.com)

Submitted by
tsalaroth
tsalaroth writes: "CCP Games hosted the first annual "Grand Masquerade" over the weekend in New Orleans, LA. At the convention, there was an announcement and teaser trailer released for the new World of Darkness Online MMO being developed by CCP Games. As an attendee, it was pretty exciting to get to see an exclusive first look at this game.

Stated at the announcement was the revelation that the "Carbon" engine for character look and design will first be introduced in EVE Online. The engine supposedly will allow unprecedented character look and feel customization in the games."

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