Global Community Software and Saveing Schools

I have always wondered why there isn't more use of Open Source software in United States' schools.  Sure I have seen Firefox catch on, but all browsers are free of cost today.  So why did Firefox catch on in the first place.  I think its a given that Firefox caught on because as we all know, unless you have been living in a cave, Firefox is faster and more secure than what most versions of Internet Explorer are.  This proved OSS (Open Source Software) could be better than commercial alternatives. 

Now what about replacing monstrously expensive programs like Blackboard.  Blackboard runs a minimum of $10,000 per year but typically runs colleges $25,000 to $75,000 per year.  There are much cheaper OSS alternatives that have virtually the same features and can even be further enhanced because of their open nature.  Blackboard could be replaced with Moodle, or Sakai which have a free price on their tag and can be self-hosted.  Sakai I find particularly interesting, its made with leadership from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with its original grant coming from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York City.  Sakai allows for online document distribution, a grade book, discussions, live chats, assignment uploads, and online testing, plus more.  Moodle is comparable but was not founded in the U.S.  Moodle is from Australia but has been in development for a little longer, 15 years.  There has been some progress in crushing the cost of LMS software for schools.  Some schools are migrating away from Blackboard to the alternatives.  Blackboard had over 90% market share in 2006 and since 2010 the alternative software have reached over 30% market share.  I urge schools and any organization that requires educational learning software such as hospitals to utilize and improve open LMS software, by helping improve your LMS you are not only improving it for your students but you are providing a free service to the rest of the global community.  I am talking about those kids in Africa, India, and other parts of the world. 

Other areas of software that may be useful for schools to save on and improve for the global community by using and improving open source software include:

1. Libreoffice in place of MSOffice for most students
2. Switch to an open ERP such as... OpenERP
3. For medical and mental services in nursing offices or particularly in Universities OpenVista, FreeMED, or OpenEMR
4. For School Homepage a CMS like Joomla, Wordpress, or Durpal
5. For the Library use an open ILS like Evergreen or Koha
6. For Math SageMath, wxMaxima, ect.
7. For Programming, Eclipse, Netbeans, QtCreator, ect.
8. For Art and design, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, BlueGriffon, ect.
9. For additional free education software and to replace Windows for most students try Ubuntu or Edubuntu which has great computer lab management software.
10. Other school related open source software to fill in the nooks include: SchoolTool, Project Fedena, A1 Academia, Gibbon, OpenSIS, and you can Google for more. 

Schools should regularly look at BOSSIE to find the latest and greatest open source software to teach with. If we can migrate everything to OSS imagine how much we could save tax payers and tuition spenders.  All of this savings put together should save hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions over the years.  The Federal Government is starting to use more OSS why not the local. Bill Gates says how he wants to donate money back to the schools, well if our local governments wouldn't have wasted so much on commercial software we would have that money now to pay for better teachers, books, and technology.  Lets not continue to make this mistake.

Refer to http://schoolforge.net/ for case studies. 

DirectX? Ha! - OpenGL is Superior

If you are looking to grab a developer’s interest, all you really need to do is begin popping out statistics. Feature something that’s not 1.2 times above par, but three or four times better, and you will know you’ve got them. That’s the good news Nvidia teamed up with AMD and Intel to present at this last week’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. AMD’s Graham Sellers, Intel’s Tim Foley, and Nvidia's Cass Everitt and John McDonald appeared on the same panel to explain the high-level methods available in today’s OpenGL implementations that reduce driver overhead by as great as 10x or more.  With OpenGL, an open, vendor-neutral standard, developers can get significantly better performance, up to 1.3 times. Though with a little tuning, they will often get 7 to 15 times more performance.

That’s a figure that will always make any developer sit up and listen.  Better still, the techniques revealed apply to all major manufacturers and are suitable for using across multiple platforms. And they brought demos, showing what these particular improvements mean on real world systems.  That’s because of the fact that OpenGL can cut through the driver overhead who is definitely a frustrating reality for game project developers since the beginning of the PC game industry.  On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate. On mobile devices, however, driver overhead is significantly more insidious, robbing both battery life and frame rate.  Learn more here.  With such possible superior performance looks like its time to kill DirectX projects and make them into highly tuned OpenGL applications for SteamOS and yes, even Windows.  Below is a video that you might get more out of if you develop with OpenGL.  I never developed directly with OpenGL but I know I will use engines and frameworks that do, especially after learning about this. 

reEarCandy Problems...

Just so you know I am having problems building reEarCandy on my computer right now.  I would appreciate some feedback if anyone can get this to build.  For some reason I can't type the program name into the program recording source.  I am also curious to see if this will build on Windows.  A couple of people have said they may be able to help me get it working on Windows.  Please contact me if you can fix these things or can give me some insight.  I am opening up comments on this post so you can give me feedback.  Thanks.  

Esenthel Next-Gen Game Engine

 Esenthel calls itself a Nex-Gen game engine.   It now supports Linux along with Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and web with no plugins.  If you want the full version that includes Linux support and Game Object Class Source Code it will run you $199.  There is a free to try version.  They also have made demo games for a variety of game types.  Esenthel's features include:

• Very Easy to Use
• Advanced Graphics and Physics
• High Performance
• Unlimited Sized Worlds
• Collaborative Development
• Auto Publishing
• 100+ Tutorials and 90+ Documentation Pages Included
• Esenthel Store to sell your own Items
• Frequent Updates
• Rock Solid - Zero Bug Tolerance
• Free to Try!

Reconstruct Your Face From DNA

Have you ever been asked, as a witness, what does this suspect look like?  Your description may be quite limited in detail.  We have all seen the artist made drawings of criminals that authorities are looking for.  These drawings even change from time to time.  Well now Scientists are working to see if they can reconstruct faces from DNA.  They have had some success, according to PLOS Genetics in a publication from yesterday.  Right now crude 3D models of the person can be made from samples of their DNA.  Researchers are looking only at genes that seem to construct facial structure.  The process is far from perfect at its current state and the scientists admit that the limitations of what they can find from the DNA may prove to be non useful in the end.  But it is too early to tell.  If scientists can find a way to reconstruct the whole face this could be very useful to forensics.  However things like weight and age will still need to be determined visually. 

Blender Now Better For Game Dev

I will keep this short.  Blender 2.70 is out and since Valve had a 6 month contract with The Blender Foundation, I think this has something to do with the, better game development support, included in this version.  Other features include: user interface improvements, modelling enhancements, motion tracking tuning, a threaded dependency graph, freestyle NPR rendering, new features for the Cycles renderer, and more.  See more at the Blender Wiki.  Blender is better for game development now, but its also great for 3D animation, physics simulation, video effects, editing and more.  If you want to see what blender can do look at this...

What Game Engine To Use

I have been playing around with game development on and off for a while.  I always have the minimum requirement for the engine to run on Linux.  I have this requirement because I run Ubuntu on my best desktop computer in the house which has a Radeon 7770 for video and has a 6 core AMD Phenom II.  This setup plays all Steam games fairly well at 1600x900.  There is even greater reason to pick an engine with Linux support because the new Steam Machine game consoles basically have game support through Linux support.  Graphics are also important to me because I love things that look beautiful.  If you are a pro game developer that wants the greatest graphics for your AAA game you are going to have to:

    A)  Pay for an engine that supports the best graphics possible.
    B)  Build your own in-house game engine with what you want.
    C)  Take an Open-Source game engine and add the latest graphics support.  (Tesseract)

If you go with option A your best options are Unity, Unreal Engine 4, or Cryengine. 
These all can run your developed game on Linux and they have pay versions that support the latest in OpenGL graphics technologies.  Unity runs $1500 per seat for a pro license.  Unreal Engine has always had a reputation for being cheaper for small projects by charging a smaller monthly fee.  And now for the first time ever Cryengine is pulling an Epic by charging a super small monthly fee of $9.90 a month which is beating Epic Games price for Unreal Engine 4!  The new EasS (Engine as a service) pricing is staring May of this year.  So Cryengine is looking like the best option for now, see the video below.  Lets not forget about Valves Source 2 Engine which will be coming out soon it might out-do even Cryengine since the Source Engine right now is free and its possible to make free contributions to its source code.