OStatic

If Vern Yip is reading this, I still need your help. Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google's SketchUp in a number of areas, it's still not much help for someone with no design sense.

This makes it even more odd that I was so excited when I spotted Elizabeth Krumbach's post on the open source, cross platform 3D interior design modeling application. I've lived in my house for nine years -- we have shades on all the windows, but only one window has actual curtains. It's just that SketchUp is a fun little application, and it's one of the only applications I've tried to run with WINE (and failed miserably in the attempt).

Sweet Home 3D, as Krumbach says, is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Because it's open source, there's the potential to model a structure (and the stuff that fills it) to a whole new level of precision. Perhaps the only drawback (and it could be a machine quirk, as everything's being difficult today) was its seeming somewhat crashprone on my Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit laptop. That could also be chalked up to my learning curve. But let's take a closer look.

According to The Register, Sun plans on laying off between 15-18% of its workforce (an estimated 5,000-6,000 positions) and restructuring itself into three major divisions, thanks to earlier periods of slowed growth (or losses) and the already bleak economic picture.

Sun's President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz says that this is a decisive action in the face of the economy, and that these cuts should facilitate the delivery of key open source platform innovations, including MySQL. In his corporate blog, however, Schwartz drops a few hints about other projects, such as OpenOffice.