collint

Why do I buy this instead of Layer Vault?

Make a list of his important and valuable contributions.

Consider this list and go from there. Specifically I suggest finding contributions of his that you consider valuable that excite him and make him happy. Push him to do more of those things.

This is not how the Dropbox API works at this moment.

There is no mechanism to push updates to your application. Only the desktop client gets async updates. It will be a glorious day when such an API exists.

But don't hold your breath, it's been a topic on their forums for years.

Also this seems like a good way to spread the connections of investors and startups beyond the standard hubs. ( Coming from the little state of Iowa that sounds like a VERY good thing to me. )

Sounds like a great idea, I'm working on my product/demo right now. And even if I was just getting told one or two things a week I already know I feel like this would be a good booster for me.

Hope you get a ton of volunteers :)

I don't see anything to deal with conflicts and operations crossing each other on the wire. The sort of thing that Operational Transformation deals with.

Almost everybody seems to miss the mark in the "What do you do?" type questions. What do you think it is about these interviews that prevents them from describing it in the way you want them to? Or do you try to make everybody be more specific than their first pitch?

I try not spend too much time on semantics at the transformation level. There are already hundreds of cases that must be understood transformed just to handle concurrent operations on an XML document. If you want the transformer to handle semantics I fear you're going to balloon in complexity to the point of deep sadness. ( What do we do if I'm typing a number inside your word? Word inside a number? Delete a number inside a word? What if you word is the name of city? etc. forever )

I think there is a better ROI on making the intent of your collaborators clear, such as with cursor/mouse indicators. If I can see you're editing a number, I can know to steer clear, or at least be ready for the consequences.

I agree with the sentiments on OT. It really ought to be baked into everything. It has features you want, such as undo/redo, collaborative editing and optimistic locking.

I've been working on an OT implementation for the past few weeks. It really is some brain wrinkling stuff. The adoption of data-bining we're seeing in the newer JavaScript client frameworks/libraries could be paving the way for something like OT to go mainstream. OT is a bit like pulling your brain through a wormhole#. I think it's going to take a really easy to plug-in library to have something like OT get any traction.

# That is, OT is fairly straightforward if you're editing a document. It gets weird when you have to map a graph of objects onto/from a stream of operations.

Yup, it's all about DNS and links.

But let's try to look more than a few years out for once? OKAY?

You could make a very decent web that is made out of many clients, that can all link to each other and maybe even all run in separate tabs of the same browser (or whatever 'process' model you want).

But god help you 50 years down the road when you need to download new client browser for every other web page.

This, among other long-term type trade-offs are the very good reasons why the "open web" as it exists on it's current trajectory are a very good idea.

I now call for a classic fixed round, but barring emergencies you do raise angel investments.

Poorly written and quite long winded. By the time the author arrives at his second argument he's lost steam.

Seems weak and confused. There are some good arguments to be had around readability, writability and when to focus on what.

Those are not here.

I think you could come up with some sort of patent truce, you use a search engine that finds overlapping patents. The truce comes with a constitution/trust that declares some metrics for that search engine. Any patents that go over that metric are not to be used for litigation by members of the truce.

You can require members of the trust to invest in the trust at level relative to market cap. Breaking the trust results in loss of the assets/cash invested. The trust can also fund a defense pool/lobbying budget to protect the interests of the trust. Namely that members outside of the trust cannot successfully litigate on patents the trust hase agreed are frivolous.

edit: obviously transparency, open membership and some high profile members are useful for such a plan.

I think it sounds like a wicked clever idea.

It also sounds like a recipe for bad-blood in the open source world. It emphasizes owning a repo rather than contributing to one that already exists.

It also seems to push for over utilization of resources. Once you get to say 1-10K installs a multi-tenant solution would probably make more sense. What happens then? Does bushido help you roll your customers into one big app? Even if it's not good for bushido's bottom line?

Don't get me wrong, I see a lot of good and interesting things coming from this. I just also see some sticky situations.

I'd say recognizing the problem is good. If you don't want to lose confidence I'd spend every waking hour between now and your sit-down finding a passionate mobile developer.

On the other hand, just because your programmer became more excited when funding appeared doesn't mean he's not devoted now. It's not entirely irrational. But that's on your judgement.

In any case. If you don't like your position, improve on it. Unless you literally get bad news on the phone during your meetings with investors the discussion should be about what you've done, and what you are doing to solve the problems you have (and good news, everybody likes good news if you have it).

This isn't quite the point of the article but holy crap is this an awful patent:

“[a] communication element associated with each of the units of the commodity capable of carrying results of the two-way local interaction from each of the units of the commodity to a central location"

What on earth could that NOT mean?

What is so clever about a nil object check?

I suppose if you're using it to make skirting the "Law of Demeter" and thats something you don't want to do it could seem like something bad.

But I'll take "foo?.bar()" over "foo.bar() if foo" gladly.

"Just like JavaScript but nicer to type." was a decent pitch to make CoffeeScript sound safe. But it's become so much more. And you get past the simplicity of that pitch quickly if you use CoffeeScript earnestly.

Going through the Table of Contents on http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ I've picked out the features of CoffeeScript that make it a different beast than just a JavaScript without warts.

* Lexical Scoping and Variable Safety * Conditional Assignment * Splats * Comprehensions * Everything is an Expression (&implicit return) * The Existential Operator * Classes, Inheritance, and Super * Destructuring Assignment * Function binding * Chained Comparisons * Extended Regular Expressions

This is beyond a simple sweetener for your JavaScript code. Yes, you could write your JavaScript like you write your CoffeeScript, but you wouldn't.

Try this little jewel in Try CoffeeScript and you'll see what I mean:

[open, contents..., end] = "<impossible>".split "" alert contents.join ""

ruby or coffeescript

   true if true

:)

Perhaps I can interest you in a "Mosby".

http://i.imgur.com/IUiAp.jpg

(I'm so sorry. I bid for time. I promise if I win I won't be wearing one of these.)

I see this: Google was a happy accident because of the web.

Given the trajectory of Apple, where would the web be in 10 years if Google wasn't throwing everything, and clearly they are doing so, at keeping their platform alive.

Android is about keeping the web a dominant platform as we shift to the next generation of computing.

Google is right to bet the farm on keeping that endeavor alive.

It appears as though they got backed into the corner, but we've never seen Google make a purchase like this.

It's more expensive than usual. And it's not an obvious up-and-comer.

I imagine the #1 thing they could do would be to start picking off staff from both companies to form a super-group to push the hardware into yet unknown territory.

(As a person whose career interests align with Google's I hope the knock it out of the fucking park.)

In that picture it looks like Alexis is somebody holding an Alexis mask in front of their face :)

if test

The Rack style API is nice for the simplicity. I <3 it.

The Rack style api is NOT a great representation of the HTTP protocol. Specifically anything with a streaming or chunked response.

start_response/yield may not be the absolute best API for this, I haven't thought to much about that. But if you go look into what was done in Rails 3.1 for chunked responses you may realize it's not actually too great.

On a very expensive and comfortable bed.

He might like the games factory: http://www.clickteam.com/website/usa/

It's not writing code but it actually teaches you a lot about objects, event handling, conditionals and you can pipe out something really cool/fun in an hour or two.

( my first game I made when I was 12 was a "death star run" game. I had no artistic talent, but it was still fun. )

I would suggest working out a deployment strategy that is portable, or at least prepare for more than one scenario.

If this is a one day event and you have a PR cost for it you can't afford to be in a situation where you can't deliver based on your choice of service provider.

Could probably use puppet or something and just get the appropriate keys. Get some sort of dynamic DNS set-up.

You could probably spend a couple/few hundred an hour for somebody with expert level experience to bang out some scripts for you, just to ensure it's been well configured and hopefully given some sort of stress test.

This sort of stuff is possible with today's available infrastructure. We really have a responsibility to use the tools the best way we can.

dropped out of home-school

What kind of applications do you want to be able to build with such a tool?