davidalln

A big part of this is the timing of the release; video game systems are always big sellers before the holidays. Anyways, the difference in price as well as function makes this a pointless comparison.

Not only that, but he's a huge supporter of science education for kids. He is a judge at the local Atlanta FIRST Robotics regional.

Facebook succeeded because it's timing was perfect. It was released right about the time when internet officially went mainstream. Drops in high speed internet prices combined with a crop of Web 2.0 applications promising a more dynamic web caused people to digitize a lot of their lives.

Facebook was able to ride this wave by marketing itself as an exclusive club. It was you and your friends home away from home. It beat out MySpace because of its focus on "networks", allowing entire schools of students to quickly have contact with each other.

I think a Facebook killer is unlikely, unless there is another wave of increased internet activity (which I don't see happening any time soon). However, niche social websites are on the grow and are gaining with popularity. Perhaps if enough of these are created, it'll engulf Facebook in popularity. But then Facebook could simply revert back to its "school" niche that it used to focus on three years ago.

I was always under the impression that Dark, Grunge, and Minimal coexisted with each other in this stage.

You can already do this in Chrome. For example, I hit ' to search Wikipedia and hit ; to I'm Feeling Lucky Google.

Preferences -> Basics -> Manage (Next to Default Search)

It's strong economy is based on a limited resource that much of the world is shifting away from. And its social policies remain incompatible with many of the major countries of today.

Also, the surrounding area is torn apart by a never-ending war.

Why Abu Dhabi? If you're really going for an "international" school, why wouldn't you pick somewhere a bit more stable? If neutrality is key, then I'd choose someplace like Geneva.

I think even more surprising than that was the hackish way that they put together the telestrator system. Instead of digging into a native iPad application they loaded on a VNC client and connected it to preexisting software.

I respect and admire their ability to see the simplest way to do things and do it, but I'm also worried that my World Cup viewing experience is held together by duct tape.

You are right, I did not make myself clear. I was trying to keep my description as general as possible as to not make it entirely self centered.

By "diverse" I mean going beyond software engineering and touching on graphics, AI, simulation, AR/VR, hardware architecture, and so on. My main worry is ending up in cookie cutter classes for four years. Then again, my idea of what college is truly like may be skewed due to the romantic idea of higher education that is sold to us in high school.

Thanks for the suggestions!

A lot of this has been done with openFrameworks (http://openframeworks.cc/). It ties together a plethora of open source frameworks including OpenCV with easy to use bindings to indirectly create a somewhat simplified version of C++. If you YouTube openFrameworks, you'll get a lot of demos demonstrating this technology using free libs.

Maybe they will get money from developers of the APIs opting into their service. As in, give us $X a month, and we will handle all your embedding needs and get your content out there to a ton of different services.

Like, think if Embedly was used for some music recommendation application that pulled together results from Last.fm, Pandora, Grooveshark, and Mog. If I was a developer of an up and coming music playing/recommendation site, I would definitely pay some dough to get included in that group for the web application. It's a win-win, the developer of the mashup gets access to a greater variety of content, I, as the developer of the new music service site, get my website's name out there, and Embedly gets money in the process.

"Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said. He added that the company expects to gain a higher percentage of its revenues from software and services in these core markets in the future."

Interesting how this gives us a bit of insight on the shift in business plans even before the iMac was officially announced. Obviously they picked the correct market to focus on going into the 2000s, but I wonder what made them specifically choose the "education and creative markets" 15 years ago.

I guess we disagree on the definition of art. Those disposable chopsticks still required the search for a satisfactory length, width, smoothness, etc. Not to mention, the label and the marketing which equally requires a mastery of human psychology in order to get their product to sell. In this way, the designers have added something great and unique to the world which many people enjoy and use every day. This is art.

An HTML parser requires fast and efficient code to successfully and quickly read the document. Furthermore, the programmer needs to take into account common variations in HTML code as well as handling nested tags and attributes. And taking it a step further, the HTML parser is used to output the trillions of websites that are currently out there in a visible form for a majority of the developed world. In this way, the designers have added something great and unique to the world which many people enjoy and use every day. This is art.

Then again, I am one of those weird people who likes modern art, so I could be a vocal minority.

I think dismissing "programming as art" as irrelevant and hurtful to the community is dangerous. Here we have the tools to create a near-infinite amount of almost everything that can run on a computer. We use code to run complicated robots that can drive a course without human input, solve the most complicated mathematic problems of today, and create artificial intelligence with the ability to learn as it ages. Yet at the same time, we use code to make short chiptune songs and fun small games hacked away in an hour or two.

Wikipedia defines art as "the product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions", and science as "the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories." Why do these two things have to be mutually exclusive? Through creation and exploring, such as in _why's projects, we are further "gathering knowledge" about the limits computers can be used. And at the same time, we are creating art as these programs have had a clear impact on at least the Ruby community.

And, bringing up a more "sciencey" example, if the fact that my handheld calculator can solve complicated algebra and calculus equations in less than a second doesn't "affect [your] senses or emotions", then you need a reality check on just how impressive technology has come in such a short time.

I personally believe that programming is one of the rawest forms of creation imaginable, and therefore must be of some artistic worth. Simply calling it science and moving on does a disservice to those who slaved for so many hours working on their piece of computer science history.

(ahem) the correct quote is "huge success"

My favorite is "mechanical issue". I use it all the time whenever the build team on my robotics team blames me (i.e., the coder) for an issue on the robot.

Build Team: DAVID! The robot is continuously driving in circles whenever we turn it on. Me: Must be a mechanical issue

This is cool but... wasn't it launched like three or four months ago?

I'm a little bit confused over what appears to be a mass hysteria about privacy problems for Facebook. I guess I really don't mind if Facebook tells company X that I listen to Modest Mouse, or lets advertisers know that I play disc golf.

Facebook is still the best communication tool out there for sharing everything (pictures, videos, messages, etc.). If, in return for using an excellent and free service, Facebook sends out a little bit of trivial information about me then so be it. It's really not that different from AdWords.

This sounds a lot like the semi-popular college game 1000 Blank White Cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Blank_White_Cards)

Make sure she has an interest in programming first. If she does, do NOT start her out on a graphical programming language like squeak/scratch. Future compsci kids have romantic visions of hackers frantically typing into a green/black terminal to break into the government mainframe. They will be turned off instantly when they see themselves just dragging and dropping blocks onto a white screen.

Thanks for posting this. I was trying to get through ActiveRecord and DataMapper on non-Rails/Merb/Sinatra ruby programs when I arbitrarily went to HackerNews and saw this: a much simpler solution to what I needed (without using straight up SQL which I find is frustrating to work with and debug).

This advice is good or bad depending on the style of your nephew. If he is really exciting about programming, then he most likely has in his head this idea of hacking away at physical lines of code rather than Alice/Squeak/Scratch.

I'd suggest BlitzBasic in companion to the fantastic book Game Programming for Teens (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598635182/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...). Blitz is cross platform, extremely easy to dive into, and has a great graphics library. Or, if you want to start him out pure, I'd suggest python/pygame.

With HTML 5 browsers should be able to access CPU processing power and other parts of the computer previously available to only native applications. So this is possible.

I think he did an excellent job of this, especially since his target demo are liberal 18-35 year olds who are generally in tune with modern technology.

If I was explaining to my Grandma what net neutrality is, I'm not going to point her to this clip.

Most flash games aren't created with the purpose of making grandiose amounts of money, but rather for fun or for showing off

On the other hand, it's much cheaper than Mathematica!

40 years ago I'm sure email seemed like a "niche tool" used by only the technical savvy. I'm not saying that Wave will replace (or even that it should replace) email, but I do think that, especially as a younger, more technically savvy generation grows up (I'd gander that less than 10% of the students at my high school don't actively use Facebook), and as that younger generation enters the workforce, technologies like this will rise up and become a popular standard. Whether or not it will be Wave remains to be seen.

Perhaps, but I think this is too cynical. You forget about the cost of Flash (assuming you're being legit), the cost of being able to put up stuff on the App Store, how potentially difficult it is to adapt the application to the iPhone, and how annoyingly stringy Apple is about bugs. This will surly shoo away a large amount of amateur Flash-ists.

Plus, you're forgetting that the market is already diluted. The only apps that make it are those which get advertised heavily or a big blog discovers and writes about it. Therefore, these "million of apps" will hardly make a difference in how difficult it is to make significant money developing iPhone apps.

The App Store is not going to become Newgrounds, I promise.

Fantastic story, and it pointed out that there is a beyond excellent graphing calculator on my computer! No more Wolfram Alpha for x= equations!

I think that all the backend of this uses drop.io's (http://drop.io/) API to get the phone number. This (quite cleverly) adds a simple interface to it.

I would also check out Twilio if you're interested (http://www.twilio.com/).