mrduncan

Initial thoughts - It looks really nice, very clean and organized compared to most education related software.

It seems like there are a lot of settings that can be updated, but what about just picking good defaults and cleaning up the unnecessary ones all together? For example, why would I want to turn Enable iCal formatted feed for my Calendar. off? Does Enable my RSS feeds for upcoming assignments and tests. do? pull in other RSS feeds, or make my rss feeds available? If it makes mine available, why would I ever want to turn it off? If I have a profile picture, who gets to see it and where is it displayed?

Editing course grades (clicking on the numbers) didn't seem very intuitive to me. It took a little clicking around to realize that I could even update them. Same thing with the Mark as complete button on assignments, it looks like the button is disabled.

Hope that helps, I only took a quick look at the demo so don't take me too seriously.

I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.

DHH just make it 57% less enterprisey - http://github.com/lifo/docrails/commit/c833bd79ecb1d60a2618c...

Indeed it is (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...). I'm not aware of them ever attempting to enforce it though. There are plenty of examples of companies which hold patents that they've never enforced (IBM comes to mind).

I can't recommend RVM highly enough. Not only will it let you easily switch between MRI (the standard ruby interpreter) versions. It'll also let you switch just as easily between other interpreters such as JRuby, Rubinius, Ruby Enterprise Edition, etc.

Soon (hopefully that was vague enough). According to DHH - "Rails 3 beta is almost ready for public testing. We're just hammering out the last bugs in Bundler. Stay tuned." [1].

As far as I can tell from watching commits/tweets/etc, the finishing touches are being put on now. It sounds like there is still some work to be done on Bundler as well as finishing up javascript handling. Other than that, I believe that all of the big pieces are in place and ready for a beta.

Hopefully someone on the core team who reads HN can chime in with a better response.

1. http://twitter.com/dhh/status/8522612662

More specifically, the release notes were compiled by Mikel Lindsaar (and props to Engine Yard who paid him to do it) [1].

1. http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core/browse_threa...

I completely agree with you, but in the interest of lively discussion I'll play devils advocate for a second here and point out Gordon [1] which is an open-source flash implementation written in Javascript and Gnash which is an open-source flash movie player [2].

[1] http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon

[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

I'm sure I've said it before, but if you're interested in running I really recommend checking out the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...

I'd really like to hear joshu's (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=joshu) take on this.

I thought there were some really interesting tidbits in there and I enjoyed reading about the office environment. About the information that they're hiring - has there ever been a time when Google wasn't hiring? (I mean that seriously, not to be snarky.)

I'd recommend starting with the PCI DSS. That standard is required by pretty much all card companies, and compliance is enforced by a self-assessment checklist and/or security assessor. If you plan on storing card information, you must be in compliance with this standard.

PCI DSS Standard: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_...

More info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu...

I really recommend that you check out the book Born to Run [1] which examines barefoot running and how we've evolved. It's been a while since I read it, but I believe it even includes a chapter about persistence hunting [2].

1. http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

It doesn't look like it's actually available yet.

The developer page (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/) where the "Get Started" link takes you is still showing everything for the 3.1 SDK.

That reminds me of Biz and Ev of Twitter talking at Startup School about when they were first playing around with it (I wish I could remember how it was described). In essence, Biz said that it was neat but not very useful to which Ev replied "neither is iced cream".

Just because it's a toy and not a tool doesn't mean it's worthless.

Edit: After re-reading your post, I'm not sure that is what you were saying. Apologies if I misrepresented you.

Interesting that McGraw-Hill isn't listed as one of their book partners. Were they dropped after their CEO opened his mouth yesterday I wonder? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079109

It'd be a great opportunity for anyone doing video. I think the real reason that they don't stream live is that the video quality usually isn't that great. By releasing the videos later they can provide higher quality and give it a more polished feel.

Not quite what you were looking for, but there is an amazing amount of info on Wikipedia.

List of colors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors

Crayola timeline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Crayola

I'm not sure if you're trying to bash Microsoft here or not, but I'm going to assume you were genuinely curious.

The reason that most people are following him (anecdotally anyway) is that he's a well known (the most well known?) and successful person in the tech space who has just joined. There isn't any reason why he can't turn off seeing "@ replies" from people he doesn't follow either - doing that will only show tweets from people you follow. Twitter's settings are pretty configurable for users who have tons of followers.

Link: http://twitter.com/billgates

I assume (based on his first few tweets) that he'll be using it to promote his foundation primarily. I selfishly wish that he would use it less for self promotion and more for just odd ideas/thoughts, I think it would be really interesting to get into his mind occasionally.

CrunchBase has (what seems to be) a pretty complete list: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/aol

Fair enough, I should have first stated that I've never tried DVORAK (so take my advice with a block of salt). What about giving it a week then? I suppose my point was that you won't know how hard it is until you give it a shot for a little while. People all learn differently, the only way to know is to just give it a shot.

Not to be snarky but I'm curious what you're doing that you need extremely fast typing for? I rarely find that typing is my bottleneck, it's usually my brain.

That said, why not give it a shot for a day or two? At worst, you'll realize it is going to take forever to regain speed - at best, you're well on your way to using the new layout.

One of my favorites as well. What really fascinates me about it is it's length, it can't be more than a couple of pages printed yet it introduces a very powerful concept.

I'm not sure if it's your site or not but auto-play music is one way to ensure that I close the tab immediately and never return.

I have to wonder if there have been some recent changes which are causing all kinds of issues. Just a few days ago, Ryan Tomayko twittered about it completely ignoring Github's robots.txt - http://twitter.com/rtomayko/statuses/7685967826

It's unfortunate that he had to use such a link-bait headline on an otherwise very insightful essay. A more accurate title would have been "Don't give money to only Haiti".

Fair enough, thanks for the explanation.

I hate to say this, but how is this hacker news? A (good) tutorial, sure; but I fail to see why this is getting upvoted. What is the rationale for the upvotes?

In 2003, hiker Aron Ralston amputated his own arm with a pocket knife after a boulder fell and pinned him down.

http://hike.mountainzone.com/2003/news/html/030502_amputate-...