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This appears to be a defensive maneuver in Apple's litigation with Lodesys. You obviously didn't read the article so I'll quote part of it here: "The idea is, in general, very similar to the Lodsys patent, however, it is much more specific. If Apple was granted the rights to the patent, both sides could easily challenge each other's patents. The question, of course, would also be what Apple would do, if this patent is granted, about Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry developers? Most likely nothing, as there are countless iOS developers who offer their apps for multiple platforms and Apple may not have an interest in upsetting them."

I'm pretty sure the blur is radiation interference from the monitor.

I bought one of these machines around that time for a design company I was interning at. It's an Intergraph, obviously I have no idea which model. These machines were built to order, so it could have anything in there. That multimedia keyboard brings back memories, prolly the worst $100 I ever spent.

This machine would be running WinNT 3 or 4, most definitely not the MIPS build.

Did you actually play with the url? It pulls in the dependencies in one file, in any order. The genius part is that it's creating cached custom dependencies for each page that could potentially be shared by other pages. This is the most efficient dependency management approach I've seen. For sites that could have hundreds to thousands of pages, css/js asset & dependency management is so critical.

Something doesn't need to be difficult to implement to be extremely useful.

Screw the layout, whoever came up with the dependency manager is a friggin' genius.

<script src="/js/lib/rwd-images.js,lib/respond.min.js,lib/modernizr.custom.min.js,globe-define.js,globe-controller.js"></script>

So yahoo.com is using jQuery now? There's like 10 references to YUI and zero for jQuery in the source... interesting algorithm.

For me FB is better for prototypin code. You have the expanded console that allows me to write code quickly on pages that I may not have direct access to (like production pages). I feel like I'm using a text editor. Webkit debugger is much more limited in this regard.

They should have been working on these issues a long time ago. I think they are far more important than many of the new features that came with v5. The only thing holding many of us back from using FF is the memory issue. Good thing the FB debugger is so awesome, because that's the only thing that keeps bringing me back at this point.

I also agree with every single one of the author's points. I've had an Android device since the day the G1 launched. Today I have the G2.

First off, for both devices I needed to run cyanogen mod. The devices were completely unusable for me without it. The only acceptable Android devices are the Nexus' or ones with custom roms.

I have not purchased an iPhone, but I do have a 3g touch and an iPad 2. I have to say, I believe Apple's multitasking is vastly superior to Androids. The reason being is stability. "Real" multitasking is great and all, but if you can't make it stable then it just plain sucks. My experience is that apps open in the background frequently FC, take up too much memory and slow the device down. Sometimes finding the errant process is near impossible and forces me to reboot.

Apple's suspend style multitasking ALWAYS ensures that every app is getting the full resources of the device. The other day I was playing Dead Space on the ipad and downloading 6 other apps I just bought... the game never hiccuped, slowed don't or degraded in any noticeable way. I see why some people don't care for it, but for me the benefit in performance makes it vastly superior. On the topic of downloading, I could have 50 apps queued up in the app store and it will never fail. The android fucking market always fucks up the downloads. It's completely maddening.

Dealing with device support just plan blows. Nvidia has their own freaking market for their 'optimized' games. Netflix is rolling out only on select devices because they don't know how the fuck it will work on everything out there- fortunately the G2 was supported early. Amazon has the best market by far, but I still don't know how the hell to use it.

Talking about openness... I have to install cyanogenmod to get any semblance of open, and that's not even the case. Recently someone had a patch to spoof a phones personal data so that apps that steal your info and sell it would be grabbing junk. It appears that Cyanogen is playing nice and not including the patch to not piss off Google and the carriers. This is only as open as what the carriers and google will put up with. It's no different than jailbreaking the iphone (aside from that fact that you can actually build "some of" android from the source, but what normal person can do that?).

In the end I still have an android device for one simple reason... economics. I'm on t-mobile and my rates are far below att & verizon. I got my g2 for free as well. I tether my data connection (to the iPad) with no issues. Even though the G2 kinda sucks, it is good enough. Justifying paying $299 for a 32gb iphone and paying the jacked up rates of verizon comes down to simply not caring enough for a gadget. The iPad is a phenomenal value, the iPhone just isn't. I'll re-evaluate the situation when my contract ends in a year and a half. For now I'll be content with amazing turn-by-turn gps, decent browser, tethering, a few 3rd party apps and a pretty good phone experience- it's the best value out there. Boils down to taking a dirt cheap "7" over an expensive "10".

I think the new version has an updated section for the rails 3.1 assets engine...

...Oops, I thought this was Learn Ruby the Easy Way with an introduction by DHH and Ryan Bigg. Sorry.

My brother, who is a novice programmer, picked up the rails basics in a couple weeks (with some help, of course). He was able to create the app he set out to, going from zero experience to a fully functioning app in 2 months.

If you are having trouble with rails, it's for two possible reasons... 1) you won't accept that it's opinionated software and throw out your preconceptions or 2) you're just not trying hard enough. The amount of books, screencasts, tutorials, podcasts out there for rails is just insane. I'm completely jealous these things weren't around in '06 when I started.

Edit: Should have mentioned that he did the Michael Hartl screencasts/tutorial (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/)

I agree strongly with the Author's issues with presenting history in this manner. History is a living document of clues that are merely interpreted by us- very little is fact.

I've been studying Egyptology for about 6 years now and it's amazing what perspectives have changed in that time. We're even starting to see stories now that are challenging the "Out of Africa" theory. Whenever I hear a teacher/lecturer describe something historical as fact, it makes me cringe because so much is left to interpretation.

Khan doing history in this manner is dangerous. But at the same time, the ways our schools do history is dangerous as well. Presenting singular perspectives and presenting them as fact only breeds misinformation.

I believe khan academy is superb for math and sciences, especially for quick overviews of concepts. But the format is absolutely terrible for presenting historical topics. Understanding history requires reading from many resources and coming to logical conclusions. A copy/paste job from wikipedia is simply pathetic.

Thanks zizzler, now I don't need to buy the book ;-)

I've been having a ton of issues with Apple myself. I've had account issues where I keep getting denied access to many downloads in the dev center despite having paid the $99.

Their support has been atrocious, it generally takes 2-3 weeks for a response. When I do get a response they ask for a screenshot despite the fact I've given them the error message verbatim, with error code.

I had to buy x-code4 through the app store because this issue is going on 3 months- still waiting on a refund.

This isn't meant to be an apple bashing post. I'm pissed about these issues, but I don't think it's because Apple doesn't care. I think it's because they are trying to cope with enormous amounts of support tickets and are probably having trouble hiring qualified people to address them. I'm guessing that Google is experiencing a similar problem x10. There's a market demand to get these products out asap, but the infrastructure just isn't ready yet.

Professional is not a word I would use for Zed. Someone that's professional would not be as confrontational and antagonistic as Zed is. He seems to be that way, often to his own detriment.

With that said, the aggressive side makes him a very unique individual that many of us highly respect. I don't aspire to be like the guy, but he sure does motivate me to step up my standards and accomplish more. Zed's just way more interesting than Professional.

I guess I was most amazed that in 1991 Apple's profits were greater than Microsoft's. I was playing Ultima 6 and King's Quest V back then... I didn't know anything existed but the IBM PC.

At 55 seconds he says the Toll Booth "has the time our son was born". This man achieved a work of art that is far from sad. It's very obvious that this has tons of sentimental value, but it is also a wonderful work of art. I hope I can achieve a long-term disciplined accomplishment like this in my lifetime (my children notwithstanding).

What makes dropbox special is that I can access it on my home iMac, my work macbook, my linux netbook, my android phone, my iPad and the web interface when I feel so inclined. On top of that, I select different directories to sync on each machine and often share file between friends and colleagues.

An uber simple interface that supported on every major platform is what makes it so awesome.

I've been using rubular since it's inception. There are lots of sites/apps for building regex's, but rubular has always been my goto guy. To the developer, thanks for an awesome site!

"She has this thing where she makes us do reviews that are about 10 questions and then she calls us up to the board to answer each question putting us on the spot."

My 10th grade geometry/trig teacher did this to us. Confidence issues I had as a result of this class lasted many years. I got over it and have done well for myself, but I still have some resentment.

I guess I'm just amazed that they (rails core) haven't learned from the RJS mistake. These 'fads' to get around JS syntax are terrible as standards.

What is so wrong with writing idiomatic, unobtrusive JS? I personally don't care for JS syntax (compared to the beauty of ruby and haml), but that's life... JS syntax my be ugly, but it can be written elegantly.

I've actually been reading this book over the past few months. I just stumbled across it while looking for info on neural networks in Ruby. The book takes a very clinical approach, but the code samples are surprisingly accessible.

I haven't bought the book yet (I read it on my iPad), but I will eventually buy it if I can't find a decent digital download. For some reason I'm so much more inclined to buy books offered for free than not.

So what caused the massive Slashdot dropoff? I generally gravitate to where the most intellectual conversations are (and hacker news is that place), but Slashdot has been consistently decent for ages.

I will say, Slashdot seems to be mostly made up of a cranky, close-minded older crowd that fails to comprehend current trends. Maybe it's the user base that's the problem?

Not only that, but the guy continues to use the same install of windows after discovering the issue. He then has more issues with the laptop and returns it for ANOTHER Samsung.

First off, if I even remotely sense that there is malware on my machine it gets an immediate format. Second, why in Thor's name would you buy from Samsung again? I get the impression he's a guy with a little knowledge that thinks he has this whole computer thing figured out. If you are going to make these types of allegations and publish them, you have to approach it scientifically and verify your results.

So are we now encouraging mobile developers to try and develop many crap applications, the sum of which will give an impressive financial return? What happened to concept of developing a great product that actually takes some effort?

It seems to me that these developers are spreading themselves extremely thin to get many apps into the marketplace with the h̶o̶p̶e̶ prayer that some catch on. Imo, this is a crappy business model which just pollutes the marketplace.

I know the goal/dream is to become self sufficient and control your own destiny, but do it with a great product that you believe in, not with bs e-books and movie quote soundboards.

I read an article a few years ago with the legitimate television manufacturers predicting this exact situation... Visio was using really cheap compoments (like knock off capacitors) and taking whatever shortcuts they could. They predicted that these components would have a very short life, resulting in dead tv's after only a couple years.

After reading that (and having experience doing my own motherboard mods), I knew to stay the hell away from their products. So I spent $75 more. TV's are NOT something that should be dispensable- they should last as long as possible. They are environmentally invasive and the resources they exploit are too precious to just throw away.

Without a doubt, I would say all advice on my college education. The first bad advice I got was that I absolutely needed to go to a small school that would give me more personal time in the classroom. This ended up stressing me greatly in school... I wouldn't find out until long after I graduated that I excel greatly in environments that require me to investigate and learn on my own with some guidance.

The other poor advice was that county college is only for loosers. My advisors and teachers impressed this on me bigtime. In retrospect, county college would have been awesome to buy me a year or so until I was able to maturely handle a challenging curriculum. I needed some time to learn how to learn and gain some confidence in my ability to learn.

I love the scene at the end where Stallman is going on one of his gnu rants on stage, and linus brings his kids out completely upstaging him.

This is one of my favorite documentaries, would definitely like to see a sequel.

So why are most of you comparing rails docs to python and php? Rails is a web framework, not a language. Look at the ruby api for an apples to apples comparison.

My feelings... If you told us you were the author of some amazing open source project that solves some impressively difficult problem in your area of expertise, then I'd believe the BS about how smart you think you are. You don't get into companies like Google or Facebook right out of college just because you think you are smart or because you have an impressive education. You need to have the complete package, and that includes tangible experience- by that I mean experience you have something to show for- and great communication skills.

It sounds like you need to improve your immigration status to achieve your goals. Seems logical that you should focus on that. Are you working on open source projects that exploit your abilities? If you are so hungry to solve problems then do it for free for a while. You will get noticed by important people if your work is good. If you get a good opportunity, then take a job that will stand out on your resume. Do your interesting work on your own time.

I generally don't like to harp on the open source thing, but it is the perfect mechanism to vault you into the position you want. As far as your age is concerned... yes, age is most definitely a factor. The fact that you haven't even finished your education and already have a laundry list of jobs you have no interest in shows quite a bit of immaturity. Your post read like an episode of Property Virgins.

I remember following a guy named Jose Valim during google's summer of code a few years ago. The kid was completely unknown, but made a name for himself very quickly in the ruby world. He took on many open source ruby projects to help solve common problems for the rails community. The kid just finished his phd and is already on the rails core team. I'm amazed at how much he's accomplished in such a short period of time. That's the kind of guy I look at for inspiration. He doesn't waste a second, he just gets shit done and gets it done well. If you can focus on that then all the other details will sort themselves out. You need to create your own opportunities.

Good luck!