trun

The site is running kind of slow so I just did the first couple levels...

The directions (e.g. forward vs left) were a little confusing as you can't tell which way the character is facing at first. Not a problem after level 1 though.

I second gerggerg's suggestion of step-by-step animation, along with highlighting as it runs each line of code. That would really help drive home the point for non-coders.

Are you capturing incorrect responses to see what common sticking points are? For example, I thought .feel() returned a string at first before eventually having to look at the tip.

Awesome idea though! I've been working on something very similar that I hope to share soon.

I was just working on something like this for a coding competition. Players submit code to compete head to head. Sandboxing is required to prevent players from modifying the game state and/or the other players' state. That's just one example that comes to mind...

Exactly. Here's what the US copyright office says[1]...

"Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form."

[1] http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

Here's the part I find interesting. YouTube's content filtering system would have required UMG to upload a copy of the video (or at least have a copy on hand to generate the fingerprint)...

"YouTube has engineered a filtering system enabling rights holders to upload music and videos they own to a “fingerprinting” database."

Even if UMG isn't guilty of abuse of the DMCA takedown system, might they be guilty of copyright infringement for having made an unauthorized copy of the Megavideo and uploading it as their own? I would really like to know more about how YouTube's fingerprinting system works.

This was more of a teaser for a future talk and contains very little data that's relevant from a development / design perspective. The only interesting stats are on a slide at 4:30 where he talks a little about the data model and shows a few benchmarks.

Meh.

This is fantastic! I've been hoping for something like this for quite some time. Any plans for an android version?

I'm also curious - how does it fetch metadata for songs? It looks like it all happens on demand from the app. I've got about 40GB of music in Dropbox so I imagine this might be a slow / API call intensive process.

More than likely it goes right back into user acquisition (ads) to drive more traffic to their games.

I hope this encourages Dropbox to venture further into streaming services. I store my entire music library in Dropbox, but I've never come across a feasible way to access that media on the go / from my mobile devices.

On the other hand, Cloud Drive nailed that use case perfectly, but getting my music into the system would require lots of tedious manual uploading.

Did they...?

"By contrast, Apple’s new cloud-music service — created with the blessing of the big labels, only uploads the songs it doesn’t know — and uses master files. In fact, if a customer has a low-quality copy of a song from one of those labels, Apple will automatically upgrade the song to a better one."

Besides, this ruling has very little effect on iCloud since it's already sanctioned by the music labels. What else would you have liked for them to say about iCloud?

"...one day your washing machine, stove, or even car infotainment system will run on webOS"[1]

If this is truly the direction they're heading then webOS is dead to me anyhow. Any further courting of developers is just salt in the wound.

edit: Don't get me wrong, I'm all for open sourcing Enyo and webOS, I just get the complete opposite vibe from HP's actions this week. They've basically said "screw you" both to die hard consumers and developers of the webOS platform.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/16/hp-looking-to-appliances-au...

WebOS has always been the most impressive mobile OS IMO, it's just never had a competent owner or decent hardware to back it up. I hope they do something with it.

This, of course, is coming from one of the suckers that paid $599 for a Touchpad on launch day, so take it with a grain of salt.

One of my favorites is The Fog of War (2003) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_fog_of_war

Besides being an incredible individual, I found Robert McNamara's lessons to be surprisingly relevant to the startup world.

Finally! Good to know that somebody else was annoyed by this bug too.

We tried this at our old office -- wasn't a huge fan. It tends to bubble up and doesn't erase well. Our new office heavily uses IdeaPaint, and assuming you can swallow the cost, it's an infinitely better solution.

I tend to think its the latter. If you look at the actual text of the bill...

(a) Novelty; Prior Art- A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--

(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention;

... it seems to indicate that prior art is still applicable when considering the validity of the patent. However, it's still not clear to me if prior art can be applied after the fact, or just during that 9 month period.

This article doesn't seem to mention anything about an actual arrest, it just says he agreed to meet with / surrender to police.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/07/wikileaks-us...

That article seems to have a bit more info, but it's still doesn't seem like he's actually in custody yet.

Maybe I just haven't got the update yet, but this looks the same behavior as always...

I believe most mobile devices already have unique device IDs built in. Perhaps they're not accessible through JavaScript, but it sounds like this technology already goes beyond the web browser anyways.

I was just looking for something like this, literally about 30 seconds before you posted it. Thanks!

Simply clearing cookies has never been an effective way to keep yourself anonymous online. Between HTML5's DOM storage, Flash's Local Shared Objects, Silverlight's Local Storage and new techniques like browser fingerprinting (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) there are much more effective ways for advertisers to keep track of you. Bottom line, if you don't want to be tracked/targeted by advertisers online you should be using tools like BetterPrivacy or simply using the advertiser's opt-out functionality. Some trackers like BlueKai (http://tags.bluekai.com/registry) actually offer a great deal of transparency into what they're tracking about you and allow you to control how that data is used.

"If you made it this far still expecting LOLcats, I'm sorry. I lied."

Sad.

It is, but you're paying for the player / CMS / advertising tools as well. It's a lot more than just a CDN.

They really glossed over the sound, which is one of the more painful aspects of a Linux HTPC in my opinion. If you're planning on usual digital audio instead of stereo sound, be prepared for a rather nasty battle.

I always recommend Brightcove (http://www.brightcove.com). It's relatively cheap and has an amazing feature set. Everything is customizable and accessible via an API and even works in sans-Flash environments like the iPhone.

I've been looking at SLAMD lately - http://www.slamd.com/. It's also distributed and can be controlled largely by a built in web interface. With many of the other distributed tools (JMeter, The Grinder) you have to muck around with the Java desktop app which is less than intuitive.

We have this at my office and I'm not a huge fan. Mostly because the little air bubbles are really annoying and nearly impossible to avoid. The surface also doesn't clean up that well. Very much prefer ideapaint - http://www.ideapaint.com/

Looks great Ryan! It's certainly come a long way in the last couple years.

First of all, this article is three years old. Second of all, Marilee Jones blatantly lied about her credentials for 28 years. Yes, she did a fantastic job while she was at MIT, but that doesn't change the fact that she lied. This is not an issue of credentialism, it's an issue of trust and integrity. As far as I'm concerned, what she did is on par with the kid from Harvard who was recently charged with fabricating his life story...

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_gl...

Firefox says the same thing.

Dropbox on the list at 985. Impressive.