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Head First Rails Screenshot-sm 57

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Anita Kuno writes "I suggested Head First Rails to a friend before I even finished it. He was asking me questions that I didn't have time to answer, and I knew the book could explain better than I. My friend is impatient, and I was uncertain what his experience would be. At first he was frustrated, but I assured him the answers were in the book. The incremental style of Head First Rails includes some exercises that are designed to fail to reinforce the learning process. I was confident that his answer would be found in the pages and he trusted me enough to go back and continue the exercises. He later told me he is very happy with the book and grateful that I suggested it." Read on for the rest of Anita's review.

Comment Re:Flawed premise (Score 5, Insightful) 458

by NoTheory (#27638517) Attached to: Reflections On the Less-Cool Effects of Filesharing
The original post AND all these comments miss the point.

File sharing is a means of distribution , NOT marketing .

If you are trying to get popular by being the top download on The Pirate Bay, then you're doing it wrong. In my experience, there is very little horizontal movement between pieces of content on torrent trackers. You go to the torrent tracker with something mind, you find it, you download it, you're done. Other media like SoulSeek are much better as an exploratory sharing system.

Nor are popular bands popular just because they're signed to major labels (otherwise Poe one of my favorite artists would be considerably better known than she is). They are popular because major labels and other soul crushing pieces of media machinery market them heavily through all the things that people are connected to. Television shows, movies, radio, the blogosphere, etc.

If you want to be popular, make yourself notable AND easy to get. Torrent trackers take care of the second bit. You've gotta take care of the first bit.
Worms

Twitter Gets Slammed By the StalkDaily XSS Worm 145

Posted by Soulskill from the tweety-bird-gets-the-worm dept.
CurtMonash writes "Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims' accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers. Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and it was created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. More information can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole."

Comment Re:Ruby? (Score 4, Insightful) 191

by NoTheory (#27382083) Attached to: Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster
Er, way to troll? If you'd like to do your ridiculous hello world you can stick to:

puts "i like beans"

And it's really unclear what "it" you're referring to. Because Ruby, for me, is a good blend of the things i wanted from Perl and Lisp with a side of Object Orientation. I get all the laziness and conveniences of Perl, and i can do all the crazy stuff i'd want to do with Lisp. So imo, you're way off base.

Comment Re:Why MacRuby Matters? (Score 4, Insightful) 191

by NoTheory (#27381945) Attached to: Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster
MacRuby matters for a lot of reasons. Early benchmarks aren't one of them. http://blog.headius.com/2009/03/on-benchmarking.html

MacRuby's potential for Cocoa integration is fantastic and great, and something i very very much want to see.

It's not clear however what relationship benchmarks at this stage (with an incomplete implementation) will actually correspond to in the future. They are a total red herring for discussion.

Look at MacRuby on the merits! not the benchmarks!
Operating Systems

Red Hat CEO Questions Relevance of Desktop Linux 615

Posted by Soulskill from the year-of-something-on-the-something dept.
snydeq writes "Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC. 'First of all, I don't know how to make money on it,' Whitehurst said, adding that he was uncertain how relevant the desktop itself will be in five years given advances in cloud-based and smartphone computing, as well as VDI. 'The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age. I'd rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.' Despite increasing awareness that desktop Linux is ready for widespread mainstream adoption, fellow panelists questioned the practicality of switching to Linux, noting that even some Linux developers prefer Macs to Linux. 'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'"

Microsoft Launches Free Web Software Eco-System 133

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-i'm-sure-it-will-be-bug-and-bloat-free dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes."
Power

20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success 373

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed-lie-lie-again dept.
New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. "Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. 'In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect,' says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. 'Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice ... you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,' he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of 'low-energy nuclear reactions,' and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion."
XBox (Games)

Increase In Xbox 360 E74 Problems 346

Posted by Soulskill from the revenge-of-the-red-ring dept.
Xbm360 writes "According to data collected by Joystiq as well as Google Trends, there's been a steady rise in reports and discussion of the so-called E74 error on Xbox 360 consoles since August of last year. The E74 error is related to video problems caused by either a faulty AV connector or, more often, a loosened ANA/HANA scaling chip. This is not the first time the Xbox 360 has experienced technical issues; in recent years many people have complained about scratched discs and over-heating consoles — the 'red ring of death.'"

Comment Clue: (Score 2, Interesting) 91

by NoTheory (#26797687) Attached to: Telling Fact From Fantasy In the World of Apple Rumors
Consumers don't care about apple rumors. They can't buy rumors.

The only care about what products are available. Only fanbois and panicky investors care about rumors (normal investors should be in it for the long haul anyway).

Sort of an interesting read on why we should ignore mac rumors (and mind you i own 4 macs in my house and use them for dev, so i love 'em just as much as anyone), but otherwise a pretty pointless piece of reading.

I guess it's still better than idle.

Comment Re:Bitter (Score 1) 197

by NoTheory (#26528173) Attached to: Watch the Obama Inauguration With Moonlight
Of course I don't think any of them imagined that it would have any effect on the bitterness over at Slashdot.

And i'm sure that they, like myself, were totally shocked at the rising of the sun again today. Can you imagine the odds!

TBH, i'm surprised to find so many positive comments (i, semi-jokingly, wonder about astroturfing).
Image

Poll Finds 23 Percent of Texans Think Obama is Muslim Screenshot-sm 562

Posted by samzenpus from the the-world-is-flat dept.
A University of Texas poll has found that 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim. Only 45 percent of the people polled correctly identified Obama as a Protestant Christian. Nationwide, the number of people who believe in the "Secret Muslim Conspiracy" is about the same as those who believe that the moon landing was faked (5-10 percent), which makes the high numbers in Texas unusual.
Books

Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks 323

Posted by timothy from the sobering-thought-about-checks-in-general dept.
Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)
Image

Math Prof Uncovers Secret Chord Screenshot-sm 177

Posted by samzenpus from the with-a-little-help-from-my-mathematician dept.
chebucto writes "The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. Dr. Brown used Fourier transforms to find the notes in the chord, and deduced that another George — George Martin, the Beatles producer — also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."
Education

Wikipedia For Schools DVD Released 132

Posted by timothy from the nothing-naughty dept.
David Gerard writes "SOS Children's Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 6000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date."

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