Khan Academy has had exercises for a while now. It's probably one of the best open source projects to work on, in terms of impact and how easy it is to contribute. You only need to know HTML and a little JavaScript. The exercises are modular, so you don't need to understand the whole codebase in order to work on it. Plus, saying "I've contributed to Khan Academy" is a pretty cool thing to put on a resume.
For all the upvotes Khan Academy gets, though, there really aren't that many contributors. I'd encourage everyone reading this with an afternoon to spare to try writing an exercise for KA.
Thanks, I appreciate the advice! This is my first real "startup" attempt, so your perspective is really valuable. I will be referring to this comment a lot in the future. :)
Hi Mike! A few years ago, I created a website where users could submit Flash game walkthroughs. It got about 200 or so guides, but never really went past 1,000 uniques a day. I'm trying to build a similar site right now, and any advice would be appreciated.
1. My main traffic will be from search engines. How can I increase PageRank? No one really blogs about Flash game walkthrough sites.
2. The demographic is mostly teenagers. From personal experience, I know that this group isn't very willing to give up their money. Are they worth anything to advertisers? How can I best monetize this site?
You seem to be saying that if Gates didn't support the decision, then he would try to get Ballmer out. I disagree -- this isn't a big enough issue for that. (Edit: I should clarify. It is a big issue, but Ballmer wasn't acting on his own. Replacing him would accomplish little.) So while Gates is a long term investor, it still makes no sense for him to speak his mind on this at the cost of stock price. It might not affect him much, but why discourage others from investing, even the slightest bit?
It doesn't have to do with political correctness, but rather stock price. If it comes out that Bill Gates thought this was a bad move, Microsoft shares will fall. He'd be hitting himself on the head with a hammer.
You're right about that, but Dvorak is much easier on the hands. The average distance travelled by your fingers is greatly reduced. (It looks like Colemak beats both, though: http://colemak.com/Compare.)
"In addition to Google's own app marketplace, Amazon, Verizon, and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android -- so there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want,"
I'm a sophomore in a high school that allows, but does not require, a laptop. Two of my sisters go to separate schools which require them. I can't speak much about how well that has worked out there, but at the very least they haven't revoked the policy yet.
Last year I brought my laptop to school to take notes on. As someone with terrible handwriting, it was was enormously helpful. I will admit, though, that I did not hesitate to browse the web during class. Sure, the school put up filters, but HotSpot shield (and in my case, an SSH tunnel) could circumvent them with no trouble. A few students spent all of their time on sports websites, only getting minimal notes for the purpose of plausible deniability.
So your old high school should know that it is impossible to block students from messing around. However, laptops can be very useful. At my sisters' schools where laptops are required, teachers are using tools such as Moodle for homework, and email for communication. These make it more convenient for everyone. Whether the latter balances out the former is difficult to judge.
I found that RailsTutorial explains Ruby well enough that I didn't need to learn it separately from Rails. The author covers Ruby concepts not found in PHP (such as ranges and symbols) in chapter four. Everything else could be filled in by looking at the online documentation.
It accepts doc, docx, and pdf and does export to HTML. I'm unsure about what the API rate limit is, though. The FAQs suggest that it can be raised by using a premier account.
> Are you willing to kill 20 people per year to keep safe?
Unfortunately, the answer for most is yes. That's more or less the definition of war.
Edit: Yikes! I'm really getting downvoted here, but no one's saying why. I didn't say I agreed with it! I just said that most people would probably say yes.
Recently on Reddit, someone posted a thread saying that he took medicine that made him forget the 15 minutes after he took it. The number one response for what he should do with this superpower is message a bunch of people on Facebook saying "Would you like to go out? Don't respond if the answer is no." That way, he doesn't feel the shame of rejection if he wakes up in the morning and there are no messages.
I can see this being an example use for your service. If you take out the "someone sent you a message and it failed to go through" part, then it might actually work. People can ask someone out, and just write it off to a failed message if they don't get a response.
As a fellow high-schooler ("one who high-schools"?), I'm impressed! You certainly seem to be doing everything that I wish I were doing right now.
This is new found motivation for me to start working on the Rails app that's been in the back of my head for a while now. Here's hoping that I can sustain that motivation long enough to build a finished product.
It seems Kongregate supports HTML5 games. Perhaps you could try hosting them there?