The only reason I still have my fake profile is because pretty much every site out there has 'connect with facebook' so it makes it super easy to get access to content that's only viewable by registered users. I basically provide 0 value to facebook in terms of my activities since I never visit my actual profile. I wonder how many of those millions of users are like me.
Picking on Khan is a little too easy. He is not an entrenched institution and Khan himself has never claimed that his goal is to replace the classroom with his own videos. His videos are just supposed to be reviews and overviews of what teachers should be teaching in class anyway so if the teachers do things right then Khan's videos will just be helpful supplements for studying for tests and reinforcing material the student already knows. If NAS and other institutions designed to keep education on track were doing their job then there would be no void being filled by Salman Khan's videos so instead of scrutinizing Khan Academy Mr. Clemens should really be taking a closer look at NAS and other academic institutions.
Download eclipse and just get started if you want to learn java. It's got plugins for practically everything and you can learn the low level details when it becomes necessary.
I think this is great. Microsoft is having a lot of platform adoption issues and this will open up their ecosystem to a lot more developers so they can focus on adding value where it counts.
Just goes to show you nobody ever gets social features right in the web 2.0 landscape. One of the reasons I've avoided github is because it feels like facebook for code geeks.
Not just any defense contractor, Lockheed Martin. They're practically another branch of the government and wouldn't exist without tax payers. So technically US tax payers just bought a 10 million dollar toy.
So far Scala is the only language I have looked at that does a decent job of mixing object oriented and functional constructs without making your eyes bleed. Nemerle seems pretty nifty based on it's feature list but I'm wondering what programmers they are targeting. .NET programmers seem pretty happy with C#/F# so they don't have much incentive to adopt another language.
What is it about math and physics majors that makes them think they somehow learn things more 'real' or relevant to the real world? Funny thing is this kind of attitude is way too common among the science majors. For some reason they think their degree is more real than the next guy's. Must have something to do with lack of emphasis on the humanitarian subjects. Before people jump the gun I should mention I have a graduate degree in mathematics and I paid for it what it was worth: 0 dollars.