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Your odds of finding a dev that is 20x over the competition are pretty close to zero. I've worked with several devs at different companies who thought they were that great and what they produced was always horrifyingly bad. Usually along the lines of: "That's some great code there guys, it doesn't do what the client needs, trying to hack it into something the client can use will only take us 3x longer, but it is neat-o."
I'd rather have 20 devs to bounce ideas off of and to try new things than 1 rockstar.
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The developer skills are multiple.
Some are great coders.
Some are great documenters.
Some are great debugger.
Some are great finishers.
Some are great analyst.
... probably many more
In my experience when someone is super skilled in one of those skill he will then be really poor in others.
In my opinion there is no such thing as a great developer.
There are great teams though.
A great team of developers is a team where team members have complementary skills and respect each others strength and weaknesses.
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This is an extremely opinionated article. I am sure that there is a big advantage in hiring better developers, but he does not justify the 20x. Without backing data, the article is basically useless. Why not say 100x. He could have. Maybe not as beleivable. Also, what is even better, is hiring a manager that can create better developers. How much better would be a manager that can create a successful development group than even a great developer. There is a saying I saw: Learn from other people's successes, not their failures, and definately not your own failure.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Help us Rockstar Ninja Developer. You're our only hope!
You also need to not see a Ph.D. on my resume and then judge my book by its cover. I am a dweeb, but a very humble dweeb.
Sincerely Yours,
Brian Hart
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Whenever there is a conversation about the future of computing, the discussion inevitably turns to the notion of a “File.” After all, most tablets and phones don’t show the user anything that resembles a file, only Apps that contain their own content, tucked away inside their own opaque storage structure. This is wrong. Interoperability? We don't need no stinking interoperability!
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With Friday being the fifth anniversary of the iPhone’s release—five years since those initial crazy lines, since the debate about whether Apple could just walk right in and change the phone industry, and the rest—it’s worth considering what the world was like back then. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.
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Apple’s new MacBook Pros have absolutely great displays, but they need every single pixel they have, because the truth of the matter is that Apple’s got a long way to go before it catches its display tech up to the incredible power of human vision. And that’s a good thing, because it means we’ve got a lot to look forward to. Eagle eye for the developer guy.
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Cult of Mac wrote: And that’s a good thing, because it means we’ve got a lot of fleecing to look forward to.
FTFY
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The history of the remote, as it's widely and improperly understood, began in 1950 with a Zenith device called the Lazy Bones. The new, hand-held thumb-clicker was attached to a set by a long cord, and allowed customers to "take it easy" by working a receiver from their seat. After more than six decades, the Lazy Bones is still how most of us understand the remote control—as a tool of relaxation and a means for doing nothing at all. Wait, what does this red button do?
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Remotes are convenient up to a point. I have three in my lounge for the DVD player, TV and satellite box. They have different form factors and worse, the one for the DVD has so many buttons you need a magnifying glass to read the text below them. If the technology itself can't solve the problem then the problem is better left unsolved.
The so-called self-learning operation is also hit-and-miss. A button pressed on the DVD player can interfere with the TV. I don't need so many buttons; but the endless pursuit to make devices do more requires the manufacturers to throw all sorts of features that nobody asked for or wants or needs. You see the same in cars. Car manufacturers exploit powerful computing to give your central console all sorts of features. The difference between the UI and function is wide.
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68).
"I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
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We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the “add features” option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade. It looks like you're upgrading Windows. Would you like help?
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"We are making it so that even grandma can kick this process off and royally screw up her machine" is how I read it. Can't wait for all of my relatives to start calling me because they upgraded their piece-of-junk, barely able to run Windows XP machine to Windows 8, despite the warnings. I can't see how it could possibly go wrong.
Remind me to be out of the country when Windows 8 comes out. Any of you folks in England need a consultant for a couple months? I'll give you a good discount.
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So, you’re hosted in a single zone, and if you’re in US-East presumably went down last night. Stop it. AWS has seven regions across the world, three of which are in the US. Each region is split in up to five avaliabilty zones. You need to use more than just mulitple zones if you want to stay up during one of these outages. Cross region is the answer. Continental redundancy is your friend.
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The first music composed by computer considered good enough for top-class musicians to play is to be performed to mark the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
----
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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So you want to do some DirectX immediate mode rendering in your C#/XAML app ? Let me walk you through how to do that using the SharpDx library
Combining XAML and DirectX is an excellent msdn article that talks about what is possible with DirectX and XAML. Unfortunately there are no examples and what information there is available is targeting the XAML/C++ world. I wanted to do this for us managed programmers!
SharpDx is a very thin library that exposes the DirectX api’s for use in C# WinRT apps Smile . It exposes the DirectX API’s nearly 1-to-1 with no higher level abstraction (like what XNA is). We will use this library to render DirectX content in our XAML/C# apps via the new controls mentioned in the above article (SurfaceImageHost & SwapChainBackgroundPanel)
Alexandre Mutel is the brilliant guy who owns SharpDx, he’s done a lot of the hard work for us BUT help is very scarce with getting these bits working on your Win8 development environment.
I’ll spend this post walking you through how to get this all setup. It’s a simple post that will set the foundation for some awesome UI/UX rich future posts!
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Umbraco 5.2 Release.
Along with the realease of Umbraco 5.2 comes the announcement that Umbraco 5 development is being discontinued. Evidently, the plan is to integrate all the nice MVC features of Umbraco 5 into Umbraco 4.
Considering I have spent the last few months learning MVC and getting some Umbraco 5 sites running on Azure, I am not amused.
EDIT: Blog post about this that goes into more details.
modified 2-Jul-12 4:34am.
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Oh! thats really not a fact of amusement I was also interested to umbraco5 as i learned MVC...
Do or Die, ultimately try!
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I'm hoping the 5 features will make it into the 4 version sooner rather than later, but I don't have the time right now to watch the hour long video that presumably goes into more detail. Though if you are curious, the video is linked to from the 5.2 release page.
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Wow, really blunt news. I have several v4 sights running and was just about to embark on a new v5 one. Will review and stick to what I know
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Certainly have to agree with that. Working with WPF and Silverlight. Some great technology, but Microsoft has not done much with technology in years. HTML5 is just another patch to technology that was intended to display simple text in a small browser window (displays were not that big back then). Wish we could move on.
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Is your SQL Server slowing you down? Are bad queries giving your application a case of the blues? Before you go looking for help with SQL Server, make sure that you’ve done everything you can to solve the problems on your own. Many of SQL Server’s ills can be solved with some easy preventative maintenance, patching, and TLC. Top table tips & tricks.
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Word processors such as Microsoft Word are said to be WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. In a sense that’s true, but in another sense markup languages such as HTML or LaTeX are really WYSIWYG. Text files are simpler because there are no mysterious forces at work.
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TL;DR: for text files, notepad is WYSIWIG. For a completely useless definition of WYSIWIG.
I might be monday-morning-dense, but what'st the point?
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peterchen wrote: for text files, notepad is WYSIWIG
For executables, blue screen of death is WYSIWIG. Yes, there is no point.
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I think the point was that proprietary wysiwyg editors like Word interject an intermediary layer to do their magic that work fine for most users... until they don't. I've had Word docs corrupted or choke on some formatting and there's no easy way to figure out how or why it's that way. And how to fix it.
That's well and fine for most people most of the time.
Text files work better (in some ways) if you know what you're doing (HTML or Markdown or LaTeX or...) and the "what you see" is as important as the "what you get". Ever seen the HTML output from Word? Can you imagine what's happening inside the DOC/DOCX file? Yikes.
Back in the day we used FrameMaker for publishing and even though we did most work in the wysiwyg editor, the text-based file format was a blessing for troubleshooting problems.
There's also the concept - which I subscribe to - that many features wysiwyg editors give us are extraneous to the content and complicate more than they help. Plain text, Markdown, simple HTML markup make for more portable files, more focus on the content and, these days, can be easily and quickly parsed for fancier presentation formats (web pages, HTML/CSS slides, etc.) when necessary.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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