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You beta me to it!
(also sorry)
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Pretty much everyone agrees that if you have a choice between a simpler software design and a more complex design, all else being equal, that simpler is better. It is also widely thought to be worthwhile to deliberately invest in simplicity — for example, to spend effort refactoring existing code into a cleaner design — because the one-off cost of refactoring today is easily offset by the benefits of easier maintenance tomorrow. Also, much thought by many smart people has gone into finding ways of breaking down complex systems into manageable parts with manageable dependencies.... But there is a subtlety that I have been missing in discussions about software complexity, that I feel somewhat ambivalent about, and that I think is worth discussing. It concerns the points where external humans (people outside of the team maintaining the system) touch the system — as developers using an API exposed by the system, or as end users interacting with a user interface. One could even argue that the utility of a product is a subset of its user experience.
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In the spirit of the early days of PC programming, here is my proposal to all of you: The 50 Line Small Basic Challenge! I proposed this challenge about three years ago as the "25 Line Challenge", and it was such a success that it spawned a competition to see who could squeeze the most complex code into the smallest space. The results were brilliant. It was quickly discovered that you could use the String and Stack based nature of the arrays to produce some startlingly compact, obfuscated and unreadable code. 50 lines of Basic ought to be enough for anyone.
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The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens. Dreaming of a downvote democracy.
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Darkly dreaming Dorsey.
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This might work wonders if:
1) Governments wanted transparency
2) Governments wanted to listen to their citizens
3) Half the citizens weren't morons.
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Bert Mitton wrote: This might work wonders if
Might work for The Venus Project.
Bert Mitton wrote: Half the citizens weren't morons
Perhaps you don't live in the US. At least 90% of our citizens are morons.
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I do live in the US... I was just being kind.
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Web Platform Docs is a new community-driven site that aims to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. Even though Web Platform Docs is still in alpha, you can already find lots of valuable content on the site.... In the future, Web Platform Docs will include even more content for you to explore such as live code examples, resources for educators and much more. To get there faster, we’d like to invite you to also contribute your knowledge. We hope you will join us! Isn't the web already documenting the web?
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Ironically, a poorly designed site: looks awful.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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Apple’s Retina revolution is an interesting evolution that is turning the design world upside down. The Retina display has a high enough pixel density to prevent pixelation to be noticable to the human eye. Therefore a Retina display is a lot sharper and more pleasant to look at. Apple has doubled the amount of horizontal and vertical pixels on the iPhone, The New iPad, and now also on the new MacBookPro. The Retina revolution is irreversible, and other companies have already started or will also start implementing this new Retina technology. Here are some good tips for dealing with Retina graphics.
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At least till this thing becomes popular, it gonna be a pain in the ass.
Apple is a great example to invest right in the technology. They made their platform to work well with different resolutions and resources.
This also leads to different issues. The apps are packed as a single per platform (iOS Unified, iOS (iPhone), iOS (iPad))
To work with different versions of devices, the developer has to pack the high resolution images along with the same app. I have an old iPhone which has non-retina display. I have an iPhone 4S with retina display. The size of app is same for both devices. In effect, I have to spend my precious storage (which is comparatively low) for the unused resources.
It's true that this is irreversible the pain has to sorted out well. Also the devices are sky-high expensive. We need to wait till it's get affordable for the common people.
-Sarath.
Rate the answers and close your posts if it's answered
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Meh. Would be a lot more beneficial if I (and the 99% of the world that doesn't have the latest iGadget) didn't have to fiddle around with browser zoom to try and see the point. Doesn't help that FF doesn't make it readily apparent what my zoom level is either. (Is this 200%? 190%? 220%?)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Swipe, swipe, pinch-zoom. Fifth-grader Josephine Nguyen is researching the definition of an adverb on her iPad and her fingers are flying across the screen. Her 20 classmates are hunched over their own tablets doing the same. Conspicuously absent from this modern scene of high-tech learning: a mouse. "Point and click" seems so quaint now.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: "Point and click" seems so quaint now.
Samuel Colt[^] would beg to differ.
Less flippantly, until they figure out how to make a touchpad/fondleslab that doesn't pain every knuckle of the finger I'm using to smear grease over it in an hour or so I don't care.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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They already have. It's called a stylus.
Also, as speech and voice recognition mature and merge you will that emerge as the dominant input technology.
Until we get a new toy to play with....
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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Michael Bergman wrote: They already have. It's called a stylus.
A single touch stylus is only capable of replicating a fraction of what multi-touch obsessed fondleslab UI designers think is cool.
Michael Bergman wrote: Also, as speech and voice recognition mature and merge you will that emerge as the dominant input technology.
I hope not. The one good thing about small fondleslabs is that they've silenced almost all of the @#$)(*&#@'s who were constantly shouting into their phones a decade ago. Siri alone was sufficient reason to damn jobs into the deepest circle of hell. </soapbox>
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I believe that the API contributed hugely to Twitter's growth, which was really kind of miraculous since nothing about it was particularly well-designed. For one thing it has always been pretty fail-y, even for OAuth. And rather than scaling the service and improving availability, Twitter has consistently fallen back on trying to limit API usage by enacting restrictive policies and rate limits. It's also pretty clear that Twitter never invested much time or thought into refining the API to be a good general resource for developers building arbitrary apps. Rather, the API was built more or less directly out from the same backend infrastructure of the website itself. You have to do significant post-processing of data to get it out of a form that's useful for anything other than replicating the core Twitter experience (which they famously don't want you to do). Information wants to be free... or else we'll steal it?
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Now multi-core Android phones can be PCs too. Ubuntu for Android enables high-end Android handsets to run Ubuntu, the world's favourite free PC desktop operating system. So users get the Android they know on the move, but when they connect their phone to a monitor, mouse and keyboard, it becomes a PC. Ubuntu for Android... maybe this is the Linux desktop you've been looking for.
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Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation. Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons. I have a patent on patents as swords. Pay me. Now.
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Just over a year since the final launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis and the retirement of the Space Transportation System, SpaceX has successfully launched a Dragon spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 rocket — the first ever commercial resupply mission (CRS-1) to the International Space Station. To boldly go where NASA has gone before (but won't anymore).
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Hackers have massacred all the virtual characters in some of online adventure game World of Warcraft's major cities. The living dead, virtually dead that is.
"As beings of finite lifespan, our contributions to the sum of human knowledge is one of the greatest endeavors we can undertake and one of the defining characteristics of humanity itself"
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The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate. The halting problem is famous for being undecidable. That is, no algorithm can solve it for all programs and all inputs. This complicates any attempt to predict program behavior: we can make predicting almost any program behavior equivalent to predicting the termination of a nearly identical program. Static analyses are algorithms that do their best to defy the undecidability of the halting problem: they attempt to predict program behavior. Bonus: build an analyzer for a register-based machine language in Racket.
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There are many free tools used to troubleshoot and debug software. Below I present a list of the tools that my peers and I use most of the time. Though most of the tools below are free Microsoft tools, not all are very well known. What are your favorite debugging tools?
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When you hear the word “algorithm,” you probably respond in one of three ways: 1. You immediately know and understand what we’re talking about because you studied computer science. 2. You know that algorithms are the workhorses of companies like Google and Facebook, but you aren’t really sure what the word means. 3. You run and hide in fear because everything you know about algorithms reminds you of high-school Calculus nightmares. If you are one of the second two, this article is for you. Code recipes 101.
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