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In September 2012 I asked programmers to tell my students why they love code and open-source software. This 20 minute video is the end result. It's great to see the passion we all share for our craft. Over 20 software developers share why they love what they do and why they love working with open-source code.
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/ravi
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The open source movement is founded on collaboration, on sharing, and the free exchange of ideas. All of these cry out for an open forum in which to flourish – or an arena in which to evolve, depending on how you want to look at it. Well, it's taken a while, but the web has finally caught up with the ambitions and needs of those doing the work, providing somewhere to actually experiment communally, to crowd-debug, or even just to show off. Here are 20 of the best tools for sharing, developing and debugging code in the browser.
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Self-discipline and Willpower. Two words that aren’t the solution. You only have a fixed amount of self-discipline and after it’s been used up, you need to wait for it to recharge. If you “fix” a personality defect by brute-forcing with self-discipline, you’ll be back in the same boat a week later. I broke the cycle of procrastination and willpower exhaustion by automating the things I was putting off. Yup, I threw money at the problem, and it was cheaper than you think. Fixing procrastination without willpower: Automate all the things!
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I'm Rob Pike. I had a long stint at Bell Labs in the Computing Research Science Center, the lab that brought you Unix and C well before I got there. I helped bring the mouse to Unix. Later, I helped make the Internet multilingual. I'm now at Google. I work on lots of things... Find out how Rob Pike gets things done.
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The Fusion Drive combines the best of both worlds: The high capacity, reliability and affordability of a traditional hard drive, with the snappy, instant-on speed of a solid-state storage drive, without breaking the budget. If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour...
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The expectations and competition for the Surface are daunting. It’s been said that Microsoft built the Surface to show up HP, Dell, and the rest of the personal computing establishment. PC sales are stagnant while Apple is selling the iPad at an incredible pace. But the Surface is something different from other tablets. Microsoft built a PC for the post-PC consumer and chose to power it with a limited operating system called Windows RT. These trade-offs, real or imagined, are what really makes or breaks this device. It is, in short, the physical incarnation of Microsoft’s Windows 8.
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this article is misleading because proper PC OS'es can multitask, and the only desktop "apps" you get with WinRT are Office and IE :/
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Windows RT does multitask. WTF are you talking about?
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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After using Microsoft’s Surface for the past week I can say that I honestly get it. This isn’t an iPad competitor, nor is it an Android tablet competitor. It truly is something different. A unique perspective, not necessarily the right one, but a different one that will definitely resonate well with some (not all) users. Surface is Microsoft’s perspective of what a tablet can be.
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Academic researchers have improved wireless bandwidth by an order of magnitude—not by adding base stations, tapping more spectrum, or cranking up transmitter wattage, but by using algebra to eliminate the network-clogging task of resending dropped packets of data. Instead of sending packets, it sends algebraic equations that describe series of packets.
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I've always thought data compression could be significantly improved using basic algebra.
Let xyz be a message in decimal. Find a, b, c, d such that a/b, from c to d, contains xyz. Find minimum a + b + c + d that satisfies this. Very processing intensive, but could reduce the data size drastically.
Another approach is adding an e for error when a/b is correct for the majority of the text, but not all, and greatly reduces the size of the message.
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Does anyone know what specifically they're doing? Is this just using some of each packet to store ECC type codes?
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 remember how important this book was to shaping how I thought about software. For the first time, I actually have the words discuss what I was doing, and proven pathways to success. Of course, we all know that… it didn’t end up being quite so good. In particular, it led to Cargo Cult Programming. From my perspective, it looks like a lot of people made the assumption that their application is good because it has design patterns, not because design patterns will result in simpler code. Do you think Design Patterns is still relevant today?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Do you think Design Patterns is still relevant today? Of course they are! Design patterns make for more manageable and testable code primarily due to loose coupling. Design patterns are baked into the JDK and .NET frameworks, so you're using them even if you didn't think you were.
/ravi
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Design Patterns have a place but slavish adherence to any pseudo standard is a bad thing. There are also evangelists who firmly believe that if you don't know every pattern and how to apply it then you can't be much of a programmer - you always meet these people at interview when you get the feeling that they know the patterns but not much else - programming by rote.
I'd say it was the other way around: they are simply tools and you use them when and where appropriate. You may even have a different name for the same pattern - like spanner and wrench - it's still the same tool with the same outcome.
So, yes, they have a place if they help you to shape better code but not as a cure-all.
"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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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Do you think Design Patterns is still relevant today?
The book? Kind of, if you don't take it too seriously. The introductory chapter is pretty insightful. As for the design patterns themselves, I think they did more harm than good to the industry, exactly because of this:
Terrence Dorsey wrote: In particular, it led to Cargo Cult Programming. From my perspective, it looks like a lot of people made the assumption that their application is good because it has design patterns, not because design patterns will result in simpler code
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I'm not sure if you mean the book or Design Patterns in general, so to answer both:
The book has its share of goodness, and yes I think it is absolutely still relevant today, if not more, (now that was the short answer if you meant the book ) which leads me to the concept of Design Patterns in practice.
I don't agree with the first reply to this question saying that you already use DP even if you don't know about it. Well, every framework out there is hopefully built with DP in mind, but you don't use that code directly, you design pieces of software from higher level bits, sure, but you still have to create your own OOP structures, and the basics of a modern application and here I believe that Design Patterns are equally important today, and probably will be for as long as there is Object Oriented Programming involved.
How do you best create the application structure with interfaces, classes, inheritance, the works? This is what Design Patterns is all about! So, still important, for sure...
Certainty of death, small chance of success...
What are we waiting for?
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Recently I have found an interesting issue with Thread.Interrupt during application shutdown. Some application was crashing once a week and we had not really a clue what was the issue. Since it happened not very often it was left as is until we have got some memory dumps during the crash. A memory dump usually means WindDbg which I really like to use (I know I am one of the very few fans of it). After a quick analysis I did find that the main thread already had exited and the thread with the crash was stuck in a Monitor.Wait. Strange Indeed... When the CLR gurus can get it wrong, the chances are high that you get it wrong, too.
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especially when "Cleanup" of COM resources on a thread actually matters
dev
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Even on modern computers, generating an image of a portion of the Mandelbrot set takes a good bit of time. When Chiaki discovered this fractal in the mid-1980s, the computers of the day took hours to generate a single, low-resolution image. Real-time zooming and scrolling was impossible but Chiaki made the best of what he had on hand and built Pyxis... A Mandelbrot set generator made entirely out of TTL logic chips.
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Myth: NuGet is tied to Visual Studio and Windows. This is only partially true. The most popular NuGet client is clearly the one that ships in Visual Studio. Also, NuGet packages may contain PowerShell scripts. PowerShell is not currently available on any other operating system other than Windows. However, the architecture of NuGet is such that there’s a core assembly, NuGet.Core.dll, that has no specific ties to Visual Studio. NuGet is a community project, and you can help.
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One of the many new things introduced with Windows 8 is the concept of “Enterprise SideLoading”. While existing “desktop” apps can be deployed in the same fashion as with previous editions of Windows, “Windows Style” apps are published to the Windows Store and then downloaded from there. Microsoft realise that this isn’t the preferred method for organizations with bespoke apps for LOB (Line Of Business), HR etc, software purchased directly from an ISV etc. and so “Enterprise SideLoading” was born. This enables organizations to publish a Windows Style app directly to machines, circumventing the Windows Store, and is available in a couple of different ways. Bloatware, enterprise-style.
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One Very Proud Dad is a wonderful animated promo by Rackspace for the Open Cloud, produced by Impossible Engine. To say this explains cloud computing is a stretch, but it is fun to watch.
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I love it!
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