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Despite what anyone might tell you, the Windows Runtime API is not a clean break from the past. Like .NET before it, WinRT includes a backdoor without which it would be practically useless. The Common Language Runtime’s backdoor was called Platform Invocation Services or P/Invoke for short. It was amazingly powerful, but also complex and troublesome. WinRT’s backdoor is a lot simpler. It’s called reinterpret_cast. You winrt_cast a spell on me...
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This is what "software craftsmanship" gets us: an imposed segregation of those who "get it" from those who "don't" based on somebody's arbitrary criteria of what we should or shouldn't be doing. And if somebody doesn't use the "right" tools or code it in the "right" way, then bam! You clearly aren't a "craftsman" (or "craftswoman"?) and you clearly don't care about your craft and you clearly aren't worth the time or energy necessary to support and nourish and grow and.... I bow with respect to the "software laborers" of the world, who churn out quality code without concern for "craftsmanship."
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This is a post about a silly (and mostly pointless) optimization. To motivate this, consider the following problem which you see all the time in mesh processing: Given a collection of triangles represented as ordered tuples of indices, find all topological duplicates. By a topological duplicate, we mean that the two faces have the same vertices. Now you aren’t allowed to mutate the faces themselves (since orientation matters), but changing their order in the array is ok. There are many solutions for this, but which one is fastest?
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With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a very tiny x86 dev board called the Gizmo, a four-inch square board that shrinks a desktop computer down to the palm of your hand. What would you build with a tiny x86 board like this?
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Uncle Owen: What I really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Well, no, I need a simple database server.
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The top performer was the Windows Division, reporting under its new name for the first time. Previously it was called "Windows and Windows Live Division." The new name reflects the termination of the "Windows Live" branding; it's also the division that houses Microsoft's Surface tablets. Revenue for the division was $5.881 billion, up 24 percent on a year ago.... Either way, this is a strong performance. Even with deferrals, revenue grew, outperforming the x86 market as a whole. The reports of my blue screen of death are greatly exaggerated.
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In general, Microsoft is aiming to steer its customers more toward the monthly subscription-based Office 365 model, rather than traditional perpetual licensing. The upfront costs for Office 365 licenses are lower than for a perpetual license. Moreover, Microsoft is promising that Office 365 users will get continuous product upgrades throughout the lifespan of their subscriptions, as well as some cloud-based benefits that perpetual licensees won't get. Why you'll probably go "to the cloud," and what it will cost.
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If you don't trust the network to deliver a password, or, worse, don't trust the server not to keep user secrets, you can't trust them to deliver security code. The same attacker who was sniffing passwords or reading diaries before you introduce crypto is simply hijacking crypto code after you do. By this measure, all cryptography is doomed.
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Recently a friend of mine asked this question. His theory was that the open web, as described in the Mozilla Mission no longer mattered because much of what we used to do using web browsers is now rapidly shifting to “apps”. Why worry about the open web if nobody is going to be using it? To me, this is really a question about what do we mean by “the web”? ...or: throwing out the past because it doesn't look like the future.
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From the article: "After this upcoming weekend, you have to ask your phone company if you want to use the phone you (kind of) bought from them on any other carrier's network. You used to be able to ask for, or purchase, or hack your way to an "unlocked" phone, but that will be illegal after Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. The Librarian of Congress believes cellphone companies are doing a good enough job of fostering competition in their market, so the era of third-party unlocking is coming to a close." [ITworld]
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What happened to Land of the Free?
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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We were so free, we were free to restrict our freedom.
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I :heart: the upvote button.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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We have the best government money can buy.
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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Was unlocking by third parties ever legal? Just two days ago an AT&T representative was telling my friend his iPhone could only be unlocked by third parties, because its contract was not yet fulfilled.
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Saturation of network links causes massive amounts of latency and slowdown, particularly on slow uplinks of asymmetric residential internet service (however, it can and does occur on the downlinks of the same). Network applications doing big bulky downloads can cause lots of latency on the network, causing real-time applications (VOIP, gaming, or SSH) to lag badly or outright fail.... The problem has been noticed for many years, although the pathology has only become well understood and publicized in the last few. Anyone who has set the upload limit on their BitTorrent client to just shy of their upstream bandwidth to their ISP was trying to counteract the effects of bufferbloat. ...or why your internet connection is slow, and what you can do about it.
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You might think that a group of intelligent people like the members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community would be free of hidden taboos. You might expect that such a group of intellectuals would find no thought forbidden or uncomfortable—but if you did, you would be wrong. Like any sub-culture, FOSS is held together by shared beliefs. Such beliefs help to create a shared identity, which means that questioning them also means questioning that identity. One thing we can agree on: "next year" is always the year of the Linux desktop.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: One thing we can agree on: "next year" is always the year of the Linux desktop.
At least until kids look at you funny and ask, "What's a desktop?"
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It's missed one - The Open Source Licenses can do more harm than good. This is partly down to the zealotry over the OS community, and the way that the core licenses are assumed to be tried and tested, and able to withstand corporate challenge.
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How about the one day in Russia that shook the world, and still does? That was Jan. 23, 1913, a century ago this week. Mathematician Andrey A. Markov delivered a lecture that day to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on a computational technique now called the Markov chain. Little noticed in its day, his idea for modeling probability is fundamental to all of present-day science, statistics, and scientific computing. Any attempt to simulate probable events based on vast amounts of data — the weather, a Google search, the behavior of liquids — relies on Markov’s idea. Markov’s work is a core abstraction needed for modeling probability today.
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The best kind of optimizations are ones that eliminate the need to do expensive but wasteful work. While analyzing internals of some open source databases I’ve found that some of them spend a lot of time trying to do the wrong optimizations at the wrong times resulting in wasteful work. The more interesting implementations try to detect when this expensive wasteful work can be avoided and just don’t do it. You would be surprised at how much processing some databases do just to tell you that the thing you queried for doesn’t exist in the database. A data structure that sometimes can help reduce wasteful work like this is a Bloom Filter. Burton Bloom's algorithm from 1970 is still useful today.
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The one tool that, in my opinion, has always been an insanely personal and opinionated preference is your IDE or editor. Everything about it matters, from keystrokes and language support to plugins and themes. It all has to flow nicely within your development style, and most importantly, it needs to help you solve the problems you’re facing without making you jump through hoops.... With Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript for both web and Windows 8 app development, there’s been a ton of changes with Visual Studio 2012 that make it an awesome tool for building for the web. This is what I plan on covering next, and hopefully you’ll see it in a very different light. What's your favorite web development IDE or editor?
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