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The International Space Apps Challenge is a technology development event during which citizens from around the world work together to solve challenges relevant to improving life on Earth and life in space. You may be earthbound, but these challenges will take you to infinity and beyond!
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I can’t help but think, though, that the first signs that the PC market might be maxing out came in early 2007, before Windows 8, the iPad or even the iPhone had any influence on the business. That’s when Microsoft released Windows Vista and an enormous number of consumers and businesses responded by saying, essentially, “No thanks, we’re perfectly happy with Windows XP.” Even today, almost a dozen years after XP’s release, the company is trying to convince a fair chunk of the PC-using world that it didn’t perfect the PC operating system back in 2001. Are PCs finally good enough, or are tablets better... and taking the industry by storm?
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Sales of personal computers were very nearly twice as bad as previously expected and experienced their worst year-on-year decline ever in the first quarter of 2013, according to the market research firm IDC.... Worldwide PC shipments came in at 76.3 million units in the first quarter of the year, amounting to a decline of nearly 14 percent. That’s much worse than the firm’s forecast, which called for a decline of 7.7 percent. The findings also amount to the fourth consecutive quarter in which sales declined compared to the previous quarter. This can't be good news for the Linux desktop, either.
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IMHO, around 4-5 years ago, PC hardware became 'good enough' for most consumer and business users. Hardware is no longer the bottleneck of productivity. I know lots of people still using Win XP on 7+ year old hardware. The user experience is not great, but acceptable. As a power user, my typical replacement rate over 14 years has been about 3 years. My main development workstation and laptop are both nearing the 3 and a half year mark, and I see no reason at all to replace either one in the near future. On the OS side, when seasoned Windows users are posting questions here like 'how do I get to the desktop' and 'how do I shut down', it's no wonder consumers and businesses are holding off on moving to Win 8.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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This mirrors my experience. A story, to illustrate:
I worked at Microsoft during the Win95 > Win7 era, and it was interesting to be on the leading edge of adoption much of the time. I recall keeping a Win95 system running for games (3DFX!) and hating it, because my Win2K and XP boxen were so much nicer to to use.
Later on, we were urged to start using Vista early on. It was terrible. OK, conceptually not bad, but in practice it really got in the way of getting work done. I went back to XP and stayed on it until, eventually, something work-related absolutely positively required that I run Vista. Sad trombone.
After that, I installed the first stable internal build of Win7 and have been running that ever since. It's quite good, I'm comfortable with it and my software. I run a (probably quite old by now) version of Office that does everything I could ever want (and probably far more than I can imagine). It just works. Why would I want to mess with that?
Not a judgement, just an observation: Apple has maintained more or less the same Mac OS UI concept since 1984, with subtle refinements and additions along the way. Without nitpicking details too much, I've found Win7 and OS X to be nearly identical is usability. In fact, with a little tweaking (fixing Alt-Tab on Mac, command keys remapped on Windows, Sublime Text as my editor everywhere...) I can be on any of my boxen and barely have to think about keyboard shortcuts, apps or workflows.
Did we reach desktop state of the art in 2008?
Mobile UI is something different altogether and IMHO it's still early days to be crowning a winner there....
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Let me guess... "Get Lucky" is not mentioned?
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Nope. Which is actually now that you mention it supposed to be at the number one spot. The others DO help, however.
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Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Danny Severns, IT Director for Dunn Tire and knee-deep in COBOL business systems. Danny is bridging COBOL apps to Java, and it's pretty interesting stuff.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: bridging COBOL apps to Java, and it's pretty interesting stuff.
Wait, are you serious?
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In the five years since Apple released its first iPhone, touch-screen smartphones have become thinner, lighter, faster and more capable. But through it all, battery life has mostly stayed the same.... Because battery capacity hasn’t improved much over the years, the batteries themselves have gotten bigger, limiting how thin and light phones can be. Meanwhile, technologies like 1080p screens and wireless screen mirroring have been hamstrung by batteries that can’t keep up. Kids, there's a reason cell phones used to look like a purse, and it wasn't fashion.
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Let's face it, the year is 2013. Where are our flying cars? Why isn't deep space travel a thing yet? Why hasn't virtual reality become, well, reality? The Oculus Rift seeks to fill that lack of virtual reality in our lives. Still in its early developmental stage, the Oculus Rift promises to deliver VR gaming to the yearning public. Join us as we take a peek inside the Oculus Rift and its hardware. One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend... disembowled for your morbid curiosity.
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The concept of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is fairly new to PHP. There’s currently no official AOP support in PHP, but there are some extensions and libraries which implement this feature. In this lesson, we’ll use the Go! PHP library to learn AOP in PHP, and review when it can be helpful. When old meets new on the web.
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How can you tell that someone is not a scientist? They’ll have the word “scientist” in their title. This seems harsh right? The truth is that if you look at most of the fields defining science you’ll see that the practitioners rarely call themselves scientists.... So why not call ourselves Computerists? Hypothesis: This copied-and-pasted code will work. Test: Does it compile? Yes! Science!
modified 10-Apr-13 19:16pm.
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How about your copy and pasted heading?
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Thanks Pete. Dangers of working at home: kid barges in and demands a story somewhere between copy and paste.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Might want to check those links too (unless that's what he meant, in which case, don't mind me).
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Thanks. I really messed that one up. Link should be fixed now.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Mozilla developers are considering dropping support for the <blink> tag from future versions of the Firefox browser, in a move that would see the web rid of the scourge of blinking text once and for all. Firefox's Gecko HTML rendering engine is currently the only one to support the blinking effect, which usability expert Jakob Nielsen once described as "simply evil." Internet Explorer has never supported it, and while Opera once did, it lost support when it switched its rendering engine to WebKit in February. (Opera has since switched again to Google's new Blink engine – which, ironically perhaps, doesn't support <blink> either.) First they came for marquee, and we said nothing. Then they came for blink...
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: in a move that would see the web rid of the scourge of blinking text once and for all.
Nope: CSS/Javascript.
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But how will I design a website aimed at people living in the 90's now?
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I could have sworn Yahoo shut down Geocities...or was it just their free sites? Either way, there are some fantastic links in that thread
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Though word of its existence first leaked in August of 2012, there's still a lot of confusion about what Microsoft's Blue is and isn't. Partially, this is due to Microsoft officials not saying a whole heck of a lot about Blue so far. That will be changing within the next couple months... The other reason for the confusion about Blue is it seems to be a codename for both products and a change in the way Microsoft builds, tests and releases software. (This same double meaning of the codename applies to Microsoft's Gemini... the codename for the next set of Metro-style Office apps... as well as the work of the Office team to change how it rolls out new releases.) So is it Codename Blue, Blue-style OS or Windows soon to be formerly known as Blue?
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It's basically SP1 for Windows 8
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