|
Next month, if you walk into any Target store across the country, browsing one of the main hubs of mass American consumerism, you’ll find a board game that teaches the fundamentals of computer programming to preschoolers. "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man"
|
|
|
|
|
Oooh, I'll have to buy a copy or three.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
|
|
|
|
|
Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying. Just not with cold hard cash, but with our privacy — as digital business models rely on gathering and selling intel on their users to make the money to pay (the investors who paid) for the free service. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
|
|
|
|
|
How delusional. In the highly improbable case that this takes off, the megacorps with their zillion server data clusters will end up dominating the farming for their crypto currency; and since they'll still end up hosting 99.9999...% of the internet will be able to subvert it for the spamvertisers benefit just like they do today.
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
|
|
|
|
|
In one alternate future, the server will indeed die as a natural result of everything becoming more and more distributed, of which there are already several decent examples like Bitcoin. The advantage of such distribution is increased resilience to nodes and networks going down and to data loss. The disadvantage might be argued to be security, but that is a technicality (albeit possibly a complex one) that, quite frankly, firewalls, current encryption schemes, etc., all currently more-or-less fail at -- they don't address the real issue of how to make a chunk of data actually secure, the current approaches are basically just condoms around data. The other thing that we've hidden in the idea of "secure" is also trust. We need systems that separate out those two concepts:
Secure - readable (note, not accessible, but readable) only to authorized people/systems
Trustworthy - can be open or secured information, but includes a measure of the data's trustworthiness, whether it's a username and password, a decryption key, or data itself.
The future will (theoretically) address both these issues more explicitly and we will develop better tools for dealing with the separate issues of trust and security.
Marc
|
|
|
|
|
There is a lot of excitement around the current trend to get more people to be into computer programming. Whether or not they end up becoming coders, we can all at least can gain a bit from “computational thinking.” Address: One Memory Lane. Resident: Me
|
|
|
|
|
It's ironic how he starts off with "computational thinking" (which is what got me to read that ridiculous post) and devolves rather quickly into "copying code and typing it in, line by line." Given that seems to be his idea of computational thinking, it should be obvious why computer users are no longer (and never were) programmers.
Marc
|
|
|
|
|
As Microsoft continues its push to remain relevant in the mobile space, it still doesn't appreciate the factors that allowed Apple to enter a market they had no previous experience in and turn it on its head with the iPhone. It's the chamfered edges, silly!
|
|
|
|
|
If anyone ever figures it out, that would be a story.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
|
|
|
|
|
Design by committee would get my vote.
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
I must admit that I have not paid attention to any previous articles about the new Microsoft CEO. After reading this article it would seem that very dark clouds loom in the future for Microsoft. If these quotes truly represent the vision and strategy of Satya Nadella, he just might be the right man to drive the company into the ground. Or at least parts of it.
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
|
|
|
|
|
Actually I found the CEO's comments make good sense. He wants to handle the consumer as well as the work aspects, which makes good sense. The article itself doesn't really have any content.
Wout
modified 27-Jul-14 10:40am.
|
|
|
|
|
Quote: About two weeks, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned a blah blah blah
About two weeks ago maybe?
|
|
|
|
|
“Are any other developers baffled by Microsoft’s strategy? They say they want us to develop for their platform, and then they deprecate XNA along with their System.Drawing API for 2D graphics. The only supported options are to code the entire GUI in XAML (too high level) or DirectX (too low level). Essentially they are making it overly difficult for us to port our existing Android games to Windows. Do any other developers feel my frustration? Or has everyone else figured out a workaround?” "Are any other developers baffled by Microsoft’s strategy?" No one here like that, right?
|
|
|
|
|
Never heard of Microsoft strategy whatsoever relative to developers...
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
|
|
|
|
|
So, basically it's "fork you" from Microsoft.
|
|
|
|
|
Every day, and every way they can...
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
Microsoft has a strategy??? Doesn't strategy imply some planning and logical thinking???
Kent Sharkey wrote: Or has everyone else figured out a workaround?”
Well duh. It's called Open Source, and the myriad of alternatives that can replace (and improve) on System.Drawing or anything else.
Marc
|
|
|
|
|
It sounds unlikely, but the Homeland Security Agency is now providing an online, open-source code-testing suite with the unlikely name of SWAMP. From the people that bring you airport security (in the US anyway)
|
|
|
|
|
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are meeting data protection officials in Brussels to discuss how best to handle right to be forgotten requests. They should 'forget' to go to the meeting. Everyone would laugh and laugh.
|
|
|
|
|
Quantum computing is a field that many will have heard of, but that very few really understand - and with good reason, as this is still an area of science that is in its infancy, with many discoveries still to be made. The giants of the technology industry have been investing in quantum computing research for some time; Microsoft's own R&D efforts have been ongoing for the best part of a decade. "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
|
|
|
|
|
Essentially content free article.
According to my calculations, I should be able to retire about 5 years after I die.
|
|
|
|
|
Other than the video?
OK, how about this article[^] about it instead?
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
What I was hoping for was an explanation of how a program for a quantum computer is organized and written. It's one thing to wave hands and say "we'll factor numbers much faster" - it's another thing entirely to explain precisely how we will do so. What serves as the language? How does input and output work? I haven't put much effort into searching for it, but I have yet to find such an explanation.
According to my calculations, I should be able to retire about 5 years after I die.
|
|
|
|
|
Aaaaah! Yeah. It's quantum. That basically requires a large quantity of handwavium for everything.
But I'd look at this article[^], and this PDF[^]. Both are from D-Wave: the "leading edge" supplier of quantum computers. They're the maker of the one that Google bought.
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|