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It's no secret why Dell's struggling so badly it just took a $2b loan from Microsoft and bought itself back from shareholders to become a private company: after more than a decade of effort, the company never figured out what consumers actually want beyond low prices, or why they might want it. You might laugh, but it's true — a look back at Dell's biggest attempts to crack the consumer market and compete with Apple over the past 10 years reveals an embarrassing series of missteps, mistakes, and flat-out bad software, culminating in a flurry of poorly-executed mobile devices in 2010 that sealed the company's fate. Optiplex: the gray box that launched a thousand TPS reports.
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A while ago, Google took its Street View cameras to the slopes and started documenting ski runs at a few select resorts. Today, Google is expanding its mapping options for skiers by adding 38 new run and lifts maps to Google Maps, including its apps for Android and iPhone. These include well-known ski resorts like Squaw Valley, Big Sky and Whistler Blackcomb. Downhill tracer.
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BitTorrent Inc. is working on an application called Sync that uses P2P technology to sync your files between your devices.... The announcement blog post is somewhat scarce on details, but here’s what I’ve been told by the company: Sync will enable direct synchronization between your machines without any cloud caching. File transfers will be protected via 256 bit AES encryption. There are native apps for Mac OS, Windows and Linux, as well as a native NAS integration. Not everyone wants their files in the cloud.
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There is nothing more frustrating for a web developer than spending hours at a time fixing a bug that should just work. Often I’ll get stuck in a programming state that feels like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, as if the language I’m using (CSS, PHP, whatever), is actually a foreign language.
What is the most bizarre language you have ever worked with?
Three sentences for getting success:
a) Know more than others.
b) Work more than others.
c) Expect less than others.
"William Shakespeare"
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Quote: Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.
WHY?!?!?
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Brilliant!!
Here is why:
And that's all I have to say! In only 123 spaces!!
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COBOL.
Come to think of it, they're all bizarre. What we need is a Plain En&^%$#&^$&*$786478.....
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VB and PHP are top of my list.
I have worked in several open source projects including MyBB and Drupal. But could never like PHP. It is just not 'fun'! Same goes for VB. I could never really fall in love with that.
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LOLCode
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LISP was pretty weird, though XSLT is the strangest language I've actually used for work. Though, regular expressions might be considered a language in their own right, and they're pretty weird too.
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I certainly prefer Regular Expressions to XSLT and XPath.
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Missed the Malbolge[^] Language. I first saw this on an episode of Elementary.
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While I don't think anyone really works with it (it's probably just someone's grad thesis gone wild), Brainfsck[^] is the weirdest I've seen.
As far as worked with, both RegEx and XSLT are solutions that lead to, "and now you have two problems".
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TTFN - Kent
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The reporting language for a product I used to work on was the wierdest I've ever used although nothing is worse the Malbolge at least not yet.
This reporting language didn't even have a name it was just reporting script but it was unlike anything else, 5 sections to Cobols 4 ( I hope I got that right ) and each one had a different syntax from really readable stuff in one section like ORDER BY CUSTOMER to a bunch of /g style switches in another. It did the job however and the job was a scary one, multi-dimensional database analysis at speeds that would make Larry Ellison with envy.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Just imagine what you'd do with the other six days[^] (less an hour)
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TTFN - Kent
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I support that. I'm ready to start now! ^^
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love the idea but going from say 5 days work to 3 days would probably mean some reduction in salary.
however, work typically kills creativity, specially overtime work, that's why western world still leads Asia and China. (worker bee will never understand they can never be #1)
so, reducing length of work week may help (but I doubt it, 3 days or 25 hrs a little extreme)
dev
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Well, if normally works from say 20-60, that's 40 years, but instead 20-80, 60 years. Then you can spread the same work over 50% more years. So you could work 33% less in your younger years. Like here in the Netherlands part of your current income goes into pension build up (about 10%), and taxes that will go into a base salary for pensioned people (not sure how much). One could scrap these institutions (and save a lot of money because these are just money eating money redirection schemes). So I think it's doable if just looking at percentages. However I don't see myself programming anymore at 80!
Wout
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Nice article! I have to say I'm too working less than 40 hours at the moment, and enjoying it!
Wout
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Well, I'm not sure that I'd count, "spending time with loved ones" as "goofing off". Certainly not in front of them anyway.
But I see your point. It would definitely require a lot of changes to society to make this work. Retiring at 80 wouldn't leave that many people left to retire.
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TTFN - Kent
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You won't spend it goofing off.
You will spend it driving your car farther and farther to the sub-sub-sub-sub-suburb which is the only place you will be able to afford a house.
The 90 minute commute is already common in California, has been for decades, and is now spreading to other areas as well
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What's my beef with productivity tools? It's much deeper than a dislike for any particular tool. Charles Petzold already described his concern about Visual Studio in 2005 in a great talk titled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. It's a long read, but definitely worth your while. You should go read it now. In case you didn't want to take the time to read that article (but then: you're already reading this lengthy article), here's the gist of it: Via IntelliSense, code generation, Wizards and drag and drop, Visual Studio assists us, but it also pushes us towards writing (or not writing) code in a particular way. It railroads us. Does it make us more productive? I don't even know how to measure developer productivity, so I can't answer that. Do we learn while coding like that? Not much, I'd say. Intellisense: good or evil? Discuss among yourselves...
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Yes, a good discussion. I find it does. Why? First, intellisense helps prompt or discover new methods. It also helps me to remember method names. I guess age and mind rott are to blame.
Secondly, re-sharper, fxcop, style cop etc are all great in my mind. Again, it helps "standardise" code and teaches you to adhere to a code practice. It again helps to prompt and question what you are doing in the first place.
It can help with productivity.
However, I do understand where Mark is coming from. In the old days, you had to "know" about what you are doing as there was little information, books etc. however, I bet the learning curve was longer.
Either that or I am just STUPID!
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