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Over 100 years ago, a Serbian-American inventor by the name of Nikola Tesla started fixing things that weren't broken. This is his story. Shocking, but true.
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Functional fixedness is defined as the fixation on the common use of an object while overlooking entire categories of features of that object. The example given in the article was the failure of people on the Titanic to see the iceberg as a kind of lifeboat that could have provided shelter from the icy waters while help arrived. In software development the same sort of cognitive barriers manifest in a few different ways. Software development as a craft and software development as a commodity.
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Probably trying to use the iceberg would have been next to impossible without ice climbing equipment. Plus there was the issue of organzing to get to the iceberg.
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As the original article states,
Titanic was navigable for awhile and could have pulled aside the iceberg. Many people could have climbed aboard it to find flat places to stay out of the water for the four hours before help arrived.
Not saying this is true, but hey - sounds like a better attempt than jump into the water.
Doing that amidst the mix of panic and arrogance would be a completely different problem, though.
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In short, the technique involves breaking an object in to its constituent parts, determining if it can be broken down further, and describing it as generically as possible. Application of this technique can then reveal the true essence of a particular object and more fully enumerate its possible uses
I now have a name, "generic parts technique", to describe something I've been doing for years. Thank you, Harvard Business Review. The world is such a better place with PhD's to give us names for things that we all know and already do.
Marc
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Remember, it's not a valid practice until some suit comes along and gives it a fancy name. It's like someone "discovering" a country, completely ignoring the fact that the locals "discovered" the country every day for thousands of years.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: It's like someone "discovering" a country, completely ignoring the fact that the
locals "discovered" the country every day for thousands of years.
Wasn't that a British specialty?
Like "discovering" Australia and claiming it for the King and the Flag?
And many other lands?
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Indeed it was. It's down to the rain here in the UK. Poor weather meant that we looked for places with nicer climates.
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Advanced Vim users understand that Vim commands are a language unto themselves, and that the key to being productive is understanding Vim’s grammar. Pritzker accurately identifies that grammar as consisting of the following parts of speech: verbs, nouns, and modifiers. Me code pretty one day.
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A couple of months ago I finally came to the conclusion that the way I am approaching HTTP is fundamentally flawed and I am already so far down the rabbit hole that it's nearly impossible to turn around and fix it. ...so let's just abstract the problem away!
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Are you a polyglot programmer? Do you think you can recognize any programming language on site? Take this little quiz and see how well you do. Test your syntax Spidey sense.
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A humbling experience: 28/75 (37.33%)
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My vote is SNUSP[^]
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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I’m Eric S. Raymond, aka “ESR”. I wrote some of the foundational papers on open-source development and maintain over 40 open-source projects and FAQs. You rely on my software every time you use a browser, a smartphone, or a gaming console. A look inside The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
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Who’s playing fast and loose with your data? The Big Brother Awards, billed as the “Oscars for data leeches” by the hackers and privacy advocates who hand out the prizes, shine a high-intensity spotlight on companies and individuals with poor privacy track records. I'd like to thank everyone whose personal data made this possible.
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On May 13th, 2002 a new filesharing client called eMule entered into our world of sharing. Ten years later we’d like to take this anniversary as an opportunity to look back at some major technical achievements of filesharing applications since then and what might come in the years ahead. With further innovation, even the mighty BitTorrent can be improved to become impossible to shut down. Share this article, please.
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Last year, The New York Times criticized usage-based broadband pricing, noting that “Moving an extra gigabyte of data at off-peak times costs virtually nothing.” More recently, a report by the advocacy group Public Knowledge suggested that broadband data caps, a form of usage-based pricing, are an inefficient way to manage congestion. Taxing the marginal bitrate.
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iOS is by no means feature-complete. But it’s getting harder to identify the low-hanging fruit — the things you just know Apple has to be working on, not just the stuff you hope they are. What's left for Apple to add?
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Linux has a reputation for robustness, but we're going to try and prove that there are still plenty of ways to damage a perfectly working system. sudo do you feel lucky | punk?
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Microsoft is currently testing a modified version of Internet Explorer 9 on its Xbox 360 console, according to our sources. The Xbox 360 currently includes Bing voice search, but it's limited to media results. Microsoft's new Internet Explorer browser for Xbox will expand on this functionality to open up a full browser for the console. We are told that the browser will let Xbox users surf all parts of the web straight from their living rooms. I'm not going to ask what gesture you do to upload a file
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The Web has parts?
Will we get better keyboards and mice for the Xbox? And won't the result simply be WebTV?
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Quote: The Web has parts?
Sure. Here's a map.[^]
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Who needs browsers when we have apps galore on our smartphones and tablets? Well, fast forward 18 months and things have changed. Browsers are starting to trend up again and some online businesses are turning away from apps. Stay tuned for next week's announcement, "The Web is dead."
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