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Cult of Mac wrote: And that’s a good thing, because it means we’ve got a lot of fleecing to look forward to.
FTFY
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The history of the remote, as it's widely and improperly understood, began in 1950 with a Zenith device called the Lazy Bones. The new, hand-held thumb-clicker was attached to a set by a long cord, and allowed customers to "take it easy" by working a receiver from their seat. After more than six decades, the Lazy Bones is still how most of us understand the remote control—as a tool of relaxation and a means for doing nothing at all. Wait, what does this red button do?
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Remotes are convenient up to a point. I have three in my lounge for the DVD player, TV and satellite box. They have different form factors and worse, the one for the DVD has so many buttons you need a magnifying glass to read the text below them. If the technology itself can't solve the problem then the problem is better left unsolved.
The so-called self-learning operation is also hit-and-miss. A button pressed on the DVD player can interfere with the TV. I don't need so many buttons; but the endless pursuit to make devices do more requires the manufacturers to throw all sorts of features that nobody asked for or wants or needs. You see the same in cars. Car manufacturers exploit powerful computing to give your central console all sorts of features. The difference between the UI and function is wide.
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68).
"I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
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We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the “add features” option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade. It looks like you're upgrading Windows. Would you like help?
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"We are making it so that even grandma can kick this process off and royally screw up her machine" is how I read it. Can't wait for all of my relatives to start calling me because they upgraded their piece-of-junk, barely able to run Windows XP machine to Windows 8, despite the warnings. I can't see how it could possibly go wrong.
Remind me to be out of the country when Windows 8 comes out. Any of you folks in England need a consultant for a couple months? I'll give you a good discount. 
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So, you’re hosted in a single zone, and if you’re in US-East presumably went down last night. Stop it. AWS has seven regions across the world, three of which are in the US. Each region is split in up to five avaliabilty zones. You need to use more than just mulitple zones if you want to stay up during one of these outages. Cross region is the answer. Continental redundancy is your friend.
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The first music composed by computer considered good enough for top-class musicians to play is to be performed to mark the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
----
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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So you want to do some DirectX immediate mode rendering in your C#/XAML app ? Let me walk you through how to do that using the SharpDx library
Combining XAML and DirectX is an excellent msdn article that talks about what is possible with DirectX and XAML. Unfortunately there are no examples and what information there is available is targeting the XAML/C++ world. I wanted to do this for us managed programmers!
SharpDx is a very thin library that exposes the DirectX api’s for use in C# WinRT apps Smile . It exposes the DirectX API’s nearly 1-to-1 with no higher level abstraction (like what XNA is). We will use this library to render DirectX content in our XAML/C# apps via the new controls mentioned in the above article (SurfaceImageHost & SwapChainBackgroundPanel)
Alexandre Mutel is the brilliant guy who owns SharpDx, he’s done a lot of the hard work for us BUT help is very scarce with getting these bits working on your Win8 development environment.
I’ll spend this post walking you through how to get this all setup. It’s a simple post that will set the foundation for some awesome UI/UX rich future posts!
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Umbraco 5.2 Release.
Along with the realease of Umbraco 5.2 comes the announcement that Umbraco 5 development is being discontinued. Evidently, the plan is to integrate all the nice MVC features of Umbraco 5 into Umbraco 4.
Considering I have spent the last few months learning MVC and getting some Umbraco 5 sites running on Azure, I am not amused. 
EDIT: Blog post about this that goes into more details.
modified 2-Jul-12 4:34am.
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Oh! thats really not a fact of amusement  I was also interested to umbraco5 as i learned MVC...
Do or Die, ultimately try!
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I'm hoping the 5 features will make it into the 4 version sooner rather than later, but I don't have the time right now to watch the hour long video that presumably goes into more detail. Though if you are curious, the video is linked to from the 5.2 release page.
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Wow, really blunt news. I have several v4 sights running and was just about to embark on a new v5 one. Will review and stick to what I know
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Certainly have to agree with that. Working with WPF and Silverlight. Some great technology, but Microsoft has not done much with technology in years. HTML5 is just another patch to technology that was intended to display simple text in a small browser window (displays were not that big back then). Wish we could move on.
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Is your SQL Server slowing you down? Are bad queries giving your application a case of the blues? Before you go looking for help with SQL Server, make sure that you’ve done everything you can to solve the problems on your own. Many of SQL Server’s ills can be solved with some easy preventative maintenance, patching, and TLC. Top table tips & tricks.
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Word processors such as Microsoft Word are said to be WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. In a sense that’s true, but in another sense markup languages such as HTML or LaTeX are really WYSIWYG. Text files are simpler because there are no mysterious forces at work.
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TL;DR: for text files, notepad is WYSIWIG. For a completely useless definition of WYSIWIG.
I might be monday-morning-dense, but what'st the point?
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peterchen wrote: for text files, notepad is WYSIWIG
For executables, blue screen of death is WYSIWIG. Yes, there is no point.
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I think the point was that proprietary wysiwyg editors like Word interject an intermediary layer to do their magic that work fine for most users... until they don't. I've had Word docs corrupted or choke on some formatting and there's no easy way to figure out how or why it's that way. And how to fix it.
That's well and fine for most people most of the time.
Text files work better (in some ways) if you know what you're doing (HTML or Markdown or LaTeX or...) and the "what you see" is as important as the "what you get". Ever seen the HTML output from Word? Can you imagine what's happening inside the DOC/DOCX file? Yikes.
Back in the day we used FrameMaker for publishing and even though we did most work in the wysiwyg editor, the text-based file format was a blessing for troubleshooting problems.
There's also the concept - which I subscribe to - that many features wysiwyg editors give us are extraneous to the content and complicate more than they help. Plain text, Markdown, simple HTML markup make for more portable files, more focus on the content and, these days, can be easily and quickly parsed for fancier presentation formats (web pages, HTML/CSS slides, etc.) when necessary.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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OK, that starts to make some sense.
Terrence Dorsey wrote: Ever seen the HTML output from Word?
Yes, and I've been around when WYSIWIG became a distinguishing feature.
For me, at the heart of WYSIWIG, is the user interacting with the result itself: e.g. instead of a list of picture names and subtitles and format instructions, they are interacting with a photo album. It *removes* the user interface from perception: instead of clicking a button that makes the text bigger, they make the text bigger.
Of course, all abstractions are leaky (or, as D.A. said it, "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair"). So yes, being able to delve down can be a life saver.
In the end, tghe real life analogy is also limiting - which isn't always bad, humans like handrails. It might help focusing on the really important stuff, like finding a funny title for the 57th picture of Jon and Kiran pouting.
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It also occurs to me that we see the circle complete itself again with tools like jsFiddle[^] or Multimarkdown Composer[^], which blur the line between code, markup and WYSIWYG.
Or even IDEs that autocomplete your code right down to the semicolon.
Quote: Yes, and I've been around when WYSIWIG became a distinguishing feature.
Indeed, I recall doing my writing and markup in WordPerfect and handing off to the desktop publishers for formatting. Man, I dreamed of better WYSIWYG tools. And they arrived, after a fashion. But all the WYSIWYG features in the world don't make page layout in Word any less soul-destroying. And now I find myself back in a (slightly more sophisticated) text editor, handing off to publishing tools only when necessary.
What's old is new again.
(And what an interesting discussion sparked by such a poorly written post!)
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Though C has been around for decades, it's still consistently ranked at the top of any list of programming languages used and studied today. I recently spoke with David Griffiths, coauthor of Head First C, about the reasons for C's continued (even increased) popularity. Respect the classics, man!
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On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second. What did you do with your extra second?
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I time traveled, of course.
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I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive. But I hate it. It’s limited, often clunky, outdated, and deeply flawed. When comfort and speed get in the way of becoming a better developer.
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