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It’s sometimes argued that mathematical analysis in the 18th century flourished in Europe and languished in England because the English stubbornly held on to fluxions, while the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, etc. happily adopted differentials. If you fight through the math in Gilbert’s paper, you’ll appreciate that argument. I knew that England was late to change but was surprised to see fluxions still being used as late as 1826. It didn’t last much longer. How high can you build a Lego tower? Read on to find out... and how we know.
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What do you do when you want to manufacture and sell a toy? A few years ago I would have told you to start with a prototype, do some patent research, try to get in touch with a manufacturer, and somehow license the idea. This is what I did, or at least tried to do. But that was a few years ago, and now we live in the future! And in this future everyone has the tools to make potentially anything. This is the story of how I tried to bring a toy to market, failed, but then made it anyways, and now I'm letting the internet decide if it is worth manufacturing on a large scale. To Toys R Us, and beyond!
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Objective-C Succinctly is the only book you need for getting started with Objective-C—the primary language beneath all Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps. Written by Ryan Hodson, the author behind our popular Knockout.js Succinctly and PDF Succinctly titles, this e-book guides you from downloading Xcode, Apple's Objective-C IDE, to utilizing advanced features like blocks (similar to C#'s lambdas) and protocols. Avoiding Objective-C? You no longer have an excuse.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Avoiding Objective-C? You no longer have an excuse.
Excuse? What if I just don't think it's *cool* to develop for Apple?
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I tend not to worry about 'cool' or not
c/cool/profitable/ and I get a bit more interested
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i was being cynical, but yes "Profitable" and as such I'd do Android, not iPhone.
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If I have to give out my name, email, phone number, and workplace to even view this "free" ebook... how is that free? Personal info is marketing currency, just because they don't put a dollar amount on it, doesn't mean it's free. If it's free, then they should not require anything in return.
While this really isn't a big deal, I just find this type of practice to be dishonest. So in return, they will get false information.
Be The Noise
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To be fair to them, they sent me updates to their books when they amended them and issue corrections. This is good to know.
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Toward the end of his presentation Don’t fear the Monad, Brian Beckman makes an interesting observation. He says that early in the history of programming, languages split into two categories: those that start from the machine and add layers of abstraction, and those that start from mathematics and work their way down to the machine. These two branches are roughly the descendents of Fortran and Lisp respectively. Or more theoretically, these are descendents of the Turing machine and the lambda calculus. By this classification, you could call C# a bottom-up language and Haskell a top-down language.
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In this post, I'm going to show you how I can implement the same leaderboard service using a relatively new member of the ASP.NET stack, Web API. Web API is designed specifically for building services that are accessed via HTTP, and is a lightweight, yet highly customizable way of building RESTful services, and even supports OData as well. I'll also show you how easy it is to host services built using ASP.NET Web API using the new Windows Azure Web Sites feature. Check out the entire series for even more back-end brilliance.
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2012 was a good year for Kindle developers. With the unveiling of the first-generation Fire tablet in late 2011 and the release of the KF8 Mobi format in early 2012, designing beautiful ebooks for the Kindle platform became a reality. KF8 introduced a fixed-layout specification for Kindle Fire, which opened the door to graphically rich titles—children’s books, graphic novels—in Mobi format. KF8 also greatly increased CSS2 compliance for standard reflowable ebooks, implemented a handful of CSS3 features (text shadow, rounded borders), and added support for embedded fonts.... But while 2012 marks a huge leap forward toward the incorporation of modern Web standards into the Kindle platform, there is still much room for improvement in terms of multimedia/interactivity, content rendering, and ease of ebook development. Here is my humble wish list of improvements for the Kindle platform for 2013. A new chapter for epub production.
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R is a tool for statistics and data modeling. The R programming language is elegant, versatile, and has a highly expressive syntax designed around working with data. R is more than that, though — it also includes extremely powerful graphics capabilities. If you want to easily manipulate your data and present it in compelling ways, R is the tool for you. I think of all the education that I've missed... But then my homework was never quite like this!
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Selling software is more difficult if your users can’t give it a try first. Reputable developers such as Apple can charge a higher price for theirs because people know the quality they produce. But what if you’re not widely known? Are enough people going to take a gamble on you? If they have to pay you a reasonable price probably not. Outside the App Store we’re used to 30-day trial software, we’ve had it for years. This allows people to see whether your software is worth what you say its worth without taking a risk up-front. When in-app purchase works (and when it doesn’t).
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In the late ’90s Microsoft was selling a million copies of Word each month and gave away 14 fonts with its program. Its knock-off of Helvetica is called Arial.... As it spread over the graphic landscape like melted runny processed cheese, I suggested renaming it Velveetica. Its blandness and general horridness oozed out on all sides. It was neutral, but also tasteless and was taking over typography. Nothing could stop it as designers unquestioningly copied one another in adopting it. The idea that it was more modern than Gill Sans or Futura has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. For Helvetica, an explanation of its history helps to explain its longevity.
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For the first time in years, Apple will manufacture computers in the United States, the chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, said in interviews with NBC and Bloomberg Businessweek. “Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States,” he said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday.... Apple, the biggest company in the world by market value, moved most of its manufacturing to Asia in the late 1990s. As an icon of American technology success and innovation, the California-based company has been criticized in recent years for outsourcing jobs abroad. Would country of origin affect your tech-buying decisions?
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Today’s video game consoles are as powerful and as complex as a personal computer, with elaborate security systems designed specifically to keep do-it-yourselfers out. They contain dozens of customized or special-purpose parts, and it takes some serious wizardry to do anything with them other than exactly what the manufacturer intended. These systems are discouragingly complicated. It’s so hard to see any common link between the circuits you can build at home, and the complex electrical engineering that goes into an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. We wanted to build something different. Our platform has no controller, no television. The system itself is the game world. To make this happen, we had to take our engineering back to basics too. This is a game platform built using parts that aren’t fundamentally different from the Arduino or Maple boards that tens of thousands of makers are using right now. How Sifteo built its own game console, from scratch.
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Since the creation of touch screens, gestures have reigned in an entirely new aspect as to how we interact with our devices. As designers, we often only focus on the visual aspects of design, but hidden beneath (or above?) the visuals of what we create, there is an otherwise invisible concept. Gestures allow users to perform specific tasks in an extremely efficient and more dynamic manner. Some of the gestures we’re most used to are swipe to unlock, pinch to zoom, and pull to refresh. While those are relatively basic by most means, gestures have evolved greatly. Third party developers have began to truly utilize the potential that multi-touch displays hold, all within their apps. Rock, paper, scissors and...
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Guatemalan police arrested U.S. software guru John McAfee on Wednesday for illegally entering the country and said it would expel him to neighboring Belize, which he fled after being sought for questioning over his neighbor's murder.
He used the good ol' Basic Instinct alibi ("I'd have to be stupid to be that obvious").
And it looks like the story about his location being revealed because of location data in a picture taken with an iPhone was legit.
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lol yes saw that funny he wasn't being too careful about these things when he's on the run
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No matter how we choose to think about the grammar, it is certainly the case that try-catch-finally is different than if and while and for and so on; try-catch-finally requires a braced block. That seems inconsistent; is there a justification for this inconsistency? The last thing we need in this language is more ambiguity.
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Yes; if , while , for , etc. should all require braces.
It's all Dennis Ritchie's Ken Thompson's fault! He shouldn't be allowed to design languages!
Well, maybe it's our fault for making them so popular.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Yes; if , while , for , etc. should all require braces.
Yes! Agreed.
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I remember the argument not so long ago about how outdated the concept of coding standards are. This is one of the standards that I believe is key to any project. Any if, while and for must use braces, even if executing only one statement.
One of the few places where VB.NET have got better syntax though, forcing you to add the End If, End While or Next...
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: The last thing we need in this language is more ambiguity or something else .
FTFY
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
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On this blog, I’ve been focusing pretty much exclusively on ASP.NET Web API, but today let’s step outside .NET, and explore how you could host RESTful HTTP services directly from the native unmanaged C++ code – and I hope, this is going to be a very interesting journey, especially as C++ is so much more efficient than any managed language. If you haven’t done C++ before, or haven’t done any in years, don’t dread, modern C++ is quite different than what you might be used to. Coding with Casablanca - like any other SDK, only more so.
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