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In 2010 Apple introduced the first iPad and basically created a new segment of devices – tablets. iPad wasn’t a full PC replacement (and still isn’t) but was considered a big step towards the real post-PC era. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that at some point in the near future iPad (and possibly similar competing products) would replace PCs for most purposes, except maybe some very specific areas. That said, to this day it’s pretty much inconceivable for someone who ever really needed a PC to be able to get by without one. Tablets are for consuming content; not creating content... or are they?
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Andrew Bujalski’s new film Computer Chess, which debuted Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, is perhaps one of the oddest sports movies ever made. A black-and-white period piece shot on 16 mm film straight out of the 1980s era it depicts, Computer Chess follows a series of programming teams at a computer chess tournament as they compete to write the ultimate program to defeat a human competitor. To be a nerd in the 1970s and early 80s was a more serious endeavor than it is now.
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Well, a slew of African start-ups are now facilitating similar types of transfers, but instead of cash, the currency being exchanged is airtime minutes. In addition to their most obvious application, these can be exchanged for cash at mobile phone dealers or bartered for products and services. One immediately apparent advantage of such a set-up is that there is no need for a proprietary system of agents — anyone dealing in prepaid airtime minutes would do. Fascinating: making payments with airtime minutes where capital is scarce.
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From the article: "The key to the discovery is a new molecule developed by chemists at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata. It allowed researchers to build magnetic memory with fewer layers of material, making it thinner, less expensive, and more usable at normal temperatures. The reward for consumers and enterprises could be storage that holds 1,000TB per square inch." [ITworld]
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I was asked to give an introductory talk on HTML5 for the latest Adobe User Group Belgium Web SIG Event. The presentation I ended up with is entitled “HTML5: It goes to ELEVEN” and can be viewed on Slideshare. Since the target audience was filled with ‘esteemed HTML5 newcomers’ I decided to focus on how easy it is to ‘switch’ to HTML5 and use it today. The way I see it, there are three levels of HTML5 usage... Fourth type: works in IE.
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Flat design is beautiful and refreshing. It’s also generally faster to design and easier to make responsive. If it was a graphic design trend, it’d be well received. Unfortunately, us web designers have that pesky ‘usability’ thing always looming large. We cannot ignore the user experience with our work, so because of that, flat design is inherently flawed. Next up: abstract expressionist interfaces. Click wherever you like. It won't mean anything.
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If it ain't broke don't fix it. If you want change for the sake of change, please don't require us to go along with you. I like buttons and menues, leave me alone!
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Said the fish in the sea, said the monkey in the tree, said grumpy Baldconsult P.
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The fish had it right. You can keep your digital watch.
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also said teh monkee in teh tree
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I like flat. I also like 3D. I like all the myriad ways to present yourself to the world via the web. There is no right or wrong: there is only fad and fashion and page hits.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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The C# compiler is a pretty good thing, but it has limitations. One limitation that has given me a headache this evening is its inability to guard against cycles in structs. As I learn to think and programme in a more functional style, I find that I am beginning to rely more and more on structs to pass data. This is natural when programming in the functional style, but structs can be damned awkward blighters. Here is a classic gotcha. The following code won't compile... Garbage in, garbage out?
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I don't see how that's the compiler's fault.
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huh, does he really want to able to do something like that??
That's just nuts.
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at the example. Why? Why would someone do that?
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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I'm very pleased to see that the latest and greatest Try F# 3.0 has been released today! Try F# is a web-based tool for learning and exploring F# 3.0, a simple and pragmatic programming language combining functional, object-oriented and information-rich programming. F# is open source and cross-platform, see the F# Software Foundation for details. Microsoft contribute to F# in multiple ways, including the Visual F# tools. This site allows easy learning of key F# principles, creating, editing and running F# code within a browser, and sharing code through the Internet. Give F# a try. There's (almost) nothing to install.
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I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA. An FPGA is a programmable integrated circuit, generally programmed using a hardware description language.... Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was created back in 1985 by the famous Japanese company Nintendo. It was an extremely revolutionary console at its time and was the best selling console for a number of years. I used to play NES a lot as a kid, so I have all those memories of the old games, and had an imminent urge to dig into the inner details of the console to figure out how it worked. Smart, bored people do such interesting things.
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WOW!
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system is a combination of two very different user interfaces, with each best used in a different way. While the whole system is touch-enabled, only the Start Screen, with its own tablet-type apps, is fully optimized for a touchscreen. The second interface — the traditional Windows desktop — is still best used with a physical keyboard and a mouse or touch pad. So, hardware makers are turning out convertible PCs that attempt to function as both tablets and traditional laptops. Return of the Tablet PC (sans stylus this time).
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Today’s open-loop mobile wallet offerings generally concentrate on three things: payments, loyalty and promotions. Most, however, are primarily focused on enabling the smartphone to connect with a merchant’s payment terminal (wirelessly in the case of NFC or optically in the case of 2D bar codes) for the purpose of transmitting the information that typically resides on the mag-stripe of a consumer’s traditional credit/loyalty card. Some, however, are taking a fundamentally different approach to the mobile wallet... Stand and deliver, your smartphone or your life!
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At 1:41am GMT today I sent out an email to a bunch of gaming sites claiming to be a Microsoft employee working on the new Xbox. I made up every single word of it along with a couple of specs copied from other rumours that have been appearing on the Internet. This was a bit of an experiment to see just how easy it is to get a fake story taken seriously. And it is shockingly easy in the games industry. Anonymous sources say "Don't believe everything you read."
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Today Intel made a sobering, but not entirely unexpected announcement: over the next 3 years Intel will be ramping down its own desktop motherboard business. Intel will continue to supply desktop chipsets for use by 3rd party motherboard manufacturers like ASUS, ASRock and Gigabyte, but after 2013 it will no longer produce and sell its own desktop mITX/mATX/ATX designs in the channel. We will see Haswell motherboards from the group, but that will be the last official hurrah. ...and I suspect the build-your-own PC business will start disappearing with it.
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It's easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it's also easy to forget that we've been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It's only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA. Play Misty for me.
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"Understanding Your New GoPro"
Time for sloooooooooooow-mo......Maybe this will help.
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