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When the Xbox 360 originally launched back in 2005—followed by the Wii and PS3 in 2006—the question was "which console should I buy?" A lot has happened in the gaming scene since then, between smartphones, tablets, streaming media, Ouya, and the rebirth of PC gaming—and that's just the beginning. Now the question becomes, "should I buy a console in the first place?" We take a look at the competition stacked up against the next generation consoles, where consoles have changed this generation, and where they will need to go if they want to keep up. History has shown that you can trump piracy if you make your service convenient and affordable.
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An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area. “Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
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There's just as much hacking originates from the good ol' US-of-A
Spoiling for a fight they are. (more aging weapons to make safe = drop on someone)
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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After the first SimCity beta weekend had ended, I read an article by Norman Chan over at Tested.com in which he attempted to discover the best suburban city layout according to the game. It's hugely interesting stuff, and quite frankly I hadn't considered the idea of putting this new SimCity to real-world use. So when the second beta weekend rolled around, I decided to have a crack at testing some theories that I have about my own hometown... Turn right at Tesco and watch out for Godzilla attacks.
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Imagine fund managers in Quant funds using SimCity or Command&Conquer to simulate battles between North/South Korea and determine how/what to invest accordingly.
dev
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A few days old, but interesting nonetheless. GitHub has released Boxen[^], an automation tool for Macs (yes, I know, but they are good). Lets you create a consistent DEV setup across your team (and wouldn't it be nice if there were a PC version?)
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TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: an automation tool for Macs (yes, I know, but they are good)
I agree, automation tools are good.
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Domain names[^] are the new software patents?
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TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Only *you* can save Python
Why would anyone want to do that?
On the other hand, "what's in a name?"; I'm sure that any such legal situations will not actually harm the language or lessen its usage. It may of course, do the opposite.
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In most programming classes, students write programs in a single language (e.g., Java, Python) and its standard library; they might use a well-documented third-party library for, say, graphics. Students fill in skeleton code templates provided by instructors or, at most, write a few chunks of code "from scratch." Specifications and interfaces are clearly defined, and assignments are graded using automated test suites to verify conformance to specs. What I just described is necessary for introducing beginners to basic programming and software engineering concepts. But it bears little resemblance to the sorts of programming that these students must later do in the real world. What secrets of programming did they forget to teach you in school?
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As a part time college professor, some of these points in the article does give me some ideas for future classes. All of the points are good, especially #3 and #6...
"I've seen more information on a frickin' sticky note!" - Dave Kreskowiak
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How to function when you're not allowed to smash one of your cow-orkers keyboard into his hands until you've broken all three of them to stop him from injecting nothing but non-functional technical debt into your codebase.
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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Please do share your feelings. Don't hold back.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Quote: What secrets of programming did they forget to teach you in school? How would I know?
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Conceptually simple features take longer than expected to implement. This statement is so true...
The shout of progress is not "Eureka!" it's "Strange... that's not what i expected". - peterchen
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Data visualisation - and in particular, web-based data visualisation - is having its moment. JavaScript libraries like D3.js, Raphaël, and Paper.js, building on modern browser support for Canvas and SVG, have made it easier than ever to produce complex visualisations that, until recently, were the province of computer scientists and a handful of specialist designers. 107% of the developers in this pie chart would prefer a bar graph.
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Quote: 107% of the developers in this pie chart would prefer a bar graph. However, only 72% of statistics are correct 60% of the time.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Forth Warrior is a game of programming, stabbing and low cunning. Your Forth code controls the actions of a valiant adventurer as she plunges ever deeper into a mysterious dungeon. Gather precious gems, defeat slime creatures and watch your step! Your program must fit in 8 kilobytes and is scored based on how many cycles it takes to execute, how many actions are taken, how many gems are collected and how many slimes are defeated. Once you've made it through all the levels, try to optimize your code and hone your strategy to maximize your score! Our heroine, Liz, is fluent in Forth.
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Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool, the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time : Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named "Build". It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine delivered great value and ranked high in terms of speed, stability and memory consumption but my enthousiasm met a source code controversial in terms of organization, best practices and comments/documentation. This reading session taught me a lot about code legacy and what helps a software live long. Nukem 'till they glow, then shoot 'em in the dark!
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LearnGitBranching is a pseudo-git sandbox and interactive series of tutorials / challenges to accelerate the understanding of how git commit trees work. The ideal audience is a complete newcomer to git, but a wide range of experience levels should be able to benefit from these tutorials. It supports a fairly wide range of commands and dynamically visualizes the effects each change has on a commit tree visualization next to the command box... Here's a nice opportunity to learn the details of git branching without completely borking your codebase.
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HDCP (the copyright protection mechanism in HDMI) is broken. I don't mean just a little bit broken, I mean thoroughly, comprehensively, irredeemably and very publicly broken. Broken in such a way that any possible recovery would mean layering it with so much additional new infrastructure as to render it entirely pointless. Broken. B-R-O-K-E-N. How can I put this? It doesn't work. So why, then, is it still being shoved down my throat? Let's look at all of the wonderful ways in which HDMI is broken.
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Windows RT, the version of Windows being loaded onto ARM-powered tablets and netbooks such as the new Microsoft Surface, has one drawback: there are tens of thousands of apps written for x86 hardware that simply won’t run on this new ARM-powered architecture. While this may present a problem for hospitals, banks, and other institutions needing a proper Wintel platform, we’re wondering how to get classic games such as Civ III and Age of Empires running on these new tablets. An x86 emulator for ARM devices that also passes Windows API calls to Windows RT.
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help.. => sanity check <=
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology — the fax machine — that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.... Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country’s deep attachment to the fax machine.... A decade ago, he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted. Folding origami from a tablet is difficult. Not impossible, though...
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