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The Alpha Engineer rules Silicon Valley and all great technology ecosystems. He holds the highest rank in technical communities worldwide and is rewarded with the greatest access to resources — which only leads to greater domination. Tough to find, he is a genius in thought, workhorse in productivity, and is worth 100 or more mediocre or lower skilled engineers. His minions are rockstars, ninjas and sharks with frickin' lasers attached to their heads.
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"•a group of mediocre designers could have built a better computer than Jobs"
Several have.
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This blog is not the first place to say similar things, and other people have said it much better.
All four of his examples were terrible; of them, only Brunelleschi was arguably a genius, and none of them became successful by working alone. Jordan was an athlete, and Jobs and Buffett were primarily salesmen / businessmen (despite popular culture viewing them otherwise).
With that being said, it's perfectly normal to create a successful software product by having a single person build it from the ground up and not introduce more developers until the product is already successful. And if you want to create a successful software product, you can follow that pattern just because it's a good idea, or you can follow it because you have crazy illusions about history and reality (take your pick).
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Music has always fascinated me. It can make us feel emotions in a way few media can. Sadly, I have always been unable to play an instrument well. Generating music by computer lets me leverage one of my strengths, computer programming (which, contrary to popular belief, can be extremely creative), in order to make music.... I opted to pursue a strategy that “evolves” music out of other pieces of music. I chose this strategy in order to emphasize the process. Where's that confounded bridge?
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One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem more familiar with Lady Gaga. It’s not just a matter of taste and an appreciation for genius. It’s a matter of forgetting important things. Lady Gaga versus Lady Ada. Only one can compile...
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When analyzing response time, or latency, you need much more information than an average provides. The average, commonly the arithmetic mean, shows the index of central tendency. But, as I found in earlier posts, the tendency is often not central, but may be skewed by outliers, or split by multiple modes. How often these factors occur was determined quantitatively, using tests and a survey of hundreds of production servers and different types of latency: over 95% had six-sigma outliers, and at least 20% had multiple modes. Butterfly plots, long tails and other species of small furry animals gathered together in a graph.
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Computers manufactured by the world’s biggest personal computer maker, Lenovo, have been banned from the “secret” and ‘‘top secret” networks of the intelligence and defence services of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, because of concerns they are vulnerable to being hacked.... The ban was introduced in the mid-2000s after intensive laboratory testing of its equipment allegedly documented “back-door” hardware and “firmware” vulnerabilities in Lenovo chips. A Department of Defence spokesman confirmed Lenovo products have never been accredited for Australia’s secret or top secret networks. It looks like you're trying to save Top Secret data. Would you like help?
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I've spent about two days with the Leap Motion Controller, a Kinect-like PC accessory that uses infrared sensors to translate the motions of your hands into input for applications. The device I received is one I pre-ordered more than a year ago; I've been anxiously awaiting its arrival ever since I saw the first video of the device in action.... With visions of Minority Report dancing in my head, I connected the Leap Motion and installed its applications. See... nothin' up my sleeve... Presto!
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Helen’s bibliography contains 27 web sites, two-thirds of which Microsoft Word annoyingly converts into hyperlinks. If selecting “remove hyper link” requires two clicks of the mouse, how many clicks will Helen expend in this awful, time-consuming task? A. File corrupt! B. What's a DOCX? C. PC Load Letter. D. All of the above.
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NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT "core" is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One. In 1993, Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1. It was followed up by NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0. Microsoft's Windows releases still rely on NT-inspired numbering conventions. Windows 7's build numbers commenced with 6.1; Windows 8's with 6.2; and Windows 8.1 with 6.3. Windows NT: Windows New Technology, VMS++ or...?
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Frequently I come across confusion with domain names. Why doesn't my website work? Why is this stupid thing broken, everything I try fails, I just want it to work!! Invariably the question asker either doesn't know what DNS is or doesn't understand how something fundamental works. More generally, people think that DNS is scary or complicated. This article is an attempt at quelling that fear. DNS is easy once you understand a few basic concepts. 1.2.3.4, can I have a little more?
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Software requirements change, it's just a fact of life. A project is either changing, or going stale. In order to deal with this these changes, many people have come up with systems that can help developers to deal with change. We are constantly trying to write a system that will not only satisfy the current requirements, but also give us a leg up on the next batch of changes.... Unfortunately, this is the wrong approach to take when writing software, and new use cases will stretch our code to the point of breaking. You are young and life is long and there is code to write today.
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We made a number of exciting changes to MSBuild for Visual Studio 2013, including rethinking the fundamental relationship between MSBuild, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework. MSBuild has shipped as a component of the .NET framework since it was first introduced in 2005 with .NET 2.0, despite the fact that it is, first and foremost, a development tool leveraged primarily by Visual Studio developers. Starting with Visual Studio 2013, the 2013 version of MSBuild will ship as a part of Visual Studio instead of the .NET Framework. This transition allows us to more rapidly evolve MSBuild. Does this simplify your life, or complicate it further?
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Quote: We made a number of exciting changes
I am the only one here that doesn't find any of the changes mentioned even a little bit exciting? The MSBuild now comes with VS instead of .NET? Who cares? You can't use VS unless you have .NET anyway so what difference does it really make? ...and, more importantly, how does this rate as being "exciting"? That's about as exciting as placing the cereal box at the left side of your shopping cart instead of the right side when shopping at the store!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Its actually a problem for groups like SharpDevelop, that use the MSBuild framework to make their own IDE's. I also have an IDE geared towards very specific application development and this news kind of pisses me off since I'm now stuck in .NET 4.5 until I make my own build system, which is a rather large endeavor.
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Exactly - that's the point. You can do automated builds from command line without having Visual Studio installed (though msbuild resolves dependent projects differently than does VS). That won't be anymore possible in future.
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Bernhard Hiller wrote: That won't be anymore possible in future.
Yes it will;
Quote: We understand that there are a great number of reasons that you may want to use MSBuild and other build tools without needing to install Visual Studio so we are making the tools available as a new standalone package called Microsoft® Build Tools. The package includes MSBuild and the VB/C# compilers.
Preview of the build tools available from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39318[^]
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs
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For the launch of its much-discussed Chromecast device for streaming content to TVs, Google focused largely on how users will be able to display YouTube and Netflix videos on their televisions. But the company is also encouraging third-party developers to build, or augment, their own apps for Chromecast. All third-party apps will need to get Google’s approval before they go live, however, according to documentation Google posted Wednesday for developers. Please Stand By... while we figure out which API call starts the show.
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You can automate your workflow in Photoshop with actions, which are pretty popular and which most of you already know about and use. Today, we’ll introduce you to an advanced automation technique: scripting. All you need for this is basic knowledge of JavaScript, which some of us Web designers already have. Script all the things... even the art department.
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I love Illustrator scripting. I created a JavaScript script to create this, which is currently the wallpaper for my phone.
Though one annoying thing I found is that Illustrator has some limitations you'd only encounter when creating scripted objects. For example, I had to remove a bunch of points from that spiral because you can't morph an object with too many points (the limit was around 200 or 300). Guess Adobe's hamsters get confused easily.
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The proliferation of frameworks, libraries and toolkits make crunching data easier and easier. However, we must keep in mind that it is up to us to choose tools appropriate for our data.... Statistical models are trickier than arithmetic because there are so many assumptions regarding the nature of your data. Having access to infinite computing power and accessible toolkits does not relieve you as a human from using rational thinking to determine if the sausage you are making has meaning. Politics, perf logs or pop flies... here are the means for better than average statistical analysis.
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So if the bug was in iAd, why does Balic believe he might be responsible for the developer portal outage? Of the 13 bugs that Balic filed with Apple, one of them was a XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability in the developer site that could have led to accounts being compromised. In fact, of the 13 total bugs, 12 of them were XSS vulnerabilities in various Apple services that had the potential to expose user details. Balic claims he did not dig as deeply into those. That's right: 12 XSS vulnerabilities. Go check your code before the horror subsides.
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Apple must have an iHeadache™©®.
brisingr_aerowing@Gryphon-PC $ rake in_the_dough
Raking in the dough
brisingr_aerowing@Gryphon-PC $ make lots_of_money
Making lots_of_money
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Microsoft's "Linux integration services" (LIS) effort is responsible for building support drivers for Linux. LIS drivers enable Hyper-V features to work with Linux virtual machines, including features such as live backups and live migration of Linux guests. Those features work for Linux guests in the same way as they do for Windows guests.... The LIS drivers get reviewed by the Linux community before being added to Linux kernel source code.... Currently supported Linux distros include CentOS, Debian, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu. "The best cloud for Linux" may run on Windows.
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