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With large numbers of Tablets and Smartphones running virtually identical software, the display becomes the single most important way for manufacturers to differentiate their products – that’s been true for Android and the same will apply for Windows devices. A top notch display makes everything that runs on a Tablet or Smartphone look great or as good as possible – including all of the Apps, web content, photos, and videos – looking a lot better than on devices with inferior displays. The ultimate smackdown: Microsoft Surface RT vs. Apple iPad 3 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
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While Sinofsky was seen as a brilliant figure at Microsoft, his downfall was that he didn't get along with others within the company. He was notorious for picking fights with other executives, including current CEO Steve Ballmer, and even pushed former executives like chief software architect Ray Ozzie to quit. It's not you, it's... well, actually it is you. Seeya.
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I didn't know that Sinofsky read this page. Now I do. Vote countered.
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I agree with Pete.
Why cannot a person post a news story without some uni-voter being an arse?
Uni-nitwit vote countered with my +5
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You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes...
Wait, wrong movie. So there's this Maunder fellow...
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terence me ol' mucker; he's half way round the world, half blind from staring at the sun, brain addled from the unaccustomed heat. You can say what you like about him (or even better, what you don't like about him). We won't tell. Honest. And there'll be no trace anywhere to read.
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For the first time in its 30-plus year history, the person leading Microsoft’s Windows unit won’t be a man. With the departure of Steven Sinofsky on Monday, Microsoft is handing over leadership of its flagship operating system to Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller, both of whom served as top deputies to Sinofsky.... They will have their hands full. For years, the highest-ranking female employee has been HR head Lisa Brummel.
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But the real question is, will they wash my windows? 
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All too often I see programmers trying to solve their problems on the internet by blindly "flipping switches." Change something, hit refresh in the browser. "Why is that cached? What's going on?" Change something else, hit refresh in the browser. "What's the deal?" When coding on the web, remember that effectively NOTHING is hidden from you.
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I thought I'd share my favorite regex of all time: [ -~] Any ideas what this regexp matches?
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Hmmmm. What a pretty darned useless regex. The I18n train passed it by without stopping.
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I like Pythonista and I was impressed with the previous update. Pythonista is a well designed implementation of Python on iOS that goes far beyond just being a dumb shell. The developer, Ole Zorn, has a new release out today that raises the bar considerably. This post will serve as an introduction to some of my favorite new features of Pythonista but also as a practical guide to how I use it. A Python interpreter for iOS... for taking your scripts on the road.
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Programming is frustrating because the tools, documentation & processes that we use every day are so bad. It’s not because programmer’s don’t understand logic or how to make algorithms, it’s because they’re still working on getting “hello world” to compile without errors. Or get a simple Facebook function to work for PHP CodeIgniter when you realize that the PHP CodeIgniter Github project has 2 lines of documentation... I’m glad I know what I’m doing because otherwise, I would have quit.
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Robbie wrote: Programming is frustrating because the tools, documentation & processes that we use every day are so bad
You can switch to become a project manager or Business ANALyst then you don't need to debug sh*t code you inherit from your peers.
dev
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In my years of programming in Python and roaming around GitHub's Explore section, I've come across a few libraries that stood out to me as being particularly enjoyable to use. This blog post is an effort to further spread that knowledge. I specifically excluded awesome libs like requests, SQLAlchemy, Flask, fabric etc. because I think they're already pretty "main-stream". If you know what you're trying to do, it's almost guaranteed that you'll stumble over the aforementioned. This is a list of libraries that in my opinion should be better known, but aren't. "Fuzzywuzzy" wins my vote for best-named library.
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When David Schnurman heard Hurricane Sandy was coming to Downtown Manhattan, he says he knew he had to act, and fast. His business had to do more than evacuate— he had to find a way to stay up and running for what was slated to be its busiest three days of the year Know where your servers are.
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Quote:
To complicate matters, the company’s servers were hosted by Amazon’s AWS platform, located in Virginia, another Sandy target. Kicking into emergency mode, Schnurman decided to transport everything to the cloud, a fast-growing option for small-businesses, in a matter of days. The company also relied on voice over IP service, so that team members could work from home.
So isn't Amazon's AWS platform located in Virginia part of the cloud then? The author seems slightly confussed.
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Jan Steyn wrote: So isn't Amazon's AWS platform located in Virginia part of the cloud then?
Yeah, that's correct. I think the point is that he was getting the data to different servers, but, yep, Amazon's AWS is technically part of the cloud.
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Microsoft's emphasis on the mobile nature of Windows 8 and its bold touch-friendly user interface may lead some to fear the software giant has taken its foot off the pedal in terms of security. Hackers, start your engines!
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Since 2000, Intel has done just about everything right in its core business, maintaining its dominance of the market for PC microprocessors and putting substantial distance between itself and competitors in the market for server chips. And yet the company finds itself in a very tough position: computers are going mobile, and Intel’s share of the microprocessor market is falling off a cliff. Still doing great in servers and PCs... which are an increasingly small part of the market for CPUs.
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I'm curious what is and isn't being counted as part of the mobile total. Unless they're excluding lower end phones the >96:1 ratio between PC and mobile isn't plausible; and I can only conclude they're rejecting older non-pc markets for CPUs to make Intel's situation look worse.
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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Dan Neely wrote: to make Intel's situation look worse
Exactly. It's purely a load of marketing tactics/scare mongering.
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Let me be clear, I want Windows Phone 8. And OEMs have introduced some pretty compelling phones with it this fall. But I think I’m going to keep my new device lust in check. At least I’m going to try. Here's why. Most developers didn’t get started working on WP8 apps until the beginning of November.
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Research in which data vastly outstrip our ability to posit models is qualitatively different. Much of science for the last three centuries advanced by deriving simple models from first principles — models whose predictions could then be compared with novel experiments. In modeling complex systems for which the underlying model is not yet known but for which data are abundant, however, as in systems biology or social network analysis, one may turn this process on its head by using the data to learn not only parameters of a single model but to select which among many or an infinite number of competing models is favored by the data. A “fourth paradigm” of science, after experimental, theoretical, and computational paradigms.
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When I’m at conferences or meetups and people discover I work for a company building a new database, there are usually a few puzzled looks. Explaining the technology behind Akiban to people is easy but the usual reason for the puzzlement is that many people wonder why on earth a company would want to develop a new database from scratch when so many alternatives already exist. There are good reasons, but I’ve struggled with articulating them especially when someone wants a 90 second explanation at a conference. In the interest of having an answer that I can easily refer people to, here’s what I think we’re trying to do. These are the problems that Akiban is aiming to solve. The pendulum swings: from SQL to NoSQL to MoreSQL...
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In the late ’90s I thought COM (Microsoft’s Component Object Model) was the way of the future. The whole architecture starting with the IUnknown interface was very elegant. And to hear Don Box explain it, COM was almost inevitable.... And yet programming COM was painful. I wondered at the time why something so elegant in theory was so difficult in practice. COM had some good ideas, and some of these ideas have been reborn in WinRT.
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I don't want to turn this into an anti-VB rant, but VB was to blame for a lot of COM problems and a fair bit of the bad rep that COM got. One of the key tenets of COM development was that you never broke the interface - if you wanted to add new features or drop a parameter in a COM method, you defined a new interface and worked with that. Unfortunately, legacy VB borked this completely up as the designers decided they knew better what people wanted out of COM. This was an endless source of frustration for me, that I'd be having to code against an ever shifting target from my nice ATL project because someone forgot to set something in a project dialog that meant a new GUID was generated on every build.
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If you want to get ahead in the Microsoft world, you have to go back[^]. Herb Sutter's bright and upbeat about the future of C++ at Microsoft.
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I recently updated my primary workhorse PC (a 6 core desktop with two 30" displays) from Windows 7 to Windows 8. As part of that, I picked up a Logitech Touchpad T650. This post includes my observations. Enhanced multitouch support for developer-grade desktop systems.
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Trying to do development work for longer than an hour with my laptops touchpad rapidly becomes painful. 1 hour/day of development and 7 hours/day of farting around doing nothing in particular won't fly with my employer; and I have no desire to be demoted into management no matter how much larger the paycheck would be.
It's still a stupid toy; and no doubt would get filthy with finger grease anyway. 
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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Regardless of our current skill level, we all were beginners at one point in time. Making classic beginner mistakes comes with the territory. Today, we’ve asked a variety of Nettuts+ staff authors to chime in with their list of pitfalls and solutions – in a variety of languages. Learn from our mistakes; don’t do these things!
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Windows Phone 8 no longer requires that apps be written in .NET, you can now use C++. When tech pundits talk about the lack of ecosystem they are basing that on the history of Windows Phone 7, but I really think that the changes made in Windows Phone 8, especially the ability to write apps and games in C++ makes a huge difference and now I think you will see Windows Phone be a first class citizen with developers because they won’t have to do nearly as much to support the Windows Phone platform. What languages would you like to see supported for Windows Phone development?
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Finally, being able to write a native program on a phone. Who's bright idea was it to make it so that you have to write programs for a virtual machine on an already resource (including battery life) constraint system?
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Lloyd Atkinson wrote: Finally, once again being able to write a native program on a phone. Who's bright idea was it to make it so that you have to write programs for a virtual machine on an already resource (including battery life) constraint system?
There, ftfy.
Like someone said on the blog: eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0[^]
Make it work. Then do it better - Andrei Straut
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All we need now is OpenGL ES 
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Zen Coding is a faster way to write HTML using a CSS style selector syntax, and you can now use Zen Coding in Visual Studio via the Web Essentials 2012 plug in (v1.7). Zen Coding was introduced by Sergey Chikuyonok in 2009 (according to Smashing Magazine) and has been updated over time to become a great way to write monotonous HTML much more efficiently. Here is a quick list of the Zen Coding features that are now supported in Visual Studio 2012.
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Soon most information will be available at your fingertips, anytime, anywhere. Rapid advances in storage, communications, and processing allow us move all information into Cyberspace. Software to define, search, and visualize online information is also a key to creating and accessing online information. This article traces the evolution of data management systems and outlines current trends. A prescient 1996 paper predicted much of the NoSQL and web tools we use today... and much more.
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The author wrote:
"If there was an error in a transaction, it was not detected until that evening’s run against the master file, and the transaction might take several days to correct. More significantly, the business did not know the current state of the database – so transactions were not really processed until the next morning. Solving these two problems required the next evolutionary step, online systems. This step also made it much easier to write applications."
In one site, the COBOL programs written for an IBM-compatible mainframe were 4 pages long, including file descriptions.
The on-line programs using a DBMS ran to 110 pages without any file descriptions that were simply INCLUDEd during compile time.
On-line systems made it much easier to write applications?
They must have some high-quality weed up in Washington state!
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The whole thing reads like a paper on data management systems written for a first course in DBMS by a BS (Computer Science) major in his sophomore class.
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I learned Racket after 25 years of mostly using C and C++. Some psychic whiplash resulted. "All the parentheses" was actually not a big deal. Instead, the first mind warp was functional programming. Before long I wrapped my brain around it, and went on to become comfortable and effective with many other aspects and features of Racket. But two final frontiers remained: Macros and continuations. Facing our fears by learning to write macros... in Racket.
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Color screens are an advancement that most graphing calculators have, inexplicably, forgone for ages. But finally, Texas Instruments is moving one of its old battleaxes to Technicolor: the company is due to release a color version of its TI-84 calculator. Shouldn't there be a (smartphone) app for that?
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For most uses, they only have to display text and simple graphics, beyond graphs of multiple functions, I don't see a benefit to it. Plus, I imagine the color display is terrible for the battery life.
I'm happy with my TI-83. Math hasn't changed, no need to update my calculator.
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I have a TI NSpire CX, which already has a color screen (and a word processor, and a spreadsheet, and several addon modules, including one for web browsing, and.... well, you get the idea).
It also has decent battery life.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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One of the new development concepts introduced with Windows Phone 8 is compiling applications in the cloud. But what does this mean, exactly? ALL THE THINGS ARE IN THE CLOUD!
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This non-Free license is intended to mock people who take licensing seriously. In fact, one could easily categorise efforts to pollute the Free Software ecosystem with fake, non-Free software as evil, which would mean all JSON.org code fails to comply with its own license, due to shipping with its license (Inception, anyone?). Before the jokers in the room claim that this kind of problem is deserved by Mono, let’s take a look at all the software in Debian which Douglas Crockford endangers with his childishness. PHP? OwnCloud? jQuery? You think Debian serves its users well by pulling jQuery from the next release in order to serve the ego of a man behaving like an eleven year old? Free software isn't really free if the licensing terms demand you "Do no evil."
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I think we have license troll here.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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There is a very, very small handful of people who can get away with saying that they will only trust a password management system that they build themselves, but you should definitely not trust a password management system that you develop yourself. There are broad challenges to consider and questions to ask when developing a password management system, and we’ve covered a number of them here on the Agile Blog. These requirements hold true even if that system is to “just use a file or disk encryption software”... My old man is a television repairman, he's got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.
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Project Orca was supposed to give the Romney campaign a technical advantage over Obama on election day. It got harpooned instead.
Any remark that I make here would be perceived as anti-Obama or anti-Romney so I will let the article speak for itself.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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Fantastic! What a giggle - Orca fell over when trying to perform an 'overwhelming' number of DB inserts, 1200 a minute - or 20 per second.
As someone in the article mentions - even Access can do that! (and easily, I might add)
Hilarious on so many levels, but the rate of data-entry at the time of failure makes my day.![Jig | [Dance]](/script/Forums/Images/jig.gif)
Make it work. Then do it better - Andrei Straut
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