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In the last few years, we’ve seen a pretty significant shift in how we use computers. We’ve gone from primarily using one Internet-enabled device (the PC) to using two (PC + phone) to using three (PC + phone + tablet), and who knows what else we’ll add in the next couple years. Not only are we looking up our data and documents on all these devices, we’re creating data and documents on them, and the time we’re spending to do it on the PC is getting smaller. Effortless and ubiquitous access to data is increasingly important to people. If your app deals with user’s data, building cloud sync into your app should not be a feature you bolt on to an app - it is the feature. It’s why you will beat competitors or lose hard to them. ...And you need to think about it at the beginning, not at the end of development.
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One month ago we released the Web App Preview of TouchDevelop, the mobile programming environment. Thanks to the feedback you’ve been sending us since then, we were able to greatly expand the list of supported platforms. As of today, the TouchDevelop Web App Preview at touchdevelop.com/app runs on PCs with Internet Explorer 10 or the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox, Microsoft Surface and other devices running Windows RT, iPad 2 or later (including the mini), iPhone 4 or later, various Android phones and tablets with Chrome, and Macs with the latest versions of Safari, Chrome or Firefox. For Windows Phone 7/8 you can get the fully featured app in the Windows Phone Store that can access even more sensors and data. The key? A predictive on-screen code keyboard and a touch-optimized programming language.
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What we're learning at GitHub is that opting in to open source project constraints often results in better natural survivability characteristics for many types of business, product development, and operations activities. That is to say, processes designed to conform to open source constraints results in a project that runs well, attracts attention, and seems to be self perpetuating where the same project structured more traditionally requires much more manual coordination and authoritative prodding. I'm not saying offices will go away entirely. They just won't be required... or useful.
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A year before the Macintosh was released, Apple’s Lisa introduced the concept of a GUI and mouse to Apple’s customers. Often considered to be ahead of its time, the Lisa also offered protected memory, limited multitasking, hard disk support and more. Here are all the Apple mice from the Lisa to today's Magic Mouse and Trackpad. How am I supposed to right-click with only one mouse button?
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It's super-easy to open an account at a Web hosting company and start fiddling around there—two excellent Ars reader-recommended Web hosts are A Small Orange and Lithium Hosting—but where's the fun in that? If you want to set up something to learn how it works, the journey is just as important as the destination. Having a ready-made Web or application server cuts out half of the work and thus half of the journey. In this guide, we're going to walk you through everything you need to set up your own Web server, from operating system choice to specific configuration options. Your Sysadmin membership card will arrive shortly...
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More and more of our data--our credit card numbers, tweets, photos, personal documents, browsing habits, music, and a hundred other things--is stored "in the cloud." The cloud metaphor evokes images of bits and bytes floating around in the ether somewhere, and we rarely hear tech companies talking about their data centers, where the data really lives. That's partly because data centers are boring.
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As we have embraced computational tools as our primary media of expression, and have made not just mathematics but all information digital, we are subjecting human discourse and knowledge to these procedural logics that undergird all computation. And there are specific implications when we use algorithms to select what is most relevant from a corpus of data composed of traces of our activities, preferences, and expressions.... That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God. What we know() and how we organize(it).
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While some people online stop at overall market share when comparing products, I am more concerned with their usage in the real world. I decided to look at sales numbers for Android and iOS devices in correlation with both their online market share and Black Friday sales numbers to see how they stacked up. What I found was rather interesting.... More Android devices sold. More iOS devices used online.
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It would have been a collective decision not to use Google Maps so that Apple fanbois can be locked into yet another Apple Experience but when it failed, somebody had to be scapegoated.
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The Eclipse Common Build Infrastructure aligns the build setup of Eclipse projects and makes building an Eclipse-based project trivial for anyone. Here's how it works. Build your own Eclipse... the easy way.
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sorry why Eclipse when MS Visual Studio Express is free?
I used Eclipse back when I was a Java developer. Not using free stuff much these days as I work only for firms who can pay me - one characteristics of such firms are that they tend to pay for expensive toys and licensed software.
dev
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"Why All The Lambdas?" is a question that comes up with ASP.NET MVC. Instead of lambdas, why don't we just pass a property value directly? Aren't we simply trying to give a text input the value of the property? There is more going on here than meets the eye, so let's start from the top... Lambdas help the helpers, that's why.
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The Network panel gives us a view into the resources that are requested and downloaded over the network in real-time. Viewing network traffic isn’t the most glamorous activity – especially if you’re new to web development. However, performance becomes an important issue, as your site’s traffic increases. Identifying and fixing requests that take a long time to complete is an important step in optimizing a site. Watch your site as it arrives, bit by bit.
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Attention modders: The DOOM 3 BFG Edition GPL Source code is now up on github. This source release does not contain any game data... but you're free to roll your own. Your mission has always been to code, soldier!
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*impatiently waits for the first fork with a built-in aimbot/radar/wallhack/press-to-win-button*
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Most discussions about sorting algorithms tend to end up discussing quicksort because of its speed. Formal computer science programs also tend to cover quicksort last because of its excellent average complexity of O(n log n) and relative performance improvement over other, less efficient sorting algorithms such as bubble sort and insertion sort for large data sets. Unlike other sorting algorithms, there are many different implementations of quicksort that lead to different performance characteristics and whether or not the sort is stable. The entire algorithm is just a loop of loops.
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While some of us were enjoying our tofurkey over the past week-plus, others were combatting a thorny Windows Server time-rollback issue. Some Windows Server users are still recovering a recent problem caused by time servers at USNO.NAVY.MIL incorrectly provided time samples that listed 2000 as the current year. Y2K Part 2: The Bug That Would Not Die!
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Wonder what the navy did to cause that glitch to happen?
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Such are the pressures in Silicon Valley, where the start-up ethos extols fresh ideas and young programmers willing to toil through the night. Chief executives in their 20s, led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are lionized, in part because of their youth. Many investors state bluntly that they prefer to see people under 40 in charge. Yet the youth worship undercuts another of Silicon Valley's cherished ideals: that anyone smart and driven can get ahead in what the industry likes to think of as an egalitarian culture. To many, it looks like simple age discrimination - and it's affecting people who wouldn't fit any normal definition of old. Youth and energy win over age and experience?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Youth and energy win over age and experience?
Not really: it doesn't take long to realize that youth and energy can only take you so far: at some point you actually have to know what you are doing. Bullshit might baffle brains but it won't baffle older brains who've seen it all before. Nothing wrong with having youngsters in the team but it needs to be balanced with cooler heads and people that command respect through accomplishment, experience and skill honed through many years of making mistakes and learning from them.
Young people think they know it all and invented everything: they don't and they didn't.
"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 stable, supported, mainstream version of Firefox on Windows is a 32-bit application. Even if you use 64-bit Windows, if you use Firefox, you're using a 32-bit browser. The exception is if you're using the Nightly build of Firefox. This represents the latest, cutting-edge version of the browser, and it's available in two versions: a 32-bit one, and a 64-bit one. However, this won't last much longer. More secure, more stable... but far fewer extensions.
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Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the collisions may have produced a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate. A translucent, greenish substance in the shape of a winged, tentacled creature...
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"... a small green globule ..."
Nigel Tufnel
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