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Encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service has stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations, an internal government document reveals. An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge. Apple privacy protection: Maps can't find you. Messages can't find you either.
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Gee, something I like about Apple. The Government should get out of spying on its own citizens.
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There are four main aspects to my job: (1) Defining the technical agenda for the team and making sure we're successful; (2) Writing code of my own; (3) Acting as the main liaison between our team and other groups at Google, and (4) Doing the "people management" for the team in terms of hiring, performance reviews, promotion, and so forth. Academics will immediately recognize the parallels with being a professor. Inside the Googleplex looks like... pretty much everywhere else.
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We've decided not to bring the Script Explorer project to RTM. In the meantime, we will start winding down the Script Explorer project. This will be a gradual process to allow time for existing users to move to other tools. We'll start by removing the RC package from the Download Center this week. For those who have already downloaded pre-release versions and are actively using Script Explorer in their environments, we will continue to operate the back-end script aggregation service used by Script Explorer for a few more months. We plan to turn off the service on June 14, 2013. Here are some alternative methods for finding and sharing Powershell scripts.
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More than ever, companies need coders. And while tech firms do the bulk of the hiring, the demand for programmers spans industries and only seems to be growing. From writing basic HTML to building complex logic into mobile applications, the ability to smartly craft lines of code continues to be one of the most in-demand — and often, well-paying — skill sets one can have. So what skills are the most sought after? Perl's on the list. Just sayin'.
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So, you know Joel Spolsky's essay Things You Should Never Do, Part I? In which he urgently recommends that, no matter what, please god listen to me, don't rewrite your product from scratch? And lists a bunch of dramatic failures when companies have tried to do so? First off, he's totally right. Developers tend to spectacularly underestimate the effort involved in such a rewrite... and spectacularly overestimate the value generated.... But sometimes, on certain rare occasions, you're going to be justified in rewriting a major part of your product. You made a mistake. You need to rewrite. Now what?
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Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours.... The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else.... Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. Here's a recipe for programming success: it takes 10,000 hours, not including compile time.
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Indeed, compile times. What's up with that? Even the simplest projects take longer to compile today than 10 years ago.
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Only 10 years?
HA![^]
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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A big annoyance in software development is having to wait around for tasks to complete; the larger the codebase, the more common it is. Some examples: Compiling and deploying the project. Pushing and pulling new code from the version control system. Running automated tests. Generating and converting assets. All this waiting around is a productivity nightmare which is sometimes underestimated, especially if the task itself doesn’t take long.... Someone more disciplined than me may prefer to spend that time writing documentation or reading tickets on the bug tracker. Unfortunately that’s still going to a be big productivity hit as the problem is the task switching – we’re just not wired to do that. Don't waste time: compile only for deployment.
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Imagine a time before smartphones. Before laptops. Before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even the mighty Google. A world without Web browsers, when the Internet belonged to universities and going online meant logging onto a local electronic bulletin board. Now imagine being able to smell it all coming—not the details, but the impact of a networked world on culture, business, politics, daily life. These were the preconditions that spawned Wired. Happy 20th birthday Wired! Issue 1 changed my life. What did Wired mean to you?
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One of the limitations of the two-step verification feature is that it will not work with linked accounts, as such users are required to unlink all their linked accounts before turning the feature on. In addition, some apps or devices that uses Microsoft account might not support two-step verification (such as the mail app on some phones), as such Microsoft also added a feature called “app password”. When you have turned on two-step verification and signs in to an app or device that doesn’t support the feature, simply generate an app password from the Microsoft account website, and enter that into the password field to sign in. Your password must contain a capital letter, a number, a haiku, a toad's foot...
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You are funny, my friend. Thank you for all those one-liners.
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Microsoft is planning to update Windows Phone 8 to support 1080p resolutions. Sources familiar with Microsoft's Windows Phone plans have revealed to The Verge that the company will issue an update later this year that brings support for the 1080p resolution and new 5-inch and higher devices. Windows Phone 8 currently supports WVGA, WXGA, and 720p resolutions. Could the next step be Microsoft TV?
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ISP-sanctioned ad injection directly into webpages—if that's what this is—has a long history, but it has been fairly rare to find it happening on pay connections in the US.... Early this year, one angry Comcast customer claimed that the giant Internet provider was injecting its own code into webpages—but only for the purpose of displaying a "courtesy notice" that a data usage threshold was near. Are CMA and R66T reviving ad injection on pay connections to residential users? Only those two companies can explain exactly what the situation is, and neither has been over-anxious to respond immediately to questions. How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK.
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What? You think just anyone can type '<' and '>'. That takes a professional! 
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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They're not really skills; more a list of languages and technologies that someone thinks might be in demand by employers. A few of them go together; for instance a web developer would need to know a reasonable mix of some of the items on the list to be able to get a job. Silly, really; single language skills are very limiting and just because you know n languages doesn't mean you're going to be any good at creating something useful with them.
"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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At previous jobs, they have asked me if I have "XML experience".
Having written XSLT user controls (and transforms for XML config files), SOAP web services, AJAX in various incarnations (with usually zero exposure to actual XML), HTML (and DOM composition/traversal, which is a bit like virtual XML), web.config files and other XML formats, yet calling XML a skill still has pretty much no meaning to me. It's like listing "Text" as a skill. It's just a basic file format (or a data format, as sometimes it's not actually stored in files); I doubt those asking for the skill know anything about it beyond the buzzwords (e.g., "semantic", "human readable", "web friendly", and so on).
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Definitely agree with you, but remember where this came from; it's driven off of job ads posted. We all know who is most likely to write those posts. So, I think your last line:
AspDotNetDev wrote: I doubt those asking for the skill know anything about it beyond the buzzwords (e.g., "semantic", "human readable", "web friendly", and so on).
is completely accurate. I'm surprised that "must own car" wasn't on the list of programming skills.
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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A number of years ago I showed an example of creating a typical digital clock using picture numbers and a little bit of VB.NET code. Fast forward to today and I have decided to show you an example of creating an analog style clock in VB.NET 2012.... If you are new to programming, and how to draw things on a Panel, this little sample code can get you started. So let's get to the project! Retro clock. Retro code.
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Timothy Jordan gave developers at SXSW a sneak peek at the Google Mirror API, which is what they'll use to build services for Glass, and now you can see it as a video. What it reveals is that the Mirror API has more structure than you might expect. Everyone seems to be as much frightened by Google Glass as they are excited by it, but what of the ways in which we can program it? Surely it is going to be complicated interacting with all that sophisticated design - speech input, speech output, the gesture based UI and so on. Where to start? Any real work that your app performs has to be done on the server.
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My love for programming languages is very much akin (and I swear linked to the same part of my brain) as my love for human languages: they are all unique and beautiful in their own way. I love Python, I love C, I love Smalltalk, I love Erlang, etc, etc. But Perl has taken an entirely undeserved beating in recent years, and so, in karmic balance, it deserves a round of outspoken championship, far more than others need right now. In pondering why Perl’s current reputation is so completely disjointed from the reality of the language, I’ve boiled it down to three “Big Bang Theory”-esque ideas: “The Cookie Slap! Effect”, “The Awkward Adolescence Fallacy”, and “The Singularity Paradox”. People still use Perl because it still works and the community has evolved with the language.
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While at Waza this year, I had a chance to talk to my friend Guillaume Roques. In addition to talking about SalesForce, we took advantage of our mutual .NET backgrounds to discuss Microsoft. We did the typically uncompromising praise of The Gu and how far Azure has come along in the last 18 months… and of course we had to talk databases. Below is my quick little list of reasons I gave him as to why I’m favoring Postgres over SQL Server from a technical/business aspect. Is the table half-full or half-empty?
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