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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]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/jig.gif)
Make it work. Then do it better - Andrei Straut
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Here's one that won't be appearing in the Insider, since it's only tangentially related to programming:
The whole world is suddenly talking about election pundit Nate Silver, and as a longtime heckler of Silver I find myself at a bit of a loss. These days, Silver is saying all the right things about statistical methodology and epistemological humility; he has written what looks like a very solid popular book about statistical forecasting; he has copped to being somewhat uncomfortable with his status as an all-seeing political guru, which tends to defuse efforts to make a nickname like “Mr. Overrated” stick...
The situation is that many of Nate Silver’s attackers don’t really know what the hell they are talking about. Unfortunately, this gives them something in common with many of Nate Silver’s defenders, who greet any objection to his standing or methods with cries of “Are you against SCIENCE? Are you against MAAATH?” If science and math are things you do appreciate and favour, I would ask you to resist the temptation to embody them in some particular person. Silver has had more than enough embarrassing faceplants in his life as an analyst that this should be obvious.
Cash indicts Silver's work on PECOTA as "a glutinous mass of Excel formulas," "large, complex, and full of creaky interactions and pinch points" with a "copious lack of documentation." Then he throws out a few edge-case misses in the analysis...
I dunno. Sounds like a typical software project to me. And it works, so... what's the problem?
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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All statistical models are approximations and are subject failure when stressed in unexpected ways.
What I got from this blog was that while Colby Cosh agrees with most of what Nate Silver has said, Nate has been wrong in the past so no one should listen to him now. This sounds petty and envious. Now I am no Nate Silver acolyte, but anyone who shuts up the idiotic pundits is okay with me; however, if you think that Nate Silver, or anyone else for that matter, is a modern day Cassandra, then you need to go back to astrology or phrenology lest you become like those who spent over $300 million on the last Cassandra, Karl Rove.
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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Michael Bergman wrote: All statistical models are approximations and are subject failure when stressed in unexpected ways.
Every abstraction is leaky, due to the fact that it's an abstraction 
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