|
I didn't get my hands on VisiCalc until 1981. The first thing any Apple ][ VisiCalc user had to know was that the '/' (forward-slash) key brings up the menu on the top row of the screen. You used the left and right arrow keys to pick a top-level command, and hit RETURN. At least some of the commands then had a sub-menu which would appear on the second row, and then you'd hit RETURN again to execute the command. It was a really elegant system for using just four keys to represent a command hierarchy on two lines of all upper-case text, just 40 characters long. That was about 8% of the total available screen real estate, which was otherwise occupied by some status readouts - location, cell contents, formula, etc. To this very day in Office 2010 on Windows the '/' key puts focus on the "Ribbon".
|
|
|
|
|
Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to announce that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates. The company will no longer offer a test environment for developer and its developer portal is already set to be read-only. Netflix’s OData catalog, which was never updated all that regularly in the first place, will be retired a month from now on April 8. If you're using that database as an example, time to update your articles.
|
|
|
|
|
Universities are not offering the IT programming skills that firms need, according to global research. Skills in programming languages like Cobol, CICS and JCL are essential to support business-critical IT systems that underpin many organisations today, but the majority of IT courses don't support them.... Respondents were also asked how they thought their IT course students felt about learning Cobol skills, and 39 percent said their students viewed Cobol as "un-cool and outdated", with 15 percent saying they wouldn’t know what Cobol was. There's also worryingly low enrollment in Conversational Latin.
|
|
|
|
|
Learning Latin would be more interesting. 
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
|
|
|
|
|
dusty_dex wrote: Learning Latin would be more interesting.
sure - and if you can get a job and pay your bills by learning that knowledge, why not ?
as for COBOL, there's still a fair bit of work out there in it, so, so much for it being 'uncool'
|
|
|
|
|
Well that's the upside.
If I could do what Richard Pryor's character did in Superman III and siphon off the fractions of $0.01c at a financial institute, and get away with it. I'd be very interested in that job. 
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
|
|
|
|
|
I got my first programming job by writing games in COBOL on a TI-990 while waiting for the batch jobs I used to run for a printing business
|
|
|
|
|
When I was in college, we were required to take 3 semesters of COBOL programming. While I have not used COBOL since I left college, many of my colleagues have.
We are constantly told there is a large body of COBOL code that needs to be maintained; whether that is true or not is not for me to say.
I will, however, make this observations: at the top of the banner for CodeProject is an advertisement for Visual COBOL. If COBOL is a 'dead language', why is there a Visual instance of it? Why would a for-profit company create a product for which there should be no market?
Tim
|
|
|
|
|
Most of the criticism about Windows 8 is around how Microsoft attempted to bridge the gap between a modern touch-based, tablet-centric (if you will), UI and the traditional desktop. Now this is actually a complex situation, because we aren’t just talking about UI but also about a new app model. In theory you could have one without the other. In previous posts I’ve talked about why the overall re-imagination of Windows, including all these elements, was important. So as one thinks about various alternative scenarios you have to consider that not all of the modernization would have necessarily occurred. A touch too much?
|
|
|
|
|
Terrence Dorsey wrote: What if Microsoft had done Windows 8 differently?
They did.
modified 11-Mar-13 0:02am.
|
|
|
|
|
It has been out for three days, and SimCity is broken. Seriously, unplayably broken. As a long-time fan who's been looking forward to this week for many years, this is a huge, frustrating disappointment. The worst part? The main issue isn't with the game itself, but an entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable always-online Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that's keeping millions of fans from playing the game they paid for, when they were told they'd be able to play it. Here's what the past 10 years of online DRM has taught anybody who's paid the slightest bit of attention.
|
|
|
|
|
Wow. They make it seem like the only reason to have a constant connection is solely for DRM. Obviously, they haven't played the game.
DRM is just a small bonus that adds very little traffic to the games communication. The much larger reason for the constant connection is the multi-city play with people all over the world working on common goals, a.k.a: Great Works. Having multiple people playing the same game means you also need cloud saves to protect the integrity of the game so people just don't hex-edit their way to success.
|
|
|
|
|
Are the multi-city play features interactive with other players?
Do both players have to be online at the same time to interactively build?
or
Is it more like a set of cities in the cloud that you connect to and build at your leisure?
The disappoint in a model like this, is for people that have no interest in playing connected to others and simply want to play offline.
A mix of both worlds would be nice.
Software Engineering is different from the traditional forms of engineering that are bound by the laws of physics. Software Engineering is only bound by the laws of stupidity.
|
|
|
|
|
Paul Watt wrote: Are the multi-city play features interactive with other players?
Yes. You can communicate with everyone else via the regions "Wall".
Paul Watt wrote: Do both players have to be online at the same time to interactively build?
Nope. Everyone, up to 16 people, can be come and go as they please with no ill effects on your part of the game.
Paul Watt wrote: The disappoint in a model like this, is for people that have no interest in
playing connected to others and simply want to play offline.
True, but you can also play up to 16 cities at the same time in the same region. You can have up to 10 games, each in their own region going at once.
But, you'd still have to be connected to the net to play at all. That's the down side...
|
|
|
|
|
It's crazy that such a simple use of network access fails so hard.
The iracing.com racing simulation service has required an internet connection to race from the start - even for practice. There's a DRM angle to it, I'm sure, but the service was built from the ground up to focus on real-time, person-versus-person racing. The iracing folks have had extremely robust network racing code for ages - going back to the Papyrus incarnation of the company (Grand Prix Legends, Nascar Racing). It's not always perfect - I've seen glitches and even dropped connections during races - but it mostly works well. I'm still pretty amazed to be racing wheel-to-wheel with someone half-way around the world.
When your company depends on something, it pays to build it well.
But this is also true: many people try to build software. Not everyone builds it well.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
|
|
|
|
|
In EA's case, they grossly underestimated both capacity at launch and the performance of the backend database servers. They've fixed a bunch of problems with the performance side and have just about doubled the number of servers to handle the high load.
In my huimble opinion, they should have had three times the number of servers up and running on day one and then fixed the performance issues. It would have been a better launch and they could have retired servers as the problems with the code were worked out.
|
|
|
|
|
Some people insist on doing stuff that makes my head hurt. Now someone (Tomasz Janczuk[^]) has created a module to allow you to run node and ASP.NET in the same process[^]. Dogs and cats living together! What's next? Ruby+Scala? (OK, you could probably do this with JRuby, but bear with my ignorance).
--------------
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
You have to admit, it takes balls to name a product Testacular[^]. But if you're looking for a decent test runner for your JavaScript, this could be something you'd want in hand.
--------------
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
If a tree fell in the forest, and no one noticed... the European Commission would impose a staggering fine -- and then congratulate itself for protecting consumers from falling trees. That's essentially what just happened: the Commission fined Microsoft $732 million for failing to show its "browser ballot" when users installed one of its Windows 7 updates.
|
|
|
|
|
If you could trouser $732 million for predicting a specific bug in a the next n versions of Windows and being right wouldn't you do just that?
This being from the same organisation that mislaid 20,000,000,000 Euro's while changing over from one system of agricultural subsidy to another. When we asked them who it belonged to they said 'no one'. when we asked them were it had gone they said we 'didn't have a right to know'.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
|
|
|
|
|
You can see this note near the top of the page on Amazon:
Important Note on "SimCity" Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information.
Page here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVRFA
Based on the 1-star average of 951 customer reviews, I am guessing they were getting too many complaints. That has to be some kind of record. 
|
|
|
|
|
Seems pretty stupid making it online only, I'll just stick to Sim City 4.
=====
\ | /
\|/
|
|-----|
| |
|_ |
_) | /
_) __/_
_) ____
| /|
| / |
| |
|-----|
|
=====
===
=
|
|
|
|
|
...and it looks like they're selling it again.
|
|
|
|
|
Do people actually use Dart? (Google's other programming language[^])
If so, you might be interested to see their interpretation of async[^]. From the post:
Future (some future result):
Future<bool> writeFile(String data,
File file) {
return file.open(FileMode.WRITE)
.then((io) => io.writeString(data))
.then((io) => io.close())
.then((io) => true)
.catchError((error) => false);
}
--------------
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
I’m taking my own advice here and responding to some frequently asked questions I receive on SPA on my blog. I get some of these a lot and it just makes sense that I aggregate them and share for discussion. The questions are all good and they cover a variety of experiences. Hopefully by sharing them, they will be of benefit to others. Curious about SPAs? John answers your questions and offers tutorials for SPA and the Hot Towel template.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
