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At first I thought you were talking about the disease, then yeah, just a different "disease"... 
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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A new service simplifies iPhone app testing. Beta testing an app before release. What a concept!
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Surveillance Self-Defense is EFF's guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices. The best defense is a good offense, so be offensive
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Modern C++ Design defines and systematically uses generic components - highly flexible design artifacts that are mixable and matchable to obtain rich behaviors with a small, orthogonal body of code. It just made too much sense before templates and macros?
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Insight from the CoderGears team - our ability with the English language is so godawful you'll struggle to make sense of anything we say.
The headline alone is just wrong: "adopted the generic programming" just scans awfully.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Before the smartphone, the laptop and the graphing calculator, there was the slide rule. It's a powerful mechanical computing device, often no larger than a 12-inch ruler, marked with numbers — but part of it slides in an out to to show relationships between different sets of numbers. "Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth."
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Yeah, sorry. It was late and my brain froze.
I wanted to get in the article though. All the (limited) technology they used in the initial space programs still amazes me, as does some of the accomplishments of the current space programs (but they hardly compare most of the time).
TTFN - Kent
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With the launch of the Surface Pro 3 in late June, we’ve finally got a full quarter of Surface revenue that includes Microsoft’s latest tablet. While Surface sales are still a mystery, Surface revenue was $908 million this quarter, up a massive 127 percent from the $400 million this time last year. Good to see people are buying the "knockoff iPad"
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I've tried to like the Surface. I really have. But it's so thick and chunky. Bring the weight down a decent chunk, add Windows 10 so it behaves sensibly when docked, make the charging cable more sensible than the uni-directional mag safe thingy they have, and I'll take another look.
Oh, and make it way, way less expensive than a similarly equipped Macbook Air. $1,600 for 256GB / i7? Yikes.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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THAT'S how expensive they are? Yikes, indeed. I know it's a touch screen, and real Windows, but Yikes.
TTFN - Kent
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Oh, the price keeps going up from there.
64GB for $849 though. However, remember that you don't get much change from your 64GB after Windows has been installed on it.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Kent Sharkey wrote: THAT'S how expensive they are?
Not the kind most of us mere mortals buy. I paid around $400 for the ones my daughters use, and MS Office was included for free.
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Much more reasonable. Is that one of the RT ones, or a Pro? (not that I'm in the market or anything, but I'm probably in the market).
TTFN - Kent
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$400 would be an RT.
The Surface 3 starts at $799US for the 64GB/i3 config. 64GB is tight and SSDs that small tend to have lower performance due to the small number of flash chips used (loss of parallelism). The 128GB/i5 model is $999; which is in the same ballpark as a premium ultra book.
OTOH Maunder's complaint about it being more expensive than an MBA is still valid. The entry level 11.6 MBA is $899 for the i5/128GB model, and you'd need to spend an extra >$100 for a keyboard cover before the Surface3 can match the capabilities of the MBA. On the gripping hand, if you're able to use the S3 as your main tablet you should add several hundred onto the comparison price for an iPad which makes the surface prices more reasonable...
Personally, at 11.6" I've found my Envy X2 big enough to be awkward to use as a tablet and have kept it docked almost constantly since I got it, so I'm not sold on a tablet that big being a good idea.
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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Thank you - this is incredibly helpful.
TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Is that one of the RT ones
Yep, the RT ones. I find them not only cheaper, but also safer then the Pro ones, which are really PCs. Also, they are very light and the battery life is good.
Obviously, not a competition to MacBook, but definitely a competition to iPad.
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Our goal with TypeScript is to continue supporting projects of this size and to make it the best language we can for JavaScript at scale. With 1.1, we released a fast, lightweight compiler that was capable of compilation speeds 4x faster than before. The new compiler is also more flexible for adding new features, which we’ll use going into 2.0. Coming soon, from Microsoft's JavaScript++
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Type safety.
It's like airbags - you don't need it, you know what you're doing, its just extra weight to carry and one day it maybe saves your life.
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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: you don't need it, you know what you're doing
I may know what I'm doing, but when I have to work with someone else's code, type information helps to understand the functions a lot. Is the parameter a string, an float, a struct, an array, what?
And, in fact, even when I write the code, my experience (specifically with Ruby) is that the type information becomes baggage that I have to hold in my head, rather than the damn code telling me. And that is extra weight, IMO. Putting type information into the parameters of a function, and definitely in the return of a function, that makes my life easier, on a minute-by-minute basis.
And that is the primary reason I personally never want to touch Ruby again. I probably will, and it was a fun honeymoon, but living with Ruby (or any duck-typed language) is like living with Oscar (the slob in The Odd Couple, for all you youngins) whereas a typed language is like Felix, nice and clean and neat.
Marc
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Agreed. Eric Lippert nailed it when (in part), he described[^] static typing/compilation/etc as a huge set of unit tests provided for you at no cost by the language designer/tool chain developers.
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: Eric Lippert nailed it when (in part), he described[^] static typing/compilation/etc as a huge set of unit tests provided for you at no cost by the language designer/tool chain developers.
That's a great summary. I never thought of type checking as a built-in unit test, that's also a great point.
Marc
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It's lack was responsible for the Ruby code bug that drove me most insane and took the longest to figure out. The strings "true" or "false" and Boolean values true or false look identical when output to the console via puts debugging but things like "true" && true won't do what you'd expect them to do if you thought both values were Booleans.
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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It explains why Unit-Testing originated in the Smalltalk community. In a dynamically typed language they become absolutely necessary.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Rob Grainger wrote: In a dynamically typed language they become absolutely necessary.
Indeed. I never fully appreciated the value of unit and integration testing until I started working in Ruby on Rails. And then I realized how much friggin additional work was required because one normally wouldn't need all that integration testing.
Marc
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