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Unveiled in 2005, Arduino boards don't have the CPU horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. They don't run a full PC operating system either. Arduino isn't obsolete, though—in fact, its plethora of connectivity options makes it the better choice for many electronics projects.... Last December, we featured 10 of the most amazing Raspberry Pi projects, including arcade cabinets, robotics, and a wearable computer. This one goes to 11—as in, we'll show you 11 awesome things hackers and electronics enthusiasts have created with the Arduino. What have you built with Arduino?
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Discover the Ouya: "a new kind of game console." This Android-powered system is the first of its kind. It's specifically designed to be open to professional and amateur game designers alike, with free software development tools included with every console. Full disclosure: The folks at Ouya tout this to be "the first totally open video game console." They have so much confidence in the Ouya, in fact, that they sent us a retail unit to take apart. Game on, folks. Final score: this gadget has enough repairability to earn extra lives.
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After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account. This is not a joke. Repeat: this is not a joke. If this were a joke you would be advised to...
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Microsoft, which already has a stake in Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college bookstore businesses, is offering to buy them outright for $1 billion, according to a report in TechCrunch, based on leaked internal documents. The documents also reportedly say that Barnes & Noble plans to discontinue its line of Nook tablets by the end of fiscal year 2014, while letting the e-readers stick around for awhile longer. A nook can’t read so a nook can’t cook, SO... a Surface with Nook might be a good hook.
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On May 9, we invite you to participate in Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the day is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) accessibility and users with different disabilities. The target audience of GAAD is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start. Take an hour out of your day to experience digital accessibility first-hand.
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Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Dave Auld, a CodeProject star that continues to shine brighter. Learn more about our own Dave Auld, whose day job is a bit more adventurous than coding.
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A couple of days ago I wrote about Why I am the world’s greatest lover (and other worthless security claims) and it really seemed to resonate with people. In short, whacking a seal on your website that talks about security awesomeness in no way causes security awesomeness.... So let’s check out exactly what’s going on here and you really need video to understand the fatal flaw in the logic of SSL logos coming down over HTTPS. An SSL logo on an unprotected page is as good as worthless.
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I’ve struggled with the challenge of work/life balance because I’m interested in so many things. I’ve learned to go through life in seasons and focus on a few things at a time, but it hasn’t always been that way. I don’t have it all figured out, but I thought it was worth sharing my thoughts with the hope that it helps someone that is struggling with balance or someone interested in finding out more about what life is like at Microsoft. Sometimes the work is too much. Sometimes the work is too interesting to stop.
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Today, ECMAScript 6 is in the process of being finalized. ECMAScript is the foundation of JavaScript and, hence, exploring the proposed features today also means that we get a sneak peak at how we will be writing JavaScript in the near future! In this article, we’ll explore ten new features, with a significant focus on tools, browsers and transpilers. Everything you wanted to know about JavaScript... and then some.
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Wow. It’s finally happened. The CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old today. The web has come a long way in the past decade. CSS3, HTML5, responsive web design, web fonts, a version of Internet Explorer that doesn’t make you want to commit seppuku every time you debug, and any other progress that we already take for granted. (You can get a sense of just how far we’ve come by reading the original cringe-worthy requirements.) The CSS Zen garden enlightened me. What about you?
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One of the really powerful features that TypeScript brings to the JavaScript world is some Static Typing, even if it is only at code/compile time. With TypeScript I can say that an object is of a certain type which implies there are only a limited set of properties/methods available to me. This is great, but it does limit the core power of JavaScript and dynamic languages in general.... Long story shot is that even though TypeScript tries to impose Static typing, which is AWESOME in most cases, you can still force it back to dynamic if you want. You say static. I say dynamic. Let's call the whole thing off and write it in C.
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At the 2013 Game Developers’ Conference, Alon and I from Mozilla and Josh Adams from Epic Games presented a talk called “Fast and Awesome HTML5 Games”. We surprised people by showing off Unreal Engine 3 running in Firefox — compiled from C++ source with Emscripten, running smoothly and efficiently. Today, Epic is making the Epic Citadel demo available, so that you can try it out for yourself. That's right: The Unreal engine, compiled to JavaScript, running in your browser.
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Earlier this week, Adobe announced that it would be discontinuing the boxed versions of its Creative Suite software.... Microsoft is another company moving in that direction—with Office 2013, the company began offering subscriptions that allow consumers to install the software on multiple PCs while providing extra SkyDrive storage space. However, Microsoft continues to offer boxed, perpetual-license versions of the software as well. Whoever came up with this plan is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
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You would think that, once we master space exploration and how to replicate the perfect cup of Earl Grey, everyone in the future according to Star Trek would understand the necessity for unique, strong passwords. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. And no, as we’ll see later, biometrics don’t seem to help. I've giv'n her all she's got captain, an' I still need an uppercase letter and symbol.
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I CAME to AdobeMAX in Los Angeles to give a talk to a room full of designers. Before arriving, I thought of Adobe as a historically important 20th century company that was slowly leaking relevance—a company web designers in the era of responsive design have begun to think of with a combination of fondness and embarrassment, like a beloved but somewhat shameful old uncle. I came to LA with those perceptions, but I leave with the impression of an exciting 21st century company in emergence. Rather than grasping onto Flash, Adobe is retooling for continued relevance on the web.
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After a decade of looking for the "year of the Linux desktop", many Linux columnists have given up. Some say it isn't coming, while others claim that Linux has simply failed on the desktop. If we responded to everyone who has ever criticised the Linux desktop, we wouldn't get any work done. But Miguel de Icaza isn't just anybody. He's well respected in the open source community as the founding developer of one of the two main Linux desktop environments, the Gnome desktop. To our utter amazement, even he now thinks the Linux desktop is dead! Growing a neckbeard is a commitment not everyone is willing to make.
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Hey everyone, Erik here posting for Intel. We’d like to invite you all to participate in the second phase of the Perceptual Computing Challenge.
In addition to wanting to see more use of gesture, voice, and facial recognition in today’s software, Intel is also looking for that one big idea that will change the way people interact with their PCs. And they are putting their money where their mouth is: With a grand-prize of $100,000 USD and thousands of dollars more in prizing available in 4 different categories, this is not one to miss.
Think you’ve got what it takes to inspire others and ignite the computing market with an innovative new concept? You’ve got six weeks to submit ideas for games, productivity tools, user interfaces, generally innovative uses of the Perceptual Computing SDK. If your idea is outstanding it will be selected by the panel of judges to progress into round two, where you’ll receive an interactive gesture camera in order to turn the idea into reality.
Here are more details about the rules and prizes, as well as a link to see who won in the first phase of the competition:
Competition home page and prize list: https://perceptualchallenge.intel.com
Showcase of winners from phase one: http://software.intel.com/sites/campaigns/perceptualshowcase/
Good luck!
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Shiny i7 goodness in a small form factor - just add RAM (up to 16GB) and an SSD!
Clickety[^]
/ravi
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"Designers are such fickle b*tches (I say this, as a designer). We want control of the entire user experience. We want to ensure repeat use, and high engagement - and to do so, we want to design every little piece of whatever it is we're working on. After all, we are largely responsible for the performance of the result. However, most of us don't want to own the work it takes to execute this full scale implementation. We want to complain about people butchering our designs when bringing them to life, and claim non-responsibility. This is the problem."
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My opinions on comments in software code have evolved with my experience. When I was a teenager first learning to program for real, I rarely used comments unless the code was for an assignment, in which case it was a forced exercise every bit as much as teachers’ requests to “show your work” added verbosity to my math and science problems’ solutions. Of course, the programs themselves were quite simple, and the languages used (BASIC, Pascal) didn’t really support OOP (not that I knew what that was). And it was important, then, to be able to express the intent of the code in English, if only so the instructor knew what was being attempted. It wasn’t uncommon to receive partial credit for comments describing the approach one would take, not having had enough time to actually write the code itself. Make source code easier to read and understand. For you. For the next coder, too.
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The high level stucture of Cello projects is inspired by Haskell, while the syntax and semantics are inspired by Python and Obj-C. Cello isn't about Object Orientation in C, but I hope that with Cello I've turned C into something of a dynamic and powerful functional language which it may have once been. Although the syntax is pleasant, Cello isn't a library for beginners. It is for C power users, as manual memory management doesn't play nicely with many higher-order concepts. Most of all Cello is just a fun experiment to see what C would look like when Hacked to its limits. I checked: it's not functional C. Yet.
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My first breakout session at the SELA Developer Practice covered the most common attacks against web applications and how to defend against these attacks. When planning this talk, I knew 60 minutes are hardly enough to cover all common vulnerabilities -- especially if I wanted to show any demos -- so I decided to focus on the three most prevalent vulnerability types, according to the OWASP Top 10: Injection (command injection and SQL injection), Broken authentication or session management and Cross-site scripting (and CSRF as a bonus). 6 tips for keeping your web site secure.
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Firefox 20.0 -- and a couple earlier versions I think -- has a nifty little feature of its "Inspector" tool that allows you to view HTML elements as 3D objects. This lets you to graphically see the DOM structure and how elements lay against one another. As soon as the feature appeared I knew what I wanted to do with it, I wanted to use it for something it wasn't intended for: 3D Modeling. When all you have is a browser, everything looks like a building block.
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SceneKit is a high level 3D framework for Mountain Lion1 that was introduced almost a year ago at WWDC 12. It is all Objective-C and integrates with other UI frameworks like Cocoa and Core Animation. This means that you can use normal NSColors, NSImages and CATransform3Ds to configure your 3D scene. It also means that you can easily animate property changes, like for example position or transform, using a regular CAAnimations and addAnimation:forKey:. Sounds amazing? It is. It's sort of like OpenGL, but all native and integrated with Core Animation.
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Systems that respond to user actions quickly (within 100ms) feel more fluid and natural to users than those that take longer. Improvements in Internet connectivity and the rise of warehouse-scale computing systems2 have enabled Web services that provide fluid responsiveness while consulting multi-terabyte datasets spanning thousands of servers; for example, the Google search system updates query results interactively as the user types, predicting the most likely query based on the prefix typed so far, performing the search and showing the results within a few tens of milliseconds. Emerging augmented-reality devices (such as the Google Glass prototype7) will need associated Web services with even greater responsiveness in order to guarantee seamless interactivity. How Google builds for high utilization and responsiveness.
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One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics. The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication. And now that they've told you, they'll have to kill you.
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Gender equality is still a major issue in the technology industry, but 50 years ago one British company was blazing trails.... The company, originally called Freelance Programmers, was founded in the early 1960s by Stephanie Shirley, a German who had been evacuated to Britain — along with many fellow Jewish children — as part of the kindertransport shortly before the Second World War. Solving the problems of gender and parenting one byte at a time.
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Worried about your longevity as a worker in the fast-moving tech industry? What you need is some inspiration from John Sloan. Who's John Sloan? He's the man pictured in a photo I used in a recent post on 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job. (See that photo below - or on the iPad in the photo above.) While Sloan may look like a symbol of outdated technology in the older photo, he's actually the polar opposite. An interesting follow-up to 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job.
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I may maintain that the fact that Microsoft has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in six months doesn’t mean much. But that doesn’t mean that Windows sales figures aren’t interesting. In fact, Microsoft’s news moved me to rummage around in Google Books, Microsoft’s press site and elsewhere for past sales data for various major editions of Windows dating back to version 1.0, which debuted in November 1985. That's a lot of Windows to open.
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Image.
It seems Exchange Online is not working. I just got a rejection notice when I tried to send myself an email, then checked the service health and noticed this.
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Do you need to monitor your Linux server’s performance? Most Linux distributions come equipped with many built-in monitoring tools. These tools allow you to retrieve information about system activities, and can be used to find possible causes for your server’s performance issues. The commands discussed in this article are some of the most basic commands when it comes to system analysis and debugging server issues, such as discovering disk, CPU, memory and network bottlenecks. sudo what's going on with my servers?
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You spent an entire weekend building a library, jQuery plugin, build tool, or other great piece of code you wanted to share far and wide, but after some tweets and a failed attempt to make the front page of Hacker News, your creation languished, unloved, in a GitHub repo. A common situation for many developers nowadays, but one you can avoid. Pro tip: write about it here on CodeProject!
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Microsoft PowerShell MVP, Chad Miller shares his top ten tips for the SQL Server Windows PowerShell scripter. Useful tip: Don't use Windows PowerShell for everything.
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All programs need some form of logging built in to them, so we can observe what it is doing. This is especially important when things go wrong. One of the differences between a great programmer and a bad programmer is that a great programmer adds logging and tools that make it easy to debug the program when things fail. When the program works as expected, there is often no difference in the quality of the logging. However, as soon as the program fails, or you get the wrong result, you can almost immediately tell the good programmers from the bad. How do you write code to simplify debugging?
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JavaScript is a bubble. Just like the housing bubble. Just like the .COM bubble. And just like any bubble, the JavaScript bubble is bound to pop. Sure, JavaScript is everywhere. It appears to be growing at a rapid pace. But I’m willing to bet that we are getting close to a complete reversal that will throw JavaScript down from its throne, shattering its JQuery scepter with it. JavaScript is bad, so let's rewrite everything in something else. Then we'll go after PHP.
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When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known. And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol. Mobile is best suited for a game that’s played at the player’s pace.
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We suggest a simple method for improving the security of hashed passwords: the maintenance of additional honeywords (false passwords) associated with each user's account. An adversary who steals a file of hashed passwords and inverts the hash function cannot tell if he has found the password or a honeyword. The attempted use of a honeyword for login sets off an alarm. An auxiliary server (the honeychecker) can distinguish the user password from honeywords for the login routine, and will set off an alarm if a honeyword is submitted. Passwords are a notoriously weak authentication method. Fake passwords are better?
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Once upon a time, teachers lacked the tools to excite and engage pupils in engineering. And the technological know-how required to put together a juddering robot limited the audience to high-school and university students. That all changed in 1998 when Lego launched its first wave of programmable bots. By the second wave, in 2006, the programming language had become visual and kids could make bots do pretty much anything simply by stringing directives together on a computer. “Today a second grader can make her own wall-avoiding triceratops in 20 minutes,” says Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University. Go find a Mindstorms education catalog and prepare to have your mind blown.
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Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's then brand new and up-to-date browser Internet Explorer 5. How much did happen in the last 14 years regarding web technologies and development? Would it still be possible to use this browser? Let's find out! The web of 2013 through the eyes of a 14 year old browser.
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Bill Gates took a shot at the iPad while explaining Microsoft's rationale for the Surface this morning on CNBC. He was asked about the declining PC market. He said that tablets are growing in popularity, and it's "going to be harder and harder to distinguish products" that are PCs versus tablets.... He then said of people using iPad-like devices, "A lot of those users are frustrated, they can't type, they can't create documents, they don't have Office there." I'm still waiting for that TPS reports app.
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Just stumbled across this site while answering a question in Q&A:
CWE™ International in scope and free for public use, CWE provides a unified, measurable set of software weaknesses that is enabling more effective discussion, description, selection, and use of software security tools and services that can find these weaknesses in source code and operational systems as well as better understanding and management of software weaknesses related to architecture and design.
Interesting site at first view, I think I'll have to take a closer look at this: Common Weakness Enumeration[^]
Regards,
— Manfred
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability!"
Ron White, Comedian
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If you are wondering about the binary format, that is what this post is all about. We actually start from the end. We have the last 48 bytes of the file are dedicated to the footer.... Part of a series by Oren Eini on the storage format used by RavenDB.
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Today, I will be discussing recent happy developments in the profitable and entertaining field of stealing other people's Internet passwords. This used to be quite annoying. Every now and then some idiot would leave ftp.someidiot.com/secret/passwords.txt just sitting there in plaintext, not the salted password hashes that they should have saved. But usually it wasn't easy to get the hashed passwords, and then it was unacceptably computationally expensive for us to brute-force our way through passwords of ever-increasing length until we found some that matched the hashes. Brute-force cracking is getting faster and faster, but if the brute-forcing time for an 80486 was "one googolplex years", then even if modern hardware can do it a million times as fast, you're still not appreciably closer to the target. How the h4xx0ring is getting easier, and safe p4sswordZ shouldn't be so difficult.
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This post is the first in a series on the difficult task of rounding a floating-point number to an integer. Laugh not! The easiest-looking questions can hide unforeseen difficulties, and the most widely accepted solutions can be wrong. This is part 0.99999999999999 of a series.
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I started using a Samsung 550 Chromebook as my on-the-go machine two semesters ago. It worked nicely for taking notes, but I remained a skeptic: how could I ever write code from a glorified web browser? Fast forward 6 months: today, I love hacking on my Chromebook, and I have no problems working offline. It took some effort to get everything set up, so I’ve put together my recommendations to get other folks up to speed. Not for those of you who prefer IDEs - the main tools here are a terminal and web browser.
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You have an idea for a program. It’s the best program idea you’ve ever had so you quickly prototype something in C... A work of genius. You quickly compile and run it to make sure all is good... Boom! But wait… What has happened? How has it gone from being quite an understandable high level program into being something that your processor can understand and run. Let’s go through what’s happening step by step. From compiling to cleaning up what you forgot to free(), and all the steps in between.
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As told in a previous post, I like to watch the RDS-TMC traffic messages every now and then, just for fun. Even though I've never had a car. Actually I haven't done it for years now, but thought I'd share with you the joy of solving the enigma. RDS-TMC is used in car navigators to inform the driver about traffic jams, roadworks and urgent stuff like that. It's being broadcast on a subcarrier of a public radio FM transmission. It's encrypted in many countries, including mine, so that it could be monetized by selling the encryption keys. Cracking traffic message encryption is more fun than sitting in traffic.
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The Jawbone UP fitness tracker is a lot more useful now that Jawbone has opened the API to third-party developers. One of the most exciting companies tapping into the UP platform is online automation tool, IFTTT. In the article below, I will talk a little bit about connecting your UP to IFTTT and then list some of my favorite recipes. Yes, there are APIs for network-connected fitness trackers. We live in the future.
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I read scientific biographies hopeful that I might understand how they achieved scientific greatness, in order obviously, that I might emulate it. The outcome is, inevitably, that I better appreciate just how exceptional the individuals are and how unlikely any strategy dependent upon emulation might be. Only one practical lesson shines through, the requirement for a sustained and unblinking focus on a challenge that is worthy of the effort that must be devoted to it. Scientific greatness is earned, but it is also chosen. The habits of 11 highly brilliant people.
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It’s a challenge to present deeply technical material to a room of people with varying expertise levels. If you leave it out, you’re abandoning the substance of your presentation. If you focus on it exclusively, you will lose most of the room. Expect to repeat yourselves two or even three times (but only one link here).
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The elite of the tech world have decided that Google Glass is the future. And perhaps they're right, but, Google Glass is clearly not the present. It's not even the near-future, if the early reviews that are rolling in turn out to be accurate.... After reading all the reviews, and talking to people who actually wore Glass, I just see a product plagued by bugs, and of questionable use, that's generating a lot of buzz because people want so desperately to have some new gadget to latch onto, and fear being wrong about the next major technology trend. Reminder: mobile phones were once awkward, buggy and only used by jerks.
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