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Gordon Crovitz is a blithering idiot. but he knows how to say what the wingnuts want to hear!
modified 24-Jul-12 16:59pm.
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Decimal approximations to pi are an artifact of our ten-fingered anatomy. Fractional approximations to pi are more satisfying, and they promise to teach us something more universal about pi. why is this fraction so close to pi? The deeper you look, the more unique and unexplained 355/113 appears to be.
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The venture capitalist Vinod Khosla recently described Silicon Valley as a state of mind, rather than a geographical place. If that's the case, that state of mind can increasingly be found in San Francisco, as young tech companies flock to the city. [ITworld]
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EVEN the most sophisticated electronic security can be defeated by forcing someone to reveal a password. But what if sensitive information could be stored in your brain in such a way that you couldn't consciously disclose it, no matter how hard you tried?
If you ask, I can't remember my password to CodeProject, honestly... 
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The original short story by William Gibson was pretty good.
The movie had Keanu Reeves.
Enough said.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Your brain has something that has the ability to retain information long term, but it isn't permanent enough to store a password. You might be able to detect your brainwaves and use that as a password, but even with that, you'd eventually find yourself locked out of your account. It just isn't reliable enough to store a password.
I've had cases where 30 minutes after I set a new password, I couldn't recreate it. So I can already be unable to disclose it.
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Amazon is offering to cover 95 percent of the cost of vocational training courses to help its warehouse staff pursue jobs in other careers, including many that Amazon does not offer, the company said Monday in a letter posted on its home page. [ITworld]
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That's great to hear... but then again, companies always wait until they're on the spot light to do anything nice for their employees. It'd be great to see more people be proactive about things like this (versus reactive).
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Robin Sloan went looking for some summer programming reading, and ended up creating this interactive book review about Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine." Code along with the video in the interactive JavaScript console to find out about Ullman's book, JavaScript and more. I guess you could say this is a book review written... in JavaScript?
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I have been reading the wishlist at Web API Codeplex repository recently, and noticed that one of the most popular requested features, is to add support for BSON (Binary JSON) media type (6th on the list). Of course all it takes to include BSON into your Web API is to simply write a media type formatter for it, and since JSON.NET already has great BSON support, it is actually quite easy. Now, you might be asking a question, why to do it in the first place? Isn’t JSON enough?
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Many modern virtual machines include either a fast interpreter or a fast baseline compiler. A baseline compiler needs extra memory and is likely slower for code that is only executed once. An interpreter avoids this memory overhead and is very flexible. For example, it can quickly switch between execution modes (profiling, tracing, single-stepping, etc.). So what, then, is the state of the art of building fast interpreters? From assembly code to WebKit, the state of the art in interpreters.
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I've seen many struggle when they first meet Backbone.js. In this blog post I will gradually refactor a bit of code from how I used to write JavaScript before, into proper Backbone.js code using models, collections, views and events. Hopefully this process will give you a firm understanding of the core abstractions in Backbone.js. Reduce, reuse, refactor.
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I recently blogged about achieving 82.5% accuracy predicting winners and losers of matchups in the 2012 Men’s College Basketball season using machine learning. I’ve only used data acquired prior to the predicted match, resulting in a valid representation of how the algorithm would be able to to predict this coming season. In this post I am actively attempting to ignore the inner workings of the algorithms used and instead focus on them as “black box” components. I speak to their use and their usefulness but not a lot about their actual mechanism. My personal interest lies in producing interesting (useful?) effects via manipulation of these algorithms and my goal is to help explain at a high level how I approached the problem. Neural networks for predicting a game of basketball.
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I tend to keep track of data in Excel, and lately I've been using it as a CRM. I keep different sheets in order to answer different kinds of questions: Who asked about cell formatting? Who did I first talk to on our online chat? How many users do we have in Chicago? In theory, each sheet is synced with a master sheet containing all customer data. In practice, maintaining everything by hand was too time-consuming, and my data became scattered. Oh, by the way, this involves scripting Excel... with Python!
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The problem with so many portable devices... was that they required a stylus to work right. Often the stylus made touch into really more of a virtual-mouse. That’s just not the intuitive way to work. On an other level there’s something fundamentally wrong about this. Some tasks simply work better with a stylus and the limits of iOS make them annoyingly limited. The pen is mightier... than the finger?
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From high-end gaming rigs to light-weight, always-connected tablets, Windows 8 supports the broadest range of graphics hardware ever in a single operating system. We hope this post has helped explain some ways in which this work enables a whole new set of rich experiences. Hardware accelerate all the things!
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The 80-20 rule says that often 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Applied to software, 80% of your customers may only use 20% of the features. So why not just develop that 20% and let the rest go? Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
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Maybe Windows 9 should just be an internet browser and nothing else.
That would satisfy The Endeavor. The rest of the lot who actually want to get some work done could do the rest of the functionality in their spare time 
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Sounds like Chrome OS' approach... not a bad idea.
daniero
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A few weeks ago, Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek,” a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records.... That’s a serious problem. It’s sad to see oppression and property theft riding in under the guise of transparency and openness. But the issue isn’t open data, but how data is used. Data by the people, for the people, about the people.
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Oracle researchers are "winding down" development of the Fortress programming language for high-performance computing, an effort started nearly 10 years ago by Sun Microsystems. [ ITworld]
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That's ok - we'll just pass 'em all to Captain Sea-sharp.
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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They don't "do mathematics". Mathematics can describe the non-linear neural processing done by the dolphins' sensory systems. But the dolphins don't do the symbolic and logical manipulations we call mathematics.
"Microsoft -- Adding unnecessary complexity to your work since 1987!"
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