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Though it seems as if we're surrounded by innovative technologies, there's a growing counter argument that we're living in a dismal era.
Get off my virtual lawn!
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I'd like to think that there has indeed been a major shift, if not revolutionary then teetering on the border, that has to do with the handling of information.
Over the years, humans have been better and better at two things regarding information:
*) Persisting it
*) Proliferating it
I think that we have reached the penultimate step in that evolution, where we no longer need to physically carry all information stored in our brains or in books in our backpacks, but can utilize the channeling of information from WWW to a small client device that fits in our pocket. All that is left there is lowering the threshold between that client and ourselves, which I believe will happen with the mainstream adoption of wearable tech.
The point to all this, though, is not the technology per se, but rather the shift in our relationship with the information we handle. There are certain limitations put on information purely for the purposes of storing and finding it. These limitations have gone from mnemonic encapsulation (for easy remembering), to sequential ordering (for easy expression in writing), to multi-media information containers that can be essentially tailored to the information and its use, rather than the other way around.
Also, the ease of accessing the information required for any situation means that the correlation between the amount of information and the effort to bring it along has all but evaporated; we have less and less need to put in the physical effort to memorize and/or carry the information with us.
This all means that the required amount of "cache" in a normal human being is much less than it used to be. And in a society as reliant on competence as ours, this means that the ability to store and access vast amounts of information no longer is the societal marker of excellence that it once was. Quite the contrary, anyone making the effort to memorize information that is readily available through a smart phone will likely be seen as curious, if not stupid.
We have, in essence, gone from a society where the power lay in the ability to keep information, to a society where the power lies in the ability to acquire it when needed here and now.
To put it another way: It's just silly to memorize stuff when you have Google.
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Google is making a big push for the enterprise market today as it announces a slew of features designed to make Chromebooks more appealing for the workplace. For $50/year, your "laptop that only works on a network" will only work when connected to *your company's network*.
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Docker has added new official repositories for language stacks to the Docker Hub, including C/C++, Java, Python or Ruby. I'm still not getting the difference from VMs, but you might be smarter
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Makes sense, given all the jockeying Docker has done lately to prove they're the kings of the container hill and start spending that capital. The Koality acquisition is another example, shoring up deployment security for Docker Hub.
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It uses Magic (tm) to get most of the benefits of VMs without as much overhead resource consumption/app deployed. Don't ask me how it works.
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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Kent Sharkey wrote: I'm still not getting the difference from VMs, but you might be smarter
It's like a VM, but you can "publish" it without having to sling around gigabytes of disk image. At least, that's my take on it, but I'm not really smarter either.
Marc
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Swiss software emulation expert Stromasys has launched a virtualization product that can take vintage VAX, Alpha, HP 3000, PDP-11, and Sparc applications to the cloud. Time-sharing meets today's buzzword
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Meh. Unless they come up with a version that can emulate the custom controller boards in the box and that we can run airgapped from the internet it won't do a thing to reduce the risks we've got over an aging alpha box that the vendor of the system it controls wants more than my annual salary to do an upgrade that would replace it with an x86/Linux controller. 
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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The emulation probably has to put a Sleep(10) between every instruction, lest some critical timing loop in processing radar information in an ATC overreacts and thinks all the airplanes are within 10 inches of each other. 
Marc
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Those features which are potentially good (data hiding, contract enforcement, polymorphism) are not unique to OOP and, in fact, stronger versions of these things are available in non-OOP languages. Those features that are unique to OOP (dependency injection, instantiation) are awful and exist only because OOP is awful. Don't sugar coat it. Tell us what you really think.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: are awful and exist only because OOP is awful.
That sounds positively Zoidbergian.
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Quote: I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people. In a sense, I am unfair to AI: I learned a lot of stuff from the MIT AI Lab crowd, they have done some really fundamental work: Bill Gosper's Hakmem is one of the best things for a programmer to read. AI might not have had a serious foundation, but it produced Gosper and Stallman (Emacs), Moses (Macsyma) and Sussman (Scheme, together with Guy Steele). I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras - families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting - saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms - you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.
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Wow, a hundred page rant. That must set a new record in blogging history.
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You down with OOP?
Yeah, you know me!
Who's down with OOP?
Everyone, except he.
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Not quite as catchy as the original, OPP - but +100 for the reference to the song.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.P.P._(song)[^]
O.P.P - Naughty ByNature[^]
"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." - John Lennon
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While there have been lot of efforts to streamline Web architecture over the years, none have been on the scale of HTTP/2. We’ve been working hard to help develop this new, efficient and compatible standard as part of the IETF HTTPbis Working Group. It’s called, for obvious reasons, HTTP/2 – and it’s available now, built into the new Internet Explorer starting with the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Because slashes make all names cool?
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The first LEDs date back to 1907, but it's only recently that their incredible efficiency has been brought to bear on the lighting market. One of the key holdups was our inability to generate a broad spectrum of colors. Specifically, we couldn't make white light because we lacked the ability to produce blue LEDs. Now, the Nobel Prize in Physics is being given to three materials scientists who overcame this roadblock. "You don't have to put on the red light"
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Almost.
"OS-Raaam, you don't have to put on the red light"
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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A host of technologies -- most prominently CoreOS -- are challenging the foundation of what Linux means and how it's sold. Are they putting vertical stripes on it?
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C++ is a complex language, admits Herb, though it must not be complex for every programmer. C++ complex? Arcane? Say it ain't so!
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(modern) C++ lacks proper high level portable libraries as standard as possible so that people can start programming without having to re-invent the wheel everyday.
Libraries like Cinder[^] or Open Frameworks[^] are a good step towards having libraries that people can use without having to go down too deep into the language.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Maximilien wrote: having to re-invent the wheel everyday
A perfect description of what I feel when I have to write code in C++.
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To help students start new software projects without breaking the bank, GitHub, Bitnami, Crowdflower, DigitalOcean, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI and Epic Game’s Unreal Engine are launching the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a new program to give students free access to their tools. Time to polish up that student card
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