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A few months back I was satisfying my OCD by reading up on java object memory layout. Now Java, as we all know and love, is all about taking care of such pesky details as memory layout for you. You just leave it to the JVM son, and don't lose sleep over it. Sometimes though... sometimes you do care. And when you do, here's how to find out. Nice, clear rules. What could possibly go wrong?
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As people write, they learn to organize, refine, and reflect on their ideas. Clearly, there are powerful reasons for everyone to learn to write. I see coding (computer programming) as an extension of writing. The ability to code allows you to “write” new types of things – interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. And, as with traditional writing, there are powerful reasons for everyone to learn to code. In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things.
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For years, the software industry has been trending away from so-called 'copyleft' licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) and toward permissive, Apache-style licensing. Given the rising importance of developers, this isn't surprising: developers just want to get work done without being bogged down by license requirements. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that permissive Apache licensing may simply be a way station on the road to no licensing at all. That's what GitHub seems to be telling us, anyway. A shift toward easy sharing and permissive licensing of code.
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When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. Dart has evolved into its own, and here are some of my favorite language features. 12 interesting features in Dart you ought to know.
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The new Kinect is kind of awesome. Just by the numbers, it's a huge upgrade. You can see (most of) the full walkthrough we saw just a bit ago here at Microsoft's Redmond campus in the video above. Parts are jaw-dropping. The demo is of a live action Kinect unit, which will be included with the new Xbox One. Right from the start, you can see the improved depth sensor. It's three times as sensitive, and can pick out bits as small as your t-shirt wrinkling or adjusting on your chest. Obvious next feature: you're not working hard enough - let's make the the game more difficult.
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The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. In the land of the Lotus eaters... or as we called it: business school.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: his early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer.
And the irony of that is that it was first brought to Commodore Business Machines with the proposal to have CBM market it for the PET. But they declined.
Marc
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It’s that time of decade again. Time for a new Xbox. It took four years for Microsoft to go from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360. The transition from Xbox 360 to the newly announced Xbox One will take right around 8 years, and the 360 won’t be going away anytime soon either. The console business demands long upgrade cycles in order to make early investments in hardware (often sold at a loss) worthwhile. This last round was much longer that it ever should have been, so the Xbox One arrives to a very welcoming crowd. [Cue din of nerds arguing over hardware specs.]
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Wilhite created the GIF when he was working at CompuServe (an early US ISP). According to The New York Times, the format was originally intended to help the company display things like color weather maps, although the first image he created was an animated paper airplane. More than 10 years after his retirement, he remains proud of his creation but there's one thing he's been wanting to clarify — the pronunciation of the word. Someone is WRONG on the internet.
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: speaking [...] jathering They're pronounced "speakinj" and "jatherinj".
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For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop, but its relative ubiquity and simplicity belie what Ethernet has done for the networking industry and in turn for consumers and enterprises. Ethernet has in the space of 40 years gone from a technology that many in the industry viewed as something not fit for high bandwidth, dependable communications to the default data link protocol. Few technologies in use today can lay claim to being 40 years old and still on the cutting edge.
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In other news, Leslie Nielsen died. One post earlier...
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yeah .. just like the electric bulb
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It’s not uncommon for an empirical CS researcher to get a review saying something like “Sure, these results look good, but we need to reject the paper since the authors never proved anything about the worst case.” Similarly, when I interviewed for faculty jobs ten years ago, a moderately famous professor spent a while grilling me about the worst-case performance of a static analysis tool that I had written. This was, to me, an extremely uninteresting topic but luckily there’s an easy answer for that particular class of tool. I recall noticing that he did not seem particularly interested in what the tool did, or if it was actually useful. Yet another consequence of the divide between the math and engineering sides of computer science.
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Today we’re announcing CoVim, a plugin that adds multi-user, real-time collaboration to your favorite (or least favorite) text editor. CoVim allows you to remotely code, write, edit, and collaborate, all within your custom Vim configuration. Originally started as a senior capstone project for Tufts University, we’re now open-sourcing it to give the world one of Vim’s most requested features. Solving the pair-programming problem with the world's most obtuse editor.
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Graph analysis is becoming increasingly important in software applications. Here a graph is a collection of nodes and edges, not a data visualization such as a bar chart. This article presents a demonstration of how to perform shortest-path analysis using a SQL CLR stored procedure. The techniques presented here can also be used for many other data-access programming tasks. “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” for data.
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Voice inversion is a method of scrambling radio conversations to render speech nearly unintelligible in ordinary radio receivers. As the name implies, it inverts the audio spectrum of a signal, making the lowest frequencies the highest and vice versa. It is not considered encryption; it's merely a sort of Pig Latin on analogue signals..., Voice inversion is cancelled by reapplying the inversion, i.e. inverting the audio spectrum again. Here I'll present some least-effort digital descrambling methods for the voice inversion scrambler that may be of interest to hobbyist listeners. I played it backward and only heard "Khaaaaaan!"
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Despite its popularity, PHP is considered by the programming elite, almost without exception, as one of the worst languages currently in use today. The term “good PHP programmer” is considered an oxymoron. Yet it’s the primary language we use here for development, and it’s the only language we use for everything touching the production MailChimp application. You can imagine the horror and surprise we see when we try to tell a good developer that we use PHP to solve cool and interesting problems. So here’s my best answer to that. The first step is admitting you have a problem.
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Javascript is a lot worse than PHP IMHO. At least in PHP it does not create a new function if you mis-spell the function name.
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VB6 at least let you turn that horrible behavior off.
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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Terrence Dorsey wrote: So here’s my best answer to that.
And his answer is: yet another framework
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I've been reading this answer:
"
Having worked with Zend, Codigniter and Rails for 5 years I can honestly say that Rails is much easier and more enjoyable to work with. Also, I use HAML & SASS which makes front end coding a delight.
"
A bit exaggerated, perhaps, or not? What are your thoughts about it?
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