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I'm totally geeked out about Smart Watches. I always have been, from the original Microsoft SPOT watch (from 10 years ago!) to the Pebble, and now the AGENT Smart Watch from Secret Labs. Secret Labs are the folks that brought us the Netduino open source electronics platform that uses the .NET Micro Framework. It's pretty awesome that you can write C# and run it in 64k or in 64gigs, from the wrist to the cloud. It's a .NET Microframework Device and you can start writing apps now.
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Looks pretty neat. I'm curious what the resolution is.
Regardless, I think I'll wait for a smart watch with color and a touch screen.
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The smart watch is exciting! people will not need adjust the watch date at the end of month.
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+1
Finally, a watch that's not real-time!
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Microsoft will release a test version of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD developers conference next week, but there's a chance that Windows update could go a long way towards hurting those developers, and slowing app growth in the Windows Store. Is there anything Microsoft can do to combat that? Reports say that among Windows 8.1's changes will be a boot-to-the-desktop option that allows people bypass the Start screen. Many users have been clamoring for it, because they find little use for the touch-oriented Start screen. That will certainly please users. But it may also hurt those, like many at the BUILD conference, who are writing so-called "Modern" apps for Windows 8. Metro, Modern... I guess we can call it "Postmodern" now.
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Many, many thousands of years ago I used an O/S called "GEM" (Graphical Environment Manager)[^] which used a "tile" style to lay out the "apps" on the screen - no overlapping windows here! It became a huge commercial success and is used by everyone on all the computers in the world today, not!
Finally MS is learning that "Windows" is perhaps a little more modern than "Modern".
By the way, DR was sued by Apple because GEM had the equivalent of the trash can - nothing changes.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Unlike other game making systems that focus on an engine/editor that happens to be able to call out to a scripting language, Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers. It's also meant to be portable (mostly courtesy of OpenGL/SDL/Freetype), allowing your games to be run on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android (in that order of maturity, currently). What did the lobster say to the mermaid? Nothing, lobsters can’t talk.
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is it free to programmer? how to download it?
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Did you read the article? The link to get it is there.
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Wow, haven't heard of anybody using SDL in a while. I used that to make Tunnels of Terror.
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If you are a web developer, you’ve probably heard of nginx (pronounced engine-x). Nginx is a fast and extremely powerful http and reverse proxy server that can be used to quickly and easily serve webpages. Unfortunately, like many sysops tools, there is very little documentation and very few tutorials that explain how it works and how to get up and running.... After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up. Learning to use the little nginx that could.
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We're talking a lot about "Mobile" solutions in the industry, but the umbrella that this moniker casts has become far too big to be useful and doesn't represent any particular scenario subset that's useful for planning services for "mobile" devices. Nearly every personal computing scenario that consumers encounter today is "mobile". This post is a personal perspective on "mobile" applications and how applications that run on devices labeled under this umbrella really enable a range of very different scenarios, and do require a different set of backend services, depending on the core scenario. Momma, momma! I went to town: inside, outside, batteries worn down.
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Ever since the news hit about the NSA PRISM surveillance program in the United States, many people have become much more concerned about what exactly search engines are tracking about them. Although Google, Bing, and Yahoo have stringent privacy policies, there have been enough people worried that they have begun looking at alternative search engines, particularly so-called “private search engines.” And they get their search data from... oh, right, totally private...
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For years, Microsoft has refused to offer financial rewards to researchers who tell the company about security flaws in its software, even as Google and Facebook have ratcheted up their so-called “bug bounty” programs. Now the software giant has suddenly changed its mind–and it’s even offering even bigger bounties in some cases than those competitors. As a bonus, you'll also be included in an exclusive list of hackers watched by the NSA.
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Under iOS, users have the option to specify their own passwords to secure their device when it is used as a personal hotspot. However, for convenience and security, Apple initially populates the password field with an automatically generated password. This ensures that even users who are not security conscious enough to change their password from the default will be protected from those attempting to access their phone with a default password. However, according to three researchers from the German university, the method in which these passwords are generated leaves them vulnerable to attack. Hold the schadenfreude: Windows Phone and Android may have similar issues.
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Today, the Pippin is a curious footnote in Apple’s corporate history, a device long since laid to rest alongside the TurboGrafx-16 and the Sega Dreamcast; dug up and enjoyed almost exclusively by a few masochistic hardware modders and eBay traders. And yet, Apple is now a leader in the video game industry, with players choosing from countless titles on the iPhone and iPad.... Apple’s rise to the top as a gaming giant, however, has hardly been quick or easy. In fact, the company’s first big foray into video games was a complete disaster. A long-forgotten battle in the Clone Wars that nearly killed Apple.
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The 802.11ac certification program, announced today, covers equipment pushing 1.3Gbps of data by using three spatial streams of 433Mbps each. This is the speed that has been supported in chips and routers for more than a year. Vendors got an early start with 802.11ac because the standard has been stable for a while, even though certification hadn't begun. But the real-world limit is not 1.3Gbps. We saw recently that chipmaker Quantenna unveiled 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips that push 1.7Gbps of data by using four wireless streams instead of three. Maximum warp. Punch it.
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When you write Objective-C code, it eventually turns into machine code – the raw 1s and 0s that the ARM CPU understands. In between Objective-C code and machine code, though, is the still human-readable assembly language. Understanding assembly gives you insight into your code for debugging and optimizing, helps you decipher the Objective-C runtime, and also satisfies that inner nerd curiosity. Think iOS is a toy OS? Hate all those square brackets in Obj-C? A little Assembly might help.
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We have this trope in programming that you should hate the code you wrote six months ago. This is a figurative way of saying that you should be constantly learning and assimilating new ideas, so that you can look at what you were doing earlier this year and have new ways of doing it. It would be more accurate, though less visceral, to say “you should be proud that the code you wrote six months ago was the best you could do with the knowledge you then had, and should be able to ways to improve upon it with the learning you’ve accomplished since then”. Beware of Setting the Bozo Bit, including on your younger self.
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This session provides an overview of several Sysinternals tools, including Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and Autoruns, focusing on the features useful for malware analysis and removal. These utilities enable deep inspection and control of processes, file system and registry activity, and autostart execution points. You will see demos for their malware-hunting capabilities through several real-world cases that used the tools to identify and clean malware, and conclude by performing a live analysis of a Stuxnet infection’s system impact. Mark Russinovich goes hunting for malware.
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You can offer too much code. By this I mean something subtly but critically different from “you can write too much code,” as when you are needlessly complicated or verbose. Offering too much code means that you’re giving users of the public interface of your classes too many options. Before my TDD days, this was something with which I constantly struggled. Consider carefully where your classes fall on the functional-immutable-mutable spectrum.
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Oh yeah, I hear you, I hear you. "My StringUtils class, has this toUppercase() method and I test this very method, right?" Well, not really. What you really test is the functionality that the StringUtils provides, and because this functionality is so trivial that it fits within one method, this makes you think that you test a method. But in reality you test a functionality. Isn't it exactly the difference between the test-first and test-last approaches?
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Associating numbers with specific characters has proved necessary to allow automated telegraph printers (teleprinters) and then computers to represent text. The most widely used mapping between numbers and letters was that approved on June 17, 1963, by the American Standards Association. It is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII. Make a wish and blow out the candles: iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
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Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe. As you may have discovered yourself, tic-tac-toe is terminally dull. There’s no room for creativity or insight.... But the mathematicians at the picnic played a more sophisticated version... The extra dimensions add a little challenge to a dusty old game.
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