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Microsoft's Kinect, a 3-D camera and software for gaming, has made a big impact since its launch in 2010. Eight million devices were sold in the product's first two months on the market as people clamored to play video games with their entire bodies in lieu of handheld controllers. But while Kinect is great for full-body gaming, it isn't useful as an interface for personal computing, in part because its algorithms can't quickly and accurately detect hand and finger movements. Digital digits.
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Yes, I have switched to Windows 8 full-time, and it’s not because of the new Metro interface or charms. It’s not because of the ribbon or Internet Explorer 10. It’s really not because of anything you may expect. It’s much more simple than that. Here’s my top reasons I’m sticking with Windows 8 on my laptop. Metro is the least important reason to like it.
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Interesting. I wonder if the copy files feature automatically queues rather than thrashing the hard drive with parallel copies. That would be really useful.
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The startup / reboot time of Windows 8 on my Ultrabook is amazing, and the little things like the progress dialogs, task manager and the little UI enhancements are magic. It's Win7 evolved, and I love Win7.
But the Metro/Desktop dichotomy is a debable. If I could turn off Metro, or safely hide it, and if I could get back a start menu with quick search I'd be very, very happy. As it stands I find myself dropped into metro fairly often, so I browse IE, and then if I download something I get kicked back to the desktop. Or if I want, say, multiple tabs, I need to go back to the Desktop.
It's jarring, it's unnecessary, and we all see what they are trying to do, but please: don't do it.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: but please: don't do it.
At least, not on desktops.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Good news, Startup/Reboot time is extremely important performance metric! "Life is too short to wait until win7 reboot" , so win8 is highly welcomed in this regards. Another "nice-to-have' is long-anticipated stable version of IE10 with at least the same level of HTML5-compliance as found in other major web browsers (i.e. FF/Chrome). Third item on the list could be performance estimates regarding HDD/SSD operations. And one extra point of interest: its efficiency in regards to parallel algorithms running on multi-core CPU, in particular Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach .
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Research in Motion Wednesday released a BlackBerry PlayBook OS update that adds full device encryption to secure personal data stored on the device to go along with the already-available encryption for corporate data. The PlayBook OS 2.1 update, which is fully described on a BlackBerry site, is available for Wi-Fi-only BlackBerry Playbook tablets. I guess they do still make these Playbook things. Who knew?
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A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next. When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks. But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools. Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language. Get used to it: PHP will be with us forever...
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: PHP will be with us forever
Just like Flash.
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Acorn is really fast. Just like Esprima. Acorn is tiny. About half as big as Esprima, in lines of code. Still, there's no good reason for Acorn to exist. Esprima is an excellent project, well-documented, and small enough for any practical use. It exposes an interface very similar to Acorn. The only reason I wrote Acorn is that small, well-defined systems are so much fun to work with, and that Esprima's web page very triumphantly declared it was faster than parse_js, the implementation in UglifyJS version 1, which is a port of my own parse-js Common Lisp library. I just had to see if I could do better. Why did he code it? Because the challenge was there...
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TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and you write it like you write JavaScript which I like. Any existing JavaScript is already TypeScript. One argument has been made that TypeScript is for people who don't want to learn JavaScript. I don't buy that. As Ward Bell said in an email: TypeScript is not a crutch any more than JSLint is a crutch. It doesn’t hide JavaScript (as CoffeeScript tends to do). - Ward Bell. I think Ward says it well. Folks rail against static typing but they don't complain about JSLint. TypeScript offers optional type annotations - it's hardly a perversion of JavaScript. TypeScript has been out a day. It's way early to see if it has legs.
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Saying the TypeScript is for people that don't want to learn Java is like saying we should still be programming with Basic.
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Dunno about the rest of you, but my favorite fix for JavaScript is Javathcript[^]. Lisp in the browser is what every real geek dreams of:
<script type="text/lisp">
(let*
( (button (getElement "btn"))
(nameField (getElement "name"))
(clickHandler (lambda () (alert (concat "Hello " (get nameField "value"))))) )
(set button "onclick" (export clickHandler))
)
</script>
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\o/ come at me bro!
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It’s been known for some time that Anders Hejlsberg was doing something interesting in the JavaScript space, and when Anders is doing something interesting, it’s worth paying attention. This is, after all, the man who got Real Programmers to use Pascal, and pulled off C++++ (put two of the +’s over the other two: #! See what they did there?). Today the covers were taken off the latest project by the man himself, and it’s TypeScript: “a strict superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript”. The good, the bad and the wishlist.
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Would be great to have something better than JavaScript, yet has compatibility. Maybe some day will not need to have JavaScript in the middle.
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And Douglas Crockford sayeth: https://plus.google.com/118095276221607585885/posts/MgzNUSTwjRt[^]
Quote: Microsoft's TypeScript may be the best of the many JavaScript front ends. It seems to generate the most attractive code. And I think it should take pressure off of the ECMAScript Standard for new features like type declarations and classes. Anders has shown that these can be provided nicely by a preprocessor, so there is no need to change the underlying language.
I think that JavaScript's loose typing is one of its best features and that type checking is way overrated. TypeScript adds sweetness, but at a price. It is not a price I am willing to pay.
PS: the comments on Crockford's G+ thread are fantastic. Lots of interesting insight.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
modified 2-Oct-12 22:52pm.
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OK, so why do I think JavaScript sucks? Well first off, as an enterprise web application developer, I don't like any scripting or dynamic languages. I like code that compiles for lots of obvious reasons. It is messy to code with and lacks all kinds of modern programming features. We spend a lot of time trying to hack it to do things it was never really designed for. Ever try to use different jQuery based plugins that require conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks. Maybe we should all go back to FORTRAN...
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I have to agree that JavaScript sucks. I think there is still a place for inline code, but JavaScript does not play nice in HTML. It also is a very different language than what Web programmers tend to program in, which is Java or C#. It is also true that JavaScript was not designed for what it is used for. I do not think that it not being a complied language is neccessarily bad. In fact it might be good since do not have to worry about the platform, and the executed code is human readable. What would be much better is being able to organize the code as one does in C# and Java where classes are put into files, and objects are supported (which both C# and Java developers are familiar with). This could be managed by the development environment packaging the code in the web page when deployed, or having it included when sent to the client.
Read article about TypeScript, and it sounds really good.
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With Java SE 8, Oracle will not have Project Jigsaw's modularity capabilities, which will be postponed until Java SE 9. Java Development Kit 8, though, which would be based on Java SE 8, will feature Project Nashorn capabilities for JavaScript programming. "This is a modern implementation of JavaScript that runs on the JVM," said Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development. Cloud features have been postponed, but that's just a passing fad anyway, right?
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Information has come forward to Windows Phone Central that demonstrates Microsoft does have their own Windows Phone hardware in the works; in fact, we’ve heard it already exists and is in testing. The source(s) are known to us and not anonymous, though for obvious reasons we must keep them off the record. Details about what it looks like, hardware specifications, launch times, etc. have not been shared with us by the person(s) who have provided the information. The only thing we do know is when compared to current WP8 hardware it’s something unique. What could Microsoft do to make a "unique" smartphone?
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To celebrate this milestone guide, we asked the leaders in computer science to share their thoughts about The C Programming Language. Read on to discover what Bjarne Stroustrup, David Patterson, Andy Tanenbaum, and many others have to say. One of the most important books ever published in computer science?
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Yeah, in concert with "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth, these two are definitely in A-list.
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The algorithm for merge sort is based on the idea that it’s easier to merge two already sorted lists than it is to deal with a single unsorted list. To that end, merge sort starts by creating n number of one item lists where n is the total number of items in the original list to sort. Then, the algorithm proceeds to combine these one item lists back into a single sorted list. The merging of two lists that are already sorted is a pretty straightforward algorithm. Here's how it works.
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A few weeks ago Microsoft silently launched a new home page. It was meant to be a temporary launch for the purposes of some preliminary testing. But as fate would have it, it became the talk of the Internet. Twitter was abuzz with opinions. Several blogs and online news sites, including The Verge, wrote about it. And, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The new Microsoft.com home page is designed with a multi-device future in mind.
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