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Chris Maunder wrote: Then why don't their products, UIs, naming and, announcements reflect this?
It may be exciting for them, but maybe a little more mystery and a little less hearing about details 12 months in advance would make it exciting for us.
The whole thing looks dung punchingly gay, the font choice is horrid, familiar, but I can't pick it.
Do you reckon they'll trade mark the f anf t joined together?
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise—the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. But people do forget—and quickly—about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else. What's your favorite "forgotten tech"?
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I have never met another person who has owned a 3DO game system. I thought my parents were being cheap when they bought me that instead of one of the more popular ones, but looking at the Wikipedia page it looks like it was quite expensive.
And how the heck is the TI-83 forgotten tech? Isn't that still the main calculator to use these days? I actually lent mine out to somebody a couple years ago and they are finally returning it to me (it's in the mail).
Ah, me and my calculator have been through a lot. It is actually a TI-83+, but started out as a TI-83. I saved up an entire summer of allowance to buy that thing. Then, one day my dad decided to wash my backpack and the calculator went along for the ride. I was heartbroken. My mom went to the store to exchange it, but they didn't have another TI-83 in stock. She apparently bitched at them so much they exchanged the broken TI-83 for a new TI-83+. I suppose my dad deserves some credit for that too.
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Although I posted the article, I actually disagree that most of these are worth pining for. Zip drives? Please. Ok, they were cheap mass storage when floppy disks ruled the world, but anyone who relied on them spent as much time cursing as copying.
My short list:
BeOS - totally brilliant, and I still keep a VM of Haiku around for fun.
NeXT cube - beautiful *and* pretty advanced computing for the time. Little did we know this would be a preview of OS X.
TIA, The Internet Adapter - proxy an interactive, graphical web session through a shell account.
NT 4/Win2k - Let's be honest, up to this point doing real work on Windows was a total crapshoot. Driver hassles aside, NT 4 and Win2k brought much appreciated stability. I actually liked the Win2K UI and stuck with it as my default until Win7 came around.
SCSI - I never had problems with device ordering and termination, and unlike USB, it was obvious how to hook up the cables.
PostScript - Got a problem with your image? Go into the (plain text) code and fix it. Oh, and it was the default NeXT display technology.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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As a cruel trick on myself, about a month ago I installed Windows 8 on my main PC to see what it was like. The answer is: abysmal. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Windows 8 is the worst computing experience I’ve ever had. As a desktop operating system, it’s annoying, frustrating, irritating, and baffling to use. I’ve tried on many occasions to explain exactly why it’s so awful to use day-to-day, and most of the time, smoke starts pouring out of my ears. I thought it would be better to get down exactly what the issues are and why you should avoid it. Perhaps you would prefer something from our Linux collection?
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The real difference is that Windows 8 is finished; it's polished and smooth, with even better performance than in the previews, and none of the rough edges left. Even the previously disappointing Modern UI-style apps such as Mail, Calendar, Messaging and People are slick, sleek and far more functional. Even though Microsoft says it will carry on updating them, they're now useful and engaging rather than frustrating. This is Microsoft putting it all together. In case you've been living under a rock and haven't heard anything about Win8 yet.
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But touchscreen or mouse, Windows 8 undeniably shines
What about keyboard navigation ?
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Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Graham Lee, Mac and iOS developer.
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My printer is unable to clean 51. It won’t work, and all it says is “Unable to Clean 51.” Here’s my suggestion for finding such useless error messages in a code review: Write a script to extract all string literals from your source code, then read over the output. The beauty of this approach is that the reviewer sees the text without the context of the surrounding code, just as the user does. Ideally someone who is not a programmer would review the output strings. I would hope someone who ran across “Unable to Clean 51″ would flag that as something that doesn’t make sense. That sounds like real work. Abort? Retry? Punt to an intern?
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She wasn’t struggling with syntax or logic, she was struggling with her own desire to make it complicated because... well, because it’s programming so it must be hard right? What this really made me realise though is that code looks hard, and as a result a newbie can think that it must be hard and the obvious solution won’t be the best way to do it. Sometimes you just need to loop your way through the problem.
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One of my first Computer Science teachers in college always told us about KISS - Keep It Simple & Stupid
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Big O notation is used in Computer Science to describe the performance or complexity of an algorithm. Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario, and can be used to describe the execution time required or the space used (e.g. in memory or on disk) by an algorithm. Anyone who’s read Programming Pearls or any other Computer Science books and doesn’t have a grounding in Mathematics will have hit a wall when they reached chapters that mention O(N log N) or other seemingly crazy syntax. Hopefully this article will help you gain an understanding of the basics of Big O and Logarithms. My initial reaction to this was "Oh!".
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Now need a beginners guide to how to determine the big-O of a problem so they know if they have designed their algorithm right. Just because you have upteen for loops inside one another does not mean that you could not have done better. That is only the upper limit, not necessarily the big-O.
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The original idea is great. It stands for releasing software frequently, with short lags for the implementation of valuable new features and ideas. The productivity of software development increases every year, and in theory you could use the word "agile" to describe many of the things that are light and bright, great and good, fast and fun about our new world. But, if we want to use the word “agile” for this, we have to burn off the stink of stagnation that surrounds the old “agile.” So, here are seven things I hate about “agile.” Let's have a stand-up to discuss this list every morning and update the new things we dislike.
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Yes, seems like should be more agile and less formalized.
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So Andy Singleton hates Agile because some old people like it.
That is probably the best reason to not take this article seriously.
Speaking as an old person, that is.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap. After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image. Here's how we did it. You know, it just occurred to me that we really haven't had a successful test of this equipment.
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Clickety beware, my organization's web filter sees as category Hacking
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As a reminder, Microsoft first provided a feature breakdown for the various Window 8 product editions back in April, in a post titled Announcing the Windows 8 Editions. As with similar Microsoft-produced tables for previous Windows versions, however, this this breakdown is woefully inadequate. So in Windows 8 Secrets, we provide a more detailed set of tables based on functional areas such as hardware capabilities, upgrade capabilities, Metro features, desktop features, and so on. Batteries not included. Some assembly code required.
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From e-mails to social networks, the digital traces left by life in the modern world are transforming social science. The emerging field of computational social science is attracting mathematically inclined scientists in ever-increasing numbers. This, in turn, is spurring the creation of academic departments and prompting companies such as the social-network giant Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, to establish research teams to understand the structure of their networks and how information spreads across them. Academics catch the Big Data craze... and hijinks ensue.
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Long before Internet Explorer became the browser everyone loves to hate, it was the driving force of innovation on the Internet. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all of the good that Internet Explorer did before Internet Explorer 6 became the scourge of web developers everywhere. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer 4-6 is heavily responsible for web development as we know it today. A number of proprietary features became de facto standards and then official standards with some ending up in the HTML5 specification. It may be hard to believe that Internet Explorer is actually to thank for a lot of the features that we take for granted today, but a quick walk through history shows that it’s true. Internet Explorer: interweb trailblazer.
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Microsoft rolled out – in the last couple of weeks – the new web UI (formerly known as METRO UI) for Hotmail (now called Outlook), SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, People and Account. The rest of the Windows Live suite is probably also due to be updated soon. The web UI is very similiar to the one found on Windows 8. You can see the new tiles of each service in the cover photo of this post. But now let’s get straight to the web apps. Does Modern UI require a "modern" browser?
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The memo, distributed to the senior technical staff, contained a ballot asking them to choose a name for a new device invented the previous winter – the semiconductor triode. Several options were presented, including my personal favorite, the Iotatron. In the end, the name “transistor” (“transconductance” + “varistor”) won out over all the others, but it’s still interesting to read the discussion of the other names. Horizontal boosters. Alluvial dampers? Ow! That's not it...
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