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I loved the interview I had with a company looking for a WPF developer. They asked all sorts of questions, but not one on WPF. Of course did not get the job since my expertise is WPF.
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My favorite non-coding but code related question I have gotten asked in an interview.
Interviewer: "Tell me about Java."
Me: "Well, what would you like to know? History? Platform Independance? Coding examples? Structure? Or something like polymorphism?"
Interviewer: Blinks a few times and does his best deer in the headlights impression.
Me: Knowing I won't get the job at this point. "Ummm, I think I should be going."
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Apple has been working on its file system and with iOS it had almost killed the concept of folders — before reintroducing them with a peculiar restriction: only one level! With Mountain Lion it brings its one folder level logic to OSX. What could be the reason for such a restrictive measure? What's wrong with all your files right there on the desktop?
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Can apple fix the problem with Software companies having the default folder the documents folder, or adding a folder to the documents folder. I hate when I get extra crap in the documents folder. Not even Microsoft keeps the Documents folder clean. It seems to me the Visual Studio should have its own folder under the user folder, and not use the Documents folder.
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When the Director of Research for Google compares one of the most highly regarded linguists of all time to Bill O’Reilly, you know it is on. Recently, Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research and co-author of the most popular artificial intelligence textbook in the world, wrote a webpage extensively criticizing Noam Chomsky, arguably the most influential linguist in the world. Their disagreement points to a revolution in artificial intelligence that, like many revolutions, threatens to destroy as much as it improves. Chomsky, one of the old guard, wishes for an elegant theory of intelligence and language that looks past human fallibility to try to see simple structure underneath. Norvig, meanwhile, represents the new philosophy: truth by statistics, and simplicity be damned. No biting, no scratching... kicking, no gouging, no kickboxing, no punching, no slapping, no spitting...
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It's essentially the same discussion again as when deep blue (may or may not ~ it's controversial) defeated Kasparov in the 90's.
There have been numerous attempts to create a program that played chess 'like' a human, especially before microprocessor era with mixed success. But once processors and memory reach a certain capacity, the brute force approach will always win.
One can argue that an advanced chess engine like Houdini just crunches numbers really fast and doesn't really understand he is playing chess. But arguing the machine doesn't understand chess falls in the category of "fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses". If you make a deep abstraction of what our biological brain actually does, it's all just number crunching as well.
Giraffes are not real.
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When placing audio and video elements on a web page I’ve worked on a number of pieces of work where, for one reason or another, clients want to have their media Autoplay. To us nerds it may seem like common sense that Automatically playing media to a visitor is a bad idea for accessibility. The W3C has made this clear with it’s WCAG guidelines – we’re nerds; we care about these kinds of things. Oh no! Mute, mute mute!
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Last year, I coded an embedded YouTube player to automatically start playing a video with the sound muted. Clicking a button that was over the video controls made the button disappear and the video unmute.
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I have run into web sites that do this, and it can be real irritating. What is really bad is that you do not even know which page may be the irritant. I know there was a restauarnt web site I went to and even after turning off the sound once, when navigate back, the sound came on again. I hated it.
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Over the past 5 years, Apple’s software and hardware have re-defined the mobile and tablet industries. Google, Samsung, RIM, Amazon, HP, and others have all tried to follow suit. But to date their offerings have been sub par; good enough at best. When you’re competing with Apple, good enough is not good enough. Because even to Apple, good enough isn’t good enough. Software’s natural vector is towards complexity.
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Mountain Lion isn’t billed as a blockbuster release, and it isn’t priced like one. It’s just nicer. And it’s the little things, the attention to detail, that show it best. But to understand what Mountain Lion really is, you really need to look at it not as a standalone OS release, but as a step in a series of releases. Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion — none of these have been radical releases of Mac OS X.1 But taken together, there have been some radical changes to the Mac experience over the last five years. Windows 8, in contrast to Mountain Lion, is a radical update.
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For a desktop OS in the year 2012, which direction is "forward," anyway? The obvious answer is "toward iOS," but Lion proved that it's not quite that simple. And really, there has to be more to it than compulsive imitation, otherwise why continue development of the Mac platform at all? Mountain Lion is Apple's answer to all these questions. It is the digital manifestation of Apple's belief that the Mac is still relevant, that it can be made better than it was before. John Sircusa's epic look at the new Mac OS X.
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Dell seems to be hedging its bets to capture business users who want to get away from Windows 7, but don't like the mobile-friendly features in Windows 8. [ITworld]
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Be interesting to see how much of the Microsoft Tax saving they pass on to the end consumer. I'm hazarding a guess it won't be a whole lot...but with Win8 not exactly getting the critical acclaim I think MS expected we might see a shift to linux based. I won't hold my breath though.
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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Wikipedia is written and maintained by tens of thousands of volunteers across the world. Those, in turn, are assisted by hundreds of "bots" - autonomous computer programmes that keep the encyclopaedia running.
ClueBOT seems to have a clue.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_NG/FAQ#Origins[^]
The "Cobi" that is spoken of in the origin section was a classmate of mine in college. He wrote ClueBot while he was still in high school.
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Life as a web developer can be hard when things start going wrong. The problem could be in any number of places. Is there a problem with the request your sending, is the problem with the response, is there a problem with a request in a third party library you're using, is an external API failing? There are lots of different tools that can make our life a little bit easier. Here are some command line tools that I've found to be invaluable. Curl up and grep a little.
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No one person is really responsible for the internet/organization. The were many things that were required to make it successful: the basic networking technology, HTML, Netscape, going to active content, etc. As Issac Newton if famous for saying "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Anybody who claims responsibility for the internet is arrogant. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants[^]
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Sometimes you have to take a step back from discussions on coupling, cohesion, patterns and katas to give some training to the ones of us that have a procedural mindset. With this article I hope to provide some initial tips for the members of the PHP community that are ready to abandon the concept of the OneSingleProcedure(TM) to embrace the object world. Spaghetti would be fine; my PHP looks more like alphabet soup.
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Step 1: Convert project into something that isn't PHP 
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lewax00 wrote: Step 1: Convert project into something that isn't PHP
voilà! spaghetti Ruby on Rails 
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It's still an improvement 
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Whenever I'm required to use PHP, I try to embrace my C# coding standards in the PHP code to the best of my ability. Most of the time, I do end up with elegant code that does well 
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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While I'm certainly not a fan of PHP, I do admit you can write elegant, readable code with it. You've hit the nail on the head: to produce quality code with PHP, don't code like a PHP programmer.
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I personally try to stay out of programming language flame wars with people because for the most part it is not the language being at fault but more the person using the language.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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