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Big Blue's next-generation operating system was supposed to change everything. It didn't. But it's also never quite gone away. The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System
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I love making tools for people. And software is one kind of tool in the universe. But I don’t think software, or any tool, is an epic creation. Making great software demands creativity and hard work, but its purpose is to allow others to do work, not to be appreciated as a thing on its own. Epic work comes from making a deeper connection to who we are, and finding a medium to express it well to others.
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I don’t think anyone can deny that the Web has changed the way people teach, learn, and do research. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything we read online is true and accurate—far from it. But I believe that through honest discussion and objective collaboration, accurate and useful information is much more likely to be the end result of any educational endeavor. And when you make mistakes, share that, too.
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The problems of accessibility, comprehensibility, and completeness outweigh my concerns about the basic accuracy. The first problem is wading through thousands of results, many of them copies of each other, from various combinations of search terms, to find a case where someone was actually dealing with a situation sufficiently similar with a solution technology of similar capability. After that the question is whether the author has bothered to explain the whole solution in penetrable terminology. I joined code project solely for the purpose of giving kudos to one of the few such cases that I have found.
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The most widely accepted explanation for the Air France Flight 447 disaster attributes a large part of the blame to human error when faced with a partial, but not fatal, systems failure. Yet a small but vocal faction blames the disaster and others like it on the increasingly automated nature of modern passenger airplanes. A deep look at “automation addiction” and the increased dangers of not trusting our computer overlords.
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Unless you are inside this technology, there are a load of phrases that all contain the word “cloud” but what do they mean? What’s a cloud platform provider as opposed to a cloud service provider? Can you be both? What’s a private cloud? A community cloud? A public cloud? So I thought I’d give a little history lesson and in doing so, clear up the confusion. It all started at IBM in 1972...
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Every day, Olark sees more than 3 million visits across thousands of different websites and browsers. We constantly have to ask ourselves: are we causing any issues or slowdowns on our customers’ websites? Knowing the answers to these questions is critical to our success. Thinking about the challenges of providing third-party Javascript as a service.
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I just sat through a day-long conference featuring a dozen or so speakers. A handful did an excellent job. They were energetic, inspiring, and left the audience excited. But far too many were thoroughly mediocre. I realized I had a book inside me clawing to get out, and Speaking for Hackers was born. You can learn to give awesome talks that get rave reviews. This book might help.
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Mozilla, the company behind Firefox and top-5 mobile operator Telefonica are co-developing a new mobile operating system. The project is codenamed Boot2Gecko by Mozilla and devices running the OS are dubbed “Open Web Devices” by Telefonica. The goal is a phone that relies entirely on web technology and where all applications, from the dialler to games, are developed with HTML5. A new mobile operating system is born.
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I hope this time they won't boot in the same time my Firefox starts on Win7 x64 8-core machine. Because if is so, maybe they should rewrite all the nsIStuff (and PRUnichar  ) in assembly.
Nuclear launch detected
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When it comes to cracking some of their field’s biggest issues, traditional science methods are not fully up to the task. Science is changing. In the age of the internet it is waking up the idea of people power: the combined forces of thousands of ordinary connected volunteers can help collect or crunch overwhelming masses of data. Using volunteer computing power for solving complex problems.
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Today I'm doing something most of you older programmers out there should do as well: I'm sitting down with my oldest son to talk about where all of the family's "digital inheritance" is. The pieces of a digital life are a lot more complicated than a physical one.
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March 31 is World Backup Day, the day that the storage tech industry exhorts us all to back up our digital possessions and practice good data hygiene. But there's one thing that's just as important as backing up your data in the first place, or possibly more so: properly getting rid of your old backups when they're no longer useful. There are plenty of cautionary tales of disk reuse gone wrong.
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Much has been written about RIM’s gloomy quarterly numbers. The attention is a testament—an apt word—to the place RIM once occupied. The trouble for RIM is simply stated: Too little too late, while the money runs out. If only the cure were as easily put. Will Microsoft add another former mobile giant to its Windows Phone portfolio?
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One of the recurring themes I’m seeing is technical founders building a product for themselves. I wish I would have been in their shoes. That is, until I find out they’re forging ahead without a marketing plan. My goal is to provide a methodology for building the framework of a marketing plan. It is geared towards those with a technical background although anyone can take advantage of this structure. Even if your product is useful, you still need to sell it to users.
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If you're a .NET developer, you're probably intimately familiar with Visual Studio. But what else is out there to make you more productive and your code better? Here's a quick list of tools you might not know about. What are your favorite .NET development tools?
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CSC -- it's all you need.
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Have a 5 for 1.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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5 to 1, baby, 1 in 5... thanks.
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People probably don't realise just how extensively server-side adaptation is used by the major internet brands in order to fine-tune the user experience for each platform. To help shine a light on this I'm going to look at the approaches that some major brands use in delivering their mobile web experiences. First up, it's Google. A 47 byte file size difference actually masks an entirely different HTML document served to different devices.
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Source code control systems are somewhat abstruse pieces of software for managing code, so why should business people, especially mainstream ones, care? It’s because software culture evolves around tools that are hidden from public view, and as code becomes increasingly critical to everyday life, everybody, programmer or not, needs to develop an appreciation for how the world of software works. Code is the hidden 9/10ths of the technology iceberg today.
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Having spent a significant amount of time conceptualizing and growing Vagrant into a decently successful open source project, I’ve come away learning quite a bit. I haven’t seen many blog posts about open source maintainers commenting on their lessons learned, so I’d like to share them here. These are not only engineering lessons, but lessons involving being an open source maintainer, promoting your project, etc. There's more to open source than giving software away.
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The Tricorder Mark 1 is, for all practical purposes, nearly identical to the device that we see in Star Trek, with the possible exception of being unable to reliably distinguish a Klingon from a Romulan. It's all open source so you can build one yourself.
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One fine night in November 2011 I got an opportunity to get my hands dirty, working on a project for the FBI. They were planning to seize a bunch of computing assets in New York City that were being used as part of a criminal empire that we called "DNS Changer." This is our story. There's a growing threat from hijacked DNS lookup. Is your computer safe?
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For many Physicists throughout the ages - their beards are as remarkable as their brains. Here are just a few. Graybeard gravitas.
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