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Quote: Forrester found that ninety-six percent of firms today standardize on a single browser for company-issued PCs,
Am I the only one who thinks that the only way that number is even vaguely credible is if it was limited to companies so tehcnically lethargic that they're mostly standardized on IE6?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Hmm, a Microsoft sponsered survey finds that IE is the best browser. Who would have thought that?
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The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. They seem to agree on one thing... From a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless. This view is mistaken.
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The Fibonacci calculation presented as an example by Evan Miller is seriously flawed!
It is less efficient than a loop and (at least with IEEE double precision) fails to get the correct value for N > 70.
(See: Fibonacci Without Loops or Recursion[^] and comments.)
I haven't checked the closed-form factorial implementation, but I suspect it will fall victim to at least the problem of numeric precision.
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Tablets have come a long way since Apple first introduced the original iPad in 2010. They’ve gotten thinner (and, sometimes, thicker), smaller (and, sometimes, larger), more durable, and, of course, cheaper. But how cheap is too cheap? Does a worthy tablet exist for just $100? Penny wise, but will you look foolish?
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At long last, Google has released its own iPhone maps app to compete against Apple's homegrown version introduced with iOS 6. For three months, iPhone users have been limited to Google's functional-but-lacking mobile mapping site, and their reaction to the new app tells us all we need to know: people really missed native Google Maps support. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood... now you know which to take.
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I’ve been thinking about code review lately, and took a little time to look at the Linux kernel git tree to see how many commits are marked with “Reviewed-by” (indicates that the patch has been reviewed and found acceptable). The short answer is, not a whole lot – or at least not consistently, but improving. The usual suspects.
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We’ve been working with, building, and evangelising message queues for the last year, and it’s no secret that we think they’re awesome. We believe message queues are a vital component to any architecture or application, and here are ten reasons why... They'd have more uses, but they're stuck in the queue.
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Network penetration testers love to complain about the unrealistic scope restrictions that get placed on our work.... Our clients place these restrictions on our work because at some point in the past they got burned. A penetration tester locked out user accounts, created an accidental black hole in the network, or brought down a production server. But isn't it ironic that blackhats bent on data theft so rarely cause system outages? The blackhat's goal is also your goal: your victims should never know you were there.
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Whether you’re a developer or designer, 3rd party tools can improve productivity and just make life easier. Here you will find my top 5 tools I use on a day to day basis. Hopefully you will find them as useful as I do! What are your favorite XAML tools?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What are your favorite XAML tools?
See the end of my sig.
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Xamarin.Mac allows developers to build fully-native Cocoa applications for Mac OS X with C#. Xamarin.Mac exposes native platform APIs, making it possible for developers to build sophisticated apps that integrate with platform conventions and leverage the rich spectrum of platform-specific functionality that make Mac apps so beautiful and distinctive. C# here, C# there... C# on computers everywhere.
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This is an improved Router Advertisement flood attack: First it simulates ten normal routers, and then sends the new flood_router26 RA flood. That makes it much more effective against all Apple devices we have tried. As the video shows, it can now kill four devices at once via a wireless network.... Microsoft's IPv6 Readiness Update greatly alleviates this vulnerability.... However, it's only available for Win 7 and Win Server 2008 R2. This one crashes the Mac, and it makes Windows Server 2012 restart. Could it be exploited further?
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A vulnerability found in Microsoft's Internet Explorer allows hackers to track the movements of your mouse cursor across the screen, which could in turn reveal data entered on virtual keyboards. Virtual keyboards and keypads can be used to reduce the chance of a keylogger recording every keystroke and therefore being able to "read" your passwords. However Spider.io discovered that Internet Explorer versions 6 to 10 make it possible for your mouse cursor to be tracked anywhere on screen, even if the IE tab is minimised. When the browser starts keeping tabs on you...
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Over the course of the intervening years... Mac OS X has evolved in a decidedly NeXT-skewed direction. Mac OS X technologies that began life at NeXT (such as Cocoa and Services) have thrived; technologies from the classic Mac OS (such as Carbon) have been deprecated and eliminated. AppleScript, however, is an exception to that evolutionary pattern—and, in many regards, an exceptionally surprisingly one. Still alive... but how much longer?
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Two researchers — Johannes Kopf from Microsoft, and Dani Lischinski from The Hebrew University — have successfully created an algorithm that depixelizes and upscales low-resolution 8-bit “pixel art” into lush vector graphics. The algorithm identifies pixel-level details to accurately shade the new image — but more importantly, the algorithm can create smooth, curved contour lines from only-connected-on-the-diagonal single pixels. I'm not sure this is progress. Maybe I'm just old and nostalgic.
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I wonder if they reticulated splines.
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Linus Torvalds has officially announced that version 3.7 of the Linux kernel has gone stable, and that means good news for developers who work with ARM-based CPUs: among its other changes, Linux 3.7 is the first Linux kernel to include generic support for multiple ARM CPU architectures, reducing the amount of effort required to get Linux-based operating systems running on phones, tablets, and ARM-licensed developer boards like the Raspberry Pi. Tablet and smartphone users shouldn't get too excited just yet.
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Yet still the users of Delphi turned out Windows code that was not so dusty, and demanded no runtime, and could fetch its backside off the disk and be begging for input before certain alternatives could so much as put up a 'Please wait' dialog.... C# hath become a lonely path. And the Beast hath shut its gates against us.
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A lot has happened with WebRTC over the last few weeks. Time for an update! In particular, we're really excited to see WebRTC arriving on multiple browsers and platforms. Here are the details: features, browsers and projects using WebRTC.
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When modeling how our domain objects map to what is stored in a database, an object-relational mapper often comes into the picture. And then, the angst begins. Bad queries are generated, weird object models evolve, junk-drawer objects emerge, cohesion goes down and coupling goes up. It’s not that ORMs are a smell. They are genuinely useful things that make it easier for developers to go from an idea to a working, deployable prototype. But its easy to fall into the habit of treating them as a top-level concern in our applications. Hide the ORM like you’re ashamed of it.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: It’s not that ORMs are a smell
Yes they are.
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I have grown to like stored procedures + ado.net + code generation quite a lot the last few years. Development is fast, I can tweak the SQL as much as I like, the debugging is easy, and the performance is great as well. There's nothing I'd wish more.
Wout
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Vim’s just not designed for demonstrations, and for a beginners talk at a Stockholm Vim meetup I needed something that looked a little less magical. The solution was to write Vimulator, a JavaScript Vim simulator that’s designed to explain each key stroke as it happens and delay the effect on the text long enough for a casual observer to see what’s going on.... Next time you’re explaining Vim to a colleague, give Vimulator a try, or if you’ve been put off before by introductions that felt like a magic show we’ve got some posts and videos to help you learn vim. To the H, to the J, to the K, to the L, learning some Vim doesn't have to be Hell...
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Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but aren’t, in general, taught to take notes as they go, and document the steps they take in building a system. 6.005, MIT’s new introductory software engineering class, attempted to require its students to keep lab notebooks for a few semesters, and was met with near-universal complaints and ridicule from the students... Captain's log, stardate 3372.7: Code long and prosper.
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