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From Bjorn Freeman-Benson’s talk Airplanes, Spaceships, and Missiles: Engineering Lessons from Famous Projects. Bjorn is discussing the ferrite core memory of the Apollo guidance system: "These are very, very robust memory systems. … But the problem is that they actually have weight to them. Core memory actually weighs a bunch, so when you’re writing your program for the lunar module … every line of code that you wrote had a consequence in weight. And you could measure how heavy your code was at the end of a compile line." Memory on Apollo: Bits, bytes, ounces and pounds.
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Happy Nerd Christmas! Apple CEO Tim Cook got you a new operating system for the iPhone and iPad. It looks different. It works differently. It has a host of new features and design elements–from full multitasking to the Pandora-like iTunes Radio. It organizes your pictures, has remarkable new AirDrop sharing features, automatically updates your apps, and overall lets you do just about everything more quickly and efficiently. What's this? Flat design? Where have I seen that before...?
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I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata”... At this point in the eighteenth century, a 254x254 matrix is what we call ”Bigge Data.”
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At today's WWDC keynote event, Apple announced the next version of its Mac operating system, dubbed "Mavericks" after a surfing area north of Half Moon Bay in California. Mavericks will feature many new Finder features including tabs, full-screen capability, tagging, and independent handling of multiple displays. Registered developers can preview Mavericks starting today.
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Ever since the Android platform emerged as the only real competitor to Apple’s iOS devices, we’ve been treated to a debate which I’ll oversimplify: If Apple makes all the money but Android gets all the volume, who will win? A cursory survey of tech journals and blogs would lead one to believe that the case is closed: Market Share trumps Profit Share. It always does. So Apple should call it a day? I’m skeptical. Will the vertical simplicity of Apple's business will tilt the field in its favor?
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It is amazing to live in an environment where the Internet connection is ubiquitous and fast. But in case the tube is having a problem and the bits from the web server are broken into random pieces, how does the web site look like? If the content degrades gracefully, the lack of style sheets may reduce the attractiveness of the page but it should not significantly hamper the experience. Fortunately, there is a way to automatically check the appearance of a web page under that circumstance. So tonight I'm gonna browse 'em like it's 1999.
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Bayesian inference grew out of Bayes' theorem, a mathematical result from English clergyman Thomas Bayes, published two years after his death in 1761. In honor of the 250th anniversary of this publication, Bradley Efron examined the question of why Bayes' theorem is not more widely used—and why its use remains controversial among many scientists and statisticians. As he pointed out, the problem lies with blind use of the theorem, in cases where prior knowledge is unavailable or unreliable. Nate Silver used Bayesian inference... for sports and politics. Here's how.
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A quick glance through the article states "In the case of the 2012 United States election, Silver used successive polls from various sources as priors to refine his probability estimates."
Has anyone used the data from the previous election to see how that stacks up? The US election polls are so widely analysed and dissected that the data from those is probably recorded somewhere.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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There were some interesting profiles of Nate's methods around the time of the last election, but I can't put my hand to the links right now. Short version as I understand it: Nate back analyzed individual pollster results against election results and used this to weight party bias of polls on state-by-state basis. He's not the only one doing this kind of analysis, just the most famous and, I think, the most accurate.
Of technical note, his highly regarded sports stats analysis was apparently done in a huge, unwieldy XLS. There was much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair when he sold that business and other people had to figure out how it worked.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: apparently done in a huge, unwieldy XLS
Perhaps he sold his IP knowledge to them, for a fee? I relate a story from a company I worked at in the UK and all developments teams were made redundant in 2009. One developer-cum-analyst had a critical understanding of how several interconnecting systems exchanged transactions. The company completely overlooked his value and he wasn't included in the knowledge transfer sessions to the outsourcing company. He was in the first wave to be pushed out of the front door. Many months later the offshore team made some changes that broke the transaction flow between the systems. The company asked the original developer they made redundant if he could come back for three months contract to help fix the problem and maintain continuity during testing and so on. He did, but he had an iron-clad contract drawn up that paid him an I-have-you-over-a-barrel rate of £2000 per day and he also had a lunch expense as well. The company had no choice but to pay that or he stayed where he was. They did and he laughed all the way to the bank. Sometimes it pays not to talk too much. The company screwed up when they made him redundant. He cashed in. Job's a good'un. 
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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What’s Google TV? Turned out that Google is also doing its own thing for the 10-foot screen. Google announced 2 versions of their famous new TV, the first is called the Buddy Box which is currently an expensive box manufactured by Sony and the second is an Integrated TV built right into the TV set that will be announced soon. Hackers & makers like to re-invent the wheel, and it’s always fun when you do. So we’re going to build our own version of the Google TV using the following open source technologies... Tune in a mobile-enabled TV experience.
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For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. And yet, these are exciting times for "executable biology," an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year, Markus Covert's Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. Before you model something, you need a very good idea of how it works.
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Windows 8 is gaining traction in the marketplace and is forcing developers to adapt and evolve. Along with the adoption of new technology come lessons and steep learning curves. Here, we seek to provide insight into best practices and issues to be aware of when making the shift to Windows 8. When developing Windows Store apps, language options include HTML5/CSS3, DirectX/C++ and XAML/C#. If you are a .NET Web Forms developer, the XAML/C# option usually makes the most sense, so that will be our focus. Let's get started. Great tips, from setting up your dev environment to pushing out updates.
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List comprehensions are an excellent concise, readable way to do search when the search is reasonably small and when you don’t really care about performance. That said making any judgements about core.logic and its utility for solving problems based on blog post code written by someone having a bit of fun makes little sense in my opinion - imagine judging the utility of object oriented or functional programming this way. What follows is an explanation of how I would approach the problem. The main insight here is the original problem is a finite domain problem in disguise. Surprisingly similar to solving sudoku!
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The jobs we hire a PC to do are being increasingly done by dedicated devices. If Adobe wants to be relevant in a world where users interact with as many as five different devices in a day, then a per-device licensing model is clearly unsustainable. Enter the SaaS model for desktop applications.
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I’m Brian Kernighan. I spent 30-plus years at Bell Labs in the group that produced Unix, C, C++ and other odds and ends of useful software. While there I wrote a few books with some super co-authors. Since 2000, I’ve been teaching in the computer science department at Princeton University. If you’re going to have a second childhood, a good university is a great place to have it. The tools Mr. Kernighan uses to get his work done.
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With our modern architecture, Xbox One games will load more quickly, will be always accessible from the cloud, and there is no physical limit to the size or scope of the content provided. Here are our platform policies and capabilities for game licensing – all of which will be made available when Xbox One launches later this year... Buy, download, trade, resell... even give away games to your friends.
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Reports this week that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is close to finalizing a giant reorganization — reshaping the company’s divisions and internal reporting structures — might seem like odd timing. It’s practically summer, after all. But actually, it makes perfect sense. Microsoft’s new fiscal year begins in July, and the company would need to get any new structure in place before then to make a clean transition. Ballmer’s attempt to make Microsoft a “devices and services” company.
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When American analysts hunting terrorists sought new ways to comb through the troves of phone records, e-mails and other data piling up as digital communications exploded over the past decade, they turned to Silicon Valley computer experts who had developed complex equations to thwart Russian mobsters intent on credit card fraud. The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto, Calif., company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal, is just one of many that the National Security Agency and other agencies have forged as they have rushed to unlock the secrets of “Big Data.” Cliche, but apparently true: ALL YOUR DATA ARE BELONG TO US.
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The above problematic code snippets aren’t the only types of code you should watch out for, but it is a good start and should hopefully open your eyes to some of the common pitfalls you could run into when developing your application. To review here are some concepts you should keep in mind... 6 different errors that accidentally make JavaScript code hard to test.
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Time Machine has been an integral component of my backup system since its inception in OS X 10.5. Despite its utility, I dislike how backup snapshots are handled when Time Machine’s hard drive is full.... This post is about my backup tool called Time Warp and how I use it to modify Time Machine’s backup behavior using weighted reservoir sampling. I built Time Warp to preserve important backup snapshots and prevent Time Machine from deleting them. It's just a jump to the left. And then your snapshot is right.
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The Web Audio API turns your browser into a powerful synthesizer. One question I’ve been asked about the Web Audio API is how to play single, one-shot sounds using the oscillators, in other words how to play notes or tunes. I’ll show one approach in this post and along the way we’ll look at how some early analogue monophonic synths worked. It's got a good DOM and I can dance to it.
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Hello there. Thank you for stopping by. Now, about the growing group of people teaching themselves software development or computer programming, there is no doubt they may miss certain skills that college education might offer. I am very confident that most people would like to go to school if they could afford it. That being said however, not all is lost because after knowing what you lack, you can then go about learning the skills. The most dangerous thing is not knowing what you need. The top 5 skills you should have, starting with an opinion about tabs versus spaces.
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Damn you, Elisha! You were supposed to keep the skills we learned in school a secret so we'd have a competitive advantage over the unschooled. 
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