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Lotus Development Corp. sold its first copy of 1-2-3 for DOS on Jan. 26, 1983, and it never looked back. Every single number-cruncher I knew at the time couldn't wait to part with the princely sum of $495 for the product -- on top of the price of the PC, typically $3,000 to $5,000. To this day, I believe Lotus 1-2-3, all by itself, started the Microsoft-Intel architecture hegemony. It was that good. Who needs spreadsheets when we've got a perfectly good Fortran... Oh, nevermind.
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To actually call yourself a software engineer you need to take into account a few aspects of what an engineer should do. Typing code into a code editor or text editor is not what a Software Engineer is paid to do. At least, it is not the primary reason this profession exists. Yes, part of the job is to write code in any number of languages and platforms... it is more then writing code, it is about writing tests, and making sure the code you do type works as designed and can be easily maintained. What's the most important part of the job (besides showing up)?
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There they sat, in front of a machine no more soulful than a hair dryer, a machine they knew intellectually was just a collection of electrical pulses and metal, and yet they paused. And while eventually every participant killed the robot, it took them time to intellectually override their emotional queasiness — in the case of a helpful cat robot, around 35 seconds before they were able to complete the switching-off procedure. How long does it take you to switch off your stereo? Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?
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I don't understand what's going on here?
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What don't you understand?
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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The 'test subjects' were instructed to interact with the robot and evaluate the robots performance on a task.
If the robot made too many mistakes, they were instructed to make it switch himself off.
What they didn't knew is that the robot would then beg the user not to shut him off because that would erase his memory and he would "die".
The actual test was to see whether they feel empathy towards the AI.
If so, they would at least hesitate before shutting it down.
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As you shall see below, the evolution of video game consoles is indeed intriguing. Did you know that there were more than 70 different consoles to date? And did you know that there was a peak era of video arcade game when Nintendo and Sega were fiercely pitting against each other with their revolutionary consoles? If you are amazed by such facts, then I guarantee that this entry will excite you even further with the bits and pieces of fascinating historical facts across the video game consoles timeline. How many of these have you played?
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On Thursday I wrote a piece about MacWrite and MacPaint, two pieces of software that influenced much if not all the software that followed. There are many other examples of seminal software products. In most cases, the products are not the first of its kind, as MacWrite was not the first word processor, but for whatever reason, put enough of the pieces together to lead the way to the future. It's not always obvious in the moment, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see. Tell us what early software inspired your career as a coder.
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Tic Tac Toe -- when I was growing up in the 70s there was a computer at the Boston Museum of Science that played it.
Also Merlin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(game)[^]
Seriously, I didn't use computers until I started to learn to code in 1983. I'm a developer, not a user.
modified 28-Jan-13 19:07pm.
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Patent trolling is based upon deficiencies in a critical but underdeveloped area of the law. The faster we drive these cases to verdict—and through appeal, and also get legislative reform on track—the faster our economy will be competitive in this critical area. We're competing with other economies that are not burdened with this type of litigation. China doesn't have this, South Korea doesn't have this, Europe doesn't have this. It's game over for a patent troll that sued nearly 50 big retailers.
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Removing the experience of working with things from everyday life hasn’t just deskilled us; it has demoralized us. Modern knowledge workers are just as alienated from their labor as any other assembly line worker; the gradual substitution of process for judgment is only “progress” if pride in one’s work and connection with one’s peers is left out of the equation.... skilled trades are not only better paid and steadier occupations these days than most so-called “knowledge work”, they also demand more intellectually, and more personally rewarding. Building with web technologies is perhaps today's most accessible DIY movement. Let's keep it growing.
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When Alec Rust asked the HTML5 Boilerplate project to switch to a HiDPI favicon, I realized how little I knew about favorite icons, touch icons, and tile icons. When I decided to dive in a little deeper, things got interesting. Since they were first introduced by Internet Explorer in 1999, almost nothing about favicons has changed. Talkin' 'bout hey now! Hey now! .ico .ico an nay...
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Long story short. If we want to encourage people to go out and show the world what they did (and we all learn from that) we need to stop dropping dismissive short sentence criticism and instead spend more time to explain, verify and validate our criticism. That way we can still prevent bad code from being used, but we don’t come across as a terrible person at the same time. Don't just tell me I'm wrong. Tell me how to be right.
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I believe that's called "Critical Thinking" in academia.
dev
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That article sucks.
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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He's just preaching to the choir.
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Despite what anyone might tell you, the Windows Runtime API is not a clean break from the past. Like .NET before it, WinRT includes a backdoor without which it would be practically useless. The Common Language Runtime’s backdoor was called Platform Invocation Services or P/Invoke for short. It was amazingly powerful, but also complex and troublesome. WinRT’s backdoor is a lot simpler. It’s called reinterpret_cast. You winrt_cast a spell on me...
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This is what "software craftsmanship" gets us: an imposed segregation of those who "get it" from those who "don't" based on somebody's arbitrary criteria of what we should or shouldn't be doing. And if somebody doesn't use the "right" tools or code it in the "right" way, then bam! You clearly aren't a "craftsman" (or "craftswoman"?) and you clearly don't care about your craft and you clearly aren't worth the time or energy necessary to support and nourish and grow and.... I bow with respect to the "software laborers" of the world, who churn out quality code without concern for "craftsmanship."
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This is a post about a silly (and mostly pointless) optimization. To motivate this, consider the following problem which you see all the time in mesh processing: Given a collection of triangles represented as ordered tuples of indices, find all topological duplicates. By a topological duplicate, we mean that the two faces have the same vertices. Now you aren’t allowed to mutate the faces themselves (since orientation matters), but changing their order in the array is ok. There are many solutions for this, but which one is fastest?
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With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a very tiny x86 dev board called the Gizmo, a four-inch square board that shrinks a desktop computer down to the palm of your hand. What would you build with a tiny x86 board like this?
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Uncle Owen: What I really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Well, no, I need a simple database server.
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The top performer was the Windows Division, reporting under its new name for the first time. Previously it was called "Windows and Windows Live Division." The new name reflects the termination of the "Windows Live" branding; it's also the division that houses Microsoft's Surface tablets. Revenue for the division was $5.881 billion, up 24 percent on a year ago.... Either way, this is a strong performance. Even with deferrals, revenue grew, outperforming the x86 market as a whole. The reports of my blue screen of death are greatly exaggerated.
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