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If you want to transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the internet. This isn’t a new idea—it’s often dubbed SneakerNet—and it’s how Google transfers large amounts of data internally. But will it always be faster? When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?
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We stand today near the beginning of the post-PC era. Tablets and smart phones are replacing desktops and notebooks. Clouds are replacing clusters. We’re more dependent than ever on big computer rooms only this time we not only don’t own them, we don’t even know where they are. Three years from now we’ll barely recognize the computing landscape that was built on personal computers. So if we’re going to keep an accurate chronicle of that era, we’d better get to work right now, before we forget how it really happened. Oddly enough, I predicted all of this almost 25 years ago as you’ll see if you choose to share this journey and read on... Robert X. Cringely revisits the history of his book and its place in Silicon Valley history.
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Working on mobile systems at Google gives me some insight into what the hard open problems are in this space. Sometimes I am asked by academic researchers what I think these problems are and what they should be working on. I've got a growing list of projects I'd really like to see the academic community try to tackle. This is not to say that Google isn't working on some of these things, but academics have fewer constraints and might be able to come up with some radically new ideas. What areas of mobile computing do you think need more research?
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Starting in May 2000 I was a member of a small team of engineers, game designers and artists working outside St. Louis, MO on a project for Sony Online Entertainment. Together we made Planetside, one of the only massively multiplayer first person shooters ever made. This is one of our stories. All I had to do was test it until something broke, fix that and repeat. I just had to do it fast enough.
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Just some quick commentary on Dell going private and Microsoft’s participation in that process. Let me start with something that should be obvious even if it isn’t. There are personal relationships here that exist just about nowhere else in the PC ecosystem. Where else are the leaders who created the PC industry still involved with the companies they created? Michael Dell and Bill Gates (and Steve Ballmer) are the only ones left standing.... Dude, you got... Dell!
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Michael Dell is to buy Dell back. Source[^].
Here's a hint Michael - if you want to make products that people want, make them fast, reasonably priced, well specced, and don't shovel a boat load of bloat onto them.
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Agree on the bloat front! My life, The amount of rubbish and so called "anti-system" "anti-virus" installed is beyond me.
Also, I spec'd up a laptop. It would have been cheaper to buy a car, drive it to Micheal's house and by my soul back!
However, I do like the DELL precision with docking station for two large monitors!!!
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A few months back there was a bunch of news around the FTC cracking down on these scams. Problem is, the FTC has about zero jurisdiction in India where the scams are originating from! They also have zero jurisdiction in anywhere that isn’t America so the effectiveness of the “crack down” is unlikely to make much difference. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that once again, this evening I enjoyed the company of a couple of gentlemen willing to help me out with my PC. What the scam looks like, and how to avoid being scammed.
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The FTC needs a military arm.
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Block the numbers from being able to dial the country
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I don't have an action plan or any available magic that could restore Perl to its former glory. In fact, I don't think that's possible. However, Perl needs to become more attractive to younger developers and reach out to those who've drifted to other pastures. For the first time ever, Perl needs to figure out how to sell itself. I was hoping way back in 2010 that an official release of Perl 6 might prime the pump for that occurrence. Obviously, that hasn't happened. Maybe there isn't one after all...
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If you've ever worked on a software development project under a time crunch, then you may have heard the phrase "mythical man month." This phrase will often get uttered by a well-read team member when presented with a business stakeholder who wants to throw more bodies at the project to make it go faster. As often as the concept comes up, it never really lives beyond my under-the-breath mutterings. I tend not to share it with clients. Because how do you explain the “mythical man month” to Mr. CEO In A Hurry? A manager had a problem. He thought to himself, "I know, I'll solve it with more programmers"...
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After reading Jon Skeet’s excellent C# in Depth - again (3rd edition - to be published soon) I’ve decide to try and actually read the C# language specification… Being a sensible kind of guy I’ve decided to purchase the annotated version which only cover topics up to .NET 4 – but has priceless comments from several C# gurus. After I’ve read a few pages I was amazed to learn that a few things I knew to be true were completely wrong and so I’ve decided to write a list of new things I’ve learnt while reading this book. What other "secrets" of C# have you learned?
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Learning C/C++ (with some assembly enough for debugging) before jumping on to the managed language bandwagon should have helped with the heap/stack confusion.
Readonly field is also a no brainer; the message of NullReferenceException says "Object reference is not set to an instance of an object.", thus a readonly reference is similar to:
Noob* const p
*doublefacepalm*
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YAML’s security risks are in no way limited to Rails or Ruby. YAML documents should be treated as executable code and firewalled accordingly. Deserializing arbitrary types is user-controlled, arbitrary code execution. For the most part, you never want to accept YAML from the outside world.
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Unfortunately, this anti-pattern is too common. It doesn't hurt until it hurts and when it does hurt, it hurts a lot. If you are developing frameworks do not provide superclasses that framework users must inherit to use your framework. Inheritance is the one of the tightest forms of coupling you can use in OO. As a framework designer, you have many other choices: eventing, listeners, and object composition.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: If you are developing frameworks do not provide superclasses that framework users must inherit to use your framework
And they wonder why some people find programming difficult.
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Oh, you mean like System.Windows.Forms.Form? Yeah, that's bad.
But what's worse is not being able to derive properly due to broken polymorphism. 
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Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.” No doubt the precogs have already seen this.
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There’s a fine line between inducing conversation and creating havoc. In the field of web accessibility (which is very complex and fragile already), it seems that this line has been crossed at least a couple times lately.... Web celebs have created confusion when the answer was already agreed upon by most web accessibility professionals. So, I won’t write about NodeJS and Spring if you other experts stick with your area of expertise. Many times, we should leave accessibility to the experts. Agreed? I guess we still need to ask: who are the experts, and what do they suggest?
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On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix company. The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive than the game itself. An AVALANCHE of information.
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Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google. RTCPeerConnection (also known simply as PeerConnection or PC) interoperability means that developers can now create Firefox WebRTC applications that make direct audio/video calls to Chrome WebRTC applications without having to install a third-party plugin. For those eager to give interop a try, here are instructions and information about “trying this at home”.
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When someone shares their code, the respectful and honorable thing to do is to carefully critique that code. No one's code is above criticism. Criticism is, after all, how we learn. Respectfully criticizing someone's code is one of the highest honors you can pay to the author. Just remember, you respect the person, not the code. The code is fair game. Acknowledge our shared stupidity. Commiserate just how difficult writing good clean code is...
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On the other hand, this would be much less stupid:
public MyClass() {}
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