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Kent Sharkey wrote: Interesting that jQuery 2.0[^] won't support IE 6-8. One of the sites I do work on (not CP) those still contribute about 15% of traffic.
Fortunately for that site you'll still have jQuery 1.9; which will be maintained with the full set of horrible legacy IE hacks needed to allow it to be used like a standards compliant browser. Jquery themselves say they expect most people will keep using 1.9 for the next few years for public access websites.
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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Microsoft needs to improve customer engagement, dramatically. And the first thing that will take is to recognize that the consumer teams’ attitude towards communicating futures is just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean abandonment of controlled information release, it means applying it more intelligently. It means disclosing platform direction early. It means bringing developers on board early. It means giving general technology direction to the public early (ala what BillG used to do) without talking specific releases or products. It does not mean releasing every detail of a product in advance. Now I get it, the Consumer guys at Microsoft are just plain wrong!
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When I recommend learning Haskell to the uninitiated, I often get asked: “Why Haskell?” “Is it a practical language?” and ”Is it something I can actually use?” My answer is definitely yes. Haskell isn’t my primary language at work (I mostly write C code for embedded systems), I’ve still found it incredibly useful. And even if I never used Haskell at work, I would still consider learning it as time well spent. So, why Haskell? It turns out Haskell is a very powerful tool for helping you write C.
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I think a good follow-up to blog posts about how great functional programming is would be links to books that teach it correctly along with exercises you can do to verify that you really have learned it.
It's one thing to download an interpreter and write "hello worlds" in a language, and it's another thing to figure out what good ideas you're supposed to extract from it when there aren't any obvious real-world problems that it's supposed to be good at solving.
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Java wasn't and isn't a very nice language to code with, but the value of write once run anywhere (WORA) seemed to outweigh the pain involved to learn it. (I still don't like it)
Javascript has most of the features that a functional programming language has. So learning a functional programming language definitely helps to write better javascript.
Just knowing the extra FP idioms means you can attack problems from a different perspective when you get stuck.
I'm currently learning Scala which has some awesome syntactic features.
Online book: http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/
Also checkout Erlang if you want to compile to pure machine binaries instead of the JVM.
If you need any more convincing that you need to know at least one FP language, take a look at the TERAFLUX project http://teraflux.eu/
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
modified 6-Mar-13 12:06pm.
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Android and iOS have existed in tension for a few years now, and each is continually borrowing ideas, designs, and features from the other. Nothing wrong with a little friendly theft when trying to stay competitive. The operating systems are far from exact mirrors of each other, and they have even grown more distinct with new generations. But there are a few features we’d still love to see cross sides, in the interest of keeping the operating systems functional and easy for customers to use. See also the companion article on Android features they'd like to see in iOS.
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I agree with the last one, it's always bugged me that I can't tell an app, "no, you can't have access to that", in any way other than not installing it. (I have of course decided against installing apps that have asked for permissions that were clearly beyond the scope of what they should have had.) I should be allowed to revoke permissions, at my own risk of buggy apps (of course, it shouldn't be hard to for the developers to cope either, just throw an exception when they try to use a feature that requires permissions, and then they can catch it and either work around it or warn the user before exiting gracefully...).
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On the surface, a microprocessor's registers seem like simple storage, but not in the 8085 microprocessor. Reverse-engineering the 8085 reveals many interesting tricks that make the registers fast and compact.... Each bit is implemented with a surprisingly compact circuit. The instruction set is designed to make register accesses efficient. An indirection trick allows quick register exchanges. Many register operations use the unexpected but efficient data path of going through the ALU. Ken Shirriff continues his adventure down the rabbit hole of chip design.
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That brings back memories. While I was in college and for some time afterward I worked on a number of embedded projects using the 8085. At one point I had a significant amount of the instruction set's opcodes memorized.
Speaking of college, I had a class entitled "Microprocessor Design Projects". The final exam include a programming problem: a list of about 100 8085 assembly language instructions, listed in random order. The problem was to write a routine that sorted an input buffer pointed to by the HL register pair, IIRC. There was a second requirement that you use all of the provided instructions exactly once. At that point in time I had been writing 8085 assembly language for a couple of years. I wrote two versions, one that met the problem requirements, and a shorter version that used less code. The professor thought I was being a smartass.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Businesses are mostly just now upgrading to Windows 7, and won’t go to Windows 8 for 2-4 more years. So in a sense you can argue that Microsoft has a lot of time to fix the side-loading story, because almost no one is going to care about this for a long time anyway. On the other hand, the developer community tends to move a bit faster. We’re a fickle bunch. If we don’t perceive WinRT as a viable future platform for business apps then we’ll start retooling our skills to something else in order to preserve our careers. That won’t take 4 years. I suspect Microsoft has less than 2 years to get developer buy-in to WinRT or the siren call of h5js will become too much to bear. Small businesses and developers need a better story for building business apps.
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One comment from that series which I think deserves more attention:
http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/Windows8LOBDeploymentLsquostoryrsquo.aspx[^]
"Microsoft tells me that ... it is technically illegal to use [the Windows 8 edition of] Windows 8 for non-personal use"
Since when does an OS manufacturer have the right to dictate what you can and cannot do with the OS?
Yes, they can restrict the features available in a particular edition, but what you do with those features should be nothing to do with them.
What next? Will Apple forbid you from using a Mac to look at suggestive or pornographic images, even if such images are perfectly legal in your country? Will Google make it "illegal" to use DuckDuckGo or Bing on Chrome OS?
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Sure, you probably can't compile them without major work, but I for one definitely think there would be a lot of learning material in these copies of Ritchie's earliest C compilers[^]
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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Leslie Neilson[^] can compile them!
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji. ( °_°) ( °_°)‿‑●‑● (‑●‑●)>
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Today it became known that the author of the popular HoverZoom extension for the Google Chrome browser also implemented “features” into the extension that many users will certainly consider unethical if only they knew about them. A user of the extension noticed that it was acting up when connections to Github were made and after additional users reported the same issue, one user wanted to know why Hoverzoom needed to POST to a Czech media company server... Mozilla Firefox add-ons have been compromised, too.
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Like all little boys, Roboy likes to show off. He can say a few words. He can shake hands and wave. He is learning to ride a tricycle. And - every parent's pride and joy - he has a functioning musculoskeletal anatomy.... As manufacturers get ready to market robots for the home it has become essential for them to overcome the public's suspicion of them. But designing a robot that is fun to be with - as well as useful and safe - is quite difficult. I prefer the term "Artificial Person" myself.
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When the iPad first launched, many people reached for a quick analysis that it was a device "only for content consumption". Despite time and experience having proven those people quite obviously wrong, the debate seems to persist as to what the iPad is, precisely, for. My own opinion is that the iPad is for about 80% of all tasks you can conceivably do on a computer. I have never thought of the iPad as a distinct entity requiring a total first-principles relearning of what it means to use a computation device. The consumption/creation split is far too simplistic a curve to grade these devices on.
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At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of scientists struggled to close in on physics' most elusive particle.... The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe. Either we find the Higgs boson, or some stranger phenomenon must happen...
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But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
Don't just fix the mistakes -- fix whatever permitted the mistake in the first place.
The solution of how a bug-free software can be written is: Set up a secure process. And if there is a bug - blame the process for the bug.
Well this solution assumes that everyone in the team is a high-standard programmer witha lot of discipline. Every plan has its weak part.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
modified 14-Apr-13 17:07pm.
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I love the sentiment , I always advocate that you reduce bugs by reducing the possibility for the bug to exist . But I am always sceptical when anyone claims to know how many bugs a piece of software has .
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Particularly when that number is zero...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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NASA is its own customer. No shifting customer requirements, with very strict *known* operational parameters.
The true cost of 'that software' must run into billions of *tax* dollars. No one could afford their software if it was for general use. imho it's a dumb example to use NASA.
Medical software is also very expensive, but not astronomical. (no pun intended) 
Even more impressive is the fact that NASA developed that code waaaay back in the late 60s or early 70s.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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And if you have paid for your mobile device, and aren't bound by a service agreement or other obligation, you should be able to use it on another network. It's common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers' needs.
So... they think we should be able to unlock our phones, as long as we aren't still paying them off as part of a contract? Guess that means we can't switch out the SIM card when on a trip to a foreign country... until the contract is up.
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