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The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which measures the customer satisfaction of business across 47 industries, released its latest report for E-business on Tuesday. The survey reveals customer satisfaction levels for social media platforms, search engines and portals, and news and information sites.Wired[^]
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The tech world abandoned Internet Explorer before Firefox even had 30% marketshare. It was easy for us to get behind ‘the cause’ of killing IE, but that was an easily replaced software product. Today we’re on the verge of a hardware revolution, initiated by a premium brand, that may or may not trickle down to PC OEMs. How long before designers start imposing a “1x Tax” on consumers with non-Retina computers because it’s too expensive and laborious to maintain two separate asset libraries? Your old display is the new IE6.
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Who what is "1x"? (other than - obviously - today's non-retina-displays?)
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If people know what they're doing it's really not that hard to scale appropriately. Especially if new hi-res displays are 2x (in each axis) the pixels of current displays. Dealing with the myriad of shapes and sizes is far more challenging than going hi-res. It would be idiotic to impose a "1x" tax in any case - once you have the "2x" (or whatever) resolution supported, down sampling is trivial for images, and already done by the OS for text.
"Retina" technology on desktops is about 10 years overdue, by the way, so thank you Apple for pushing people in that direction, finally. I hope independent LCD makers take notice.
Look at me still talking when there's science to do
When I look out there it makes me glad I'm not you
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It happened again last week. No, not Yahoo! Voices, not the Phandroid Android forums, not NVidia and not Formspring, this time it was Billabong, our legendry Aussie surf brand. So what went wrong? How does such a thing happen? It’s not quite clear yet, certainly nothing has been publicly said about root causes, but I propose that in a case like Billabong, the writing was already on the wall. In fact the signs are still all over their websites, you just need to know where to look. Clear and present Billabong failures, and why they happen again and again.
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Many things in programming become easier as your level of experience increases. However, some things remain stubbornly difficult. This document tries to characterize five of these difficult things; optimization, networking, security, reliability and scalability. What makes them hard and what can you do about it? The most important part of the job is showing up... and then tackling this stuff.
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I thought HTML 5 (see next topic) was all the five things that are hard but then I see the guy is talking about something else altogether!
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Ah nice, more misconceptions about micro-optimizations.
Chris McKenzie wrote: They [micro-optimizations] are at best, localized, temporary, almost unmeasurable boosts in performance.
You wish. If it were that easy, I would be out of a job.
At best they can give a boost of .. I don't even know how much (I certainly haven't explored all possible cases), but a lot. That crazy micro-optimized branchless bithack you used at the bottom of a huge search tree might just knock %80 off the original running time.
It's not uncommon for a micro-optimized "lame algorithm" to far outstrip the lazily-coded "fancy-pants algorithm", either.
But somehow people have decided that micro-optimizing == always premature and evil. If you've benchmarked your code and determined that optimizing that one function could really pay off, tough! Optimization isn't allowed anymore.
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One of the essential problems with any new technology is whether to adopt it and diabolically abandon users who are not able to upgrade or miss out on new possibilities and eventually become irrelevant. However, not all of the things we would like to do are possible yet. That’s what this post is about; places where HTML5 currently falls short that have hurt us in the last month. IE gets more of the blame than it deserves, and here are some other examples.
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Every day I come across code that is insecure. Sometimes the code is so hilariously insecure that any 10 year old could break it. I've also gotten into discussions with people who should know better about their practices. It's very, how to put this, disheartening. It's sad that the average developer knows (and cares) so little about proper security practices. So, I've put together a simple pledge (or manifesto, if you'd like). I will not store sensitive data in plain text...
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Most people in the tech space already believe that HTML5 will replace flash when it comes to online video and UI. What's more of a toss-up is whether it will replace Flash when it comes to online gaming. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla - four of the largest tech companies are actively pushing HTML5 in all areas, including gaming. More importantly, their products account for 97% of browser usage. Here's why the competition & the collaboration of these companies will lead to HTML5 overtaking Flash for browser-based gaming (and who knows, maybe PC gaming in general, but let's not get ahead of ourselves). Competition is good and is making the browsers better and better.
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don't want to downvote you for the post.
but is insane to compare a browser toy-like scripting when it comes to gaming tech.
and i think I am being soft for using just the word "insane" 
Leonardo Paneque
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not even close
Leonardo Paneque
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If you're reading these lines it's because of this man. He's Dave Winer, the inventor of blogs and RSS syndication, two of the backbones of the web. Often controversial, always challenging, this is the story of what got him inspired to do it all. From that point on, no one questioned the power of an individual with a net connection and a scripting language.
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I always thought of John Carmack as the first "blog" I followed back when he did .plan updates. It drove me nuts when "blogging" was treated like some great, new idea. Wow, people putting stuff they want to say on the internet, what a revolution. 
Look at me still talking when there's science to do
When I look out there it makes me glad I'm not you
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Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next C.E.O. of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America. The appointment of Ms. Mayer, who was employee No. 20 at Google and was one of the few public faces of the company, is considered a surprising coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top flight talent in its battle with competitors like Google and Facebook. Out of the search engine and into the... um, what does Yahoo do these days?
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However unlikely it may seem, Microsoft just announced two new versions of Office, and the new builds aren’t pieces of inscrutable, soul-killing bloatware per the company’s productivity suite tradition. Believe it or not, Microsoft has finally made Office borderline cool. Facing competition from Google Drive and Apple’s iWork/iCloud integration, Microsoft is stepping up its game, making real strides in an Office suite that everyone uses, but no one really enjoys. An inside look at the new Office 13 and Office 365.
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Ever since the first beta editions of Windows 8 appeared, rumors have circulated over how Microsoft would revamp its other flagship consumer product, Office, to be all the more useful in the new OS. Would Office become touch-oriented and Metro-centric, to the exclusion of plain old Windows users? Now Microsoft has whipped the drapes off the preview edition of Office 2013, providing the short answer to the above question: no. Cloudy with a chance of spreadsheets.
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I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I don't really know about that; but what I do know what keys are pressed when writing with different programming languages. Let me guess: Lisp uses a lot of parentheses.
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VB uses lots of 'backspaces'. 
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Ctrl, C and V for most of them, I suppose 
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Jarek Kruza wrote: Ctrl, C and V
Depends on the editor you are using
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