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We have talked about Windows 8 as Windows reimagined, from the chipset to the user experience. This also applies to the editions available – we have worked to make it easier for customers to know what edition will work best for them when they purchase a new Windows 8 PC or upgrade their existing PC. It's just Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT.
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Equations have held remarkable power in facilitating humanity’s progress and, as such, call for rudimentary understanding as a form of our most basic literacy. E = mc what?
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Ethically sourced coffee is easy to find nowadays, but it is hard to feel good about where your smartphone comes from. The industry is beset by allegations of factory-worker abuse, of raw materials being sourced from conflict zones, and of generating mountains of electronic waste. Is there a smartphone you can feel good about buying? People are willing to pay more if they know a product is ethically sourced.
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Recently, we recommended Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome as the best business browsers. But for many companies, they both have a major problem: they're not Internet Explorer 6. Intranet applications that choke on newer browsers, but which work in Internet Explorer 6 or sometimes 7, are an unfortunate feature of many working environments, and regularly force companies to stick with software that's long past its prime but nonetheless mission critical. Which of these products is the best option for you?
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For most of my life, I’ve struggled to quantify what constitutes an enticing interface. There are certain basic aims from which you can take your pick - intuitiveness, attractiveness, clarity, simplicity, consistency, and more - but those are general guidelines. With the arrival of the iPad, however, I’ve noticed an increasingly-prevalent UX aesthetic that I think gets close to the natural role of these devices in our lives. Touch-based devices are empowering extensions to our real, actual lives - and that’s a profound thing.
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Programmers in demand get approached by people about new projects. Demanding an NDA upfront starts the relationship off on the wrong foot. [ITworld]
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What's your best career advice for new IT professionals? [ITworld]
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Do what you love. If you do, you will always be successful. I hate to see people go into a field just because of industry predictions that it will be a good field. Do what you love. Don't chase money.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Sheryl Sandberg says in a video interview that she thinks it would be great if tech workers didn't put in stupidly long hours at the office. But don't count on her triggering a Silicon Valley revolution. [ITworld]
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In spite of the fact that I’m a pretty high end .Net guy, I would caution new startups that are considering using .Net. I think .Net is awesome, and I use it for my own startup HireFlo. However there's one big landmine that could handicap your startup before it even gets going, webforms. You see, ASP.Net development is divided into 2 camps, and there are major architectural differences, and cultural differences between them. ASP.NET MVC versus WebForms, which would you choose?
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Yawn: another know-it-all tells us what we should and shouldn't be doing because he happens to like one methodology over another.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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I'm starting what could be called a business. Regardless of if it becomes profitable, I'm using it as an opportunity to learn ASP.net MVC, Umbraco 5, and Windows Azure.
I've found Windows Azure to be pretty nice so far. You aren't actually locked into Azure if you use it... your Azure project is different than your main web application project, and you can actually build the web app to run outside of Azure as well as in Azure (the book I read on Azure, the name of which I forget at the moment, demonstrates some of those techniques). In that sense, you are not locked into Azure.
As far as the Azure environment being difficult to replicate on a local box, it comes with compute and storage emulators, which I have tried and which seem to work fine. Debugging does not really seem different than outside of Azure.
In any event, since I'm using this as a learning exercise, I can afford to fail, so I can see why somebody who can't afford to fail would want to avoid Azure or any new technology.
And I'm thinking of getting a business license later this year, so Bizspark may be a real option for me. It's good to know the individual licenses extend beyond the initial 3 years 
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AspDotNetDev wrote: I've found Windows Azure to be pretty nice so far
read the production pricing fine print and tell me what you think after that
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I've read it. I can have a site running for less than $30/month, including SQL Server and bandwidth.
Though, the bigger server instances seem to be priced excessively high (the XL is $720/month). In theory, if you have enough users to warrant instances that hefty, you'd be able too afford it.
Was there anything in particular you don't like about the pricing?
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Guess what - the world isn't perfect.
Peter Wasser
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa
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8 years ago I wrote about a period of debilitating pain I went through when coding. Too many long hours at the keyboard took their toll on me so that even placing my fingers on the keyboard would cause me pain. I experienced numbness in my fingers, pain in my wrists, back and shoulders, and lots of headaches. In short, I was a mess. Debugging your body's aches and pains.
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I've never found a perfect chair, but I've come across some that have been close.
Just yesterday, I bought a new chair for home use. Looks like this Serta Leather Multifunction Managers Chair (I got it for about $150 on a discount), but in a different color. Has some neat features, but I most appreciate that the back can tilt distinctly from the base. That's great, because my legs are apparently short and my feet dangle on most chairs, but I have found a comfortable position on this chair (I still get a better position by wearing shoes).
My work chair looks a bit like this Aeron Chair by Herman Miller. It's nice because the front can be adjusted to bend to my liking, which reduces the pressure I feel on my legs with most chairs.
Unfortunately, most chairs I have ever tried have not been low enough. Much of the time, I'll end up crossing my legs on the chair rather than let my feet rest on the floor. Chair makers really need to account for us short legged folk.
One thing I do recommend is that people should not shop for chairs online. Like shoes, it can be really hit or miss (I had to give away a custom pair of Nike's that cost me $160 because Nike had a drastically different sizing scheme for a their new custom shoe option). Trying it out in person at a store is the best way to ensure you're getting exactly the chair you want.
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For ethnologists, linguistic diversity is a cultural resource to be nurtured and preserved, much like biodiversity. All human languages are valuable; the more the better. That attitude of detached reverence is harder to sustain when it comes to computer languages, which are products of design or engineering rather than evolution. The creators of a new programming language are not just adding variety for its own sake; they are trying to make something demonstrably better. Every programmer knows there is one true programming language. A new one every week.
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Initially heralded as the future of browser gaming and the next step beyond the monopolised world of Flash, HTML5 has since faced criticism for being tough to code with and possessing a string of broken features. Whether developers like it or not, HTML5 is here to stay. Or is it?
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Actually, the main thing that article says is that HTML5 audio is broken. The rest is just padding
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For a long time, it was considered fairly obvious, I think, that syntax didn’t really matter. It was just the surface skin over the underlying ideas. In recent times, though, the prevailing wisdom has reversed, and it is now quite common to hear people talk about how “syntax matters”. The siren call of pretty syntax
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Apple’s system has sometimes been called the first personal computer; it wasn’t, unless you use a definition designed to let it claim that honor. It may not even have been the best-selling machine in the early days. It was, however, easily the most visionary of the early personal computers. Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.
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It’s been seven years since I took my first step into Information Architecture and, sadly, it seems that the practice of understanding and prioritizing information before designing the interface has been abandoned. And because of that, we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX, which is, simply put, that we are devolving. Are we not men? We are dev-elopers.
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Brain emulation requires enormous computing power. Enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore's law. Further Moore's law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in chip fabs. Chip fabs are both expensive and vulnerable. Therefore, the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by attacks on chip fabs. My mission is to protect you.
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