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What does the kernel have to do to keep track of a game of Tic-Tac-Toe? I reckon the following isn't to far off the mark... Implementing a Tic Tac Toe game in VB.
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Now that we are close to releasing Mozart 2 (a complete redesign of the Mozart system), I have been thinking about how best to summarize the lessons we learned about programming paradigms in CTM. Here are five "laws" that summarize these lessons... Two bits beats a paradigms... in my language, anyway.
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An incredible developer that I work with gave me a piece of advice I won’t be forgetting anytime soon: The key to being a good developer is to be able to find your answer as quickly as possible without learning anything else. To be honest, it hurt when I heard it because I literally have spent probably close to 100 hours so far looking for answers online and getting caught up into learning something else. You know how it is... Cuiosity killed the cat. So did looking at animated GIFs of cats. Only more slowly.
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While Brad's intentions may have been good, his expression of them was poor and ill-advised. Too many inexperienced developers are going to read his statement and think that, if the information they're reading doesn't immediately apply to the problem at hand, it's worthless. They will miss opportunities to improve their skills and to expand their repertoire for the sake of 'gimme codez'.
If you find yourself following a path that isn't immediately related to the problem, save a link to it. When you've got some free time  , go back and review those links. Maybe if you had more than a hammer in your tool chest, you'd realize that not all problems are nails, and wouldn't need to spend as much time searching for answers.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: save a link to it
This advice somewhat implies that you also do this yourself, so may I ask what method/tool you prefer, more precisely is there a better alternative to Evernote or Pocket?
Thanks!
Also for on-topic: I disagree with the author, just searching only for the solution with a tunnel vision actually doesn't help you learn anything, it mostly just solves the given problem. The beauty of the web is that there is so much information out there, you are bound to find a real gem every once in a while. Do agree though that this shouldn't distract you from the main problem at hand.
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szukuro wrote: what method/tool you prefer, more precisely is there a better alternative to
Evernote or Pocket
My solution is pretty brainless. I use IE, and I keep the Favorites bar displayed. I've made a folder in the bar called 'Interesting'. When I find something interesting that I don't want to finish reading right now, I drag the link to the 'Interesting' folder. I eat my lunch at my desk. I'll use that time to review the contents of the Interesting folder. As I read items, I delete or move them elsewhere in my favorites.
I'll admit it's low-tech, but it's simple.
Software Zen: delete this;
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That's almost exactly how I do it except for using Chrome. I even called the folder "Interesting"!
I also sync my favourites so that I can follow up at home, at work or anywhere.
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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It is exceedingly difficult to argue against a simply designed product…so long as it does what you want or when it does more than competitive products. In fact it is so difficult to argue against simplicity that this post won’t even attempt to. Let’s state emphatically that software should always do only what you need it to do, with the fewest number of steps, and least potential for errors due to complex choices and options. On the other hand, good luck with that. 7 reasons why simplicity in software design is incredibly difficult.
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Egads! I was recently given a 478 page hard-cover textbook by a major educational publisher on Scrum. You gotta be kidding me. There is so much talk and writing about Agile and Scrum and, frankly, in my opinion, 99% of it is confusing and makes things worse for the people who read it. Don’t read that stuff. Read this. Keep it simple. Here’s how Scrum works... Want to try Rich Man’s Scrum? It's the same thing with fancier jargon.
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Businesses offering cloud-based services face a growing data leakage threat, say Taiwanese hardware designers. They claim to have devised a tactic to fight back: a chip with circuitry to frustrate what are known as side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks scrutinize things like computation time, power consumption, and electromagnetic emissions to glean something about the operations of cloud servers or to steal the cryptographic keys they use. It makes side-channel attacks take so long that they become impractical... for now.
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A similar chip has been developed using reversible TSG gates.
Also for thwarting side channel attacks, such as power consumption and electromagnetic leakage.
"It's true that hard work never killed anyone. But I figure, why take the chance." - Ronald Reagan
That's what machines are for.
Got a problem?
Sleep on it.
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We are living in an unparalleled time for technological progress. In 10 years, it will be almost impossible to describe to any child in India what life was like before the internet. Only about two billion of the world's seven billion people have an internet connection, and i believe the remaining five billion will get one in the next decade. Almost one billion of them will come online in India. They will have different needs from people online today and expect different things from the internet. Now is the moment for India to decide what kind of internet it wants for them: an open internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation. Does a free and open internet == a free and open country?
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Internet in India right now is the kind that gets you arrested for saying innocuous things that someone may not like and complains to the police about.
Eg: A university professor in Calcutta sent an e-mail containing a cartoon about the state's Chief Minister. He was arrested and thrown in jail and denied bail.
Eg: When a divisive politician died in Bombay, shops shuttered their doors. One woman wrote in Facebook that the closures were more due to fear of what his followers may do to shops that were open than to any respect the shopkeeper may feel for the dead man. Another woman "liked" it. Both were arrested when a local party goon approached the police and said that if the two were not arrested, rioting would take place. Instead of arresting the goon, the police arrested the two 21-year-old girls at night and held them in jail, despite the existence of a Supreme Court order that no woman can be arrested after 7 pm (for fear of rape in police custody).
We are behind China though in pro-active censorship, if that is any consolation.
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After a computer glitch sidelined NASA's Mars rover Curiosity late last month, another problem has it down again. NASA reported that Curiosity put itself into safe mode on Saturday after a software bug caused a command file to fail a size-check. "This is a very straightforward matter to deal with," said Richard Cook, Curiosity's project manager. "We can just delete that file, which we don't need any more, and we know how to keep this from occurring in the future." NASA said late on Monday that bringing Curiosity out of safe mode is expected to take a couple of days. Another dimension, new galaxy. Intergalactic Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
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Newly leaked documentation accompanying the developer's kit for the successor to the Xbox 360, codenamed Durango, is rekindling rumors that the new system will require disc-based games to be installed to a hard drive before being played. The "Hardware Overview" included in the Xbox Developer Kit help files was obtained and published by VGLeaks, and it matches up closely with rumors leaked last month by SuperDaE... The document discusses how Durango games will be distributed via Blu-ray disc (an upgrade from the Xbox 360's DVDs) but says those games won't be playable directly from that optical media. Instead "all games will be installed on the hard drive... disc media will be used for distribution, but during gameplay, games will not use content from the optical disc." If they can eliminate the constant update delays, Game On!
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Hopefully they get rid of the requirement of discs to play the game (even if you copy the game to the hard drive today, you still need to insert the dic to play the game, I think). Or maybe they could require the discs, but do so wirelessly (i.e., if the disc is resting happily in a spindle within a few hundred feet, the system can detect that and allow the game to play from the hard drive). I wouldn't want network activation unless there is a high limit on the number of systems a game can be installed on (say, 10, and it resets every year).
And while I'm at it, an SSD rather than an HDD would be nice. Hopefully for a price that isn't 5x the typical market price.
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This month marks the third anniversary of Apple’s iPad. Since it hit the market, it has sold over 120 million units, and tablets in general have taken off. But large-screen tablets like the 9.7-inch iPad have remained dear for many budgets. The latest iPad and Microsoft’s new Surface RT start at $499. Even lower-priced, full-size tablets from name-brand companies typically cost $300 to $400. To pay significantly less, you’ve had to opt for a much smaller unit, in the 7-inch range. Now, major manufacturers are lowering prices for some larger-screen tablets to at least slightly below $300. What's your favorite tablet, and how are you using it?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What's your favorite tablet, and how are you using it?
I got an Asus Transformer Pad (TF300T), and since it was refurbished I only paid $330 for it (pretty close to fitting the article's limit). It's made a great replacement for my laptop, the battery life is significantly better (I can watch Netflix during my free time between classes, only uses ~13% of the battery per hour...and that's just the tablet's battery, not counting the extra battery in the dock). And I find myself using the keyboard less and less, I still pull it out when I want to prop the tablet on a table, or when typing anything more than a couple sentences, but I don't do that often when I'm away from a desktop.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What's your favorite tablet, and how are you using it?
I have an iPad Mini (known in India as i Padmini)*.
My next purchase will be a 21" tablet. I wonder if I can name it iMaxipad! 
As to use, I fling birds at pigs on my tablet! I study projectile trajectories and the resulting impact.
* Padmini is a woman's name in India.
modified 21-Mar-13 12:19pm.
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The canvas element was introduced with HTML5 and provides an API for rendering on the web. The API is simple, but if you've never done graphics work before it might take some getting used to. It has great cross-browser support at this point, and it makes the web a viable platform for games.... In this article, we're going to create a 2d game with canvas; a real game with sprites, animations, collision detection, and of course, explosions! What's a game without explosions? Build your own Canvas-based game, or just grab the code and start exploding stuff.
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A common traffic pattern we see at Shopify is the flash sale, where a product will be discounted heavily or only available for a very short period of time. Our customer's flash sales can cause traffic spikes an order of magnitude above our typical traffic rate. This blog post highlights one of the problems dealing with these traffic surges that we solved during our preparation for the holiday shopping season. In a flash sale scenario, with our app servers under high load, response time grows. As our response time increases, customers attempting to buy items will hit refresh in frustration. This was causing a snowball effect that would contribute to reduced availability. One solution per customer. Limited to product in stock. Operators are standing by...
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Good point. By the way, what does IIS do? HTTP 499 is nginx specific...
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Breaking it down, what I've called "buildable artifacts" usually means source code, which should be housed in a version control system. A build process takes those artifacts, and produces new artifacts: artifacts which are ready to be deployed with a deployment process. These artifacts are typically binaries, usually packaged into some kind of format, and stamped with metadata explaining the contents. This idea of decoupling the build process from the deployment process is important. Package deployment isn't a new problem. Which solutions do you think work best?
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