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Kent Sharkey wrote: When you think of a Microsoft product, do you think of "cool" or "attractive?"
Back in the UseNet days, somebody had a tag line:
"If Microsoft ever built something that didn't suck, it would be a vacuum cleaner".
I think that says it all...
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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What a description of a failure! Did that guy know German language? The German word for "vacuum cleaner" is "Staubsauger" - literally "dustsucker".
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One feature of Privacy Badger aims to stop tracking tied to clicking the Facebook 'like' on outside sites. "I am in disguise. This way no one will recognize me."
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Researchers at Aalborg University, MIT and Caltech have developed a new mathematically-based technique that can boost internet data speeds by up to 10 times, by making the nodes of a network much smarter and more adaptable. "Do you want to go faster?"
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"Could"? "Can"? "Up to"? Weasel words. I won't hold my breath.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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And of course you'll have to pay for ISP's not to throttle.
As I grow older I've found that pleasing everyone is impossible but pissing everyone off is a piece of cake.
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That may be, but Verizon will still deliver crap speeds regardless.
Marc
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To understand why so many serious Microsoft observers were encouraged by Satya Nadella’s week-ago memo Bold Ambition and Our Core,1 it’s useful to go back 10 years and read Steve Ballmer’s 2004 memo Our Path Forward. It was around this time that cracks were first starting to appear in the Microsoft machine: the stock had been stagnant for going on four years, Windows XP was besieged by a security crisis, and Microsoft was about to announce the reboot of Windows Vista née Longhorn. Meanwhile, the iPod was exploding, and Google’s stock price had quadrupled since its IPO earlier that year on the back of its 85% share of search. "So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999"
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in theory? Great. A well thought-out argument. I don't see it ever happening, but that doesn't mean the guy isn't dead-on.
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Did I not just a day or two ago make a comment about Microsoft creating spinoffs of its products? Still waiting for the official announcement from Nadella!
Marc
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You did, and I keep hoping.
TTFN - Kent
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C-style language inspired by JavaScript leverages C# and F# and enables building of DSLs. Just in case none of the other scripting choices appeal to you
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It's been around for a while, see here[^] first posted in October 2013.
Not that I don't like it, as I haven't even used it yet.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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Thanks.
 Now to find another news item. /sniff /sob
TTFN - Kent
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First I heard of it, Kent...thanks for posting.
People should see this news section sort of like the scroller on CNN...you watch it till you've seen all the items then you move on...no point yelling at CNN because you saw that one already.
On topic: anything that could supplant JavaScript needs to be beaten to death in the news to get it to take off 
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DaveX86 wrote: People should see this news section sort of like the scroller on CNN...you watch it till you've seen all the items then you move on...no point yelling at CNN because you saw that one already.
I regret I can only upvote you once for this, as it seems a lot of people here must yell at CNN a lot.
TTFN - Kent
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Yeah, don't take it personal Kent...lot of people are uptight from all the stress.
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It's fine. Some people may have not heard of it before now, so this is some good publicity for the project. It isn't really easy to find the article (I had it in my history), so this might help.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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It feels a bit ironic to be discussing, in 2014, if C++ is a viable, or more importantly, a great choice for multi-device, multi-platform app development. It’s ironic in the sense that despite the attention Objective-C, Java, and C# get for app development, most of the software we use on a daily basis is written in C/C++ and after all these years represents the largest community of developers. "In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
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The Apollo missions had technology no more complicated than a pocket calculator … everybody knows that. But hardly anybody talks about the computer code that helped send astronauts to the moon and back, which was equally as simple. A lot. Fortunately.
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I think it's a mistake to minimize the efforts of the programmers who wrote that code. Their toolset was minimal and unbelievably primitive compared to what we're used to. The hardware was cramped, to say the least. They had very few resources when they found problems. I can only assume they had a premium support contract from IBM, which meant they might be able to call someone on the phone to help out.
All of that diminishes to insignificance when compared to the consequences if they made a mistake. Three lives, millions of dollars in hardware, and the dreams of a nation could die.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: I think it's a mistake to minimize the efforts of the programmers who wrote that code.
Sorry if I did, that wasn't intent. I'm just glad we're not verbing the noun for a UI anymore. And I'm REALLY glad I don't have to code in the limits they were forced into.
TTFN - Kent
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have a read of this to get some idea of just how restricted the environment was.
The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation (Springer Praxis Books / Space Exploration)
You will develop a whole new respect for the caliber of the programmers
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I didn't think you were at fault, Kent - it was the article and the condescending tone of the opening paragraphs.
I was a kid in the 60's and grew up with the space program. With the pallid, slack-jawed, sunken-chested state of NASA these days, remarks about Apollo and what was accomplished are one of my hot buttons.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Downloading the software has changed a bit as well:
Software written by MIT programmers was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory[^]
no last minute bug fixes and definitely no 'Windows Update'.
Peter
"Until the invention of the computer, the machine gun was the device that enabled humans to make the most mistakes in the smallest amount of time."
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