mattiask

Very true, big companies are usually as good as their despot. At least when it comes to taking risks and "saying no". Apple could go all-in because Jobs had the clout to give marching orders to the whole company. Microsoft has Ballmer, who is more of a salesman/business guy and probably with less clout (perhaps fortunately)

I too have a bit of worry for Apple now that Jobs is gone. Ive has taste and seems to have gotten some power to go with it. However, the next time it is time to go from evolution to revolution they won't have Jobs to kick them there.

"We heard you like tablets, so we took your tablet and made it a laptop so you can pretend it's a tablet while you're using Windows!"

Thats what made it so funny. I can see the Microsoft meeting:

-Hey so everyone talking about this Retina thing how are we going to compete? -Let's make up our own word! Do we have anything lying around we can use? -Developer: Well, we have this ClearType thing but it's really more about software... -Marketing Guy: Software Hardware, what's the difference. ClearType Display it is! -Developer: I quit

I'd be very surprised if Microsoft sold these under their own brand. Perhaps they're more like the Intel proof of concepts and "the real thing" will be announced by Nokia?

I'm not going into an originality discussion, certainly that argument has been made thousand of thousand times on forums all over the internet.

Very few companies are truly original. Even fewer are successful while being truly original. But having the guts to go all in, be consistent and going that little extra mile will get you pretty far.

I'm actually a Windows user (although I own an iPad), but you have to be a bit humored by all this. As usual where Apple has used a feather Microsoft have used the whole chicken with keyboards, screws, different versions, the whole enchilada. I'm only surprised there's no stickers. "ClearType display"? really, you felt you had to brand it just to compete with "Retina display".

Despite all this the tablet might actually be good, and seeing another quality tablet contender is always good for competition. I am however getting a bit worried by Microsofts "me too"-attitude and the reek of desperation these days. They could be making awesome stuff but they lack follow-through and the finer points of taste

It's a pity they won't put their chips down on things that actually were original, like the courier or mainstreaming the surface (the table). In the end they didn't have any choice since they couldn't surrender their enterprise tablet/smartphone customers to Apple. The Courier was innovative but perhaps too niche so its not even sure that was a bad call.

I guess I'm just arguing about the finer points about their attitude and execution, with Microsoft I'm always afraid that in-company bureaucracy will manifest itself into some stupid decision on the consumers behalf. Apple are fanatics (and splending assholes in some cases), but atleast you feel they pretty much set the consumer first and have some taste

Having said all this I'm still kinda rooting for MS since they ironically enough seem to be the underdog nowadays, how the tables have turned...

It was quite serendipitous how although Rocket jumping was "incidental" to Q1 most levels still played extremely well using that feature. Still level-designers who later knew about it and designed for it managed to (ab)use it even more. I designed a level where the entire layout was optimized around rocket-jumping being possible (and encouraged) as much as humanely possible, great fun!

Every time I watch an episode of House or read a story like this I think "Why isn't there an expert system for diagnostics". The notion of a person being able to manage such vasts amount of knowledge seems ridiculous and cost-ineffective.

If you could enter a bunch of positive and negative statements together with various medical records, and have the computer being able to ask additional queries, it seems a good system would be able to narrow down a list substantially. It would also side-step a lot of cognitive problems we humans face.

Now, I'm sure there are systems like this but they probably just aren't sophisticated , widespread enough or don't have large enough database. Or have they simply not yet reached widespread use because they cost too much, what's holding them back?

* Found this article on the topic: http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/clinical-syst...

Obviously Eurovision is something of a subgenre which is more about its own "brand" of music rather than for established artists (otherwise we'd just send Robyn and win every year). If you see it as the Pride festival for music it makes a lot more sense. Feel free to vote this post UP-UP-UP-UP

I find that once you realize there's a problem that can be solved it's often the case that a solution is available if you look for it. My bank for instance makes it easy to set up automatic payment of most of my bills. Yet if I never realize that this is an annoyance that could be solved I wouldn't have gone looking for that "feature".

The key is to combine "minimalistic living" with life hacks. Reduce your life down to the essentials, then use life hacks to go even further.

For example: you probably won't get away without paying your bills so a "life hack" that automates that process will take another load of your shoulders.'

On the other hand, a "life hack" for storing "all your stuff" might not be as good as simply "get rid of all your crap"

Also good point about life design, there's not much point in "saving x minutes" or earning "x dollars" if you don't do anything useful and worthwhile with it

All in all the most important thing is to have a process, call it kaizen, constant improvement, or whatever. Try different things, measure / see what works, learn from the mistakes, rinse - repeat

I've had an ipad for a while, in the beginning I hardly used it at all, I read some books or watched some video/tv on it occasionally, but mostly at home.

But after a while I found what I think is the tablet sweetspot, and that is a "digital newspaper". Kindle is arguably better for reading books, a "ultrabook" is arguably better compromise if you want to both author and consume content. The mobile is best for taking photos/checking your email etc.

Nothing beats the iPad however when it comes to catching up with news on the train/airplane/café/sofa. Apps like Flipboard and Zite offers a better reading/discovery experience than even on a laptop I'd argue with interfaces free from clutter, magazine like layouts and personalization.

I have a hard time seeing me lugging around anything the size of the Note all the time...

I used to be a gamer but then I realized something. While gaming is fun, sometimes fulfilling and a source of "flow" it's ultimately without higher meaning. Imagine spending hundreds of hours playing WoW, DI:3 or whatever, now imagine what you could have done with that time.

It's better to game your life than spending your life gaming. I Enjoy gaming in certain amounts,prefer gaming over TV, but prefer creating, socializing and learning over gaming.

I've had a similar experience, in school I got hooked on chess. Having an unfortunate tendency to try to master anything I suck at that I find interesting I dedicated quite a lot of time to learning chess, playing in the swedish masterships and even attending a special high school with chess on the curriculum.

The thing is though with chess (as with anything I'd guess) the first 20% of skill can be really hard to acquire since you need to "get started". The next 60% is usually a challenge that's fun and stimulating. Going beyond that it gets rough (unless youre exceptionally talented). I think chess is especially bad from that aspect, at higher level the amount of pure database knowledge you have to memorize is tremendous and IMO takes some of the fun out the game. Fischer tried to solve this by inventing a version where you randomized the position of the pieces each time. Games like go also seems much better since it's more about skill and intuition than rote memorization.

A big part of becoming great at chess is actually retraining the part of the brain that remembers faces to absorb board positions. I'm not talking about absolute recall , but a grand master has seen so many games that he can "intuit" a board drawing from his experience.

"Good hobbies", IMO, form either new brain connections , improve body coordination or just generally improve mental or physical health. I'd be surprised if learning chess didn't change the brain pathways in some ways that are beneficial but it probably doesn't increase much after a certain skill level. Learning to play an instrument, juggling, snowboarding , meditating, jogging are probably all "better hobbies" quantiatively

Anyways, I realized that while playing at a top level was probably achievable, the effort wasn't worth it. Working with computers and playing chess is a little more sitting down than I'd like in my life and time was better spend moving around and enjoying the company of others :)

I wish I could spend chess "just for fun" but alas it's hard to do at that level. Better to play some of the more clever board games where memorization isn't such a large component and you actually socialize as well

Some day there'll probably be a nextgen language that addresses at least some of these issues. One way to resolve some of them today however is code generation.

While not appropriate to all kinds of solution I've had some success with building solutions, especially "enterprise solutions", where you model the problem descriptively (in say xml) and then generate the appropriate code.

This way you can glue together "architecture" code with "meat code", (ie substantial methods) and have the agility to refactor and regenerate. The bulk of the code is often some kind of yak pattern shaving so you can save quite a lot of time.

You're basically designing your own DSL (Domain Specific Language) and then writing the "parser/compiler"

I agree that single dispatch seems to be a pretty obvious problem with most oop languages, if you have a method that has two different types as parameters, on which do it belong? Take a pick and hold your breath... or do some unwieldy manager class :) Smalltalk and Lisp seems (zealously) loved by many, and it's easy to like the simple elegance of languages like that.

For me they always felt wee bit too messy and academically oriented. I want a language that reads more like a book and less like a formula, perhaps that's just me :)

As I've become more experienced over the years I've come to believe that the prolification of patterns to "fix" oop problems (dependency injection, immutability, builder patterns, events etc etc) are a symptom of inherent flaws in the object oriented model.

It feels like we're bending over backwards to fix a model that promotes lots of problematic designs while not doing much for resolving them (or supporting basic things like concurrency/parallelism). We can never predict all possible problems, or predict the future so no language can be "perfect", but a language could inherently be more agile and flexible. I wish I could say what a better model would be. I'd hazard a guess that its something more based on composition and functional programming than inheritance and classes. Perhaps even metaprogramming and/or code generation

For now it seems OOP is the worst paradigm for programming, except all other paradigms of programming

Loved the story and it's very good advice indeed. I'd like to add one thing though. Having a "fuck them" or "they are losers" attitude (not saying the article advocates that) isn't really healthy. It might be great for a boosting your ego short term but it isn't constructive in the long run.

I don't think one should look down or harbor anger/resentment towards anyone. Not because it hurts them, but because it hurts you, and your happiness.

So my advice would be to try and understand why people act the way they do, why it probably is caused by some underlying problems/childhood whatever and if anything feel pity (so long it doesn't go into besserwisser territory) rather than resentment.

It's also great to be able to socialize with all kinds of people. They might not be exactly like you, they might not share all or any of your values but surely you can find something interesting in interacting and trying to understand them.

Another sign of personal growth is that you don't have to convince other people they're wrong or convert them to your views. If it's being discussed you can put front your opinion in a constructive manner and let it be up to them whether to agree or disagree. Also always be open minded about other people's viewpoints and try to understand where there coming from and if there might be something to it.

Sorry if I sounds a little fluffy or obivous but I feel that changing my own perspective on things like that has been very beneficial

While file-less source control would be a very interesting concept I don't see how the lack of it would affect the editor. Simply present code as file-less and behind the scenes put every entity (class, struct, whatever) into it's own file that can be version controlled

I'm not arguing for patents, only that a programming language should probably be patentable if other similar creative efforts are, I don't see why they should be exempt. I agree with you that patents are bad overall (if that's your stance) and should be revamped or abolished.

Aren't all patents ideas? Surely the difference between a patent or not can't be whether the ideas is a physical object or not.

If all patents were abolished tomorrow I wouldn't mind, but as so long as they aren't it seems silly that some things that really demand a high degree of creativity and innovation isn't protected. That kinda seems to be the point of patents, not like coming up with the idea of buying something with 1-click

Are they arguing that all languages are free or that the Java language specifically was free? If it's the former it seems a little strange. If I tomorrow invented some programming language that for instance described some novel way to handle concurrency, why wouldn't that be protectable? I'm not pro-patents but languages being public domain per default doesn't seem right either

Personally I prefer the more hackerish: "h*n", harder to prounciate though :)

Am I the only one that would like to see some kind of locking support in the API? So if you have multiple clients working against the same file it could take out a lock for x minutes and the other client could query to see if a file is locked. Useful for synchronization between clients..

I think the best way I managed to wrap my head around the refutation of that is this: First off, some foods make you hungrier so you consume more calories. People have a very strong tendency to eat when they're hungry. The might be able to put that aside for a short while (dieting) but its' very hard to combat in the long run

Secondly, it has to do with how the body stores fat. Eating fast carbs produces insulin which signals the body to store fat in larger amounts than low/slow carb.

It's a pity that the caloric model is so entrenced when really it's the least useful one.

Really, it's not rocket science,stop eating white foods, don't drink calories, eat quality meat and veggies,and your set.

Little Bobby Tables apparently has a norwegian cousin

If you dress differently because of what other people think then perhaps you're not the rebel hacker you think you are ;) that includes not wearing a suit if you're comfortably in one. Personally I don't get get why not more people wear suits, you have lots of pockets for your gear, they make dressing well easy (as long as your suits fit you) and effortless. Just go suit and a nice t-shirt to dress semi-casual, so suit up! :)

I'm for one is limbering up to outrun our new robotic sprinter overlords

I'm sure there are developer pairings and scenarios where pair programming indeed would be beneficial. The point is that in your case the developers where free to themselves test and evaluate it's efficiency and then chose whether to use it. If that's the case then of course you should go with pair programming. That's different however from mandating pair programming where they'd have to use it whether or not it fitted them personally or that the pairing worked out.

My point is not as much about specific practices but rather about mandatory ones.

http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09...