mckoss

I think the point of the comment is that Science's study is purely self-serving, since they did not also send their sting paper to the more traditional journals to test their peer review rejection rate of this bogus paper.

Do you really need a submersible to lay cable? Could be they have on an espionage mission to tap someone else's cable?

Ironically, the roughly 7% increase in MSFT share price due to his retirement announcement, has added nearly $1B to Balmer's net worth.

New claim that NSA regularly "hacks" into network routers to get access to traffic without the permission of the router owners.

There are two different questions here:

- Why can't we build software as fast as we think?

- Why can't we build software as fast as we think we can?

The author probably meant the latter (which is more associated with estimation and prediction).

But I find the former question MUCH more interesting. We've all had the experience of envisioning software solutions that would be useful to us - but then the actual task of developing that software seems much more difficult than the task SHOULD be.

I attribute much of this to IMPEDANCE rather than FRICTION. We are often not using the best tools for the job, and hence suffer great amount of superfluous work in solving any particular problem.

General purpose programming languages may always have this problem; being able to describe any solution means that they are not particularly well suiting to expressing solutions to particular classes of problems).

I've always experienced myself being much more efficient when I have domain-specific languages specifically tailored to the class of problems I want to solve. I think we are moving (slowly) in the direction of developing more targeted languages (e.g. Angular or Dart from Google for client-side web development).

I was about to lament how reckless the police were to be in a high-speed pursuit, but it's hard to fault them when this began with a fatal shooting of an officer at the beginning of the encounter.

Just a really sad turn of events.

I really have the embedded XML in javascript code. I'm much more interested in the Angular or Dart approaches to building web applications.

Why isn't this tax evasion?

About two-thirds of Apple’s cash — about $102 billion — sits overseas in lower-tax jurisdictions. If it returned some of that cash to the United States to reward its investors, the company could have significant tax consequences.

As a private tax payer - the IRS would have no problem calling this a tax-aviodance "scheme" - and hit me with a big tax bill and penalties.

Thanks for the reminder - just uninstalled Path.

In 8 years (by 2021) 90% of Bitcoins will have been issued. Strictly speaking, the supply is inflating continuously, though it is unlikely to ever be growing faster than future demand (we seem to have past that point within the last year). The only reason economists would call Bitcoin deflationary is the presumption of constantly growing demand.

Bitcoin provides for secure transmission and storage of value independent of a trusted 3rd party (and backed by the largest distributed super-computer in the world). Isn't that enough?

I disagree that 1M coins could not be sold very quickly on MtGox. Yes, the price would go way down, but there are plenty of interested buyers who would be happy to "cash Satoshi out" to take some profits; he would certainly get serveral millions of dollars for his coins.

The bigger problem is that selling on MtGox requires identifying himself to create an account (not to mention the current $1,000 per day withdrawal limit for USD).

They implied they might take some servers down to add more to their cluster.

In case your account is not yet enabled for inactivity...

What should happen to your photos, emails and documents when you stop using your account? Google puts you in control.

You might want your data to be shared with a trusted friend or family member, or, you might want your account to be deleted entirely. There are many situations that might prevent you from accessing or using your Google account. Whatever the reason, we give you the option of deciding what happens to your data.

Using Inactive Account Manager, you can decide if and when your account is treated as inactive, what happens with your data and who is notified.

Something bad is happening at MtGox - they quote a price of $156 for the last trade - yet my order at $200 was not filled and is still marked as "pending".

When real-time trading data is available from MtGox these sites show up to date charts and seem to be the most up-to-date.

http://coinlab.com http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/

It's variable. Each miner decides (in software) which transactions to include in a block.

Everything is in here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification

Or read the source code for the standard client: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp

I wonder if they are contracting with Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos's space company). They've been focusing on powered return from the beginning of their program.

http://www.blueorigin.com/updates/updates-2011-11-17-video-o...

Schools using Khan Academy have the ultimate in "tracking" - each student has a customized class geared exactly to his or her current abilities.

A fork for those having trouble getting this to run on Mountain Lion.

https://github.com/mckoss/Minecraft

The true problem is obviousness. Any machine is reducible to an algorithm is reducible to an integer. They are all the same. It's ridiculous to say that algorithms are "discovered" and not "made by man".

There needs to be a better procedure for throwing out all the stupid obvious or trivial patents - but allow ones that have required the blood, sweat and tears of their inventor to create.

I think the article said $10 billion dollars - not kroner for the acquisition (or $60 billion kroner).

This sort of tax avoidance feel unethical to me - you have 600 employees in Denmark developing this software, but all the profits are being booked in a tax haven. Microsoft should have to move the developers to Bermuda or Ireland if they want to avoid the Danish tax.

It's a shame to have to arbitrarily make this tradeoff. There is nothing inherent in saying that apps that desire rich client-side navigation are 100% the apps the DON'T require search engine support.

Google does have a spec for hash-bang URL's to enable both to be present in a single app. Unfortunately, it's clunky and not universally implemented.

I think there is a place for anchor URLS - they make sense as a means of expressing purely client-side navigation. Note that, by design, they will never be transmitted to the server - so there is no need to mirror the client-side navigation implemented in JavaScript within the server implementation. I think this factoring of the server-space navigation and client-side navigation is sometimes useful and keeps the two separated.

The search engines complicate the design choice of client-side vs. server-side MVC. While there are ways to hint search engines to retrieve searchable views of our application data, it adds an additional layer of complexity to your application. From my experiments, Google (or Bing) has yet to make a truly agnostic search engine when it comes to the design choice of client-side vs. server-side rendering. To do so, they would need to routinely emulate the full browser stack and javascript rendering on every page crawl. They do not yet do this. This is especially true when client-side anchor tags are used in URL's to represent client side navigation.

Wow!

When many of us started using computers, all you could do with them was learn to program them. There were relatively few distractions of video games, or the Internet to draw your focus away.

Today's computers are so engaging as a communications and entertainment device, many young people are not exposed to the possibility of using the computer as a creative tool.

Learning to program is just one such activity to get the creative juices flowing in the next generation. Learning to use a computer to write a paper, make a presentation or build a spreadsheet are fine; but the power a computer can unleash has much more potential for creativity and originality when students are taught to instruct the computer directly.

The early learn-to-program sites are focused on learning programming languages. This should evolve into more sophisticated environments where higher level constructs are made readily available (e.g., graphical environments, data storage and communication features).

It's exciting because we can also bring the social element into the equation to create for and with your friends and family.

I would have agreed with you several years ago - but Google has vastly improved this across their services over the last two years. There are still holes, but I now can switch accounts in a single drop-down on most Google sites I use.

I still have problems with Google Wallet (aka Checkout) and Analytics seems to have it's own multi-account sign-in system.

I believe some mobile browsers do not support GZIP - but I don't have the data. Presumably older models (a dying breed) - but returning GZIP'ed content without receiving the appropriate accepts header is non-compliant with the HTTP standard.

Is there still an issue with GZIP encoding S3-delivered static assets? From my reading, it looks like Amazon will not automatically convert assets to to GZIP encoding when the browser indicates support. Rather, you have to upload GZIPed files and manually configure the content encoding headers. This approach would be broken for browsers that don't support GZIPed files.