Kickstarter. Steam. App Store. Food carts. Netflix. Square. I like this trend. DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS!
— Cabel M. Sasser (@Cabel)
Great long-form article from The Verge on the decline of Research in Motion and the fall of the Blackberry to the iPhone.
There are only three hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and handling of the 29th of February.
It's not just temporary. Now that it works you're not going to touch it because something else depends on that behavior and touching it will be far too risky. You're probably not going to clean it up, except perhaps to put it under the bed and hope no one trips over it later.
Even on a tight schedule, last-minute block-ship bugs appear and what should have been a simple, straightforward bug fix will turn into some Giger-esque state-driven nightmare causing everyone associated with the project to invent new profanities because the ones they have don't seem emphatic enough.
All because you weren't ruthless enough on your code. Amen!
US law (in fact, Maryland state law) has been imposed on a .com domain operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality appears to be that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info.
At least they had a court order this time, but this is ridiculous. Government, the Internet doesn't work the way you think it does and you're breaking it.
Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?
Is it simply being smarter or working harder?
Surprisingly, while rhythm is quite regular, it turns out that it is not as predictable as we might have expected. [...] If you look at the timing of musical notes, they are not as regularly spaced as we might expect and in fact have a certain fractal structure as well. Using a large collection of music that spans centuries, the researchers find that musical rhythm obeys a 1/f pattern, with different types of music being able to fit to this power law (though varying in the exponent of the power law).
More music and math combination fun for you.
These would be why people think Ballmer needs to go.
The genius is always puzzled by answers, it is the fool who is satisfied by them.
— Bertrand Russell
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets.
"If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated," said Joel F. Brenner, formerly the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.
I didn't even begin to think hacking into visitor's mobile devices for access to corporate or government information was that prevalent.