Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

 OTHER


  The price of information

SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.It did. More than...

1,765 0       INFORMATION PRICE VALUE FACEBOOK SOCIAL NETWORK


  Unicode over 60 percent of the web

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.Unicode was...

3,171 0       UNICODE ENCODING WEBSITE PERCENTAGE STATUSTIC


  FTP Must Die

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscure Cisco IOS manual -- it apparently stands for Terminal Access Control protocol. Whatever that means. . ...

3,193 0       FUTURE DEATH TREND FTP PROTOCOL


  How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change.Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time. We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful running your own business, to steal a cricket metaphor, your tail has to wag. You have to find a way to maximise...

30,792 0       EFFORT PRODUCTIVE TIME LIMIT TIME


  A Solution to CPU-intensive Tasks in IO Loops

Back in October 2011, Ted Dziuba infamously said that Node.js is Cancer.  A provocative title to a provocative article.  The only thing it didn’t really provoke in the commentary was much thought ;)  Zing.My interpretation of the article is that Ted holds up the classic blocking-IO process-per-request (or  thread per request; same difference) model as superior.  Yet we all remember where the blocking-IO forking model got Apache in the early days.  So I’m a tad uncomfortable with his solution from the good old days.  But fundamentally you ca...

3,448 0       C++ SOLUTION CPU INTENSIVE IO LOOPS


  The Death of File Sharing

Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snake...

2,528 0       FILE SHARING DEATH TREND CLOUD


  5 Signs of a Great User Experience

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook.In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fai...

3,453 0       STANDARD USEF INTERFACE GOOD UI CRITERIA


  Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong.Here’s what he said.First, think about how you attack a pile of study material. “People tend to try to learn i...

2,154 0       LEARNING THOUGHT BEFORE WRONG