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  Fun With Numbers

Yesterday the NPD Group issued a report on U.S. tablet sales in the U.S., from January through October of 2011. Worth noting up front is that the numbers in this report are about sales — actual tablets sold to actual customers — not “shipments” from the factory to stores and warehouses.Much-reported on is that second-place went to HP, after its fire sale on the discontinued TouchPad. What hasn’t gotten much commentary is the extraordinarily contort...

   Tablet,iPad,TouchPad,HP,Market share,2011     2011-11-24 09:12:58

  Lessons Learned while Introducing a New Programming Language

I've used a lot of languages (professionally) over the years: (off the top of my head) Cold Fusion, HTML, Javascript, php, SQL, CSS, ASP(classic & .net), C#, Ruby, Flex, Java, & Clojure. Each language has pros and cons. Being a programmer, it's easiest to discuss the cons - and in general I believe it was best said:I hate all programming languages - Matt FoemmelI think it's important to start with this in mind. At some point you're going to hate what you're advocating, so imagine h...

   Experience,New language,Tips,Risk     2012-03-05 05:13:59

  bakercom1 5 Ways to Make Your IT Staff Unpoachable

When it comes to hiring practices, the tables have turned – capsized, actually. After a global recession saw thousands of jobs lost in IT departments everywhere, now the race is on to hire swarms of top talent. The trouble is: There isn’t enough talent to go around, and the threat of losing key staff to “poachers” is growing daily. “In the current war for talent in Silicon Valley, a lot of leaders believe that it is not possible to compete with the Google an...

   IT,Experts,Keep,Unpoachable     2011-07-25 08:35:49

  Get vs Post in HTML form

In HTML, one can specify two different submission methods for a form. The method is specified inside a FORM element, using the METHOD attribute. The difference between METHOD="GET" (the default) and METHOD="POST" is primarily defined in terms of form data encoding. The official recommendations say that "GET" should be used if and only if the form processing is idempotent, which typically means a pure query form. Generally it is advisabl...

   Get,Post,HTML,form,data submission     2011-05-10 11:12:04

  Battlelog: Modern Web Applications are Here

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. An...

   Game,Call of duty,Elite,Battlelog,Web platform     2011-11-15 08:11:40

  JavaScript Needs Blocks

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes it natural to assume equivalence. In fact, when people talk about why Ruby’s blocks are different ...

   JavaScript,Block,Style,Format,Maintainebility     2012-01-11 11:59:35

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  IBM Launches Maqetta HTML5 Tool as Open-Source

IBM announced Maqetta, an HTML5 authoring tool for building desktop and mobile user interfaces, and also announced the contribution of the open-source technology to the Dojo Foundation. LAS VEGAS – At the IBM Impact 2011 conference here, IBM announced both Maqetta as well as the open-source contribution of its Maqetta HTML5 visual authoring tool to the Dojo Foundation. Maqetta is an open-source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces using drag-and-drop ass...

   IBM,Open Source,Dojo foundation,HTML 5,W     2011-04-12 01:59:29

  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generat...

   Python,Anecodate,Optimization,Efficiency     2011-10-25 10:33:20

  Why I Hate Android

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse. I should probably explain. Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Androi...

   Android,Hate,Feature     2012-01-10 07:19:27

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