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  Why Software Is Eating The World

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the...

   software,quota,internet world,eat up     2011-08-22 12:06:40

  Optimization Tricks used by the Lockless Memory Allocator

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that ...

   Optimization,Memory allocation     2011-11-16 08:02:16

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

  The Disruptor In The Valley

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear watched their first startup, an online calendar called Kiko, implode when Google decided to do the same thing in 2006. They sold Kiko's scraps on eBay for $258,000 and wondered what to do with their lives. So the pair did the only thing they could think of: They went to see Paul Graham at his house in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard Square. Graham sat them down and helped bang out a plan to create Justin.tv, now the Web's biggest portal for live video, with 31 million ...

   Paul Graham,Creative,Programmer,Investme     2011-08-28 04:13:43

  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

  Translating math into code with examples in Java, Racket, Haskell and Python

Discrete mathematical structures form the foundation of computer science.These structures are so universal that most research papers in the theory of computation, programming languages and formal methods present concepts in terms of discrete mathematics rather than code.The underlying assumption is that the reader will know how to translate these structures into a faithful implementation as a working program.A lack of material explaining this translation frustrates outsiders.What deepens that fr...

   Math,Algorithms,Formula,Program,Python     2011-11-14 08:43:15

  Cache them if you can

“The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.” I always smile when I hear a web performance speaker say this. I forget who said it first, but I’ve heard it numerous times at conferences and meetups over the past few years. It’s true! Caching is critical for making web pages faster. I’ve written extensively about caching: Call to improve browser caching(lack of) Caching for iPhone Home Screen AppsRedirect caching deep diveMobile cache file sizesImproving app ...

   Cache,HTTP request,Websiite     2012-03-27 12:54:02

  C++11 multithreading tutorial

The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: https://github.com/sol-prog/threads. In my previous tutorials I’ve presented some of the newest C++11 additions to the language: regular expressions, raw strings and lambdas. Perhaps one of the biggest change to the language is the addition of multithreading support. Before C++11, it was possible to target multicore computers using OS facilities (pthreads on Unix like systems) or libraries like OpenMP and MPI. This tutorial is meant to get you st...

   C++,Multithreading,Standard 11,Demo     2011-12-18 00:50:35

  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

  Developing Game Audio with the Web Audio API

Caution: This article discusses APIs that are not yet fully standardized and still in flux. Be cautious when using experimental APIs in your own projects. Introduction Audio is a huge part of what makes multimedia experiences so compelling. If you've ever tried watching a movie with the sound off, you've probably noticed this. Games are no exception! My fondest video game memories are of the music and sound effects. Now, in many cases nearly two decades after playing my favorites, I still c...

   Web Audio,HTML5,Game audio     2012-04-15 01:25:23

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