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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

  The 10 Greatest Hacks of My Life

My co-founder and I briefly considered applying to YCombinator for the Winter 2012 session. We eventually decided to bootstrap Curvio initially, and raise a seed round on our own after we launch (so far so good!). But looking over the YC application, one question intrigued me:Please tell us about the time you, tansey, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.Now, there are a lot of ways to interpret this. A mechanical interpretation would be about...

   Hack,Most important,Example,Curvio     2011-10-22 12:47:42

   Python – parallelizing CPU-bound tasks with multiprocessing

In a previous post on Python threads, I briefly mentioned that threads are unsuitable for CPU-bound tasks, and multiprocessing should be used instead. Here I want to demonstrate this with benchmark numbers, also showing that creating multiple processes in Python is just as simple as creating multiple threads. First, let’s pick a simple computation to use for the benchmarking. I don’t want it to be completely artificial, so I’ll use a dumbed-down version of factorization...

   Python,Multitasking,Multiprocessing,CPU bound     2012-01-17 11:38:22

  What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels.It has been fascinating.That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups.Find the customers first, then build for themIt took me a long time to understand YC’s motto that you should:Make something people want.The first time I heard that, ...

   SEO,Promote,Website,Advice,Traffic     2011-11-10 10:58:40

  API Design is UI for Developers

I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently.I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.22/02/2012 19:10 via webReplyRetweetFavorite@gparkerGreg ParkerWhen I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could design a better programming language. One which behaved in a sane fashion without a lot of le...

   API design,UI,developers,PHP     2012-03-11 13:21:43

  File System vs Core Data: the image cache test

Code for this project is on GitHub While doing a full re-write of Droplr's iOS app for the 2.0 launch, I couldn't find any good file/image caches out there had a particular feature I really wanted: extending item expiration whenever it's touched. I set out to write my own — which wasn't that much of a challenge — but somewhere along the process I had this crazy idea that perhaps (SQLite-backed) Core Data would be a much better tool for the job: No mismatch between cache index ...

   File system.Image cache,Multimedia     2012-02-01 08:52:02

  Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry; repairs cost carriers $2 billion

Repairs to Android smartphones cost wireless carriers $2 billion per year according to a new year-long WDS study that tracked 600,000 support calls around the globe. Android’s popularity and the introduction of a number of low-cost smartphones has put a strain on the wireless business model, WDS noted in its report. “Deployment by more than 25 OEMs and lower-cost product coming to market is leading to higher than average rates of hardware failures and, in turn, return and repair cos...

   Android,iPhone,Blackberry,Hardware,Cost     2011-11-03 13:26:42

  How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates

David Coursey from Forbes has a nice article on Gates titled - How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?There were a couple of line in Coursey's article that rang very true.All that money you think Gates stole from you? He’s giving it back, with interest, to the world’s poorest.All that money you think Apple has overcharged people? Apple still has it and Steve got and kept his share.Steve Jobs has fittingly had a long list of tributes. He was among the greatest technologists, busi...

   Bill Gates,Steve Jobs,Glory,Competition,Good guy     2011-11-05 07:08:56

  Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing

Computerworld - At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility. But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them. While these types of costs ...

   Cloud computing,Cost,Chanllenges,Platfor     2011-08-23 07:48:24

  Dart is to JavaScript as C# is to C++

Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more str...

   Dart,Google,JavaScript,Virtual Machine,Chromium     2011-10-21 08:40:09

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