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  The Death Of The Spec

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the...

   Specification,Android,Platform,Software design     2011-11-15 08:20:22

  How expensive is a MySQL query?

Database access speed is always the bottle neck of many applications. Many application have large amount of data to search, retrieve and display nowadays. How do we improve the performance of our applications, how do we reduce the cost of database access? Apart from the design of database, the quality of the query is also one important factor to take care.  But before that, we need to know how much network traffic a query will consume. Yunyang,Zhang from Nubee in Singapore did some research...

   MySQL,Network traffic,Query     2013-04-09 05:13:33

  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

  Native Audio with HTML5

Once upon a time, audio on the web lived primarily in the world of third-party browser plug-ins like Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight. This was not a bad world, but it had its issues.For one, most plug-ins require the user to install them, but not all users are willing (or able) to install them. Also, many players built with these plug-ins are inaccessible, making it difficult for folks who use assistive technologies to access the audio or alternative content.Then there are the front-end design ...

   Audio,HTML5,Built in,Audio tag,Video     2011-10-13 13:04:07

  JavaScript Attack/Defend

As developers and designers we work hard to build visually attractive, fast and easy to maintain applications. Our goals are to make sure the applications we build stick to users and keep them coming back for more. Security is not always at the forefront of our minds. No one intentionally builds insecure software but often a lack of security knowledge leads developers to build vulnerabilities into their applications. In this article we are going to examine two web security attacks, how they are ...

   JavaScript,Attack,Defend,Security,Cross site     2011-10-13 13:09:11

  The Great Tech War Of 2012

From left: The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Larry Page, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Photos courtesy of David Paul Morris/Getty Images (Jobs); Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (Zuckerberg); Chip East/Reuters (Page); Mario Tama/Getty Images (Bezos).Gilbert Wong, the mayor of Cupertino, California, calls his city council to order. "As you know, Cupertino is very famous for Apple Computer, and we're very honored to have Mr. Steve Jobs come here tonight ...

   2012,Tech war,Facebook,Apple,Google,Amazon,Tablet,Cloud,Analysis     2011-10-17 11:06:25

  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 obscur...

   FTP,Future,Death,Trend,Protocol     2012-02-06 08:13:36

  HTML5 and Accessibility

Accessibility for people with disabilities is a legal responsibility in many countries. It's also the right thing to do, and one of the characteristics distinguishing professional developers from the WWWs: WYSIWYG-wielding wannabes. But for many, accessibility has been a somewhat black art, requiring adding extra stuff to your code like alt text, table summaries, ARIA information that can be difficult to test by developers who are not assistive technology users themselves.The arrival of HTML5 ha...

   HTML5,Accessibility,Video,Music,Canvas     2011-08-19 08:13:44

  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

  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

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