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  The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, ...

   Software,Obvious,Easy,Possible,Requirements     2011-11-30 11:48:12

  Scala, Patterns and The Perl Effect

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward). He showed me the code, and it was basically a situa...

   Scala,Perl,Pattern,Partial function,Template     2011-12-21 09:25:41

  Microsoft’s “Picture Password”: A Breath Of Fresh Air On The Lock Screen, Of All Places

Remember that feeling you got back when Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, and he did the “slide to unlock” gesture for the first time? I remember the way he said it – “You like that? Want to see it again?” Since then I haven’t seen a lock screen interface that has made me feel that same “how obvious, how elegant!” feeling – until today at the NVIDIA press conference, and later at the Microsoft keynote here at CES. It sounds a little silly...

   Microsoft,Windows 8,Picture Password,CES     2012-01-10 06:55:28

  Converting Decimal Fractions to Binary

Converting Decimal Fractions to Binary In the text proper, we saw how to convert the decimal number 14.75 to a binary representation. In this instance, we \"eyeballed\" the fractional part of the binary expansion; 3/4 is obviously 1/2 + 1/4. While this worked for this particular example, we\'ll need a more systematic approach for less obvious cases. In fact, there is a simple, step-by-step method for computing the binary expansion on the right-hand side of the point. We will illustrate the metho...

   Decimal,Fractional,Binary     2011-03-19 06:45:35

  Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but...

   Productivity,Salary,Efficiency,Programmer,Not match     2011-11-16 08:12:00

  Why should we keep column as NOT NULL instead of NULL in MySQL?

Keep table column as NOT NULL instead of NULL except in some special cases. This statement is cited by many articles of MySQL optimization, but they don't say why we should do this. Here we discuss about this. First why are there many people using NULL when defining table? The reasons may be: NULL the the default when defining table, the rookies or people who don't want to have much troubles will keep this default setting Many people think NOT NULL will require more space Many people don't want...

   MySQL,NULL,reason     2012-10-27 03:21:27

  Today on history : Twitter cofounder Evan Williams was born

Evan Williams, born March 31, 1972. American entrepreneurs, has created a number of Internet companies, including Pyra Labs, (operational blog, Blogger) and Twitter. He was Twitter, CEO from October 2008 to October 2010. Twitter former CEO Evan WilliamsEvan Williams grew up on a farm in Nebraska Clark Village. At the University of Nebraska, he studied a year and a half, then he started to work. He did different technologies work in some tech start-ups in Key West, Dallas, Austin, Texas. In 1996...

   Twitter,Cofounder,Evan Williams,Introduction     2012-03-31 08:49:18

  Say good bye to netbook

Asus and Acer are the last two manufacturers of netbooks, but these two companies announced that they would not manufacture netbooks starting from January 1, 2013. Prior to them, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard and Dell stopped production of the netbooks. This means that the life cycle of netbook officially ended.Back to 2009, the U.S. market research firm ABI Research was very optimistic about netbook's future, they said netbook would open a new era for PC market and predicted netbook shipments would ...

   Netbook,Tablet PC, Comparison     2013-01-02 11:53:33

  JavaScript as a First Language

At Khan Academy we've been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we're likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language. We're in a very unique position as we're primarily aiming to teach students who've been through our previous math and science-centric curriculum. Because of this we can create some rather compelling exercises and projects that never would've been feasible other...

   JavaScript,Learning,First language,Inheritence,Prototype     2011-12-23 07:53:45

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

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