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  There are no free lunches on the internet

Hot data: An IT technician checks the network servers at a data farm. Alamy Photograph: Juice Images/AlamyPhysics has Newton's first law ("Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed"). The equivalent forinternet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.The strange thing is that most use...

   Free lunch,Facebook,Google,Privacy information     2011-11-21 03:03:31

  Ten things I want Siri to be able to do for me

Now that I've had my iPhone 4S for a couple of days, I'm amazed with what Siri can do. I've asked a number of questions -- real ones, not questions like "What is the meaning of life?" -- and have been totally impressed with how my interaction with the iPhone has changed. But there are more things I'd love to be able to do with Siri, which is the reason for this post.Everyone should understand that Siri is currently a beta product from Apple. A lot of the things I'm talking about here should happ...

   Siri,iPhone 4S,AI,Tweet,Four square,Intelligent agent     2011-10-17 11:24:37

  How much money do you *really* need to start your company?

I keep hearing startup entrepreneurs tell me “We need funding. If we just had $XXXk of investment, we’d be killing it right now.” I press them with one question: what would you do with the money if you had it? Inevitably the question is met with a blank stare. Most of the time people haven’t thought about it. The answers that do come feel a little half-baked:“Buy a bunch of ad words to get people to our site – that’s all we need”“Build th...

   Business,Startup,Investment,Money,Ad     2011-09-26 11:16:35

  10 design flaws of JavaScript

JavaScript's design took only ten days. Moreover, the designer didn't want to design it initially, he just wanted to complete the task assigned by company. It is now a very powerful client side programming language used in almost all the websites. It's an excellent language, but it also has some flaws. 1. Not suitable for large projects JavaScript doesn't have namespace, it's hard to be modular, there is no standard for putting codes in multiple source files. It allows defining functions with th...

   JavaScript, Design flaw, Object     2012-11-29 11:39:35

  What I learned interviewing with Google

Over the last few weeks I’ve been interviewing with Google for a job doing primarily JavaScript development. I didn’t end up getting the job but I thought I would share the process of interviewing for Google as it was both very exciting and a humbling experience. I can’t reveal everything as I’m under a few NDAs. I’m not going to mention the products or teams that I was interviewing for but you may be able to guess. For those that don’t know me, I...

   Google,Experience,Interview,Algorithm     2012-02-10 06:19:17

  Roundup on Parallel Connections

A lot of blogging and follow-up discussion ensued with the announcement that IE8 supports six connections per host. The blogs I saw: IE8: The Performance Implications IE8 speeds things up IE8: 6 Connections Per Host IE 8 and Performance Testing IE8.s Connection Parallelism IE 8 Connection Parallelism Issues It’s likely that Firefox 3 will support 6 connections per server in an upcoming beta release, which means more discussion is expected. I wanted to pull all the facts into one place an...

   Browser,Concurrent connection,Persistent     2011-09-05 01:51:44

  Five Reasons Why Microsoft's Windows Phone Will Make A Big Splash In The Smartphone Market

The rave reviews for the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Windows Phone aren’t the only reason Microsoft will do better in the smart phone industry than it did in the MP3 player market. Whereas the Zune never really offered anything substantially different from the iPod and never pushed any real boundaries, Microsoft’s latest push into the mobile operating system business is much more bold. Microsoft isn’t rushing it this time – and it shows. So far, tech ...

   WP7,Windows Phone,Zune,2012,Nokia Lumia 900     2012-01-09 08:52:52

  The tips of learning Linux kernel

  As the Linux kernel has become one of the most gigantic and complex software project in the world, its complication scare many novices away. In this post, I will give some personal experience on how to learn Linux kernel, and hope these tips can offer some help to newcomers. (1) Download vanilla kernel and install it. Yes, I suggest you can find a physical machine, or if you really don’t have one at hand, virtual machine is also OK. Download the newest vanilla k...

       2017-07-28 22:53:11

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

  Obviously Correct

What do automatic memory management, static types and purity have in common? They are methods which take advantage of the fact that we can make programs obviously correct (for some partial definition of correctness) upon visual inspection. Code using automatic memory management is obviously correct for a class of memory bugs. Code using static types is obviously correct for a class of type bugs. Code using purity (no mutable references or side effects) isobviously c...

   Memory management,Code,Static,Purity     2011-11-07 08:13:05

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