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  Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer

ARM has swung a one-two punch at Intel's plans to muscle in on the smartphone and tablet space that's currently dominated by the plucky chip designers from Cambridge.At press soirées in London and San Francisco on Wednesday, ARM announced both a design for a tiny new chip, the Cortex-A7 MPCore, and a system-on-chip scheme that will marry the new A7 with the much more robust Cortex-A15 MPCore, which was announcedlast September and which should see the light of day next...

   ARM,Killer,Intel,Chipzilla,Performance     2011-10-22 12:55:23

  Windows 8 first impressions: It's a game changer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The PC needs saving. With Windows 8, Microsoft believes it has the magic cure.It just might. I've been testing a consumer preview version of Windows 8 for the past week, and it's unlike anything I've ever seen in a PC operating system.The stunning "Metro" interface just begs you to touch and interact with it. Beautifully designed apps, ultra-simple navigation, and instinctive commands make it hard to believe Metro came from the same company that brought us Windows Vista...

   Windows 8,Hands on,Game changer,Impression     2012-03-17 04:26:54

  New Text-to-Speech API for Chrome extensions

Interested in making your Chrome Extension (or packaged app) talk using synthesized speech? Chrome now includes a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API that’s simple to use, powerful, and flexible for users.Let’s start with the "simple to use" part. A few clever apps and extensions figured out how to talk before this API was available – typically by sending text to a remote server that returns an MP3 file that can be played using HTML5 audio. With the new API, you just need to add "...

   TTS,Google,Speech,Text,Text to Speech     2011-10-21 08:46:41

  Tricks with Direct Memory Access in Java

Java was initially designed as a safe managed environment. Nevertheless, Java HotSpot VM contains a “backdoor” that provides a number of low-level operations to manipulate memory and threads directly. This backdoor – sun.misc.Unsafe â€“ is widely used by JDK itself in packages like java.nio or java.util.concurrent. It is hard to imagine a Java developer that uses this backdoor in any regular development because this API is extremely dangerous...

   Java,Directly memory access,Tricks,JVM     2012-02-13 05:31:19

  Why programmers work at night

A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code. And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am. At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special a...

   Programmer,Sleep,Later,Efficiency,Habit     2011-12-16 10:13:27

  Our Go Cache Library Choices

In Build a Go KV Cache from Scratch in 20 minutes, I walked you through what matters when writing a local cache, and eventually implemented one, whose performance was beaten badly by that of the popular go-cache on Github though. However, the bright side is that we can learn a lot from those excellent Github Go cache products, studying their features, applicable scenarios, and implementations, and extracting what we need. In this article, I will mainly analyze and compare the four...

   GOLANG,CACHE,GO-CACHE,BIGCACHE,GOURPCACHE     2022-04-16 07:48:11

  Before Python

This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog it here. Warning: this is pretty unedited (or else it would never be published :-). I'm posting it in my "personal" blog instead of the "Python history" blog because it mostly touches on my career before Python. Here goes.Have you ever written a computer program? Using which language?HTMLJavascriptJavaPythonC++COther - which?[It turned out the students ha...

   Python,History,Programming language,B     2012-01-18 08:08:53

  Web Symbols typeface

There are those points in every interactive designer’s career when he becomes fed up with producing the same set of graphics all over again for every website he designs. It could be the social network icons, gallery arrows or any number of his «signature» butterflies for the footer of each of his projects. Similar for interactive developers that have to slice the same GIFs and PNGs each time art-director asks them to.U...

   Web,Type face,Interactive mode,Design icon     2011-11-19 02:08:47

  How I Became a Programmer

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, an...

   Programmer,Advice,Method,Study     2011-11-24 09:14:50

  India: The World's Secret Silicon Valley

You might not know it, but a key cog in the global innovation machine is hiding in plain sight in the world's largest democracyReutersFor many firms, developing new products for consumers around the world is the most visible manifestation of innovation - the "real deal." But many people still see India as a place where other people's ideas are made or executed and not where innovation begins. (After all, you don't hear about an Indian equivalent to Google, iPod or Viagra.) Bu they're wrong. In m...

   Innovation,India,Silicon Valley,GE,Chip,Intel     2011-11-16 08:06:54

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