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Inequality in Equalland
Every resident of Equalland has the same life story. From birth until age 18, they live with their parents, earning nothing and spending nothing — their parents cover all their needs. At age 18, they graduate from high school, become independent of their parents, and go to college. The government of Equalland funds…
Steve's story - Google employee #13
I was born in 1972 to a poverty-level family in suburban Chicago. During the first few years of my life, I shared a 600 sq ft, 1 bedroom cot...
And suddenly, you're hip
This Perl marketing thing you know.. I'm really thinking about it every day. I've always wondered how those mechanism of "being THE it-language" or "the tool the cool kids use these days" or "success" in terms of "spreading everywhere" really works.
A Healthy Diet For The Mind
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
There has been a long running debate in the Application Platform Services Group here at Burton Group between the REST people on one side and the SOAP people on the other. For the most part it mirrors the external debate. In one recent exchange, while discussing the complexity of SOAP and the web services framework…
A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design
The conservatives see non-standard custom UI elements as wrong. Liberals see an app built using nothing other than standard system UI elements as boring, old-fashioned, stodgy.
CES2011: The end of the PC era
At this year’s CES two unthinkable things happened: The abandonment of Windows exclusivity by practically all of Microsoft’s OEM customers. The abandonment of Intel exclusivity by Micro…
Mac App Store: Open for Business
macOS 27 Golden Gate with all-new Siri AI powered by Apple Intelligence and new features for a more responsive, delightful experience.
Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010
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Airlines using reverse auctions to determine true seat pricing
Of this (via MR): It’s an auction conducted at the airport terminal. In this auction you are a seller and you are bidding to sell your ticket back to the airline. Optimists look at this and …
Technical job post tips for the desperate
For software engineering jobs, most companies, especially startups, just can't find qualified candidates, even after tapping their networks. If you're one of these companies who has more trouble...
GameBoy Emulation in JavaScript: The CPU
In the first of this series of articles, I'll look at how a CPU can be emulated through JS, and start building an emulation core for the GameBoy console.