With the advent of the iPad, many tend to believe the end is near for electronic paper. In the reading market however, one reality makes it so that the iPad will never be able to replace printed and electronic paper. Here’s why. Continue reading
I think the single thing that amazes me the most with open source software is how humans lack the ability to be of the same opinion.
Much of the new Linux efforts, such as Android and MeeGo, are just excuses for one company to get all the attention and money. I mean, why doesn’t Nokia use Android instead of making its own Linux distro? Because they know they can’t put their name on it. Android is also mostly developed by Google and I don’t think Nokia would have its word in there. Continue reading
Amazing, in two days of being in the city of Ottawa, I’ve seen three iPads in the wild.
The adoption rate of those things is stunning even in Canada, where people don’t even make lineups for hot products (usually).
I took the liberty of observing what fellow iPadders were doing. One of them was playing sudoku, the other was reading an iBook in a Chapters bookstore, how ironic, and the last was actively managing stuff on eBay and PayPal. Judging by the definite wait for loading moments, he was clearly on 3G and not the Starbuck’s WiFi. Smart choice sir, smart choice.
While this might seem absurd, obviously one would want to study a given domain in its own language, I’m tempted to believe it isn’t.
In fact, learning a language specifically for a domain of study might allow you to go much further in your career.
For example, if you’re a programmer, given that practically all programming languages and computing innovations are originating from North America, learning English obviously gives you access to much more knowledge. In fact, English speakers that work in computing might not directly benefit from learning another language, at least not as much as people who learn English as a second language.
In the same way, it’s unquestionable that learning English is also good for international relations, much in the same way learning a country’s language is essential if you plan to have major interactions with them, such as living there.
I’ve also observed that for science and standards, French can be beneficial. For example, CERN, a major physics laboratories, takes its acronym from French and operates in a country that has all French, German, Italian and Romansh as official languages. German is also considered an important language for science in the same regard.
Now, if you go on the art side and start learning music, you’ll quickly discover the way Americans do music, or the way English speaking countries do it, is a far stretch from its roots. This mostly has to do with the way musical notation is in English, namely A, B, C, etc. In French and Italian, all music notation is read in solfège, which is itself a French word, also known as solfeggio in Italian. French and Italian are also two of the most closely related languages on Earth, so much that French speakers can readily understand core concepts of written Italian without any previous knowledge of the language, and vice versa for Italians. In other words, once you know French or Italian, it’s very easy to learn Italian or French.
Unfortunately for Asia lovers, major mathematician theorems did not sprout to existence in Japan or China, but mostly in Europe. In fact, English could even be considered a second citizen in science, because most of today’s modernity, including the Metric system, were not made in English. Heck, our numbering system has Arabic roots.
In any cases, the fortunate reality is that with globalization, languages can now be interchangeably used for any kind of science, be it computer science, physics science, or just pure mathematics or even art like music.
In this way, I don’t think it’s needful of me to make this article accurate or meaningful for the origins of anything. That is, nowadays, if you’re in a moderately rich society with strong access to knowledge, that is, if strong universities exist, it is possible to go very far with only one language, especially if it’s English.
In any cases, I believe limiting yourself to only one language is always limiting. English is my second language, and I don’t think I’d be at the same place today without it. English has granted me access to unprecedented quantities of knowledge not available in French, especially on the Internet given the superiority of the English Wikipedia over every other language.
So, if you’re interested in whatever, go learn a language that has to do with it, it’ll never harm to know more than your own country’s.
You know, when you look at such a thing, you can’t help but think “Oh my god, something is definitely wrong about this picture.”
Although I’ll leave to you that Miley has at least a little bit of decency.
This is a lesson I learned recently and I thought I’d share with my readers. If it helped me, I’m sure it can help others.
On a side note, I think this is one of the first personal blog post I have ever written. In fact, I had to create an entirely new section for it, called life.
It’s also my first post written entirely on a mobile device, aka BB Storm, and in a coffee place. I normally only write at work and at home.
So let’s get on with it. What’s that about personal tastes and the work place? It’s how people tend to attach way too much importance to the people they share a workspace with, and these people’s personal tastes, or at least how I do so.
Here’s my story. I used to be a designer way before entering the realm of programming. I’m only 21 as of this writing though, so my life as a designer wasn’t actually that long. I already spent more of my life coding than designing, but I have roots in other artistic venues such as music.
Hence, what basically happened is that througout highschool, at a time where what I’d do with my life was more important than it ever was, I started, basically from an artist’s mindset, to question the importance of mathematics to me. Casually convincing myself I would never need them, my then elite skills in mathematics started to plummet, up until a point I was led to believe I sucked at math. Needless to say I pertinently know today that this is far from being true, but I used to believe it.
Since then, in the back of my mind, while programming, I always wondered whether my place was truly amongst programmers, constantly trying more daring programming venues to reassure myself of my mathematic competence.
Everything going well, I then had to go do a six week internship for the end of my program in college. I did the internship in question in a small programming firm making Java software for education staff planification, which is basically employee managing software.
Right beside our office was a design firm with which we shared the office building. I shortly discovered that I had much more in common with the design people there than the staff of my own internship location.
This came lurking in my mind hard enough to considerably shake my ideals and make me wonder if I was not heading in the wrong direction with this whole programming thing.
In fact, I almost completely changed my mind afterwards and was heading towards an artist career path. What made me change mind again is the realization that the workplace and its people and my personal tastes for programming had nothing to do with each other. I discovered that by reading a book about game programming, where the guy talked about how the game development world had you collaborate with a bunch of different people, including in major part artists and designers, despite only doing hardcore programming.
Rather than coming to the conclusion that a different work environment can yield better or worse relationships while keeping the exact same job, I came to the realization of something on a higher level. What you experience in your work place has nothing to do with and should never be confused with personal tastes.
That is, doing such an association could deprive you of something you actually like for the rest of your life. It’s a dangerous affair really, and it almost happened to me. That is, if you discover a passion for coding, don’t ever let a boring work environment step on it, and vice versa for any other passion you may have.
With this, I have decided to start leaning C, as I believe it is a good foundation to delve deeper into programming and of course, Objective-C, my most recent venture. I’m planning on writing an article on what I think a good programmer should learn to ease its life, so stay tuned for that. I’m also going to answer M. Davies on the omnibar problem with Dictionary.com. I realize it took me ages to respond as it’s almost been two weeks since I received the email in question but worry not as I have disabled the non-working captcha implementation which blocked all comments on this blog.
Ever been really angry at your BitTorrent downloads being uber slow? Chances are nobody ever told you about what upload actually does in your connection. Continue reading
For a bit of guidance, refer to this article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/google-wants-to-face-single-mega-lawsuit-over-wifi-snafu.ars
Google has recently been blamed by all sorts of people for their discovery that they accidentally sniffed personal data off open WiFi networks while scanning for the geo-location of SSIDs and Mac Addresses of routers with their StreetView cars.
Some argue that scanning for SSIDs and Mac Addresses is of questionable practice. I argue that you could have done the research prior, and that if you’re not happy that your SSID and Mac Address is public, which is how it’s always been by default, you can blame the people who designed wireless and how the Internet works in the first place and stop using a WiFi router.
What Google was trying to do was absolutely O.K.
In no way did they were able to track down your house with an SSID either, they just recorded that the SSID was available in that given area, meaning the SSID is necessarily around this area, providing good information for triangulating your position on mobile Google Maps, and that’s just useful, not a breach of your privacy.
I’ll state this again: The accidental personal data collection happened on open, unprotected data networks.
What this means is easy: The people using the networks were willingly or stupidly, openly sharing their connection with anyone who walked in its range of operation.
The accidental sniffing of data was on unprotected networks. Should Google be held liable for checking what’s on a network which has been left with no protection at all?
Of course not, and this is where I openly ask to everyone who holds a lawsuit against Google for that matter to shut up, go home and protect their dam WiFi network.
Geez, they didn’t invent such sophisticated protection algorithms for nothing. Google didn’t even break through WEP protection, which is easy to break through, so they’re not liable for anything evil or illegal. Whether these people knew it or not, they were willingly leaving their networks open to anyone, including attackers that are of criminal intent.
Do you really think Google would have a criminal intent regarding this matter? Come on, the company has done nothing but make our life easy while trying the best it can to protect our privacy at a break-neck speed of innovation. Can you really blame Google for your idiocy, for leaving your network unprotected and open to anyone, good or evil?
No, you can’t. All of the people suing Google don’t even the right to pronounce a word against them in my opinion, simply because the networks were legitimately opened and unprotected.
Oh dear god protect your dam WiFi network or get rid of it or suffer the consequences.
*Note: This article portrays highly philosophic views on technology. If you actually want to make software and video games that increase your cash flow, I actually recommend not following some the advice in this article. Notably, developing with non self-serving technologies can actually hurt more than those technologies will ever hurt you as a developer. Remember you have to actually make a living.
Self-serving technologies are essentially any tech that is created with the core goal of helping a company’s already existing product. This type of technology is common, but whether it is self-serving has more to do with software development, because the platforms we develop on are major hubs for additional money flow.
A good example of self-serving technology is Silverlight. Despite not being marketed as such, Microsoft’s Silverlight is a platform that benefits Microsoft’s own, already existing product, Windows. Why? Because developing for Silverlight requires using Microsoft-created tools that only run on the Windows operating system. Thus, major efforts on the Silverlight platform by Microsoft are understandable because they hence drive much more sales and public to their own venues than other products could alone.
Much in the same way, Apple’s iOS platform is self-serving, but more severely so, allowing only development on Apple products, and allowing only development for Apple’s products. Continue reading
From Samsung’s perspective, the so called Retina Display on the iPhone 4, a display with an amazing pixel density of 326 PPI (Pixels Per Inch), is not so good after-all.
The concerns are both valid but of questionable importance. What Samsung is basically saying is that AMOLED offers superior view angles and contrast, and that while the Retina Display offers a 3 to 5 percent increase in sharpness over its own Galaxy S, it consumes 30% more power.
