Excel#: A Teaching Language

What with all the talk about language directions, I was thinking about a hobbyhorse of mine that spreadsheets are proven to be something that a lot of people "get" and that it behooves language designers to pay attention to them. Usually, I speculate about a spreadsheet-like development environment, but in …

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Microsoft .NET LINQ Preview (May 2006)

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Journalism and Memory

We received a letter on the SD Times reflector with lines such as "you guys mindlessly regurgitating the marketing hype of the self-congratulatory X committees....X is essentially nothing but a tacit admission...that the previous 4 versions of the spec were nothing but an incredibly expensive series of mistakes …

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Uh... Are Continuations Really Easy Once You Have Anonymous Delegates?

Can you just transform the scope subsequent to the callcc into a delegate, store it in your Continuation object, and then execute the delegate when it's called? Yes, you need compiler support (since you need to transform callcc() from a keyword or method call into the beginning of a new …

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DIY Augmented Reality Windshield HUD

casey mentioned that he wants to investigate augmented reality. Having played with the accelerometers on my M200, I'm leary of the challenge of maintaining orientation over many integrations in a handheld or head-mounted device. On a car, though, you can auto-orient using the GPS and a roadmap and there'd be …

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Tablet Context Tagging Tool and Java/SWT?

Anyone have experience using specialized input contexts with Java/SWT?

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Videogames Don't Get "Darkest Before the Dawn"

I was thinking about buying the videogame "Star Wars: Empire at War" (not that I have any spare time). Anyway, I decided against it because I was sure, like most games, I'd abandon it after a few hours. And I realized that one reason I do that is because, unlike …

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I Don't Understand How "Insurance Adjustments" Work

I have a high-deductible PPO medical plan: if I go to a Doctor, I pay the bill directly. It's not unusual for there to be a discount "If you pay at the time of services." Generally, it's around 25%, but sometimes it goes as high as 50%. I interpret this …

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Borland Re-Org Includes Questionable Decisions

Alan Zeichick, in today's SD Times News on Thursday, observes two aspects of Borland's re-org that are troubling: "The first is combining sales and professional services together into one field operations group. The other is folding customer support into research & development."

Zeichick says: "Knowing that the goal of a sales …

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