How Much of the Industry Will Go Parallel?

Michael Seuss ponders one of my favorite questions: How much of the software industry will have to deal with the concurrent computing [opportunity]? He hits the vital points:

  • 2, 4, and maybe 8 cores may be usefully exploited by system services (anti-virus, disk indexing and searching, etc.), but when you …
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Microsoft Unveils "Surface" Multi-Touch Table Interface

Bill Gates has gone public on Microsoft's commercializing a multi-touch table interface called "Surface". This has been shown before, but only as one of the (many) prototypes that you see these brief glimpses of and which often are not commercialized (I think "Surface" and the device-pairing stuff was shown at …

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Comment:Code > 1:3 ?

Andrew Binstock adds to his pithy series on quality ratios (unit tests per method, unit test coverage) with a post saying that high-quality code is likely to have around 35% and perhaps even more than 45% of lines devoted to comments.

He also mentions two "commenting" practices that drive me …

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The Missed Opportunity of a PDC Without a Grand Unveiling

"Professional Developer's Conference." "[T]he definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform." That sounds awesome, but is unfortunately paired with the clause "we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones."

Given a major technology announcement, it's logical that the PDC to …

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Two Cups of Coffee, A Coke, and A Plate of Broiled Octopus: Everything I Ate Today

Oh, and there was a side of white rice with the octopus.

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Pandora brings internet radio to Sprint cellphones

\$3 a month for Pandora? Geez, I might have to buy a cellphone just to get it.

Web broadcaster Pandora has announced Pandora on the Go, a mobile client that works with a handful of Sprint cellphones.
There's a 30 day free trial for Sprint Power vision customers. After the …

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Why Ruby's The Mansion of Bliss

Scott Hanselman weighed in on the Ruby buzz, saying that no language is all things to all people at all times.  I agree, but think that there are a couple things about Ruby that don't require us to get into language design philosophies. Let me quickly state that these things …

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SubSonic: .NET-based Database Access Layer akin to Ruby's ActiveRecord

Via  Rob Connery Interviewed by Miguel de Icaza, I took a quick look at SubSonic, which appears to be a good solution in the ASP.NET world for very rapidly generating Create-Retrieve-Update-Delete functionality pages that honor database foreign keys.

One of the dazzlers in the Ruby world is a library …

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Electric Karmann Ghia

My friend Doug has apparently gotten his converted Karmann Ghia onto the road...

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Microsoft's Popfly: Getting Their Ducks In A Row

Popfly is the name (and URL) of Microsoft's new non-professional developer community, a Windows Live site whose flashiest feature is a Silverlight-based "mashup editor" that facilitates pipes-and-filters development. Before reviewing the gratuitous 3-D spinning cubes, though, pay attention to the context:

  • Visual Studio Express has had 14,000,000 downloads …
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