Perhaps We Need Something Other Than Silver Bullets

Of course, debates on the theoretical effectiveness of programming paradigms may be missing the point entirely, given the too-horrifying-to-be-true assertion that many programmer applicants cannot:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the …

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I, Werewolf?

My dispute with Wesner Moise continues...

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/IWerewolf_716D/image02.png"" atomicselection="true"> I'm going to take this post with good humor -- the "werewolf" being a reference to the question of a silver bullet and an image in one of my responses. And the …

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In Outlook, Any Way to Use Rules / Folders to Choose Reply Account?

I have an email account on a customer's Exchange server and I need to ensure that I reply using that account to email traveling over that server. I don't want it to be my default account for normal email. Essentially, I want to say, "When replying to mail in Outlook …

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Newsgator Online Has Stopped Working?

Huh... I use Newsgator Online because I have so many machines. I don't know if I should hold this out as an example of the problem with browser-based applications, but suddenly Newsgator Online has stopped properly marking articles as read. The problem extends across both Firefox and IE7, so I …

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Retail Security: Growth Industry

Via Dale Churchward, standing in for Harry Pierson, comes word that Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill to punish retailers for personal data leaks. Dale speculates "there may be some good jobs in retail IT data security."

I think so. Of course, you should figure out what you love to …

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CG Portrait -- Not So Uncanny

Via Bill de h?ra comes this CG image. I don't follow the CG scene so I don't know how this compares to the best work of others, but I wouldn't pause for a second if I saw an image like this in an ad. So if stills have crossed …

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Ah hah! Ward Cunningham Explained!

Fran Allen's Turing Award made me ponder future recipients. Most of the action in the software development world today rotates around business, not science. The Turing Award is supposed to honor technical contributions, not marketshare or business models. The problem with that is that "everything happened in the Golden Age …

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Fran Allen Receives Turing Award: First Woman So Honored

The ACM honored Frances Allen with the Turing Award today. Allen started her career teaching FORTRAN to scientists in the late 50s, wrote a classic paper called Program Optimization in the mid-60s, and did major foundational work on optimizing transformations. She is the first woman to receive the Turing Award …

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Visual Basic + Mono + LiveCD == Programming Console for Education?

Mono now has native support for Visual Basic. Linux already supports a "console" approach to your hardware: pop in a CD/DVD and boot into a specialized environment. While I think general-purpose computers are more appropriate for intermediate-and-better users, the console approach is very appealing when it comes to training …

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Perhaps I'm Wrong About Multitouch

A few commentors have taken me to task for drooling over the "multitouch" UI demo. My gut reaction is two-fold: I want a huge display (covering 150 degrees or so, with high-density pixels, of course) and I want direct manipulation. Although I'm pretty sure I'm right about the former, I …

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