Micropost

Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better communicate. This is reason enough to study them. But algorithms are also a reminder that visualization is more than a tool for finding patterns in data. Visualization leverages the human visual system to augment human intellect: we can use it to better understand these important abstract processes, and perhaps other things, too. ...

Related: Android has been with us in one form or another for more than six years. During that time, we’ve seen an absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. When it came time for Google to dive in to the smartphone wars, the company took its rapid-iteration, Web-style update cycle and applied it to an operating system, and the result has been an onslaught of continual improvement. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that’s slower than it used to be. For the first year of Android’s commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months. ...

Abres WhatsApp cada diez minutos y, sin embargo, nunca has reparado en la historia fascinante que esconden tres de sus emoticonos más populares. Están en la categoría de smileys, justo debajo de la fila de expresivos gatitos amarillos, flanqueados por la máscara del lengendario Tengu nipón y una imponente calavera. A primera vista, son solo tres simpáticos y expresivos monos que dan mucho juego en las conversaciones, pero las apariencias engañan: detrás hay tradición, misterio y un lejano mito oriental. ...

En la primavera de 1978 mientras que Dan Bricklin se sentaba en una de las clases del Máster que se estaba sacando en la Escuela de Empresariales de Harvard (Harvard Business School), se le ocurrió la idea de plasmar de forma electrónica lo que el profesor estaba haciendo en la pizarra. Éste, estaba dibujando una matriz con números en ciertas celdas y operaciones aritméticas en ciertas otras. Es decir, a Bricklin se le acababa de ocurrir la idea de crear una hoja de cálculo electrónica. ...

Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I’ve (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC’s internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I’m not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they’ve been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the ”keep America’s internet slow and expensive forever” lobby. ...

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed under the auspices of a committee of the American Standards Association, called the X3 committee, by its X3.2 (later X3L2) subcommittee, and later by that subcommittee’s X3.2.4 working group. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute or USASI and ultimately the American National Standards Institute. » Charles Torvalds | askapache.com

The roots of CGI lie in the first mechanical aids to drawing and painting. The earliest of these were developed to help solve a problem every artist has found to be sticky: perspective. Before the introduction of geometric perspective, the realistic depiction of nature was not one of the purposes of art. Instead, artists chose the size and position of objects in a picture by their relative importance to one another. A distant castle might appear to be larger than one in the foreground simply because it was considered more important. ...

I remember my first program, by which I mean one that I cobbled together myself, not simply typing in a complete listing from the manual. I was twelve, the year was 1985, and the computer a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (a machine which was actually the first 16-bit home computer). My program was a very simple text adventure game, created by chaining together as many IF¦ THEN GOTO statements as I had patience for. ...

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: ”Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.” They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming. ...

Programming is social, too. Most people think it’s not. With assistance from media portrayals of programmers and sloppy stereotypes of our own, they think most of us would prefer to work alone in the dark. Some do, of course, but even then most programmers I know like to talk shop with other programmers all the time. They like to talk about the places where they are stuck, as well as the places they used to be stuck. War stories are the currency of the programmer community. ...