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I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA. An FPGA is a programmable integrated circuit, generally programmed using a hardware description language.... Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was created back in 1985 by the famous Japanese company Nintendo. It was an extremely revolutionary console at its time and was the best selling console for a number of years. I used to play NES a lot as a kid, so I have all those memories of the old games, and had an imminent urge to dig into the inner details of the console to figure out how it worked. Smart, bored people do such interesting things.
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WOW!
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system is a combination of two very different user interfaces, with each best used in a different way. While the whole system is touch-enabled, only the Start Screen, with its own tablet-type apps, is fully optimized for a touchscreen. The second interface — the traditional Windows desktop — is still best used with a physical keyboard and a mouse or touch pad. So, hardware makers are turning out convertible PCs that attempt to function as both tablets and traditional laptops. Return of the Tablet PC (sans stylus this time).
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Today’s open-loop mobile wallet offerings generally concentrate on three things: payments, loyalty and promotions. Most, however, are primarily focused on enabling the smartphone to connect with a merchant’s payment terminal (wirelessly in the case of NFC or optically in the case of 2D bar codes) for the purpose of transmitting the information that typically resides on the mag-stripe of a consumer’s traditional credit/loyalty card. Some, however, are taking a fundamentally different approach to the mobile wallet... Stand and deliver, your smartphone or your life!
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At 1:41am GMT today I sent out an email to a bunch of gaming sites claiming to be a Microsoft employee working on the new Xbox. I made up every single word of it along with a couple of specs copied from other rumours that have been appearing on the Internet. This was a bit of an experiment to see just how easy it is to get a fake story taken seriously. And it is shockingly easy in the games industry. Anonymous sources say "Don't believe everything you read."
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Today Intel made a sobering, but not entirely unexpected announcement: over the next 3 years Intel will be ramping down its own desktop motherboard business. Intel will continue to supply desktop chipsets for use by 3rd party motherboard manufacturers like ASUS, ASRock and Gigabyte, but after 2013 it will no longer produce and sell its own desktop mITX/mATX/ATX designs in the channel. We will see Haswell motherboards from the group, but that will be the last official hurrah. ...and I suspect the build-your-own PC business will start disappearing with it.
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It's easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it's also easy to forget that we've been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It's only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA. Play Misty for me.
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"Understanding Your New GoPro"
Time for sloooooooooooow-mo......Maybe this will help.
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Was the password "pencil"?
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Good for Skytech!
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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I'm glad it has a happy(er anyways). Expelling him seemed like a bit much. Then again, I'm a bit biased because I did some similar things in high school, would have been really bad for me if they expelled me for it (and I was a bit more destructive, I gave everyone the WiFi password that no one was supposed to have...nothing really bad but still worse).
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For Windows 8, the Bing team built News, Weather, Finance, Sports, Travel and Maps apps. This technical overview provides insight on the architecture of these apps, key Windows 8 features and the contracts they use, common controls they employ, and world readiness more generally. What do you think of the new Bing apps?
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FizzBuzz? The hilarious drinking game? Well, almost. It all started with a blog by Imran on how FizzBuzz was used during interviews to weed out programmers that, believe it or not, cannot program.... Simple enough, but FizzBuzz proved to be scarily effective in eliminating programmers that actually cannot produce software. During the lengthy discussions that followed, a lot of creative solutions to FizzBuzz were posted. They ranged from over-engineered Java to down-to-the-metal Assembler, wicked Perl one-liners, and XSLT solutions. Of course I want to be a part of this rising FizzBuzz industry! Failing to see the solution.
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Many databases today differentiate themselves from their NoSQL counterparts by claiming to support "100% ACID" transactions or "guaranteeing strong consistency (ACID)." In reality, few of these databases—including traditional “big iron” systems like Oracle—provide formal ACID guarantees, even when they claim to do so. Many databases drop the ACID claim. Which of them trip badly in practice?
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Today I would like to introduce an idea that I’ve been playing around with as a thought experiment for years, but that has finally become a reality. Imagine a programming language designed specifically for teaching young computer science students a solid foundation in sound computer science topics as well as practical techniques useful in creating rock-solid industrial systems. Below, I’ll outline the features of Enfield. I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.
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In my opinion, a multi-paradigm language isn't a good beginner language.
Programming languages evolved in a particular order and I believe they (or their paradigms  ) should be learned in that order. Not specifically start with COBOL or Fortran, but a language like that -- see what you can and can't do easily with it. Then learn the next paradigm/language and see how it improves on the other.
I remember first learning BASIC in high school -- at one point we were assigned a task that was tedious with what we'd been taught so far, then we were shown arrays! And were told to redo what we had previously done and it was so much easier! The same thing happened with Pascal -- records! And then Data Structures! And then OOP!
I think it's wrong to start out having to learn OOP before you know the fundamentals.
You give a kid a hammer, not a nail gun.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I think it's wrong to start out having to learn OOP before you know the fundamentals.
I totally agree. I think this is a particular problem in the Java world. For example, there is a book called "Objects with Java" which teaches right from the very first page about classes. Get this, that's before it has even covered: printing to the screen, conditional statements, hell even before it teaches how to add two numbers up!
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That's exactly the problem. The VB.net book I bought a few years back doesn't have if until page 353, chapter 18. It's a lot of money and trees to not teach programming.
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Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches. But what is the evidence and what can we do about it? Every few months I still see programmers who are asked to not use headphones during work hours or are interrupted by meetings too frequently but have little defense against these claims. I also fear our declining ability to handle these mental workloads and interruptions as we age. Stop working for a minute and read this.
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Work related interruptions, I can deal with...it's part of the job. The frequency of work related interruptions, for me, has remained fairly steady through the years. However, the frequency of non-work related interruptions (ocurring during working hours) has gone through the roof all due to one device...the cell phone. (leash) 
There used to be a rule about not calling people at work unless it was an emergency. That rule seems to no longer apply...it's not like they are calling your work number right?..and everything is an emergency.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I put my phone on vibrate. If it's important, they'll leave a voicemail, which I'll listen to at my leisure.
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And people wonder why I normally leave my phone at home. 
Only a handful of people outside of work that I trust implicitly not to call for anything that can wait have my deskphone number (in a real emergency the rest could Google the main number and get forwarded by the receptionist). So far all the people in the know have honored my trust; the least important thing I've been called about in the not quite eight years I've spent in this job was someone being in the ER and scheduled for an appendectomy a few hours later.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: I normally leave my phone at home.
I would love to do that but my cell phone is paid for by the company. The worst offenders (calling during work hours) are retired in-laws. My father in-law calls constantly for petty crap like how to change the input oh his TV to watch a DVD, or like yesterday when he couldn't find the right channel for a basketball game. I looked it up and told him the channel to punch in the remote at which point he starts pushing the numbers on the phone! While I am trying to get him to stop pushing the buttons on the phone, I can hear him in the background cursing that 'the damned thing still doesn't work!'. It was a big laugh when he realized what he was doing. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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