“Samsung joins the Skype-TV crowd”

It seems that we’ve finally achieved one of the icons of the 1950s vision of the future: the living room videophone. And it might even catch on. But come on, guys… you promised that sixty years ago. That’s a heck of a long time to deliver on a promise. And where’s that flying car you …

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“Gmail Detects and Warns You If Someone Else Is Using Your Account”

Wow… there’s been some debate over whether Google’s response to the whole Chinese hacking episode is just posturing, but more recent news seems to suggest that they’re seriously pissed at the Chinese government. And now comes the news that they’ve added code to show users when an account is accessed from an unexpected geographical area …

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“Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby”

Hot on the heels of my own version-control post, Joel Spolsky writes one of his own. It’s a good overview of what’s different between a traditional version-control system and the new distributed version-control systems, and how the new ones are better. (It works for me, I use Git myself.) The takeaway quote: If you are …

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“US comp-boffins claim fix for multicore ‘concurrency bugs'”

Many programmers claim that multi-threaded programming is painfully difficult, to the point that when I say otherwise, they claim that it shows “a lack of expert knowledge.” (Obviously, I disagree with that assessment.) πŸ˜‰ But just because it’s “not difficult” doesn’t mean that it’s easy. And since most people who write programs don’t have my …

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“Advanced Persistent Threats: Should your panties be in a bunch, and how do you un-bunch them?”

A good article, and one that will (to quote my sainted grandmother) “scare the pee-water right out” of anyone responsible for corporate-level security. But the main reason I wanted to mention it was for the excuse to put the amusing phrase “your panties in a bunch” into a blog title. πŸ˜‰

“Everything I need to know I learned from tiny pretend people.”

A kid and his mother playing the Sims 3. It wouldn’t seem like a learning experience, but you might be surprised — there are six lessons listed there, and only one of them is something I’d expect. (Which one is left as an exercise for the reader. πŸ˜‰ ) I think our generation has pretty …

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