Good morning movie liners, let’s get started!
Good luck!
Say… That’s a nice bike…
Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.
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Regarding Web Evangelists
Joe Hewitt: “I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows, and becomes a footnote in history. That thing we used to use in the early days of the Internet.”
Ah, yes, computing, and more specifically software, just shifts and changes like the tide.
I do believe in web services but I also firmly believe those services are best consumed by platform native clients. It’s all about the User Experience and in my opinion the browser still isn’t there.
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David Frum, Man of Reason
David Frum: “But on any realistic assessment of the problems faced by Americans – and not just would-be Republican office-holders – it’s the recession, not the presidency, that is National Problem #1 and demands the most urgent action. It won’t be enough to save Obama if he does not deserve saving – but it may be enough to save your neighbor’s house, job, and family. Or even … your own. Republicans after all have been victims of this crisis too. It’s an hour of national emergency even more urgent and overwhelming than the aftermath of 9/11. And things may soon get worse, if the Eurozone begins to crack up, as it seems it may. This is the hour for united action against the economic crisis, not partisan maneuvering.”
David Frum seems like a pretty reasonable guy. Let’s fix the country, not stick to party lines.
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WinRT, a replacement for Win32
Paul Thurrott: “Microsoft has an unfortunately inaccurate high-level diagram showing the relation between WinRT and the environments its replacing (which are shown as IE, Win32, and .NET). But the important thing to note is that there’s the NT kernel and then, right on top of it (like Win32) is WinRT. This WinRT has an application model and three boxes of capabilities that are expressed by APIs (Communications & Data, Graphics & Media, and Devices & Printing). “Above” WinRT is the two sets of presentation layer/programming language couples: XAML and various high level programming languages (C#, VB, and so on) and HTML/CSS and JavaScript, respectively. (DirectX is left out, but this sits on top of WinRT too.)”
In an earlier post, Windows 8 Speculation, I had diagrammed some options for WinRT. It looks like Microsoft went with the middle choice, making WinRT a peer to Win32. This is a very good thing.
Now I’m pretty excited to see what the API’s look like.
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iPad as Daily Driver?
Ars Technica: “The initial proposition seemed crazy. I was sure it was not possible to work this way. My job as a writer and editor here at Ars depends on (too much) serious multitasking with multiple open windows. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to successfully write full articles with proper formatting, links, images, and HTML using only iPad apps. And let’s not even talk about the Ars CMS—many of us at Ars have attempted to use it from our iPhones in the past; it has always ended in tears.”
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Go Native or Go Home
Daring Fireball: “But at a technical level, is this really something Adobe should be crowing about? The game requires an iPad 2 for performance reasons, even though the animation is 2D, not 3D. The game was originally written in Air for play on the PC, so I have little doubt it was less work to port it to the iPad within Air rather than rewriting it natively in Cocoa Touch. But it doesn’t seem right to me that this game doesn’t run on first-gen iPads. Commenters on Brimelow’s post seem to agree.”
Compiling existing code for another platform can be cost effective, but it doesn’t mean it will translate to a superior experience.
Remember Visual Basic? I do. I’ve written quite a bit of code in VB, and VBA, over the last 15 plus years. I’ve seen a lot of great Visual Basic code in that time. Mostly, I’ve seen a lot of poorly written Visual Basic code. Microsoft wanted to give the power of writing Windows applications to mere mortals and boy did they write applications. Thousands and thousands of crappy Windows applications.
I worked with a great software engineer that tells a story of a former employer having designers develop the client application for their product. This client was written in Flash and communicated to a backend application to do the grunt work. It was discovered the client application was having performance issues. When the developers started looking into the issues they found horribly written Flash code was the culprit. The designers went back to designing, the developers went back to developing, and performance was improved.
My point is this. Just because the tool is easy to use doesn’t mean the resulting code will be well written.
This game may have issues because the code is poorly written, or it could be the cross compiler and its supporting libraries. It’s also worth mentioning someone could write a really horrific game, or application, using native tools, but, I still claim native gives you the best chance to be successful.
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Netflix by Mail now Qwikster
Netflix Blog: “So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwiksterâ€.”
Qwikster? All of the good names must have been taken?
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French Medicine
Ian Morrison: “Carte Vitale. The French have a ubiquitous electronic smart card called Carte Vitale that contains basic health information on the patient. It is really a portable electronic health record and insurance card. Doctors also swipe it through a card reader for billing purposes.”
I picked the above snippet because my brother, Jay, is a medical professional and is interested in stuff like this, but this article goes way beyond that. Read the entire article. It’s pretty darned interesting and foreign to most Americans.
I’ve been saying it for years, Americans don’t know how to live.
Wonder if I can get my lovely wife to move to France? Probably not.
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Movie line of the week answer
Good morning, we have a winner!
Congratulations to Mr. Steven Vore!
The correct answer was…
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
See you next Thursday.
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Movie line of the week
Good morning!
Here’s the line, good luck!
No. I am your father.
Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.