Evidence Of Zika Virus Found In Tears

A software problem which has already been solved, but not everywhere.

In the early days of the WWW, some websites were a lot better than others. Some places you would fill out a form and it would log you out and forget your stuff; the meaning of icons varied across the web; ….

Nowadays, there are a lot of Standards. There’s a certain way things generally work. Visual cues consistently mean the same thing and work the way I, as a semi-daft user with a lisp and a peg leg, would expect it to, without any further thought or research.

How did this wonderful increase in usability and optimisation happen? I think it’s due to JQuery.

For those who don’t know, JQuery is a bunch of software libraries that do common tasks like “initiate twitter-like pagination” or “build a form” the right way. In other words, some people who had seen a lot of good and bad choices, wrote some functions that any other programmer can use, and wrote down all the best 500-line programs so that other people could do them with just 1 line. (If you still don’t understand what I mean by a “library”, look at the third or fourth lesson on an introduction to C++ tutorial – somewhere in the beginning the instructor will explain why sometimes you want to take a long program and split off bits of the code as separate functions.)

  So here are several problems that have all been solved very nicely. The problems were that:

not everyone has the time/funds to perfect every last nanometer of their website

not everyone has the expertise to do everything perfectly

consequently, users had a bad experience

consequently, less business was transacted online

many people were solving the same problem

too much code was being written to solve the same problem in different places

consequently, management’s and programmers’ interests were disaligned.

The problem was solved through specialisation, as well as programming techniques like abstraction, callbacks, encapsulation, so on.

How far can this Library solution be taken? I mean both in the sense of economic viability and in the sense of programmability.

If I’m typing in some random stuff into R, I kind of expect that sparse matrices are multiplying in the best way possible, or in general that calculations are being done as quick as they could be.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every data structure could automatically tap into any relevant mathematical theorems that reduce calculation time or provide insights? For example the computer shouldn’t literally add the numbers 1+2+3+…+97+98+99+100 because mathematicians already know that 1+100 + 2+99 + 3+98 + 4+97 … = 101 × 50, which is way quicker to calculate. Wouldn’t it be great if data structures could automatically “know” (via libraries) any theorem about curvature, graph traversal, Yoneda lemma, and so on, without the programmer having to be a maths textbook him/herself?

Is this impossible? Or has it just not been done yet?

Report: Hacking Crews are all APT now

Report: Hacking Crews are all APT now

  The tactics of cyber criminal hacking crews are indistinguishable from those of sophisticated, state sponsored “advanced persistent threat” groups, the firm FireEye said in its most recent M-Trends report. In-brief:The tactics of cyber criminal hacking crews are indistinguishable from those of sophisticated, state sponsored “advanced persistent threat” groups, the firm FireEye said in its most…

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The love you give today, is an investment in the future, for the future is seeded by what you sow today.

Leon Brown (via deeplifequotes)

Human Spatial Memory is Made Up of Numerous Individual Maps

Spatial memory is something we use and need in our everyday lives. Time for morning coffee? We head straight to the kitchen and know where to find the coffee machine and cups. To do this, we require a mental image of our home and its contents. If we didn’t have this information stored in our memory, we would have to search through the entire house every time we needed something. Exactly how this mental processing works is not clear. Do we use one big mental map of all of the objects we have in our home? Or do we have a bunch of small maps instead – perhaps one for each room? Tobias Meilinger and Marianne Strickrodt, cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, investigated these questions in a research study.

The research is in Cognition. (full access paywall)

Weird how the moment my FP goes to bed/stops talking to me is the same moment my mood goes from 100 to 0…. hm, must be a coincidence….

this week the senate will vote on whether or not to give the fbi warrantless access to your browsing data. this is extremely dangerous and a violation of privacy. not only would the fbi be able to essentially hack into your computers and internet service, but they might also hack into ones overseas. anything on your computers, they’ll be able to have access to. this is an extremely dangerous power the fbi is trying to get, and it CAN be stopped, but only if you guys are willing to put forth the effort.

how do you stop it? first, get the word out. twitter, tumblr, facebook, just get the word out by either making your own status or sharing this link. 

secondly, call your senators. on this website, just enter your phone number and it will give you a script to read off of. it will take you less than 30 seconds, trust me. you can also tweet them, send them emails, etc. all the contact info is on this site here. they will listen. dont know who your senators are? go here and scroll to the bottom. it lists all the senators and who you can call. also, you can tweet at them or send them an email. (all the links in this paragraph lead to the same source)

guys, it is extremely important this bill not get passed. PLEASE reblog this and at least tweet at them? you dont even have to think of anything to type. you literally click the tweet button and it does it for you. please, guys, please.

Leave who you were. Love who you are. Look forward to who you will become.

Unknown (via deeplifequotes)

1401. A muggleborn with a passion for computers learns programming during summer and brings their computer science books to Hogwarts, until one year they manage to bring a laptop and make it work. They inmediately start working on setting up a wi-fi network. Their muggleborn friends are eager to bring movies and series on pendrives the next semester.

Apple launches late AirPods into immediate ship slip

Apple today began selling the delayed AirPods, but the wireless headphones almost immediately skated to a 2017 ship date.

The Cupertino, Calif. company warned customers that the product would be available in “limited quantities at launch.”

Indeed.

The $159 headphones – which resemble enlarged ear buds sans wires – debuted on Apple’s online store earlier Tuesday. Within minutes, the estimated ship date shifted from Dec. 21 to mid-January 2017.

Apple introduced the AirPods in September, alongside the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. At the time, executives said that the headphones would be available in October. Late in October, however, Apple confirmed that the AirPods were delayed, saying, “We need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

via http://www.computerworld.com/article/3149861/computer-peripherals/apple-launches-late-airpods-into-immediate-ship-slip.html#tk.rss_news and www.computechtechnologyservices.com