When I was about 12, my dad brought home a Texas Instruments portable terminal. It was not a computer, just a terminal that could connect to the mainframe computer at his work through the telephone. It had no screen, just a thermal printer.
Comments closedCategory: Technology
Healthcare.gov, the US Government’s health insurance exchange website for states that didn’t provide their own, was supposed to handle about 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know what a complete disaster the website as been. But it didn’t (and doesn’t) have to be that way.
Comments closedEverybody is taking about multi-platform software development these days. From a desktop to a laptop to a tablet to a phone, people and companies want their software to run on whatever device they are using.
Comments closedOn June 13th, 2013, Google announced that they would be discontinuing support for their ChromeFrame plugin for Internet Explorer. For those of you who are not aware of it, ChromeFrame enabled older versions of IE to support the newer HTML5 protocols by running Google Chrome from within.
Comments closedThis week Microsoft posted a series of videos on YouTube clearly mocking Apple’s creative process. One of the actors is obviously supposed to be Jonathan Ive. Some have said the other bears a resemblance to Steve Jobs and that if that’s who they were mocking, it’s in poor taste. While Microsoft is no stranger to poor taste, I think they were mocking Tim Cook, not Steve Jobs.
Comments closedLast week, the country of New Zealand (or “Middle Earth” for Lord of the Rings fans like me) joined the EU in passing legislation banning software patents. They did this because it’s becoming impossible for software developers to innovate without finding themselves violating someone’s patent. This drives up the cost of software development and drives down innovation.
Comments closedDumb Ways to Code
By Geoff Perlman
Sung to the tune of “Dumb Ways to Die” by Tangerine Kitty
Use an object that's out of scope
Don't escape your SQL quotes
Ship without a beta test
Think Google Translate to localize is bestComments closed
Nearly all CPUs used by your devices, from computers to tablets to phones, now contain multiple CPU cores. With a multi-core CPU, your computer can literally do multiple things at one time, which is called multiprocessing. And with a little careful planning, your Xojo apps can use multiprocessing for significant performance improvements in your apps.
Comments closedI’ve discovered a way to potentially speed-up your Internet access. Before we get to that, it occurs to me that the way in which computers find each other on the Internet may be a bit of a mystery to many. If you’d like to understand how it all works read this first.
Your devices (computers, tablets and smartphones) are constantly accessing their assigned DNS server and since they often can’t continue until a response is received, the speed of your DNS server can have a big effect on the speed of your Internet access. If you’re using any of the Internet classes in Xojo, this will of course affect the performance of your apps as well. Not all DNS servers are created equal. You are probably using one at your Internet provider and it may not be the fastest DNS server available to you. But with all the DNS servers out there, how can you know which one is fastest?
Comments closedThe LA Times is reporting that the Los Angeles Unified School District has awarded Apple a $30 million dollar contract to provide 35,000 iPads to students in the district. The iPad was chosen after students and teachers tried several tablets and gave the iPad the highest score.
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