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Someone who knows how to search for code examples and how to learn from the work of others will be more or less self-sufficient. They can learn and grow their skills on their own without needing someone else to do it for them. The ability to learn and grow your knowledge is the single most important skill for any developer. Without the ability to grow you will find yourself quickly deprecated. I do expect people to know how to use the language and/or framework they were hired to work in, but I judge them primarily based on the work they submit. A guy who can figure out how to do things that he doesn’t know how to do, on his own, on the fly, is a real programmer.

A Fox News contributor and former state department adviser has accused WikiLeaks of conducting "political warfare against the US" and called for those behind the whistleblowing website to be declared "enemy combatants" so they can be subjected to "non-judicial actions".

In addition to Google's own app marketplace, Amazon, Horizon and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. So there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid. This is going to be a mess for both users and developers. Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.

Not to argue with The Steve or anything, but if a single app store, controlled by a single corporate entity, is better than many, then I guess we also need only one web site, and only one newspaper, and only one political party. Apple's classical "1984" commercial is getting more and more ironic.

IS CYBERWARFARE (a) one of the biggest threats of the 21st century or (b) an elaborate hoax designed to extract money from gullible governments? Stuxnet, the computer worm running rampant in Iran's nuclear facilities, tells us the answer. An analysis

of the worm by computer security company Symantec makes it abundantly clear that a few lines of malicious computer code can trip electricity grids, burn out power-station generators, pollute water supplies and sabotage gas pipelines. That cyberattacks can become real-world attacks is no longer a matter of conjecture.

The idea of the reset style sheet is to globally target every markup element and set all of its possible attributes to zero, default or inherit. This gives the developer a “clean slate” with no browser default styles. Many say that this is the first thing you should add when you start building a web page, but I firmly disagree.

I’m sure that I am one of the small minority of web developers who’s saying this, but reset style sheets are bad practice, and it’s time to stop using them.

Software obeys the laws of entropy, like everything else. Continuous change leads to software rot, which erodes the conceptual integrity of the original design. Software rot is unavoidable, but programmers who fail to take conceptual integrity into consideration create software that rots so so fast that it becomes worthless before it is even completed. Entropic failure of conceptual integrity is probably the most common reason for software project failure. (The second most common reason is delivering something other than what the customer wanted.) Software rot slows down progress exponentially, so many projects face exploding timelines and budgets before they are killed.

Jag bestämmer mig för att säga till henne och alla andra i väntrummet precis som det är. Att vi just fått in en tonårspojke som ser ut som ett plockepinn invärtes och att läkarna opererar honom. [...] Dör han på operationsbordet kan det gå snabbt. Överlever han rör det sig om åtskilliga timmar.

En efter en av de som aldrig borde sökt vård på en akutmottagning kom nästan lite skamset och bad att få tillbaka pengar och patientbricka och sa att det nog var bättre att de vände sig till vårdcentralen på måndag.

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Kristdemokraterna vill locka väljare med en akutgaranti. Ingen, menar partiet, ska behöva vänta mer än fyra timmar på en akutmottagning för att få träffa en läkare. Men om man kan vänta fyra timmar på en akutmottagning, och det inte beror på något slags felbedömning, så är man sannolikt på fel ställe från början. Medicinskt är en akutgaranti ett ungefär lika angeläget vallöfte som en intensivvårdsgaranti för förkylda.

A leading music industry figure has labelled attempts to thwart internet file-sharing as a "waste of time".

Peter Jenner, the former manager of Pink Floyd and now emeritus president of the International Music Managers' Forum (IMMF), launched a scathing attack on the music industry's tactics at a Westminster e-Forum.

A vast proportion of software at work today is horribly over-engineered for its task. And I’m not talking about the interfaces, about having too many controls or options for the users. These are, indeed, terrible sins but they are the visible ones. The worst of the overengineering goes on under the surface, in the code itself.

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The most insidious cause of overengineering is over-generalizing. We will over-generalize anything given half a chance. Writing code to work with a list of students? Well, we might want to work with teachers and the general public someday, better add a base People class and subclass Student from that. Or Person and then EducationPerson and then Student. Yes, that’s better, right?

Only, now we have three classes to maintain each with their own virtual methods and interfaces and probably split across three different files plus the one we were working in when a one-line dictionary would have been fine.

Every time the subject of checked versus runtime exceptions comes up, someone cites Bruce Eckel as an argument by authority. This is unfortunate, because, as much as I like and respect Bruce, he is out to sea on this one. Nor is it merely a matter of opinion. In this case, Bruce is factually incorrect. He believes things about checked exceptions that just aren’t true; and I think it’s time to lay his misconceptions to rest once and for all.

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Checked exceptions never meant that every exception had to be caught as soon as it was thrown. It is perfectly acceptable to declare that a method throws a checked exception. Indeed, this is exactly how exceptions are meant to be used. It warns whoever calls your method that they need to be ready for this exceptional condition, and they either need to catch it and handle it themselves; or, they themselves need to declare that they throw it so that they warn their callers.

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