DevTopics

First it was musicians, now it’s software developers, and next it will be movie stars.  The gravy train is over, folks!

If you write code for a living, your career is in the crosshairs of the Web’s demand that everything digital be cheap or free.  A whole generation is growing up believing that if you cannot touch it, then it has no monetary value and is free for the taking.

The terrific webcomic The Oatmeal demonstrates this brave new world:

Is this necessarily a bad thing?  If we remove the economic incentive for the time-and-resource-intensive business of software development, consumers are likely to see fewer ambitious software products like Photoshop and Microsoft Office.  However, I’m confident in the future that we’ll all enjoy an endless supply of Fart apps.

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This is what I tweeted after being blown away by the movie Inception:

Inception is AMAZING! That rare combination of high-concept brain teaser with summer popcorn blockbuster.

And this tweet by Stas Miasnikou is one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the movie.  However, you must truly be a geek if this comment makes you LOL:

The main idea of "Inception": if you run a VM inside a VM inside a VM inside a VM, everything will be very slow

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Here’s a clever way to pre-screen candidates: post the job description in C# code.  That’s what a company in Port Chester, New York did for a $80K-$100K .NET Developer position posted on CraigsList.  The job description starts as:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace CandidateSearchApp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main( string[] args )
        {
            var candidateSearch = new CandidateSearch();

            foreach (Candidate candidate in candidateSearch.GetCandidates())
            {
                if (candidate.IsViable() && candidate.IsQualified())
                    candidate.SubmitResume();
            }
        }
    }

And the necessary qualifications are summarized as follows:

return
    canWriteCSharp
    && canWriteCPlusPlus
    && knowsOO
    && knowsInterop
    && knowsThreading
    && knowsEntity
    && knowsClientWCF
    && knowsLinq
    && knowsWinForms;

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An old joke floating around the Internet:

A little boy goes to his father and asks, “Daddy, how was I born?”

The father answers:

Well, son, I guess one day you will find out anyway!  Your Mom and I first met in a chat room on Yahoo.  We really hit it off, so I set up a date with your Mom via email.  Our first date was at a cyber cafe.  We snuck into a secluded room and googled each other.  Then your mother agreed to a download from my hard drive.  As soon as I was ready to upload, we discovered that neither one of us had used a firewall, and since it was too late to hit the delete button, nine months later a little pop-up appeared that said:

“You’ve got MALE!”

Photo Copyright © Erin Lee, used under license
Joke found at Web-Funny

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“I’m tellin ya, mo fos… I’ll bet my last clean diaper that C# is the best programming language there is.”
 

Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a programming poem.  A BABY programming poem, no less!  Apparently Google App Inventor is so easy that even an infant can build Android apps.

But back to the poem by Andra McCoy.  Here is the first stanza:

Why does PHP and HTML sleep in the same crib,
Whenever I look, they’re sharing a bib.
They seem to support some code they call OOP,
I find it irrelevant, more concerned with my Poop!

Any poem that contains both OOP and poop is true geek art in my book!

Read the rest of the “Baby On Rails” poem

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We label someone a “couch potato” if they spend too much time sitting on the couch watching TV.  The boob tube consumes about half of America’s leisure time or nearly three hours per day.

But the amount of time people spend online and using computers is also increasing.  Children spend an average of 89 minutes each day using a computer "for entertainment purposes," up from 62 minutes in 2004.  Eighty percent of U.S. adults spend an average of 13 hours per week online, while 1 in 7 are online more for than 24 hours per week.

Marriam-Webster defines “mouse potato” as “a person who spends a great deal of time using a computer.”  Although there is some debate about the future of the computer mouse — given the rise of non-mouse devices such as smartphones and tablets — “mouse potato” is a fitting term to describe our digital sloth selves.

Continue reading »

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Steve Jobs still knows what’s best for you, and it’s not porn.  Which is yet another reason why programmers prefer Android.

Thanks to Android News

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It’s a standard movie cliché: A hacker pounds away on his keyboard for 30 seconds to break a military-grade encryption scheme.  Nevermind that in real life it would take 8.4 million CPU years to factorize a 1024-bit number in software.  (Although the days of total security with 1024-bit RSA are coming to an end.)

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From “Where’s the Any Key?”, embedded with permission

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During a recent security audit, a company discovered that a
blonde employee was using the following password:

“MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento”

When the company asked the blonde why she had such a long password, she said the login screen required the password to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.

From Politically Incorrect Humor

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