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Showing posts from May, 2008
Bill Gates interview - 1986 As chief executive officer of Microsoft, William H. (Bill) Gates is considered one of the driving forces behind today’s personal computing and office automation industry. Gates started his career in computer software at a young age. Both Gates and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, worked as programming consultants while attending high school in Seattle, Washington. In 1974, Gates, then an undergraduate at Harvard University, worked with Allen to develop a BASIC programming language for the first commercial microcomputer, the MITS Altair. After the successful completion of this project, the two formed Microsoft to develop and market software for the emerging microcomputer marketplace. Microsoft has set standards for the software industry in languages, operating systems, and application software. Gates has provided the vision for the company’s new product ideas and technologies. He also provides hands-on guidance to the technology groups that develop new produ
DVI vs VGA DVI - information goes directly from your video card to your monitor. The color of each pixel on your monitor is calculated by your video card and then sent as digital information to your monitor so that no conversion is necessary. An LCD monitor simply reads this information and displays it directly VGA - Information is converted from digital to [red,green,blue] format. Some accuracy and time is lost in this converstion. How much is lost depends on the monitor's conversion hardware. Image Quality: On a CRT monitor, there is no real image quality difference between DVI and VGA. This is because a CRT is natively based on the [red,green,blue] format for displaying each pixel. On an LCD, you will notice a difference between the 2 formats if you look hard enough. Different LCDs will handle the conversion differently. You may start to see dithering, banding, "dancing pixels" and blander/incorrect colors when using vga on an LCD. The larger the LCD/resolution the mor
Little Boxes...Little Boxes.........A song on ticky tacky houses!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEvEEcc9iC8&feature=related By Regina Spektor (I love her for this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGTDRztaCCw&feature=related )
What makes programming so difficult - and can we make it easier? By Karsten Wagner I read this great article by Karsten Wagner and couldn't stop myself from reproducing it here... I often thought about the reasons why programming seems to be so difficult and also so different to many other professions. And to what degree it's possible to simplify and quicken the process. Inspired by this blog post , I want to share my view of the topic here. What's the 'process' behind programming? How do we do it? I think that we can break down the process of programming info three steps: Step 1: Analyse the problem you want to write a program for and create a model of the problem which can be implemented as a program. This step has do be done no matter which programming language you use for implementation. It requires both domain specific knowledge as implementation specific knowledge. It also requires knowledge how people interact with computers, about which things are solvable