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Let me give you some advice, as someone who went to school for Computer Engineering (very aware of embedding programming) and now works for a major Internet browser vendor. C may have been considered high level back in the day, but relatively speaking is now one of the lowest level programming languages. While it's simple, and fast, it is verbose as hell to write anything useful. C's idea of portability is also bizarre, relative to modern higher level languages (autotools generates thousands of files). I love C, and it's my go to for lower level languages. I just cannot keep track of all there is to C++, it's like a dog that kept getting legs nailed to it until it was referred to as an octopus. C++ is a great language, but it's not for me. I have one lower level language that I'm expert in, and one higher level language that I'm expert in. Java, and C# in my opinion don't differentiate themselves enough from C (by design) as a dynamically typed language would.

That said, it's worthwhile to learn multiple different languages, even if you don't master them, because each one has something to teach you, will change how you think of programming, and make you more effective in programming with other languages as you can reuse interesting patterns. Seeing other people say "don't follow new trends" is disappointing; it's so close minded that it's sad to see that they've closed themselves off from learning new paradigms.

As far as higher level language is concerned, I'd recommend JavaScript. It's dynamically typed, which should be a new paradigm for you. Its loosely typed nature shouldn't be completely foreign to a C programmer (unless you don't understand C's implicit promotion and conversion rules). JavaScript is pervasive and you don't need an IDE for it (not like making an IDE for a dynamically typed language is trivial); just fire up your browser and you can play around with it. You'll find the web to be much more portable for your programs (though it's still not a perfect solution). JavaScript can also be used for the back end as well, with the Node.js runtime. Further, there are even higher level languages like TypeScript or, my favorite, CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript combines some of my favorite parts of Ruby and Python, but if you're not careful can generate some awful JavaScript (returning the evaluation of a for loop), but you can do the same with mistakes with C (generating awful assembly). JavaScript will also open you mind to functional programming, while not forcing it down your throat.

PHP was my first love, but many developers fail to recognize it as a language and think it's tightly bound to Apache. Ruby has some of the most mind bending metaprogramming features, but the performance pails in magnitude to modern JavaScript VMs. Python's community has a split that I see as detrimental between 2.X and 3.X, but has some great features of the language. I'm really not sure what differentiates Perl anymore, as its regex functionality has been borrowed by Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. Lua might be useful in place of JavaScript, as it's embeddable within C projects and is used frequently in scripting game engines (so I would recommend that, or JavaScript). That said, I have learned something useful from all of the above, and am glad I took the time to learn more about them, even if I did not choose to master them.

For my senior design project, I used C in an embedded device, as well as CoffeeScript to receive info and display it via a web interface. It was awesome to have such fine grain control of the bits when I needed, and the ability to create a Hash with a literal when needed. That's why I recommend on mastering one low level and one high level language.

For a quick intro I gave recently on JavaScript: http://mozilla-ntu.github.io/s... For more on C and JavaScript: http://nickdesaulniers.github....

If you don't agree that higher level is the way to go, Rust has an interesting new approach to systems programming, even if the APIs change every (still in beta) release.

Real-Time Face Substitution Will Hide You In The Scariest Way Possible

http://kotaku.com/real-time-face-substitution-will-hide-you-in-the-scarie-1496953478

"Audun Mathias Ãygard's creative experiment uses real-time facial recognition to hide your face in a webcam feed with different masks."

http://auduno.github.io/clmtrackr/examples/facesubstitution.html

Real-Time Face Substitution Will Hide You In The Scariest Way Possible

http://kotaku.com/real-time-face-substitution-will-hide-you-in-the-scarie-1496953478

"Audun Mathias Ãygard's creative experiment uses real-time facial recognition to hide your face in a webcam feed with different masks."

http://auduno.github.io/clmtrackr/examples/facesubstitution.html

Mercurial is actually making some strides in that direction... the hg-git mercurial plugin lets you push/pull from git repositories, and it transparently integrates itself into the mercurial command line, not as a separate tool.

Explicit vectorization is indeed much more reliable than automatic vectorization, and it will always deliver better performance.

Interestingly, there seems to be quite a few abstraction layer libraries for SIMD. There are also at least Boost.SIMD (part of NT2 [1]) and Vc [2].
Several array-handling libraries (NT2 [1], Eigen [3]) also a leverage SIMD explicitly.
Alternatively there are plenty of languages based on C with explicit SIMD programming, like the Intel SPMD Compiler [4].

If you're interested in SIMD, there is also apparently a workshop being held soon on this subject in Orlando [5].

[1] https://github.com/MetaScale/nt2
[2] http://code.compeng.uni-frankfurt.de/projects/vc/
[3] http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
[4] http://ispc.github.io/
[5] https://sites.google.com/site/wpmvp2014/

Look at the crowd of people on that lawn over there! -- More --

The question is PR for Amazon, the answer is PR for Netflix :-)

For pretty much everything he asked for, there's a Netflix open source project that does exactly what he wants. Docker-like project to create AMIs? Aminator. Tool to manage deployments? Asgard. Plus plenty more that solve issues that he either doesn't have yet or doesn't realize he has.

There is some existing work on the same basic idea of massively parallelizing regex matching by doing all the NFA branches in parallel, but using a GPU. Now a GPU is not necessarily perfectly suited to this problem, but it does have the advantage of being a mass-market consumer product, which produces economies of mass-market scale that let the average GPU have a ton more processing units and RAM than this Automata processor does. Would be interesting to see if an NFA-specialized processor gets enough of a speedup to overcome the manufacturing advantage of just throwing a beefy GPU at the problem.

Were you aware of Paver? http://paver.github.io/paver/

The names could get a little confusing as pave is also a Python project in nearly the same space.

Chrome changed the game in two ways: it focused on speed/security, and it brought many of the geeks back to a closed-source browser. Sure enough, Google is slowly building in proprietary non-standards compliant tech into Chrome. It's not as overt as ActionScript with IE back in the bad ol' days, but we're getting there, IMHO. Mozilla is the last bastion of a free, standards-compliant browser. And Mozilla has done amazing work in the last few releases to make Firefox faster. And, their R&D is impressive. While Google wants to make the web faster by pushing everyone to integrate a new language into every browser engine (Dart), Mozilla created asm.js. http://kripken.github.io/mloc_emscripten_talk/sloop.html I'd assert that the work Mozilla is doing is vital to the continued health of the internet. I don't agree with every decision they make, but asserting that it's somehow a better idea for them to drop most of the work they're doing and start funding themselves through PayPal or Kickstarter every year is absurd. Every other major browser (Chrome, IE, Safari) has a multi-hundred-billion dollar company backing it. Marketing and R&D are critical parts of Mozilla's survival strategy.

You seem to be the one full of shit. Mozilla doesn't use a "skinned webkit", it uses gecko. Go ahead and run the MathML Acid2 test on Android in both Firefox and Chrome if you don't believe me.

Um... I didn't say using Vatican as a metonym was wrong. I only object to doing so when it's anachronistic, especially in what purports to be a work about history. It's like talking about the American war for independence as a battle between Washington D.C. and London.

The language does not become richer by the sloppy use of poetic language. In fact, I agree with Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" that using figures of speech after we've lost a sense of the what the figure indicates does not enrich the language so much as it impoverishes thought.

Dependent on your connection you must be very patient. It has to load around 10MB from the web server. The emulator works in Firefox, Chrome and IE. Maybe you have more luck with this link: http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/

Web Audio API actually is an interesting feature.

See some of it in action: http://mohayonao.github.io/timbre.js/

This is the feature I've been waiting for since I like to write games and port them to HTML5. I have an audio-only game that only worked in Chrome until today because I had the audacity to require left/right panning.

Web Audio API actually is an interesting feature.

See some of it in action: http://mohayonao.github.io/timbre.js/

Just remember to smile as you leave.

Tried it in a javascript linux instance. Seemed to screw things up quite nicely.

Try it yourself:
http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/

for Linux and Windows:

creepy - A geolocation information aggregator (Linux+Windows)

http://ilektrojohn.github.io/creepy/
http://ilektrojohn.github.io/creepy/faq.html

"creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation."

Features

Map providers available :

        Google Maps
        Virtual Maps
        Open Street Maps

Location information retieval from :

        Twitter's tweet location
                Coordinates when tweet was posted from mobile device
                Place (geographical name) derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. Place gets translated into coordinates using geonames.com
                Bounding Box derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface.The less accurate source , a corner of the bounding box is selected randomly.
        Geolocation information accessible through image hosting services API
        EXIF tags from the photos posted.

Social networking platforms currently supported :

        Twitter
        Foursquare (only checkins that are posted to twitter)
        Gowalla (only checkins that are posted to twitter)

Image hosting services currently supported :

        flickr - information retrieved from API
        twitpic.com - information retrieved from API and photo exif tags
        yfrog.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        img.ly - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        plixi.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        twitrpix.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        foleext.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        shozu.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        pickhur.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        moby.to - information retrieved from API and photo exif tags
        twitsnaps.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        twitgoo.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags

Automatic caching of retrieved information in order to reduce API calls and the possibility of hiting limit rates.

GUI with navigateable map for better overview of the accumulated information

4 Maps providers (including Google Maps) to use.

Open locations in Google Maps in your browser

Export retrieved locations list as kmz (for Google Earth) or csv files.

Handling twitter authentication in an easy way using oAuth. User credentials are not shared with the application.

User/target search for twitter and flickr.

for Linux and Windows:

creepy - A geolocation information aggregator (Linux+Windows)

http://ilektrojohn.github.io/creepy/
http://ilektrojohn.github.io/creepy/faq.html

"creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation."

Features

Map providers available :

        Google Maps
        Virtual Maps
        Open Street Maps

Location information retieval from :

        Twitter's tweet location
                Coordinates when tweet was posted from mobile device
                Place (geographical name) derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. Place gets translated into coordinates using geonames.com
                Bounding Box derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface.The less accurate source , a corner of the bounding box is selected randomly.
        Geolocation information accessible through image hosting services API
        EXIF tags from the photos posted.

Social networking platforms currently supported :

        Twitter
        Foursquare (only checkins that are posted to twitter)
        Gowalla (only checkins that are posted to twitter)

Image hosting services currently supported :

        flickr - information retrieved from API
        twitpic.com - information retrieved from API and photo exif tags
        yfrog.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        img.ly - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        plixi.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        twitrpix.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        foleext.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        shozu.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        pickhur.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        moby.to - information retrieved from API and photo exif tags
        twitsnaps.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags
        twitgoo.com - information retrieved from photo exif tags

Automatic caching of retrieved information in order to reduce API calls and the possibility of hiting limit rates.

GUI with navigateable map for better overview of the accumulated information

4 Maps providers (including Google Maps) to use.

Open locations in Google Maps in your browser

Export retrieved locations list as kmz (for Google Earth) or csv files.

Handling twitter authentication in an easy way using oAuth. User credentials are not shared with the application.

User/target search for twitter and flickr.

Mostly because I used to work on Chrome but I like gyp. It will generate projects for XCode and Visual Studio so developers on those platforms can use the tools they're comfortable with. It will also generate projects for Ninja which is much faster than Make.

Reminds me of http://internetcensus2012.github.io/. I hope they'll publish all the data sets and I hope they won't have legal problems because of some sensitive data there, though I don't really believe it's possible. That's why the original author of IC2K12 published it anonymously.

You should check out BookJS ( http://sourcefabric.github.io/BookJS/ ). It's made so you can design book pages in the Chrome browser and create PDFs using the browser's print-to-pdf function. it can handle footnotes, floats, margin notes, etc. . It's being used in Fidus Writer ( http://www.fiduswriter.org/ ) and Booktype ( http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/ ). However, going on with Fidus writer, I am less sure that book editing can be directly done woith HTML, without a large amount of Javascript, basically because the contenteditable feature is so broken in most browsers. I have filed tickets with Chrome and Firefox.

Did you know that in most cases, you only need to bypass whatever method is used for checking your location. The server that does this, is usually not the one you stream your video from. It means that after passing the location check, you can actually connect directly to the video server for watching the video itself (and suffer much less from connectivity issues, if at all).

Look at this trick for example.

"Basically we are interested in proxying content only for certain domains. The actual streaming media sits on CDN networks and is usually not geo-locked. The amount of proxying we'll end up doing will be relatively insignificant compared to a VPN-based setup."

In case you want to try it out, there is a free service that does it. I'm a customer of a paid one which combines both VPN ("ibVPN") and DNS ("ibDNS") based services. On the paid front there are many other services that offer similar functionality. Most offer several hours of free trial, so you could see which ones works best for you.

Having said that, did you try contacting your ISP for support? Perhaps they change something in their routing tables which happens to work very bad for you? Maybe they can help.

it is wholly useless without the userspace binary blob

This looks promising.

There are lots of alternatives that can play back YouTube videos without using Google's JavaScript or Adobe Flash (e.g. ViewTube, youtube-dl, UnPlug, quvi and youtube-viewer (which also supports viewing comments).

http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/ So far it only exists as a plugin for Plex with versions for XBMC and raspberry pi in development

What I'd like to be officially able to do is queue up some 1- to 10-minute videos to watch, download them (possibly using encryption) while connected to the Internet, disconnect, and watch them.

I'd like it to be officially available, too. But the unofficial solution is pretty sweet.

Memory management is an issue that has me excited about Rust. Rust memory management is explicit, easy to use, deterministic, efficient and safe. The language designers understand that garbage collection is costly and that endemic use of a garbage collector limits applicability.

Although Rust does have reference counted heap objects on the so-called "exchange" heap, memory is normally allocated on the stack or on a "local" heap (via an "owned" pointer) that has "destructor-based memory management," much like C++ objects but without the leaks and wild pointers.

The result is the vast majority of allocated memory is not managed by the garbage collector. Use of the exchange heap is exceptional and explicit, yet immediately available when necessary. Otherwise, memory "management" is reduced to efficient stack pointer manipulation or simple, deterministic destruction. Compile time checks preclude bad pointers and simple leaks so common with traditional systems languages.

There is a series of detailed blog posts about Rust memory management here.

Rust was inspired by the need for an efficient, AOT compiled systems programming language that is productive, concise and at least as safe as contemporary "managed" languages. Its memory management scheme goes directly to the point of this story.

Yeah, we know about document.querySelector(). It's still limited and more of a pain in the ass to use than jQuery's $().

Here's what you're going to do, son. You're going to go through these lists of library functions, and you're going to list the native equivalent, and how well it's supported by the major browsers:

http://api.jquery.com/

http://underscorejs.org/

http://mochi.github.io/mochikit/doc/html/MochiKit/index.html

We're even starting easy, and just giving you three JavaScript libraries to cover. Remember, you have to do this analysis for each and every one of those functions.

I sure hope that you don't give up once you realize how wrong you are with your bullshit claim that "every feature has a native equivalent that works across browsers".

Oh, and if you don't prepare this comparison and have it ready within a few hours, we're going to know that you're wrong and that you're full of shit, son.

LinkedIn uses it for their mobile backend.
But I more than suspect that the mobile backend is just a simple frontend to the real backend. And that is written mainly in Scala.

As far as I know the closest thing to node.js in Scala would be something like Finagle, which they use at twitter:
http://twitter.github.io/scala_school/

For my current hobby project the backend is written in Scala, Akka and Play! - though I am considering replacing Play with Spray, since all the backed does is serving JSON from REST services.

http://akka.io/
http://spray.io/

SPDY is over TCP not UDP as you suggest.

http://mbelshe.github.io/SPDY-Specification/draft-mbelshe-spdy-00.xml#rfc.section.1.1

Seriously, web programming is for chumps, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.

Having worked on websites since '97 (and learned "on the job", so to speak), I can actually say it's getting better quickly. Standardized approaches like responsive design and Bootstrap are helping tremendously. Also, most of the technologies you mention are used in a small percentage of Web applications...for better or worse, most Web developers are dealing with the LAMP stack + HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

Like most people, I'm mostly interested in the capability to stream audio to all kinds of devices. And people have already pointed out some key differences with DLNA that explain why there is reason to be happy with something like MagicPlay.

But Airplay offers streaming of audio, as well as video, photo's and screen mirroring. I haven't looked into the source yet, but going by the description, it looks like MagicPlay doesn't offer any of that and sofar nobody is planning to add it. Has anyone looked at the source and are they able to refute this?

Calling MagicPlay "open source AirPlay" seems a bit of a stretch then. That's like calling AbiWord "open source Office". Of course the marketing department won't like it, but MagicPlay seems more like "open source RAOP" (Remote Audio Output Protocol, see the Unofficial AirPlay Protocol Specification ) with the added stuff required to nicely hook up sinks to sources.

Well, it depends.

This is the text of a slide of the presentation linked below:

"A Unified Approach?
Should we compile entire VMs from C/C++ to JavaScript, and implement JavaScript-emitting JITs?
Seems the only way to run most languages with perfect semantics + maximum speed
This is why I believe C/C++ to JavaScript translation is the core issue regarding compilation to JavaScript"

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/29324270

http://kripken.github.io/mloc_emscripten_talk/

Not perfect, but better... http://mrdoob.github.io/three.js/examples/css3d_periodictable.html

If we're going to use "sessionStorage, localStorage, and client-side databases" (as per TFA), why not just use an executable? Write the thing in .NET or Java or C

One of the appealing reasons for transitioning everything to the web is ease of portability (when standards are followed) the browser is your middleware. You do bring up a good point about the fat client. In the days of yore there was mainframe computing and arguably like real estate there are cycles, however, client/server model never really disappeared (Citrix). Thin clients are once again in the spotlight but the market isn't fully there yet (see the chrome book) and may not jump on it. The merits of these systems is another discussion. Regarding going the "traditional" binary route for (web) applications, you are now supporting multiple platforms. There is a lot of work involved to make this happen. QA for installers is an instant turn off personally, and now you've got Win32 & Win64, OSX, iOS (7 is coming), Android (Many flavors) and the churn of progress for each of these platforms with depricated apis, exceptions etc.

Traditional development aside there are many exciting things happening on the web side of things, I'm not sure if you've kept up with ASM.js or Emscripten. The gist, this allows compilers to export to JS where the application (written in C or Qt for example) is accessed via your browser. It's still in its infancy. However, with the increases made to JS engines in browsers these things are now possible and gaining traction. We shall see what the future holds, from an academic standpoint I think it's cool to see Quake done in JS.

There are also client heavy sites (take a look at USAToday.com) which use Backbone.js or other variants to achieve something really slick.

Another question: do modern day browsers encrypt cookies? I don't know for sure, but I suspect they don't.

No, this is left up to the developer. As an aside, there are frameworks which provide functionality like this out of the box.

I'm a programmer, but not a web developer.

I'm not certain what your background is, but if you're a Java guy you might be interested in the Play Framework. Fast iteration and you can get started pretty quickly. For the record I'm not affiliated with this project. If you're interested in something typesafe and different check out a Haskell based framework such as snap.

They released a UI enhancement Javascript library.

I'm on a 50 mb/sec internet connection and can't stream youtube movies above 360p without the movie stopping every couple of minutes due to buffer underrun. I've no issues with amazon prime, hulu or netflix movies. I don't know why this only happens with youtube. I don't see why I'd be paying $1.99/month.

Why stream when you can watch from the command line. For years I didn't know YouTube embedded ads in the videos.

The performance analysis tools for PostgreSQL are still rough, but they're coming out stronger now than ever before. The old slow query profiling approach is based on database log files, and the pgbadger tool has gotten a lot of improvements in the last year to take the lead in that area. Some web app providers have added PostgreSQL data collection and visualization to the products recently, Datadog is a good example, they even run Postgres internally.

Last year's PostgreSQL 9.2 added a built-in query profiling feature via an improved pg_stat_statements module. That makes it relatively easy to see what queries are taking up time on the server, in a way that matches similar statements based on underlying their query plan. I wrote a sort of call to arms to suggest how the next generation of analysis tools can leverage that in Beyond Query Logging.

You are correct that no one has really grabbed ahold of this area and put together a really easy to use tool set around it. All of the hard to construct pieces needed are in place now, and my list of goals for this year's 9.3 development includes pushing the tuning methodology outlined in my High Performance PostgreSQL 9.0 book into some reference tool implementations. The idea that this is a "black art" is coming from consultants who want you to be intimidated. People who want to understand how things work can read my book, and then wander out to confidently build terabyte size databases. I talk with new people who have done just that every week now.

The difference between asm.js with and without special optimizations is not necessarily that big. See benchmarks here, showing it can be anywhere from 1x (almost no change) to 5x. It depends a lot on the benchmark. And in a demo like this, the GPU matters a lot too, which makes asm.js matter less.
So all modern browsers should already work on this demo. But this is a very large codebase (over 1M lines of C++ compiled to JS), and it pushes the limit of what browsers have tested on. Now that this demo is public, that should make it easier for other browsers to fix what they need so the demo can work on them.

I see how passing this test is important in principle, I guess, but since it is elementary constructs used in a very complex and artificial way, does it really have much to do with how real math will look?

At least it's objective. That's something.

That chrome (at least the MacOS 26.0.1410.65 build) falls down hard on even the more reasonable mathml acid1 seems more significant...

the arcane kludges needed to produce popular web-page layout effects easily achieved using evil tables

Rejoice brother, for the era of display:table-cell has begun (supported in IE8 and up, and IE7 is effectively dead, thank god). Nice clean semantic markup, but now with access to all the juicy table features like vertical & horizontal-block centering, shared column height, and automatic column sizing. (Good article: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

You know there's something wrong with a standard when Microsoft's broken box-model implementation makes more sense.

We now have the option to use this as well :) http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/ Again, supported in IE8 and up.

Especially on responsive/fluid sites (where you often want to do things like, "I want this column to be 33.333% wide, oh but I also want 10px of inner padding"), this is a revelation. Sure we could've used a wrapper div, but sometimes this is not an option, and either way it makes the markup cleaner.

Other IE8+ stuff we can now use includes:
- :first-child (but hilariously, NOT :last-child)
- multiple class selectors (.foo.bar)
- direct-descendant selectors (.foo > .bar)
- :before and :after (IE8 still has some minor bugs, but easily avoidable)

Here's the BAD news:

IE10 has removed support for conditional comments, and .htc (something like PIE polyfill is now impossible). Go ahead and try getting something like border-image (or even a reasonable fallback) working in IE10, I dare you.

the lack of 'constants' to set standard colours and measurements

You're of course correct that native CSS still has no concept of anything like that. This is where LESS or SASS come in. And with the power of mixins (ie, to easily generate all the browser prefixes for more advanced stuff like gradients, shadows, etc), it's getting borderline irresponsible to not use a pre-processor. I instantly switched to SASS when I discovered this: http://jakearchibald.github.io/sass-ie/. This technique, I am convinced, is THE way to write maintainable, sophisticated responsive code (with a good path to easily strip out all media queries for IE8) right now.

Here's an interesting cross-platform (runs on Windows and Linux) open source IDE that sits on top of the GNU ARM tools:

http://ryansturmer.github.io/cuttlebug/