90–90 Rule: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. … The Dunning-Kruger Effect: If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. … Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. … Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. … Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.
Tag: software
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Aspect, photo organization redefined – Bildhuus
For twenty years we have been using star ratings and color labels to organize our photos. We think it’s time for something better. Novel collection based organization approach; peer-to-peer synchronization across devices; transparent and automated photo storage; standard metadata and open formats; no subscriptions, no cloud.
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MIS market churn spring 2025 – WhichMIS?
Looking across the January census figures from 2021 to this year, we see that the SIMS school numbers have fallen dramatically, from a healthy 15,753 schools using their MIS in January 2021 to just 8,818 this year. That is a loss of some 6,935 schools in just four years! This means that some 44% of their schools have moved away from SIMS in that time. It reduces their market share from 67% in 2021 to just 40% now. Looking further back, SIMS was the dominant player for many years, with around 85% of the market in England only ten years ago…
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The Microsoft Excel World Champion isn’t worried about Copilot beating him (yet) – PCMag
In the US, you can catch the championships on sports channels like ESPN. “The fact I’ve been televised from a sports channel is just really funny,” Jarman says. “It’s awesome. All my friends at uni were rugby and football players, much sportier than me. And now it’s like, ‘Who’s a televised sportsman now?’ It’s just very entertaining.” …
“I don’t think Copilot is anywhere near [being] able to beat me or Andrew or anything like that,” Jarman says. Before each round at the championship, Microsoft advertised Copilot by showing videos of people solving questions with it. The competitors, who are a tight-knit bunch, found this “amusing, because it was all the easy questions Copilot was answering,” Jarman says. “I was out there going, ‘Well, yeah, but I could have done that in three seconds.’ But at some point, if it continues getting better, which I think it will, and it can beat me or Andrew, then we’re all out of a job,” Jarman says.
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The largest collection of free stuff on the internet! … Can I donate? We appreciate that people want to support us, but we never have and never will accept donations. We maintain this project because its fun and we want to help others, not make money.
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Apple innovation and execution – Benedict Evans
It ships MVPs that get better later, sure, and the original iPhone and Watch were MVPs, but the original iPhone also was the best phone I’d ever owned even with no 3G and no App Store. It wasn’t a concept. it wasn’t a vision of the future- it was the future. The Vision Pro is a concept, or a demo, and Apple doesn’t ship demos. Why did it ship the Vision Pro? What did it achieve? It didn’t sell in meaningful volume, because it couldn’t, and it didn’t lead to much developer activity ether, because no-one bought it. A lot of people even at Apple are puzzled.
The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. Last summer Apple told a very clear, coherent, compelling story of how it would combine the software frameworks it’s already built with the personal data in apps spread across your phones and the capabilities of LLMs to produce a new kind of personal assistant. This was the eats of Apple – taking a new primary technology and proposing way to make it useful for everyone else The hero demo at WWDC was ‘when is mom’s flight landing? / what’s our lunch plan? / how long will it take us to get there from the airport?” with your iPhone synthesising data from across apps and services to answer real-world questions posed in ways that computers could not answer before. This is your iPhone knowing who your mother is, finding the flight in all the various threads of comms in the last few weeks, knowing that it need to find a flight in the near future, and showing you what you need.
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Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May – XDA
Skype was first launched back in 2003, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011. A couple of years after that, it discontinued some of its in-house communication products like Windows Live Messenger, and then in 2015, the Redmond firm tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10. … In 2017, Microsoft launched Teams, a collaboration platform built on the backbone of Skype, designed to compete with the likes of Slack. It’s been pushing Teams pretty hard ever since, so you’d be forgiven if you were expecting Skype to be killed off, say, six years years ago when Skype for Business was retired. But just as you’d expect it to happen, some update would ship, and you’d say to yourself, “People are still working on this thing?”
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From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem – MIT Technology Review
In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you. So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?
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Use this app instead of Excel to directly edit CSV files – Lifehacker
ModernCSV, an indie app for Linux, Mac, and Windows computers, is the best tool I’ve come across for this purpose. If you work with CSV files frequently, or just need to edit one quickly, it’s worth checking out. This application is built specifically with CSV files in mind and makes working with them simple. … There’s even a command bar, triggered with the keyboard shortcut CLTR/CMD-L. This lets you quickly use any of the commands offered by the application without needing to learn the dedicated keyboard shortcut—just type what you want to do and hit enter.
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Twelve dudes and a hype tunnel: Scenes from the ‘Super Bowl for Excel nerds’ – The New York Times
“I remember thinking ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?’” Mr. Jarman, 30, a British financial consultant who lives in Toronto, said of the tunnel. “But it’s all in good fun. And if the other e-sports do it, we should too.” Mr. Grigolyunovich said his vision for future tournaments includes more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize for the winner. For now, many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN’s annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships. -
One for all and all for none – Notes, links, etc
You can look for available GP appointments using the NHS app. Pretty cool. Unless your local surgery has opted to use a different system. If that’s the case, you need to make sure you don’t click the ‘Check for available GP appointments’ button in the app because it will just say ‘No appointments available’. And when you phone the surgery, you’ll get a recorded message which says to use the app. So you’ll try again of course and get the same result: No appointments available. Perhaps you’ll feel bad for being a burden – because it’s flu season and the surgery must be flat out. Perhaps you’ll wait another day and when you try again you’ll find there are still no appointments available. -
Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld
For the Lab, the move towards browser-based accessibility to Second Life is based on addressing a number of long-term pain points in using the platform: The fact that it continues to require fairly high-end computer hardware to experience it at its very best – and roughly 50% of the existing user base do not have such hardware at their disposal. The fact that it requires a dedicated viewer to be downloaded and installed by new users as a part of the sign-up process. The fact that the viewer has a sprawling and complex UI which can be both hard to master by new users. Offering a browser-based / streaming solution can overcome these issues – and that is the point of what is being called Project Zero: to allow those on low-spec systems experience SL as if they were using a gaming rig with a high-end GPU, whilst offering incoming new users direct access to coming in-world via a URL within the sign-up workflow. -
Browser-based access to Second Life: Limited testing begins today – Second Life Community
Starting today, Second Life residents can help us test access to Second Life directly through the browser, with no download or GPU required. Initial testing will use the standard viewer UI, but in the next phase of work we will dramatically simplify the user interface, with the overall goal of greatly improving the accessibility of Second Life for a larger audience. -
I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop – Ars Technica
For things that are bigger than a note or dry-erase board but smaller than paying for some single-use, subscription-based app, I build little private webapps with Glide. You might use something else, but Glide is a really nice entry into the spreadsheet-to-app milieu. The apps it creates are the kind that can easily be shared and installed (i.e., “Add to Home Screen”) on phones, tablets, or desktops, from a browser. -
WhichMIS?
WhichMIS? is a free online publication for schools, multi-academy trusts and the wider education industry. It aims to present a balanced view of the MIS landscape in the UK, with views from all the key market players, as well as reviews, the latest news and expert commentary. -
Everything you can do from Google Chrome’s address bar (besides run searches) – WIRED
Chrome’s omnibox is not just for typing out URLs or searching Google. Use it to take notes, write emails, and chat with Gemini.
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