I don't hope MS is going to abandon the MSP system. Me, just as every other Norwegian loves traveling to Sweden to buy cheap food and stuff, and among those stuff is MSP  

posted by martinmine

I don't get how Apple is so high on that list. Out from rumors I have heard, the working conditions ain't really good in there. Maybe their workers gets paid to score good on that test? I would deff want to work in Microsoft when I'm done with my studies, one of my goals is to get over at Redmond and work there. So maybe I will see you in the future, Laura

posted by martinmine

I'm happy to see that you guys are working on your Facebook app again. I remember my experience with the current Facebook application on my Lumia 800 was that it was plain slow. I did not see why the menus where lagging and why it took so long time to start the application and load stuff on it. It ended up for me to use other apps for Facebook which had some iframe-like integration of the web-version of Facebook. But it is nice to see it is finally getting worked on

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

You find it closing sales of alcohol 1AM weird? I find it rather odd you even sell alcohol that early. Here in Norway, stores can't sell anything with alcohol after 8PM (or 6PM in the weekend) and alcohol over a certain percentage which I can not remember has to be sold in a special store which closes even earlier

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

Meh, I think Microsoft should focus more on quality on their apps. "hurr durr, my platform has X apps" It doesn't really means that the apps are good and that the users will have a good user experience with it. Sure Apple got tons of apps, but there was still no decent Imgur app until recently. I believe this will rather make developers submit an app just to get those 100 dollars, and lose focus on functionality and the purpose of their app. As a user, I don't wanna have a gazillion apps on my phone where this app is good for posting stuff on social network X, and this app is good for browsing social network X, key is to get good quality applications so the users don't exactly need that many apps, not some pre-release alpha/beta-stuff that barely works and crashes on one of 10 startups. 

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

I'm on IRB with the Twitter thing would just lead to marketing spam. I'm fed up as it is with "like this, like that, share this, share that" on Facebook, I also find it funny how people are using a technique on Twitter where they get followers by following others. I can then see in my mailbox some random people followed me which also follows a few thousand other people, but when you follow that many, you kinda lose the point of using Twitter. The more people who uses a social network, the more advertisers and kids uses it who create what I would call "digital noise" which is what makes me uninterested and more or less annoyed about what pops up on my social networks (Facebook is the worst of them). So Paul, if you are able to make ads which are not annoying, they are interesting and they apply to their target group, you would really have a nice business going

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

Valentines day? That day Reddit was flooded with posts of that? Studying and reading some books I just got on C++

Anyways, why didn't I come up with this idea after last episode? You guys should give us some more insight into what's going on at the Redmond campus like do some small intervju with some people (outside the studio where they actually work) about what they think about this and that which just happened, etc. It would probably require some more time spending on the program, but I'm sure it would be great!

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

And why didn't you tell me that you guys where on Reddit? I even submitted a question to Bill Gates when he was on Reddit a few days ago  

And about the Redbox, that might be good... for you guys in the US. People here in Norway still has to wait maybe over a year before they have to pay 2x your price in order to get a new movie on a dvd or bluray, probably why so many people download it from TPB and get it for free instead  

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

However, years passed on and during 8th grade I was getting into private server development. After fixing a SQL syntax error in a open-source game-server, I decided to continue learning this language, which was C#. I had previously been looking at PHP which I found rather easy. I had an issue with the server randomly disconnecting users, and the only trace I was left with was a stack-trace log file. This stack-trace said a connection was forced to be closed by host machine or something like that. That made me think there was something wrong in the socket-wrapper for the game server. After a few months from reading code, I picked up variables, functions, classes and later on static classes in the C# computer language and I suddenly wrote my own socket-wrapper. However, once the new wrapper was completed, I realized my router was randomly closing connections on port 21, which was where all the connections went through. 

It is kind of interesting how the bug or whatever it was in my rotuer caused me to actually learn C# which later on had a huge influence on my programming skills. I am learning C++ in uni now, which I find quite easy since the course is for people who has not touched any code at all.

I believe my first "real" program was a simple port-scanner checking if port X to Y on host Z is open. And just like that kid, I am the kind of person who sits right after unwrapping my presents on xmas eve (yes, that's how we do it in Norway) and codes some cool stuff. It was kinda funny though, since this xmas was when I managed to write a new socket wrapper class for a C# server-application I had which was my actual goal when I first started coding. The wrapper was written in C++ CLI.

I totally agree computer languages are getting easier and easier to learn. However, there is a huge downside of this: A lot of "self-learned programmers" often does not know how to code properly. By saying so, I mean you can understand how a basic syntax of a program is and you can start writing applications in .NET or whatever framework you want. However, you do not know what happens behind the scenes on your application and perhaps there are tons of bugs and the code might be extremly slow. This is something I have seen way too often in for example open-source private server communities: Oh my god! My server is running NHibernate on .NET 4.5 using framework X, Y Z, it is sooo awesome! Yes, the framework might be nice, however, in many of the citations I have seen, they do not even understand how to use the framework right, or got some other fundamentally function wrong. Another example is collections. They are either wrongly designed or not even thread-safe (in server-applications). I have often seen a List<Connection> where the Connection is a class holding the connection, connectionID, etc, where it actually loops through every single item in the list and check if the connection ID of this connection equals to the one we are trying to find. And on top of that, there is an entire lock around it which can theoretically cause a deadlock if you have other locks in different places around eg. an expensive foreach loop in the list. 

Of course, most .NET programmers would think, duh! use a hashtable or a dictionary! However, this was not the case. I am seeing this more and more often, applications that are either slow and/or contains a huge tons of bugs. One good example was the Spotify app on the Windows Phone platform which was almost useless since it crashed almost at every time I tried to resume the app, or even randomly. Sadly, this was one of the main reasons which made me go get the new iPhone 5, yet I miss the practical user-interface on the Windows Phone platform compared to the outdated iOS UI which I wrote about on my blog (http://martinmine.net/post/2012/12/09/The-Incredibly-Great-Revolutionary-iPhone-5.aspx). I think it is great we start learning a low-level programming language like C++ in school since we get to learn how a lot of stuff actually works which in my opinion is needed to write good code in contrast to just knowing the basics and knowing how to library calls. 

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

About the new Xbox, I really hope they are gonna ditch the disks (when a new console gets released). The disks are annoying to find, and they can get scratches which makes them unreadable. They also make a lot of noise and are in general slow to read from. Some memory stick solution would be great, it takes a lot less space, they are faster and the lifetime is far longer than the disks. I also hope Microsoft does something with the speed on the friends/messaging system. It is kinda annoying when I accidentally hit the xbox home button while playing Halo 4 and I have to WAIT for the thing to appear and then go away, and in the meantime I got killed. The xbox website is also quite slow, but has gotten a bit faster over the last month. This is something I hope Microsoft soon looks into since it is what annoys me most with the current console. On the other hand, I agree a lot that we do not really need a new console yet. Maybe in a few years when the new 4K tvs gets released which everyone is so hyped about. Oh, and about the bluray players, I don't even buy movies any movies, I stream everything through Netflix so it is kinda useless.

Oh, and Laura, did you watch CNET's Always On during CES where they did a lot of horrible things to tech products, they actually took a GoPro camera in liquid nitrogen while it was recording, and guess what? It survived! :O http://cnettv.cnet.com/gopro-camera-gets-torture-tested-liquid-nitrogen-ces/9742-1_53-50138568.html Really amazing, they even dropped a Microsoft Surface (torture test) and it was one of the few tech products that actually survived the fall What made me scared was that they took an iPad, took it into ice, it turned on, they took it into liquid nitrogen and it turned on while they had it in there, later on they dropped it so it shattered, and then it turned itself on. Freaking zombie tablet.

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

I always comment when I get time to do so, I think I actually comment more here than on Youtube actually O.o

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine

posted by martinmine