Programming languages history and current popularity

Here’s very nice infographic about programming languages history. At the end of it you’ll find a comparison chart with the most popular programming languages as of May 2011.

 

Interesting read: How Hard Drives work

The 'Hard' Disk

I’ve been reading about hdds lately and I stumbled across an interesting article.

Original Source

Even if you’re a self-proclaimed computer geek who can build a PC from components, I bet there are parts that you don’t fully understand. You might know, in abstract terms, how a computer restarts — but do you know the actual process? Likewise, there are few people — geek or otherwise — who don’t know the basis of how a hard drive operates; disks spin and heads read and write data.. but beyond that, how much do you know about the actual operation of a hard drive?

How do the heads move, for example? The head must be able to accurately seek a magnetic region that is just a few nanometers wide while the disk spins at thousands of revolutions per minute. That certainly couldn’t be done with a normal motor — and in fact, hard drive heads are moved with avoice coil actuator, much in the same way that a cone in a speaker is moved to make sound. By applying tiny amounts of electricity to a wire, a Lorentz force is used to move the hard drive head very accurately. There are no cogs, and minimal wear and tear — which is one of the reasons why hard drives last for such a long time (compared to other machines that operate under such conditions, anyway).

How does a head read data? At its most basic, the head is a piece of metal that’s wrapped in wire. As the head moves over the magnetic fields on the platter, changes in magnetism induce a current that is measured and converted into a binary value. It’s not quite that simple — there are different ways of making hard drive heads and encoding data on the magnetic surface — but Faraday’s law of induction is always used.

Finally, because the density of data is so high on modern drives — up to 625 billion bits (78GB) per square inch on a 1TB platter — the head must float just 5 or 10 nanometers above the magnetic regions. Instead of trying to machine a fixed head that hangs 10nm above the platters, modern hard drive heads float on a layer of air that’s created by the rotation of the drive. This technique is self-correcting: if the head rises too much, it loses buoyancy and falls back down to its “floating height.” Just so you have some idea of how close a head flies over a hard drive platter: 10nm is three times smaller than the transistors used in the latest computer processors — and as hard drive density increases, the floating height will only get lower.

For more information, watch Bill the Engineer Guy in the video below. Everything we’ve covered here is in the video, plus a few more cool factoids.

47 Extraordinary Psychological Facts about humans

#1 — You Have “Inattention Blindness”

Firstly, check the video below:

This is an example of what is called “inattention blindness” or “change blindness”. The idea is that people often miss large changes in their visual field. This has been shown in many experiments.

So what does this mean if you are designing a website or something on a computer screen? It means that you can’t assume that just because something is on the screen means that people see it. This is especially true when you refresh a screen and make one change on it. People may not realize they are even looking at a different screen. Remember, just because something happens in the visual field doesn’t mean that people are consciously aware of it.

#4 — You Imagine Objects From Above and Tilted (The “Canonical Perspective”)

Why you should believe the research in this blog post even though it’s from 1981— Whenever I talk about “old” research some people start right away to dismiss it. It’s easy to think that research done in the 1990s or 1980s, or heavens! the 1970s! couldn’t hold any interest for us now. I heartily disagree. If the research is sound and it’s about people, then the chances are high that it still has relevance. Certainly if you are talking about research from the 1980s showing that it is hard to read text on a computer screen, then more recent data is important –  the quality of computer monitors has changed so dramatically from the 1980s till now (believe me on this one, as I was around to see the screens of the 1980s. I am aware that many of you reading this blog have only seen a screen from the 80s in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, or maybe you saw it in an old black and white movie (joke), or, as my daughter likes to say to me, “that must have been when you were younger and the dinosaurs roamed).Have an Open Mind— So the purpose of the above long preamble to ask you to have an open mind about the following research that was done and written up in a book from 1981.Draw a Coffee Cup — If you ask someone to draw a picture of a coffee cup, chances are they will draw something that looks like this:

Everyone Drew A Similar Picture — In fact, a researcher named Palmer went all around the world and asked people to draw a coffee cup and the pictures above were what people drew. Notice the perspective of the cups. A few of them are “straight on”, but most are drawn from a perspective as if you are slightly above the cup looking down, and offset a little to the right or left. This has been dubbed the “canonical perspective”.

Why Not This? — No one he studied drew this:

which is what you would see if you were looking at a coffee cup from way above and looking down. Of course not, you say, but…. why not? And if you are going to say that the first perspective is the one that we actually see most of the time, when we look at a coffee cup… that it is the angle we are used to seeing the cup on our kitchen tables, I will tell you that this research has been done on many objects. For example, people were shown pictures of horses from various angles and perspectives and they most quickly recognized it as a horse when it was from this same canonical perspective. Yet I am fairly sure that most of us have not looked at horses from above most of the time. And the research was done with people recognizing a very small dog or cat. The canonical perspective still won out, even though when we see cats or very small dogs we are mainly looking at them from high above, not just slightly above. In fact the research shows that when we imagine an object we imagine it from this canonical perspective.

So, Why Care? — It seems to be a universal trait that we think about, remember, imagine and recognize objects from this canonical perspective. Why care? Well, if you want to use icons at your web site or in your web or software application that people will recognize, then you might want to use this perspective. This is probably not so critical if you are using a well known logo, for example, the logo for itunes or Firefox, but becomes important if the icon is not as familiar, such as recognizing below that one of the logos is of a truck, or a photo printer.

Read More at BusinessInsider.com

Originally published at WhatMakesThemClick.net.

Minecraft

http://www.minecraft.net/

I’ve been recently testing a cool new game that’s called “Minecraft“. It’s a sandbox game were you can alter everything in the world and extract certain resources to produce different tools that will allow you to extract even more resources, or the same resources but faster.

The game is still in its alpha stages, and it currently costs about 10 euros, but after it’s finished it’ll cost 20 euros.

You may be thinking “well, ok, but this seems to be rather old”. No, it’s still being developed, the project started in 2009. It looks like this because the “world” this game generate is huge, if those blocks(even poorly textured) were… well.. not blocks, you wouldn’t be able to play the game on a normal computer. I saw there are some mods though, like highdef textures.

It’s both browser-based and downloadable, and you can play it in multiplayer.

Oh, did I say it also features rail tracks and mine carts?

It’s a fun little game that can be a good time waster .

Here’s a fun minecraft rollercoaster somebody built:

 

Spin, a cool video

This is a very interesting short video I have found on Youtube. Watch it and enjoy

HL Rooms- A TWHL project

It’s the first Half-Life modification where I participated. It’s a project that’s been initiated on http://www.twhl.co.za, practically anyone who wanted could make a room and then the person who managed the entire project ( Captain Terror from TWHL) would include in the a chain of interconnected rooms. A lot of this kind of projects have failed, but this one resisted.
My map( a dedication for MuzzleFlash,now “The Mighty Atom” from TWHL) was too large and had too many features to be included in that chain, so it was included as a bonus map. You can acces it from the “portal map” where you can see the credits, play the mod, and other things. My map is represented by a spinning globe, near a “Jim Carry” flag( my avatar from TWHL).

Download Link

Have fun playing!