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Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.
But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)
I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming - the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on.
Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are.
This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.
A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
The original specifications for Apollo navigation called for the ability to fly a complete mission, including a lunar landing, with no help from Earth - none, not even voice communications.
He said this has the potential to be the first broadband killer application, and it has sort of become the truth because obviously it's so bandwidth intensive. I mean, it has been an issue.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).
Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
Just take terrorism, for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's not like what people think about what Facebook is.
A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. I think part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.
In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.
Berlin definitely has one of the most vibrant of the startup scenes that I have seen. Not really just across Europe, but across the whole world in terms of cities. It's an interesting dynamic.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.
There are good examples of companies - Coca-Cola is one - that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.
We were doing mobile games before the iPhone. We were doing free-to-play with 'Quake Live.' We wanted to do massively multiplayer stuff in the early days but didn't have the resources to do it.
When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don't want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren't. There are pranks, IMs.
There really was nothing like it at the time. We had good ideas for implementation, so we proceeded. I think it was an excellent solution to the reliability issues with existing search engines.
Oculus version three or five or whatever it ends up being is something that can be used unplugged - we'd have our own Android stuff and all that - but you could plug it into the PC and use that.
When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.
The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.
I think as a company, if you can get two things right--having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff--then you can do pretty well.
Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy.
I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we'd initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.
You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.
If the original Facebook was the first five minutes [of a conversation] and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you today is the rest-the next few hours of a deep engaging conversation.
In general, we're a social network. I prefer that because I think it is focused on the people part of it - as opposed to some people call it social media, which I think focuses more on the content.
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people - and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
Well, coffee is my drug of choice, generally, with a little bit of Pepsi here and there, if I need more sugar. But yeah, if I could do intravenous coffee, I would. But I guess that's pretty standard.
Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.
Before you know it, you're half-way done with your idea and you've accidentally learned how to do it too. In short, you start with little bit of something real and make it tick. Then you make it tock.
You hear these stories about people who take apart their radio and put it back. Or just learn a lot from taking it apart. But I wasn't as into that stuff as I was just into how computer programs work.
I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.
Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020.
Companies face a handful of different risks, whether it is competitors or different market environments. But I think that people focus way too much on competitors and not enough on their own execution.
A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it's the most ridiculous concept.
Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.
If you want to build an open source project, you can't let your ego stand in the way. You can't rewrite everybody's patches, you can't second-guess everybody, and you have to give people equal control.
A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.
I don't hate anybody. The Winklevi aren't suing me for intellectual property theft. They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, the world didn't work the way it was supposed to for them.
In my experience everyone will have a different view of the right level of tax so governments need to provide clear guidance that conforms to a set of international standards that all governments accept.
The cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.
Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.
The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.
On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system.
I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, 'Maybe someday we'll build a company. This probably isn't it, but one day we will.'
There are a lot of people whove been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.