Daily Link Round-up

The Evil Unit Test (Blog Post)
In this blog post, Alberto Gutierrez complains about the fact that programmers tend to use Unit Test's so religiously, without regard to its use and practicality in all situations.

Tabs vs Spaces, need I say more?

Introduction to Git

In this nearly 2 hour presentation, Randal Schwartz presents "Introduction to Git", presented on January 5th, 2012 for the monthly UUASC-LA meeting.

It should only take a few hours... (Blog Post)

Hilton Lipschitz talks about how people underestimate the amount of work that goes into software development.

ålenkå - A GPU Based Database Server

From the SourceForge page: "Alenka is a modern analytical database engine written to take advantage of vector based processing and high bandwidth of modern GPUs:

• Vector-based processing: CUDA programming model allows a single operation to be applied to an entire set of data at once. 
• Self optimizing compression: Ultra fast compression and decompression performed directly inside GPU.
• Column-based storage: Minimize disk I/O by only accessing the relevant data.
• Fast database loads: Data load times measured in minutes, not in hours.
• Open source and free."

So far this is still in very early development and lacks some serious features when compared to current database solutions. But it is definitely showing potential in terms of performance and who knows, one day it might just lead to something big.

Funny Bill Gates Email rant (Blog Post)

In the above linked .pdf file from 2003 an email discussion goes on about certain issues on the microsoft.com website. Things get interesting when Bill Gates starts ranting (from page 3) about the trouble users have to go through to download software from the microsoft.com website. Things have certainly changed a lot since then for Microsoft but I have not doubt things got pushed significantly when the big boss (who is a geek himself after all) voiced his utter dissatisfaction in cases such as these (together with some competition from other tech companies). This is the very reason a large company such as Microsoft needs some clear direction from the top boss. Of course the opposite is often true as well, a great deal of businesses have been pushed over cliff edges due to poor management decisions and lack of drive.