The Insider News

Technology Review[^]:

A wearable brain scanner could give computers insight into how hard you're thinking.

Tested[^]:

Pixar's Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman recount how the files for Toy Story 2 were almost lost due to an accidental Linux command and bad backup.

The Oatmeal[^]:

Over 100 years ago, a Serbian-American inventor by the name of Nikola Tesla started fixing things that weren't broken. This is his story.

IdolHands.com[^]:

Functional fixedness is defined as the fixation on the common use of an object while overlooking entire categories of features of that object. The example given in the article was the failure of people on the Titanic to see the iceberg as a kind of lifeboat that could have provided shelter from the icy waters while help arrived. In software development the same sort of cognitive barriers manifest in a few different ways.

rc3.org[^]:

Advanced Vim users understand that Vim commands are a language unto themselves, and that the key to being productive is understanding Vim’s grammar. Pritzker accurately identifies that grammar as consisting of the following parts of speech: verbs, nouns, and modifiers.

Armin Ronacher[^]:

A couple of months ago I finally came to the conclusion that the way I am approaching HTTP is fundamentally flawed and I am already so far down the rabbit hole that it's nearly impossible to turn around and fix it.

Heroku[^]:

Are you a polyglot programmer? Do you think you can recognize any programming language on site? Take this little quiz and see how well you do.

The Setup[^]:

I’m Eric S. Raymond, aka “ESR”. I wrote some of the foundational papers on open-source development and maintain over 40 open-source projects and FAQs. You rely on my software every time you use a browser, a smartphone, or a gaming console.

Electronic Frontier Foundation[^]:

Who’s playing fast and loose with your data? The Big Brother Awards, billed as the “Oscars for data leeches” by the hackers and privacy advocates who hand out the prizes, shine a high-intensity spotlight on companies and individuals with poor privacy track records.

TorrentFreak[^]:

On May 13th, 2002 a new filesharing client called eMule entered into our world of sharing. Ten years later we’d like to take this anniversary as an opportunity to look back at some major technical achievements of filesharing applications since then and what might come in the years ahead. With further innovation, even the mighty BitTorrent can be improved to become impossible to shut down.

Ars Technica[^]:

Last year, The New York Times criticized usage-based broadband pricing, noting that “Moving an extra gigabyte of data at off-peak times costs virtually nothing.” More recently, a report by the advocacy group Public Knowledge suggested that broadband data caps, a form of usage-based pricing, are an inefficient way to manage congestion.

Daring Fireball[^]:

iOS is by no means feature-complete. But it’s getting harder to identify the low-hanging fruit — the things you just know Apple has to be working on, not just the stuff you hope they are.

Linux Hive[^]:

Linux has a reputation for robustness, but we're going to try and prove that there are still plenty of ways to damage a perfectly working system.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft is currently testing a modified version of Internet Explorer 9 on its Xbox 360 console, according to our sources. The Xbox 360 currently includes Bing voice search, but it's limited to media results. Microsoft's new Internet Explorer browser for Xbox will expand on this functionality to open up a full browser for the console. We are told that the browser will let Xbox users surf all parts of the web straight from their living rooms.