The Insider News

The Economist[^]:

As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-controlled machines facing ethical decisions is moving out of the realm of science fiction and into the real world. Society needs to find ways to ensure that they are better equipped to make moral judgments than HAL was.

The Clayman Institute for Gender Research[^]:

Asked to picture a computer programmer, most of us describe the archetypal computer geek, a brilliant but socially-awkward male. We imagine him as a largely noctural creature, passing sleepless nights writing computer code. According to workplace researchers, this stereotype of the lone male computer whiz is self-perpetuating, and it keeps the computer field overwhelming male. It may be surprising, then, to learn that the earliest computer programmers were women and that the programming field was once stereotyped as female.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency[^]:

Forget Facebook. Forget Groupon. Forget everything you know about Silicon Valley. Because Ponzify isn’t like other tech companies. We don’t promise results. We show them to you, on a piece of paper, that has your name and a monetary figure that increases every month.

The Verge[^]:

Thirty-one. That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract. Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore.

ThoughtStream.new[^]:

Anders Is 100% Correct. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Maintaining large JavaScript apps is nearly, if not entirely, impossible. But Derick, You Write Large JavaScript Apps... No, actually, I don’t.

m.e.driscoll: data utopian[^]:

As we dedicate an increasing fraction of our time interacting with software — from airport check-in terminals and parking meters, to desktop and mobile applications — digital interface design is becoming as important as physical architecture in improving our experience of the world.

Tab Completion[^]:

CSS was written from the beginning to be very forgiving of errors. When the browser encounters something in a CSS file that it doesn't understand, it does a very minimal freak-out, then continues on as soon as it can as if nothing bad had happened.

Bitovi[^]:

Have you ever found yourself wishing jQuery had just one more feature or wanted it to be a tiny bit faster? I know I have, but I understand jQuery can’t do everything. This is why the team at Bitovi created me, a collection of extremely useful DOM helpers and special events that complement jQuery.

F-Secure[^]:

About 900 million Windows computers get their updates from Microsoft Update. In addition to the DNS root servers, this update system has always been considered one of the weak points of the net. Antivirus people have nightmares about a variant of malware spoofing the update mechanism and replicating via it. Turns out, it looks like this has now been done.

GigOm[^]:

A report that Microsoft will hold back on Office for iPad and Android devices until it’s safely ensconced on Windows 8 tablets and Windows phones illustrates Microsoft’s quandary in the tablet age.

Boing Boing[^]:

Radia "Mother of the Internet" Perlman and the ghosts of RADM Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace and every woman who worked in technology for the past 150 years frown upon you, sir. Women may have been invisible, but the work we did laid the groundwork for more visible advancements now credited to more famous men.

Wired[^]:

Everyone uses search. If you’re like me, you use it all the time. Which means any time you type a query into that search field, you’re hit with a deluge of messages tangentially related to what you’re looking for. That needs to change, and the best way to do it is to adapt our emails accordingly.

The Atlantic[^]:

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.