The Insider News

Brett Forrest[^]:

Grigori Perelman is one of the greatest mathematicians of our time, a Russian genius who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, which plagued the brightest minds for a century. At the height of his fame, he refused a million-dollar award for his work. Then he disappeared. Our writer hunts him down on the streets of St. Petersburg.

Wired.com[^]:

Samsung revealed the world’s first Windows Phone 8 handset, dubbed the ATIV S. The company announced the ATIV S at the IFA conference in Berlin on Wednesday, showing off a 4.8-inch smartphone powered by a dual-core Qualcomm chip. The smartphone has a HD Super AMOLED display made from Corning Gorilla Glass 2 and features a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor. As for cameras, there’s an 8-megapizel rear camera and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing one. The phone comes in a 16GB or 32GB model, and both come with 1GB of RAM on board.

Xconomy[^]:

Microsoft won’t compete with Apple by going head-to-head in the hardware business. But the software pioneer could still climb back into the fight by offering connected software services that work on every platform—including Apple’s. That’s the read from Charlie Kindel, a Seattle-area entrepreneur and angel investor who spent some 20 years at Microsoft.

Citrix Systems[^]:

While “the cloud” may be the tech buzzword of the year, many Americans remain foggy about what the cloud really is and how it works. A new national survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Citrix, showed that most respondents believe the cloud is related to weather, while some referred to pillows, drugs and toilet paper. Those in the know claim working from home in their “birthday suit” is the cloud’s greatest advantage. The good news is that even those that don’t know exactly what the cloud is recognize its economic benefits and think the cloud is a catalyst for small business growth.

How-To Geek[^]:

Now that Windows 8 Enterprise is available to the public as a 90-day evaluation and Windows 8 Pro is available for Microsoft TechNet subscribers, we decided to collect links to the Windows 8 articles we’ve published since the release of the Developer Preview.

Rainbow Tux[^]:

This is what makes Linux great: you have the chance to choose what suits you best, you do not have to agree with me or someone else telling you what to do. The time spent searching is in my opinion a small price to pay for such a privilege. If anything, I hope that I have encouraged you to try new Linux distributions and get out of your comfort zone, to find what is the best Linux distribution for you!

Hack a Day[^]:

Instead of relying on an FTDI chip or otherwise sending serial data down a USB pipe, Ben's project is meant to be the hardware compliment to his book on programming USB devices. His hardware board is exceedingly simple, just an ATtiny 2313, a USB port, and a handful of other components, but allows Ben to receive data on eight pins on a breadboard and send them over USB to a computer.

ScottGu's Blog[^]:

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications. It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas. We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon.

Data Science Central[^]:

Hadoop (MapReduce where code is turned into map and reduce jobs, and Hadoop runs the jobs) is great at crunching data yet inefficient for analyzing data because each time you add, change or manipulate data you must stream over the entire dataset. In most organizations, data is always growing, changing, and manipulated and therefore time to analyze data significantly increases. As a result, to process large and diverse data sets, ad-hoc analytics or graph data structures, there must be better alternatives to Hadoop / MapReduce. Here are a few of them.

A geek with a hat[^]:

While LISP never really delivered on its promise of artificial intelligence and the whole field has started turning in a probabilistic rather than descriptive approach, this paper is a good read for anyone whose interests in computer science and engineering go beyond comparing Ruby to PHP on a syntactical basis. The Paper is 34 pages long and took me roughly 6 hours to grok, here’s the gist in ~1300 words.