The Insider News

Github[^]:

GitHub is a goldmine of resources for game developers. I'd like to introduce you to five open source projects that'll help you build your first, or next, amazing game. Check them out for your weekend projects, Game Jam entries, or day-to-day projects at work!

Erik McClure[^]:

I see a lot of people get excited about extreme concurrency in modern hardware bringing us closer to the magical holy grail of raytracing. It seems that everyone thinks that once we have raytracing, we can fully simulate entire digital worlds, everything will be photorealistic, and graphics will become a "solved problem". This simply isn't true, and in fact highlights several fundamental misconceptions about the problems faced by modern games and other interactive media.

The Next Web[^]:

Google today announced a huge change for Google Apps, including its Business, Education, and Government editions. As of October 1, users will no longer have the ability to download documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in old Microsoft Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt). Assuming the Google Docs included Google Apps will be following in the footsteps of the Google Docs available to consumers, this means that the search giant will still support exporting into these Microsoft formats: Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), and PowerPoint (.pptx). Of course non-Microsoft formats will continue to be supported: ODT and RTF for documents, ODS and CSV for spreadsheets, SVG/PNG/JPEG for presentations, as well as PDF, TXT, and HTML for all three.

IEEE Spectrum[^]:

Since the dawn of the space age, more than 20 000 objects larger than a softball have accumulated in Earth’s orbit. About 1000 of those objects are spacecraft that carry active payloads, serving many valuable missions for mankind. But the rest could best be called junk, the by-product of thousands of launches and routine spacecraft deployments, nearly 200 explosions, and several collisions. And this junk poses a serious problem.

Jerry Nixon[^]:

New browsers introduce new ways of thinking. IE10 is no different. There are compatibility concerns to make your site look awesome everywhere. So where do you start to learn about this stuff? How about right here!

The Atlantic[^]:

Randall Munroe began his career in physics working with robots at NASA's Langley Research Center. He is famous, however, for engineering a creation of different kind: the iconic web comic that is xkcd. Last week, Munroe won the web's wonder for approximately the thousandth time when he published comic #1110, "Click and Drag," a soaring, spanning, surprising work that encouraged users to explore a fanciful world through their computer screens. As Rev Dan Catt pointed out, if you printed the comic at 300dpi, the resulting image would be about 46 feet wide.

The MOApp weblog[^]:

From Xerox Star to OS X Lion, here's a sample of the evolution of scrollbars on your screen.

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.

Learnable Programming[^]:

The goals of a programming system should be: 1. to support and encourage powerful ways of thinking, and 2. to enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs. A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. JavaScript and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning. And live coding, as a standalone feature, is worthless.

leebutterman.com[^]:

The ultimate goal is to take a passphrase, tokenize it into individual words, and find low-entropy words in increasingly-long contexts (0th order Markov model, 1st order, 2nd order), using completely local data sources. The front end is a straightforward Backbone.js GUI. Those models and views rely on querying for the existence of 1-grams, 2-grams, and 3-grams in pre-loaded data structures. The backend needs knowledge of roughly 10 million 2-grams and roughly 40 million 3-grams.