The Insider News

SIAM News[^]:

Some of the very best algorithms of the computer age are highlighted in the January/February 2000 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a joint publication of the American Institute of Physics and the IEEE Computer Society. Guest editors Jack Don-garra of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Fran-cis Sullivan of the Center for Comput-ing Sciences at the Institute for Defense Analyses put togeth-er a list they call the “Top Ten Algorithms of the Century.” “We tried to assemble the 10 al-gorithms with the greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century,” Dongarra and Sullivan write. As with any top-10 list, their selections—and non-selections—are bound to be controversial...

IBM[^]:

Java developers should learn functional paradigms now, even if they have no immediate plans to move to a functional language such as Scala or Clojure. Over time, all mainstream languages will become more functional; Neal Ford explores the reasons why in this installment.

Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga[^]:

Sometimes I just need to type garbage. Just to clear out my mind. Using editors to type such gibberish annoys me because it clutters my project workspace (I'm picky, I know). So I do this. Since I live in the browser, I just open a new tab and type in the url tab....

ZDNet[^]:

For users with an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, as the expiration date of that subscription approaches, users will receive notifications inside the Office applications and via e-mail to remind/nag users about the approaching expiration date. Once the subscription expires, the Office apps will enter a "read-only reduced functionality mode." This means users will be able to view or print documents, but won't be able to create any new documents or edit existing documents.

Ars Technica[^]:

Today, Microsoft releases Office 2013—the first full release of Microsoft's latest-generation productivity suite for consumers. Office 2013 has already made a partial debut on Microsoft's Windows RT tablets, though RT users will get a (slight) refresh with the full availability of the suite. The company gave consumers an open preview of Office last summer, which we reviewed in depth at the time of the suite's announcement. So there aren't any real surprises in the final versions of the applications being releasing today, at least as far as how they look and work.

Phys.org[^]:

Stanford Engineering's Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) has set a new record in computational science by successfully using a supercomputer with more than one million computing cores to solve a complex fluid dynamics problem—the prediction of noise generated by a supersonic jet engine.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

I believe one of the debates that is going on inside of Microsoft is how, and if, they should release Office 2013 Professional, Enterprise, or Office 365 for Windows RT. This is a far more complicated question than most observers would give it credit for. It’s not that it is hard to do, it is that it may not meet customer expectations while creating a long-term support (and migration) headache. Just on the support front it commits Microsoft to up to a decade of support for what is likely an interim offering (more on that later). And it commits them to new releases of desktop Office for a while on Windows RT as well. It also raises questions about more generally opening the desktop on Windows RT, which is something that is counter-strategic.

High Scalability[^]:

Pushing privacy is a good way to carve out a competitive niche against Google et al, as by definition they can never compete on privacy. I get that. But what I found most compelling is DDG’s strong vision of a crowdsourced network of plugins giving broader search coverage by tying an army of vertical data suppliers into their search framework. For example, there's a specialized Lego plugin for searching against a complete Lego database.... It will be fascinating to see how these forces play out. But for now let’s see how DuckDuckGo implements their search engine magic.

Silicon Valle[^]:

In 1981, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was shocked by the announcement of the IBM PC which threatened to steal market share from their high end systems, aka the VAX and PDP-11. One year later (1982), they responded with a “three pronged approach” which included... The Rainbow 100... DEC’s direct response to the IBM (aka IBM PC killer). It offered to run DOS, but also it had a Z-80 (found on Tandy machines and very popular at that times) to allow it to run CP/M (another wanna be from similarly named Digital Research. At last it had a VT100 terminal mode, so it could connect to big VAX systems.

Mental Floss[^]:

If you’re a geek of a certain age, a good portion of your childhood probably revolved around sitting too close to the TV, clutching a plastic safety cone-colored hand gun and blasting waterfowl out of a pixilated sky in Duck Hunt (also, trying to blow that dog’s head off when he laughed at you). The Duck Hunt gun, officially called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper, seems downright primitive next to the Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, but in the late 80s, it filled plenty of young heads with wonder. How did that thing work?

Bloomberg[^]:

Google Inc., which says it gets about 1,400 requests a month from U.S. authorities for users’ e- mails and documents, is organizing an effort to press for limits on government access to digital communications. The company has been talking to advocacy groups and companies about joining a lobbying effort to change the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.... Google officials say changes in the law are needed to prevent law enforcement from obtaining certain e-mails and other content without search warrants, and to give documents stored on cloud services the same legal protections as paper documents stored in a desk drawer.

InfoWorld[^]:

Lotus Development Corp. sold its first copy of 1-2-3 for DOS on Jan. 26, 1983, and it never looked back. Every single number-cruncher I knew at the time couldn't wait to part with the princely sum of $495 for the product -- on top of the price of the PC, typically $3,000 to $5,000. To this day, I believe Lotus 1-2-3, all by itself, started the Microsoft-Intel architecture hegemony. It was that good.

Eric Hexter's Blog[^]:

To actually call yourself a software engineer you need to take into account a few aspects of what an engineer should do. Typing code into a code editor or text editor is not what a Software Engineer is paid to do. At least, it is not the primary reason this profession exists. Yes, part of the job is to write code in any number of languages and platforms... it is more then writing code, it is about writing tests, and making sure the code you do type works as designed and can be easily maintained.

NPR[^]:

There they sat, in front of a machine no more soulful than a hair dryer, a machine they knew intellectually was just a collection of electrical pulses and metal, and yet they paused. And while eventually every participant killed the robot, it took them time to intellectually override their emotional queasiness — in the case of a helpful cat robot, around 35 seconds before they were able to complete the switching-off procedure. How long does it take you to switch off your stereo?