The Insider News

The Verge[^]:

In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji.

ghacks.net[^]:

Today it became known that the author of the popular HoverZoom extension for the Google Chrome browser also implemented “features” into the extension that many users will certainly consider unethical if only they knew about them. A user of the extension noticed that it was acting up when connections to Github were made and after additional users reported the same issue, one user wanted to know why Hoverzoom needed to POST to a Czech media company server...

BBC News[^]:

Like all little boys, Roboy likes to show off. He can say a few words. He can shake hands and wave. He is learning to ride a tricycle. And - every parent's pride and joy - he has a functioning musculoskeletal anatomy.... As manufacturers get ready to market robots for the home it has become essential for them to overcome the public's suspicion of them. But designing a robot that is fun to be with - as well as useful and safe - is quite difficult.

Fraser Speirs[^]:

When the iPad first launched, many people reached for a quick analysis that it was a device "only for content consumption". Despite time and experience having proven those people quite obviously wrong, the debate seems to persist as to what the iPad is, precisely, for. My own opinion is that the iPad is for about 80% of all tasks you can conceivably do on a computer. I have never thought of the iPad as a distinct entity requiring a total first-principles relearning of what it means to use a computation device.

NYTimes.com[^]:

At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of scientists struggled to close in on physics' most elusive particle.... The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe.

http://www.fastcompany.com:

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

The White House (Le Blanc Maison?):

And if you have paid for your mobile device, and aren't bound by a service agreement or other obligation, you should be able to use it on another network. It's common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers' needs.

Troy Hunt[^]:

I don’t know how Evernote stored my password, you know, the one they think might have been accessed by masked assassins (or the digital equivalent thereof).... Last year we saw LinkedIn breached and some millions of SHA1 passwords with no salt exposed. Last week we saw Australia’s own ABC do the same thing; it took me 45 seconds to crack 53% of those and others have since gone on to crack more than 90% of them. These storage mechanisms are not robust, they’re stupid.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's not every day you get a proper new title in the SimCity series. In fact, it's been a bit over ten years since SimCity 4 last showed us what it was like to control the fate of a vast metropolis (Socities and Sim City Social notwithstanding). So it's fair to say that our expectations were high as we sat down with final release code for the new game, which launches in the US tomorrow. Even without access to the full global servers, which EA hasn't turned on yet, we were excited to try promised new features like undulating curved roads, government buildings with snap-on expansions, and a regional commodity system that lets you buy and sell excess resources.

Nic Young[^]:

Python provides a high level threading library that makes threading virtually painless.... Anybody with any experience with threads know that you have to have a way to synchronize the tasks between the threads. Python once again makes this easy by providing the Queue data structure. The following will be an in depth look at one of the multi-threaded paradigms you can take advantage of using Python's built-in threading and Queue library.

Haacked[^]:

Developers take pride in speaking their mind and not shying away from touchy subjects. Yet there is one subject makes many developers uncomfortable. Testing.... No, I’m talking about the kind of testing where you get your hands dirty actually trying the application. Where you attempt to break the beautifully factored code you may have just written.

NSHipster[^]:

That's right: this edition of NSHipster covers a topic so obscure, it doesn't even officially exist. Back Row is a private framework used in the Apple TV user experience. Its name is a reference to Front Row, an application included in Mac OS X 10.4 – 10.6 that paired with the Apple Remote to transform the Mac into a couch-friendly media center. The original Apple TV could be described as a "short Mac Mini", which ran a modified version of Front Row on a stripped-down build of Mac OS X. It was little more than an iTunes remote, streaming content from a shared iTunes library on a separate computer.

Somasegar's blog[^]:

For those of you who have downloaded our preview builds of these tools, you’ll find some very welcome enhancements in this release.... They enable a continuous integration workflow, with both the on-premises Team Foundation Server and the cloud-hosted Team Foundation Service supporting build workflows for apps for Office and SharePoint. Windows Azure cloud service projects can be used to easily create provider-hosted apps for SharePoint. The workflow designers have been dramatically improved, with a lot of fit-and-finish applied since the last preview. Remote debugging is now much more applicable and powerful, thanks to Service Bus. And a whole lot more.

another techie’s log[^]:

You had one job, Posterous, before shutting down. You promised us an archive before disappearing, and you delivered. Sort of. A general note for everyone: unless you really, really know what you’re doing, and boilerplate far exceeds the amount of data inserted, do not use template languages to generate XML.