The Insider News

ACM Queue[^]:

Both the HDD, the core building block of nonvolatile storage in computer systems today, and the SSD are part of a class of storage called block devices. These devices use logical addressing to access data and abstract the physical media, using small, fixed, contiguous segments of bytes as the addressable unit. Each block device consists of three major parts: storage media, a controller for managing the media, and a host interface for accessing the media.

Ars Technica[^]:

In August, a collection of military, government, and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations from 22 countries in the Pacific gathered in Singapore for Pacific Endeavor 2012, a joint exercise to test how quickly and how well they could communicate in the face of a disaster. While the simulated mission was peaceful, some of the participants were put through a separate, more hostile test—Cyber Endeavor, a full-on "live fire" cyberwarfare exercise focused on "protecting information in a collaborative environment, "with both innocent bystanders and hostile attackers."

Headspring[^]:

The Standish Group is an organization that has been studying and reporting on software projects for many years. In 1995, it reported that only 16.2% of software projects succeeded. In large companies, the number was only 8%. That is, these projects were on time and on budget. In 2012, there is some improvement. The 2012 report is still fairly damning of the industry as a whole. It cites 12% success rate for waterfall projects and 42% success rates for agile projects.

Test Run[^]:

When neural networks are used to model a set of existing data so that predictions can be made on new data, the main challenge is to find the set of weight and bias values that generate the outputs that best match the existing data. The most common technique for estimating optimal neural network weights and biases is called back-propagation. Although there are many excellent references that describe the complicated mathematics that underlie back-propagation, there are very few guides available for programmers that clearly explain how to program the back-propagation algorithm.

Medium[^]:

In our trade we sometimes like to segment the land of the programmers. You have the Computer Scientists, and the engineers, and the programmer, and the app developers, and the hackers, and the script kiddies, and on and on. Some groups like to make fun of the others (e.g. “heh. PHP kiddies. heh.”). There is a notion that you really need a deep understanding of the programming world before you can get going.

The Danger Zone[^]:

Sampling theory deals with the process of taking some continuous signal that varies with one or parameters, and sampling the signal at discrete values of those parameters. If you’re not familiar with signals and signal processing, you can think of a signal as some continuous function of any dimension that varies along its domain. To sample it, we then calculate that function’s value at certain points along the curve.

Living in an Ivory Basement[^]:

After yet another round of futile Twittering on the subject of research software, I thought I'd share a deeply personal story -- a story that explains some of my rather adamant stance that most research scientists need to think more critically about their code, and should adopt at least some of the basic coding hygiene used by virtually every modern practicing programmer.

ScanMySite[^]:

Bitcoin is a digital currency, shared among its peer network that helps people to buy and sell things online with no connection to their local currency. Sounds enticing, but this young concept is not for the faint-hearted. Its growing success has attracted incessant attacks against both individuals and Bitcoin merchants. This post explores the risks associated with adopting the fledgling currency and looks at some of the major security breaches that have hit the headlines in the last year.

The Future of Reading[^]:

Despite being one of its inventors, I can see a time when ClearType becomes obsolete. It solved a real problem of too-low display resolutions when we invented it about nine years ago, and I estimate it still has a long useful life in front of it. But it definitely has a limited lifespan. How long that will be depends on how quickly displays move towards higher resolution. That might take longer than anyone realizes. In fact, maybe a combination of ClearType and hardware resolution will get us where we need to be - in which case it could be around forever.