The Insider News

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.

Curious Rat[^]:

You helped build Twitter into the global platform it is today. You were the ones who saw something meaningful in what others considered stupid and superfluous. You gave Twitter “at” replies and short links and hashtags and everything else that made the 140 character limit just a little easier to deal with. You were the true innovators - not them. But your services are no longer required. Please pack your things and go.

BuildStarted.com[^]:

If you’re just starting out or you’ve been programming for 20+ years it can be scary to share your code with others. I hope I can encourage some of you to share your code. Share ideas. Make friends. Take that step. You never know where it might lead but it will lead nowhere if you don’t take a chance.

hilarymason.com[^]:

One of the most fun and challenging parts of my job is setting bitly’s research agenda. We’re a startup, so this means prioritizing the set of questions we look into in the context of what will be most beneficial for the rest of the business. We work on a wide variety of projects, from pure research to press collaborations to infrastructure and experimental products. We always have a list of research questions way longer than we have time and resources to pursue, so we developed a process for evaluating whether a given question is worth pursuing at a particular time.

KurzweilAI[^]:

The next version, dubbed “Watson 2.0,” would be energy- efficient enough to work on smartphones and tablets. The challenge for IBM is overcoming the technical obstacles to making Watson a handheld product, and figuring out how to price and deliver it. Watson’s nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, New York, that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today.

The Register[^]:

A new browser-based exploit for a Java vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on client systems has been spotted in the wild – and because of Oracle's Java patch schedule, it may be some time before a fix becomes widely available.