The Insider News

Tim Anderson's ITWriting[^]:

Adobe’s Roy Fielding, who is also the original author of the W3C’s Tracking Preference Expression draft, has patched Apache, the open source web server, to ignore the Do Not Track header sent by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10, the browser in Windows 8. Even if you agree with Fielding’s views on browser defaults, quietly patching the world’s most used web server to ignore the IE10 setting looks hard to defend, especially on a matter that is far from clear cut. Fielding is personally involved, not only as the author of the Tracking Preference Expression document, but also as an employee of Adobe, which specialises in digital marketing and may be more aligned with the vendors and their brands which may want to track user activity wherever their ads appear, rather than with end users.

Tomm’s Tinkerings[^]:

I use C# with .NET or Mono on a daily basis. To be honest, I love the language. It’s clean, efficient and simple. Yesterday however, I suggested on IRC that whilst C# has definately benefited OpenSim with its simple debugging, rapid development and wide selection of prebuilt classes to choose from, it was not a great choice for what is, essentially, a high performance application. Upon stating this, a couple of people chirped up to tell me that while a language like C or C++ would provide better performance, I would be suprised how far JIT compilers have come. I decided to put this to the test.

mux' blog[^]:

Today I am going to tell you about my newest build: Fluffy2 and how I got her as efficient as she is now. What I want for my computers is low power consumption and efficiency. That last term means that I want them to achieve maximal performance while using minimal power, money and space on my desk. To accomplish this, I do not hesitate to solder the most essential parts right off the motherboard to see if that helps in it’s power consumpion. Also, to help both myself and others, I often design special electronics to make personal computers more efficient.

All this[^]:

The trick of Apple’s Retina graphics isn’t simply producing hardware with high-resolution displays, it’s also producing software that understands how and when to use pixel-doubling tricks to produce the best output without making everything tiny. This is especially true when it comes to rendering text. Oddly enough, Apple did something very similar almost 30 years ago with the original ImageWriter.

ACM Queue[^]:

Most applications do not deal with disks directly, instead storing their data in files in a file system, which protects us from those scoundrel disks. After all, a key task of the file system is to ensure that the file system can always be recovered to a consistent state after an unplanned system crash (for example, a power failure). While a good file system will be able to beat the disks into submission, the required effort can be great and the reduced performance annoying. This article examines the shortcuts that disks take and the hoops that file systems must jump through to get the desired reliability.

The Verge[^]:

RoboCup started twelve years ago, with an absurd goal to field a team of soccer robots against the human World Cup champions in 2050... and win. Right now the robots couldn't beat a team of toddlers. A bit like a regular soccer match, robot soccer has two teams, two goals, a field, a ball, players and a referee. On each team's sideline is a long table that acts as a makeshift robot hospital...

The Atlantic[^]:

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.

Ars Technica[^]:

The problem Nokia has appears to be not so much its hardware; it's the software. Windows Phone 8 isn't done yet. Not only is Windows Phone 8 not done, it's not even public yet. If Nokia let the assembled members of the fourth estate use its shiny new phones, they'd end up learning about Windows Phone 8's unrevealed features—features that Microsoft hasn't yet talked about.

NYTimes.com[^]:

It’s one thing if a bottomless money well like Google wants to sink its profits into Project Glass, its own wearable-computing initiative. But for a 300-person software company like Valve, developing eyeball computers seems an absurdly ambitious — some say foolish — enterprise. Valve’s exploration of new forms of game hardware comes as the PC, the device on which it has depended for much of its history, is changing in ways that could undermine its business. With a new PC operating system, Windows 8, coming out in October, Microsoft will start its own online marketplace for distributing software, including games. The move could take some of the, well, steam out of Steam.

SmartPlanet[^]:

Heather Knight has a friend named Data who performs standup comedy. She actually taught Data everything he knows. She programmed him. Data is a robot, a very funny robot, and part of Knight’s Marilyn Monrobot Labs in New York City. Knight has been working in robotics for just over a decade and is specifically interested in developing new ways for robots to interact with and help humans, to help us “flourish” as she puts it.