The Insider News

Pat Shaughnessy[^]:

Blocks are one of the most commonly used and powerful features of Ruby. As you probably know, they allow you to pass a code snippet to iterators such as each, detect or inject. You can also write your own functions that call blocks for other reasons using the yield keyword. Ruby code containing blocks is often more succinct, elegant and expressive than the equivalent code would appear in older languages such as C or Java. However, don’t jump to the conclusion that blocks are a new idea! In fact, the computer science concept behind blocks, called “closures,” has its roots in the Lisp programming language, invented in 1958 by John McCarthy.

HotHardware[^]:

Black Mesa is the result of years of effort from a team determined to bring Gordon Freeman's first adventure into the modern age without compromising Valve's original artistic vision. It's one of the finest examples of fan-built mods that we've ever seen. This is no high-resolution texture update or lighting effects package. This is Black Mesa -- and it's going to remind you why you fell in love with Half-Life fourteen years ago.

DataGenetics[^]:

There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be arranged to form a 4-digit pin code. Out of these ten thousand codes, which is the least commonly used? If you were given the task of trying to crack a random credit card by repeatedly trying PIN codes, what order should you try guessing to maximize your chances of selecting the correct number in the shortest time? If you had to make predication about what the least commonly used 4-digit PIN is, what would be your guess?

Mashable[^]:

Circumstances have led to a de-facto monopolized market, Susan Crawford argues. According to a newly released study by the New America Foundation, “In the future, consumers wishing to subscribe to higher speed Internet services will likely face a near monopoly from cable providers, as telephone providers have halted wide-scale upgrades of their networks.” To make matters worse, major cable companies don’t compete with each other in local markets, which they have effectively divided up. The result, as the study concludes, is that in many places, you will soon only have one choice when connecting to the Internet.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads. “We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.

GeekWire[^]:

Today, the Redmond-based company officially unveiled the new pricing scheme for Office 365. Pricing is simple: $8.33 per month, $99.99 per year (billed annually). It’s an example of the company’s shift toward subscription-based pricing. Instead of simply launching a product for one computer, and requiring multiple licenses for each device, Microsoft’s shift to the cloud is allowing for a more robust experience, plus upgrades to future Office versions as long as users continue to pay the subscription fee.

iFixit[^]:

The Kindle Fire HD has landed on the doorstep of iFixit. Naturally, we've embarked on the epic voyage of exploring the electronic innards of the Kindle Fire HD. What will we find? Follow along as we methodically break down each component.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just a few issues - literally off the top of my head - that I personally dealt with last week.

Vimeo[^]:

We’ll explore the evolution of CSS’s layout capabilities from CSS 1 to CSS 3 and beyond. Along the way we’ll talk about why equal-height columns were such big a problem, what the CSS Working Group is currently working on, and what challenges are presented by taking print design capabilities and translating them for the Web.

Boris Smus[^]:

When developing in a particular environment, say Android or Cocoa, we are subconsciously aware that the APIs are essentially fixed and beyond our control. The web, however, is built by many different companies and individuals, giving consumers of the platform (web developers) a unique chance to also become contributors to its evolution. Rather than griping about how broken something on the web is, remember that you can play a part in fixing it!

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

To make it easier to figure out what you consider to be programming I’ve made a handy little list in ascending order of what I think is easy and what I think is complex. For the record, I think that all of these except the first are programming. Programming to me is defined as making some agent perform a task, no matter whether or not that agent is a computer or simply another person.

New Scientist[^]:

One goal of scientific publication is to share results in enough detail to allow other research teams to reproduce them and build on them. However, many recent reports have raised the alarm that a shocking amount of the published literature in fields ranging from cancer biology to psychology is not reproducible. Pharmaceuticals company Bayer, for example, recently revealed that it fails to replicate about two-thirds of published studies identifying possible drug targets.

.net magazine[^]:

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started with data visualisations. Beyond following blogs, you need to practise – and to practise, you need to understand the tools available. In this article, I want to introduce you to 20 different tools for creating visualisations: from simple charts to complex graphs, maps and infographics. Almost everything here is available for free, and some you have probably installed already.

Read Write Web[^]:

Microsoft is updating all of its major product lines this year, with the new Windows 8, Office, Windows Server and Internet Explorer releases, plus ongoing updates to the software used by its Xbox gaming platform. But while Ballmer called the year “epic,” he appears ready to if not jettison those products, at least subsume them in a new wave of devices around which Microsoft can develop platforms. “I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, [but] you’ll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company,” Ballmer told the Times. “Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it’s a different form of delivery...."