The Insider News

pandodaily.com[^]:

Many of the digital magazines on the market today – you can find them anywhere among Next Issue’s stable of subscriptions – are glorified PDFs that lean heavily on the design concerns of print magazines, with a few interactive elements tacked on in an effort to take advantage of the new medium. Basic rule: If the magazine app requires an instruction guide for how it should be used, it’s probably failing.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

One of the driving forces in modern science is the idea that the Universe “computes” the future, taking some initial state as an input and generating future states as an output. This is a powerful approach that has produced much insight. Some scientists go as far as to say that the Universe is a giant computer. Is this a reasonable assumption? Today, Ken Wharton at San Jose State University in California, makes an important argument that it is not.

AnandTech[^]:

With more spare area, write amplification is lower. The controller has more room and thus flexibility with running its defragmentation and garbage collection algorithms. The dreaded read-modify-write scenario is triggered less frequently as there's less space pressure thanks to additional spare area. If you're testing in a full-drive scenario, there's simply less data to keep track of when you've got more NAND set aside as spare area. This keeps internal data structure footprints smaller by default, which also improves performance.

Lifehacker[^]:

Some of the best and most interesting topics we cover here at Lifehacker are our how-to guides: Those posts that take you through a project step by step and leave you at the end having completed something you've always wanted to do. Here's a look back at our most popular how-to features of 2012.

• Cabin in the Woods was asked to be taken down from Blockbuster, iTunes, Amazon, and others.
• How I Met Your Mother was asked to be taken down from CBS.
• Take down notices were also issued for film reviews and Wikipedia articles.

Nettuts+[^]:

Every new version of JavaScript adds some extra goodies that make programming easier. EcmaScript 5 added some much needed methods to the Array data type, and, while you can find resources which teach you how to use these methods, they typically omit a discussion on using them with anything other than a boring, custom function. The new array methods added in ES5 are usually referred to as Array Extras. They ease the process of working with arrays by providing methods to perform common operations.

Making the Complex Simple[^]:

Now don’t get me wrong. C++11 is fantastic! I am in just about 100% agreement with all of the changes that have been made. C++ has definitely become much easier to use and it has even become more powerful. There is one thing it didn’t become though—and this is the most important—more simple. It seems that many of the seasoned developers have forgotten why we stopped using C++ and moved on to Java, C# and other modern languages.

Develop in the Cloud - Tim Kellogg[^]:

As a programmer, have you ever had to work with multithreaded code? It's horrible. You might as well give up on unit testing and quality; concurrency bugs usually aren't very reproducible. Hence the old adage: "Some people see a problem and say 'I know, I'll use threads.' Now they have two problems...." We need a language where we can write code as we normally do (single threaded) and have the compiler transform it into multithreaded code automatically. Such a compiler could weigh the benefits of multithreading against the overhead of creating threads and optimize accordingly. This is the only solution to our long-term dilemma.