The Insider News

Quote: foxnews.com[^]

North Korea will soon allow foreigners to tweet, Skype and surf the Internet from their cellphones, iPads and other mobile devices in its second relaxation of controls on communications in recent weeks. However, North Korean citizens will not have access to the mobile Internet service to be offered by provider Koryolink within the next week.

Quote: trapcc[^]

Compute with 0 instructions on Intel! Discover the awesomeness of the Intel MMU! Follow @julianbangert and @sergeybratus for updates. See a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSRcvrVs5ug

What is this?

This is a proof by construction that the Intel MMU's fault handling mechanism is Turing complete. We have constructed an assembler that translates 'Move, Branch if Zero, Decrement' instructions to C source that sets up various processor control tables. After this code has executed, the CPU computes by attempting to fault without ever executing a single instruction. Optionally, the assembler can also generate X86 instructions that will display variables in the VGA frame buffer and will cause control to be transferred between the native (display) instructions and 'weird machine' trap instructions

Applied Information Sciences Blog[^]:

As we build applications for more and more platforms, it is extremely important that we maximize our code reuse across platforms. With the release of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has made significant improvements in platform convergence – this convergence will continue with each release. They share the same core as Windows, and Microsoft removed .NET compact framework and replaced it with CoreCLR and added WinRT. Much of this is common to Windows 8 itself. However, it is important to understand that these are still two distinct platforms and still do not have 100% convergence with binary compatibility. Maximizing reuse across these platforms is key to an efficient development experience.

Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework[^]:

Sample Browser 1.0 for Windows 8 is released in the Windows Store today – a new relaxing way for Developers to search, browse, learn and share over 5000 code samples on any Windows 8 devices, including Surfaces! This is a collaborative effort from Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Windows 8 Content Publishing Team and MSDN Samples Gallery.

Mike Volodarsky[^]:

ASP.NET Health Monitoring was one of the big features I worked on for the ASP.NET 2.0 release. It was going to be the solution for troubleshooting and supporting ASP.NET apps in production … it also was one of the most misunderstood and arguably most over-engineered features we built. Fast forward 8 years later, after releasing ASP.NET, IIS7, and building LeanSentry. This is the story of this feature, lessons learned while building it, and a practical take on when to use/not to use Health Monitoring for monitoring your ASP.NET applications.

Nettuts+[^]:

Test-driven development (TDD) is a process that has been documented considerably over recent years. A process of baking your tests right into your everyday coding, as opposed to a nagging afterthought, should be something that developers seek to make the norm, rather than some ideal fantasy. The whole process is very simple to get to grips with, and it shouldn’t take too long before you wonder how you were able to get anything done before! There are huge gains to be made from TDD – namely, the quality of your code improving, but also clarity and focus on what it is that you are trying to achieve, and the way in which you will achieve it. TDD also works seamlessly with agile development, and can best be utilized when pair-programming, as you will see later on.

The Official Blog of BigML.com[^]:

Recently, Professor Pedro Domingos, one of the top machine learning researchers in the world, wrote a great article in the Communications of the ACM entitled “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning“. In it, he not only summarizes the general ideas in machine learning in fairly accessible terms, but he also manages to impart most of the things we’ve come to regard as common sense or folk wisdom in the field.... Now, while it’s very light reading for the academic literature, it’s fairly dense by other comparisons. Since so much of it is relevant to anyone trying to use BigML, I’m going to try to give our readers the Cliff’s Notes version right here in our blog, with maybe a few more examples and a little less academic terminology.

Errata Security[^]:

In the decade leading to 2001, Intel CPUs went from 33-MHz to 3-GHz, a thousand-fold increase in speed. In the decade since, they’ve been stuck at 3-GHz. Instead of faster clock speeds, they’ve been getting more logic. Instead of one instruction per clock cycle, they now execute four (“superscalar”). Instead of one computation per instruction, they now do eight (“SIMD”). Instead of a single CPU on a chip, they now put four (“multi-core”). However, desktop processors have been stuck at four cores for several years now. That’s because the software is lagging.

GigaOm[^]:

More and more companies and open source projects are trying to let users run SQL queries from inside Hadoop itself. Here’s a list of what’s available and, on a high level, how they work.

Network World[^]:

Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs' clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures. AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested -- from HP and Rackspace -- were lacking, particularly at larger scales.

Tautological Cascade[^]:

This goes without saying, but honestly, I never thought I'd see the day. Running Half Life nice and smooth... On Linux. Wow. Although there were really no actual problems with the installation process, there were some annoyances, so I've decided to compile a short list of steps that you should follow in order to use Steam on Debian. Please note that these only solve problems which I myself have encountered, and that they are usually solved for you if you use Ubuntu.

Exploring IE[^]:

Today we’re excited to announce the online debut of Thief of Thieves: Experience, an interactive online game based on the comic book series from Robert Kirkman and Skybound, his imprint at Image Comics. The site is a showcase of the new features in Internet Explorer 10, including full multi-touch capabilities and HTML5 support. We thought bringing the comic book style to the web would suit the immersive, chromeless browsing experience on Internet Explorer with Windows 8.

The most important JEPs that we've slipped into M7 are those related to
Project Lambda, the sole driving feature of the release. The language
and VM work for Lambda has already been integrated, but at least another
six weeks are needed to refine the stream API and finish the related
core-libraries enhancements (JEPs 107 and 109).