The Insider News

The Verge[^]:

The topic of DeRose's lecture is "Math in the Movies." This topic is his job: translating principles of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra into software that renders objects or powers physics engines. This process is much the same at Pixar as it is at other computer animation or video game studios, he explains; part of why he's here is to explain why aspiring animators and game designers need a solid base in mathematics. As Pixar's Senior Scientist, DeRose has more than a solid base: PhD in computer science, specialty in computational physics, a decade as a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

AllThingsD[^]:

Apple tightly controls its software and hardware, and is fiercely competitive in battling its rivals, especially in the mobile market. And yet, while the company never creates apps for anyone else’s mobile system or device, each of its major mobile-platform foes — Google, Amazon and Microsoft — make many of their apps available for Apple devices. That makes those devices the sort of Switzerlands of the mobile world.

iFixit[^]:

Welcome to the future of watch evolution. The Pebble E-Paper Watch is the "first watch built for the 21st century." It can track your bikerides, display your text messages, and even tell the time! We had no choice but to bust the Pebble open and see what made it tick.

NYTimes.com[^]:

In agreeing to settle a case brought by 38 states involving the project, the search company for the first time is required to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly tell the public how to fend off privacy violations like this one. While the settlement also included a tiny — for Google — fine of $7 million, privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy.

The Next Web[^]:

Configuration Profiles (mobileconfigs) are small files installed with a single tap on iOS devices. They’re essentially instruction lists which can alter many settings, including network configurations and they’re used by thousands of companies around the world including app developers, corporations with IT departments and more. Their use is officially approved by Apple and there is nothing innately malicious about any given profile. But, if put to the right uses, they do open up the ability to read usernames and passwords right off of a screen, transmit data that would normally be secure (over HTTPS) to a malicious server where it can be read and a lot more.

Jon Gallant[^]:

My hard drive crashed today. As you can see in "My Backup Strategy" post, I am a rigorous backer-upper, but I got schooled today. My strategy includes "File History" from my C drive to my L drive and then backup the L drive to CrashPlan. When I setup my backup strategy I was under the impression that I'd be able to go to File History and restore all files to the latest version. Unfortunately that isn't the case.

A List Apart[^]:

Improving performance is a constant process. First we ditched tables, spacer gifs, and inline markup such as the element in favor of CSS, reducing page sizes, and separating style from layout. Then we became aware of all our DNS requests, caching, and the total number of files and started using CSS sprites, moving many small images out of the HTML and into a single background image. Now it’s time we embrace the third epoch in performance optimization: symbol fonts.

browserdiet.com[^]:

And what if we got together a bunch of experts who work on large sites to create a definitive front-end performance guide? And not just one of those boring guides made for robots, what if we did something fun? The definitive front-end performance guide...

Kinect for Windows Developer Blog[^]:

We are happy to announce we are releasing the Kinect for Windows samples under an open source license. You can find everything on CodePlex. We have posted a total of 22 unique samples in C#, C++, and Visual Basic. We’re doing this for a few reasons...

The Register[^]:

Here's the programme. I am going to put TextPad and Sublime through Verity's Immutable, Scientific And Absolutely Perfectly Fair Six Point Programmers' Editor Test, and see who wins. I am aware I am treading on sensitive and subjective ground here, so I am going to apply legendary Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen's anti-nitpicking strategy. I will attempt to anticipate and dismiss in advance every possible commentard objection, and leave the right-thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality, and definitely not obsessive paranoia.

devo.ps[^]:

Back when our team was dealing with operations, optimization and scalability... we had our fair share of troubleshooting poorly performing applications and infrastructures of various sizes, often large (think CNN or the World Bank). Tight deadlines, “exotic” technical stacks and lack of information usually made for memorable experiences. The cause of the issues was rarely obvious: here are a few things we usually got started with.

Hack a Day[^]:

The book is a great read on practical applications of hardware hacking. It starts off with simple hacks: installing a blue LED, building a USB adapter for the device’s controller ports, and replacing the power supply. The rest of the book goes over how the security on the device was compromised, and the legal implications of pulling off the hack.

CITEworld[^]:

It was snowing when we arrived at the BlackBerry campus in Waterloo, on a bitterly cold winter day. There were icicles under the bus, and the bare trees and snow-covered fields turned Canada black and white. We were visiting BlackBerry’s home ground to hear the story behind BlackBerry 10, the company’s new operating system and the engine it hopes to power a dramatic turnaround. Two years of work had just ended, and the company was ready to talk about what it had done, how it had done it, and where it wanted to go.

ZDNet[^]:

In a surprise reversal, Microsoft has changed the default behavior of Flash content on websites viewed using Internet Explorer in Windows 8 or Windows RT. Previously, sites had to be on a whitelist before Flash would work. The new behavior effectively turns the Compatibility View list into an exclusive blacklist of badly behaved sites.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft made a bold bet to build its own hardware, competing directly with Apple's iPad, but it was never an easy task to create something new and unique. Microsoft's own tablet is the result of it facing a "big challenge" relying on its hardware partners to create a high quality physical device that could go up against Apple. Project "Georgetown," the codename for Surface RT, started with two simple goals: the tablet couldn't leak and it must ship when Windows 8 is ready.... After months and months of prototyping and tweaking, the end result was unveiled to the world on June 18th of last year. These are a few of the concepts and prototypes that led to that final product.

Quote:

Almost three years after Google released its WebM video encoding technology as a "free" and open alternative to the existing H.264 backed by Apple and others, it has admitted its position was wrong and that it would pay to license the patents WebM infringes.