The Insider News

Linux.com[^]:

Parallel computing and heterogeneous systems — with mixed types of computational units — are able to break through SMP scaling limits and achieve increased performance with reduced power consumption. However, they also come with their own challenges, and making parallel computing easy to use has been described as “a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced.” With these challenges in mind the Parallella project has set out to help close the knowledge gap by developing an affordable, high performance and truly open parallel computing platform.

TechNewsDaily.com[^]:

The clock to unlock a new mobile phone is running out. In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on January 26.

Alan Mendelevich[^]:

In 2010 Apple introduced the first iPad and basically created a new segment of devices – tablets. iPad wasn’t a full PC replacement (and still isn’t) but was considered a big step towards the real post-PC era. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that at some point in the near future iPad (and possibly similar competing products) would replace PCs for most purposes, except maybe some very specific areas. That said, to this day it’s pretty much inconceivable for someone who ever really needed a PC to be able to get by without one.

Wired.com[^]:

Andrew Bujalski’s new film Computer Chess, which debuted Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, is perhaps one of the oddest sports movies ever made. A black-and-white period piece shot on 16 mm film straight out of the 1980s era it depicts, Computer Chess follows a series of programming teams at a computer chess tournament as they compete to write the ultimate program to defeat a human competitor.

UniBul[^]:

Well, a slew of African start-ups are now facilitating similar types of transfers, but instead of cash, the currency being exchanged is airtime minutes. In addition to their most obvious application, these can be exchanged for cash at mobile phone dealers or bartered for products and services. One immediately apparent advantage of such a set-up is that there is no need for a proprietary system of agents — anyone dealing in prepaid airtime minutes would do.

Mathias Bynens[^]:

I was asked to give an introductory talk on HTML5 for the latest Adobe User Group Belgium Web SIG Event. The presentation I ended up with is entitled “HTML5: It goes to ELEVEN” and can be viewed on Slideshare. Since the target audience was filled with ‘esteemed HTML5 newcomers’ I decided to focus on how easy it is to ‘switch’ to HTML5 and use it today. The way I see it, there are three levels of HTML5 usage...

Matthew Moore Design[^]:

Flat design is beautiful and refreshing. It’s also generally faster to design and easier to make responsive. If it was a graphic design trend, it’d be well received. Unfortunately, us web designers have that pesky ‘usability’ thing always looming large. We cannot ignore the user experience with our work, so because of that, flat design is inherently flawed.

Charles Young[^]:

The C# compiler is a pretty good thing, but it has limitations. One limitation that has given me a headache this evening is its inability to guard against cycles in structs. As I learn to think and programme in a more functional style, I find that I am beginning to rely more and more on structs to pass data. This is natural when programming in the functional style, but structs can be damned awkward blighters. Here is a classic gotcha. The following code won't compile...

Don Syme[^]:

I'm very pleased to see that the latest and greatest Try F# 3.0 has been released today! Try F# is a web-based tool for learning and exploring F# 3.0, a simple and pragmatic programming language combining functional, object-oriented and information-rich programming. F# is open source and cross-platform, see the F# Software Foundation for details. Microsoft contribute to F# in multiple ways, including the Visual F# tools. This site allows easy learning of key F# principles, creating, editing and running F# code within a browser, and sharing code through the Internet.

Ludde's FPGA NES[^]:

I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA. An FPGA is a programmable integrated circuit, generally programmed using a hardware description language.... Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was created back in 1985 by the famous Japanese company Nintendo. It was an extremely revolutionary console at its time and was the best selling console for a number of years. I used to play NES a lot as a kid, so I have all those memories of the old games, and had an imminent urge to dig into the inner details of the console to figure out how it worked.