The Insider News

Andrew Clunis[^]:

Saturation of network links causes massive amounts of latency and slowdown, particularly on slow uplinks of asymmetric residential internet service (however, it can and does occur on the downlinks of the same). Network applications doing big bulky downloads can cause lots of latency on the network, causing real-time applications (VOIP, gaming, or SSH) to lag badly or outright fail.... The problem has been noticed for many years, although the pathology has only become well understood and publicized in the last few. Anyone who has set the upload limit on their BitTorrent client to just shy of their upstream bandwidth to their ISP was trying to counteract the effects of bufferbloat.

Datamation[^]:

You might think that a group of intelligent people like the members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community would be free of hidden taboos. You might expect that such a group of intellectuals would find no thought forbidden or uncomfortable—but if you did, you would be wrong. Like any sub-culture, FOSS is held together by shared beliefs. Such beliefs help to create a shared identity, which means that questioning them also means questioning that identity.

Harvard Gazette[^]:

How about the one day in Russia that shook the world, and still does? That was Jan. 23, 1913, a century ago this week. Mathematician Andrey A. Markov delivered a lecture that day to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on a computational technique now called the Markov chain. Little noticed in its day, his idea for modeling probability is fundamental to all of present-day science, statistics, and scientific computing. Any attempt to simulate probable events based on vast amounts of data — the weather, a Google search, the behavior of liquids — relies on Markov’s idea.

kellabyte[^]:

The best kind of optimizations are ones that eliminate the need to do expensive but wasteful work. While analyzing internals of some open source databases I’ve found that some of them spend a lot of time trying to do the wrong optimizations at the wrong times resulting in wasteful work. The more interesting implementations try to detect when this expensive wasteful work can be avoided and just don’t do it. You would be surprised at how much processing some databases do just to tell you that the thing you queried for doesn’t exist in the database. A data structure that sometimes can help reduce wasteful work like this is a Bloom Filter.

Nettuts+[^]:

The one tool that, in my opinion, has always been an insanely personal and opinionated preference is your IDE or editor. Everything about it matters, from keystrokes and language support to plugins and themes. It all has to flow nicely within your development style, and most importantly, it needs to help you solve the problems you’re facing without making you jump through hoops.... With Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript for both web and Windows 8 app development, there’s been a ton of changes with Visual Studio 2012 that make it an awesome tool for building for the web. This is what I plan on covering next, and hopefully you’ll see it in a very different light.