The Insider News

Tali Garsiel[^]:

Web browsers are probably the most widely used software. In this book I will explain how they work behind the scenes. We will see what happens when you type 'google.com' in the address bar until you see the Google page on the browser screen.

Bitboxer[^]:

Ruby and Python. Two languages. Two communities. Both have a similar target: to make software development better. Better than Java, better than PHP and better for everyone. But where is the difference? And what language is “better”? For the last question I can say: none is better. Both camps are awesome and do tons of great stuff. But for the first question the answer is longer. And I hope to provide that in this little article.

The Endeavour[^]:

Here’s a strange detail of floating point arithmetic: computers have two versions of 0: positive zero and negative zero. Most of the time the distinction between +0 and -0 doesn’t matter, but once in a while signed versions of zero come in handy.

Read Write Web[^]:

With the increasing digitization of healthcare, the trend of "Big Data" has been gathering steam. According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm. That's predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. The report, which I've summarized in this post, does an outstanding job of profiling the leading products utilizing Big Data in healthcare.

Ars Technica[^]:

In the face of negative press about iOS 6's new Maps app, a bit of detective work by mobile app producer Onavo has unearthed a positive tidbit of news. The company says that iOS 6's Maps app uses considerably less data than its Google-powered predecessor—in fact, Onavo claims the much-maligned Apple Maps is "up to five times more efficient" than the previous incarnation.

Technology Review[^]:

Microsoft's Kinect, a 3-D camera and software for gaming, has made a big impact since its launch in 2010. Eight million devices were sold in the product's first two months on the market as people clamored to play video games with their entire bodies in lieu of handheld controllers. But while Kinect is great for full-body gaming, it isn't useful as an interface for personal computing, in part because its algorithms can't quickly and accurately detect hand and finger movements.

Owened by Owen Williams[^]:

Yes, I have switched to Windows 8 full-time, and it’s not because of the new Metro interface or charms. It’s not because of the ribbon or Internet Explorer 10. It’s really not because of anything you may expect. It’s much more simple than that. Here’s my top reasons I’m sticking with Windows 8 on my laptop.

Computerworld[^]:

Research in Motion Wednesday released a BlackBerry PlayBook OS update that adds full device encryption to secure personal data stored on the device to go along with the already-available encryption for corporate data. The PlayBook OS 2.1 update, which is fully described on a BlackBerry site, is available for Wi-Fi-only BlackBerry Playbook tablets.

VentureBeat[^]:

A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next. When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks. But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools. Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

Marijn Haverbeke[^]:

Acorn is really fast. Just like Esprima. Acorn is tiny. About half as big as Esprima, in lines of code. Still, there's no good reason for Acorn to exist. Esprima is an excellent project, well-documented, and small enough for any practical use. It exposes an interface very similar to Acorn. The only reason I wrote Acorn is that small, well-defined systems are so much fun to work with, and that Esprima's web page very triumphantly declared it was faster than parse_js, the implementation in UglifyJS version 1, which is a port of my own parse-js Common Lisp library. I just had to see if I could do better.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and you write it like you write JavaScript which I like. Any existing JavaScript is already TypeScript. One argument has been made that TypeScript is for people who don't want to learn JavaScript. I don't buy that. As Ward Bell said in an email: TypeScript is not a crutch any more than JSLint is a crutch. It doesn’t hide JavaScript (as CoffeeScript tends to do). - Ward Bell. I think Ward says it well. Folks rail against static typing but they don't complain about JSLint. TypeScript offers optional type annotations - it's hardly a perversion of JavaScript.

codeface[^]:

It’s been known for some time that Anders Hejlsberg was doing something interesting in the JavaScript space, and when Anders is doing something interesting, it’s worth paying attention. This is, after all, the man who got Real Programmers to use Pascal, and pulled off C++++ (put two of the +’s over the other two: #! See what they did there?). Today the covers were taken off the latest project by the man himself, and it’s TypeScript: “a strict superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript”.