The Insider News

NCZOnline[^]:

Most discussions about sorting algorithms tend to end up discussing quicksort because of its speed. Formal computer science programs also tend to cover quicksort last because of its excellent average complexity of O(n log n) and relative performance improvement over other, less efficient sorting algorithms such as bubble sort and insertion sort for large data sets. Unlike other sorting algorithms, there are many different implementations of quicksort that lead to different performance characteristics and whether or not the sort is stable.

ZDNet[^]:

While some of us were enjoying our tofurkey over the past week-plus, others were combatting a thorny Windows Server time-rollback issue. Some Windows Server users are still recovering a recent problem caused by time servers at USNO.NAVY.MIL incorrectly provided time samples that listed 2000 as the current year.

Reuters[^]:

Such are the pressures in Silicon Valley, where the start-up ethos extols fresh ideas and young programmers willing to toil through the night. Chief executives in their 20s, led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are lionized, in part because of their youth. Many investors state bluntly that they prefer to see people under 40 in charge. Yet the youth worship undercuts another of Silicon Valley's cherished ideals: that anyone smart and driven can get ahead in what the industry likes to think of as an egalitarian culture. To many, it looks like simple age discrimination - and it's affecting people who wouldn't fit any normal definition of old.

Ars Technica[^]:

The stable, supported, mainstream version of Firefox on Windows is a 32-bit application. Even if you use 64-bit Windows, if you use Firefox, you're using a 32-bit browser. The exception is if you're using the Nightly build of Firefox. This represents the latest, cutting-edge version of the browser, and it's available in two versions: a 32-bit one, and a 64-bit one. However, this won't last much longer.

MIT[^]:

Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the collisions may have produced a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate.

Hack a Day[^]:

Ben Krasnow built his own version of the TSA’s body scanner. The device works by firing a beam of x-rays at at target. Some of the beam will go through the target, some will be absorbed by the target, and some will reflect back. These reflected x-rays are called ‘backscatter‘, and they are captured to create an image.

Brian Noyes' Blog[^]:

Whether you are trying to set up a Minecraft server or some other kind of internet accessible piece of software, Windows Azure provides an attractive and easy to use hosting option. Setting up your own virtual machine you have full control over installing whatever software you need and configuring the box. The machine is sitting in a high bandwidth data center that can handle traffic much better than your own machines through a home or small office connection. You don’t have to worry about exposing your own machines or network to the open internet because you can put what you want to be publicly accessible out in the cloud, isolated from your own stuff.

MSDN Blogs[^]:

PowerPoint is a really great rapid prototyping tool its slide-by-slide approach allows you to present a flow and tell a story with your designs. You can even create basic clickable prototypes by adding hyperlinks between slides. Furthermore, PowerPoint is available on almost every computer, including the new Windows Surface devices that run Windows RT, and is fairly simple to get started with.

Java Code Geeks[^]:

On a rainy morning I found myself sitting on the desk thinking about efficient working. Before I started as a freelancer I had some days were I worked lots but could look only back on a worse outcome. I started with Zen practice back in 2006. What clearly came to my mind before a good while was: the old Zenmasters already knew before hundreds of years, how today programmers should work. Even when I don’t like these “be a better programmer” posts, I want to outline some of my thoughts from that morning.

CUBRID Blog[^]:

Every developer who uses Java knows that Java bytecode runs in a JRE (Java Runtime Environment). The most important element of the JRE is Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which analyzes and executes Java byte code. Java developers do not need to know how JVM works. So many great applications and libraries have already been developed without developers understanding JVM deeply. However, if you understand JVM, you will understand Java more, and will be able to solve the problems which seem to be so simple but unsolvable. Thus, in this article I will explain how JVM works, its structure, how it executes Java bytecode, the order of execution, examples of common mistakes and their solutions, as well as the new features in Java SE 7 Edition.

Gusts Kaksis (a.k.a. gusC)[^]:

You might think I’m crazy, but I’m into this thing “Write your own OS”. I have some commercial ideas on how and why, but I’m willing to share my knowledge of what I’ve found so far. This is the first one in the series, as I’m currently researching stuff and wanted to write them down for others like me. For starters, it’s more about running your own code directly on CPU, once the PC is turned on, without any underlying OS, than writing OS itself. But the grand master plan still remains – to create my own OS.

TechHive[^]:

If your kid doesn't already have a tablet, chances are they want one. You have lots of options to choose from, but if you think they're ready for a "real" tablet, you’ll need to pick a tablet whose parental controls match what you want to enforce and emphasize as a parent. Amazon Kindle Fire HD, Barnes & Noble Nook HD, and Apple’s iPad all have parental controls to some degree. Which tablet’s approach is right for your family will depend on what features you value most.

TIME[^]:

I've been studiously avoiding making any predictions about Windows 8's chances of success…except to say that I think it's going to take a while until we know whether Microsoft's big bet is going to pay off. But here's a question that's worth pondering: If Windows 8 is a misbegotten idea, what should Microsoft have done instead? What should Windows 7's successor have looked like? What sort of products should the company offer for the era of touch interfaces and tablets? How should it position itself to do well in the post-PC years and decades to come?

Music Machinery[^]:

In the music information retrieval research community there has been quite a bit of research into algorithmically extracting song structure, and visualizations are often part of this work.... Of course, not every pop song will follow the pattern that I’ve shown here. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that this very simple visualization is able to show us something about the structure of the modern pop song, and how similar this structure is across many of the top pop songs.

Encosia[^]:

I’ve been playing with a shiny new Microsoft Surface RT that I’ve had for about a month now. I’ve had a bunch of requests for a post about my experience with it thus far, so here we go.... In an unsurprising twist ending, I wrote the first few drafts of this entire post on my Surface RT. I used the Touch Cover for most of it, and then picked up a Type Cover toward the end and used that for the rest.

SemiAccurate[^]:

And so the PC ends with a whimper, not a bang. Broadwell will be available in a ‘desktop’ variant as well as a laptop version, but neither will be socketed. There are a lot of good technical reasons to release it only as an embedded and mobile CPU, but not for anyone other than Intel. They want more of the PC ecosystem, and are taking it. Enthusiasts have been written off, and the rest of the ecosystem is being preemptively kneecapped in case they try to step out of line. The desktop is dead, and with it, PCs become irrelevant, mobile or not.