The Insider News

Nettuts+[^]:

Test-driven development (TDD) is a process that has been documented considerably over recent years. A process of baking your tests right into your everyday coding, as opposed to a nagging afterthought, should be something that developers seek to make the norm, rather than some ideal fantasy. The whole process is very simple to get to grips with, and it shouldn’t take too long before you wonder how you were able to get anything done before! There are huge gains to be made from TDD – namely, the quality of your code improving, but also clarity and focus on what it is that you are trying to achieve, and the way in which you will achieve it. TDD also works seamlessly with agile development, and can best be utilized when pair-programming, as you will see later on.

The Official Blog of BigML.com[^]:

Recently, Professor Pedro Domingos, one of the top machine learning researchers in the world, wrote a great article in the Communications of the ACM entitled “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning“. In it, he not only summarizes the general ideas in machine learning in fairly accessible terms, but he also manages to impart most of the things we’ve come to regard as common sense or folk wisdom in the field.... Now, while it’s very light reading for the academic literature, it’s fairly dense by other comparisons. Since so much of it is relevant to anyone trying to use BigML, I’m going to try to give our readers the Cliff’s Notes version right here in our blog, with maybe a few more examples and a little less academic terminology.

Errata Security[^]:

In the decade leading to 2001, Intel CPUs went from 33-MHz to 3-GHz, a thousand-fold increase in speed. In the decade since, they’ve been stuck at 3-GHz. Instead of faster clock speeds, they’ve been getting more logic. Instead of one instruction per clock cycle, they now execute four (“superscalar”). Instead of one computation per instruction, they now do eight (“SIMD”). Instead of a single CPU on a chip, they now put four (“multi-core”). However, desktop processors have been stuck at four cores for several years now. That’s because the software is lagging.

GigaOm[^]:

More and more companies and open source projects are trying to let users run SQL queries from inside Hadoop itself. Here’s a list of what’s available and, on a high level, how they work.

Network World[^]:

Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs' clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures. AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested -- from HP and Rackspace -- were lacking, particularly at larger scales.

Tautological Cascade[^]:

This goes without saying, but honestly, I never thought I'd see the day. Running Half Life nice and smooth... On Linux. Wow. Although there were really no actual problems with the installation process, there were some annoyances, so I've decided to compile a short list of steps that you should follow in order to use Steam on Debian. Please note that these only solve problems which I myself have encountered, and that they are usually solved for you if you use Ubuntu.

Exploring IE[^]:

Today we’re excited to announce the online debut of Thief of Thieves: Experience, an interactive online game based on the comic book series from Robert Kirkman and Skybound, his imprint at Image Comics. The site is a showcase of the new features in Internet Explorer 10, including full multi-touch capabilities and HTML5 support. We thought bringing the comic book style to the web would suit the immersive, chromeless browsing experience on Internet Explorer with Windows 8.

The most important JEPs that we've slipped into M7 are those related to
Project Lambda, the sole driving feature of the release. The language
and VM work for Lambda has already been integrated, but at least another
six weeks are needed to refine the stream API and finish the related
core-libraries enhancements (JEPs 107 and 109).

Quote: www.usatoday.com[^]

SAN FRANCISCO - A touch-screen Chromebook? Speculation is building about what search giant Google might announce at a press event Thursday morning in San Francisco