The Insider News

stratēchery by Ben Thompson[^]:

The jobs we hire a PC to do are being increasingly done by dedicated devices. If Adobe wants to be relevant in a world where users interact with as many as five different devices in a day, then a per-device licensing model is clearly unsustainable.

The Setup[^]:

I’m Brian Kernighan. I spent 30-plus years at Bell Labs in the group that produced Unix, C, C++ and other odds and ends of useful software. While there I wrote a few books with some super co-authors. Since 2000, I’ve been teaching in the computer science department at Princeton University. If you’re going to have a second childhood, a good university is a great place to have it.

xbox.com[^]:

With our modern architecture, Xbox One games will load more quickly, will be always accessible from the cloud, and there is no physical limit to the size or scope of the content provided. Here are our platform policies and capabilities for game licensing – all of which will be made available when Xbox One launches later this year...

GeekWire[^]:

Reports this week that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is close to finalizing a giant reorganization — reshaping the company’s divisions and internal reporting structures — might seem like odd timing. It’s practically summer, after all. But actually, it makes perfect sense. Microsoft’s new fiscal year begins in July, and the company would need to get any new structure in place before then to make a clean transition.

NYTimes.com[^]:

When American analysts hunting terrorists sought new ways to comb through the troves of phone records, e-mails and other data piling up as digital communications exploded over the past decade, they turned to Silicon Valley computer experts who had developed complex equations to thwart Russian mobsters intent on credit card fraud. The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto, Calif., company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal, is just one of many that the National Security Agency and other agencies have forged as they have rushed to unlock the secrets of “Big Data.”

the pluralsight blog[^]:

The above problematic code snippets aren’t the only types of code you should watch out for, but it is a good start and should hopefully open your eyes to some of the common pitfalls you could run into when developing your application. To review here are some concepts you should keep in mind...

Dr. Bunsen[^]:

Time Machine has been an integral component of my backup system since its inception in OS X 10.5. Despite its utility, I dislike how backup snapshots are handled when Time Machine’s hard drive is full.... This post is about my backup tool called Time Warp and how I use it to modify Time Machine’s backup behavior using weighted reservoir sampling. I built Time Warp to preserve important backup snapshots and prevent Time Machine from deleting them.

Chris Lowis[^]:

The Web Audio API turns your browser into a powerful synthesizer. One question I’ve been asked about the Web Audio API is how to play single, one-shot sounds using the oscillators, in other words how to play notes or tunes. I’ll show one approach in this post and along the way we’ll look at how some early analogue monophonic synths worked.

Simple Developer[^]:

Hello there. Thank you for stopping by. Now, about the growing group of people teaching themselves software development or computer programming, there is no doubt they may miss certain skills that college education might offer. I am very confident that most people would like to go to school if they could afford it. That being said however, not all is lost because after knowing what you lack, you can then go about learning the skills. The most dangerous thing is not knowing what you need.

Open Source @ Jane Street[^]:

The notes fall into the following categories: notes about the cost of commonly used OCaml constructs and general recommendations that might help speed up OCaml code; notes on reading OCaml assembly code so that you may understand what your own OCaml programs do on the CPU. When possible I have tried to motivate these with snippets of assembly code generated by ocamlopt.

Businessweek[^]:

By 2010, HFT accounted for more than 60 percent of all U.S. equity volume and seemed positioned to swallow the rest. Swanson, tired of Citi’s bureaucracy, left, and in mid-2011 opened his own HFT firm. The private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures gave him tens of millions to open a trading shop, which he called Eladian Partners. If things went well, TCV would kick in another multimillion-dollar round in 2012. But things didn’t go well.

functionspace.org[^]:

Today is Leonhard Euler's 306th birthday. Euler was one of the most influential and prolific mathematicians in history. He had published over 800 papers and 20 books, making him the greatest contributor in mathematics.... In this article, we'll try to understand the most beautiful equation in all of mathematics: eiπ+1=0 It connects the five most important constants of mathematics and three most important mathematical operations - addition, multiplication and exponentiation. So, how did Euler arrived at this result?

Electronic Frontier Foundation[^]:

Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans.... In plain language: the order gave the NSA a record of every Verizon customer’s call history -- every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for the phone and call.