The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security notified both the EDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there was a potential malware infection within the two agencies' systems. The NOAA isolated and cleaned up the problem within a few weeks.... EDA's CIO, fearing that the agency was under attack from a nation-state, insisted instead on a policy of physical destruction. The EDA destroyed not only (uninfected) desktop computers but also printers, cameras, keyboards, and even mice.

guardian.co.uk[^]:

Take Google's bizarre practice of publicly killing products. To most companies, killing a product is a shameful thing. It disappoints customers, and it hurts your own ego because it's an admission that you failed. Most companies hide their product cancellations... Google does the exact opposite – a couple of times a year it trumpets to the world that it's terminating products and services that millions of people love and rely on. Google isn't merely up front about these cancellations; it's downright cheerful... If you look at the world through the eyes of the scientific method, every Google project is an experiment, and experiments must be periodically reviewed. When an experiment is completed, you either choose to follow up on it, or you terminate it and move on to something else.

Quote:

A Muslim search engine that blocks forbidden content “according to Islamic law” was launched today, a press release stated.

‘Halalgoogling’ fetches results from leading search engines such as Google and Bing and has a built-in “advanced special filtering system that blocks Haram content according to the Law of Islam”, the press release said.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

In this tutorial I will guide you through the fundamentals of VB.NET. In fact, the following topics are fundamental to every programming language. You cannot make progress without an understanding of these topics.

apiaxle.com[^]:

Every developer sets out to make their API perfect when they start writing it, but, at least from this author's experience, it often veers as requirements pour in. The following is a small checklist of things that might indicate you're veering too far.

Karl Seguin[^]:

All modern languages and framework expose a set of buffer-backed data structures. Things like dynamic arrays (aka [Array]Lists) and StringBuilder. They are a useful convinience that comes with a steep price: poor memory characteristics. The way these work is simple: a fixed-length structure (typically an array) which copies itself into a larger fixed-length structure as needed.... The performance characterstics of such structures is the same as the underlying structure for read operations. While a write operation isn't guarnateed to be the same as the underlying structure, more often than not it is. The real problem with these structures is the impact it has on memory.

C#er : IMage[^]:

I recently took a vacation the same week as the 4th of July and had lots of time to reflect upon my career to date. It was a little shocking to realize I’ve been writing code for nearly 30 years now! I decided to take advantage of some of the extra time off to author this nostalgic post and explore all of the languages I’ve worked with for the past 30 years. So this is my tribute to 30 years of learning new languages starting with “Hello, World.”

Gamedevtuts+[^]:

The next generation of game consoles is here. This time around, nipping at the heels of the giants (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) are the microconsoles: less powerful, cheaper, and more welcoming to indie game developers. The superstar of this new family of game consoles is the Ouya. In this How to Learn guide, we’ll introduce you to the Ouya platform and its capabilities, share links to resources, and present a few suggestions to get you started developing games with it.

ITworld[^]:

I see a lot of headlines these days about "big data" and immediately identify. I think of all the big data problems that I've grappled with over the years and imagine what the key problems with managing big data will be as the data stores get larger and more diverse.... In a sense, I've been working with big data for decades -- cumbersome system logs, sometimes that went on for months, and crazy big logs from big web sites (e.g., the web logs from magazines like SunWorld and JavaWorld back in the late 90's). I might be analyzing tens or hundreds of gigabytes worth of data to answer important questions. The tools that I use won't be much different that those I use to work with files that are tens of kilobytes in size, but the techniques vary considerably.