The Insider News

All this[^]:

The people who make the hyperlocal weather app, Dark Sky, have opened up their API so regular mortals can access the app’s short-term rainfall forecast. As it happens, there’s more information in the API than is presented in the Dark Sky app itself...

Tobi Lehman[^]:

I am reading Jesse Storimer’s fantastic little book “Working with Unix Processes” right now, and inspiration struck after the second chapter “Processes Have Parents”. When a Unix process is born, it is a literal copy of it’s parent process. For example, if I am typing ls into a bash prompt, the bash process spawns a copy of itself using the fork system call. The parent process (bash) has an id which is associated with the child process (ls). Using the Unix ps command, you can see the parent process id of every process on the system.

Haacked![^]:

In recent times, there’s been some pessimism around .NET open source. There’s the occasional rustle of blog posts declaring that someone is “leaving .NET”. There’s also this perception that with Windows 8, the Windows team is trying its best to relegate .NET into the dustbin of legacy platforms. I don’t necessarily believe that to be the case (intentionally), but I do know that many .NET developers feel disillusioned.

Preshing on Programming[^]:

I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these subjects approachable and understandable, but at the end of the day, talk is cheap! Nothing drives the point home better than a concrete example. If there’s one thing that characterizes a weakly-ordered CPU, it’s that one CPU core can see values change in shared memory in a different order than another core wrote them. That’s what I’d like to demonstrate in this post using pure C++11.

Yuzhikov.com[^]:

Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. Why is there almost no means for correction of blurring and defocusing (except unsharp mask) - maybe it is impossible to do this at all? In fact, it is possible - development of a respective mathematical theory started approximately 70 years ago, but like other algorithms of image processing, deblurring algorithms became wide-used just recently.

HoneyMap[^]:

You are looking at the HoneyMap, a real-time world map which visualizes attacks captured by honeypots of the Honeynet Project. Red markers on the map represent attackers, yellow markers are targets (honeypot sensors). Yes, you are looking at real attacks which are captured by our honeypot sensors. Those sensors emulate vulnerable systems and record incoming attacks.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Microsoft has created lots of confusion with the introduction of Windows RT, but I think everyone who does understand the difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 is making things worse by the way they are explaining it. Basically the difference is ”Windows 8 runs both existing and new applications while Windows RT only runs new applications”.

ZDNet[^]:

A Facebook friend of mine, who'll remain nameless, taunted me a bit after my, "Windows 8 Tablets: The most successful tablets ever." article, saying that, "Our developers hate it." I told him that his developers need to "Grow up" and get with the program (pun possibly intended). There's no need to cling to the previous version of any operating system, although Windows XP is/was the proverbial bomb, it just makes you look like an anachronist, luddite or someone who refuses to change. Either you have to be mature enough change with the times and be flexible or you need to go flip burgers at a fast food restaurant.

ACM Queue[^]:

Both the HDD, the core building block of nonvolatile storage in computer systems today, and the SSD are part of a class of storage called block devices. These devices use logical addressing to access data and abstract the physical media, using small, fixed, contiguous segments of bytes as the addressable unit. Each block device consists of three major parts: storage media, a controller for managing the media, and a host interface for accessing the media.

Ars Technica[^]:

In August, a collection of military, government, and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations from 22 countries in the Pacific gathered in Singapore for Pacific Endeavor 2012, a joint exercise to test how quickly and how well they could communicate in the face of a disaster. While the simulated mission was peaceful, some of the participants were put through a separate, more hostile test—Cyber Endeavor, a full-on "live fire" cyberwarfare exercise focused on "protecting information in a collaborative environment, "with both innocent bystanders and hostile attackers."

Headspring[^]:

The Standish Group is an organization that has been studying and reporting on software projects for many years. In 1995, it reported that only 16.2% of software projects succeeded. In large companies, the number was only 8%. That is, these projects were on time and on budget. In 2012, there is some improvement. The 2012 report is still fairly damning of the industry as a whole. It cites 12% success rate for waterfall projects and 42% success rates for agile projects.

Test Run[^]:

When neural networks are used to model a set of existing data so that predictions can be made on new data, the main challenge is to find the set of weight and bias values that generate the outputs that best match the existing data. The most common technique for estimating optimal neural network weights and biases is called back-propagation. Although there are many excellent references that describe the complicated mathematics that underlie back-propagation, there are very few guides available for programmers that clearly explain how to program the back-propagation algorithm.