The Insider News

Math Hombre[^]:

I've been asked multiple times this week about good iPad apps for math... so time to put together a list. I have not had an opportunity to use most of these with students yet, so I'm going on my impressions and recommendations. Many of these do have android versions.

TechHive[^]:

What could you do with $3500 and an old smartphone? You could toss the phone, take the cash, and buy yourself the next best smartphone. Or, with a bit of a DIY attitude, you could push the limits of this hefty piece of technology and use it to power something else. That's the initial idea of the PhoneSat project, a small satellite project run by a team of engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center. The PhoneSat team has built and developed two small satellite models powered by Android smartphones, with the rest of the body constructed mostly of things you could buy at your nearest hardware store.

Shawn Blanc[^]:

Mechanical keyboards are addictive. I think I have a problem. But I’m quitting now. Once you’ve acclimated to the tactical feedback and the clickety clack, typing on anything else doesn’t feel (or sound) the same. Earlier this year I spent a nerdy amount of time testing and comparing the three most popular Mechanical Keyboards for the Mac. Here's what I found.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft is in the midst of launching a host of new operating systems and tools this summer/fall. So what's a developer to choose to build apps and services for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012 and/or Windows Azure? There are familiar, legacy .NET tools and frameworks available, like Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. There are newer and less familiar (to many Microsoft developers) options including XAML and HTML5/JavaScript. And on the server side, there's ASP.Net for building server-based Web applications. What's a developer supposed to use?

CloudFlare blog[^]:

At CloudFlare, an attack needs to get over about 5Gbps to set off alarms with our ops team. Even then, our automated network defenses usually stop attacks without the need of any manual intervention. When an attack gets up in the tens of Gigabits of data per second, our ops team starts monitoring the attack: applying filters and shifting traffic to ensure the attacked customer's site stays online and none of the rest of our network is affected.

Pat Shaughnessy[^]:

Blocks are one of the most commonly used and powerful features of Ruby. As you probably know, they allow you to pass a code snippet to iterators such as each, detect or inject. You can also write your own functions that call blocks for other reasons using the yield keyword. Ruby code containing blocks is often more succinct, elegant and expressive than the equivalent code would appear in older languages such as C or Java. However, don’t jump to the conclusion that blocks are a new idea! In fact, the computer science concept behind blocks, called “closures,” has its roots in the Lisp programming language, invented in 1958 by John McCarthy.

HotHardware[^]:

Black Mesa is the result of years of effort from a team determined to bring Gordon Freeman's first adventure into the modern age without compromising Valve's original artistic vision. It's one of the finest examples of fan-built mods that we've ever seen. This is no high-resolution texture update or lighting effects package. This is Black Mesa -- and it's going to remind you why you fell in love with Half-Life fourteen years ago.

DataGenetics[^]:

There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be arranged to form a 4-digit pin code. Out of these ten thousand codes, which is the least commonly used? If you were given the task of trying to crack a random credit card by repeatedly trying PIN codes, what order should you try guessing to maximize your chances of selecting the correct number in the shortest time? If you had to make predication about what the least commonly used 4-digit PIN is, what would be your guess?

Mashable[^]:

Circumstances have led to a de-facto monopolized market, Susan Crawford argues. According to a newly released study by the New America Foundation, “In the future, consumers wishing to subscribe to higher speed Internet services will likely face a near monopoly from cable providers, as telephone providers have halted wide-scale upgrades of their networks.” To make matters worse, major cable companies don’t compete with each other in local markets, which they have effectively divided up. The result, as the study concludes, is that in many places, you will soon only have one choice when connecting to the Internet.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads. “We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.

GeekWire[^]:

Today, the Redmond-based company officially unveiled the new pricing scheme for Office 365. Pricing is simple: $8.33 per month, $99.99 per year (billed annually). It’s an example of the company’s shift toward subscription-based pricing. Instead of simply launching a product for one computer, and requiring multiple licenses for each device, Microsoft’s shift to the cloud is allowing for a more robust experience, plus upgrades to future Office versions as long as users continue to pay the subscription fee.