The Insider News

Harvard Gazette[^]:

How about the one day in Russia that shook the world, and still does? That was Jan. 23, 1913, a century ago this week. Mathematician Andrey A. Markov delivered a lecture that day to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on a computational technique now called the Markov chain. Little noticed in its day, his idea for modeling probability is fundamental to all of present-day science, statistics, and scientific computing. Any attempt to simulate probable events based on vast amounts of data — the weather, a Google search, the behavior of liquids — relies on Markov’s idea.

kellabyte[^]:

The best kind of optimizations are ones that eliminate the need to do expensive but wasteful work. While analyzing internals of some open source databases I’ve found that some of them spend a lot of time trying to do the wrong optimizations at the wrong times resulting in wasteful work. The more interesting implementations try to detect when this expensive wasteful work can be avoided and just don’t do it. You would be surprised at how much processing some databases do just to tell you that the thing you queried for doesn’t exist in the database. A data structure that sometimes can help reduce wasteful work like this is a Bloom Filter.

Nettuts+[^]:

The one tool that, in my opinion, has always been an insanely personal and opinionated preference is your IDE or editor. Everything about it matters, from keystrokes and language support to plugins and themes. It all has to flow nicely within your development style, and most importantly, it needs to help you solve the problems you’re facing without making you jump through hoops.... With Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript for both web and Windows 8 app development, there’s been a ton of changes with Visual Studio 2012 that make it an awesome tool for building for the web. This is what I plan on covering next, and hopefully you’ll see it in a very different light.

Daily Mail[^]

Receptionist and fiance left red-faced after she sends email discussing their sex life to entire office

Linux.com[^]:

Parallel computing and heterogeneous systems — with mixed types of computational units — are able to break through SMP scaling limits and achieve increased performance with reduced power consumption. However, they also come with their own challenges, and making parallel computing easy to use has been described as “a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced.” With these challenges in mind the Parallella project has set out to help close the knowledge gap by developing an affordable, high performance and truly open parallel computing platform.

TechNewsDaily.com[^]:

The clock to unlock a new mobile phone is running out. In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on January 26.

Alan Mendelevich[^]:

In 2010 Apple introduced the first iPad and basically created a new segment of devices – tablets. iPad wasn’t a full PC replacement (and still isn’t) but was considered a big step towards the real post-PC era. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that at some point in the near future iPad (and possibly similar competing products) would replace PCs for most purposes, except maybe some very specific areas. That said, to this day it’s pretty much inconceivable for someone who ever really needed a PC to be able to get by without one.

Wired.com[^]:

Andrew Bujalski’s new film Computer Chess, which debuted Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, is perhaps one of the oddest sports movies ever made. A black-and-white period piece shot on 16 mm film straight out of the 1980s era it depicts, Computer Chess follows a series of programming teams at a computer chess tournament as they compete to write the ultimate program to defeat a human competitor.

UniBul[^]:

Well, a slew of African start-ups are now facilitating similar types of transfers, but instead of cash, the currency being exchanged is airtime minutes. In addition to their most obvious application, these can be exchanged for cash at mobile phone dealers or bartered for products and services. One immediately apparent advantage of such a set-up is that there is no need for a proprietary system of agents — anyone dealing in prepaid airtime minutes would do.

Mathias Bynens[^]:

I was asked to give an introductory talk on HTML5 for the latest Adobe User Group Belgium Web SIG Event. The presentation I ended up with is entitled “HTML5: It goes to ELEVEN” and can be viewed on Slideshare. Since the target audience was filled with ‘esteemed HTML5 newcomers’ I decided to focus on how easy it is to ‘switch’ to HTML5 and use it today. The way I see it, there are three levels of HTML5 usage...

Matthew Moore Design[^]:

Flat design is beautiful and refreshing. It’s also generally faster to design and easier to make responsive. If it was a graphic design trend, it’d be well received. Unfortunately, us web designers have that pesky ‘usability’ thing always looming large. We cannot ignore the user experience with our work, so because of that, flat design is inherently flawed.