The Insider News

Troy Hunt[^]:

I know there’s this unwritten law that newer software requires more resources but my experience with Windows 8 has always been that’s it’s way faster certainly than Windows 7 was on the same hardware, but it’s my recollection that XP was never really as snappy as 8 is now on any hardware. So I dug up the oldest, crustiest hardware I could get my hands on and did some tests...

coderjournal.com[^]:

When you put open source software out there in the wild there is a mutual understanding that, you are going to see my source code, and probably take some influence from it into your own source code. Maybe sometimes you even take a little more than influence, and copy some lines of code. As an open source developer, we all know this is happening and we all know this is alright, encouraged, and to be expected. When it gets to the point of out right copying of whole files it becomes a different story all together.

TUAW[^]:

Linden Lab is best known for putting together the old social MMO Second Life, but more recently the company has been getting involved in tablet development.... Today, Linden has released another app, and like Creatorverse and Second Life, this app is more of an engine than a game -- it's an interactive fiction platform essentially, designed to upgrade the idea of traditional text adventure games into something more replayable and dynamic.

Brendan Eich[^]:

At the Mozilla mission level, monoculture remains a problem that we must fight. The web needs multiple implementations of its evolving standards to keep them interoperable.... I expect more web engines in the next ten years, not fewer, given hardware trends and the power wall problem. In this light, Mozilla is investing not only in Gecko now, we are also researching Servo, which focuses on the high-degree parallel (both multicore CPU, and the massively parallel GPU) hardware architectures that are coming fast.

Intel Developer Zone[^]:

The Intel HTML5 App Porter Tool - BETA is an application that helps mobile application developers to port native iOS* code into HTML5, by automatically translating portions of the original code into HTML5. This tool is not a complete solution to automatically port 100% of iOS* applications, but instead it speeds up the porting process by translating as much code and artifacts as possible.

andrew makes things[^]:

I’ve been using ledger, combined with a custom Ruby gem called reckon, to balance my small business’s accounts for the last few years. The command line, Bayesian statistics, and Double Entry Accounting! What could be better? Here’s how I do it.

Ogle Earth[^]:

Like many others, I was absolutely astounded by the meteor strike over Chelyabinsk when I woke on Friday morning. One silver lining to our self-surveilling society is that an event of this magnitude is certain to get caught on the myriad of always-on dash- and webcams. I for one could not get enough of the videos. Might it be possible to use this viral footage with Google Earth to have an initial go at mapping the meteorite’s trajectory?

Ars Technica[^]:

The claim took life with the publication of a book called Inside Apple, which claimed some employees were "hired into so-called dummy positions, roles that aren't explained in detail until after they join the company."... But is it true? I was prompted to look into the question after several friends—Apple employees, no less—expressed disbelief at the claim. Their skepticism matched my own experience; in my years of reporting on Apple and speaking to many of its employees, I had never heard of such a practice.

Redmondmag.com[^]:

Some analysts have described Office 2013 as a minor improvement to previous versions of Office and in some ways I agree. However, I think Office 2013 is a worthwhile upgrade. The ability to convert PDF files to editable Word documents will likely prove very handy and having Outlook remind users when they forget message attachments should save time, frustration and embarrassment. All in all, I really like what Microsoft has done with Office 2013 and I feel good about recommending it.

PCWorld[^]:

Intel has scaled back plans for the next version of Itanium in a move that raises questions about the future of the 64-bit server chip, used primarily in Hewlett-Packard's high-end Integrity servers. In a short notice posted quietly to its website on January 31, Intel said the next version of Itanium, codenamed Kittson, will be produced on a 32 nanometer manufacturing process, like the current version of Itanium, instead of on a more advanced process, as it had previously planned.

Ars Technica[^]:

OK, you've got us. The jig is up. There is no use for absurdly large prime numbers—yet (we’ll explain that eventually). Slightly less ludicrous prime numbers do have a point, which we'll describe here. One modern-day instance of practical use for prime numbers is in RSA encryption, which allows two parties to pass secret messages back and forth using independent encryption and decryption codes. In RSA, someone who wants to receive a private message will publish a product of two large prime numbers as their "public key," which senders can use to encrypt messages intended for the key publisher.