The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Hell finally froze over yesterday, so Apple announced a new Mac Pro at WWDC. At first glance, the new machine was as mysterious as it was terrifying to me and many other creative pros who have been waiting for ages for this thing to drop. But now that Apple has a full site page for the new machine and I’ve gotten some info from people familiar with its internals and with OS X 10.9, the Mac Pro has becomes less of a mystery. But that’s also what’s freaking us out.

Medium[^]:

From the outside, it would appear I was on the textbook path of programming. Started making websites at 15. Took programming and web design classes in my tech-oriented high school. Was accepted into my first choice school and majored in Computer Engineering. Had great internships at a tech giant. Wrote code that was used by millions of people. Graduated with distinction. Cofounded a software startup. And yet despite doing everything right, I didn’t think of myself as a good programmer.

Vaisagh V T[^]:

I made a first person exploration game in minecraft which I’m using to study how human beings gain and store spatial knowledge. This post outlines the processes involved in making and getting data for analysis from a minecraft server. A little bit of background first: my PhD thesis is on modeling human behavior in simulations of crowds. More specifically it’s about modeling crowds that are evacuating buildings during fires, terrorist attacks or something similar. As a part of my thesis, I’ve been planning to develop a model of spatial knowledge and exploratory behavior of humans; this could be invaluable in structuring buildings in a way so that evacuation is quick, efficient and relatively painless.

Infragistics.com Blog[^]:

JavaScript needs no introduction. So, instead of writing you a walkthrough for Javascript’s past, we’d like to take a peek into the future. The future is called Harmony. Harmony is the name given to the next version of the infamous client scripting language by the ECMA Committee. The ECMA is an international non-profit standards organization responsible for maintaining the JavaScript standard (known officially as ECMAScript). Harmony would officially be the 6th version of JavaScript, the 5th being the one currently in use, that was published in 2009.

justinangel.net[^]:

In this article we’ll review new developer WinRT features that’ll be released in the upcoming Windows 8 release (dubbed “Windows 8.1” / “Windows Blue”). Microsoft recently announced that during June 2013’s BUILD conference a developer preview of Windows 8.1 will be released for download. In the meanwhile many Windows 8.1 “leaked” images are available online. These “leaked” images allows us to get a sneak preview of the featuresets that’ll be announced in BUILD conference. For the length of this article we’ll go over those features.

The Extensible Web Manifesto[^]:

We—the undersigned—want to change how web standards committees create and prioritize new features. We believe that this is critical to the long-term health of the web. We aim to tighten the feedback loop between the editors of web standards and web developers. Today, most new features require months or years of standardization, followed by careful implementation by browser vendors, only then followed by developer feedback and iteration. We prefer to enable feature development and iteration in JavaScript, followed by implementation in browsers and standardization.

mikeash.com[^]:

I thought I'd mix things up a bit today and give my readers a quiz. The C language is perhaps the most popular computer language in existence, but it's also quite odd, and because of that often poorly understood. I'd like to give you a quiz to see how much you know about some of the odd but useful corners of the language.

The Endeavour[^]:

From Bjorn Freeman-Benson’s talk Airplanes, Spaceships, and Missiles: Engineering Lessons from Famous Projects. Bjorn is discussing the ferrite core memory of the Apollo guidance system: "These are very, very robust memory systems. … But the problem is that they actually have weight to them. Core memory actually weighs a bunch, so when you’re writing your program for the lunar module … every line of code that you wrote had a consequence in weight. And you could measure how heavy your code was at the end of a compile line."

Wired.com[^]:

Happy Nerd Christmas! Apple CEO Tim Cook got you a new operating system for the iPhone and iPad. It looks different. It works differently. It has a host of new features and design elements–from full multitasking to the Pandora-like iTunes Radio. It organizes your pictures, has remarkable new AirDrop sharing features, automatically updates your apps, and overall lets you do just about everything more quickly and efficiently.

Kieran Healy[^]:

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata”...