The Insider News

Windows 8 Secrets[^]:

As a reminder, Microsoft first provided a feature breakdown for the various Window 8 product editions back in April, in a post titled Announcing the Windows 8 Editions. As with similar Microsoft-produced tables for previous Windows versions, however, this this breakdown is woefully inadequate. So in Windows 8 Secrets, we provide a more detailed set of tables based on functional areas such as hardware capabilities, upgrade capabilities, Metro features, desktop features, and so on.

Nature[^]:

From e-mails to social networks, the digital traces left by life in the modern world are transforming social science. The emerging field of computational social science is attracting mathematically inclined scientists in ever-increasing numbers. This, in turn, is spurring the creation of academic departments and prompting companies such as the social-network giant Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, to establish research teams to understand the structure of their networks and how information spreads across them.

NCZOnline[^]:

Long before Internet Explorer became the browser everyone loves to hate, it was the driving force of innovation on the Internet. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all of the good that Internet Explorer did before Internet Explorer 6 became the scourge of web developers everywhere. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer 4-6 is heavily responsible for web development as we know it today. A number of proprietary features became de facto standards and then official standards with some ending up in the HTML5 specification. It may be hard to believe that Internet Explorer is actually to thank for a lot of the features that we take for granted today, but a quick walk through history shows that it’s true.

Cobalt Sign[^]:

Microsoft rolled out – in the last couple of weeks – the new web UI (formerly known as METRO UI) for Hotmail (now called Outlook), SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, People and Account. The rest of the Windows Live suite is probably also due to be updated soon. The web UI is very similiar to the one found on Windows 8. You can see the new tiles of each service in the cover photo of this post. But now let’s get straight to the web apps.

adafruit industries blog[^]:

The memo, distributed to the senior technical staff, contained a ballot asking them to choose a name for a new device invented the previous winter – the semiconductor triode. Several options were presented, including my personal favorite, the Iotatron. In the end, the name “transistor” (“transconductance” + “varistor”) won out over all the others, but it’s still interesting to read the discussion of the other names.

InfoAdvisors' Blog[^]:

I’m asked do these sorts of “make a recommendation for a solution” presentations all the time. I know how difficult it is. These presentations are different than teaching moments. They need to have a certain structure...

Ars Technica[^]:

The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study from 2007. As the Gawker breach demonstrated, such password reuse, combined with the frequent use of e-mail addresses as user names, means that once hackers have plucked login credentials from one site, they often have the means to compromise dozens of other accounts, too. Newer hardware and modern techniques have also helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking.

Rogueleaderr[^]:

The solution? Create a (mostly free) micro server on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and use it as a “poor man’s VPN” by routing all traffic from your laptop through the server and from there out onto the internet. The worked marvelously on the Boston guest wifi, and as I’m writing this it’s letting me connect to EC2 servers via SSH on a Southwest flight. This is easier than it sounds to set up, provided you have directions. So…here you go!

Computer History Vignettes[^]:

As we've shifted from thousands to hundreds of millions of computer users, much history is lost. Few realize that the backslash character did not exist in much text usage prior to 1961, and in no computer until 1958. A paper by Eric Fischer, submitted to the Annals of the History of Computing in early 2000 (and not yet published), unearthed a backslash on the keyboard of the Teletype Wheatstone Perforator, circa 1937-1945. But this was unknown to data processing people, who were stuck even up to the FORTRAN era (beginning 1955) with the Hollerith punch card code. Here is the story for the record.

Mailinator(tm) Blog[^]:

There is another technological shift conspiring against many web frameworks that isn't focused on performance, but instead focused on "ease of use" - which in many cases may hit far closer to home. That shift is the reorganization of MVC.... What thousands and thousands of Rails developers discovered upon moving to backbone is that they no longer needed their fancy template views. Their backend became a system that pushed JSON over HTTP. Very clean and very simple.

fxguide[^]:

For Brave, the team at Pixar had to deal with a hero or rather heroine, who is on screen for almost every shot, but who needed wild, yet beautiful hair. The simulation department needed to develop a technique and approach not only viable on a hand crafted trailer shot, but something that could be used almost ‘out of box’ on most shots, or the film was simply never going to make its deadline.

Reuters[^]:

Automobiles are already considered "computers on wheels" by security experts. Vehicles are filled with dozens of tiny computers known as electronic control units, or ECUs, that require tens of millions of lines of computer code to manage interconnected systems including engines, brakes and navigation as well as lighting, ventilation and entertainment. Cars also use the same wireless technologies that power cell phones and Bluetooth headsets, which makes them vulnerable to remote attacks that are widely known to criminal hackers.

Perspectives[^]:

Cold storage is unusual because the focus needs to be singular. How can we deliver the best price per capacity now and continue to reduce it over time? The focus on price over performance, price over latency, price over bandwidth actually made the problem more interesting. With most products and services, it’s usually possible to be the best on at least some dimensions even if not on all. On cold storage, to be successful, the price per capacity target needs to be hit. On Glacier, the entire project was focused on delivering $0.01/GB/Month with high redundancy and security.

John Graham-Cumming[^]:

It seems every time I come across a story about the Mars Curiosity rover there will be many people commenting on the technology used starting with "Why don't they just..?" and usually pointing out things like: the processor in their smart phone is way faster than the one of Mars, or they have way more memory on their iPad, or their digital camera is way better than the one sending back pictures. These "Why don't they just..?" questions are both annoying and to be expected. Annoying because the underlying thought is "Those NASA/JPL guys are so dumb LOL" and to be expected and encouraged because we wouldn't make any progress without asking questions and, in particular, asking why.