The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

It's safe to say that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing; it's the platform on which some of the Internet's most popular sites and services are built. But just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

Jef Claes[^]:

I have been experimenting with the HTML5 offline application cache some more over the last few days, doing boundary tests in an attempt to learn more about browser behaviour in edge cases. One of these experiments was testing the cache quota. Here's what I found.

NYTimes.com[^]:

When it comes to cheating, chess might seem all but invulnerable. After all, the board and its pieces are out in the open for all to see. But an eruption of recent scandals has made it clear that cheating — fueled by powerful computer programs that play better than people do, as well as sophisticated communication technologies — is becoming a big problem for world championship chess.

Making the Complex Simple[^]:

The next time you consider creating a cancel button, I suggest you think of it as a commitment. In my world the cancel button has two promises. Are you ready to keep them?

219 bytes tron[^]:

With some coworkers, we challenged each other to write the smallest possible game of Tron in JavaScript (an exercice known as JavaScript golfing). This page explains our final version (219 bytes).

Jayway[^]:

In Javascript, and other C-like programs, there are only two valid cases for using braces. It is when I am declaring objects and functions (and in other C derivates: classes). So what does this mean in practice?

Rachel Appel[^]:

ASP.NET developers have to think carefully about more than business requirements. The environment, team, tools, deployment, performance, security, and other factors weigh in when it comes to building robust Web applications. When thinking about using ASP.NET on Azure, you or your team might wonder what challenges an ASP.NET deployment on Azure will entail. Let's take a look at some of the common concerns.

DZone[^]:

In JavaScript, all numbers are floating point numbers, encoded in double precision according to the IEEE 754 standard for floating point arithmetic. That standard handles the sign in a manner similar to sign-and-magnitude encoding for integers and therefore also has a signed zero. Whenever you represent a number digitally, it can become so small that it is indistinguishable from 0, because the encoding is not precise enough to represent the difference.

RR's Random Ramblings[^]:

While delivering a training recently, I got a request to put together a JVM tuning cheat sheet. Given the 50+ parameters available on the Sun hotspot, this request is understandable. I’ve tried to narrow down the most important flags that will solve 80% of JVM performance needs with 20% of the tuning effort.

Sam Saffron[^]:

While preparing for my talk at Codemania I started filling my slides with links, clearly not something that scales. So, instead, here is a big list of interesting tools and resources that can help you journey through the murky waters of web performance.

PCWorld[^]:

Windows 8‘s Metro interface may be controversial, but it looks like few PC users will complain about the new operating system’s performance. The PCWorld Labs put the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 through a battery of tests and found it generally faster - sometimes a lot faster - than Windows 7.

Technology Review[^]:

The thing that is often overlooked about diversity is that teams composed of something other than a cognitive monoculture often have a competitive edge over their less-diverse counterparts. Take, for example, gender in tech companies.

Air & Space Magazine[^]:

In late autumn of last year, more than six months after Discovery landed for the final time, NASA crews began peeling back the orbiter’s skin, clipping wires, and pulling hydraulics. They removed and analyzed propellant tanks and valves and scrutinized electronics, looking for evidence of deterioration the way coroners look for signs of illness during autopsies. Here's what they found.

Harvard Business Review[^]:

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators.

ZeroVM[^]:

Traditional virtualization is ill-suited for cloud-native applications. ZeroVM attempts to provide a new virtualization platform that uses higher-level abstraction, built-in storage capabilities, better transiency and improved elasticity. It's a work in progress, but worth checking out.

Quote:

The Queensland Police fraud squad will be the first in Australia to go on "wardriving" missions to help residents protect their wireless internet networks.

Ron Garret[^]:

The demise of Lisp at JPL is a tragedy. The language is particularly well suited for the kind of software development that is often done here: one-of-a-kind, highly dynamic applications that must be developed on extremely tight budgets and schedules. The efficacy of the language in that kind of environment is amply documented by a long record of unmatched technical achievements.