The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise—the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. But people do forget—and quickly—about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else.

PCGamesN[^]:

As a cruel trick on myself, about a month ago I installed Windows 8 on my main PC to see what it was like. The answer is: abysmal. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Windows 8 is the worst computing experience I’ve ever had. As a desktop operating system, it’s annoying, frustrating, irritating, and baffling to use. I’ve tried on many occasions to explain exactly why it’s so awful to use day-to-day, and most of the time, smoke starts pouring out of my ears. I thought it would be better to get down exactly what the issues are and why you should avoid it.

TechRadar[^]:

The real difference is that Windows 8 is finished; it's polished and smooth, with even better performance than in the previews, and none of the rough edges left. Even the previously disappointing Modern UI-style apps such as Mail, Calendar, Messaging and People are slick, sleek and far more functional. Even though Microsoft says it will carry on updating them, they're now useful and engaging rather than frustrating. This is Microsoft putting it all together.

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.

The Endeavour[^]:

My printer is unable to clean 51. It won’t work, and all it says is “Unable to Clean 51.” Here’s my suggestion for finding such useless error messages in a code review: Write a script to extract all string literals from your source code, then read over the output. The beauty of this approach is that the reviewer sees the text without the context of the surrounding code, just as the user does. Ideally someone who is not a programmer would review the output strings. I would hope someone who ran across “Unable to Clean 51″ would flag that as something that doesn’t make sense.

Simon Barker[^]:

She wasn’t struggling with syntax or logic, she was struggling with her own desire to make it complicated because... well, because it’s programming so it must be hard right? What this really made me realise though is that code looks hard, and as a result a newbie can think that it must be hard and the obvious solution won’t be the best way to do it.

Rob Bell[^]:

Big O notation is used in Computer Science to describe the performance or complexity of an algorithm. Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario, and can be used to describe the execution time required or the space used (e.g. in memory or on disk) by an algorithm. Anyone who’s read Programming Pearls or any other Computer Science books and doesn’t have a grounding in Mathematics will have hit a wall when they reached chapters that mention O(N log N) or other seemingly crazy syntax. Hopefully this article will help you gain an understanding of the basics of Big O and Logarithms.

Assembla[^]:

The original idea is great. It stands for releasing software frequently, with short lags for the implementation of valuable new features and ideas. The productivity of software development increases every year, and in theory you could use the word "agile" to describe many of the things that are light and bright, great and good, fast and fun about our new world. But, if we want to use the word “agile” for this, we have to burn off the stink of stagnation that surrounds the old “agile.” So, here are seven things I hate about “agile.”

NYC Resistor[^]:

While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap. After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image. Here's how we did it.

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.