The Insider News

mikeash.com[^]:

I'm back again, with a somewhat off-the-cuff treatment of a very twisted set of code I use to pretend that C has exceptions. C, being something of a bare-metal language by today's standards, lacks any advanced facilities for managing control flow when errors happen. Most platforms have found their own ways of coping with the situation, some with language features, some with framework conventions, and others by not coping at all. I delve into little-known extensions of C, Linux compatibility, and worst of all, goto, so be warned!

Factual Blog[^]:

Here at Factual we apply machine learning techniques to help us build high quality data sets out of the gnarly mass of data that we gather from everywhere we can find it. To date we have built a collection of high quality datasets in the areas of places (local businesses and other points of interest) and products (starting with consumer packaged goods). In the long term, however, Factual is about perfecting the process of building data regardless of the area, so many of our techniques are domain agnostic. In this post, I cover 5 principles we use when putting machine learning techniques to work.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

People don't like it when you move their cheese. They are just trying to get through the maze, they have it all under control and then, poof, someone moved their cheese. Now it's a huge hassle to find it again. Change a hotkey or the case of the menus and all heck breaks loose. I upgraded from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 8 Pro. Once it's installed, it's initially confusing but I have been using it every day all day since it was released and have got myself productive again. Here's what I ran into and how I realized that there's less reason to freak out than I originally thought.

Blankenblog[^]:

I decided it was about time I put all of these resources in one place, so that I remember where they are. The following is a list of Windows 8 developer resources I’ve found around the web.

Composite Code[^]:

The technology Microsoft develops ranges from complete junk (re: Bob, paperclip, sealed classes, The 1st X version of Entity Framework) all the way to the completely awesome amazing stuff, like the Node.js SDK & work with Windows Azure for Node.js, Visual Studio can be amazing sometimes too, and there are other things that are really solid pieces of software. So here’s my happy list and not so happy list of Microsoft Software.

VentureBeat[^]:

These new chips won’t be programmed in the traditional way. Cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, remember, and learn from the outcomes. They mimic the brain’s “structural and synaptic plasticity.” The processing is distributed and parallel, not centralized and serial. With no set programming, the computing cores that the researchers have built can mimic the event-driven brain, which wakes up to perform a task.

PCWorld[^]:

Samsung must pay Apple $1.05 billion for infringing several of its patents in Samsung smartphones and tablets, a federal court jury decided on Friday. The verdict ending a landmark trial between the two companies is a complex one, involving numerous products and company subsidiaries. But in most instances the jury found products of the Korean company and two of its U.S. subsidiaries infringed Apple's patents. The verdict can be seen overall as a big win for Apple.

Amy Shira Teitel[^]:

Armstrong’s legacy is so much more than just Apollo 11. His contributions to and role in some of the earliest and most innovative early spaceflight programs are significant. Preserving that legacy will keep him alive and is vital to doing his memory justice. I can’t possibly sum up all the projects Armstrong was involved in in one article, so here’s a brief look at his career leading up to the Apollo 11 Moon landing with links to full stories I’ve covered elsewhere.

Spaceflight Now[^]:

Neil Alden Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon and an enduring icon of the the space age for taking "one giant leap for mankind," died Saturday after complications from cardiovascular surgery. He was 82.

TechSpot

Observant software hacker Nadim Kobeissi stumbled upon an interesting observation today while running a network packet analyzer under Windows 8. It appears, by default, Microsoft's latest operating system is sending information to Redmond servers each time a user installs an application. Before the hearts of our readers are aflutter with panic though, allow me to stress this point: this behavior is simple to disable.