The Insider News

MIT Technology Review[^]:

Windows 8 is a computer science masterpiece trapped inside a user interface kerfuffle. Microsoft’s new operating system for phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers brims with innovative technologies, bold ideas, and visual elegance. The system’s radical new interface, called Modern, is a pleasure to use on phones and tablets. And although that interface fares poorly on today’s larger desktop computer screens, Windows 8 probably won’t damage the company’s standing in corporate America. It might even shore up its eroding presence on residential desktops and laptops by offering a user experience that’s new, fun, and different from anything offered by Apple and Google. Indeed, that’s my only real criticism of Windows 8...

Rhizome[^]:

There are many ways of telling the history of universal computation, and many origins of the technologies we now consider computational machines. A longer history might begin with Gottfried Leibnitz and Isaac Newton's simultaneous development of modern calculus and the dream of a universal artificial mathematical language. Alternately, we might look to the history of calculating machines, beginning with Charles Babbage's Difference Engine or Herman Hollerith's Electric Sorting and Tabulating Machine. Most every history would certainly include the contributions of Alan Turing, an English mathematician who is considered by many to be the father of computer science.

Wired.com[^]:

The past year was a breakout for desktop 3-D printing. MakerBot released two new models, Formlabs debuted the first prosumer 3-D printer to use high-accuracy stereolithography, and a slew of innovative, printed projects lifted awareness and desirability of additive manufacturing for the general public. But the year ended with a legal hiccup. Formlabs will be dealing with a patent infringement lawsuit brought against them by 3D Systems, one of the biggest players in the industry. The hobbyist segment of the industry has been built on the back of expired patents, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, many patents that will be required to advance the state of the art will not expire for years or even a decade.

Alan Winfield's Web Log[^]:

One of the oft quoted paradoxes of consciousness is that we are unable to observe or experience our own conscious minds at work; that we cannot be conscious of the workings of consciousness. I've always been puzzled about why this is a puzzle. After all, we don't think it odd that word processors have no insight into their inner workings (although that's a bad example because we might conceivably code a future self-aware WP and arrange for it to access its inner machinery)....

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors:

Yesterday, The New York Times reversed its opinion on the review of our Model S and no longer believes that it was an accurate account of what happened.

Edudemic[^]:

We’ve already looked at MOOCs, tablet computing, gamification, and learning analytics. Joining 3-D printing on the ‘third horizon’, (or entering mainstream use in four to five years) is wearable technologies. Much like 3-D printing, wearable technologies are much less mainstream than tablets in the classroom, so they’ve gotten a bit less face time with our lovely audience (Shout out to you guys! Thanks for being awesome!), though there have been a few mentions as of late. The Horizon Report identified some of the trailblazers that are already using wearable technologies in their classrooms.

Brent Ozar Unlimited[^]:

Hi. I’m a former developer who’s moved into database administration, and here’s what I wish somebody would have told me when I got started.

[LWN.net][^]:

Contemporary compilers are capable of performing a wide variety of optimizations on the code they produce. Quite a bit of effort goes into these optimization passes, with different compiler projects competing to produce the best results for common code patterns. But the nature of current hardware is such that some optimizations can have surprising results.... GCC provides an optimization option (-Os) with a different objective: it instructs the compiler to produce more compact code, even if there is some resulting performance cost. Such an option has obvious value if one is compiling for a space-constrained environment like a small device. But it turns out that, in some situations, optimizing for space can also produce faster code.

Intel Developer Zone[^]:

A couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to be asked if I would like to participate in an upcoming Intel challenge, known at the time as Ultimate Coder 2. Having followed the original Ultimate Coder competition, I was highly chuffed to even be considered. I had to submit a proposal for an application that would work on a convertible Ultrabook™ and would make use of something called Perceptual Computing. Fortunately for me, I'd been inspired a couple of days earlier to write an application and describe how it was developed on CodeProject - my regular hangout for writing about things that interest me and that haven't really been covered much by others.

Easel Blog[^]:

When you ask a web developer what makes good markup, you’ll probably get some mix of the following: readable code, separation of content and style, semantically meaningful markup, cross-browser/device support, graceful degradation, standards compliance, and performance. Each of these aspects of a markup are important, however, they can’t all be the highest priority.... The best developers understand these constraints and deliver markup that balances these factors in an ideal manner.