The Insider News

Binpress[^]:

To progress, an open-source project needs the same resource as every software development project – developer time. You need dev time to fix bugs, you need dev time to add features, you need dev time to write documentation. If the donation stream is not regular and dependable enough to allow project team members to either quit their jobs (if working full-time) or reduce contracted hours (if working freelance), then donations are not going to add more dev time to the project. If you can’t depend on funds from donations, they are relegated into the “nice-to-have” category. You can use it to pay off some external costs like hosting or running some ads (if it makes sense), but you can’t use it for anything important like salaries.

PCWorld[^]:

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology--to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right? Wrong! While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.

SIAM Connect[^]:

For many of us, maple syrup is an essential part of breakfast—a staple accompaniment to pancakes and waffles—but rarely do we think about the complicated and little-understood physiological aspects of syrup production. Each spring, maple growers in temperate regions around the world collect sap from sugar maple trees, which is one of the first steps in producing this delicious condiment. However, the mechanisms behind sap exudation—processes that trigger pressure differences causing sap to flow— in maple trees are a topic of much debate. In a paper published today in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, authors Maurizio Ceseri and John Stockie shed light on this subject by proposing a mathematical model for the essential physiological processes that drive sap flow.

TechBlog.Netflix.com:

But since Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2021, we need to find a replacement some time within the next 8 years. We'd like to share some progress we've made towards our goal of moving to HTML5 video.

TechCrunch.com:

Microsoft has announced general availability for Windows Azure Infrastructure Services with a promise to match any price drop from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
[...]
Hilf that they will also offer new high memory instances of up to 28 and 56 gigabytes to accommodate applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint that just need more memory.

Ode to Code[^]:

Assuming I already have an existing web site or web application deployed, running, and working great for desktop browsers, my decision tree for getting the site working on mobile devices looks something like the following.... Like everything else in software, the decisions are all about tradeoffs and where the software has to go in the future.

BlackWasp Software Development[^]:

There are various metrics that can be calculated for source code. These can help to determine its complexity, readability or maintainability. When you are involved in code reviews, it can be useful to determine such metrics for the code being examined. This can help you to identify problem areas and rectify issues before they become too embedded in the software. Visual Studio 2008 introduced a set of five automatically calculated metrics, which continued to be present in Visual Studio 2010 and 2012.

Chris Love's Official ASP.NET Blog[^]:

The way browsers work today has changed in many ways thanks to jQuery. Just a few years ago DOM parsing was rather complicated, jQuery made that easy. DOM manipulation was not straight forward, thanks to jQuery developers can manipulate with little effort. Today 96%+ browsers in use today support document.querySelectorAll, which accepts a CSS selector and returns a list of matching nodes. In many ways thanks to jQuery, jQuery itself is no longer needed. There I said it.... I encourage you to give it a shot. Write your next application, library or just code for fun without jQuery. See what you can do.