The Insider News

opensource.com[^]:

In broad terms, functional claiming refers to writing patent claims that cover the broader function enabled by an invention rather than writing claims to the specific embodiment developed or contemplated by the inventor. In other words, instead of erecting a signpost that points others directly to the invention, functional claiming is akin to building a wide fence to surround the invention in an attempt to claim as much territory as possible.

Nature[^]:

The usually quiet world of mathematics is abuzz with a claim that one of the most important problems in number theory has been solved. Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture, which proposes a relationship between whole numbers — a 'Diophantine' problem.

Nick's Blog[^]:

Suppose you have a very large dataset - far too large to hold in memory - with duplicate entries. You want to know how many duplicate entries, but your data isn't sorted, and it's big enough that sorting and counting is impractical. How do you estimate how many unique entries the dataset contains? It's easy to see how this could be useful in many applications, such as query planning in a database: the best query plan can depend greatly on not just how many values there are in total, but also on how many unique values there are.

Kent Beck[^]:

The issue was naming. My partner wanted to name an abstraction after it's implementation. It's natural. You're in the middle of implementing binary search, so you call the function binarySearch. This is where the ummm... stimulating conversation started. Take a step back, I said. Think about this from the perspective of the caller, I said. "Why?" he said.

Macstories[^]:

The very first text-based adventure game, titled “Colossal Cave Adventure” was written and developed by William Crowther in 1976. Crowther went through an awful divorce and needed some distraction. He also wanted to keep the connection to his two children up and running. Like any cool programmer/father would do, he created a game for them — “Colossal Cave Adventure”. Originally written in Fortran and developed for the PDP-10 computer family, the game became a classic on several different systems. During the ’80s, it was translated into many different IF programming languages, including the most important one in IF history: ZIL, short for Z-Machine Interpreter Language.

TechHive Beta Blog[^]:

Apple is busy preparing for a much-hyped announcement on September 12. You’ve probably already heard about this announcement, and how it’s likely to be the big reveal of the new iPhone 5. In fact, at this point, you’ve probably already seen dozens of images of the convention center being decorated in anticipation of the event. While the next few weeks are sure to be full of iPhone-related news, there’s plenty more happening in mobile right now (with recent announcements from Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, and Amazon). If you’re curious as to how these competitor handsets stack up against the Apple heavyweight, then just read below to take a gander at all the features the crowd favorite from Cupertino currently lacks.

Wired[^]:

With his group, UGNazi, Cosmo took part in some of the most notorious hacks of the year. Throughout the winter and spring, they DDoS’ed all manner of government and financial sites, including NASDAQ, ca.gov, and CIA.gov, which they took down for a matter of hours in April. They bypassed Google two step, hijacked 4chan’s DNS and redirected it to their own Twitter feed, and repeatedly posted Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s address and Social Security number online.

A List Apart[^]:

More than one in eight internet users in the UK, US, and France—and nearly one in four American teens—uses a game console to get online, according to studies from 2010 and 2011.... Add in a vast array of handheld consoles with browsers—like Sony’s PSPs and Nintendo’s DS line—and we have 15 years of internet-enabled gaming devices of all sizes and shapes. Yet to date, we’ve talked about game console browsers very little. It’s time we change this.

toothycat.net[^]:

There's an idea called "Turing completeness", which is used to indicate that a system has a particular degree of complexity. Any Turing-complete system is theoretically able to emulate any other. One way to show that a system is Turing complete is to make a "Turing machine" in it. (I'm grateful to Joe Fitzsimmons for the idea to approach the question this way.) This isn't the most common way of demonstrating Turing completeness, but it is one of the more understandable. In the discussion on this site I assemble a Universal Turing Machine from Magic: the Gathering cards.