The Insider News

Scott Hanselman[^]:

REPLs are great! REPL stands for Read–eval–print loop and is pronounced "REP-L" quickly, like "battle." Lots of languages and environments have interactive coding and REPLS at their heart and have for years. C# and F# do also, but a lot of people don't realize there are REPLs available!

Gizmodo[^]:

Using brain implants and sophisticated software, researchers can now predict what their subjects are seeing with startling speed and accuracy.

Computerworld[^]:

Developers have a year to rework their apps before it shuts down.

ZDNet[^]:

We're exactly six months through Microsoft's unprecedented free upgrade offer for Windows 10. The offer officially expires July 29, 2016, on the one-year anniversary of the new operating system's release. But what happens then? I see three possible scenarios.

"Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in May, said earlier this month that vast troves of research were "trapped in silos, preventing faster progress and greater reach to patients." While few researchers disagree, many are still reluctant to share the raw data used in their research, posing big obstacles to the vice president’s initiative.

The tension boiled over this month when Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the New England Journal, and co-author Dan Longo, wrote in an op-ed that while sharing was all well and good, it had to be done collaboratively, not by "data parasites" who stole or misused work that might have taken bench scientists decades to assemble. The editorial did not mention Biden’s initiative, but many commenters noted its relevance.

Over a snowbound weekend, the Twittersphere exploded with angry attacks on the Journal, which gave the impression of an ivory tower beset by flame-throwing iconoclasts. Geneticist Michael Eisen, at the University of California, Berkeley, decried the editorial (which Drazen toned down four days later) as "one of the most shockingly anti-science things ever written."

The Register[^]

The modern car's operating system is such a mess that researchers were once able to get complete control of a vehicle by playing a song laced with malicious code.

Malware encoded in the track was executed after the file was loaded from a CD and processed by a buggy parser.

Gizmodo[^]:

More than a thousand years before the first telescopes, Babylonian astronomers tracked the motion of planets across the night sky using simple arithmetic.