The Insider News

[LWN.net][^]:

What's in a string? That depends on who you ask, apparently; a lesson that Fedora recently learned when it unexpectedly ran into a problem with the release name for the upcoming Fedora 19, "Schrödinger's Cat"—and all of the unusual characters contained within. Typographic oddities might seem like a trivial reason to upend the distribution release process, but a validation tool in the bug reporting system objected to the name, so Fedora developers found themselves asking whether it was more practical to stop and fix all of the utilities, or to change the release name itself.

John Graham-Cumming[^]:

Alice and Bob are crossword enthusiasts. Every morning they rush to complete the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword. One morning Alice finishes the crossword and telephones Bob to gloat. Bob challenges her by asking for the solution to 21D as proof that she's completed the entire thing.... So Alice's dictionary procedure is a 'one way function': it's easy to go from a word to another in one direction, but very hard to do so in the opposite. Such one way functions are widespread in computer security.

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

APIs are great, they allow companies to expose parts of their engine for inclusion into the products of others to increase adoption and to facilitate the development of features and products around a common set of data. In theory APIs are a win-win, both for the party that exposes the API as well as for the party that uses it and since the mid 90’s APIs have become more and more common.... In practice though, APIs are a double edged sword, both for the exposer as well as for the user. In this article I’ll try to outline what the shadowside is of exposing an API, and why this is a potential problem for any users of that API.

Ars Technica[^]:

A desktop PC used to need a lot of different chips to make it work.... As chip manufacturing processes have improved, it's now possible to cram more and more of these previously separate components into a single chip. This not only reduces system complexity, cost, and power consumption, but it also saves space, making it possible to fit a high-end computer from yesteryear into a smartphone that can fit in your pocket. It's these technological advancements that have given rise to the system-on-a-chip (SoC), one monolithic chip that's home to all of the major components that make these devices tick.

Google[^]:

Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

net-security.org[^]:

Teso, who has been working in IT for the last eleven years and has been a trained commercial pilot for a year longer than that, has combined his two interests in order to bring to light the sorry state of security of aviation computer systems and communication protocols. By taking advantage of two new technologies for the discovery, information gathering and exploitation phases of the attack, and by creating an exploit framework (SIMON) and an Android app (PlaneSploit) that delivers attack messages to the airplanes' Flight Management Systems (computer unit + control display unit), he demonstrated the terrifying ability to take complete control of aircrafts by making virtual planes "dance to his tune."

spaceappschallenge.org[^]:

The International Space Apps Challenge is a technology development event during which citizens from around the world work together to solve challenges relevant to improving life on Earth and life in space.

TIME.com[^]:

I can’t help but think, though, that the first signs that the PC market might be maxing out came in early 2007, before Windows 8, the iPad or even the iPhone had any influence on the business. That’s when Microsoft released Windows Vista and an enormous number of consumers and businesses responded by saying, essentially, “No thanks, we’re perfectly happy with Windows XP.” Even today, almost a dozen years after XP’s release, the company is trying to convince a fair chunk of the PC-using world that it didn’t perfect the PC operating system back in 2001.

AllThingsD[^]:

Sales of personal computers were very nearly twice as bad as previously expected and experienced their worst year-on-year decline ever in the first quarter of 2013, according to the market research firm IDC.... Worldwide PC shipments came in at 76.3 million units in the first quarter of the year, amounting to a decline of nearly 14 percent. That’s much worse than the firm’s forecast, which called for a decline of 7.7 percent. The findings also amount to the fourth consecutive quarter in which sales declined compared to the previous quarter.

CodeProject[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Danny Severns, IT Director for Dunn Tire and knee-deep in COBOL business systems.

TIME.com[^]:

In the five years since Apple released its first iPhone, touch-screen smartphones have become thinner, lighter, faster and more capable. But through it all, battery life has mostly stayed the same.... Because battery capacity hasn’t improved much over the years, the batteries themselves have gotten bigger, limiting how thin and light phones can be. Meanwhile, technologies like 1080p screens and wireless screen mirroring have been hamstrung by batteries that can’t keep up.

iFixit[^]:

Let's face it, the year is 2013. Where are our flying cars? Why isn't deep space travel a thing yet? Why hasn't virtual reality become, well, reality? The Oculus Rift seeks to fill that lack of virtual reality in our lives. Still in its early developmental stage, the Oculus Rift promises to deliver VR gaming to the yearning public. Join us as we take a peek inside the Oculus Rift and its hardware.

Nettuts+[^]:

The concept of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is fairly new to PHP. There’s currently no official AOP support in PHP, but there are some extensions and libraries which implement this feature. In this lesson, we’ll use the Go! PHP library to learn AOP in PHP, and review when it can be helpful.