SUPERHERO.JS -
Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic.
posted by Artw
on Mar 22, 2013 -
10 comments
via Reuters A joint venture sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a vast student database including personal information on students grades K through 12 will be shared with corporations selling "personalized" educational software. Information can include social security numbers, presence of learning disabliities, or anything else school officials choose to share with any companies involved in this venture.
posted by DMelanogaster
on Mar 6, 2013 -
88 comments
This past August, producer Bryan Singer (
The Usual Suspects,
X-Men) launched a new digital series:
H+. The premise: in the near future, 33% of humanity has retired their smartphones, tablets and computers in favor of an implanted computer system,
H+, which connects them directly to the internet 24/7. The story begins as a computer virus attacks the implants, killing billions. In intersecting storylines across four continents (told in part through flashbacks,) the series then unravels what happened, who caused it and why.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 19, 2012 -
66 comments
Classic Shell is an open-source program that fixes two of the biggest problems users perceive with the newly-released Windows 8: it brings back the Start Menu, and it allows users to log-in directly to the Desktop instead of the Start Screen.
(8.4 MB WINDOWS DOWNLOAD)
posted by JHarris
on Oct 29, 2012 -
154 comments
Over the course of the next two months, each participating ISP [*AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon] expects to begin rolling out its version of the [Copyright Alert System] – a system through which ISPs will pass on to their subscribers notices sent by content owners alleging copyright infringement over peer-to-peer networks. Educational alerts will come first, followed by acknowledgement alerts that require the recipients to let their ISP know they have received the notices. For accounts where alleged infringing activity continues, enhanced alerts that contain “mitigation measures” will follow. - Jill Lesser, Executive Director, Center for Copyright Information
[more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Oct 21, 2012 -
136 comments
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics has
been awarded to Serge Haroche (France) and David Wineland (US) for discovering ways to measure and manipulate quantum particles, a discovery which
many are suggesting may soon allow us to build computers with virtually limitless capabilities. The Nobel press release provides a layman friendly
PDF summary of the research and its potential applications, as well as a less layman friendly PDF with additional
scientific background information. The press release cites two older Scientific American articles for further reading, and the magazine has made these articles available to read free online for the next 30 days:
Monroe, C. R. and Wineland, D. J. (2008) Quantum Computing with Ions, Scientific American, August.Yam, P. (1997) Bringing Schrödinger’s Cat to Life, Scientific American, June.
posted by dgaicun
on Oct 15, 2012 -
51 comments
Television Without Pity re-capper
Jacob Clifton has written a short steampunk story for Tor.com. “There’s a level on which the story is an indictment of using steampunk as a fashion or trend. It came about because I wanted to see what would happen if you substituted Jane Austen for Jules Verne in the steampunk equation...”
The Commonplace Book
posted by The Whelk
on Oct 2, 2012 -
19 comments
Timely not real-time.
Rhythm not random.
Moderation not excess.
Knowledge not information.
These are a few of the many characteristics of
The Slow Web.
posted by Foci for Analysis
on Sep 6, 2012 -
36 comments
Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. ... How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning? [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Jul 26, 2012 -
124 comments
This is just the top 30, what I consider to be the most likely candidates for actual new programming jargon based on community upvotes, not just "funny thing that another programmer typed on a webpage and I felt compelled to upvote for hilarity". Because that would be Reddit. Coding Horror presents
the top 30 Stack Overflow New Programming Jargon entries.
posted by Artw
on Jul 20, 2012 -
66 comments
In the early 80’s, personal computers were a new innovation. Films like
WarGames made it seem as if a kid with a keyboard could hack into anything: a school or corporate mainframe, NORAD, the US nuclear arsenal or your neighborhood bank. Hoping to capitalize on this, in 1983 CBS premiered a show which could have been considered
WarGames’ intellectual successor. It featured a group of resourceful kids who solved crimes by hacking and cracking, led by Matthew Laborteaux, child star of
Little House on the Prairie, and advised by a
Gavilan SC-toting, mustachioed reporter played by Max Gail, formerly of the show
Barney Miller.
Whiz Kids lasted only a single season: 18 episodes, but all of them live on in cyberspace, on YouTube.
Complete episode links contained within. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 8, 2012 -
41 comments
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.
The flight from conversation.
posted by cashman
on Apr 22, 2012 -
38 comments
If you've ever worked with the command prompt on a Unix-based computer, you're likely familiar with
SSH (Secure SHell), which is a program and a protocol that allows you (yes, you!) to securely access a remote system. While SSH has certainly earned the "Secure" portion of its namesake over the years, it's functionality as a shell has ironically received very little attention, and has begun to show signs of age and obsolescence: SSH doesn't work very well on mobile connections, and its support for
Unicode is buggy and incomplete. A group of MIT researchers think they've found solutions to these problems, and have created
Mosh as a potential successor to SSH, which fixes many of the old protocol's annoyances and shortcomings, while retaining all of SSH's security features.
posted by schmod
on Apr 12, 2012 -
77 comments
In the main link in
griphus' post this morning, there was this little aside:
"In 1957...a physics student named Don Knuth built a program for the IBM 650 to help the 1958 Case Institute of Technology basketball team win the league championship."
Yes,
THAT Don Knuth. Here's
a young Don with the team and the
IBM 650 (capable of making 50,000 calculations a minute!), and
here he is talking about it.
[more inside]
posted by MtDewd
on Apr 10, 2012 -
16 comments
