Micropost

Never has a tweet been more true, or potentially more disastrous for a vendor. Years ago Google’s Andy Rubin, stung by Steve Jobs’ criticism that Android wasn’t truly open, tweeted that anyone could fork - i.e., modify - Android, making it ”open” in the truest sense of the word. Unfortunately for Google, many OEMs took Rubin at his word. Today, Google’s Android business is booming, but it’s clear that Android fragmentation minimizes just how much Google—or its ecosystem of app developers—can make from the open-source mobile OS. Unfortunately, according to new ABI Research data, it’s only going to get worse. ...

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of hacking on the frontend code for a bunch of xkcd’s interactive comics, including: unixkcd, xk3d, Umwelt, Time, Externalities, and Lorenz. This weekend, I was pinged about making something to coincide with the release of What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. The process of building ”Pixels” was even crazier than our usual April Fools rush, and had the extra intrigue of being live during Randall Munroe’s Colbert Report interview. Here’s a few anecdotes from the development of Pixels and a quick explanation of how it works. I hadn’t worked with some of the graphics programming patterns (coordinate systems!) for a while, so I ended up making some classic mistakes – hopefully you can avoid repeating them. :) ...

Andrey Kolmogorov, Fred Hennie, Richard Stearns, and Walter Savitch are all famous separately; but they have something in common. Read on, and see. Today I wish to discuss some algorithmic tricks and show that they were initially used by complexity theorists, years before they were used by algorithm designers. To steal a phrase: it`s computational complexity all the way down. Well not exactly. The situation is slightly more complex”a bad pun. The complexity theorists often invented a concept and used it in a narrow way, while later it was rediscovered and made a general notion. ...

Ese día, la programadora Grace Hopper se encontraba trabajando con un Mark II en la Universidad de Harvard: el ordenador dejó de funcionar, y los ingenieros encontraron una polilla enganchada a uno de los relés del ordenador. El bicho pasó a la historia de la informática, porque pegaron sus restos en el libro de registro del ordenador, junto a una nota que decía ’First actual case of bug being found’. ...

Like many others, I spend most of my day behind a computer. In order make the most of it (and to keep my body from complaining too much), I try to maintain an optimized setup. For example, I code in Vim, browse with Vimperator, and move windows around in i3. Another common task is filesystem navigation. I prefer to use the command-line for this, but typing cd ~/some/very/deep/often-used/directory over and over again does become cumbersome. ...

For those less familiar with the story and the theories, I thought it might be interesting and useful to have a single thread that lists all of the theories that have arisen given the various questions and unknowns surrounding the Song. There are a lot of brilliant people on these boards and some of them have come up with truly excellent theories, right or wrong, to answer those thoughts we have. ...

Los unos y los ceros llevan milenios entre nosotros, desde algunas culturas primitivas, pero las bombillas se han ido encendiendo poco a poco hasta llegar a su actual omnipresencia en la electrónica. Primero fueron Leibniz y la aritmética, luego Boole y la lógica, y finalmente Shannon y su idea de utilizar el álgebra de Boole para simplificar los circuitos. Una historia apasionante hasta llegar a nuestro smartphone. » David G. Ortiz | blogthinkbig.com

Vivimos en una era de ’ciberguerras’, intrusiones en línea e inseguridad informática, pero también en una época de libertad de acceso a cantidades ingentes de datos e información sin precedentes, de acceso casi ilimitado al conocimiento. No es posible explicar semejante paradoja sin asomarse la historia del ’hacking’ y, aunque parezca mentira, en España esa historia es apasionante. » hackstory.es » Pablo Romero | elmundo.es

We’re happy to announce that fail0verflow, GTVHacker, and Team-Eureka have jointly discovered and exploited a new vulnerability in the Chromecast which allows root access on the current software build (17977) as well as new in box devices » Team-Eureka | xda-developers.com

So, what is systemd? Well, meet your new God. You may have been praying at the alter of simplicity, but your religion is being deprecated. It likely already happened without your knowledge during an upgrade of your Linux box. systemd is the all knowing, all controlling meta-deity that sees all and supervises all. It’s the new One Master Process that aspires to control everything it can - and it’s already doing a lot. It’s what init would look like if it were a transformer on steroids. It’s complicated, multi-faceted, opaque, and supremely powerful. ...