Micropost

Las máquinas de vídeopóquer Game King llegaron a los casinos en 1970 y fueron un éxito inmediato. Con los años, su software se fue actualizando, incluyendo nuevos juegos y opciones. En 2002 lanzó su quinta gran actualización, que presumía de unos gráficos de calidad nunca vista antes en uno de estos aparatos, así como sonido en estéreo mejorado respecto a versiones anteriores. Lo que este programa incluía también, y nadie se dio cuenta, fueron una serie de sutiles errores de código que tardaron siete años en ser descubiertos. ...

Nick Holonyak Jr., the person widely credited with the development of the first visible-light LED, the device that now lights up countless clocks, traffic signals, and other electronic displays, might be one of them. On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to three inventors of the blue light-emitting diode. Holonyak isn’t exactly complaining that he isn’t among them; his objection is that his 1962 invention has never been singled out for recognition by the academy. ...

DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai out of India are aiming to redesign the Linux kernel as MOOL, or the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux. The project site explains, ”MOOL (Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux) aims at redesigning the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of OO (Object Oriented) abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in existing kernel. Studies have shown that common coupling is increasing in successive versions of Linux. This will make maintainability of Linux difficult in coming years. As a starting step we have tried to reduce the number of global variables of the kernel. Some global variables are used only by two or three kernel modules. These are passed as function arguments. The performance of the modified kernel is measured with the standard performance analysis tools. The modified kernel performs almost same as original. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules.” ...

The problem we discussed is laid out in some detail in my Brain Drain post, but a quick summary is this: scientific research in many disciplines is becoming more and more dependent on the careful analysis of large datasets. This analysis requires a skill-set as broad as it is deep: scientists must be experts not only in their own domain, but in statistics, computing, algorithm building, and software design as well. Many researchers are working hard to attain these skills; the problem is that academia’s reward structure is not well-poised to reward the value of this type of work. In short, time spent developing high-quality reusable software tools translates to less time writing and publishing, which under the current system translates to little hope for academic career advancement. » Jake Vanderplas | The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble ...

Imgur user smellystring has officially changed my view of Minecraft – and he’ll change yours as well. Below is a fully functional 1KB hard drive, created within Minecraft and it’s incredible. Smellystring walks us through the process which includes binary blocks, pistons, a data collection room, indicator lights and ”bit” emulators. Watch and learn. » reddit.com » | imgur.com » Steven Norris | gearburn.com

Running Doom on a printer is more than a gimmick: it’s a security concern. In 1993, first-person shooter Doom was a groundbreaking game. In 2014, it’s being used by ethical hackers to demonstrate security vulnerabilities in connected devices. » Tom Fox-Brewster | theguardian.com

It’s not surprising that academics – hell bent on taking the fun out of everything – would hate our beloved and iconic movie version of them. But Canuto is no killjoy. His ironic tone and acerbic wit seem honed by long boring days in the sun. So I bite. I quickly learn that there’s a good reason why most every archeologist on Earth hates Indy. And that they might have a point. Because Jones isn’t an archeologist at all. ...

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. ...