Windows Server 8: The Ultimate Cloud OS? →

While Microsoft has certainly gotten its act together with its last two Server releases in terms of basic stability, has brought it's core OS up to date with Windows 7 and has made a good college try at virtualization with early releases of Hyper-V, I haven't been truly excited about a Windows Server release in a long time.

Call me excited.

Looks like Windows Server 8 is hitting some pretty serious talking points, too.

The Latest Jobs Plan →

The unfortunate reality is that even if Republicans gave Mr. Obama everything he wanted, the impact on growth would be modest at best. Washington can most help the economy with serious spending restraint, permanent tax-rate cuts, regulatory relief and repeal of ObamaCare. What won't help growth is more temporary, targeted political conjuring.

F-16 Pilot Was Ready to Give Her Life on Sept. 11 →

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather "Lucky" Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day's fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn't have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.

9/11 Memorial: Name Placement Based on Clever Algorithm →

cameronmoll:

Linda Tischler, Co. Design:

When the National September 11 Memorial opens this fall … friends' names will be inscribed next to each other on the granite wall surrounding the Memorial Garden's fountains.

Their adjacency is product of a masterful bit of programming undertaken by the New York media design firm Local Projects, which took 1,800 requests from families of the 3,500 9/11 victims, and created an algorithm that let them be grouped by affinity: firefighters with firefighters, cops with cops, all the members of each of the flights, first responders, or just pals.

What Every Computer Science Major Should Know →

There are so many things on this very thorough list, I never would have graduated. Most of them are, in theory, very astute, though.

Lessons from Valve – How to Build a Designer's Paradise →

Valve hires the very best. They'll wait for a year for the right candidate to become free instead of hiring someone who is merely great, and immediately available. "Once you're here, you don't leave," one Valve designer told me. There's a reason for that – Gabe Newell knows how to make a designer's paradise. Here's how.

'Willpower', Glucose, and Self-Control →

In 1998, Roy Baumeister co-published a paper suggesting that self-control decisions drew on some limited resource. After resisting cookies and chocolates, he found, subjects had less self-control at a subsequent task. In Willpower, Baumeister and John Tierney convincingly describe another addendum: willpower depends on glucose as an energy source.

As a control, some subjects drank a "large, tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop." But the researchers found that both the ice cream shakes and the joyless glop reversed the effects of depletion. It wasn't pleasure that rejuvenated willpower, it was the calories, a discovery they confirmed by measuring glucose levels after self-control tasks, and, by comparing the effects of lemonade with sugar versus lemonade with Splenda.