Interesting Snippets from 2012-07-30

• Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other - NYTimes.com

  Machine-to-machine communications has been around for more than two decades, initially run on landline connections and used for controlling industrial processes remotely. With advances in mobile broadband speeds and smartphone computing, the same robotic conversations are now rapidly shifting to wireless networks.

  When the total amount of data traffic generated by machines overtakes that created by human voice conversations — or possibly before — mobile operators will have to choose who waits in line to make a call or receive an e-mail — the machine or the human.

• Treatise on Font Rasterisation

  Font rasterisation is, in the author’s opinion, one of the most interesting fields of computer science. If music is the subjective application of physics, then font rasterisation is almost certainly the subjective application of computer science. The purpose of this article is threefold: firstly, to provide an introduction into the various methods available to aid in the rasterisation process; secondly, to provide a critical analysis of these methods against the needs of desktop applications; and finally, to relate this analysis to free software.

• A guide to analyzing Python performance « Huy Nguyen

  While it’s not always the case that every Python program you write will require a rigorous performance analysis, it is reassuring to know that there are a wide variety of tools in Python’s ecosystem that one can turn to when the time arises.

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