The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Currently, there are four major types of e-voting around the world that are worth keeping an eye on: Brazil’s homegrown direct recording electronic (DRE) setup, Australia’s open-source software, Estonia’s Internet voting, and a Spanish startup’s efforts to expand what’s been called "crypto-voting." Each of these approaches has its own unique set of problems, but the primary obstacles they present for many voting officials and computer scientists is their lack of ability to verify source code and expense.

Ars Technica[^]:

At BUILD in Redmond today, Microsoft announced its plans to improve C++ standards conformance in its Visual Studio development environment, and talked about ways in which C++ would become a better, regularly updated, modern programming language. Microsoft developer and C++ standard committee chair Herb Sutter introduced work being done by the C++ community to make the language better, and also discussed the work being done by Microsoft to make its own compiler better.

Atomic Spin[^]:

So it turns out C is a functional language too! On the way to Strange Loop this year, John Van Enk and I were trying to find a way to write some C code that avoided dynamic (malloc) allocation. We discovered a technique that allows you to forgo the use of malloc in many common cases. It also enables very pure functional C code. You doubt? I shall demonstrate!

Kenny Kerr[^]:

When I first started writing concurrent software, C++ had no support for synchronization. Windows itself had only a handful of synchronization primitives, all of which were implemented in the kernel. I tended to use a critical section unless I needed to synchronize across processes, in which case I used a mutex.... Today the synchronization landscape has changed dramatically. There are a plethora of choices for the C++ programmer.

Elm[^]:

If you have worked with AJAX or node.js or any other callback heavy framework, you have probably been to Callback Hell. Your whole application ends up being passed around as callbacks, making the code extremely difficult to read and maintain. The resulting tangled mess of code is often pejoritively called spaghetti code, a term borrowed from the days of goto.

Rodrigo Alves Vieira[^]:

Suppose you’re learning Python, you should try to build a copy of the cat program with it or try to implement tree, for example. Unix programs are often small and focused on doing something unique and doing it very well (read more about the concept), which is also ideal for learning to program. Just pick up a single problem and solve it in the best way possible.

Hack a Day[^]:

Carlos started his investigations into the properties of prime numbers by drawing a series of circles on a number line in AutoCAD. These circles were of diameters of all the integers, and going down the number line, these circles started to have an interesting, chaotic pattern (see above picture). Carlos found that whenever two circles intersected, that position was a prime number. It’s really nothing more than a Sieve of Eratosthenes, but it’s a very cool-looking visualization nonetheless.

The Next Web[^]:

Microsoft's security team is killing it: Not one product on Kaspersky's top 10 vulnerabilities list
Security firm Kaspersky has released its latest IT Threat Evolution report. There were some interesting findings in the report, as always, but the most interesting thing that stuck out was all the way at the bottom: Microsoft products no longer feature among the Top 10 products with vulnerabilities. This is because the automatic updates mechanism has now been well developed in recent versions of Windows OS.

Channel 9[^]:

At Build, we'll dive deep to cover all the areas you care about. How to design and build beautiful Windows 8 apps. How to sell your apps in the Windows 8 Store and make money. And much more. Join us on the Microsoft Campus for 4 days of extraordinary presentations delivered by the engineers behind the products and services to get you up to speed.

ignore the code[^]:

This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need «entry-level» performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: «Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.» And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is incredibly slow, the keyboard sucks, and they either never actually use it, or eventually come to the conclusion that they just hate computers. In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.

Dodgy Coder[^]:

I've just read some predictions for the future of the PC, written in 1993, by Nathan P. Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft. His memo is amazingly accurate. Note that his term "IHC" (Information Highway Computer) could be roughly equated with today's smartphone or tablet device, connecting to the Internet via WiFi or a cellular network. In his second last paragraph, Myhrvold predicts the winners will be those who "own the software standards on IHCs" which could be roughly equated with today's app stores, such as those on iOS (Apple), Android (Google, Amazon) and Windows 8 (Microsoft). The only thing you could say he possibly didn't foresee would be the importance of hardware design in the new smartphone and tablet industry.