The Insider News

GNU Smalltalk[^]:

GNU has been producing free software for almost 30 years now, and there's no reason why it should stop.... So, here are some proposals to fellow hackers. Some of them may work out, some of them may not. It is even possible some of them are inapplicable because of U.S. law for non-profits. But I'm sure that they are welcome by the FSF, and that's already a good motivation to write them.

Nettuts+[^]:

Writing code, which is easy to change is the Holy Grail of programming. Welcome to programming nirvana! But things are much more difficult in reality: source code is difficult to understand, dependencies point in countless directions, coupling is annoying, and you soon feel the heat of programming hell. In this tutorial, we will discuss a few principles, techniques and ideas that will help you write code that is easy to change.

MPG[^]:

Over the past few years a semi-conscious unease has been steadily growing in my mind: OS X is not getting more reliable and more stable, it is instead developing more and nastier problems that range from interference with getting work done to potential data loss.... The goal here is for Apple to step up to the plate and engage in responsible OS X development; some of these issues are absolutely unacceptable even in a single minor release, but to see them persist for months or years is unforgiveable.

Standard C++[^]:

Many people don’t realize how many web pages offer access to try out C++ compilers, including many of the latest compilers with burgeoning C++11 language support. So we thought we’d publish a list.

Paul Thurrott[^]:

My “Windows Secrets” co-author Rafael Rivera has spent much of the past week investigating Play To, the streaming media technology available in Windows 7 and Windows 8. And perhaps not surprisingly, this is another example of Microsoft doing the right thing—supporting a standards-based interoperability solution—and then going absolutely nowhere with it.

Wired.com[^]:

People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web. The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream.... This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time.

The Register[^]:

With Office 2013 now officially available, is there anything in it actually worth upgrading for? As was the case with its predecessors, the latest Office upgrade is driven less by actual appetite from consumers for new features as by compatibility factors. Will anything but the latest or at least a recent version run properly on Windows 7 or 8? Will it play nicely with SharePoint? Will users be able to read emailed documents, and create documents that are intelligible to others?

Gamasutra[^]:

As our industry is dragged into yet another round of scapegoating, I am discovering that the conversation about violent video games is rigged against us from the start, and that we collectively need to change the terms of the conversation before we sit down to talk with anyone.

Ars Technica[^]:

Some say we're living in a "post-PC" world, but malware on PCs is still a major problem for home computer users and businesses. The examples are everywhere: In November, we reported that malware was used to steal information about one of Japan's newest rockets and upload it to computers controlled by hackers. Critical systems at two US power plants were recently found infected with malware spread by USB drives. Malware known as "Dexter" stole credit card data from point-of-sale terminals at businesses. And espionage-motivated computer threats are getting more sophisticated and versatile all the time.

Securityweek[^]

This attack underscores the security problem posed by third party code. In this case, the vulnerable application was probably not coded by Yahoo! team, and not even hosted on Yahoo’s server farm, leaving Yahoo! with the full responsibility for securing the application on one hand, and a very limited capability to actually control the code, on the other hand.

Full report from Imperva (PDF)[^]

Addy Osmani[^]:

The Chrome comic book was originally designed as a limited edition print book for journalists all the way back in 2008. What you may not have known is that it's also a fantastic read for any web developer. Released during the week of our first Chrome launch, the comic described our multi-process architecture, how the V8 JavaScript engine works, predictive DNS lookups (for optimizing based on your usage patterns) and many technical architectural concepts in a way that was surprisingly accessible to the everyday user.

Kalzumeus Software[^]:

January has been a very bad month for Ruby on Rails developers, with two high-severity security bugs permitting remote code execution found in the framework and a separate-but-related compromise on rubygems.org, a community resource which virtually all Ruby on Rails developers sit downstream of. Many startups use Ruby on Rails. Other startups don’t but, like the Rails community, may one day find themselves asking What Do We Do When Apocalyptically Bad Things Happen On Our Framework of Choice? I thought I’d explain that for the general community.