The Insider News

Extreme Tech[^]

In an amusing twist that undoubtedly spells the end of some hapless manager’s career, Microsoft has accidentally gifted pirates with a free, fully-functioning Windows 8 license key. If you so desire, it is now possible to activate Windows 8 Pro for free, using a legitimate key provided by Microsoft itself.

Pete Brown's 10rem.net[^]:

No one likes to waste time by going through the submission and certification process multiple times. Many apps also require additional credentials or specific information that users of the apps would normally have access to. This is one spot where we see rejections that could be very easily avoided.

Jerry Nixon @work[^]:

Jerry Nixon welcomes Eric Battalio, Ayman Shoukry and Raman Sharma from the Visual C++ team as they discuss how you can develop Windows 8 apps using C++. Tune in as they provide best practices and reasons why you would want to use this language.

Ars Technica[^]:

The Linux kernel, of course, already runs on smartphones, tablets, desktops, servers, and supercomputers. While Ubuntu is the most widely used Linux desktop, it has done nothing to stop the dominance of Windows and it only runs on mobile devices in limited ways. There is Ubuntu for Android, which aims to turn Android phones into Ubuntu desktops when connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. And Ubuntu can be installed on the Nexus 7 tablet in an experimental fashion.

Monday Note[^]:

Channels, shows, special events should all be presented as apps. Click, pay, and play, with standard fare for free. Catch the 6 pm news when you get home at 9:30; watch two programs side-by-side with Android 7 or iOS 9, all on your screen of choice: smartphone, tablet, PC, or TV. The technology isn’t an issue. There’s enough bandwidth on cable (or pretend-fiber) networks, plenty of storage on servers, and all the required computing power in current or future TV boxes, from Apple and its competitors. But there’s an obstacle in the tangled, encrusted business models that the Comcasts, CBSs, and Disneys cling to out of fear that Apple will wrest control of their content, that they’ll be disintermediated a la iTunes or the iPhone/iPad App Store.

Epeus' epigone[^]:

If you’ve read Nasim Taleb’s Antifragile, you know what comes next. By shielding people from the complexities of the web, by removing the fragility of links, we’re actually making things worse. We’re creating a fragility debt. Suddenly, something changes - money runs out, a pivot is declared, an aquihire happens, and the pent-up fragility is resolved in a Black Swan moment. The special place disappears entirely.

New Scientist[^]:

WHO runs the internet? For the past 30 years, pretty much no one. Some governments might call this a bug, but to the engineers who designed the protocols, standards, naming and numbering systems of the internet, it's a feature. The goal was to build a network that could withstand damage and would enable the sharing of information. In that, they clearly succeeded.... But perhaps not for much longer. This week, 2000 people have gathered for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to discuss, in part, whether they should be in charge.

The Windows Phone Blog[^]:

From the day Windows Phone 7 made its debut, we’ve gotten lots of kudos for its on-screen keyboard and intelligent suggestions and corrections. Engadget called it “one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we've used on any platform.” Gizmodo declared: “The keyboard is boss.” Even the New York Times loved the “smart auto-suggestions.” In Windows Phone 8, we set out to make our critically-acclaimed keyboard even more intuitive, accurate, and personal. As one of the program managers for the feature, I wanted to tell you about improvements in the new release, and also explain some of the science behind our prediction technology, something we get a lot of questions about.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

By day, Matthew Zakutny works as a project manager at a trenchless sewer repair company. By night, he’s leading a group of volunteers working to revive a software project that once looked set to challenge the market leaders in the rapidly growing smartphone market. Zakutny and his fellow volunteers are hatching a plan to rescue webOS, the mobile operating software initially developed by smartphone pioneer Palm and later offered by HP, by making the software compatible with the latest smartphone hardware.

High Scalability[^]:

The economics of flash memory are staggering. If you’re not using SSD, you are doing it wrong. Not quite true, but close. Some small applications fit entirely in memory – less than 100GB – great for in-memory solutions. There’s a place for rotational drives (HDD) in massive streaming analytics and petabytes of data. But for the vast space between, flash has become the only sensible option.

io9.com[^]:

What do scientists think about seeing their fields of research pulverized by science fiction? We asked researchers from diverse fields to tell us whether any science fiction gets it right.... We did get some in-depth, and surprising, answers from other scientists, whose fields range from robotics to biology. Here they are.

jeremylikness.com[^]:

The other day I was browsing some archives on an old disk drive and came across the T64 formatted binaries of some demo software I wrote for the Commodore 64 in the 1980s. Demo software is fun to write and is more about tricks and optimizations than business rules or data models. I had written a few fun projects in Silverlight a few years back and decided to convert some over to Windows 8.... Once again, I was amazed at how quickly and easily I was able to port the code over to Windows 8.

I Programmer[^]:

You have to be some optimist if you believe that Silverlight has any future in the new Microsoft, but it is still interesting if sad to watch as the edifice is taken down. The news today is that the Silverlight-specific website has been removed and all we have now is a mess of broken links. Now only the far flung reaches of Microsoft, such as Microsoft Research, still make use of Silverlight for new projects.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

Return values and exceptions are both inadequate tools for handling errors. But we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future — just as we have been for decades.

spinellis.gr[^]:

A substitution of a comma with a period in project Mercury's working Fortran code compromised the accuracy of the results, rendering them unsuitable for longer orbital missions. How probable are such events and how does a programming language's design affect their likelihood and severity? In a paper I recently presented at the 4th Annual International Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools I showed results obtained by randomly perturbing similar programs written in diverse languages to see whether the compiler or run-time system would detect those changes as errors, or whether these would end-up generating incorrect output.

0xdabbad00.com[^]:

DEP and ASLR are two simple protections every Windows binary should be implementing. For a developer to use them, all they need to do is compile with any version of Visual Studio since 2005, and it should be the default setting. If you are compiling Windows code, you should be using Visual Studio, and even if you use a different compiler, it should still have options for DEP and ASLR. Enabling DEP and ASLR, I believe, is the easiest thing a developer can do to improve the security of their code. Obviously, you can still have DEP and ASLR and still have the buggiest, sloppiest, most insecure code, but all you need to do is turn on two linker settings and instantly memory corruption exploits become much more difficult to exploit.

Rugged Circuits[^]:

Use a sledgehammer, fire a bullet at it, throw it into a pool....that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to show you how to electrically destroy your Arduino, though many of you seem to already know how to do that through unfortunate experience. You know what we mean....that funny smell, the scorch mark on a component, or the dreaded “programmer not in sync” error message -- all signs that you’ve just learned a lesson the hard way. Why are we doing this? If you own an Arduino, it’s good to know what is and what isn’t OK to do with it.

Massively Parallel Procrastination[^]:

In early 2012, I ran across a fascinating project on the keyboard forums at geekhack.org. The ErgoDox is a project by some gifted hobbyists to build a split ergonomic keyboard inspired by the Key64 Project. The Key64, in turn, counts the µTron, TypeMatrix, Maltron and Kinesis keyboards among its influences.... As soon as I saw it, I signed up to buy an ErgoDox kit when the folks designing it were ready to start the group-buy process. Here's the build process in depth.