The Insider News

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.

Clark's Tech Blog[^]:

Way back in the day, when I first really got into real Mac programming I used an old IDE called Think Pascal. One of the cool things about it was that unlike Think C, it allowed programming with proportional fonts. I typically used Geneva to code in Pascal and Monoco to program in C. I later switched to doing almost all my coding in Visual Studio which didn’t work well with proportional fonts.... [Then] someone mentioned to me that Xcode actually works with proportional fonts...

Tommi Kaikkonen[^]:

Have a blog? With small adjustments, you can noticeably improve its typography. Your readers will thank you for it. This guide will help you understand the typographic foundations that will improve the readability of your articles.

Promit's Ventspace[^]:

I don’t feel that the way DirectX has been handled in recent years has been a positive thing. A number of technical decisions were made that were unfortunate, and then a number of business and marketing type decisions were made that compounded the problem. Many of the technologies (DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectShow) have splayed into a mess of intersecting fragments intended to replace them. The amount of developer support for Direct3D from Microsoft has been unsatisfactory, and anecdotal reports of internal team status have not been promising. Somebody told me a year or two back that the HLSL compiler team was one person. That’s not something you want to hear, true or not. Worst of all, though, was the communication. That’s the part that bugs me.