The Insider News

Quote:

Like the Republican Party, Microsoft’s leadership team never got the message that the landscape was rapidly changing to its disadvantage. The company’s fixation on the declining Windows platform reminds me of the Republican Party’s continuing focus on 18th-Century social values where no Internet existed, long-distance travel was done via horse and carriage, and Social Security and Medicare were not heard of.

Peter Ritchie's MVP Blog[^]:

There’s a plethora of IoC containers for .NET. They’re all great tools, like StructureMap, Autofac, Ninject, Unity, etc. Don’t get me wrong, they’re powerful and they do a lot of things. But, they do a lot of things. What do I mean by “they do a lot of things”? Well, they’re all effectively designed to work with codebases that are not DI-friendly. They go out of their way to provide features to support DI in any imaginable design. “What’s wrong with that” you say? If you’ve got a brownfield project, that’s great—you can likely get testability with code not designed to be testable—which is a good thing. But, these abilities make us lazy.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

A buddy of mine and I were discussing website building while downing some pints of Lucky Bucket the other night... The conversation turned to "should I give a rats patoot about the 3% of people who disable javascript when dipping into the joys of jquery and yui controls, or do I tell'em to eat a fudgicile?".

Source: An OpenNews project[^]:

In our scenario, we are mapping census data to show how similar geographic areas compare to each other in terms of population, income, race, or education level. Before you start writing any code, you’ve got design issues that matter not just to aesthetics, but to the reader’s comprehension of the presentation. So how do you choose color? What colors are the “right ones”? The key is that color is relational. In any composition or layout, a single color does not exist in a vacuum, but is always comprehended in relation to the other colors present.

Victor Yurkovsky[^]:

FPGA technologies had 'leveled the playing field'. A kid can save up $50 to buy a devboard, load up some free software and create a never-before-seen brilliant new CPU design. And implement it, without a million-dollar fab cycle. And it will run at clock speeds of at least tens of MHz. So where are all the new brilliant CPU designs, from kids or grownups? Where are the original ideas and breakthroughs? Sure there are some improvements such as clever cache designs, branch prediction, out-of-order code execution. But most processors we see today are pretty much ripped from the pages of dusty old computer architecture books. I've been trying to find something new and exciting for a while. When I feel particularly clever I sit down with a clean FPGA and try to write 'The Great American Processor' (TGAP). It is a humbling experience, and I strongly suggest it to all of you, for those times you feel especially clever.

kellabyte[^]:

Regardless of programming language, if you’re doing a lot of CPU intensive tasks the more you can consider how the CPU and it’s memory operate the better performance you will get. Depending on language you may or may not have access to certain optimizations like SIMD (JVM and CLR don’t support the 15 year old instructions yet) but there are still a lot of decisions that can make a big difference especially when it comes to memory. Consider these numbers as you make your decisions.

The Verge[^]:

Stardock, creators of start menu replacement Start8, is introducing its latest Windows 8 app today: ModernMix. Windows 8's Metro environment, or however you refer to it, has been the source of focus for Microsoft and also a source of criticism around the way you interact with it. Unlike typical Windows apps, ones built to run in the Windows 8-style environment are designed to run fullscreen or as a snapped application to the side, but there's no other options for windowing. ModernMix aims to change this.

TechCrunch[^]:

I spent the day with the founding members of the Street View team to learn about how it went from a gimmick in someone’s mind to a utility that we use without thinking, and in some cases, wouldn’t want to live without. Starting out as a camera strapped to Page’s car, Street View technology has been added to vans, cars, tripods, backpacks, bikes and even a snow mobile. It has become the eyes of all of Google’s vision for how we view the world after launching on May 25, 2007. While the product has had its fair share of controversy, Google has forged ahead.