The Insider News

The Register[^]:

Mozilla developers are considering dropping support for the <blink> tag from future versions of the Firefox browser, in a move that would see the web rid of the scourge of blinking text once and for all. Firefox's Gecko HTML rendering engine is currently the only one to support the blinking effect, which usability expert Jakob Nielsen once described as "simply evil." Internet Explorer has never supported it, and while Opera once did, it lost support when it switched its rendering engine to WebKit in February. (Opera has since switched again to Google's new Blink engine – which, ironically perhaps, doesn't support <blink> either.)

ZDNet[^]:

Though word of its existence first leaked in August of 2012, there's still a lot of confusion about what Microsoft's Blue is and isn't. Partially, this is due to Microsoft officials not saying a whole heck of a lot about Blue so far. That will be changing within the next couple months... The other reason for the confusion about Blue is it seems to be a codename for both products and a change in the way Microsoft builds, tests and releases software. (This same double meaning of the codename applies to Microsoft's Gemini... the codename for the next set of Metro-style Office apps... as well as the work of the Office team to change how it rolls out new releases.)

Ars Technica[^]:

Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that's capable of 100Gbps.

xkcd[^]:

There is an update for Adobe Download Manager...

TechRadar[^]:

What do you get when you combine the Raspberry Pi with some inspirational young inventors? Terrific Raspberry Pi project designs, that's what. Fourteen groups of teams from schools, universities and businesses gathered in late March at PA Consulting Group's Cambridge Technology Centre for the awards ceremony of the PA and Raspberry Pi-making competition. The young programmers presented their inventions to a hand-picked judging panel after being given three months to work on their designs, a £25 Raspberry Pi and up to £50 of additional hardware and software.

CNET News[^]:

Encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service has stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations, an internal government document reveals. An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge.

Volatile and Decentralized[^]:

There are four main aspects to my job: (1) Defining the technical agenda for the team and making sure we're successful; (2) Writing code of my own; (3) Acting as the main liaison between our team and other groups at Google, and (4) Doing the "people management" for the team in terms of hiring, performance reviews, promotion, and so forth. Academics will immediately recognize the parallels with being a professor.

Windows PowerShell Blog[^]:

We've decided not to bring the Script Explorer project to RTM. In the meantime, we will start winding down the Script Explorer project. This will be a gradual process to allow time for existing users to move to other tools. We'll start by removing the RC package from the Download Center this week. For those who have already downloaded pre-release versions and are actively using Script Explorer in their environments, we will continue to operate the back-end script aggregation service used by Script Explorer for a few more months. We plan to turn off the service on June 14, 2013.

ReadWrite[^]:

More than ever, companies need coders. And while tech firms do the bulk of the hiring, the demand for programmers spans industries and only seems to be growing. From writing basic HTML to building complex logic into mobile applications, the ability to smartly craft lines of code continues to be one of the most in-demand — and often, well-paying — skill sets one can have. So what skills are the most sought after?

OnStartups[^]:

So, you know Joel Spolsky's essay Things You Should Never Do, Part I? In which he urgently recommends that, no matter what, please god listen to me, don't rewrite your product from scratch? And lists a bunch of dramatic failures when companies have tried to do so? First off, he's totally right. Developers tend to spectacularly underestimate the effort involved in such a rewrite... and spectacularly overestimate the value generated.... But sometimes, on certain rare occasions, you're going to be justified in rewriting a major part of your product.

Peter Norvig[^]:

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours.... The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else.... Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology.

Not Implemented[^]:

A big annoyance in software development is having to wait around for tasks to complete; the larger the codebase, the more common it is. Some examples: Compiling and deploying the project. Pushing and pulling new code from the version control system. Running automated tests. Generating and converting assets. All this waiting around is a productivity nightmare which is sometimes underestimated, especially if the task itself doesn’t take long.... Someone more disciplined than me may prefer to spend that time writing documentation or reading tickets on the bug tracker. Unfortunately that’s still going to a be big productivity hit as the problem is the task switching – we’re just not wired to do that.