The Insider News

Computer History Vignettes[^]:

As we've shifted from thousands to hundreds of millions of computer users, much history is lost. Few realize that the backslash character did not exist in much text usage prior to 1961, and in no computer until 1958. A paper by Eric Fischer, submitted to the Annals of the History of Computing in early 2000 (and not yet published), unearthed a backslash on the keyboard of the Teletype Wheatstone Perforator, circa 1937-1945. But this was unknown to data processing people, who were stuck even up to the FORTRAN era (beginning 1955) with the Hollerith punch card code. Here is the story for the record.

Mailinator(tm) Blog[^]:

There is another technological shift conspiring against many web frameworks that isn't focused on performance, but instead focused on "ease of use" - which in many cases may hit far closer to home. That shift is the reorganization of MVC.... What thousands and thousands of Rails developers discovered upon moving to backbone is that they no longer needed their fancy template views. Their backend became a system that pushed JSON over HTTP. Very clean and very simple.

fxguide[^]:

For Brave, the team at Pixar had to deal with a hero or rather heroine, who is on screen for almost every shot, but who needed wild, yet beautiful hair. The simulation department needed to develop a technique and approach not only viable on a hand crafted trailer shot, but something that could be used almost ‘out of box’ on most shots, or the film was simply never going to make its deadline.

Reuters[^]:

Automobiles are already considered "computers on wheels" by security experts. Vehicles are filled with dozens of tiny computers known as electronic control units, or ECUs, that require tens of millions of lines of computer code to manage interconnected systems including engines, brakes and navigation as well as lighting, ventilation and entertainment. Cars also use the same wireless technologies that power cell phones and Bluetooth headsets, which makes them vulnerable to remote attacks that are widely known to criminal hackers.

Perspectives[^]:

Cold storage is unusual because the focus needs to be singular. How can we deliver the best price per capacity now and continue to reduce it over time? The focus on price over performance, price over latency, price over bandwidth actually made the problem more interesting. With most products and services, it’s usually possible to be the best on at least some dimensions even if not on all. On cold storage, to be successful, the price per capacity target needs to be hit. On Glacier, the entire project was focused on delivering $0.01/GB/Month with high redundancy and security.

John Graham-Cumming[^]:

It seems every time I come across a story about the Mars Curiosity rover there will be many people commenting on the technology used starting with "Why don't they just..?" and usually pointing out things like: the processor in their smart phone is way faster than the one of Mars, or they have way more memory on their iPad, or their digital camera is way better than the one sending back pictures. These "Why don't they just..?" questions are both annoying and to be expected. Annoying because the underlying thought is "Those NASA/JPL guys are so dumb LOL" and to be expected and encouraged because we wouldn't make any progress without asking questions and, in particular, asking why.

ExtremeTech[^]:

Do I miss the days when Nvidia drivers and chipset launches could boost performance by 20-30% across a huge range of applications? Yes. But would I trade them for the data destroying sound card conflicts, substandard driver support, and days when Windows would BSOD if you crossed your eyes at it? Not really. And I like the fact that the computer I built for my parents in 2008 is still “blazing fast” with the addition of an SSD and a bit more RAM, as opposed to needing an all-new system with a new OS installation.

GrokCode[^]:

There are a number of great version control systems out there; the most important thing is to pick one and learn to use it effectively. No matter which source control system you decide to use, there are a number of universal principles that will help you to get the most out of source control.

Web Reflection[^]:

I keep seeing developers complaining about different things with the JSON protocol and, don't get me wrong, I've been the first one trying to implement any sort of alternative starting from JSOMON and many others... Well, after so many years of client/server development it's not that I've given up on thinking "something could be better or different", it's just that I have learned many reasons JSON is damn good as it is, and here just a few of these reasons.

#AltDevBlogADay[^]:

Bad code doesn’t have to be a problem, as long as it’s not misbehaving, and nobody pokes their bloody nose in it. Unfortunately, that state of ignorant bliss rarely lasts. A bug will be discovered. A feature requested. A new platform released. Now you have to dig into that horrible mess and try to clean it up. This article offers some humble advice for that unfortunate situation.