The Insider News

Bits and Behavior[^]:

I’m not really a hard core gamer any­more, but my fas­ci­na­tion with pro­gram­ming did begin with video games (and specif­i­cally, ren­der­ing algo­rithms). So when I saw John Carmack’s 2012 Quake­Con keynote show up in my feed, I thought I’d lis­ten to a bit of it and learn a bit about the state of game design and development. What I heard instead was a hacker’s hacker talk about his recent real­iza­tion that soft­ware engi­neer­ing is actu­ally a social sci­ence.

Scripting News[^]:

Anyone can write a spec. What matters is what software is supporting the protocol, what content is available through it and how compelling is the content. RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless.

Timoh[^]:

Do people expect to achieve something more when they use encryption? Probably yes. Often people think they secure their application if they magically use encryption. Now we get to the point. Encryption itself is most of the time useless as is. Encrypted data is malleable, which means the adversary can change the contents of your plaintext by modifying the ciphertext. This is something a secure system should not let happen under any circumstances.

TechNet Blogs[^]:

It’s been 25 years since we’ve updated the Microsoft logo and now is the perfect time for a change. This is an incredibly exciting year for Microsoft as we prepare to release new versions of nearly all of our products. From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, you will see a common look and feel across these products providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs.

Ars Technica[^]:

We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise—the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. But people do forget—and quickly—about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else.

PCGamesN[^]:

As a cruel trick on myself, about a month ago I installed Windows 8 on my main PC to see what it was like. The answer is: abysmal. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Windows 8 is the worst computing experience I’ve ever had. As a desktop operating system, it’s annoying, frustrating, irritating, and baffling to use. I’ve tried on many occasions to explain exactly why it’s so awful to use day-to-day, and most of the time, smoke starts pouring out of my ears. I thought it would be better to get down exactly what the issues are and why you should avoid it.

TechRadar[^]:

The real difference is that Windows 8 is finished; it's polished and smooth, with even better performance than in the previews, and none of the rough edges left. Even the previously disappointing Modern UI-style apps such as Mail, Calendar, Messaging and People are slick, sleek and far more functional. Even though Microsoft says it will carry on updating them, they're now useful and engaging rather than frustrating. This is Microsoft putting it all together.

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.

The Endeavour[^]:

My printer is unable to clean 51. It won’t work, and all it says is “Unable to Clean 51.” Here’s my suggestion for finding such useless error messages in a code review: Write a script to extract all string literals from your source code, then read over the output. The beauty of this approach is that the reviewer sees the text without the context of the surrounding code, just as the user does. Ideally someone who is not a programmer would review the output strings. I would hope someone who ran across “Unable to Clean 51″ would flag that as something that doesn’t make sense.