The Insider News

Read Write Web[^]:

Nikola Tesla, the tragically brilliant Serbian-American inventor beloved of hipsters, techies and historians the world over, may soon have his own museum, thanks to Web comic The Oatmeal's online efforts. Eager Tesla fans will have to wait for the museum, but in the meantime, check out these outrageous videos - including classic "Sweet Home Alabama" played on Tesla coils.

Rands In Repose[^]:

For me, the amount of email that arrives is inversely proportionate to my amount of free time. This means the less time I have to read mail, the more mail that arrives. Greater minds than mine have attempted to tackle this unfortunate time management situation, so I’m going to keep it simple. You and I are busy people. We may or may not know each other, but we have the same goal - how can each of us effectively surf an ever-growing pile of information? To this end, I would like to come to an agreement with you.

DaedTech[^]:

You probably have seen code like this, and I hope that it makes you sad. I know it makes me sad. It makes me sad because it’s clearly the result of a fundamental failure to understand (or at least implement) polymorphism. Code written like this follows an inheritance structure, but it completely misses the point of that structure.

.net magazine[^]:

Microsoft caused a stir in the design industry with the release of Windows Phone. With its Bauhaus-inspired minimalism, strong focus on typography and use of subtle but impactful motion design, Windows Phone showed that there is definitely room for innovation in the mobile space. Windows 8, due for release on 26 October, brings the same design goals and ideals to the desktop and tablet market. Given the focus on creating beautifully functional applications – not to mention a much larger potential market than iOS – this is definitely a platform designers should get involved with.

Hack a Day[^]:

We’d bet everyone reading this article has played a game on an emulator at some time or another. And you may have a base idea of how those emulators work. But we’d wager the vast majority of you are clueless about the actual implementation of game emulators (we know we are). But that has all changed after seeing this demonstration of how Bisqwit wrote his own NES emulator. The description doesn’t cover anything more than the basics of writing code that emulates the NES CPU hardware itself. But it’s presented in such a way that makes it quite easy to understand for anyone who has a basic knowledge of programming.

#AltDevBlogADay[^]:

Comments increase the value of your code. Compared to comments, though, we often spend more time learning methodologies like Scrum and Agile; functional and object oriented programming; test driven development and refactoring. Yet comments are critical in ways that methodologies aren’t. In the real world, we rarely spend years working on the same project; we often switch from one program to another multiple times in a week! Each program has its own style, design patterns, and idiosyncracies; comments help us learn them.

Greg's diary[^]:

Once upon a time, files were small. The First Edition of Unix had a maximum file size of 64 kB, and even today we see the effect of the ancient 2 GB limit in the Linux O_LARGEFILE flag to open. But the truth is much larger. I back up my systems to disk, and looking at them is something like: 36211690564. What are those values? How big are the files? Your eyes go funny just trying to count the digits.

Strata Conference[^]:

Evolution in the digital universe has been driven, since the beginning, partly by improvements in code and partly by improvements in machines. Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model of universal computation of 1936 led directly to John von Neumann’s 5-kilobyte, two-dimensional implementation of 1946. The resulting address matrix, still in place after sixty years, is how the machines know where to find the code, and how the code knows where to find the machines. Mapping real-world correspondence to data structures populating a storage matrix currently expanding by some 5 trillion bits per second is the challenge that brings us here.

Elegant Code[^]:

Nancy is my passion. I truly believe there is enough room in the .NET market for ASP.NET alternatives, but could I make a living out of it? People seem to enjoy working with it, so why not? To some people that would be enough to quit their job and set off to work full-time in their project. That’s not me though. I’ve always been a bit cautious to life-changing decisions and even more so since I got married and had kids.

TechHive[^]:

ICANN was planning to use a "Digital Archery" contest to determine which applications for a new Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) such as ".security", ".beer" or ".download" should be evaluated first. A system like this is needed because not all the 1923 gTLD applications can be handled at once. Using Digital Archery, applicants would have to shoot their digital arrow as close as they could to the bulls eye of a time stamp. This method was cancelled in June after applicants complained about unexpected results and network latency issues which they said made the method unfair. And since than ICANN has been contemplating an alternative method.

Technology Review[^]:

A new way for websites and other online services to store passwords could prevent breaches like the one that resulted in 6.5 million LinkedIn users having their passwords posted online earlier this year. That kind of data dump happens when an attacker gains access to the server storing user passwords. Researchers at computer security company RSA have created a system that splits passwords in two and stores each half in different locations. The two halves never come together, even when a person logs in and has his password verified.

GigaOm[^]:

The cost of a Raspberry Pi computer you can buy today is $25. It has a 700 MHz CPU with 256 MB RAM.

 In 2001, the Power Mac G4 Cube, with 450 MHz CPU with 64 MB RAM, cost $1,799. That is how much hardware prices have fallen. Meanwhile, a LEGO X-Wing costs $59.99. So for $25 anyone can work on a project that uses computers at its heart, and if something breaks, they can just go buy a new one. This makes small Linux computers like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards the hardware DIYers’ new LEGO bricks.

Fabulous Adventures In Coding[^]:

One of the most basic ways to think about a computer program is that it is a device which takes in integers as inputs and spits out integers as outputs. The C# compiler, for example, takes in source code strings, and those source code strings are essentially nothing more than enormous binary numbers. The output of the compiler is either diagnostic text, or strings of IL and metadata, which are also just enormous binary numbers. Because the compiler is not perfect, in some rare cases it terminates abnormally with an internal error message. But those fatal error messages are also just big binary numbers. So here's an interesting question: are there functions which cannot be computed, even in principle on a machine with arbitrarily much storage, by any C# program?

Web Reflection[^]:

Nobody seems to be happy, nobody seems to understand it ... everyone is trying to change it, pretending to make it better ... and again, nobody seems to realize it has been here since ever, it has been working in any field, it does everything, and it keeps getting faster!