The Insider News

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

We’re just hours away from what will hopefully be an enlightening and exciting Windows Phone 8 launch. I must admit I’ve mostly been ignoring Windows Phone the last few months . It’s hard to get excited, or even pay attention, when Microsoft is trying so hard to keep everyone in the dark. Hardware announcements with no software details? No upgradability of old devices, and little information on the WP 7.8 release that will cover those as well as new low-end devices? I just tuned the Windows Phone world out. We’ll see if Microsoft can regain my attention tomorrow. If they can’t get me interested I don’t know how they’ll get anyone interested. Sigh.

Ars Technica[^]:

Windows 8's most obvious—and most divisive—new feature is its user interface. However, it would be a mistake to think that the user interface is the only thing that's new in Windows 8: there's a lot that's changed behind the scenes, too. Just as is the case with the user interface, many of the improvements made to the Windows 8 core are motivated by Microsoft's desire to transform Windows into an effective tablet operating system. Even those of us with no interest at all in tablets can stand to take advantage of these changes, however.

iFixit[^]:

We got our hands on Microsoft's new Surface, and to its credit, it lasted a good twenty minutes before we decided to tear it open.

PCWorld[^]:

Titan is built into 200 server cabinets, which is the same size as Jaguar. ORNL upgraded by moving to 16-core CPUs and the latest graphics processors, which are faster and more power efficient. Titan has 700TB of memory. Titan consumes about 9 megawatts of power and the energy costs for running the supercomputer could add up to $10 million a year.... The next milestone for supercomputers is to reach exaflop performance, which is about 1000 petaflops, by 2018.

Coding Horror[^]:

I don't want to extend Markdown by adding tons of crazy new functionality, or radically change the way it currently works, or anything like that. I'd be opposed to such changes. I just want to solidify and standardize the simple, useful version of Markdown that is working so well for everyone right now. I want there to be an unambiguous, basic standard that everyone using Markdown can expect to work in the same way across all web sites in the world when they begin typing.

TechCrunch[^]:

The TinyBASIC port consists of an editor, called TinyBASIC One, which allows programs to be inputed, edited and run; the BASIC interpreter — including support for language features such as PRINT, REM, LET, STOP and GOTO — and in the raspberry flavour additional features include WHILE/WEND and REPEAT/UNTIL loops (but not GOTO).

PCWorld[^]:

Since most free games are (usually) made by small teams on shorter timelines, they have to scale down their games in comparison to AAA titles with budgets in the tens of millions and hundreds on staff. Scaling down doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, though; sometimes whittling a game down to its core elements results in a game with a laserlike focus on what makes it fun. This week we’ve got free games that make less into more in different ways.

jeffwofford.com[^]:

Herb Sutter—Microsoft’s chief C++ language guru—recently admitted that Microsoft found implementing variadic templates—a C++11 feature that the open-sourced GCC had already possessed for a couple of years—simply too hard. Makes you wonder about brain drain at Microsoft.

Ars Technica[^]:

Microsoft killed Drive Extender not long before pulling the plug on the Windows Home Server entirely, but the intent behind it lives on in Windows 8's new Storage Spaces feature. In essence, Storage Spaces takes most of Drive Extender’s underlying functionality and implements it in a way that is more technically sound; early versions of Drive Extender sometimes corrupted data when copying files between drives and mangled file metadata, but the underlying filesystem improvements made to support Storage Spaces should make it much more robust, at least in theory.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

I have been trying every which way to avoid calling the new Windows 8 user experience and applications by the code name Microsoft used, Metro. But I’m giving up. I mean “Windows Store Apps”, “Microsoft Design Language”, “New Windows Experience”, or whatever BS ways they’ve been coming up with to try to refer to this stuff just doesn’t cut it. Sure they have some kind of trademark problem with the name Metro. So why not come up with some catchy easy to use name to replace it? Absent that I’m going back to using the name Metro.

It will never work in theory[^]:

Unlike what has been done in previous work, Hanenberg decided not to use existing programming languages and IDEs in his experiment because he worried that subjects’ familiarity with the tooling would influence the results, in particular if his subjects knew only the dynamic or only the static version used in the study. Therefore, he developed a new object-oriented programming language “Purity” (with some similarities to Smalltalk, Ruby and Java) and a corresponding IDE (class browser, test browser and console). Actually, he developed two versions of Purity: one with static types, the other one with a dynamic type system. The two versions were identical in all other aspects.

CNN.com[^]:

Upgrading to the new Windows 8 operating system is not nearly as complicated as it looks, despite Microsoft's sometimes muddled marketing. Getting used to using it is a different story. Here are the basics for regular, non-techy Windows users curious about getting started with Windows 8.

Wired.com[^]:

The videogame console as we’ve always known it actually died a few years ago. It keeled over somewhere around the time that Microsoft redesigned the Xbox 360’s user interface so you had to tab through “Bing,” “Home,” “Social” and “Video” before you got to the tab marked “Games.” Ever since, the big three makers have been bending over backward to show that their boxes aren’t just dumb game players but connected everything-machines that play more Hulu than Halo.

Seven Days[^]:

Even 10 years ago, mapping software was still incredibly expensive and difficult to use. Maps cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, and to share them, you had to print and distribute hard-copy versions. That’s all changing very quickly. The maps of today are mobile, intuitive and fueled by a rapidly expanding catalogue of data to which laypeople — sometimes unknowingly — contribute.

Informationweek[^]:

In today's era of advanced persistent threats, spear-phishing attacks, social engineering campaigns, and drive-by attacks, are endpoint security solutions performing well enough? The NSS Labs report suggests not. "Most vendors lack adequate protection against exploits," according to the report. As a result, "based on market share, between 65% and 75% of the world is poorly protected, and 75% to 85% in North America is poorly protected."