The Insider News

Silicon Valle[^]:

In 1981, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was shocked by the announcement of the IBM PC which threatened to steal market share from their high end systems, aka the VAX and PDP-11. One year later (1982), they responded with a “three pronged approach” which included... The Rainbow 100... DEC’s direct response to the IBM (aka IBM PC killer). It offered to run DOS, but also it had a Z-80 (found on Tandy machines and very popular at that times) to allow it to run CP/M (another wanna be from similarly named Digital Research. At last it had a VT100 terminal mode, so it could connect to big VAX systems.

Mental Floss[^]:

If you’re a geek of a certain age, a good portion of your childhood probably revolved around sitting too close to the TV, clutching a plastic safety cone-colored hand gun and blasting waterfowl out of a pixilated sky in Duck Hunt (also, trying to blow that dog’s head off when he laughed at you). The Duck Hunt gun, officially called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper, seems downright primitive next to the Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, but in the late 80s, it filled plenty of young heads with wonder. How did that thing work?

Bloomberg[^]:

Google Inc., which says it gets about 1,400 requests a month from U.S. authorities for users’ e- mails and documents, is organizing an effort to press for limits on government access to digital communications. The company has been talking to advocacy groups and companies about joining a lobbying effort to change the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.... Google officials say changes in the law are needed to prevent law enforcement from obtaining certain e-mails and other content without search warrants, and to give documents stored on cloud services the same legal protections as paper documents stored in a desk drawer.

InfoWorld[^]:

Lotus Development Corp. sold its first copy of 1-2-3 for DOS on Jan. 26, 1983, and it never looked back. Every single number-cruncher I knew at the time couldn't wait to part with the princely sum of $495 for the product -- on top of the price of the PC, typically $3,000 to $5,000. To this day, I believe Lotus 1-2-3, all by itself, started the Microsoft-Intel architecture hegemony. It was that good.

Eric Hexter's Blog[^]:

To actually call yourself a software engineer you need to take into account a few aspects of what an engineer should do. Typing code into a code editor or text editor is not what a Software Engineer is paid to do. At least, it is not the primary reason this profession exists. Yes, part of the job is to write code in any number of languages and platforms... it is more then writing code, it is about writing tests, and making sure the code you do type works as designed and can be easily maintained.

NPR[^]:

There they sat, in front of a machine no more soulful than a hair dryer, a machine they knew intellectually was just a collection of electrical pulses and metal, and yet they paused. And while eventually every participant killed the robot, it took them time to intellectually override their emotional queasiness — in the case of a helpful cat robot, around 35 seconds before they were able to complete the switching-off procedure. How long does it take you to switch off your stereo?

hongkiat.com[^]:

As you shall see below, the evolution of video game consoles is indeed intriguing. Did you know that there were more than 70 different consoles to date? And did you know that there was a peak era of video arcade game when Nintendo and Sega were fiercely pitting against each other with their revolutionary consoles? If you are amazed by such facts, then I guarantee that this entry will excite you even further with the bits and pieces of fascinating historical facts across the video game consoles timeline.

Scripting News[^]:

On Thursday I wrote a piece about MacWrite and MacPaint, two pieces of software that influenced much if not all the software that followed. There are many other examples of seminal software products. In most cases, the products are not the first of its kind, as MacWrite was not the first word processor, but for whatever reason, put enough of the pieces together to lead the way to the future. It's not always obvious in the moment, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see.

Ars Technica[^]:

Patent trolling is based upon deficiencies in a critical but underdeveloped area of the law. The faster we drive these cases to verdict—and through appeal, and also get legislative reform on track—the faster our economy will be competitive in this critical area. We're competing with other economies that are not burdened with this type of litigation. China doesn't have this, South Korea doesn't have this, Europe doesn't have this.

The Third Bit[^]:

Removing the experience of working with things from everyday life hasn’t just deskilled us; it has demoralized us. Modern knowledge workers are just as alienated from their labor as any other assembly line worker; the gradual substitution of process for judgment is only “progress” if pride in one’s work and connection with one’s peers is left out of the equation.... skilled trades are not only better paid and steadier occupations these days than most so-called “knowledge work”, they also demand more intellectually, and more personally rewarding.

Jonathan T. Neal[^]:

When Alec Rust asked the HTML5 Boilerplate project to switch to a HiDPI favicon, I realized how little I knew about favorite icons, touch icons, and tile icons. When I decided to dive in a little deeper, things got interesting. Since they were first introduced by Internet Explorer in 1999, almost nothing about favicons has changed.

Christian Heilmann[^]:

Long story short. If we want to encourage people to go out and show the world what they did (and we all learn from that) we need to stop dropping dismissive short sentence criticism and instead spend more time to explain, verify and validate our criticism. That way we can still prevent bad code from being used, but we don’t come across as a terrible person at the same time.