The Insider News

Learning by Shipping[^]:

In what could be considered an extremely bold and thoughtful move, according to reports Yahoo recently announced that employees will be required to work from a Yahoo facility rather than “remote”. As one who has spent time on these challenges, the commentary that followed was arguably predictable. With reactions ranging from tone deaf and archaic to downright anti-motherhood, there seems to be a great deal of pushback or at least feedback. Like so many things in managing a large organization there is no clear cut way to manage through this structural and organizational challenge. What are some of the considerations in attempting to structure a modern product development team?

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

I believe that a lack of domain knowledge is the root cause of a lot of very bad software that gets developed and I think that it is up to computer programmers and their managers to deal with this. Acquiring domain knowledge is an essential component in the development of software that really works well for its users. A programmer that has to automate a warehouse but that has never picked an order and doesn’t have a clue about actual logistics is going to be writing far less effective software than someone that has done a few shifts on the floor.

touch /dev/null[^]:

After so many years of multiple OSes, I am surprised that there isn’t a single filesystem that is truely cross-platform and modern. The keyword is modern. FAT32 is still the only candidate for a true cross-platform Filesystem, but its dated, it has very hard limitations on file-sizes that makes it hard if you want to store 4gig+ movies, games, and other data.

Ars Technica[^]:

By the time Sony unveiled the PlayStation 4 at last night's press conference, the rumor mill had already basically told us what the console would be made of inside the (as-yet-nonexistent) box: an x86 processor and GPU from AMD and lots of memory. Sony didn't reveal all of the specifics about its new console last night (and, indeed, the console itself was a notable no-show), but it did give us enough information to be able to draw some conclusions about just what the hardware can do. Let's talk about what components Sony is using, why it's using them, and what kind of performance we can expect from Sony's latest console when it ships this holiday season.

Hack a Day[^]:

Scratch, a graphical programming language developed by MIT’s Media Lab, is an excellent tool for teaching programming. Daniel created an Arduino Sensor Shield to interface with Scratch, allowing for real-world input to the language. This board is a derivative of the Picoboard, which is designed for use with Scratch. Fortunately, the communication protocol was well documented, and Daniel used the same protocol to talk to the graphical programming environment. The shield includes resistance sensing, a light sensor, a sound sensor, and a sliding potentiometer.

zdnet.com:

Microsoft's Windows Azure storage service went down worldwide just before 4 p.m. ET/9 p.m. UTC, apparently due to an expired HTTPS certificate.