The Insider News

Alan Winfield's Web Log[^]:

It's been quite awhile since I debugged a computer program. Too long. Although I miss coding, the thing I miss more is the process of finding and fixing bugs in the code. Especially the really hard-to-track-down bugs that have you tearing your hair out - convinced your code cannot possibly be wrong - that something else must be the problem. But then when you track down that impossible bug, it becomes so obvious. I wanted to write here about the most fun I've ever had debugging code. And also the most bizarre, since fixing the bugs required the use of an oven. Yes, an oven.

Gamasutra: Benjamin Sipe's Blog[^]:

The freemium or free to play (F2P) business model is still new and in an immature state. There are some early adopters that have used exploits or tricks to squeeze money from their players, while others created what we call a “pay-to-win” experience where you’re almost guaranteed to win if you pay money. While these tactics may have generated a lot of revenue for these developers, as the market, business model and player expectations mature, these tactics will become less and less accepted by players. They probably won’t go away all together, but it’s better to get ahead of the curve and start designing and executing smarter games today. Here are examples of 5 of these tactics...

Fabulous Adventures In Coding[^]:

We are closing in on the actual requirements of the "monad pattern". So far we've seen that for a monadic type M<t>, there must be a simple way to "wrap up" any value of T into an M<t>. And last time we saw that any function that takes an A and returns an R can be applied to an M to produce an M<r> such that both the action of the function and the "amplification" of the monad are preserved, which is pretty cool. It looks like we're done; what more could you possibly want?

profserious[^]:

I am not a computer scientist. Or to be accurate, I am a computer scientist by adoption. I adopted the discipline, having as a background systems engineering, and the discipline adopted me. Of course, the result is that shamefully, I miss large parts of the proper formation of a computer scientist and have had to acquire the requisite knowledge, at least sufficient to 'pass' as a computer scientist, subsequently. Perhaps however, this has given me a more sensitive appreciation of the elegance of computer science and of its 'ninja arts'. Here are my selected five, which exemplify the intellectual and technical tools that computer scientists are able to bring to bear on complex problems.

codeface[^]:

Hopefully just a brief post in response to one I consider to be spectacularly wrong.... The author of the above-linked post knows a hell of a lot about TDD and the various disciplines that go along with it, and I’ve generally got a lot of respect for him and his work, but when you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and when you’re an authority figure and you’re wrong it needs to be pointed out in case you make a lot of other people wrong too.

JakeSavin.com[^]:

I didn't get my hands on VisiCalc until 1981. The first thing any Apple ][ VisiCalc user had to know was that the '/' (forward-slash) key brings up the menu on the top row of the screen. You used the left and right arrow keys to pick a top-level command, and hit RETURN. At least some of the commands then had a sub-menu which would appear on the second row, and then you'd hit RETURN again to execute the command. It was a really elegant system for using just four keys to represent a command hierarchy on two lines of all upper-case text, just 40 characters long. That was about 8% of the total available screen real estate, which was otherwise occupied by some status readouts - location, cell contents, formula, etc.

TechCrunch[^]:

Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to announce that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates. The company will no longer offer a test environment for developer and its developer portal is already set to be read-only. Netflix’s OData catalog, which was never updated all that regularly in the first place, will be retired a month from now on April 8.

Techworld.com[^]:

Universities are not offering the IT programming skills that firms need, according to global research. Skills in programming languages like Cobol, CICS and JCL are essential to support business-critical IT systems that underpin many organisations today, but the majority of IT courses don't support them.... Respondents were also asked how they thought their IT course students felt about learning Cobol skills, and 39 percent said their students viewed Cobol as "un-cool and outdated", with 15 percent saying they wouldn’t know what Cobol was.

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

Most of the criticism about Windows 8 is around how Microsoft attempted to bridge the gap between a modern touch-based, tablet-centric (if you will), UI and the traditional desktop. Now this is actually a complex situation, because we aren’t just talking about UI but also about a new app model. In theory you could have one without the other. In previous posts I’ve talked about why the overall re-imagination of Windows, including all these elements, was important. So as one thinks about various alternative scenarios you have to consider that not all of the modernization would have necessarily occurred.

IGN[^]:

It has been out for three days, and SimCity is broken. Seriously, unplayably broken. As a long-time fan who's been looking forward to this week for many years, this is a huge, frustrating disappointment. The worst part? The main issue isn't with the game itself, but an entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable always-online Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that's keeping millions of fans from playing the game they paid for, when they were told they'd be able to play it.

Quote: CNet[^]

If a tree fell in the forest, and no one noticed... the European Commission would impose a staggering fine -- and then congratulate itself for protecting consumers from falling trees. That's essentially what just happened: the Commission fined Microsoft $732 million for failing to show its "browser ballot" when users installed one of its Windows 7 updates.