The Insider News

NSHipster[^]:

In C, the scope and lifetime of a variable or function within a program is determined by its storage class. Each variable has a lifetime, or the context in which they store their value. Functions, along with variables, also exist within a particular scope, or visibility, which dictates which parts of a program know about and can access them.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

A perceptron is code that models the behavior of a single biological neuron. Perceptrons are the predecessors of neural networks. A neural network can be thought of as a collection of connected perceptrons.

Jeff Fritz[^]:

I have been reviewing the comments and feedback questions sent after the AJAX webinar, and a question that has come up several times is, “What is that thing that you have in Visual Studio?” I know I have a number of unique add-ins and tools in Visual Studio, and I wanted to describe the tools that I have installed for those that may want to use them as well.

Intel Developer Zone[^]:

The first part of this week revolved around finalising the core saving and loading of photographs. As I revealed last week, the filters aren't applied directly to the image; rather, they are associated with the image in a separate file. The code I showed last week demonstrated that each filter would be responsible for serialising itself, so the actual serialisation graph code should be relatively trivial.

Quote:

"The first rule is if you see a snake, don't call committees, don't call your buddies, don't form a team, don't get a meeting together, just kill the snake.

The second rule is don't go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made.

And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes."

curleybraces.com[^]:

We’ve all got an idea about what Computer Science is, whether you went to school for it or not. When some people hear the words “Computer Science”, they instantly think about programming applications. Others think about Discrete Mathematics, Boolean Algebra, and Graph Theory. While the later can be pasted together into a pretty loose definition about what the reality of Computer Science is – and the former completely dismissed as false – a more appropriate definition can be established. “The analysis of algorithms and processes”.

BBC News[^]:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen will share the £1m award. The citation panel said the five men had all contributed to the revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades. The UK government initiated the QE Prize as a companion to the Nobels to raise the profile of engineering.

Alex Limi[^]:

If I told you that a company is shipping a product to hundreds of millions of users right now, and included in the product are several prominent buttons that will break the product completely if you click them, and possibly lock you out from the Internet — can you guess which product it is?

Medium[^]:

Before I start I want to say up front, yes I worked at Yammer which was acquired by Microsoft. However, I was considering a WP7 long before then. I've been an iOS user for a long time. I'd say for about five years. I have always been open to other mobile OSs but for one reason or another none have really appealed to me. That is, until WP7. I never made the switch though because I was worried it was buggy or I'd hate the lack of apps.

Monday Note[^]:

The Google driveless car is an extraordinary technical achievement.... Spectacular as it is, this public demonstration is merely the tip of the iceberg. For Google, the economics of self-driving cars lie in a vast web of data that will become a must to operate partially or fully self-driving vehicles on a massive scale. This network of data will require immense computational and storage capabilities. Consider the following needs in the context of Google’s current position in related fields.

RobMensching.com[^]:

When I worked at Microsoft I used to read about startups on tech blogs and such. The funny thing is I cannot remember reading about any startups' experiences as they were just getting started. Now that it is my turn, I thought I'd try to capture some of the more mundane details about starting a startup. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. I left Microsoft on the last day of 2012. I took two weeks to announce my departure and sketch out a possible future. By the third week of January, we were in full startup mode.

Scott Berkun[^]:

A debate is rising on whether the old platitude No UI is the best UI is good or bad. I’ll tell you who is right: no one. Debates like these fall into the same stupid trap academics have fallen into for centuries: Platonic ideals are an illusion. They’re fun to play with, but they’re useless when your hands are dirty trying to solve a real problem for a real person. The only sane replacement is The best UI is what’s best for the person and situation I’m designing for. That’s all. Who cares what’s best in the abstract?

GigaOm[^]:

When Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found.

Obviously a Major Malfunction...[^]:

A little while ago I got involved in a project that needed some hardware security testing. It was a complex system that used just about every protocol under the sun, including RF. Now RF, like other 'invisible' transport mechanisms, always gets me interested because, in my experience, once data becomes invisible, something magical happens: they forget about security. Nobody can see what's going on, so we don't need to worry about it, right? Wrong. Time and time again I've seen this... MagStripes, InfraRed, RFID, Bluetooth, Magic Moon Beams. You name it, they'll send data over it insecurely.

Egor Homakov[^]:

Most of our OAuth hacks pwn the Provider and its users (only the most-common vulnerability pwns the Client's authentication). This makes me really curious what the hell is wrong with Facebook and why don't they care about their own Graph security and their own users. Why do they allow a flexible redirect_uri, opening an enormous attack surface (their own domain + client's app domain)? We simply play Find-Chain-Of-302-Redirects, Find-XSS-On-Client and Leak-Credentials-Then-Find-Leaking-Redirect_uri games. Don't they understand it is clearly their business to protect themselves from non ideal clients?

Channel 9[^]:

From our humble beginnings as a website built with alpha quality forum technologies that we stitched together with creative code and a lot of love, and our videos were made by a few dudes roaming the halls of Microsoft with a cheap camcorder – look at us now. Channel 9 streams live events to 100,000s of people around the world, we have a state of the art recording studio, we do C9 Live at events around the world bringing you directly into the conversation with Microsoft folks in real time.

TUAW[^]:

One of my favorite features of Dropbox is 'versioning,' which keeps a copy of every change that you make. Every time you press 'save' on a document that's in your Dropbox, a new version is saved. There are two things I have been wondering about versioning: What happens to changes that you make while offline? What happens to changes when the file is renamed or overwritten? I finally did some quick tests of this, and the answers are pretty straight-forward...

TechRadar[^]:

Online gaming platforms and web forums have used avatars for years, and graphical representations of humans are hardly new, but the wider concept of the avatar is finally waking up. By morphing into life-size, artificially intelligent and customisable platforms, personal and even corporate avatars could soon replace receptionists, sales clerks and even replicate your colleagues in both real and virtual environments. And the avatar revolution has already started on your smartphone.