The Insider News

Internet Archive[^]:

Books related to the Atari line of computers, including the Atari 400, 800, ST, XL and XE. Titles include: Atari Calculator Manual, Your Atari Computer, Your Atari Computer XL Edition, Your Atari Comes Alive and Users Handbook to the Atari.

Lifehacker[^]:

We feature a lot of different DIY electronics projects on Lifehacker, but the barrier for entry might seem high at a glance. However, it's not nearly as difficult as it looks. Here's how to get started.

Bill Reiss' Development Blog[^]:

So back to my original frustration about Windows Phone and having a default non-WebKit browser. This is a real issue and I feel now that I recommended the wrong solution. The better solution is to add the capability to Windows Phone 8 to choose an alternative default browser. This would leave it open to the browser providers such as Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc. to provide a better option on the platform. Specifying a different default browser is something you can’t do on the iPhone, and Windows Phone could easily turn it into some positive publicity. After all, Windows 8 lets you pick your default browser, so why not enable this in Windows Phone.

DZone[^]:

Typography is one of the important aspect of the web designing . The User Interface / UX (User Experience) design is one of the challenging work in the design and development of the website. In this blog post , we will explore some of the Typography tools which will be useful for the Web Designers.

Ars Technica[^]:

Researchers have uncovered an ongoing, large-scale computer espionage network that's targeting hundreds of diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in at least 39 countries, including the Russian Federation, Iran, and the United States. Operation Red October, as researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have dubbed the highly coordinated campaign, has been active since 2007, raising the possibility it has already siphoned up hundreds of terabytes of sensitive information. It uses more than 1,000 distinct modules that have never been seen before to customize attack profiles for each victim.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

I came across this article discussing why PHP has a bad reputation. A lot of it came down to developers using poor practices. This excerpt: "Copying internet tutorial code and not reviewing it" struck me as particularly relevant, and something I think we see a lot of in the PHP forum. Granted for any language there are the low-quality and outdated tutorials out there, but PHP seems to have an abundance of this.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

A few months ago while sitting at a Burger King (yes, I know) I recorded a video on "How to use Windows 8 in 3 minutes" and threw it up on YouTube. It's been viewed nearly a half million times. Eek. It's got poor audio, and it's WAY too fast. I did it on a goof. However, people keep showing it to family and friends.... So tonight I took a few hours and did a new video that I'm VERY happy with and I hope you enjoy it. It's clean, clear, and only 25 minutes long and it explains, I believe, Windows 8 and its changes for anyone with basic Windows experience.

Ken Shirriff's blog[^]:

By focusing on a simple circuit, the 6502 microprocessor chip can actually be understood at the silicon level. It's interesting to see how the complex patterns etched on the chip can be mapped onto gates, and their function understood.... In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathematics of the 6502 overflow flag earlier and thought it would be interesting to look at the actual chip-level implementation. Even though the overflow flag is a slightly obscure feature, its circuit is simple enough that it can be explained at the silicon level.

programming is terrible[^]:

Dijkstra is an emminently quotable computer scientst, mostly for his famous lists of uncomfortable truths. Oft repeated is his rallying call against BASIC, most of the time without context: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."... The thing people forget is that programming was substantially different in 1975. Dijkstra railed against Dartmouth Basic — a glorified assembler language. It isn’t the BASIC used today.

O'Reilly Radar[^]:

Programming is changing. The PC era is coming to an end, and software developers now work with an explosion of devices, job functions, and problems that need different approaches from the single machine era. In our age of exploding data, the ability to do some kind of programming is increasingly important to every job, and programming is no longer the sole preserve of an engineering priesthood.... Where am I headed with this line of inquiry? The goal is to be able to describe the essential skills that programmers need for the coming decade, the places they should focus their learning, and differentiating between short term trends and long term shifts.

Channel 9[^]:

In this episode, Robert revisits the Windows 8 line of business app he wrote. This app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports—and for managers to view and approve or reject them. Robert first reviews the app as you last saw it and then discusses what changes he made to the app's user interface and why he thinks those changes resulted in a much better app. He also announces that the app is now available for your downloading pleasure on CodePlex.

Luigi Montanez[^]:

It’s worth considering the open source and free software movements. Does Richard Stallman fall under the banner of activist engineer? Linus Torvalds? The Ubuntu and Apache teams? Have they not changed the world? I’d argue that most open source software is about craft rather than seeking societal change. Rails and Django are terrific at improving the lives of the developers who work with them every day. But they’re ultimately tools used to build things, not outcomes in and of themselves.

Forbes[^]:

Google, with Android, is the biggest threat to Microsoft. Apple operates on a similar principle to Microsoft – still taking a cut at the point of sale, although in Apple’s case they count hardware and software together, where Microsoft focuses on the software side of things. But Google, with their ‘free’ software, is playing a completely different game. The recurring revenue from users through advertising is the key. The more users in Google’s world, the better Mountain View’s bottom line. What would be a better way to expand their reach that claim not just the web browser, but the whole desktop?

Aaron Swartz[^]:

The first thing I did, which presumably all of you have already got covered, was to learn about computers, the Internet, and Internet culture. I read a bunch of books, I read enormous numbers of web pages, and I tried stuff. First I joined mailing lists and tried to understand the discussions until I felt comfortable jumping in and trying to participate for myself. Then I looked at web sites and tried to build my own. And finally I learned how to build web applications and I started building them. I was thirteen....