The Insider News

ZDNet[^]:

We all know now that Windows 8 sales have been.... disappointing. You can blame the hardware. You can blame Windows 8's mixed-up interfaces. You can blame the rise of tablets and smartphones. Whatever. The bottom line is Windows 8 PC and laptop sales have been slow. So, what, according to Amazon, in this winter of Windows 8 discontent has been the best selling laptop? It's Samsung's ARM-powered, Linux-based Chromebook. Shocked? Amazed? Why? The Chromebook has several things going for it.

CNET Blogs[^]:

The third full generation of Lego's programmable robotics platform, EV3 is aimed at both enthusiasts -- young and old -- and educators, and blows past the previous generation with a long list of new features that add speed and power, intelligent programmability, and more ways to communicate with the robots. Lego expects to begin selling the product, which includes 594 Technic pieces that can be used to make five different robots, this summer at a retail cost of $350. It will also release instructions for 12 additional robots at launch.

Neowin.net[^]:

Lenovo is starting up CES 2013 with a very big announcement, and we do mean big. The PC maker just announced plans to release the IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC, a massive 17.8 pound, 27-inch all-in-one Windows 8 PC that can also be laid flat on any surface.

CreativeJS[^]:

It’s fair to say that Dune 2 is one of the founding fathers of the RTS gaming genre. The initially slow paced strategic action builds up over some beautifully crafted missions and was an instant hit when Westwood Studios unleashed it onto DOS based PCs and the Amiga in 1992/93. Fast forward 20 years and the OpenDUNE project is a modern day attempt to faithfully re-create the classic on today’s hardware. But as seems to be the trend at the moment author Aleksander Guryanov has seen fit to compile the C source of OpenDUNE down to JavaScript, making the game fully playable in your browser in the process.

familab.org[^]:

Going back to the days of ITX computer case mods, I’ve had the desire to place a computer inside of a stock Super Nintendo case. Instead of the project being a simple case mod, I’ve wanted to configure the computer in such a way as to maintain a console playing experience, with the additional benefit of having a full-fledged computer under the hood. With the Raspberry Pi, I finally found a platform suited to the project’s needs.

AnandTech[^]:

What follows is a good mixture of art and science. Intel's power engineers will take apart a competing device and probe whatever looks to be a power delivery or filtering circuit while running various workloads on the device itself. By correlating the type of workload to spikes in voltage in these circuits, you can figure out what components on a smartphone or tablet motherboard are likely responsible for delivering power to individual blocks of an SoC.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

With Windows 7 and Windows 8 the team and I blogged quite a bit, and often at great length , about the design choices, implementation, and features of those products. Learning by Shipping picks up where these blogs leave off. The title comes from something impressed upon me early in my career, which is that learning as an engineer comes from the process of starting, then finishing, and iterating on products–getting products to market and putting the broad feedback loop to work. The teams and processes used to create products are critically important and fun to talk about relative to shipping and learning as we search for the best approaches to use at a given time.

8th Light[^]:

SQL injection attacks were once considered the greatest threat plaguing the Internet. They continue to be the source of many large data breaches today. This is due to the fact that these vulnerabilities are common, easy to exploit, and very rewarding to attackers. As a web developer, it is your responsibility to protect your clients and users from these threats.

Eli Bendersky's website[^]:

I recently ran into a statement that left me very perplexed. A programmer was proudly declaring that he can’t understand every piece of code he wrote a week ago. I honestly tried to figure out where the pride comes from, but I can’t. Is he proud that he writes so much code every day? That anyone is willing to pay him to write code? Let me state my opinion on this matter clearly up-front: not being able to understand the code you wrote a week ago, or a year ago, is unforgivable for a professional programmer.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows[^]:

At some point, the cheerleaders—and yes, amazingly, they’re out there—are going to have to face reality: Windows 8 is selling slowly. More slowly than Windows 7 at launch, and more slowly than Windows 7 a year ago. And while a peek at NPD’s publicly released data for the holiday selling season can provide some clues as to why, I can tell you exactly what happened.

Kenny Kerr[^]:

SyncTools is a meta-tool that keeps a folder on your computer up-to-date with all the latest tools from Sysinternals. Simply pick a folder where you would like to keep the Sysinternals tools and run SyncTools.exe in that folder. It will download all of the tools and check for updates on tools it previously downloaded. Any time Mark Russinovich publishes an updated version or even a completely new tool, simply rerun SyncTools.exe to download it for you.

Paul Kocialkowski's coding blog[^]:

A couple days ago, I announced, on the behalf of the Replicant project, the release of the Replicant 4.0 SDK, motivated by some recent license change regarding the Android SDK: Google decided to put an overall non-free license for their SDK.... These conditions seem totally unacceptable to me and are likely to cause a reaction such as calling the Android SDK proprietary from anyone who values software freedom.

MTRC[^]:

Researchers launching a new vector-based video codec this week are claiming their work will lead to the death of the pixel within the next five years.... Digital pictures are built from a rectangular grid of coloured cells, or pixels. The smaller and closer the pixels are together, the better the quality of the image. Pixel-based movies need huge amounts of data and have to be compressed, losing quality. They are also difficult and time consuming to process. The alternative, a vector-based format, presents the image using contoured colours. Until now there has not been a way to choose and fill between the contours at professional quality. The Bath team has finally solved these problems.