The Insider News

My Microsoft‘s tablet no threat to iPad: analysts[^]

REUTERS - Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) new Surface tablet looks promising, but many questions need to be answered before it can be considered a rival to Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPad, analysts said the day after the company made its first foray into the computer hardware business.

The shares of the world's largest software company jumped almost 3 percent as Wall Street and investors welcomed Microsoft's move. But analysts had questions about the lack of enthusiasm among developers for creating applications that run on the new Windows 8 operating system and the absence of hard details on pricing and availability.

My First 23 Questions About Microsoft’s ‘Surface’ Windows 8 Tablet[^]

I don’t claim to be psychic, so I’m not embarrassed by my utter failure to predict what Microsoft would announce at its mystery event in Hollywood on Monday (click here to check out photos from the event). I was seduced by the scuttlebutt that the company would unveil a Kindle Fire-like media-consumption tablet with Xbox and Barnes & Noble Nook-related features, running something that might not be Windows 8. It sounded more plausible than other possibilities.

Yannis Smaragdakis[^]:

I keep hearing aphorisms about the "software crisis" and the lack of progress in software development. I have been programming for over 15 years, and I find such claims to be completely false: I am convinced that I could reproduce with today's tools the work of a competent programmer of 15 years ago in a small fraction of the time. By analogy to Moore's law and (more appropriately, because of its intention to provoke, rather than predict) Proebsting's law, I propose that programmer productivity doubles every 6 years.

Ole Begemann[^]:

How long until we see cars where the driver/customer cannot access the engine at all? If Apple made cars, the hood would be secured with pentalobe screws (Please visit an authorized garage to have your wiper fluid refilled). I’m not sure if this would be a good thing for cars but in computers, I’ll gladly take better design and usability in a smaller and lighter package over upgradeability and serviceability.

Infinite Undo[^]:

I have repeatedly been confounded to discover just how many mistakes in both test and application code stem from misunderstandings or misconceptions about time. By this I mean both the interesting way in which computers handle time, and the fundamental gotchas inherent in how we humans have constructed our calendar — daylight savings being just the tip of the iceberg.

AVG[^]:

This is an impressive and first-time experience in my anti-virus career. I chatted with a hacker while debugging a virus. Yes, it’s true. It happened when the Threat team were researching key loggers for Diablo III while many game players playing this game found their accounts stolen.... This hacker was not so foolish to tell us all the truth. He then shut down our system remotely.

Embedded in Academia[^]:

The other day a student and I were trying to understand a subtle part of the C standard. Often, the easiest way to clarify this kind of issue is to recognize that compiler writers have already grappled with it — so just write some code and see what various compilers do with it.... That’s a lot of trouble being caused by a two-line function.

D. J. Power[^]:

Spreadsheets have been used by accountants for hundreds of years. Computerized or electronic spreadsheets are of much more recent origin. Information Systems oral history and some published newspaper and magazine stories celebrate Dan Bricklin as the "father" of the electronic spreadsheet. Bricklin and Bob Frankston then co-invented or co-created the software program VisiCalc. What happened after that?