The Insider News

Wired.com[^]:

Nick Holonyak was sure the LED would replace the incandescent light bulb when he presented it to GE executives 50 years ago. While the incandescent is still king in homes across the nation, the LED has transformed lighting in more ways than Holonyak could have imagined. From those first dim red diodes to powerful streetlights in major cities, the LED has made its mark on the world.

Retro Thing[^]:

You may not know his name, but you've encountered Hans Camenzind's designs countless times. He was also one of the first independent semiconductor designers, famed for hitting a home run with his first solo design–the 555 timer chip that has been incorporated into countless inexpensive electronic devices. Incredibly, over one billion 555 timer chips are sold each year. It's a simple little 10 cent device that makes it possible to build devices that flash, buzz or turn on and off at variable intervals. Incredibly, he created the chip alone, spending a year designing it by hand as a freelancer.

Bitbucket Blog[^]:

It’s a big day here at Bitbucket HQ. The Bitbucket team is unveiling a brand new, redesigned Bitbucket. Our goal for this huge release was to rethink and rebuild the Bitbucket web experience from the ground up. Today, we’re are excited to introduce the new Bitbucket – faster, easier and more beautiful than ever.

DVICE[^]:

Once a year we are given carte blanche to commune with the dead, to cast spells and to become the evil that we otherwise fear in the world. We let the fear in, let it dance around in our heads and give us nightmares. This year, we're digging up a few buried horrors for you, and we've called upon the spirit of the NES to conjure up some newer scares as well. From the sublimely terrifying to the ridiculous, here are 15 games full of 8-bit scares to fill your Octoberween. Click through the links to get in the spirit and play, purchase or download each of these retro scare-fests.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft has been working for the past few years to convince users, especially business users, they don't need to wait until the first service pack to deploy a new Windows release. With Windows 8, Microsoft officials believe they've gotten a step closer, by rolling out via Windows Update on October 9 the “Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 General Availability Cumulative Update.” This update provides post-RTM (release to manufacturing) updates around performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility.

From OpenDyslexic[^]:

Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening.

Martin Kleppmann’s blog[^]:

Pretty much everyone agrees that if you have a choice between a simpler software design and a more complex design, all else being equal, that simpler is better. It is also widely thought to be worthwhile to deliberately invest in simplicity — for example, to spend effort refactoring existing code into a cleaner design — because the one-off cost of refactoring today is easily offset by the benefits of easier maintenance tomorrow. Also, much thought by many smart people has gone into finding ways of breaking down complex systems into manageable parts with manageable dependencies.... But there is a subtlety that I have been missing in discussions about software complexity, that I feel somewhat ambivalent about, and that I think is worth discussing. It concerns the points where external humans (people outside of the team maintaining the system) touch the system — as developers using an API exposed by the system, or as end users interacting with a user interface.