The Insider News

PCWorld[^]:

Since most free games are (usually) made by small teams on shorter timelines, they have to scale down their games in comparison to AAA titles with budgets in the tens of millions and hundreds on staff. Scaling down doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, though; sometimes whittling a game down to its core elements results in a game with a laserlike focus on what makes it fun. This week we’ve got free games that make less into more in different ways.

jeffwofford.com[^]:

Herb Sutter—Microsoft’s chief C++ language guru—recently admitted that Microsoft found implementing variadic templates—a C++11 feature that the open-sourced GCC had already possessed for a couple of years—simply too hard. Makes you wonder about brain drain at Microsoft.

Ars Technica[^]:

Microsoft killed Drive Extender not long before pulling the plug on the Windows Home Server entirely, but the intent behind it lives on in Windows 8's new Storage Spaces feature. In essence, Storage Spaces takes most of Drive Extender’s underlying functionality and implements it in a way that is more technically sound; early versions of Drive Extender sometimes corrupted data when copying files between drives and mangled file metadata, but the underlying filesystem improvements made to support Storage Spaces should make it much more robust, at least in theory.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

I have been trying every which way to avoid calling the new Windows 8 user experience and applications by the code name Microsoft used, Metro. But I’m giving up. I mean “Windows Store Apps”, “Microsoft Design Language”, “New Windows Experience”, or whatever BS ways they’ve been coming up with to try to refer to this stuff just doesn’t cut it. Sure they have some kind of trademark problem with the name Metro. So why not come up with some catchy easy to use name to replace it? Absent that I’m going back to using the name Metro.

It will never work in theory[^]:

Unlike what has been done in previous work, Hanenberg decided not to use existing programming languages and IDEs in his experiment because he worried that subjects’ familiarity with the tooling would influence the results, in particular if his subjects knew only the dynamic or only the static version used in the study. Therefore, he developed a new object-oriented programming language “Purity” (with some similarities to Smalltalk, Ruby and Java) and a corresponding IDE (class browser, test browser and console). Actually, he developed two versions of Purity: one with static types, the other one with a dynamic type system. The two versions were identical in all other aspects.

CNN.com[^]:

Upgrading to the new Windows 8 operating system is not nearly as complicated as it looks, despite Microsoft's sometimes muddled marketing. Getting used to using it is a different story. Here are the basics for regular, non-techy Windows users curious about getting started with Windows 8.

Wired.com[^]:

The videogame console as we’ve always known it actually died a few years ago. It keeled over somewhere around the time that Microsoft redesigned the Xbox 360’s user interface so you had to tab through “Bing,” “Home,” “Social” and “Video” before you got to the tab marked “Games.” Ever since, the big three makers have been bending over backward to show that their boxes aren’t just dumb game players but connected everything-machines that play more Hulu than Halo.

Seven Days[^]:

Even 10 years ago, mapping software was still incredibly expensive and difficult to use. Maps cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, and to share them, you had to print and distribute hard-copy versions. That’s all changing very quickly. The maps of today are mobile, intuitive and fueled by a rapidly expanding catalogue of data to which laypeople — sometimes unknowingly — contribute.

Informationweek[^]:

In today's era of advanced persistent threats, spear-phishing attacks, social engineering campaigns, and drive-by attacks, are endpoint security solutions performing well enough? The NSS Labs report suggests not. "Most vendors lack adequate protection against exploits," according to the report. As a result, "based on market share, between 65% and 75% of the world is poorly protected, and 75% to 85% in North America is poorly protected."

NYTimes.com[^]:

Desktop Windows has tiny buttons, menus and controls that are generally too small for finger manipulation, and TileWorld is filled with gestures that make sense only on touch screens. If you install Windows 8, you’ll have to learn both environments, like it or not; you can’t live in just one environment or the other. So the question arises: how are you supposed to operate TileWorld if you have a nontouch computer?

Salted Password Hashing - Doing it Right[^]

If you're a web developer, you've probably had to make a user account system. The most important aspect of a user account system is how user passwords are protected. User account databases are hacked frequently, so you absolutely must do something to protect your users' passwords if your website is ever breached. The best way to protect passwords is to employ salted password hashing. This page will explain how to do it properly.