The Insider News

Royal Pingdom[^]:

There is so much happening on the Internet during a year that it’s impossible to capture it all in a blog post, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway. How many emails were sent during 2012? How many domains are there? What’s the most popular web browser? How many Internet users are there? These are some of the questions we’ll answer for you.

Cryptome.org:

A parcel containing a camera is sent to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London through the Royal Mail. Through a hole in the parcel, the camera documents its journey through the postal system.

Krebs on Security[^]:

Less than 24 hours after Oracle patched a dangerous security hole in its Java software that was being used to seize control over Windows PCs, miscreants in the Underweb were already selling an exploit for a different and apparently still-unpatched zero-day vulnerability in Java, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Channel 9[^]:

Learn about the latest and greatest C++ performance features. All hardware being produced by Intel, ARM and AMD is now mulit-core with each core supporting a rich instruction set supporting vectorization of ordinary C++ that uses 128-bit registers. Additionally, on chip GPU’s are going through their 3rd iteration in many hardware product lines thus making general purpose computing on the GPU important. This talk provides an accessible overview of all the new hardware and how C++ allows the developer to take advantage of it. We start with the engineering of auto-vectorization and auto-parallelization for existing unaltered C/C++ programs, progress to PPL and then tie in the new C++ AMP language extensions.

Grenouille Bouillie[^]:

Today’s 3D graphics are generated by hardware capable of filling petagazillions of pixels per second, so young readers may not realize that the memory bandwidth at the time made the simple task of filling the screen with polygons more than a few times per second a challenge in itself. Starglider 2 was smooth!… which, at the time, did not mean 60fps like today, more like 10-15 when the screen got crowded. Remember, this was the time where the boink demo was considered extremely cool. In summary, doing better than Starglider meant something like filling two thirds of the screen, having 15 objects on screen instead of 4, and remaining above 10 frames per second.

BrandonSavage.net[^]:

When I was first starting out in development, I thought that writing code was pretty easy. It took me a while (and a long learning process) before I realized that writing code is harder than it looks. Looking back on some of that first code, I wonder how it ever worked, how I avoided a serious security problem, and what I was thinking about when I wrote some of that code. Experience is the way that most of us learn how to write code, but experience is a lousy teacher: it gives the lesson after the test. Here are some ways you can improve your code writing right now.