The Insider News

Scripting News[^]:

On Thursday I wrote a piece about MacWrite and MacPaint, two pieces of software that influenced much if not all the software that followed. There are many other examples of seminal software products. In most cases, the products are not the first of its kind, as MacWrite was not the first word processor, but for whatever reason, put enough of the pieces together to lead the way to the future. It's not always obvious in the moment, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see.

Ars Technica[^]:

Patent trolling is based upon deficiencies in a critical but underdeveloped area of the law. The faster we drive these cases to verdict—and through appeal, and also get legislative reform on track—the faster our economy will be competitive in this critical area. We're competing with other economies that are not burdened with this type of litigation. China doesn't have this, South Korea doesn't have this, Europe doesn't have this.

The Third Bit[^]:

Removing the experience of working with things from everyday life hasn’t just deskilled us; it has demoralized us. Modern knowledge workers are just as alienated from their labor as any other assembly line worker; the gradual substitution of process for judgment is only “progress” if pride in one’s work and connection with one’s peers is left out of the equation.... skilled trades are not only better paid and steadier occupations these days than most so-called “knowledge work”, they also demand more intellectually, and more personally rewarding.

Jonathan T. Neal[^]:

When Alec Rust asked the HTML5 Boilerplate project to switch to a HiDPI favicon, I realized how little I knew about favorite icons, touch icons, and tile icons. When I decided to dive in a little deeper, things got interesting. Since they were first introduced by Internet Explorer in 1999, almost nothing about favicons has changed.

Christian Heilmann[^]:

Long story short. If we want to encourage people to go out and show the world what they did (and we all learn from that) we need to stop dropping dismissive short sentence criticism and instead spend more time to explain, verify and validate our criticism. That way we can still prevent bad code from being used, but we don’t come across as a terrible person at the same time.

Kenny Kerr[^]:

Despite what anyone might tell you, the Windows Runtime API is not a clean break from the past. Like .NET before it, WinRT includes a backdoor without which it would be practically useless. The Common Language Runtime’s backdoor was called Platform Invocation Services or P/Invoke for short. It was amazingly powerful, but also complex and troublesome. WinRT’s backdoor is a lot simpler. It’s called reinterpret_cast.

JavaWorld's Daily Brew[^]:

This is what "software craftsmanship" gets us: an imposed segregation of those who "get it" from those who "don't" based on somebody's arbitrary criteria of what we should or shouldn't be doing. And if somebody doesn't use the "right" tools or code it in the "right" way, then bam! You clearly aren't a "craftsman" (or "craftswoman"?) and you clearly don't care about your craft and you clearly aren't worth the time or energy necessary to support and nourish and grow and....

0 FPS[^]:

This is a post about a silly (and mostly pointless) optimization. To motivate this, consider the following problem which you see all the time in mesh processing: Given a collection of triangles represented as ordered tuples of indices, find all topological duplicates. By a topological duplicate, we mean that the two faces have the same vertices. Now you aren’t allowed to mutate the faces themselves (since orientation matters), but changing their order in the array is ok.

Hack a Day[^]:

With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a very tiny x86 dev board called the Gizmo, a four-inch square board that shrinks a desktop computer down to the palm of your hand.

Ars Technica[^]:

The top performer was the Windows Division, reporting under its new name for the first time. Previously it was called "Windows and Windows Live Division." The new name reflects the termination of the "Windows Live" branding; it's also the division that houses Microsoft's Surface tablets. Revenue for the division was $5.881 billion, up 24 percent on a year ago.... Either way, this is a strong performance. Even with deferrals, revenue grew, outperforming the x86 market as a whole.

Redmondmag.com[^]:

In general, Microsoft is aiming to steer its customers more toward the monthly subscription-based Office 365 model, rather than traditional perpetual licensing. The upfront costs for Office 365 licenses are lower than for a perpetual license. Moreover, Microsoft is promising that Office 365 users will get continuous product upgrades throughout the lifespan of their subscriptions, as well as some cloud-based benefits that perpetual licensees won't get.

Matasano Security[^]:

If you don't trust the network to deliver a password, or, worse, don't trust the server not to keep user secrets, you can't trust them to deliver security code. The same attacker who was sniffing passwords or reading diaries before you introduce crypto is simply hijacking crypto code after you do.

Allen Wirfs-Brock[^]:

Recently a friend of mine asked this question. His theory was that the open web, as described in the Mozilla Mission no longer mattered because much of what we used to do using web browsers is now rapidly shifting to “apps”. Why worry about the open web if nobody is going to be using it? To me, this is really a question about what do we mean by “the web”?