The Insider News

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

Microsoft needs to improve customer engagement, dramatically. And the first thing that will take is to recognize that the consumer teams’ attitude towards communicating futures is just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean abandonment of controlled information release, it means applying it more intelligently. It means disclosing platform direction early. It means bringing developers on board early. It means giving general technology direction to the public early (ala what BillG used to do) without talking specific releases or products. It does not mean releasing every detail of a product in advance.

atomicobject.com[^]:

When I recommend learning Haskell to the uninitiated, I often get asked: “Why Haskell?” “Is it a practical language?” and ”Is it something I can actually use?” My answer is definitely yes. Haskell isn’t my primary language at work (I mostly write C code for embedded systems), I’ve still found it incredibly useful. And even if I never used Haskell at work, I would still consider learning it as time well spent. So, why Haskell?

Ars Technica[^]:

Android and iOS have existed in tension for a few years now, and each is continually borrowing ideas, designs, and features from the other. Nothing wrong with a little friendly theft when trying to stay competitive. The operating systems are far from exact mirrors of each other, and they have even grown more distinct with new generations. But there are a few features we’d still love to see cross sides, in the interest of keeping the operating systems functional and easy for customers to use.

Ken Shirriff's blog[^]:

On the surface, a microprocessor's registers seem like simple storage, but not in the 8085 microprocessor. Reverse-engineering the 8085 reveals many interesting tricks that make the registers fast and compact.... Each bit is implemented with a surprisingly compact circuit. The instruction set is designed to make register accesses efficient. An indirection trick allows quick register exchanges. Many register operations use the unexpected but efficient data path of going through the ALU.

Rockford Lhotka[^]:

Businesses are mostly just now upgrading to Windows 7, and won’t go to Windows 8 for 2-4 more years. So in a sense you can argue that Microsoft has a lot of time to fix the side-loading story, because almost no one is going to care about this for a long time anyway. On the other hand, the developer community tends to move a bit faster. We’re a fickle bunch. If we don’t perceive WinRT as a viable future platform for business apps then we’ll start retooling our skills to something else in order to preserve our careers. That won’t take 4 years. I suspect Microsoft has less than 2 years to get developer buy-in to WinRT or the siren call of h5js will become too much to bear.

The Verge[^]:

In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji.

ghacks.net[^]:

Today it became known that the author of the popular HoverZoom extension for the Google Chrome browser also implemented “features” into the extension that many users will certainly consider unethical if only they knew about them. A user of the extension noticed that it was acting up when connections to Github were made and after additional users reported the same issue, one user wanted to know why Hoverzoom needed to POST to a Czech media company server...

BBC News[^]:

Like all little boys, Roboy likes to show off. He can say a few words. He can shake hands and wave. He is learning to ride a tricycle. And - every parent's pride and joy - he has a functioning musculoskeletal anatomy.... As manufacturers get ready to market robots for the home it has become essential for them to overcome the public's suspicion of them. But designing a robot that is fun to be with - as well as useful and safe - is quite difficult.

Fraser Speirs[^]:

When the iPad first launched, many people reached for a quick analysis that it was a device "only for content consumption". Despite time and experience having proven those people quite obviously wrong, the debate seems to persist as to what the iPad is, precisely, for. My own opinion is that the iPad is for about 80% of all tasks you can conceivably do on a computer. I have never thought of the iPad as a distinct entity requiring a total first-principles relearning of what it means to use a computation device.

NYTimes.com[^]:

At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of scientists struggled to close in on physics' most elusive particle.... The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe.

http://www.fastcompany.com:

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.