The Insider News

engadget.com[^]:

When Mozilla said devices running Firefox OS would be cheap, we didn't know they'd be this cheap. Telefónica has just tweeted that the ZTE Open will be launching in Spain tomorrow for €69, which translates to around $90 and is a good $30 less than the cheapest developer unit we'd seen until now.

jitbit.com[^]:

Unlike the cool startup kids building stuff with "Socket.io on top of Node.js with MongoDB and a Rails layer", our startup is mostly Microsoft-based. To be honest, I do regret that sometimes... I wish I was a cool kid too - hacking stuff in XCode, doing Rails development... In fact, we do try all these tools for our experimental projects. But when it comes to a commercial product - after hours of discussing all the pros and cons we keep choosing Microsoft. Over and over.

searchengineland.com[^]:

You appeared on the search engine scene in December 1995. You made us go “woah” when you arrived. You did that by indexing around 20 million web pages, at a time when indexing 2 million web pages was considered to be big. Today, of course, pages get indexed in the billions, the tens of billions or more. But in 1995, 20 million was huge. Existing search engines like Lycos, Excite & InfoSeek (to name only a few) didn’t quite know what hit them. With so many pages, you seemed to find stuff they and others didn’t.

Visual C++ Team Blog[^]:

If you’ve ever profiled an optimized build of a C++ application there is a good chance that you looked at the profiling report and saw some functions missing that you expected to be present so you had to assume that they had been inlined but couldn’t be certain. Likewise, if you’ve ever tried to improve your application’s performance using the Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) feature in Visual Studio, you were likely blind to whether your training data actually had the desired effect. To help with this, in Visual Studio 2013 we’ve done work to help you understand when the compiler inlines functions and how your PGO training data has translated to the optimized binary.

Visual C++ Team Blog[^]:

Since the newer Visual C++ content is not yet live on MSDN, I copied the key bits from the "What's New for Visual C++ Developers" and replicated it below. Note that this post may be removed after the MSDN content has been available for a few weeks.

Je L'ai Dit[^]:

Facebook recently launched support for hash tags as well. So, in a way, our online life revolves around hash tags. Given that, it’s a really great thing for bash power users that # in shell means comment. I usually tend to type long commands and won’t bother remembering or saving them somewhere as it is in the bash history and i can retrieve it by reverse-i-search (Ctrl+R) anytime I want.

Fred Wu's Blog[^]:

As discussed in my book, to predict the future of a high tech industry such as computing is not particularly difficult. I believe in the foreseeable future the computing industry is still going to advance based on Moore’s law. Although, it is possible that in the next year or two quantum computers become a practical reality, in that case it will change everything!

the-pope.com[^]:

The approach of this online HTML treatise is to focus mostly on those particular elements ("tags") which are gone, or at least going away, and to track in detail the comings and goings of the various elements and attributes across the versions of HTML. A special emphasis is given here to those many versions of HTML that precede HTML 2.0, a breakdown of the many discrete versions of HTML, which is something that to my knowlege has not yet been attempted.

Hack a Day[^]:

The film explains the core concept of UNIX by demonstrating modularity with a great example by Brian Kernighan. He took a short passage from a paper he wrote and found spelling errors by piping his paper though different commands from the shell. First the words in the paper were separated line by line, made lowercase, and sorted alphabetically. All the unique words were extracted from this list, and compared to a dictionary. A spell checker in one line of code, brought to you by the power of UNIX.

matt.might.net[^]:

In honor of July's resolution, "Focus on security," I've prepared this article on the basics of using encryption. Encryption makes privacy a right that can be claimed rather than granted. Plenty of others have weighed in on the merits of encryption and its importance in modern times.... This article is a quick summary of basic encryption tools for protecting your data and your privacy. The goal is to raise awareness of these tools.

marketingland.com[^]:

Google Reader is turning off their feed on July 1st and by now many of you have already switched to a new RSS reader – but, for those of you who have yet to make the jump, keep reading. We wanted to give you a concise chart explaining the features, costs and functionality of some of the larger RSS feed readers on the market.

AnandTech[^]:

In the PC industry, the concept of a fabless semiconductor manufacturer isn’t unusual. NVIDIA has always been one, and now AMD is one as well. Fabless semiconductors create all of the designs for their chips, but they’re physically manufactured at a foundry partner.... ARM goes one step beyond the fabless semi: it doesn’t even sell any chips into the marketplace. ARM instead, designs IP (instruction set architecture, microprocessor, graphics, interconnects) and licenses it to anyone who wants to use it.

AllThingsD[^]:

In a quiet blog post after markets closed, Yahoo announced it will be “sunsetting” 12 of its services over the coming months, beginning as soon as today. Among the casualties is Yahoo Axis, a rather attractive and creative search browser the company debuted just one year ago. Also particularly relevant and perfectly timed: Yahoo is deep-sixing its RSS alerts, dovetailing exactly with the much bemoaned death of Google Reader on July 1.

CodeProject[^]:

I work on the Visa Integrated Payment (VIP) System. This is the mainframe system that processes Visa’s real-time authorization messages. It sits at the core of Visa’s processing platform and is the underlying system for all of the different card authorization platforms offered by Visa. VIP isn’t flashy or even well known to most individual cardholders, but many of them use it several times a day. Nearly all Visa transactions that take place anywhere in the world flow through this system in real time, so it is critically important that it be secure, robust, and efficient.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I just bit the bullet and installed the Windows 8.1 Preview on my Surface RT.... I honestly didn't use my Surface RT that much, mostly just for Movies and Stuff, but this new 8.1 update adds some stuff that will have me using it around the house more. Here's 10 features that are making me look harder at Windows 8.1.

8th Light[^]:

The goal of a code retreat is to spend a full day practicing techniques you may not otherwise encounter. One of my favorite constraints to give to participants is as follows: Code Conway's Game of Life using no conditional statements - no ifs, etc. It always throws people for a loop.

Somasegar's blog[^]:

I fundamentally believe that there has never been a better time to be a software developer. In our emerging world where every company is a software company, developers have the awesome role and responsibility of driving forward all kinds of innovation across many different industries. Whether building apps for enterprises or consumers, whether harnessing the mobility and intimacy afforded by devices or the scale and economy enabled by the cloud, whether pursuing the art of development as a hobby or as a profession, and whether new to the game or a seasoned veteran, developers everywhere have the potential to build creative and compelling solutions that delight and transform the world. We at Microsoft strive to ensure developers have the tools they need to thrive while doing so.

.NET Blog[^]:

Today, we are announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, which includes new features and improvements across the product. We’ve made it easier to build .NET apps in Visual Studio, with convenient and useful productivity improvements that are a direct response to your feedback and requests. .NET apps are now faster, because they make better use of your hardware. We’ve also laid groundwork that will enable you to more easily take advantage of updates to the .NET Framework.

DaedTech[^]:

All of this mounting technical debt could easily be avoided by giving each loop its own count variable. Having them recycle the same one creates a compile-time dependency of what’s going on in each loop with what happened in the loop before, even though there are no other similar dependencies in evidence. In other words, recycling this local variable is the only thing that’s creating a coupling in your code–there’s no logical reason to do it.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

Recently I was intrigued by Joe Kunk's On VB column about commenting code. I especially liked Kunk's comment that: "It's important to communicate what the code should be doing." I thought that was the best description of what comments should do that I'd read in a very long time. I also think it's the only thing comments should do. Comments should explain the "why" of the code and stop there.