The Insider News

tostring.it[^]:

Visual Studio 2012 is absolutely the best IDE in the world and, with the latest version, it has sorted most of the big problems (from my point of view the previous version was a bit slow). I’m not a big fan of extensions because they often make Visual Studio unstable and/or slow, but I’ll make an exception because in this case it’s incredibly cool!

Bits and Behavior[^]:

I’m not really a hard core gamer any­more, but my fas­ci­na­tion with pro­gram­ming did begin with video games (and specif­i­cally, ren­der­ing algo­rithms). So when I saw John Carmack’s 2012 Quake­Con keynote show up in my feed, I thought I’d lis­ten to a bit of it and learn a bit about the state of game design and development. What I heard instead was a hacker’s hacker talk about his recent real­iza­tion that soft­ware engi­neer­ing is actu­ally a social sci­ence.

Scripting News[^]:

Anyone can write a spec. What matters is what software is supporting the protocol, what content is available through it and how compelling is the content. RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless.

Timoh[^]:

Do people expect to achieve something more when they use encryption? Probably yes. Often people think they secure their application if they magically use encryption. Now we get to the point. Encryption itself is most of the time useless as is. Encrypted data is malleable, which means the adversary can change the contents of your plaintext by modifying the ciphertext. This is something a secure system should not let happen under any circumstances.

TechNet Blogs[^]:

It’s been 25 years since we’ve updated the Microsoft logo and now is the perfect time for a change. This is an incredibly exciting year for Microsoft as we prepare to release new versions of nearly all of our products. From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, you will see a common look and feel across these products providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs.

Ars Technica[^]:

We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise—the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. But people do forget—and quickly—about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else.