The Insider News

Tobias van Schneider[^]:

Technology is adapting, trying to keep up with our needs and how we handle things. How come then, that the email never really changed? When the first email was sent in the 1970s there was no big difference to the email we know today.

Tech Philosophy[^]:

Before Linux was around there was a huge problem on the UNIX-based operating systems, since they were all proprietary and each OEM had their own version of the OS. Now, if you look carefully and you’ll notice that the same is happening with Android.... Everyday Android feels a lot more like vaporware for me.

Maniacal Rage[^]:

I have always half-jokingly taken credit for inventing the @reply on Twitter. Recently, user @rabble put together a blog post titled Origin of the @reply - Digging Through Twitter’s History, in which he did some research to show when it was first used. Only his research isn’t entirely correct and it doesn’t give fair credit to everyone involved.

Cloud Computing News[^]:

Hadoop is firmly planted in the enterprise as the big data standard and will likely remain firmly entrenched for at least another decade. But, building on some previous discussion, I’m going to go out on a limb and ask, “Is the enterprise buying into a technology whose best day has already passed?”

Learn Code the Hard Way[^]:

Daily Code Drills is an experiment by Zed Shaw, creator of the Learn Code the Hard Way series of tutorials, to see if a daily drill in Python or Ruby helps build your coding muscles. Try to do this every day for as long as you can or until you can do the whole thing in 10 minutes.

Dionysis Zindros[^]:

We already know there are tools to measure how fast a program runs. There are programs called profilers which measure running time in milliseconds and can help us optimize our code by spotting bottlenecks. While this is a useful tool, it isn't really relevant to algorithm complexity. Algorithm complexity is something designed to compare two algorithms at the idea level — ignoring low-level details such as the implementation programming language, the hardware the algorithm runs on, or the instruction set of the given CPU. We want to compare algorithms in terms of just what they are: Ideas of how something is computed.

Jon Fox[^]:

Daniel Clifford recently gave a great talk at Google I/O 2012 called “Breaking the JavaScript Speed Limit with V8″. In it he goes in depth to explain 13 simple optimizations you can do in your JavaScript code to help Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine compile / run your JavaScript code faster. In the talk he gives a lot of great explanations as to what they are and why they help, but if you just want the quick and dirty list, here goes...

Datamation[^]:

Some developers waste time waiting for their employer to train them on new technology or complaining they aren’t getting the training to stay current. While companies continue to cut training budgets, every developer should take the initiative to educate themselves, especially with so many free resources available on the web. When a developer takes risks like this, everyone on a team benefits.

xkcd What If...[^]:

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

CNN[^]:

The Internet was designed to be robust, fault-tolerant and distributed, but its technology is still in its infancy.
The fact that the Web has not stopped functioning in its initial decades sometimes encourages us to assume that it never will. But like any system, biological or man-made, the Internet has the potential to fail.

52 Tiger[^]:

Apple didn’t cut the iPad from whole cloth (which probably would have been linen). It was built upon decades of ideas, tests, products and more ideas. Before we explore the iPad’s story, it’s appropriate to consider the tablets and the pen-driven devices that preceded it.

TIME[^]:

PCs are more complicated and less reliable than they should be. They require too much maintenance, like a car that requires you to top off the oil, check the tire pressure and fill the gas tank on every trip. Even though they use chips that are far more powerful than the ones in the iPad, they’re often much slower. They rarely have built-in wireless broadband. Every moment I spend dealing with this stuff is a moment I’m not spending creating content. I find that deeply frustrating.

Coding Horror[^]:

I'd argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we've seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows – at its core, you've got the same old stuff: a start menu, a desktop with icons, taskbar at the bottom, overlapping windows, toolbars, and pull-down menus.... Windows 8 is, in my humble opinion, the most innovative version of Windows Microsoft has released since Windows 95.

Windows 8 to RTM in August; to be generally available in October[^]

Today at the annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Canada, Microsoft shared the details about the upcoming Windows Milestones with its partners. The Windows Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller provided details on Windows 8 General Availability.

Windows 8 is on track and all set to Release to Manufacturing (RTM) in the first week of August. The enterprise consumers with Software Assurance benefits will have early access to RTM or final build of Windows 8 in August.