The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.... Now a 91-year-old widower, the German-born Baer is the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. The Odyssey is predated in the games-on-screens space only by experiments like Willy Higinbotham's Tennis for Two and the coin-op dud Computer Space. But Baer also has a long and distinguished record as an engineer and inventor.

Atomic Spin[^]:

Fast forward 100 years to present day, and you will find amateur radio has grown past spark gap transmitters and morse code. Transceivers have grown from spark gap transmitters and receivers into software-defined radio, which uses digital signal processing instead of hardware audio filters. Morse code, or CW, is no longer the only mode of communicating. Voice and various digital modes now fill the airwaves.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Just a few years ago, hackers like Mr. Auriemma and Mr. Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay for such flaws, raising its top offer to $150,000. But increasingly the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet.”

Mental Floss[^]:

One of the programmers’ pet peeves was that whenever the computer encountered a coding glitch, they had to manually restart the entire system. Turning the machine back on automatically initiated a series of memory tests, which stole valuable time. “Some days, you’d be rebooting every five minutes as you searched for the problem,” Bradley says. The tedious tests made the coders want to pull their hair out. So Bradley created a keyboard shortcut that triggered a system reset without the memory tests.

First Floor Software[^]:

The following lists provide a convenient overview of the API changes in the various framework versions released by Microsoft.

Angus Croll[^]:

Last summer I introduced the concept of literary JavaScript with If Hemingway wrote JavaScript in which five well known authors wrote a JavaScript utility to generate the Fibonacci sequence. In May I presented their efforts at JSConf 2013, and to mark the occasion I asked an additional six authors (as well as the irrepressible Hemingway) to solve factorial(n) as only they could. Here’s what they sent me…

Ars Technica[^]:

Microsoft has unveiled the preview of Windows Server 2012 R2. It's not just a "service pack" of bug fixes for last September's release—this is a full update with a raft of further improvements targeted at further knocking down the walls between on-premises servers and private and public clouds. Some of those changes fine-tune the balance between simplicity of management and the enterprise power Microsoft was going for. They continue to enhance the server platform's suitability both as a component of a cloud-computing environment and as an on-ramp to cloud services for small and mid-sized organizations.

Michael Feathers[^]:

One of my pet peeves in programming is null checks. Many codebases are littered with them and, as a result they are often very hard to understand. It's easy enough to complain about null checks, but it's harder to root out all of the places they occur and find alternatives. The typical advice is to move your code toward using the null object pattern or to just check for null immediately and make sure that you don't pass nulls along in your program. After all, we do often need to retrieve objects and sometimes they aren't there. Let's re-examine that.

Scott Chamberlin[^]:

Recently I was interviewing candidates for some positions we had open. When I look at lots of candidates back to back I like to use the same interview question so I can compare their answers against each other. Over the years there is one technical coding question I’ve been going to more often than others as its fairly easy to describe the problem and there is just enough complexity that a good candidate can code it while leaving time for probing the depth of their understanding.... This year a couple candidates... solved it with a couple lines of LINQ.

TIME.com[^]:

The news isn’t shocking. In fact, it’s sort of a shock it didn’t happen several years ago. After slightly more than thirty years in print, PCWorld magazine is ceasing publication, effective with the current issue, to focus on its website and digital editions. If I have to explain why, you haven’t been paying attention to the media business for the past decade or so. The web has been awfully hard on magazines, and no category has suffered more than computer publications.

guardian.co.uk[^]:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.... The documents show that: Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal...

CNET News[^]:

If smartphones can have app stores, why not cars? That's the thinking of at least some of the big automakers as they work to build the foundation for curated selections of car-centric apps that can be purchased directly from the vehicle's in-dash monitor.... The industry, which is used to multiyear development cycles on each car model and a consistent annual shipment schedule, is attempting to work with a mobile device sector more accustomed to a phone or tablet launch every other month, and where the pace of innovation has been relentless.

The Register[^]:

Hewlett-Packard has agreed that there is an undocumented administrative account in its StoreVirtual products, and is promising a patch by 17 July. The issue, which seems to have existed since 2009, was brought to the attention of The Register by Technion, the blogger who earlier published an undocumented backdoor in the company's StoreOnce products.... Although data isn't accessible via the backdoor, one user with around 50 TB of StoreVirtual capacity said the account gave sufficient access to reboot nodes in a cluster, “and so cripple the cluster”.

Microsoft[^]:

Today, we are announcing a far-reaching realignment of the company that will enable us to innovate with greater speed, efficiency and capability in a fast changing world. Today’s announcement will enable us to execute even better on our strategy to deliver a family of devices and services that best empower people for the activities they value most and the enterprise extensions and services that are most valuable to business.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Portable Class Libraries are the Happy Little Feature that Could. They've been chugging along, doing their thing, and it's getting to the point where they are going to pop. That's pop in a good way. If you're not writing .NET apps for more than one target, then you likely haven't bumped into them. However for those people who are writing .NET and want it to run on everything from Watches to Phones to Tablets to Xboxen to Desktops to the Cloud, they are enjoying what PCLs can offer.

peterlundgren.com[^]:

Git receives a lot of positive press. There are countless websites, articles, and blog posts dedicated to the adulation of Git. It’s plenty easy to find a list of reasons to use Git. It’s much harder to find a list of substantial reasons not to use Git.... Unable to find a complete list of Git’s weaknesses, I have attempted to compile a list myself.

Sealed Abstract[^]:

The real elephant in the room here is that in all these articles on this subject, rarely does anyone actually quantify how slow JS is or provide any sort of actually useful standard of comparison. (You know… slow relative to what?) To correct this, I will develop, in this article, not just one useful equivalency for JavaScript performance–but three of them.... I’m going to quantify exactly how slow it is, and compare it to a wide variety of things in your real-life programming experience so that, when you are faced with your own platform decision, you can do your own back-of-the-napkin math on whether or not JavaScript is feasible for solving your own particular problem.