The Insider News

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.

Appleinsider wrote:[ ]

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak quips Steve Jobs "came back reincarnated at Microsoft" referring to the Redmond-based company's recent design breakthroughs that have culminated in the new Surface, a tablet which sports a marriage of art and technology reportedly befitting of the late tech guru