The Insider News

Embedded in Academia[^]:

Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a programming language to admit undefined behaviors? Here I mean undefined behavior in the C/C++ sense where, for example, “anything can happen” when you use an uninitialized variable. In my opinion, five conditions need to be fulfilled.

A geek with a hat[^]:

Yesterday a comment on HackerNews got me thinking about the horrible horrible code I used to produce as a young human (and to this day). Here is a non-exhaustive list of the worst monstrosities I have created in the past 13 years.

8th color[^]:

My story is probably similar to one thousand others: used to be a Java programmer, switched to Ruby. While discussing the “why” is probably not really relevant, I wanted to take the opportunity to write about the good and bad points of the transition, from my own personal point of view. I’m in both environments each and every week, which gives me a rather good view of my own quirks about each language.

skilldrick[^]:

I’m going to show you how to get started writing 6502 assembly language. The 6502 processor was massive in the seventies and eighties, powering famous computers like the BBC Micro, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Bender in Futurama has a 6502 processor for a brain. Even the Terminator was programmed in 6502.

Sam Stephenson[^]:

One question I get a lot is, “are your dotfiles published anywhere?” For some reason, people want to know how my computer is configured. What’s the secret sauce that keeps me productive? As programmers we are voyeur-tinkerers. We study our colleagues’ work environments and adjust our own in response. What works for them might work for us too.

Joel on Software[^]:

The software production process has several major “inventory” accumulation points, itself. Stuff accumulates at those points and ends up wasting a lot of time and money. Let’s go over the three places most inventory accumulates.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft's Tami Reller has announced that Windows 8 will Release to Manufacturing (RTM) in the first week on August, with a release in late October to retail stores. Speaking at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Canada, Reller revealed that the company is "on track" to finishing the final copy of Windows 8 in early August.

Ars Technica[^]:

For electronics, smaller is almost always better. Moore's Law—which says that the amount of transistors one can cram into a given amount of space tends to double about every eighteen months—still holds roughly true for NAND flash. There's a lot happening with solid state storage, and a lot more set to happen—but some serious problems need to be solved first.

Bloomberg[^]:

Corporate customers, the backbone of RIM’s business, are fortifying contingency plans so they won’t be affected by a possible breakup of the BlackBerry-maker or other setbacks. With millions of employees connecting to the office through mobile e- mail, companies have been eager to establish a fallback or replacement plan.

Henri Bergius[^]:

Many of the things people associate with iPad were already common for us in the old Internet Tablet times. I was getting my morning news on the 770 with Google Reader just like I now do with Pulse on an Android tablet, and I was sharing my location with friends via Plazes like people now do with Foursquare. The only difference is that back then the tablets were for a bit more exclusive club of Linux enthusiasts.