The Insider News

Jet Propulsion Laboratory[^]:

Considerable efforts have been invested by many different organizations in the past on the development of coding standards for the C programming language. The intent of this standard is not to duplicate the earlier work but to collect the best available insights in a
form that can help us improve the safety and reliability of our code. By conforming to a single institutional standard, rather than maintaining a multitude of project and mission specific standards, we can achieve greater consistency of code quality at JPL.

Howard Dierking[^]:

Now that Visual Studio 2012 is done, we’re busy figuring out what we should do next. For Web optimization, there are a few key scenarios that we know we want to support moving forward. There are also a whole bunch of other scenarios that we’ve either heard from different people or come up with during brainstorming. Here are some of our ideas.

Paul Stovell[^]:

Six years ago, I wrote an article about validation in WPF on Code Project. I also wrote a custom error provider that supported IDataErrorInfo, since, would you believe, WPF in version 3.0 didn't support IDataErrorInfo. Later, I worked on a bunch of open source projects around WPF like Bindable LINQ and Magellan. I was even in the MVVM-hyping, Code Project-link sharing club known as the WPF Disciples for a while. As I look back at WPF, I see a technology that had some good fundamentals, but has been really let down by poor implementation and, more importantly, by a lack of investment.

Justin Dunham's journal about making things[^]:

One wonderful thing about do-it-yourself, as a movement, is that it is a powerful way of creating more skilled technicians, lowering the cost of a repair. Also, because it’s fun, you’re realizing value that is difficult to capture in an economic analysis – conservation, thrift, self-reliance, and, if you’re doing a project with other people, community and social interaction. In this case, the repair was easily justified by the value of my time (low), and this is true in many other cases, too. But these reasons are why do-it-yourself is important culturally, not just from a purely monetary standpoint.

TechPresident[^]:

During the early and mid 1960s – about a half a century ago – computers were physically very big. Only big companies, universities and governments had computers, storing them in special air-conditioned rooms. And they were expensive. On IBM’s flagship mainframe computer, the IBM 7094, the memory unit – what you would now call the RAM – held one megabit, i.e. about 128KB, and cost about one million dollars in the early 1960s. That’s about five million dollars in today’s terms. Each computer was also the center of its own universe. There were a few experiments and special projects to connect computers together, but nothing common or easy. Here’s how the government changed all of that.