The Insider News

Plausible Labs[^]:

Have you ever wondered how PCI cards are able to perform basic operations — such as accessing a disk, displaying graphics, or booting off the network — before their drivers have been loaded? Or why cards are platform specific, despite the fact that everyone is using standardized PCI interfaces? The answer actually lies on the card itself, inside a bit of addressable flash memory called the “Option ROM”, which contains executable code that’s located and run at boot time.... This leads me to my small Friday evening project in getting a PC version of the Radeon 7000 64MB working on a PCI Power Macintosh, for which no 64MB cards were released.

neocomputer.org[^]:

If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently, I'm not alone. On this page I'm going to briefly explore why people hate E.T., and how the game can be fixed.... It turns out that E.T. isn't a bad game after all. With a few simple changes we were able to dramatically improve an already good game by eliminating the most common complaints.

Max Burstein's Blog[^]:

Bit level manipulation allows us to write more efficient code due to the fact that CPU's are really good at handling bits. In fact that's all they really do. Even if you've never played around with bit manipulation it's likely that your compiler has modified your code to use bit manipulation.

Not Implemented[^]:

We are all familiar with URLs: the string uniquely identifying the requested document. However, we don’t always consider they are more than that: URLs are user facing and should be considered important UI elements. They should be clean, understandable, semantic, hierarchical and not excessively long.

Scripting News[^]:

In September 2004, the activity we called audioblogging was starting to gain traction. There were a dozen or so regular programs. We had tools for creating audioblog feeds, and an aggregator that could pull them all together into a river of audio programming.... In the first days of the iPodder-dev mail list the term podcast was introduced and adopted as the name of the activity. Here's the sequence of events, with links.

Ars Technica[^]:

If we go way back to the 18th century, we find ourselves in the heyday of mechanics. Indeed, many physicists believed that the world was essentially mechanical and deterministic. More importantly, everyone was thinking about mechanical solutions to problems. In that milieu, it seemed natural to think of computing in terms of gears, chains, sprockets, and cams. The result was mechanical computers. Once the electronics revolution hit full stride, these machines ended up being remembered as the pinnacle of a bygone age. Now, in a blast from the past, a pair of researchers from New Zealand have demonstrated an updated version of the mechanical computer: an artificial, muscle-based computer. It's slow and bulky, and it can't do a lot, but the researchers argue that it has great potential for robotics.

UX Magazine[^]:

This actually happened. An e-commerce website had been designed and developed. Launch had been initiated, and it was abruptly taken offline in mid-air.... The form, fit, and function of the entire website—particularly the content management, multivendor shopping, and the customer interaction—was not shared with the website customer. Sixteen months of design and development more than $25,000 wasted, to say nothing of the lost market opportunity. Bad UX, front-end and back-end, can kill a website.

Tom's Guide[^]:

After Google revealed that it's forking WebKit with the launch of the Blink browser rendering engine for Chrome, WebKit developers began discussing the removal of Chrome-specific code from the project. This is by no means a "retaliation" despite how it sounds. It makes perfect sense to remove support for a browser that will no longer use the WebKit engine.

Gamasutra[^]:

The gutting of LucasArts earlier this week was a tragic loss for the video game industry, but for many of us, it was more than that. It was more severe of a loss than the cancelled projects, the rumored 150 job losses, or the between-the-lines message that even a company as diverse and global as Disney puts little value in game development. No, for us, the death of LucasArts was the death of a dream. A dream rose-tinted by nostalgia, perhaps, but a dream nevertheless. A dream that one day, the unique environment that birthed what may have been the most wildly creative studio in mainstream game development history would, somehow, come back.

The lack of strong typing invites runtime errors, while the lack of namespaces and class structure make it difficult to organize and manage code as it grows.

That's where TypeScript, an open source language created by Microsoft, comes in. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that presents class structure and type safety for coders, helping them better manage and maintain their code. Projects written in TypeScript compile to valid, standards-compliant JavaScript code.

CodeProject[^]:

CodeProject’s technical training arm has arrived, CodeProject.TV.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's hard to believe that just a few decades ago, touchscreen technology could only be found in science fiction books and film. These days, it's almost unfathomable how we once got through our daily tasks without a trusty tablet or smartphone nearby, but it doesn't stop there. Touchscreens really are everywhere. Homes, cars, restaurants, stores, planes, wherever—they fill our lives in spaces public and private.... This article is the first of a three-part series on touchscreen technology's journey to fact from fiction.

The Changelog[^]:

Last week, I told you all about an incoming security patch for Postgres. Well, today, it’s here. Please check out this page and upgrade your Postgres. As the Postgres team says, ‘This is the first security issue of this magnitude since 2006.’

Redmondmag.com[^]:

The security strength (or eventual weakness) of Microsoft's app model lies in its sandbox.... However, no matter how hard Microsoft has pushed the strength of its sandbox environment, no system is 100 percent protected from attacks. With higher adoption rate of Microsoft's newest OS, we'll start to see hackers turning their skills towards breaking it. And once that happens, I think we will get our first look at how secure Windows Store apps really are.

ferd.ca[^]:

The classic cop out to producing documentation is not having the time. Of course, it's entirely valid and possible that more urgent things take priority over documentation. However, developers who use time as an excuse should be aware that time they do not pour into documentation is time their users instead have to invest in it.... Frankly, not having documentation is a net loss in terms of time for everyone involved.