The Insider News

Devlicio.us[^]:

If you like tabletop RPGs, build Xaml applications or build Html/JS applications, I’m very excited to officially announce to you today that RPGWithMe is live! RPGWithMe is a web-based platform centered around tabletop RPGs. If you play these games you are going to like this a lot.

Ars Technica[^]:

I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it has incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin.

Steve Bennett[^]:

Git is the source code version control system that is rapidly becoming the standard for open source projects. It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things with branches, and rewriting history. What a pity that it’s so hard to learn, has such an unpleasant command line interface, and treats its users with such utter contempt.

Nick Charney[^]:

Be warned this is a radical approach to a complex problem as such it would require a certain degree of intestinal fortitude to pull off. But if co-workers are sapping your productivity with questions and diversions, this might help you get that time back (at the possible expense of a few friends).

MIT News[^]:

In tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing algorithms whose performance had already been optimized by seasoned programmers. The Halide versions were typically about one-third as long but offered significant performance gains — two-, three-, or even six-fold speedups. In one instance, the Halide program was actually longer than the original — but the speedup was 70-fold.

Red Sweater Blog[^]:

Apple, and other companies who hold the “keys to the castles,” can help by developing technologies that empower us to apply increasingly strong protections while at also minimizing the day-to-day hassles of a complicated passphrase. For example, I would be happy to use a simple 4-digit passcode that unlocked my phone, if a longer passphrase was demanded after an hour of inactivity. This would allow me to use my phone in confidence that it would be fairly hard to unlock quickly without the passcode, and that a thief would only have an hour to make that happen before the phone entered “strong lockdown” mode.

ZoomZum[^]:

Not every person who uses windows is tech savvy. Everyone does keep a password for extra security and they do sometimes tend to forget it. The people who do not understand the technology or computer very well cannot easily crack it and will resort to options of either re-installing or re-formatting the entire operating system.

Wired.com[^]:

Microsoft itself suggests that ad sales were not the crux of its business strategy. Most Outlook.com users likely will already be Microsoft customers, who as buyers of its software are the main source of the company’s revenue, a company spokesperson told Wired in a statement Wednesday. “We see our users as customers, not inventory.”

TIME[^]:

TRS-80 software was just as important as TRS-80 hardware, and at first, it had a wider selection than any other microcomputer. Conventional wisdom has long held that Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s VisiCalc spreadsheet for the Apple II was the first killer app–a program so useful that people bought a computer to run it. But even before Apple got VisiCalc, the TRS-80 had the Electric Pencil, the first microcomputer word processor. At the very least, it was a proto-killer app.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Over the last 12 to 18 months, one buzzword at Microsoft has come to encapsulate a bold redesign of the look of its most high-profile products: Metro. First used to describe the new tile- and typography-heavy user interface for Windows Phone, its smartphone operating system, the Metro look has popped up on the Xbox, Windows 8 and even in the layout of PowerPoint slides used by Microsoft executives. Now Microsoft is banishing the Metro name from its products.

Mashable[^]

Starting at the end of August, McAfee will be making it a little safer to share your photos on the social network. The security company is launching a product called Social Protection, which lets you control who can see your photos on the site and prevents people from downloading those pictures to view elsewhere.