The Insider News

Windows Store[^]:

Code Writer is a free text and code editor app with active syntax highlighting that updates as you edit documents and has 20 supported file types. A tabbed document interface allows for quickly switching between open documents. 20 syntax-highlighted file types supported including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, C#, VB, C++, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, and many other common languages.

Ars Technica[^]:

When it comes to backing up and restoring your PC, Windows 8 took a few steps forward and a few steps back. Your settings and apps in the new tablet-y interface (yeah, we're still calling it Metro) are automatically backed up if you use a Microsoft account.... There's also a new backup tool on the desktop side of things, but this has its limits too.... One problem is neither File History nor the Metro restore feature are complete backup tools. The ability to clone and restore your whole PC, files, settings, and applications — by creating a System Image — is gone, or seemingly gone.

Eurogamer.net[^]:

Microsoft's Xbox adventure in Japan began years before Bill Gates' 2001 keynote speech. When the Xbox was being created in Redmond, Bachus and Seamus Blackley, the two Xbox co-creators who spent the most time in Japan, always knew the market would be a challenge. At the turn of the century Japan dominated the console games industry with a whopping thirty per cent of the market. Here's what went wrong.

GitHub[^]:

This project aims to allow any type of device to be controlled by a common web interface (IR, X10, etc.). Originally written by Daniel Myers, Alex Wilson, and Alex Zylman, this rewrite serves to improve extensibility by using a plugin architecture with a minimal core and plugins for features or protocols.

Senseless Words[^]:

Computer processors are, for programmers, almost magical devices that do their commanded bidding. However, delving a bit deeper and figuring out what is really going on inside the processor can be an incredibly rewarding experience, and can help programmers write well-performing code as well as understand how the code they write actually gets executed. In this code, I'll go over how a program goes from human-readable form (i.e. assembly language) into a processor and how the processor executes a program.

The Verge[^]:

Today, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) is announcing that it’s completed its three-year quest to finalize the HTML5 specification.... But despite the fact that the specification is now feature complete, meaning nothing more will be added to it, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before HTML5 reaches the finish line in 2014, and there are unanswered questions about how the group plans to deal with video, an essential part of the web that has yet to see any clear resolution.

Smartphone-friendly Satis toilets eradicate waste, provide a soundtrack for your business[^]

You can also use the app for the requisite music playback, because no one wants to go in silence.

Ars Technica[^]:

The integrity of Windows Store applications is an important issue. It forms part of the value proposition to developers, of the store itself; not only does the store provide easy, reliable billing, distribution, and updating, it also provides at least some degree of protection against piracy and other kinds of exploitation. If Windows 8 can't provide this then competing platforms (such as iOS) and competing delivery mechanisms (such as the Web) become more appealing.

thecodingbrain[^]:

If computer programming languages are languages, then people who spoke one language and could programme to a high standard should be bilingual. Research has suggested that bilingual people perform faster than monolingual people at tasks requiring executive control – that is, tasks involving the ability to pay attention to important information and ignore irrelevant information. So, I set out to find out whether computer programmers were better at these tasks too.

Brython[^]:

Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web. As such, it is a Python implementation (you can take it for a test drive through a web console), adapted to the HTML5 environment, that is to say with an interface to the DOM objects and events. The gallery highlights a few of the possibilities, from creating simple document elements to drag and drop and 3D navigation.

derick_bailey[^]:

When someone submits an issue or a pull request that is “obviously wrong” in your eyes, don’t make fun of them and kick them out of the cool club. Help them learn from the situation. Ask more questions, find out why they are suggesting this change. Dig in to the reasons behind the request and see if there is any merit to it. Take the time to understand their perspective and thought process before you react and judge others.

Sam Stephenson[^]:

In just a few short years Prototype went from best practice to anti-pattern—and depending on who you listened to, you might even be convinced that it was one of the worst things to happen to the web. The reality is that Prototype helped lots of people despite its flawed foundation. But its time had come and gone, and I eventually realized it was time to move on. It was hard not to take Prototype’s failure personally.

bunnie's blog[^]:

We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.... Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology.

Gamasutra[^]:

This is not intended to be a list of 10 developers who happened to make good games in 2012 (though releasing a good game certainly didn't hurt anyone's chances of being included). When selecting the developers on this list (presented alphabetically), Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine editors determined which ones defined the year in a positive way. These are the developers and studios that left their mark on 2012 -- the ones that the industry will be watching in the years ahead.

The Register[^]:

The transistor, the ubiquitous building block of all electronic circuits, will be 65 years old on Sunday. The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who operated the first working point-contact transistor during an experiment conducted on 16 December 1947. Yet this now ubiquitous device - these days more as an element in silicon chip design than as a discrete component - has a history that goes back to the mid-1920s.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

The core problem here is that many test organizations design their test regimes to test Security Suites... and then apply those tests just to MSE rather than to the entire “Microsoft security suite” of which it is part. Why? One key reason is that Microsoft doesn’t explicitly offer a security suite, instead it spreads security capabilities across its products and components. Rather than MSE being the cornerstone of its security efforts, as an anti-malware engine is for a traditional security vendor, for Microsoft MSE is a component that fills in a missing piece in the Windows security effort.

Anil Dash[^]:

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

The Register[^]:

C++ 11 is “far better than previous versions”, says the inventor of the language Bjarne Stroustrup.... C++ is an ISO standard, first ratified in 1998 with C++ 11 completed in 2011, but Stroustrup revealed he was initially resistant to standardisation efforts. “It took some arm-twisting to get me to realise that it was time to start a standards effort," he said. "People pointed out that you couldn’t have a language used by millions controlled by a single guy in a single company. Even if you could trust the guy, you can’t trust the corporation. I was a bit sad, because the things I wanted to do would take years instead of months, because you have to build up consensus, and then you have to wait for five compilers to catch up."