Software is hard to develop for many reasons: We must figure out what to do, do it, and ensure that we have done it correctly. Last week, I said that I was going to discuss invariants. I’ve decided to put this topic off for a while because when I started thinking about it, I realized that it was just a small part of a much bigger subject. Invariants are an intellectual tool that we can use to increase our confidence that a program is working as we expect. However, it…

Brand journalism? Yes, it’s true; at first glance, this does seem an oxymoron. It would be easy to assume brand journalism is just a fancy euphemism for content marketing, a new ‘buzzword’ designed to remodel old marketing techniques in a seemingly more credible package. But brand journalism is much more. All cynicism aside, brand journalism is not the same as content marketing. Spotting the crucial differences between the two is the first step to understanding what it is and how you can receive work as a brand journalist and how…

It’s a fact. Email is making us slower, less productive and even dumber. The average employee now checks email 36 times an hour, spending a full 13 hours a week reading, deleting, sending and sorting emails. Each time we’re distracted with an email, it takes an average of 16 minutes (yes, 16 minutes) to refocus on the task at hand. But the news gets worse: Workers who check email frequently suffer a 10-point drop in IQ, the equivalent of missing an entire night’s sleep. Our email inboxes, once-upon-a-time the private…

Farmigo, a small farm-delivered food service, has an audacious dream: It thinks it can help wipe out the likes of Kroger and Albertsons. Benzi Ronen thinks that the supermarkets’ time is up. And his company is just the thing to speed up its demise. “Our goal is to make the supermarket obsolete from a fresh perspective,” Ronen says. Farmigo, his five-year-old 30-employee startup, sells produce and other products like milk and cheese purchased directly from farmers for 10%-20% less than equivalent grocery store items. He does it by shrinking the…

Kaspersky Lab presented its “Windows usage and vulnerabilities” research conducted in the summer of 2014. According to it the CVE-2010-2568 vulnerability was discovered back in 2010 at the same time as the notorious Stuxnet worm. Even today malware program exploiting this vulnerability remains widespread and poses a threat to users: 19,000,000 users encountered it in an eight-month timeframe from November 2013 to June 2014. CVE-2010-2568 is a shortcut handling error in Windows, allowing attackers to load an arbitrary DLL without the user’s knowledge. This vulnerability affects Windows XP, Vista and…

Consumers’desire to stream video content on TV screens will drive content device purchases, Council For Research Excellence studies suggest. The most important determining factor among consumers in purchasing a new TV or video device is the ability for it to connect to the internet and stream content, a just-released study has found. Smart TVs were selected by the majority of households participating in the qualitative study, an acceleration ethnography designed to help determine consumers’ likely future video-device purchases, conducted for the Council for Research Excellence (CRE) by GfK. The acceleration…