The Insider News

MSDN Blogs[^]:

For Windows 8, the Bing team built News, Weather, Finance, Sports, Travel and Maps apps. This technical overview provides insight on the architecture of these apps, key Windows 8 features and the contracts they use, common controls they employ, and world readiness more generally.

Adam Petersen[^]:

FizzBuzz? The hilarious drinking game? Well, almost. It all started with a blog by Imran on how FizzBuzz was used during interviews to weed out programmers that, believe it or not, cannot program.... Simple enough, but FizzBuzz proved to be scarily effective in eliminating programmers that actually cannot produce software. During the lengthy discussions that followed, a lot of creative solutions to FizzBuzz were posted. They ranged from over-engineered Java to down-to-the-metal Assembler, wicked Perl one-liners, and XSLT solutions. Of course I want to be a part of this rising FizzBuzz industry!

Peter Bailis[^]:

Many databases today differentiate themselves from their NoSQL counterparts by claiming to support "100% ACID" transactions or "guaranteeing strong consistency (ACID)." In reality, few of these databases—including traditional “big iron” systems like Oracle—provide formal ACID guarantees, even when they claim to do so.

fogus[^]:

Today I would like to introduce an idea that I’ve been playing around with as a thought experiment for years, but that has finally become a reality. Imagine a programming language designed specifically for teaching young computer science students a solid foundation in sound computer science topics as well as practical techniques useful in creating rock-solid industrial systems. Below, I’ll outline the features of Enfield.

ninlabs.com[^]:

Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches. But what is the evidence and what can we do about it? Every few months I still see programmers who are asked to not use headphones during work hours or are interrupted by meetings too frequently but have little defense against these claims. I also fear our declining ability to handle these mental workloads and interruptions as we age.

ZDNet[^]:

Oracle's Java plugin for browsers is a notoriously insecure product. Over the past 18 months, the company has released 11 updates, six of them containing critical security fixes. With each update, Java actively tries to install unwanted software. Here's what it does, and why it has to stop.

Big Bubbles (no troubles)[^]:

You know what? We - the UNIX community - only ever borrowed/co-opted Linux, because it was the easiest, cheapest way to get a mostly (or occasionally better) UNIX experience on the kind of hardware we could afford. But it turns out that Linux wasn’t really meant for us, and doesn’t care about that stuff; it has wider ambitions. Whether those ambitions will turn out to be worthless once the destination is reached, because the party has moved on, time will tell.

BYTE[^]:

Every industry has its snake oil, and software is no different. A program for Windows 8 called Memory Optimizer from Softorino recalls perhaps the greatest scam program of all time, SoftRAM from Syncronys Softcorp. Memory Optimizer doesn't appear to be fraudulent like SoftRAM, but it is every bit as useful.

.net magazine[^]:

For many, XP might seem like a distant memory, but... around one in four PCs still runs that operating system, and in some locales (for example, China), its share rises significantly. With Microsoft unable or unwilling to enable XP to run IE9 or later, this means IE8 will likely have a very long tail in terms of usage, not least due to, as Hunt notes, many organisations having a ‘standard’ OS environment that doesn’t allow more modern XP-compatible browsers to be installed alongside the ageing IE8.