The Insider News

Boris Smus[^]:

When developing in a particular environment, say Android or Cocoa, we are subconsciously aware that the APIs are essentially fixed and beyond our control. The web, however, is built by many different companies and individuals, giving consumers of the platform (web developers) a unique chance to also become contributors to its evolution. Rather than griping about how broken something on the web is, remember that you can play a part in fixing it!

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

To make it easier to figure out what you consider to be programming I’ve made a handy little list in ascending order of what I think is easy and what I think is complex. For the record, I think that all of these except the first are programming. Programming to me is defined as making some agent perform a task, no matter whether or not that agent is a computer or simply another person.

New Scientist[^]:

One goal of scientific publication is to share results in enough detail to allow other research teams to reproduce them and build on them. However, many recent reports have raised the alarm that a shocking amount of the published literature in fields ranging from cancer biology to psychology is not reproducible. Pharmaceuticals company Bayer, for example, recently revealed that it fails to replicate about two-thirds of published studies identifying possible drug targets.

.net magazine[^]:

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started with data visualisations. Beyond following blogs, you need to practise – and to practise, you need to understand the tools available. In this article, I want to introduce you to 20 different tools for creating visualisations: from simple charts to complex graphs, maps and infographics. Almost everything here is available for free, and some you have probably installed already.

Read Write Web[^]:

Microsoft is updating all of its major product lines this year, with the new Windows 8, Office, Windows Server and Internet Explorer releases, plus ongoing updates to the software used by its Xbox gaming platform. But while Ballmer called the year “epic,” he appears ready to if not jettison those products, at least subsume them in a new wave of devices around which Microsoft can develop platforms. “I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, [but] you’ll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company,” Ballmer told the Times. “Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it’s a different form of delivery...."

ITworld[^]:

Since free software is so pervasive these days, it might not be very hard to find something within a company's product portfolio that depends greatly on free or open source software. Once discovered, all it takes is a claim of license violation like this one to shut down that software. Red Hat's legal-fu is massive, because it's using the fact that there is still a lot of non-compliance of the GPL out there to its clear advantage.

Ars Technica[^]:

Researchers have uncovered active malware attacks that exploit a critical and previously unknown vulnerability in the latest versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The attacks are being waged by the same malware group that recently exploited a separate, zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's Java software framework. The attacks install the Poison Ivy backdoor trojan when unsuspecting people browse a booby-trapped website using a fully patched version of Windows XP running the latest versions of IE 7 or IE 8...

All this[^]:

Even if you never visit the Google Reader site itself, there’s a good chance the feed readers you do use—NetNewsWire, Reeder, Vienna, whatever—use Google Reader to sync the status of feed subscriptions across your devices. And if you’re a blogger, the same is true of most of the subscribers to your site’s feed—Google Reader has become almost everyone’s master subscription list.

Github[^]:

Technical writing should teach someone how to do something. The easiest path to this is to be clear. A good start is by answering a couple implicit questions your reader will have. Why should I care? What new thing will I be able to do?

Google Apps update alerts[^]:

As we announced last year, we support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and prior major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Computer[^]:

On the occasion of the presentation of the Computer Society's and Hitachi's inaugural Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing, Computer visited recipient Ken Thompson at Lucent's Bell Labs. We were interested in learning about Thompson's early work on Unix and his more recent work in distributed computing. We were especially interested in learning about the creative process within Bell Labs and his sense of where computer science was heading.