The Insider News

Nikolai Tillmann's Blog[^]:

One month ago we released the Web App Preview of TouchDevelop, the mobile programming environment. Thanks to the feedback you’ve been sending us since then, we were able to greatly expand the list of supported platforms. As of today, the TouchDevelop Web App Preview at touchdevelop.com/app runs on PCs with Internet Explorer 10 or the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox, Microsoft Surface and other devices running Windows RT, iPad 2 or later (including the mini), iPhone 4 or later, various Android phones and tablets with Chrome, and Macs with the latest versions of Safari, Chrome or Firefox. For Windows Phone 7/8 you can get the fully featured app in the Windows Phone Store that can access even more sensors and data.

Ryan Tomayko[^]:

What we're learning at GitHub is that opting in to open source project constraints often results in better natural survivability characteristics for many types of business, product development, and operations activities. That is to say, processes designed to conform to open source constraints results in a project that runs well, attracts attention, and seems to be self perpetuating where the same project structured more traditionally requires much more manual coordination and authoritative prodding.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's super-easy to open an account at a Web hosting company and start fiddling around there—two excellent Ars reader-recommended Web hosts are A Small Orange and Lithium Hosting—but where's the fun in that? If you want to set up something to learn how it works, the journey is just as important as the destination. Having a ready-made Web or application server cuts out half of the work and thus half of the journey. In this guide, we're going to walk you through everything you need to set up your own Web server, from operating system choice to specific configuration options.

TechHive[^]:

More and more of our data--our credit card numbers, tweets, photos, personal documents, browsing habits, music, and a hundred other things--is stored "in the cloud." The cloud metaphor evokes images of bits and bytes floating around in the ether somewhere, and we rarely hear tech companies talking about their data centers, where the data really lives.

Culture Digitally[^]:

As we have embraced computational tools as our primary media of expression, and have made not just mathematics but all information digital, we are subjecting human discourse and knowledge to these procedural logics that undergird all computation. And there are specific implications when we use algorithms to select what is most relevant from a corpus of data composed of traces of our activities, preferences, and expressions.... That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God.

TenFingerCrunch[^]:

While some people online stop at overall market share when comparing products, I am more concerned with their usage in the real world. I decided to look at sales numbers for Android and iOS devices in correlation with both their online market share and Black Friday sales numbers to see how they stacked up. What I found was rather interesting....