The Insider News

@jhooks[^]:

When I use the term “enterprise” to describe software, I typically mean “software that helps people get work done more efficiently.” In this sense, Angry Birds and your favorite Twitter client are not enterprise applications. A Twitter client that has additional features to facilitate and track a company’s social engagement, on the other hand, might fall into the enterprise category. An application that is used in a call center to track incoming support requests is definitely “enterprise”. A system that connects several “legacy” systems and presents employees with a unified interface and saves 1000s of man-years every month of application context switching? Enterprise.

Ludwig Wendzich[^]:

I remember how in University my photography class and I struggled to grasp exposure and how it worked. We had exercises where for hours on end we were asked to "play" with the settings and get a feel for what they do. I don't like getting a "feel" for something. I like knowing how it works.... The trick was learning what each of the vertices afforded and cost you. That was the key to our DSLR simulator.

TechRepublic[^]:

Haswell is Intel’s new family of processors targeted at the PC and server market. With Haswell Intel has designed a processor suited to new PC form factors – laptops no thicker than 25mm, PC/tablet hybrids, pure tablets and all-in-one PCs. In particular Intel has targeted the fourth generation chip at serving what it calls the ‘ultrabook’ market. Intel defines ultrabooks as mobile computers thinner than 25mm, with touchscreen and voice control as standard and possibly convertible into either a tablet or laptop.

CNET News[^]:

Microsoft researchers say they have come up with a novel approach to boost the accuracy of speech recognition and rev up the speed in which it's rendered by creating a computation model that mimics the way the brain works. By applying so-called deep neural networks to speech recognition, Microsoft researchers claim that users in the United States, composing a text message or searching via Bing with their voices, will see results twice as fast as they did with Microsoft's previous technology. And the researchers say accuracy has improved by 15 percent.

Justin Dunham[^]:

Much of what I’ve heard when I hear about UX is: How do we arrange everything on the screen so that a user can figure it out and quickly accomplish their goals? How do we make use of graphic design, layout, text, interactivity, affordances, animation and so on to make things easier for the user? Lately I’ve start learning to build electronics with Arduino and it’s made me much more sympathetic to the designers of simple hardware.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft is reaching out to two main audiences this year at Build, said Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Group: The existing Win32, line-of-business/commercial developer community and the startup community. "We need a good conversation with that community," said Guggenheimer about the existing .Net developer base, many of whom have felt disenfranchised by Microsoft's recent developer push toward HTML/JavaScript.