The Insider News

spaceappschallenge.org[^]:

The International Space Apps Challenge is a technology development event during which citizens from around the world work together to solve challenges relevant to improving life on Earth and life in space.

TIME.com[^]:

I can’t help but think, though, that the first signs that the PC market might be maxing out came in early 2007, before Windows 8, the iPad or even the iPhone had any influence on the business. That’s when Microsoft released Windows Vista and an enormous number of consumers and businesses responded by saying, essentially, “No thanks, we’re perfectly happy with Windows XP.” Even today, almost a dozen years after XP’s release, the company is trying to convince a fair chunk of the PC-using world that it didn’t perfect the PC operating system back in 2001.

AllThingsD[^]:

Sales of personal computers were very nearly twice as bad as previously expected and experienced their worst year-on-year decline ever in the first quarter of 2013, according to the market research firm IDC.... Worldwide PC shipments came in at 76.3 million units in the first quarter of the year, amounting to a decline of nearly 14 percent. That’s much worse than the firm’s forecast, which called for a decline of 7.7 percent. The findings also amount to the fourth consecutive quarter in which sales declined compared to the previous quarter.

CodeProject[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Danny Severns, IT Director for Dunn Tire and knee-deep in COBOL business systems.

TIME.com[^]:

In the five years since Apple released its first iPhone, touch-screen smartphones have become thinner, lighter, faster and more capable. But through it all, battery life has mostly stayed the same.... Because battery capacity hasn’t improved much over the years, the batteries themselves have gotten bigger, limiting how thin and light phones can be. Meanwhile, technologies like 1080p screens and wireless screen mirroring have been hamstrung by batteries that can’t keep up.

iFixit[^]:

Let's face it, the year is 2013. Where are our flying cars? Why isn't deep space travel a thing yet? Why hasn't virtual reality become, well, reality? The Oculus Rift seeks to fill that lack of virtual reality in our lives. Still in its early developmental stage, the Oculus Rift promises to deliver VR gaming to the yearning public. Join us as we take a peek inside the Oculus Rift and its hardware.

Nettuts+[^]:

The concept of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is fairly new to PHP. There’s currently no official AOP support in PHP, but there are some extensions and libraries which implement this feature. In this lesson, we’ll use the Go! PHP library to learn AOP in PHP, and review when it can be helpful.

fogus[^]:

How can you tell that someone is not a scientist? They’ll have the word “scientist” in their title. This seems harsh right? The truth is that if you look at most of the fields defining science you’ll see that the practitioners rarely call themselves scientists.... So why not call ourselves Computerists?

The Register[^]:

Mozilla developers are considering dropping support for the <blink> tag from future versions of the Firefox browser, in a move that would see the web rid of the scourge of blinking text once and for all. Firefox's Gecko HTML rendering engine is currently the only one to support the blinking effect, which usability expert Jakob Nielsen once described as "simply evil." Internet Explorer has never supported it, and while Opera once did, it lost support when it switched its rendering engine to WebKit in February. (Opera has since switched again to Google's new Blink engine – which, ironically perhaps, doesn't support <blink> either.)

ZDNet[^]:

Though word of its existence first leaked in August of 2012, there's still a lot of confusion about what Microsoft's Blue is and isn't. Partially, this is due to Microsoft officials not saying a whole heck of a lot about Blue so far. That will be changing within the next couple months... The other reason for the confusion about Blue is it seems to be a codename for both products and a change in the way Microsoft builds, tests and releases software. (This same double meaning of the codename applies to Microsoft's Gemini... the codename for the next set of Metro-style Office apps... as well as the work of the Office team to change how it rolls out new releases.)