The Insider News

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.)

Ars Technica[^]:

Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that's capable of 100Gbps.

xkcd[^]:

There is an update for Adobe Download Manager...

TechRadar[^]:

What do you get when you combine the Raspberry Pi with some inspirational young inventors? Terrific Raspberry Pi project designs, that's what. Fourteen groups of teams from schools, universities and businesses gathered in late March at PA Consulting Group's Cambridge Technology Centre for the awards ceremony of the PA and Raspberry Pi-making competition. The young programmers presented their inventions to a hand-picked judging panel after being given three months to work on their designs, a £25 Raspberry Pi and up to £50 of additional hardware and software.

CNET News[^]:

Encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service has stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations, an internal government document reveals. An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge.

Volatile and Decentralized[^]:

There are four main aspects to my job: (1) Defining the technical agenda for the team and making sure we're successful; (2) Writing code of my own; (3) Acting as the main liaison between our team and other groups at Google, and (4) Doing the "people management" for the team in terms of hiring, performance reviews, promotion, and so forth. Academics will immediately recognize the parallels with being a professor.

Windows PowerShell Blog[^]:

We've decided not to bring the Script Explorer project to RTM. In the meantime, we will start winding down the Script Explorer project. This will be a gradual process to allow time for existing users to move to other tools. We'll start by removing the RC package from the Download Center this week. For those who have already downloaded pre-release versions and are actively using Script Explorer in their environments, we will continue to operate the back-end script aggregation service used by Script Explorer for a few more months. We plan to turn off the service on June 14, 2013.