The Insider News

Computerworld[^]:

The failure rate for software development projects is high generally, particularly large ones like Healthcare.gov, says Standish Group data

News.com[^]:

A small-claims complaint asks Apple for a way to remove the automatically downloaded iOS 7 install file on iOS 6 devices and earlier, something that can take up space.

News.com[^]:

The growth spurts continue: Nokia's third-quarter Lumia device sales have more than doubled from a year ago, according to the Wall Street Journal.

ZDNet[^]:

White, male, middle aged -- sound familiar? While the stereotype is still largely true, the demographics are changing.

The Verge[^]:

Google has announced a new suite of tools for activists and non-profits at their Ideas conference in New York today, including tools for evading web censorship and oppressive regimes. The biggest focus has been on DDoS attacks, a kind of brute-force action that can easily take down a small site without leaving any clues as to the culprits. DDoS has been a persistent problem for small-scale activists on the web, but Google's new Project Shield would aim to fix that, offering free DDoS mitigation services to sites serving "media, elections, and human rights related content."

Infoworld[^]:

With its vast portfolio of software and billions of dollars in data center infrastructure investment, Microsoft stands poised to rule the cloud

Jeff Atwood[^]:

My main complaint with the Surface Pro is the incredibly lackluster battery life. Granted, this is a classic Intel x86 box we're talking about, not some efficient ARM system-on-a-chip designed to run on a tiny battery. Still, I was hopeful that the first Surface Pro with Haswell inside would produce giant gains in battery life as Intel promised.

Infoworld[^]:

It's easy to forget the value of any given technology once its buzz has arced across our collective consciousness and died a fiery death beyond the hype horizon. Take Cobol, that "Mad Men"-era relic -- just like fish past its prime, as the hipster tech pundits say: worthless, smelly, out of date, bad for you. Java may be the next enterprise mainstay to find itself on the ropes of "relevance."

Infoworld[^]:

I asked -- and the people responded! Fun fact No. 1: Apparently only 28 percent of Java developers write Java full time.

InfoQ[^]:

With the current state of Java, there are several different SDKs for Java: Java SE 7, CDC 1.1 (based on SE 1.4.2), CLDC (based on SE 1.3) and Java ME, just to name a few. In the past, these implementations served their specific vertical markets very well, but each implementation has diverged and become more and more siloed over the years. With Java 8, there will be a compact profile that replaces CDC.

Internet Evolution[^]:

Surface is designed to function as both a tablet and notebook. It has its own purpose-built keyboard-cover that gets rave reviews even from Apple and Google fanboys. And the operating system and applications are designed to run in dual mode -- either as tablet software or laptop software, depending on the configuration.

The Verge[^]:

There is seemingly no end to the number of things you can do in Minecraft — and the latest thing is experimenting with quantum physics. A new mod called qCraft, built by none other than Google's Quantum A.I. Lab Team, adds blocks that exhibit quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer-dependency properties. Some of the new blocks can be "activated" simply by looking at them, while others are prone to disappear at any moment.