The Insider News

Lance Ulanoff wrote:

Microsoft Surface is now a known quantity. It’s sold out on pre-order and has been tested to the hilt by tech pundits across the U.S (including this one). The Surface is an exceptional Windows tablet that, with its Touch Cover, can masquerade as a touch-screen Ultrabook. We know so much, but not everything. Here are nine behind-the-scenes secrets about the new Microsoft product, which I learned from those who built it.

Seven Days[^]:

Remember college — specifically, the all-nighters powered by energy drinks and junk food? A “hackathon” is kind of like that. A bunch of computer programmers with an array of skills get together, and each one tries to build something within 24 hours — sleep deprivation be damned.

YouTube[^]:

Sachin Patney and Aswath Krishnan from the SQL Server Engineering Team demonstrate SQL Kinection, an experimental project that allows you to control SQL Server 2012 with gestures using Microsoft Kinect. Watch as they create new databases and tables, conduct backups, drop databases, create Availability Groups, and perform manual fail overs -- all by using gestures!

The Atlantic[^]:

The idea that "social networks" and "social media" sites created a social web is pervasive. Everyone behaves as if the traffic your stories receive from the social networks (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon) is the same as all of your social traffic. I began to wonder if I was wrong. Or at least that what I had experienced was a niche phenomenon and most people's web time was not filled with Gchatted and emailed links. I began to think that perhaps Facebook and Twitter has dramatically expanded the volume of -- at the very least -- linksharing that takes place.

Vimeo[^]:

In September 2012 I asked programmers to tell my students why they love code and open-source software. This 20 minute video is the end result. It's great to see the passion we all share for our craft.

.net magazine[^]:

The open source movement is founded on collaboration, on sharing, and the free exchange of ideas. All of these cry out for an open forum in which to flourish – or an arena in which to evolve, depending on how you want to look at it. Well, it's taken a while, but the web has finally caught up with the ambitions and needs of those doing the work, providing somewhere to actually experiment communally, to crowd-debug, or even just to show off.

Steve Corona[^]:

Self-discipline and Willpower. Two words that aren’t the solution. You only have a fixed amount of self-discipline and after it’s been used up, you need to wait for it to recharge. If you “fix” a personality defect by brute-forcing with self-discipline, you’ll be back in the same boat a week later. I broke the cycle of procrastination and willpower exhaustion by automating the things I was putting off. Yup, I threw money at the problem, and it was cheaper than you think.

The Setup[^]:

I'm Rob Pike. I had a long stint at Bell Labs in the Computing Research Science Center, the lab that brought you Unix and C well before I got there. I helped bring the mouse to Unix. Later, I helped make the Internet multilingual. I'm now at Google. I work on lots of things...

AllThingsD[^]:

The Fusion Drive combines the best of both worlds: The high capacity, reliability and affordability of a traditional hard drive, with the snappy, instant-on speed of a solid-state storage drive, without breaking the budget.

TechCrunch[^]:

The expectations and competition for the Surface are daunting. It’s been said that Microsoft built the Surface to show up HP, Dell, and the rest of the personal computing establishment. PC sales are stagnant while Apple is selling the iPad at an incredible pace. But the Surface is something different from other tablets. Microsoft built a PC for the post-PC consumer and chose to power it with a limited operating system called Windows RT. These trade-offs, real or imagined, are what really makes or breaks this device.