The Insider News

Neowin[^]:

Windows RT was/is positioned to be a variant of the Windows platform that is lightweight, offers great battery life, and has a terrific out of the box experience by shipping with Office pre-installed. One of the arguments behind Windows RT was that Intel was not able to scale its CPUs down quickly enough to be power efficient and at the same time, ARM had found ways to scale up its designs at a rapid pace to compete with Intel in the low-price market. In theory, it sounded great, ARM based devices would dominate the low-end market (netbook-ish category of devices) and Intel/AMD would fight in the upper regions for those who wanted proper Windows 8 and the ability to run legacy applications. While good on paper, this separation has yet to appear in the market.

dev.twiter.com:

Back in September, we released the Twitter REST API v1.1 and announced that API v1 would be retired in March 2013.

Quote: cnet.com[^]

MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom has the right to sue New Zealand's spy agency for illegal surveillance, a court ruled Thursday.

The New Zealand Court of Appeal rejected the attorney general's request to exclude the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) from Dotcom's lawsuit. The GCSB collected intelligence on Dotcom ahead of the 2011 raid on his house to determine whether he posed any danger to the police who would later swoop in by helicopter to arrest him.

Canadian Developer Connection[^]:

Cross-site Scripting remains one of the most common vulnerabilities found during web application security assessments, I can safely say from my experience professionally performing security code review for tens of ASP.NET applications, the average for me has been at least 9 out 10 web applications had one or more cross-site scripting issues. There are several reasons for the prevalence of this beast. While the lack of input validation and output encoding remain the top two reasons to blame for the dominance of cross-site scripting. The developers’ unfamiliarity with the differences between HTML contexts could definitely score the third place in the list of top reasons.

Gamasutra[^]:

Is one framework really better than the other? Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. If you're looking for a lightweight, high-level JavaScript / HTML5 framework then I'd certainly recommend Impact. Once you learn some of the quirks, it is easy to prototype with, and removing the need to compile each time you want to make a change is a blessing. Something I didn't cover before is Injection.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

In the 1990s, Web developers had to test their markup on Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer (IE). Eventually IE won out (it was even the official browser on the Mac, for a time), and developers could effectively target a single rendering standard. Firefox, Safari and, later, Chrome changed that, forcing developers to test their HTML on multiple browsers once again. But it's a fair bet that most developers would prefer a single standard. Opera's decision means that just such a single standard could emerge, and WebKit could be it.

kellabyte[^]:

There are many different data structures used in databases to create indexes used to quickly evaluate queries. Each one has different strengths and weaknesses based on the tradeoffs they make on memory, cpu and storage (if persisted). One of these types of indexes is called a bitmap index. For the purpose of this post I’m going to be using relational database terminology but the same techniques can apply to different database types like column oriented databases or many others non-relational databases.

onderhond.com[^]:

Though technically links aren't a requirement to make the internet function (you can get by on just urls), they are the primary reason why the web took off so gloriously. Linking is an essential part of every web page out there, without links we would be copying urls the entire time (or we wouldn't because who likes to work like that). But the implementation of links (the html a-element) has been broken since the very beginning of the web and with the addition of block-level links things only got worse.

Ars Technica[^]:

When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian—the officially recommended Pi operating system—came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers.

GeekWire[^]:

“Should I join Microsoft or a startup?” As the co-founder of a profitable startup and a former Microsoftie, I hear this question a lot, especially from college students ready to start their careers. In tech cities like Seattle and San Francisco, we’re quick to jump on the pro-startup bandwagon. Robert Scoble advises: “Join a startup. You will learn more there and have a bigger impact. Later, when you have a family and a mortgage, you can take the safe route.” But this advice ignores the advantages—like knowledge, confidence, and money—to working for a Microsoft, Google, or Amazon first.

Wired.com[^]:

Roku 3 is the latest in a long line of set-top boxes that date to the days when TVs had but 13 channels you could see only after fiddling with a pair of rabbit ears wrapped in foil. (Ask your grandparents. They’ll tell you all about those dark days.) Now we have set-top boxes -- most of which actually sit under your ultra-thin HDTV -- that let you watch DVDs, stream video and play games, often from a single gadget. Ain’t progress wonderful?

ZDNet[^]:

Google's Chrome OS, thanks to the growing popularity of Chromebooks, is being used by more and more people. Many people know that Chrome OS has a Linux foundation. But how Chrome OS developed from Linux, and exactly what is in Chrome OS today, has been something of a mystery -- until now.

The Economist[^]:

VARIETY is the spice of life, though not if you are the maker of an ageing internet browser maker losing ground to your younger, nimbler competitors. Microsoft, maker of the Windows 8 operating system and the Internet Explorer web browser, has been fined €561m ($732m) by the European Union’s antitrust regulators for breaking a promise to offer its customers a choice of the browser they would like to use to surf the internet on their personal computers.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Microsoft needs to improve customer engagement, dramatically. And the first thing that will take is to recognize that the consumer teams’ attitude towards communicating futures is just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean abandonment of controlled information release, it means applying it more intelligently. It means disclosing platform direction early. It means bringing developers on board early. It means giving general technology direction to the public early (ala what BillG used to do) without talking specific releases or products. It does not mean releasing every detail of a product in advance.

atomicobject.com[^]:

When I recommend learning Haskell to the uninitiated, I often get asked: “Why Haskell?” “Is it a practical language?” and ”Is it something I can actually use?” My answer is definitely yes. Haskell isn’t my primary language at work (I mostly write C code for embedded systems), I’ve still found it incredibly useful. And even if I never used Haskell at work, I would still consider learning it as time well spent. So, why Haskell?