The Insider News

Don Syme[^]:

I'm very pleased to see that the latest and greatest Try F# 3.0 has been released today! Try F# is a web-based tool for learning and exploring F# 3.0, a simple and pragmatic programming language combining functional, object-oriented and information-rich programming. F# is open source and cross-platform, see the F# Software Foundation for details. Microsoft contribute to F# in multiple ways, including the Visual F# tools. This site allows easy learning of key F# principles, creating, editing and running F# code within a browser, and sharing code through the Internet.

Ludde's FPGA NES[^]:

I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA. An FPGA is a programmable integrated circuit, generally programmed using a hardware description language.... Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was created back in 1985 by the famous Japanese company Nintendo. It was an extremely revolutionary console at its time and was the best selling console for a number of years. I used to play NES a lot as a kid, so I have all those memories of the old games, and had an imminent urge to dig into the inner details of the console to figure out how it worked.

AllThingsD[^]:

Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system is a combination of two very different user interfaces, with each best used in a different way. While the whole system is touch-enabled, only the Start Screen, with its own tablet-type apps, is fully optimized for a touchscreen. The second interface — the traditional Windows desktop — is still best used with a physical keyboard and a mouse or touch pad. So, hardware makers are turning out convertible PCs that attempt to function as both tablets and traditional laptops.

Steve Gurley's Blog[^]:

Today’s open-loop mobile wallet offerings generally concentrate on three things: payments, loyalty and promotions. Most, however, are primarily focused on enabling the smartphone to connect with a merchant’s payment terminal (wirelessly in the case of NFC or optically in the case of 2D bar codes) for the purpose of transmitting the information that typically resides on the mag-stripe of a consumer’s traditional credit/loyalty card. Some, however, are taking a fundamentally different approach to the mobile wallet...

X-Surface[^]:

At 1:41am GMT today I sent out an email to a bunch of gaming sites claiming to be a Microsoft employee working on the new Xbox. I made up every single word of it along with a couple of specs copied from other rumours that have been appearing on the Internet. This was a bit of an experiment to see just how easy it is to get a fake story taken seriously. And it is shockingly easy in the games industry.

AnandTech[^]:

Today Intel made a sobering, but not entirely unexpected announcement: over the next 3 years Intel will be ramping down its own desktop motherboard business. Intel will continue to supply desktop chipsets for use by 3rd party motherboard manufacturers like ASUS, ASRock and Gigabyte, but after 2013 it will no longer produce and sell its own desktop mITX/mATX/ATX designs in the channel. We will see Haswell motherboards from the group, but that will be the last official hurrah.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it's also easy to forget that we've been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It's only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA.

Abe Kislevitz[^]

"Understanding Your New GoPro"

Article:

Al-Khabaz says he has been offered employment by the president of Skytech Communications, which provides the software for Dawson’s system.

Scorecard
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Ahmed Al-Khabaz: 1
Dawson College:  0

MSDN Blogs[^]:

For Windows 8, the Bing team built News, Weather, Finance, Sports, Travel and Maps apps. This technical overview provides insight on the architecture of these apps, key Windows 8 features and the contracts they use, common controls they employ, and world readiness more generally.

Adam Petersen[^]:

FizzBuzz? The hilarious drinking game? Well, almost. It all started with a blog by Imran on how FizzBuzz was used during interviews to weed out programmers that, believe it or not, cannot program.... Simple enough, but FizzBuzz proved to be scarily effective in eliminating programmers that actually cannot produce software. During the lengthy discussions that followed, a lot of creative solutions to FizzBuzz were posted. They ranged from over-engineered Java to down-to-the-metal Assembler, wicked Perl one-liners, and XSLT solutions. Of course I want to be a part of this rising FizzBuzz industry!

Peter Bailis[^]:

Many databases today differentiate themselves from their NoSQL counterparts by claiming to support "100% ACID" transactions or "guaranteeing strong consistency (ACID)." In reality, few of these databases—including traditional “big iron” systems like Oracle—provide formal ACID guarantees, even when they claim to do so.

fogus[^]:

Today I would like to introduce an idea that I’ve been playing around with as a thought experiment for years, but that has finally become a reality. Imagine a programming language designed specifically for teaching young computer science students a solid foundation in sound computer science topics as well as practical techniques useful in creating rock-solid industrial systems. Below, I’ll outline the features of Enfield.

ninlabs.com[^]:

Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches. But what is the evidence and what can we do about it? Every few months I still see programmers who are asked to not use headphones during work hours or are interrupted by meetings too frequently but have little defense against these claims. I also fear our declining ability to handle these mental workloads and interruptions as we age.