The Insider News

CIO[^]:

After a year of in-the-field testing, the Windows Azure HDInsight Service, which allows customers to spin up Hadoop clusters in the cloud, gets the green light for release into general availability.

The Verge[^]:

A Cornell professor and a senior Facebook engineer are claiming to have developed a Facebook algorithm that can accurately identify who you're dating and, especially for new relationships, whether you're in danger of breaking up.

JS Mess[^]:

he JAVASCRIPT MESS project is a porting of the MESS emulator, a program that emulates hundreds of machine types, into the Javascript language. The MESS program can emulate (or begin to emulate) a majority of home computers, and continues to be improved frequently. By porting this program into the standardized and cross-platform Javascript language, it will be possible to turn computer history and experience into the same embeddable object as movies, documents, and audio.

The Verge[^]:

The Internet Archive has officially released a tool that will let decades-old software run in your browser, along with a catalog of noteworthy, fun, or notorious games and applications. The Archive team has spent two years creating and troubleshooting a JavaScript port of the MESS computer software emulator, giving users of any modern browser an almost instantaneous way to run anything from Atari games to the very first spreadsheet application. To make it more useful, the group has also launched the Historical Software Collection, which cherry-picks the most important and interesting titles from its archives.

ZDNet[^]:

New research from Microsoft suggests that software development faces a number of hurdles as the IT world adjusts to new platforms and devices

ZDNet[^]:

When Android first launched, it was widely panned by critics and consumers alike. Five years later, it’s installed on more than half of all U.S. devices. Despite its initial struggles, Windows RT could still strike it lucky, according to two of the chipmaker's product executives.

Wired[^]:

Your smartphone is your most portable computer. It’s also a treasure trove of personal information. You wouldn’t leave your laptop unlocked in public, so why leave your phone unprotected? Lock up that data and encrypt it.

Conversational Git[^]:

I recently had some close friends talk about their hesitation in adopting Git as opposed to continuing to work with Subversion. I’ve used Subversion for many years, and advocated for its use. I have since jumped wholeheartedly on the Git bandwagon, so I wanted to find a way to tell the story of why I made the switch and why I think so much of the open source community is now based around Git and Git-friendly sites like GitHub.

Computerworld[^]:

The only news you read about Microsoft these days is bad, so it may come as a shock to some that Microsoft just announced a blowout quarter of earnings, with revenue of $18.53 billion and net income of $5.24 billion, both well up from a year ago. Is this a one-time blip, or is the company proving the nay-sayers wrong?

NPR[^]:

Is all this devotion to fatty pig flesh merited? Does bacon truly make everything better, as some cookbooks have boldly declared?

IT World[^]:

More tips on how to make lots of money as a software developer

Cminusminus[^]:

You would be much happier with one portable assembly language that could be generated by a front end and implemented by any of several code generators. Such a language should serve as the interface between high-level compilers and retargetable, optimizing code generators. Authors of front ends and authors of code generators could cooperate easily. C– is that language.

Information Week[^]:

Contractors point fingers at each other and the government as they attempt to shift responsibility for healthcare website problems.