The Insider News

guardian.co.uk[^]:

Developers have created more than 100,000 apps for Windows Phone, as Microsoft continues its efforts to make the platform a viable alternative to iOS and Android for app developers. But how are those efforts going down? To find out, I posed some questions to five companies who've recently released Windows Phone apps, asking about their motivations for supporting the platform, how they've found it, and how they'd like to see it evolve.

brett sandusky[^]:

eBook DRM is not only undesirable for digital products, it denies users a fundamental function of a book: sharing. Clearly a reader cannot (easily) share an eBook that is “protected” by DRM. And publishers like to “protect” their content so that they can make dat money rather than have their content just given away and shared around. But, there is another side to the argument, beyond sharing, that is essential to understanding this issue: the ways in which people interact with books is an expression of their identity.

Cloud Computing News[^]:

Hadoop is on its way to becoming the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without flaws. If the growing number of options for replacing HDFS signifies anything, it’s that HDFS isn’t quite where it needs to be. Here are eight products and projects whose proprietors argue can deliver what HDFS can’t.

Rajiv's blog[^]:

I was in charge of scaling Dropbox for a while, from roughly 4,000 to 40,000,000 users. For most of that time we had one to three people working on the backend. Here are some suggestions on scaling, particularly in a resource-constrained, fast-growing environment that can’t always afford to do things “the right way” (i.e., any real-world engineering project).

Agilebits[^]:

Password reuse—using the same password for multiple sites or services—is both rampant and dangerous. There is real evidence that people are getting robbed because they are reusing their passwords. Thieves systematically exploit reused password to pay for retail items or hijack accounts for other intentions. And yet, we are reminded again this week by the recent leak of almost half a million Yahoo passwords that a majority of people just can’t stop reusing passwords.

paperplanes[^]:

We can learn from the problems that lead to catastrophes and loss of life and apply them to the field of web operations, because the similarities in the systems and their operations are striking. The rather sad news is that only recently have these other fields and instrustries started to openly discuss failures in complex systems and how to respond to them. They're no different from us. What we have is the advantage that we can iterate quickly and make changes to improve our application's resilience.