The Insider News

Technology Review[^]:

Pleasing the crowd at the Black Hat and Def Con computer security conferences that took place in Las Vegas last week is relatively easy: simply hop on stage and confidently show how to compromise, or "pwn," a system that no one has hacked into before. Notoriety, cash, and multiple offers of work can be the rewards for those who demonstrate truly novel attacks. But some speakers at this year's events say that the obsession with breaking into systems has gone too far, and are calling for their community to show more interest in advancing defense techniques, which don't have such cachet.

Telerik[^]:

“Why build for Windows 8 now?” “Why not wait until a future date when the platform is more stable?” These questions are valid from a consumer and an enterprise point-of-view and I’ll try to explain why we believe that you should start writing applications for Windows 8 today.

The Windows Phone Developer Blog[^]:

It’s a question that’s probably crossed your mind as you design and publish your own apps. Well, we were curious, too. Recently the Marketplace team spent time crunching download stats and doing side-by-side comparisons of the top 50 apps in each Marketplace category looking for clues. The result? While there’s certainly no magic formula for instant success, the analysis showed that best-selling apps do have things in common—lessons you can apply to your own apps to help boost downloads and revenue.

mathbabe[^]:

It’s a good thing that data algorithms are getting democratized, and I’m all for there being packages in R or Octave that let people run clustering algorithms or steepest descent. But, contrary to the message sent by much of Andrew Ng’s class on machine learning, you actually do need to understand how to invert a matrix at some point in your life if you want to be a data scientist. And, I’d add, if you’re not smart enough to understand the underlying math, then you’re not smart enough to be a data scientist.

The Economist[^]:

There are also direct analogies between natural language and computer code. Well-written code is light on the computer's memory, and runs smoothly; well-written prose is easy on the reader's working memory, and reads easily. Badly written code will cause errors in execution; badly written prose can cause errors in interpretation. Some people will never learn to write. Some will never learn to code.

Macdrifter[^]:

In my continuing efforts to migrate off of WordPress, I now understand some of my biggest mistakes and flaws. Here are ten of them.

Ars Technica[^]:

The US court responsible for hearing patent appeals is showing fresh signs of disarray over the question of when software-based "inventions" can be patented. We recently covered a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that upheld a patent on the idea of using a computer to perform a particular kind of financial transaction. Now, just a couple of weeks later, the same court has reached the opposite conclusion about a patent on using a computer to manage a particular type of life insurance policy.

The Atlantic[^]:

E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off. To be sure, we still get the occasional article or blog post celebrating the smell of "real books" and denouncing the disembodied fakery of text on a screen, but not nearly as many as in recent years. E-readers are simply part of the reading landscape now -- the first Kindle was released almost five years ago -- and it's time for a midterm progress report. How is the technology developing? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done?

ExtremeTech[^]:

If Microsoft Research gets its way, you might soon be controlling computers using the tiniest of muscle twitches and no controller in sight. With a hand still in your pocket, or behind your back, you will be able to control a computer with a variety of finger-waggling and pinching gestures.

Outlook Blog[^]:

We think the time is right to reimagine email. So today, we're introducing a preview of Outlook.com. We realized that we needed to take a bold step, break from the past and build you a brand new service from the ground up. You already know Outlook via the Outlook desktop application-for PCs and Macs-as the world's most popular application for reading email, managing a calendar, and connecting to people. And you may have used the Outlook Web App connected to Exchange Server in your organization. Now, in addition to a desktop application and a service for businesses, we're offering Outlook as a personal email service - Outlook.com.