The Insider News

Simon Says...[^]:

There's undoubtedly more to discover in this case, but the lessons about control are clear. Locked-down devices, proprietary formats and digital restrictions all combine to create the conditions for this sort of failure. Combine that with the faceless bureaucracy of a large company with little respect for its customers and their liberty, and this sort of situation is bound to arise.

Busynessgirl[^]:

The single most important tool I’ve found for improving Digital Literacy is Wolfram Alpha. At your fingertips, whether on your phone, tablet, or laptop, you have access to all the world’s readily available data. All you have to do is ask. The best thing I can do to improve data literacy is to teach students (and other adults I know) to question the facts they are being quoted as gospel.

Ars Technica[^]:

After months of rumor roundups and speculation, Apple’s iPad mini has finally been announced—and the 7-inch tablet market has just heated up. This growing product category now has more to offer than Android devices with differing UI skins and varying components—or that BlackBerry PlayBook that’s not selling too hot. That’s not to say that Apple’s entrance into the mini-tablet game is solely what’s fueling the fire. Up until now, only the first-generation Kindle Fire and the recently launched Google Nexus 7 were considered worthy buys. Add the iPad mini to the mix, and this particular product category has a little more steam.

FOSS Patents[^]

In a non-final Office action the USPTO has declared all 20 claims of Apple's rubber-banding patent (U.S. Patent No, 7,469,381 invalid, including claim 19, which Apple successfully asserted against Samsung in the summer trial in California.

Minimal Mac[^]:

I have come to believe that the best and most cost effective technology upgrade that one can make is to themselves. I’m not talking cyborg implants here. I’m speaking about knowledge. That is, increasing your skill, aptitude, and understanding when it comes to any device, application, or tool.

The Official Microsoft Blog[^]:

Last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stopped by the Microsoft campus in Redmond to celebrate 30 years of the employee Giving Campaign here at the company. While Bill was here, Next at Microsoft Editor Steve Clayton had the opportunity to sit down with him and get Bill’s thoughts on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Surface and the exciting wave of products the company is launching this month.

Skillcrush[^]:

When you save your blog post it goes into a database, same goes for your bank account balance. A database can have anywhere from hundreds to billions of entries in it! Because a database isn’t actually a spreadsheet, though, you need a programming language to get data in and out. A popular one is a language called SQL. You might have heard of MySQL – it’s one of the many databases that use SQL.

Awelon Blue[^]:

The primary cause for problems achieving persistence, upgrade, visibility, extensibility, and live-programming is local state. And I don’t just mean the explicit local state (mutable references and objects). Even implicit local state, represented in continuations, closures, callbacks, message queues, procedural stacks, dataflow loops, etc. will cause the same problems. The issues are inherent to the fundamental nature of local state: state cannot be cheaply recomputed or regenerated like other live values, and because the state is locally encapsulated it is semantically inaccessible to components that might provide persistence, extensions, or support transition of state during upgrade.

j00ru//vx tech blog[^]:

Several months back we have been playing with different file systems on various system platforms, examining the security posture and robustness of numerous device drivers’ implementations. One of the configurations we spent some time on was the commonly used NTFS on Microsoft Windows – as the file system is rather complex and still largely unexplored, we could expect its device driver to have some bugs to that would be easily uncovered. In addition, it was certainly tempting to be able to simply insert a USB stick, have it automatically mounted by the operating system and immediately compromise it by triggering a vulnerability in ntfs.sys. We had some promising results during the process...

RoughlyDrafted Magazine[^]:

Windows Enthusiast Ed Bott of ZDNet compared the skepticism and apathy facing Windows 8 to the gradual adoption of Windows XP just over a decade ago, making the case that nothing has changed in over ten years and that everything is fine and there’s nothing for Microsoft to worry about. He’s wrong, here’s why.

CNET News[^]:

The software giant asked the exec to deliver a new, quality operating system and do it on time. This week, we'll find out if his sharp elbows and turf fighting were worth it.

PCWorld[^]:

This is a heady time for Microsoft as it rolls out an ambitious OS and polishes off its productivity suite, billed as "the new Office." At the suite's core is Office 2013—the desktop applications. Changes include a sleek appearance that reflects the look of Windows 8, functional improvements, and tie-ins to SharePoint and SkyDrive for storing documents online. In addition, the various components of Office Web Apps improve productivity in the cloud, while Windows 8 Surface RT tablets get their own flavor of Office.

InfoWorld[^]:

An academic paper from law professor Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University looks more closely at the challenges patents pose for startups. She found 40 percent of the respondents to her survey reported trolls causing significant operational impact on their young businesses, including delays in hiring, undesirable changes of strategy, and loss -- or elimination -- of value. She also found that patent trolls were frequently used as a buyer for the patents of failed startups.

Ars Technica[^]:

Windows 8 is a major release, and it is very different from the Windows before it. And yet it's strangely familiar: when you peek under the covers of the new user interface and look at how it all works, it's not quite the revolution that Microsoft is claiming it to be.

All this[^]:

The people who make the hyperlocal weather app, Dark Sky, have opened up their API so regular mortals can access the app’s short-term rainfall forecast. As it happens, there’s more information in the API than is presented in the Dark Sky app itself...

Tobi Lehman[^]:

I am reading Jesse Storimer’s fantastic little book “Working with Unix Processes” right now, and inspiration struck after the second chapter “Processes Have Parents”. When a Unix process is born, it is a literal copy of it’s parent process. For example, if I am typing ls into a bash prompt, the bash process spawns a copy of itself using the fork system call. The parent process (bash) has an id which is associated with the child process (ls). Using the Unix ps command, you can see the parent process id of every process on the system.

Haacked![^]:

In recent times, there’s been some pessimism around .NET open source. There’s the occasional rustle of blog posts declaring that someone is “leaving .NET”. There’s also this perception that with Windows 8, the Windows team is trying its best to relegate .NET into the dustbin of legacy platforms. I don’t necessarily believe that to be the case (intentionally), but I do know that many .NET developers feel disillusioned.