The Insider News

O'Reilly[^]:

Emil Eifrem @emileifrem is the Founder of Neo4j and CEO of Neo Technology. He is also one of the authors of Graph Databases. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Emil and we talked about the current and future opportunities for graph databases.

FunScript[^]:

FunScript is a lightweight F# library that lets you rapidly develop single-page applications. You can connect to external data sources and call REST APIs with intellisense, produce dashboards using JavaScript visualization libraries and write asynchronous computations easily without explicit callbacks.

smartbear.com[^]:

Put down the iPhone for a second, and consider what computing was about when it wasn’t all linked up like it is today. When machines needed to do stuff all by themselves, with no supplemental resources available to them. When local storage was all there was to be had. That is the context of the early machines: computers that blazed a path (which I think was not clear at the time even to their creators) for how people could use small machines, which we ever-so-preciously called microcomputers (compared to minicomputers such as the DEC VAX, which were all the rage in geek circles). These were the experiments that lead to the mainstream forms of personal computing that followed.

theconversation.com[^]:

We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all? In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies.

Christian Heilmann[^]:

As a strong rule of thumb – show love to the audio folk of the venue you speak at. They know their stuff and it is up to them for you to be audible by the audience. Follow their advice and make their life easier and you’ll give a great talk.

CNN.com[^]:

More than passively eavesdropping, we're penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We're creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be "fired" against some piece of another country's electronic infrastructure on a moment's notice.... We're pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren't making the Internet any safer. We're reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We're ignoring resilience in favor of offense. Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century.

Gizmodo[^]:

Microsoft just announced that its much-maligned DRM policies won't look at all like they originally had originally been described. They're going to more relaxed, sort of like the PS3's. Good news, you say? No. Bad news. The Xbox One just got worse. But what? Isn't all DRM bad and anti-consumer? No. Often it is, sure. If applied in the ways that gaming culture has been anxious about for the past few weeks, it would be disastrous. But that's not what was really at stake.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft has offered its basic Office Web Apps free to Outlook.com and Office 365 customers for over three years now, but one of the big drawbacks for students and businesses has been the lack of true real-time co-authoring. Google Docs has long supported real-time editing with multiple users, but the Office Web Apps have been fairly basic when it comes to editing documents alongside other users. Microsoft is planning to change this over the next few months, and the company is demonstrating the changes this week.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I'm totally geeked out about Smart Watches. I always have been, from the original Microsoft SPOT watch (from 10 years ago!) to the Pebble, and now the AGENT Smart Watch from Secret Labs. Secret Labs are the folks that brought us the Netduino open source electronics platform that uses the .NET Micro Framework. It's pretty awesome that you can write C# and run it in 64k or in 64gigs, from the wrist to the cloud.

Computerworld Blogs[^]:

Microsoft will release a test version of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD developers conference next week, but there's a chance that Windows update could go a long way towards hurting those developers, and slowing app growth in the Windows Store. Is there anything Microsoft can do to combat that? Reports say that among Windows 8.1's changes will be a boot-to-the-desktop option that allows people bypass the Start screen. Many users have been clamoring for it, because they find little use for the touch-oriented Start screen. That will certainly please users. But it may also hurt those, like many at the BUILD conference, who are writing so-called "Modern" apps for Windows 8.

Wouter's Wiki[^]:

Unlike other game making systems that focus on an engine/editor that happens to be able to call out to a scripting language, Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers. It's also meant to be portable (mostly courtesy of OpenGL/SDL/Freetype), allowing your games to be run on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android (in that order of maturity, currently).