Microsoft previews new Visual Studio, .NET
Microsoft has given MSDN subscribers access to a preview version of Visual Studio 11 and a new version of .NET as well as developer version of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system.
The company announced the new developerware on Wednesday at its BUILD conference in Anaheim, California. The Visual Studio preview provides tools for building Windows 8 Metro applications in HTML5, JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic and C ++, and it includes new tools for code analysis and review as well as extension management. At the conference, Microsoft demoed a visual image editor that allowed coders to highlight a single pixel and instantly find the line of code responsible for it. Read more...
Google Dart aims to supplant ‘fundamentally flawed’ JavaScript
Demand for increasingly complex Web apps is steadily growing, but JavaScript is too fundamentally flawed to keep up, at least to Google's taste. Rather than waiting for major overhauls to JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), the search and software giant has been working on an open JavaScript alternative dubbed Dart.
Google's plan is to continue contributing to the development of JavaScript while also pushing Dart, with the long-term goal of having its language usurp JavaScript's position as the lingua franca of open Web development.
Google has not officially said much about Dart, though two Googlers will give a keynote presentation titled "Dart, a New Programming Language for Structured Web Programming" at the GOTO Aarhaus 2011 conference next month. However, in a purportedly leaked internal memo dated Nov. 16, 2010, Google's Mark Miller went into some detail about Dart (apparently called Dash at the time). Read more...
Microsoft dragging its feet with browser fix, security vendor says
StrikeForce Technologies, a small vendor of a keystroke encryption technology, is accusing Microsoft of not acting fast enough to fix a browser issue that it says is preventing StrikeForce's technology from working with Internet Explorer 9.
The problem was first reported to Microsoft, and acknowledged by the company, in April, said George Waller, executive vice president of StrikeForce. Since then, Microsoft has been saying it will fix the problem but has not gotten around to doing it yet, Waller said.
"I've been calling Microsoft every two weeks since April," said Waller, who sent Computerworld the text of what he said were several email exchanges StrikeForce has had with Microsoft on the issue over the past few months. "They keep on saying we are working on it each time we call them," he said. Read more...
Apple cuts French App Store’s ‘Jew Or Not Jew’ App
Apple Inc. has removed a mobile app, called "Jew or Not Jew?", from its online App Store in France.
The app let users consult a database of celebrities and public figures to determine if they are Jewish or not. Its removal follows a complaint from a French anti-racism group that threatened to sue the iPhone and iPad maker.
The app, "Juif ou pas Juif?" in French, was selling for 0.79 euro cents ($1.08) in France until it was cut on Wednesday. SOS Racisme had argued that the app violated France's strict laws banning the compiling of people's personal details without their consent. Read more...
Facebook responds to Google+, Twitter with ‘subscribe’ button
Facebook is extending the scope of its site into Twitter and Google+ territory by making it possible for Facebook members to subscribe to each other's public posts without necessarily having to be approved friends.
The option to let other Facebook members subscribe to one's public posts will go live across the site in the coming days, Facebook said on Wednesday.
"It's a change in the social architecture of Facebook and it's clearly a competitive response to both Google+ and Twitter," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.
This feature will apparently replicate Twitter's "follow" model and similar functionality available in Google+. This is a capability that famous users have been requesting for a while, because personal profiles have a maximum limit of 5,000 friends. Read more...
Acer, Asus to bring Intel’s Thunderbolt to Windows PCs
Acer and Asustek Computer next year will deliver Windows PCs with Intel's Thunderbolt interconnect, which for a time was available exclusively on Apple's Macintosh computers, Intel said on Wednesday.
Thunderbolt, introduced in February, is a high-speed interconnect technology developed by Intel and Apple that can transfer data between host computers and external devices at up to 10 gigabits per second. The technology was initially licensed exclusively to Apple, but Intel said it would make it available to PC makers at a later date.
A Windows PC with Thunderbolt technology was demonstrated onstage during a keynote address by Mooly Eden, Intel's general manager of the PC client group, at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco. Solid-state drives from Intel were connected to the PC and transferred four uncompressed videos at 700 megabytes per second. Read more...
AT&T center to tap into Silicon Valley talent
AT&T set up shop in Silicon Valley on Wednesday with its Foundry Development Center in Palo Alto, a facility where software and hardware developers can get help bringing their inventions to the real world.
The site is AT&T's third Foundry Innovation Center, following ones opened earlier this year in Plano, Texas, and in Israel. But the carrier has high hopes for meeting promising startups in the hotbed of U.S. technology.
AT&T wants to free developers from the hassles of dealing with technology on the back end of AT&T's infrastructure, such as billing and location functions, so they can finish their applications and make them work on the network more quickly, said John Donovan, the carrier's CTO. Read more...
Server virtualization pushes storage demand to new highs
In 2001, VMware delivered its first virtualization products for x86 servers, setting off what has become one of today's biggest tech trends. But the benefits of virtualization, particularly its ability to allow users to rapidly provision new workloads, are pushing demand for storage to new highs.
Just over half of all workloads in a data center are now virtualized, a milestone that was hit this year, according to Nemertes Research, which benchmarks data collected from user organizations.
Ted Ritter, an analyst at Nemertes, believes that about 78% of all workloads will eventually be virtualized. The remaining workloads will continue to run on dedicated physical servers because of security and compliance issues, or in some cases because the software vendor doesn't yet support virtualization. Read more...
Surf the web and fry an egg on this futuristic computer
The Electrolux Mobile Kitchen can slice, dice, cook, and surf the web all at the samElectrolux Mobile e. And, miraculously, all on the same laptop. Unfortunately, it's just a concept design right now from designer Dragan Trenchevski, but a very cool one.
The idea is to have an induction heat stove top, a cutting board and touch screen LCD in one unit. You can use the monitor to browse through recipes or watch videos on how to cook. There would be a web cam embedded on top of it so you can talk with your friends who may be walking you through the cooking process. Read more...
iPad Success Floating Other Tablets To Sales Boom, IDC Says
Could Apple's utter domination of the tablet market actually be good for the competition in the long term?
Market research firm IDC believes so, raising its forecast of tablet shipments for the year to 62.5 million units, up from 53.5 million units, based on global media tablet shipments rising 88.9 percent on a sequential basis and 303.8 percent year over year in the second quarter to 13.6 million units.
That demand was heavily fueled by the release of Apple's iPad 2 in February, which saw shipments reach 9.3 million units, or a whopping 68.3 percent share of the worldwide market, up from 65.7 percent the previous quarter. Read more...