Visual Studio 2011: Developers’ first reactions
With Microsoft readying a beta version of Visual Studio 11, the next major upgrade to the company's IDE, developers are interested in HTML5 backing as well as in basic functional fixes. Visual Studio 11, available as a developer preview since last month, is set to feature accommodations for the upcoming Windows 8 OS, as well as the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, along with capabilities such as code cloning and enhanced unit testing. No release date is yet scheduled.
"I do like the HTML5 stuff they're showing and also some of the intelligence enhancements they have for CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] 3," says Joel Padot, a developer at Florida Farm Bureau Insurance. His company is looking at HTML5 and Web applications as way to support mobile devices. (HTML5 features are planned for the HTML editor in Visual Studio 11.) Padot also praised code review capabilities planned for the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server application lifecycle management server. Read more...
New details emerge about Oracle’s Social Network
More specifics about Oracle's new Social Network software came to light on Thursday, following the product's debut at the OpenWorld conference earlier this month.
Oracle Social Network is part of the company's new Public Cloud lineup. It will serve as a high-profile competitor to the likes of rival Salesforce.com's Chatter as well as the array of speciality enterprise social-network vendors in the market.
OSN is "part of a much broader user engagement platform" powered by Oracle's WebCenter family of technologies, with the other pillars including Sites, Portals and Content, said Andy Kershaw, senior director of product management, during a webcast Thursday.
Companies are using collaboration tools today in a "very much siloed" manner, he said. For example, a conversation may begin in an instant-messaging program, but then one party to the discussion may later reply by e-mail and point someone to a document stored in yet another system. Read more...
First Lady Michelle Obama Sends Her First Tweet
First Lady Michelle Obama has officially joined the Twittersphere with her very first tweet on October 19 sent from the World Serie
s. Mrs. Obama's first tweet went out over the @joiningforces account to answer questions about Joining Forces and to spread awareness about supporting America's troops.
The First Lady joined with Dr. Jill Biden, the Second Lady of the United States, to talk about Joining Forces at -- of all places -- the first game of the World Series. The choice was actually appropriate since Game One was officially dedicated to veterans, service members and their families. Read more...
Have a lot of Facebook friends? Your brain has more grey matter too
If you've got a ton of Facebook friends, your friend count isn't all you've got to brag about — you might actually have a superior brain too. According to a new study comparing groups of people with many Facebook friends versus those with only a handful, the former group of social media socialites actually has more grey matter in the areas of the brain implicated in social skills. Grey matter is packed with neuronal cell bodies, in contrast to white matter, which primarily contains the tendrils that transmit signals from neuron to neuron. Read more...
Adobe Flash exploit allows websites to access your webcam without permission
Your webcam can be a powerful tool for communicating with loved ones or even having a conversation with a world-famous luminary. But when that power is put into someone else's hands, it can have dire consequences. A new exploit of Adobe's Flash media application could potentially allow websites to access your webcam without your permission, opening the door for any number of unseemly people to peer into your world. Read more...
Worms Crazy Golf tops iPhone Games of the Week
The strategy game series Worms is generally about big explosions and cartoonish wars, but the earthworm battle atmosphere is pretty well translated to golf with Worms Crazy Golf. A worthy title for the Games of the Week, it heads up a great list of titles that includes multiplayer, puzzle and action titles. Check them out below.
Worms Crazy Golf (iPhone, iPad) $2.99
Worms manages to hit a stride similar to Super Stickman Golf – a side-scrolling golfing game with crazy environments – and takes it up a notch. First is the Worms license, which adds a humorous and cartoonish bent to the game. Then, the game expands on the simplicity of its golf undertones by throwing in things like the ability to choose what club to use or add spin to the ball after it lands. There are also obstacles like groundskeepers and sheep with which to deal, resulting in a fairly deep golf experience that’s also light-hearted and fun. It has pass-and-play multiplayer, so it’s great for a party as well as alone. Read more...
Amazon Silk Web browser given green light by EFF
Amazon's Kindle Fire is off the hook with one important group when it comes to privacy worries about Silk, the specially created Web browser for the new e-reader/tablet due out next month.
Representatives from the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked with Amazon officials about the speedy, new cloud-based browser, focusing on what user information will be transmitted via the cloud and shared by the company.
"Our conversation with Amazon allayed many of our major concerns," said the EFF.
As msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman explained when Kindle Fire was announced, Silk "weds the tablet to Amazon's cloud network. The browser gathers user behavior in order to predict where you'll go next, and caching that Web page in advance. If you always jump from msnbc.com to the tech/sci page, it will start loading it on the back end, so that it's quicker to load for you." Read more...
Internet talks about ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ media listens
First proposed by anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters earlier this year, the Occupy Wall Street movement started gaining notable Internet "buzz" on Sept. 10, NM Incite reports. Much to the consternation of many following the movement, however, it took mainstream media almost a month to start paying attention. When Web traffic suddenly shot up on Thursday, Oct. 6, the world couldn't help but notice.
That's the day when police arrested a mass of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, and videos of officers pepper-spraying citizens went viral. Not long after, the media followed suit. These are the findings of Web analytics company NM Incite and Think Progress, a progressive ideas and policies blog.
Tracking "Occupy Wall Street" in blogs, boards, groups, videos and images, NM Incite registered a drastic spike on Oct. 6, with 13,133 messages across Internet forums on that day. As the chart below reveals, a comparable spike occurred on the following Monday, Oct. 10, accompanying news that GOP candidate Buddy Roemer and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream stated support for the movement. Read more...
This robot might beat your Angry Birds high score
Those of us who grew up in the latter part of the 20th century were inundated with sci-fi fantasies of humanoid robots flying spaceships, helping to win wars, and engaging in witty banter with humans and other robots alike. You could make the case that real robots have now done all of the above, but what we have here may be a robot occupation that had never occurred to you. This robot prefers to keep things simple. His speciality is slingshotting birds into unsuspecting pigs.
Yes, this robot has been built to play Angry Birds. It uses a retractable finger-like rod that is covered in some kind of skin-like synthetic material that fools a touchscreen into thinking it’s a human finger. The robot’s creator, Jason Huggins, then sends signals to two servo motors via keys on a remote. While there’s no C3PO-like (or even Siri-like) artificial intelligence involved, what we do have is a remote-controlled robot that can smash swine with the best of them. Read more...
Google Doodle celebrates Disney Legend Mary Blair
When I was growing up Disney cartoons and feature-length films were something you looked forward to appearing on TV every major holiday, and Disneyland was a place that I always wanted my parents to take me to. But it was always seen as just Disney the brand, never the clever and talented people behind it.
The Google Doodle today aims to change that by highlighting one of Walt Disney’s best artists. She was so good in fact, she was honored with the title of Disney Legend.
Her name was Mary Blair, and today she would have been 100 years old. Not many of us reach three digits though, and Blair was no exception. She died in 1978, but left behind an impressive portfolio of work that helped shape a number of Disney’s most celebrated works. Read more...
Peter Cochrane’s Blog: The iPad and iPhone revolutions presage a deeper turmoil
In my lifetime the rate of technological change has been very apparent. There's no doubt it's accelerating. More smartphones and tablets than PCs are being sold and 550,000 Android devices are activated every day. Those figures bear testament to an incredible feat of design, manufacture, logistics and support.
Throughout my professional life I have attended, organised and run conferences on a changing range of topics. A few weeks ago I attended a US conference that I have supported for over 17 years, where the audience represent all the big IT, defence, banking and government organisations.
Everyone in the room has power and LAN access, and it is the norm for them to be 100 per cent online. Historically, Windows laptops have monopolised this setting, but recently there has been a migration to netbooks, tablets and smartphones. This year it was all very different again.
For the first time, Apple products predominated, with the iPad the most common device. Of the rest, there was only one netbook and a large contingent of Android-powered laptops and tablets. For the first time, Windows laptops were in the minority. Read more...
Cassandra database now ready for mere mortals
The NoSQL database Cassandra has hit 1.0-level maturity with a heavy play for enterprise customers.
Jonathan Ellis, vice president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Cassandra project, is reported to have announced that the NoSQL database is now ready for "mere mortals".
"You don't have to know as much as you did about the nuts and bolts" to operate the database, Ellis said here.
Developed by Facebook, Cassandra has mostly been picked up by web hyper-scale giants – including Digg, Rackspace and Twitter – to process huge amounts of data in real-time. Read more...
Intel exec: Windows 8 will be on Ultrabooks next year
Ultrabooks -- Intel's label for thin laptops with an edgy design à la the MacBook Air -- with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 OS are due to reach market next year, and the OS could help propel demand for the devices, an Intel executive said this week.
More than 60 Ultrabook designs could become available next year and "11 or so designs" will be available by the end of this year, said Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel, in an interview following the company's third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Windows 8 could help drive up Ultrabook demand in the second half of next year during the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, Kilroy said.
In addition to Windows 8, Ultrabooks will have next-generation Core processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which will include performance and graphics improvements, Kilroy said. Some 4 of 10 laptops sold by the end of next year will be Ultrabooks, he said. "Judging by the excitement, that's a realistic goal," Kilroy said. Read more...
Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012
The technology that makes up many of the systems in the IT world today is at a critical juncture and in the next five years everything from mobile devices and applications to servers and social networking will impact IT in ways companies need to prepare for now, Gartner vice president David Cearley says.
For example, enterprises will need to invest capital to improve network capacity and reliability. They will also need to improve wireless governance to improve wireless manageability and service levels, Cearley told attendees of the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo this week. At the annual presentation of Gartner's popular Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends presentation, Cearley offered the following as examples of the way the tech world is changing:
• 30 billion pieces of content were added to Facebook this past month
• Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015
• More than 2 billion videos were watched on YouTube ... yesterday
• The average teenager sends 4,762 text messages per month
• 32 billion searches were performed last month ... on Twitter Read more...
Caution: iOS 5, iCloud and the iPhone 4S in the enterprise
Apple's iOS 5 and the new iPhone 4S, which went on sale Friday, are packed with new features, many of which should boost the productivity and on-the-road capabilities of professional users. But, as with many consumer-oriented mobile platforms making their way into the workplace, iOS 5 and Apple's new iCloud service present some serious challenges in business environments.
Security issues involving iCloud and several other features will likely be the first things IT professionals weigh when it comes to iOS 5, which Apple rolled out last week. That's good, because even though Apple quietly provided some new enterprise features in iOS 5 that should make iPhones and iPads better corporate citizens, new concerns have emerged.
What to worry about
Out of the 200-plus new features in iOS 5, there are really just three that pose new security challenges: iCloud syncing and backup, location-based services like the new Find My Friends app, and the Siri virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S. Read more...