Windows 8 will mark 'the end' of the 

Microsoft OS : Marc Benioff

 Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 will mark "the end" of the computer industry's dominant OS due to increasing competition and choice sparked by alternatives, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff predicted Friday.

Windows 8 is a catalyst or "gambit" for CIOs, forcing them to say "am I going to Windows 8, or am I going to something else," Benioff said during a question-and-answer session at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce event in New York, which was webcast.

Years ago, "a common phrase was, 'the Windows 7 upgrade cycle,'" Benioff added. "You're not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. I'm not saying that as a big, aggressive statement against Microsoft, that's just the reality of today's environment."

Windows has become "irrelevant," being displaced by next-generation LTE wireless networks that will "disintermediate" the need for WANs and LANs, along with "all of these great services that are available right off the cloud."

"Now, we're not completely there," Benioff added. "Everything is not heterogenous client, everything is not LTE, everything is not cloud ... But we're going to this great new place in our industry."

A Microsoft representative declined to comment on Benioff's remarks.

In an effort to validate his claims, Benioff referred to a conversation he had with a global CIO recently, whom he did not name.

"Her goal is to get rid of all of the PCs," Benioff said. "She doesn't see a demand curve from users for PCs." Instead, the CIO is hoping to move to a BYOD (bring-your-own-device) approach, Benioff said. Next-generation mobile devices have "forced CIOs to make changes already," he added.

Of course, Benioff is hardly the only person predicting that Windows 8 may be in trouble. His claim also serves Salesforce.com well, since its software is cloud-delivered to multiple platforms and devices, not installed in a customer's data center and run solely on PCs.

Also Friday, Benioff touched upon Salesforce.com's ongoing attempt to become "the customer company," in the sense of a vendor that can provide tools and services for connecting companies with their customers. That's meant a primary focus on sales, marketing and collaboration software, but Salesforce.com recently took a small step into human resources applications with the introduction of Work.com for employee performance management.

It's also formed partnerships with cloud ERP (enterprise-resource-planning) vendors such as Workday. But on Friday, Benioff maintained that Salesforce.com isn't keen on going further into back-office processes for now. "We integrate with the back-office providers like SAP and Oracle but we want to be that dominant front-office provider, and that's the piece we're focused on," he said.

Salesforce.com has also been presenting itself as a vendor that can help companies become "social enterprises," with many aspects of the business becoming infused with a social-networking.

  

Google Dart :NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Let's begin with the good news. Google's Dart is a modern, full-featured tool designed by grabbing the best features of Java, JavaScript, and C. The development team is obviously large, and the samples show they have the ambition and talent to create a system that will power desktop, mobile, and browser applications in the future. The tools are real, and the path to gaining widespread acceptance is one that Google can travel. The platform works.

There really isn't any obvious bad news, but there is plenty of cold, hard reality that appears after one plays with the code for a bit. The documentation is upbeat and highlights how Dart is fixing the pet peeves of the Dart creators -- peeves that many of us probably share. But the Dart developers are not superhumans, and they did not find new breakthroughs to taming the way that software turns into a jungle of vines. At best, it's not even clear that they did more than remove some hard corners and smooth over some rough edges. Their fixes work for them, but like all fixes in laws and software, they're bound to create new problems down the road.

Not all of the moves will have this effect. Almost everyone I know who writes JavaScript for the Web also uses a library like jQuery to smooth out the differences among browsers. I'm sure every one of them also wonders why someone hasn't made jQuery part of the official JavaScript spec or permanently baked it into the browser.

The developers of Dart heard these cries and added most of the goodness from these libraries to Dart. They've gotten rid of the lengthy names like getElementsByTagName and replaced them with a catch-all function called query that takes jQuery-like parameters to find what you want.

They've also smoothed out the internal data structures describing the DOM. The fields of each DOM element now use standard data structures. That means you don't need to remember method calls like hasChildNodes and firstChild. You just need to know that there's a field "node" that responds to the standard collection methods. These seem like perfectly obvious solutions and I'm thrilled with them.

 

Code names can take on all manner of themes–like Apple’s cat theme for OSX–but Google opted to go with a sugary sweet spin on code naming for their mobile operating system Android.

The first version had no code name but by the time it worked its way into public consumption it was sporting a delicious code name: Cupcake. From there on Android code names have named after things sweet treats: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo (Frozen yogurt), Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and IceCreamSandwich.

Although naming software after treats is rather uncommon, there is one other notable code name series with a sweet spin. The code names assigned to sugar on a stick–a version of Fedora Spin Live designed to support the sugar learning platform , an educational suite originally designed for the One Laptop Per Child initiative–are fruit-based like Strawberry, Blueberry, and Pineapple.

The New C Standard Explored 

C11 specifies many security features that require minimal changes to existing code. They greatly reduce unexpected behavior and prevent many kinds of common attacks.

C and C++ are members of the same family of languages. The evolutionary boldness of C++ removes some of the marketplace pressure on C; people who are continually pushing for innovation are naturally drawn to the C++ development process. Each language had a coherent original design (by Dennis Ritchie and Bjarne Stroustrup, respectively), followed by successive refinement in a very competitive marketplace of ideas. Both languages share an extreme concern for performance, with the slogan "don't leave space for a more-efficient systems-programming language underneath our language (C or C++)." However, it's unfair to complain that the original designs assigned too little importance to cybersecurity; both languages pre-date the beginnings of concern for security. But in recent years, as the marketplace has started to emphasize cybersecurity, C and C++ have been responding in several ways.

The C11 Annex K Functions

I'll start my tour of Annex K with the fopen_s function. The main innovation is that files are opened with exclusive (also known as non-shared) access. Furthermore, if the mode string doesn't begin with u (such as with code being updated from the older fopen ), then to the extent that the underlying system supports it, the file gets a file permission that prevents other users on the system from accessing the file.

In this article, I'll sequentially enumerate the security benefits of these _s functions. The new semantics illustrate the pattern of "least privilege." This "exclusive" mode was previously available in the Posix open() function, but the ISO standard for C doesn't standardize system-dependent, low-level I/O.

fopen() safety

If a file is opened with x as the last character in the mode argument, and the requested filename is already in use, the fopen_s function fails (as opposed to truncating the existing file, which is presumably already being used by someone).

Fixing tmpnam()

This function illustrates another security pattern in C11: "In the calling sequence of the function, every pointer through which the function might modify an array is immediately followed by the number of elements which the function is permitted to modify."

ISSAC NEWTON

Isaac Newton was so devoted to science that he stuck a needle behind his eye to test a hypothesis!

Newton thought that color is infused by pressure on the eye. To prove this, in an optical experiment, Newton stuck a darning needle around the side of his eye until it poked the backside. 

He calmly noted that he saw white, dark, and colored circles when he stirred the needle in his eye. Although it is not known what he concluded from his experiment, Newton argued that light is composed of particles. 

Science later adopted a wave theory of light and color, because of what some experiments found. Newton had some vindication on his theory, though. With the discovery of quantum mechanics, light is now thought to be both a wave and a particle. 

Google has developed a driverless car!


This new technology sounds as if it is right out of a science fiction movie, and that’s because it’s not far off. Over the past several years Google engineers and scientists have been working tirelessly at Stanford Laboratories to develop a technology that will change the way we live in the upcoming decades: the Google Car. 

This car is completely driverless. It combines information from Goggle Street View with artificial intelligence software that communicates with a sensor on top of the car, which in turn speaks to the wheels and steering wheel to drive the car without any human interference. So far the car has clocked over 175,000 miles and had zero accidents. 

In fact, the technology has caught on so fast that the state of Nevada has passed the first laws allowing for automated cars! To see a Google Car in action check out the video below! Are you excited or hesitant about driverless cars? Let us know in the comments

The New Native Languages

To many developers, the recent trend of reversion to true compiled languages implies a re-engagement with C and C++, or for denizens of smaller niches, a renewed embrace for Pascal, Fortran, Ada, and other languages of the pre-2000 era. But for some programmers, this native trend, which is most heavily touted by Microsoft as part of its re-engagement for C++, leaves a certain sense of dissatisfaction. C and C++ look a lot like they did in 1995. And even though C11 and C++11 have added useful features that we have been carefully chronicling in Dr. Dobb's, the languages can have the feel of a past era onto which contemporary elements have been grafted.

                              For developers who yearn for something more modern, languages that reflect current concepts of parallelism, immutability, large libraries, extended data types, and the like there are interesting alternatives; especially since many of them key off the basic C syntax, which makes them comparatively easy to adopt. Chief among these are D (from Digital Mars), Go (from Google), Rust (from Mozilla), and Vala (from Gnome). All four languages are available free and all but D are completely open source. (D is almost completely open source). Looking at these languages provides interesting insights in language design and shows in some ways what C and C++ are lacking.