Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.<p>

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Yahoo has <a href="http://axis.yahoo.com">just announced Axis</a>, a browser extension thing and mobile app that “redefines what it means to search and browse the Web [sic].”

It's hard to imagine another, similar case on the scale of Oracle versus Google, so it's remarkable that an almost identical one came to resolution in Europe at almost the same time. SAS Institute sued World Programming for copyright infringement in what seems like a much more clear-cut case than Oracle versus Google. World Programming copied the SAS programming environment with the intent of direct competition, yet the court did not find against World Programming.</p><p>

Although the case has nuances, the court was clear that although software itself could be copyrighted, its externalities -- the function it performs, the programming interfaces it exposes, and the data structures it uses -- cannot be. This is entirely reasonable. Without such a division, interoperable technology markets would be impossible.

At one of the world's biggest gatherings of Web culture, a 28-year-old executive talks about landing a tech job by sending a CEO "bikini shots" from a "nudie calendar" he created.</p><p>
On campus at Stanford University, a hot startup attracts recruits with a poster asking if they want to 'bro down and crush some code.'"</p><p>
And the world's largest Internet registration company entices Web entrepreneurs with a Super Bowl ad in which two female celebrities paint its logo onto the body of an apparently naked model.
Forget what you think you know about the benignly geeky computer programmer who lives for the thrill of finding a single misplaced semicolon in thousands of lines of code.</p><p>
And welcome to the world of the "brogrammer."

It's sort of like high school is repeating itself. We have an isolated population, and within it we've got the cool kids making life (real life, this time) difficult, frustrating and miserable for people who don't deserve to be walked all over.</p><p>
Consider for a moment that while you might love binge drinking – and listen, I've done my share in the past... so I know it can be a blast – not everyone is into it, and it has nothing to do with code.

Even as the UK government seems keener than ever to promote the technology sector as an engine of much needed growth – especially startups – there’s a programme right under its nose which has been running for years which needs help, and now. Young Rewired State has been running annually on very low funding for a while.

The sophistication of the worm is one thing, but the fact that an entirely new programming language may have been created for it, points to some seriously deep pockets backing the project. Security experts have suggested that a state must have been involved in its development, and Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky supports this speculation on Twitter:

The mystery of #Duqu framework <a href="http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework">http://bit.ly/w5BrzP</a> <- seems the state behind #Duqu sponsored the development of a new progr language

"This is a very important consultation and opens a whole new door to open education and should not be ignored. But the consultation is in the formal format and requires you to answer specific questions, and not see what anyone else has said.

"So, Craig Snowden @CraigSnowedIn, a 17 year old developer from Scotland who answered a twitter call to open the consultation, popped it into Google docs.

"In Google docs you can read and comment, and see others’ comments, and properly understand what this might be saying.

"Now, this is not the formal process, but there is no reason why the comments cannot be fed into the formal process and I will volunteer to do that."