An anonymous reader quote InfoWorld: Two years ago Microsoft did the unthinkable: It declared it would open-source its .NET server-side cloud stack with the introduction of .NET Core... Thus far, the move has paid off. Microsoft has positioned .NET Core as a means for taking .NET beyond Windows. The cross-platform version extends .NET's reach to MacOS and Linux...

Developers are buying in, says Scott Hunter, Microsoft partner director program manager for .NET. "Forty percent of our .NET Core customers are brand-new developers to the platform, which is what we want with .NET Core," Hunter says. "We want to bring new people in." Thanks in considerable part to .NET Core, .NET has seen a 61% uptick in the number of developers engaged with the platform in the past year.
The article includes an interesting quote from Microsoft-watching analyst Rob Sanfilippo. "It could be argued that the technology generates indirect revenue by incenting the use of Azure services or Microsoft developer tools."

prone2tech writes "From an article at Dr. Dobb's: Chipmakers have essentially said that the job of enforcing Moore's Law is now a software problem. They will concentrate on putting more and more cores on a die, and it's up to the software industry to recraft software to take advantage of the parallel-processing capabilities of the new chips. As is argued in this article, this means becoming proficient in parallel functional programming. The bad news? Getting good at functional programming is hard, harder than moving from iterative Pascal or Basic or C coding to object-oriented development. It's an exaggeration but a useful one: When you move to FP, all your algorithms break.'"

John Lam was one of many readers to send in news that on Thursday, "at a conference in Vienna, Austria, as reported by the BBC, a European Community science working group built a quantum backbone using 200-km of standard commercial optical fiber running among seven sites and successfully demonstrated the first secure quantum cryptographic key distribution network. In addition, each of the seven links used a different kind of quantum encryption, demonstrating interoperability between the technologies. To paraphrase, the project focused on the trusted repeater paradigm and developed an architecture allowing seamless integration of heterogeneous quantum-key distribution-link devices in a unified framework. Network node-modules managing all classical communication tasks provide the underlying quantum devices with authentic classical channels. The node-module architecture uses a layered model to provision network-wide, end-to-end, provably secure key distribution."

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."

dizzymslizzy writes "With prompting from the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, the US Library of Congress announced today that its online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles, for legislation documents. As Free Government Info says, 'it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600-word description of how to link on another page.' Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS: 'Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.'

danielstoner writes "The article '13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die... of old age' makes an interesting analysis of the programming languages battling for a place in programmers' minds. What really makes a language popular? What really makes a language 'good'? What is success for a programming language? Can we say COBOL is a successful language? What about Ruby, Python, etc?"

An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks article detailing the changes coming in PHP V6 — from namespaces, to Web 2.0 built-ins, to a few features that are being removed.

A number of readers made sure we are aware that the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for simultaneously and independently discovering giant magnetoresistance. This property has allowed the explosion of disk-space growth and is cited as being one of the first nanotechnology breakthroughs. From the announcement: "Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current."

An anonymous reader writes "'Gene targeting,' which allows scientists to isolate stem cells in mice and reproduce genetically modified offspring, has won the Nobel Prize for medicine. Having allowed pathologists to better understand diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and cystic fibrosis for close to 20 years, the technology is just now getting its big day in the sun. From Nobel's full how-it-works: 'Their [i.e. ES cells] use as a vehicle for the transfer into the mouse genome of mutant alleles, either selected in cell culture or inserted into the cells via transformation with specific DNA fragments, has been presented as an attractive proposition. In many of these studies the use of pluripotential cells directly isolated from the embryos under study should have great advantages.'"

Kelson writes "Internet Explorer 7 hit the 100 million download mark last week. Yet in the three months it's been available, Firefox's market share has continued to grow. InformationWeek reports that nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6. People don't seem to be switching back to IE in significant numbers, prompting analysts to wonder: has Microsoft finally met its match?"

mcalwell writes with an article about the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (or KVM for short) in the release candidate Linux 2.6.20 kernel. From the article: "[T]he Linux 2.6.20 kernel will include a full virtualization (not para-virtualization) solution. [KVM] is a GPL software project that has been developed and sponsored by Qumranet. In this article we are offering a brief overview of the KVM for Linux as well as offering up in-house performance numbers as we compare KVM to other virtualization solutions such as QEMU Accelerator and Xen."

scdeimos writes "The prototype of a new solar patrol telescope in New Mexico recorded a tsunami-like shock wave rolling across the visible face of the Sun following a major flare event on Wednesday, Dec. 6. The shock wave, known as a Moreton wave, also destroyed or compressed two filaments of cool gas at opposite sides of the solar hemisphere." From the article: "'These large scale 'blast' waves occur infrequently, however, are very powerful. They quickly propagate in a matter of minutes covering the whole Sun, sweeping away filamentary material,' said Dr. K. S. Balasubramaniam. 'It is unusual to see such powerful waves encompassing the whole sun from ground based observatories. Its significance comes from the fact that these waves are occurring near solar minimum, when intense activity is yet to pick up.'"