• Oracle NetBeans 7.2 supports the latest PHP, C++

  The newest version of the Oracle NetBeans IDE (integrated developer environment) will come with support for the latest versions of PHP and C++.

• Quickbooks Online outage leaves some customers in sour mood

  Intuit's Quickbooks Online service suffered an outage this week that left "a small subset" of customers unable to access their data, but the company says the problems with the on-demand accounting software have now been fixed.

• Coding contest shows how big data can improve health care

  A recent coding competition in the Boston area brought together IT professionals, medical workers and others with an interest in health IT to show how data analytics can improve health care.

• Windows 8 update: all the latest rumours, opinions and possibilities

  While it lacks the mobility usually associated with this class of device, there's an 80-inch tablet serving the head of Microsoft as a wallboard and as a substitute for other work-related gear.

• Researchers propose TLS extension to detect rogue SSL certificates

  A pair of security researchers have proposed an extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that would allow browsers to detect and block fraudulently-issued SSL certificates.

• Internet Explorer 9: A getting started guide

  Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 officially launched late Monday and is ready for download here.

• Enable iTunes Home Sharing in iOS 4.3

  The next major iOS update is slated to be released this Friday, March 11, alongside the ultra-hyped iPad 2. One of the key features is a little something called iTunes Home Sharing, which allows users to stream music, podcasts, movies and more from PC to iOS device.

• Open source FreeOTFE encrypts disks handily

  FreeOTFE may sound like a political bumper sticker, but it stands for "Free On The Fly Encryption." The "Free" part is self-explanatory; "On The Fly Encryption" refers to the encrypting/decrypting of data as it is written to or read from your hard disk.

• Digitize your movies

  Analog movies can be the easiest--or the hardest--medium to digitize, depending on the format you're working with. While older camcorder and video formats such as 8mm and Hi8 or VHS and Betamax tapes are easy to transfer, digitizing film can be difficult at best.

• Prepare your PC for future data disasters

  Reformatting and restoring a PC is not fun--in the way spending 2 hours in the dentist's chair is not fun. You have to back up all your data (and pray that you haven't forgotten anything), reformat the hard drive, install Windows, track down missing drivers, find and reload all your software, restore your data, and pull out clumps of hair over the things you inevitably neglected to save. (Firefox plug-ins, anyone?)

• In depth: Unified communications still fragmented

  Unified communications (UC) technology has garnered a fair amount of attention, much of it due to vendors touting their UC offerings as the answer to problems workers have keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners and customers in a highly frenetic, increasingly mobile business world.

• Study: Facebook relies on good design to retain users

  What is Facebook's secret to keeping the world's largest user base content? Sticking to well-proven software design principles, one study has concluded.

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  Analysis: Why Linux is a desktop flop

  It's free, easier to use than ever, IT staffers know it and love it, and it has fewer viruses and Trojans than Windows.

• Open for business: It's the year of the corporate app store

  With more employees using smartphones and tablets for business, enterprises are setting up their own app stores for application distribution, leveraging a consumer model for mobile application access that is tuned to the workplace. Instead of saddling already overburdened IT personnel with getting applications to individual devices, these app stores provide a central distribution mechanism for employees to download applications themselves.

• The big promise of big data

  For Twitter, making sense of its mountains of user data was big enough of a problem that it purchased another company just to help get the job done.

Whitepapers about software

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  Managing Growth: A review of the global software & IT services industry

  This report investigates the opportunities for software and IT services companies in 2012 and beyond, and analyses how the United Kingdom, United States and Australia compare and contrast, to identify important trends that highlight the opportunities and threats to the sector over the next 12 months.

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  IBM agility@scale™: Become as Agile as You Can Be

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  Transforming Software Delivery: An IBM Rational Case Study

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  Case Study: Danske Bank Group improves efficiency and reduces time to market