Weekend tech reading: Facebook to buy Opera for its own browser?

Is Facebook about to buy Opera to create own Facebook browser? A Facebook browser that would allow you keep up to date with your social life from in-built plug-ins and features on the menu bar could be on the cards. Pocket-lint has heard from one of its trusted sources that the social networking giant is looking to buy Opera Software, the company behind the Opera web browser. According to our man in the know, the company could be about to expand into the browser space to take on the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and now even Yahoo... Pocket-lint

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL It was 6 a.m. when Eric Simons was jolted awake by the yelling. After working until 4 a.m, the 19-year-old entrepreneur had finally passed out. A few hours of sleep would help with the day ahead. But unlike most people working at AOL's Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, Simons was already there. He'd been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company's food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing at him, it was all over. CNET

How Tim Cook is changing Apple In February of this year, a group of investors visited Apple as part of a "bus tour" led by a research analyst for Citibank. The session started with a 45-minute presentation by Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, and the 15 or so investors who attended the session were treated to Apple's unique brand of hospitality: They met in a threadbare conference room in Apple's Town Hall public conference center at the 4 Infinite Loop building in Cupertino, Calif., where the refreshments consisted of "three stale cookies and two Diet Cokes," in the words of one participant. CNN

Dataland: the MIT's '70s media room concept that influenced the Mac In research for our latest Future Passed piece, I came across the mention of "Dataland" and a spatial data-management system. Hardly the most exciting-sounding concept, couched in academic technobureaucratese from the late '70s, but I started digging around in old forums and email lists, with the hope of finding more about this photo mentioned in The Computer Age: A Twenty Year View. I eventually hit internet gold, finding the original spatial-data-management system study PDF deep in the MIT archives at the Speech interface Group. The Verge

Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)." David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University's Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already. Ars Technica

Respawn's West And Zampella sound off on upcoming Activision lawsuit We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Respawn Entertainment's Jason West and Vince Zampella, the one-time heads of Infinity Ward and creators of Call of Duty. During our conversation we finally got to hear their version of the events surrounding their dismissal from Activision and the bitter legal battle that has carried on for two years. This is the most personal account of the Infinity Ward story to date... Game Informer

Against the future: inside the Jewish anti-internet rally This weekend I took a 45 minute train ride to Citi Field, which typically houses a baseball team called the Mets and some of its fans. But me and my fellow passengers on the 7 train weren't attending a baseball game: we were there, along with 40,000-ish ultra-Orthodox Jews, to learn about the internet. Since I'm currently (for non-religious reasons) not using the internet for a year, I seemed to be the right guy to tag along. The Verge

Understanding the business impact of Windows XP migration plans For the last several months, we've been talking about the importance of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. Much of the discussion has focused on the two year countdown for end of support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014, however, we have also pointed out that Windows XP is over a decade old – two generations behind Microsoft's current product technology and will soon be three generations behind. Microsoft

Max Payne 3 PC: Developer interview After the success of the console release last week, the PC release of Max Payne 3 is highly anticipated. We caught up with Kevin Hoare, Lead PC Designer on Max Payne 3, to talk about the differences in this long-awaited sequel to Remedy Entertainment's classic noir-inspired action games. There's some good stuff in here, so keep an eye on this space for our upcoming Max Payne 3 review. PCWorld

Data in the fast lane A new approach to managing data over a network has enabled a Microsoft Research team to set a speed record for sifting through, or "sorting," a huge amount of data in one minute. The team conquered what is known as the MinuteSort benchmark – a measure of data-crunching speed devised by the late Jim Gray, a renowned Microsoft Research scientist, and deemed the "World Cup" of data sorting. Microsoft

Supercomputer to connect to 400PB of storage via Ethernet The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is rolling out a storage infrastructure that will include 380 petabytes of magnetic tape capacity and 25 petabytes of online disk storage made up by 17,000 SATA drives. The massive storage infrastructure is designed to support of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, called Blue Waters. Computerworld

How Google can beat Facebook without Google Plus Out in the Mojave Desert, there's a place called California City that's fascinated me ever since Geoff Manaugh brought its story to the Internet's attention. The city is one of the largest in the state by land area, but its population sits at a mere 14,718. The facts together indicate the grandeur of the planned community's conception and its failure. The Atlantic