News

New MinuteSort Record Set by Microsoft Research   Wednesday 23 May

A team from Microsoft Research has taken the lead in the MinuteSort data sorting test using a specially-devised technology, Flat DataCenter Storage.

Mechanical Turk Launches Categorization App   Wednesday 23 May

Amazon's Mechanical Turk has just introduced a Categorization App that should make it easier to get accurate results on categorization projects.

Leap 3D Sensor - Too Good To Be True?   Wednesday 23 May

The Leap 3D motion control system is the size of iPod, more accurate than a mouse and more sensitive than a touchscreen. See it in action and sign up for its developer program.

GitHub for Windows   Tuesday 22 May

GitHub has released a free-to-download Windows version that will run Windows on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8.

Kinect SDK 1.5 - Now With Face Tracking   Tuesday 22 May

The new Kinect 1.5 SDK adds a lot of new features to the existing Kinect for Windows without any need for changes to the hardware. It now comes with face tracking, seated skeleton tracking and a lot of new developer tools.

NoSQL Database OrientDB 1.0 Released   Tuesday 22 May

OrientDB 1.0, a Java-based NoSQL database that combines the features of document and graph databases has been released. 

Chrome Overtakes IE In Global Stats   Monday 21 May

Chrome has been steadily increasing its share of the browser market while Internet Explorer's share has been in decline. Last week finally Chrome overtook IE.

Wolfram Finance Platform Launched   Monday 21 May

Wolfram Research has released a finance tool that harnesses the computational power of Wolfram’s Mathematica software and applies it to finance workflows. 

Bing Search API Moves to Windows Azure Marketplace   Monday 21 May

If you want to make heavy use Microsoft’s Bing API in your apps you’ll soon have to pay for it, as it has been moved to the Windows Azure Marketplace and changed from a free-to-use model.

Clothbot Climbs You   Sunday 20 May

Clothbot is a strange robot designed to climb up humans by getting a grip on their clothing, hence the name. Watch it in action and cringe. What is this for?

Cartoon - Why 1970? or Dating Troubles   Sunday 20 May

This week's xkcd cartoon might be a problem if you have never had any difficulties with dates. However, if you have never had any difficulties with dates, this suggests that you have never had to work with dates - as dates usually mean problems.

Turing Centennial Celebration at Princeton   Sunday 20 May

During Alan Turing Year celebrations are being held all over the world; many in places Turing himself never visited. He did, however, spend two years at Princeton University which has just held a three-day conference to mark its association with Turing.

Google Data Center Security   Saturday 19 May

All of us have to take precautions to keep our own or our customers' data safe. ever wondered what it must the problem be like when you scale it up to a Google-scale enterprise?

Hidden Markov Models, Viterbi and the Higgs Boson   Saturday 19 May

It isn't often that you get the chance to view a video that includes a discussion of a wide range of very technical topics. In this interview, Brian Beckman really does range over topics as diverse as the Viterbi algorithm and the Higgs boson.

New AWS Managed Services   Friday 18 May

Amazon has launched managed database and application services that you can use to deploy and manage SQL Server databases and ASP.NET applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Google Search Goes Semantic - The Knowledge Graph   Friday 18 May

The most reasonable response to Google's recent announcement of the Knowledge Graph is "what took you so long?" If Google wants to stay ahead in search, it has to innovate and, since the introduction of the page rank algorithm, core innovation has been very slow.

Loebner Prize Judges Could Easily Identify Chatbots   Friday 18 May

The 2012 Loebner Prize for the best chatbot has been awarded to Chip Vivant, created by Mohan Embar, a software consultant based in Milwaukee.

Native Apps Still Rule   Thursday 17 May

The number of Android and iOS users has more than doubled in the past year, the proportion of time users spend on apps compared to the web has increased and so has the average number of apps per device.

Performance enhancements in PostgreSQL 9.2   Thursday 17 May

The beta release of the next version of the PostgreSQL database has been announced, with improvements in performance as the main highlight.

The Core

Easy JavaScript Prototype Inheritance   Friday 18 May

Still confused about prototype-based inheritance? Still think that JavaScript needs classes and full inheritance? It all looks a lot simpler if you try to forget the classical way of doing things and concentrate on how JavaScript handles objects.

eBooks

WinRT JavaScript - The App Bar   Wednesday 23 May

One of the best examples of how Microsoft is extending the range of controls that you can access from JavaScript and HTML is the app bar. It also happens to be a very useful standard UI element.

Babbage's Bag

Floating Point Numbers   Tuesday 22 May

Inconvenient though they may be, fractions are the real stuff of number and to work with them we need to know about floating point numbers ...