News

A Recursive Interview With Bjarne Stoustrup   Wednesday 19 December

The CodeRage 7 online conference took the opportunity to interview the creator of C++ Bjarne Stoustrup. He discusses the difficulty of letting go of his language to a standards committee, what makes it special and where it should be going.

Oracle's NoSQL 2.0 Released   Wednesday 19 December

Oracle has released 2.0 of NoSQL, with better integration with Hadoop and Oracle Database.

Rasbery Pi Gets An App Store   Tuesday 18 December

Should we call it the pie shop? The single board low cost ARM computer Raspberry Pi now has an app store where you can, if you want to, sell your work.

Complete HTML5.0 Definition Published   Tuesday 18 December

The W3C has published the complete definition of the HTML5 and Canvas 2D specifications. Although these are not yet W3C standards, the specifications are feature complete which represents a degree of stability that will help all concerned in web design and development.

A New Museum Of Math Opens In NY   Monday 17 December

Math is fascinating and fun, but not everyone agrees. A new Museum of Math, nicknamed MoMath, has just opened in New York. Can it do anything for the image that Math suffers from?

The Kinect Is About To Shrink   Monday 17 December

PrimeSense, the company which designed Microsoft's Kinect, is about to launch a micro version of the device claimed to be small enough to fit in a mobile phone. How does this change things?

New Call For Turing Pardon   Monday 17 December

As 2012, Alan Turing Year, draws to close a group of highly regarded UK scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, have repeated the call for a posthumous pardon for Turing's criminal conviction.

Bill Gates To Deliver 2013 Dimbleby Lecture   Sunday 16 December

One of our programming heroes, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, will deliver BBC One's annual lecture next month. In this he follows in the footsteps of the Prince of Wales, Bill Clinton and Terry Pratchett.

1 Billion Web Pages = 1 Million Dollars?   Sunday 16 December

It seems to be easier that we thought to win "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". All you need is a little data mining and access to the web and answering the questions is almost trivial.

Apple 1 Breaks Records In Online Auction   Sunday 16 December

A fully functioning Apple 1, complete with peripherals and BASIC on cassette tape, was sold in November for a record-breaking $630K to an anonymous Internet bidder.

Are E-Book Readers Already Heading Towards Obsolescence?   Saturday 15 December

After experiencing spectacular growth over a period of 5 years, sales of e-book readers have declined in the past year and this trend is forecast to continue. The culprit, of course, is the tablet.

UK Universities To Offer Free And Open Online Courses   Saturday 15 December

The UK's Open University has announced Freelearn, a new MOOC platform that will provide online educational offerings that are free of charge.

Population Learning In Chess   Saturday 15 December

Swarm intelligence is an often used idea in AI, but do human populations improve at tasks? Is there a population learning effect in, say the game of chess, or are there just brilliant individual players?

Couchbase Server 2.0   Friday 14 December

Version 2.0 of Couchbase Server has been released with a new flexible document data model that will give more freedom for developing apps.

Release Candidate of ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2   Friday 14 December

An update to ASP.NET is due to be released early next year. If you are eager for its new features the Release Candidate is now available for download.

Crockford On Monads And Gonads   Friday 14 December

If you have wondered what monads are all about. Doug Crockford, author of "JavaScript The Good Parts", stars in a video explaining functional programming and monads in general.

Mozilla's Game On Is Back   Thursday 13 December

Mozilla is challenging developers to create gaming experiences that push the limits of what Open Web technologies can do.

Narwhal - A Far-Reaching Geospatial Data Library   Thursday 13 December

A new software library that can be used to analyze complex geospatial data has been released by Microsoft Research.  The data doesn’t even have to be ‘location based’ in the traditional sense.

Google Maps - The Alternative iOS Mapping SDK   Thursday 13 December

Google maps for iOS is now available as a free download, and this should see the end of the Apple map fiasco. Most important, however, is that it comes with an SDK that gives developers a choice of which maps to include in their apps.

Professional Programmer

Christmas Book Choice 2012   Monday 17 December

Are you looking for a carefully chosen book as a Christmas gift for the programmers and non-programmers among your family and friends? Our selection of ten titles is designed to help.

The Core

The Triumph Of Deep Learning   Friday 14 December

Deep Neural Networks are succeeding at AI tasks in a way that can only be described as spectacular. What is the secret behind their success?

Babbage's Bag

Inside Random Numbers   Wednesday 19 December

We often refer to things that are unpredictable as being "random" but this is not the same as truly random behaviour - which is something we have to work hard to achieve. Put another way - how can a logical deterministic device like a computer produce a random number?