News

New - PhpStorm 7   Wednesday 23 October

JetBrains has a new major release of PhpStorm, its PHP development environment with support for all the new stuff including Vagrant, Drupal, Zend 2, Web Components, TypeScript and easy debugging. 

DARPA Competition For The Intelligent Defensive Computer   Wednesday 23 October

DARPA's latest challenge seems like a good idea, but it is asking for enough AI to make sure that a computer detects an attack, defends and repairs itself?

Google Support For Free Internet   Tuesday 22 October

Google has unveiled two new services to confront online censorship and  promote free expression. Project Shield has already been effective in combating DDos attacks while uProxy aims to protect Internet connections from surveillance or misdirection.

Hadoop 2 Introduces YARN   Tuesday 22 October

Apache Hadoop 2 is now available with support for Apache YARN, a framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management, and high availability for the HDFS filing system.

Bing As Platform Arrives   Tuesday 22 October

Following up on the promise to make Bing into a platform that developers can use to improve their apps, Microsoft has released new controls for speech recognition, OCR and translation. 

NetBeans 7.4 Released   Monday 21 October

NetBeans IDE 7.4, which extends the HTML5 development support introduced in NetBeans IDE 7.3 to Java EE and PHP applications and offers new support for mobile web development on Android and iOS, has been officially released.

Six Degrees Of Separation Is New   Monday 21 October

There is lots of evidence that we live in a small world in the sense that any two people are connected by a small chain of people who know each other. Now there is some evidence that this situation may be relatively new. In the 14th century the world seems to have been very much larger.

Highlights Of Visual Studio 2013   Monday 21 October

The final Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download, ahead of the official virtual launch on November 13. It includes the Windows 8.1 SDK, which is also available standalone.  NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are also available for download.

Minecraft Goes Quantum   Sunday 20 October

Minecraft is an incredible Turing complete game as it is, but now Google is responsible for adding quantum mechanics into the mix. So  can you now build a quantum computer from Minecraft bricks as well as a classical one?

The Swarm Game   Saturday 19 October

Can you control a swarm of robots with a single controller that has the same effect on all of them? You can find out by playing a game and helping develop new control algorithms.

Microsoft Remote Desktop For Android, iOS and OSX - Now Windows Is Everywhere   Friday 18 October

Microsoft has delivered an application that could change everything and give Windows a chance in the new post-PC world by making the PC important again.

European Office 365 Connect 2014   Friday 18 October

There's just three weeks left to register for early bird discounts for a  conference for decision makes, developers and IT Pros who are considering the transition to the Microsoft cloud.

GOTCHA - No More Password Hacking   Friday 18 October

The GOTCHA is a sort of CAPTCHA designed to stop dictionary attacks on password hashes. It's new and it might have more uses in security than just being better password protection. 

Mozilla's TogetherJS - The Easy Way To Collaborative Apps   Thursday 17 October

Now adding real-time collaboration to a website involves very little extra work and you don't even have to design your app to make use of it. You can simply add it to an existing app and expect everything to work when more than one user accesses it at the same time. 

RIA Services Goes Open Source   Thursday 17 October

Microsoft’s RIA Services are now open source and the code is available on Codeplex.

Google Apps Script Gets Eclipse Support   Thursday 17 October

One of the problems in using Apps Script is that you have to work in the Web page editor that Google provides. Now you can use a full featured IDE in the form of Eclipse. 

The Core

Whos Afraid of eXtreme Programming   Tuesday 22 October

You probably have heard of eXtreme Programming or XP. It's a type of agile software development and a lot of people think it's great. Some are trying to turn it into something more like software engineering and others are simply against it. So what is it all about and why does it ring true with some and makes no sense al all to others?

History

ICT 1301 - A 1960's Computer   Thursday 17 October

Flossie is the nickname given to a historic ICT 1301 computer that has recently been rescued from the scrap heap for the third time in its 50-year history. It has now been donated to The National Museum of Computing, located at Bletchley Park, where it will go on display when space permits.