News

Neural Networks Describe What They See   Wednesday 19 November

There has been an amazing growth in what neural networks can do and the next step is to put vision together with language to produce a network that can describe what it sees.

Apache Drill Reaches 0.6   Wednesday 19 November

The developers of Apache Drill, the open source software that you can use to write SQL queries on data stored in Hadoop, have released version 0.6.

Google Play Services 6.5   Wednesday 19 November

Google Play services 6.5 includes enhanced features in Google Maps, Drive and Wallet as well as the recently launched Google Fit API. For developers it introduces "granular dependency management", a move towards being more lightweight.  

Free Guide For Android Developers   Tuesday 18 November

Google has produced an 80-page booklet to help and encourage developers to publish apps on Google Play. You can download it as pdf or from Google Play, or even request a printed copy sent by mail.

LokiJS - A JavaScript Database   Tuesday 18 November

LokiJS, a lightweight JavaScript document-oriented database has reached version 1.0. An in-memory database, it prioritises performance.

Amazon AWS Lambda   Monday 17 November

Amazon has announced AWS Lambda, a compute service that runs your code in response to events so you can create apps that respond quickly to new information.

Steve Ballmer Funds Harvard CS Expansion   Monday 17 November

Harvard's computer science faculty is set to grow by fifty percent following a gift from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is himself a Harvard graduate.

Visual Studio 2015 Preview   Monday 17 November

If you compare the latest Visual Studio 2015 preview with almost any other version you will be shocked by what you find in it. Visual Studio used to be specific to Microsoft technologies. Now it has gone cross platform in a big way. 

A Worm's Mind In A Lego Body   Sunday 16 November

Take the connectome of a worm and transplant it as software in a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot - what happens next?

Atlas And The Crane Kick   Saturday 15 November

The latest robot video of Atlas doing some partial Karate moves seems to have attracted the attention of the Internet - the video is worth seeing.

Full Visual Studio Now Free   Friday 14 November

Microsoft has announced Visual Studio Community edition, which is in no way a cut down version. It is free not only for education and open source projects but for individual developers and teams of five and fewer.

WPF Lives!   Friday 14 November

While the "big" .NET news is that it has gone open source, what has just happened to WPF is a better indication of what Microsoft is thinking. 

Turing Award Now Million Dollar Prize   Friday 14 November

Starting with the 2014 award, the ACM A.M. Turing Award will be $1,000,000, four times its previous level. All the funding will be provided by Google.

Microsoft Open Sources .NET?   Thursday 13 November

It looks as if Microsoft just unexpectedly gave away the farm. Of course, this being Microsoft it did no such thing. What has Microsoft just done?

Amazon Launches Supercharged MySQL Alternative   Thursday 13 November

Amazon has announced a rebuilt version of MySQL created for the cloud, and engineered to be extremely low maintenance and easy to protect and affordable.

Registration Opens For Online Hack.Summit   Thursday 13 November

A developer conference with a difference is scheduled to take place December 1-4. Where is it? Anywhere and everywhere. How much does it cost? You choose and your donation goes to supporting programming non profits.

Professional Programmer

Not Dumping .NET - Microsoft's Method   Friday 14 November

Microsoft has a complex relationship with the .NET ecosystem it created. Recently it seemed intent on dumping .NET which, after all the work, would be madness. Now the relationship seems to have entered a different phase and there might just be method in the madness.

Babbage's Bag

Inside Random Numbers   Tuesday 18 November

We often refer to things that are unpredictable as being "random" but this is not the same as truly random behavior - 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?