News

Santa Trackers from Google and Microsoft   Wednesday 03 December

There may be only one Santa  delivering presents to children around the globe, but there are two rival Santa Trackers. Microsoft and Google have both started the countdown to Christmas with new activities to access every day until December 24th.

Gertbot - Robot Power For The Pi   Wednesday 03 December

The latest addon for the Raspberry Pi makes it very easy to control enough motors for a robot or anything you care to imagine. The Gertbot is more sophisticated than you might think. 

Windows 8.1 Overtakes XP?   Wednesday 03 December

The trend away from XP has accelerated until by the end of the month Windows 8.1 share of the desktop operating system market had overtaken it on a worldwide basis.

F# 4.0 Preview   Tuesday 02 December

Microsoft has announced a pre-release version of F# 4.0 and the latest Visual F# Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Preview.

A New Hour Of Code   Tuesday 02 December

Code.org has partnered with Disney to produce its latest one-hour tutorial in which kids learn to code with Blockly assisted by Anna and Elsa, the heroines from Disney's Frozen.

ENIAC Returns To Fort Sill   Tuesday 02 December

Almost 60 years after ENIAC was effectively broken up and scattered, a large chunk of it has been put back together. Although not restored to its original functionality, it is back in the location where it operated until 1955, Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

R Heads For Top Ten Languages   Monday 01 December

You may doubt the TIOBE index, but it is still interesting to read the signals and relative movements. This month the shock news is that R has jumped up the table to number 12 and there is more to say about the meteoric rise of Dart.

Google Offers Cash Incentives to US Public Schools   Monday 01 December

Computer Science Education Week starts next Monday. If students want to do rather more than an hour of code, Google has partnered with Codecademy to encourage teachers in US Public Schools to adopt a 12-hour long JavaScript curriculum.

Android Studio Release Candidate   Monday 01 December

It looks as if Google's Android Studio is close to its first release. For a company that has a reputation for keeping everything in eternal beta, this is quite a step.

ROI Survey   Sunday 30 November

What computer language repaid your investment in learning and can you thank your school, or any traditional educational establishment for the experience?

A $39 Nao For Xmas!   Saturday 29 November

Before you get too excited it's an action figure, not the real robot. Aldebaran now has a shop for fans of the cutest robot ever made. 

EDSAC Display Officially Opened   Friday 28 November

EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was originally built immediately after World War II at  the University of Cambridge, England. It is now being re-built at the UK's National Museum of Computing.

Hack.Summit Speaker Schedule Posted   Friday 28 November

A 4-day virtual conference in which we are all invited to "Learn from the master of our craft" starts on Monday December 1st at 9:00 PST (17:00 UTC). There have already been over 44,000 registrations so this event is set to make history by being the largest ever developer conference.

Machine Learning Pioneer Vladimir Vapnik Joins Facebook   Friday 28 November

Facebook's AI Research (FAIR) has announced that it has hired Vladimir Vapnik - inventor of the Support Vector Machine and statistical learning theory.

Twitter Indexes Every Single Tweet Ever   Thursday 27 November

Twitter is creating an index of every public tweet ever made, to make it possible to search without restrictions on the age of the tweet. This is being achieved using Apache Mesos, an open source cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks.

Cutting Edge Topics At SDD 2015   Thursday 27 November

Registration is now open for the Software Design and Development conference, SDD 2015. It takes place in London from May 11-15 and dozens of speakers will cover topics of interest to all developers.

The Core

The Essence Of Loops   Thursday 27 November

Loops are an essential part of any program and becoming a programmer is mostly a matter of mastering the idea of controlled repetition. It is sad that most programmers only know the forms of loops provided by one or at most two languages because they have a life and structure that doesn't depend on language. 

History

Eckert & Mauchly and ENIAC   Wednesday 03 December

Was ENIAC the first practical computer? It is the sort of question that we really would like a definitive answer to but the truth is much more complicated than you might expect.