News

Fear And Loathing In the App Store 9 - The EFF Refuses Apple's Conditions   Wednesday 21 January

The EFF has recently made it clear that Android is OK but iOS is just a step too far. It really, really, really doesn't like the conditions and argues that neither should you.

Calling Graphics Devs - Help Name Next Gen Open GL   Wednesday 21 January

The Khronos Group, responsible for the well known open source Open GL cross-platform graphics API, is running a survey asking devs involved with graphics to help fix on a good name for the forthcoming 'next generation' release. 

Atlas Rebuilt - DARPA's Almost New Robot   Wednesday 21 January

DARPA's Atlas robot is designed for its Robot challenge and in its first version it was impressive, if slightly threatening. Now it's back with an up-grade and its 75% new and amazing.

Groovy And Grails Lose Sponsor   Tuesday 20 January

If you have never heard of Groovy then you might well wonder why you should be interested in the future of this open source language? The reason is that it highlights differences and difficulties of relying on open source at all. 

VS 2013 Included In GitHub Student Dev Pack   Sunday 18 January

Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is already free for educational use. Now it is part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack. 

Google Translate - Breaking Down Babel   Monday 19 January

The latest version of Google Translate takes us a step further into a world where we'll be able to communicate without language barriers. This is a disruptive change that is happening without us really taking notice. 

Tizen At Center Of Samsung's IoT Strategy   Monday 19 January

Samsung has launched the first Tizen powered smartphone and has also announced that all Samsung devices will be IoT-ready in five years and that many of them will be running Tizen. 

Dive Into A Convolutional Neural Network Class   Monday 19 January

Do you fancy trying to get your head around computer vision, image classification, back propagation and all the other ramifications of convolutional neural networks. If so course materials from a Stanford class are being made available online.

Your Personal Robot - Less Than $2000   Sunday 18 January

We have made amazing progress in AI, but is all the progress put together enough to build a real and useful personal robot? Robotbase thinks so and is ready to sell you one. 

Facebook Cup 2015 Underway Solutions Available   Saturday 17 January

Over two thirds of the those who participated in the qualification round for this year's Facebook Hacker Cup and  of them are through to Round 1 of the contest which starts today at 10:00 PST and lasts 24 hours.

NCache 4.4 Open Sourced   Friday 16 January

A distributed object cache for .NET and Java apps has been made open source and is available for free.

Supreme Court Seeks Guidance On API Copyright Issue   Friday 16 January

The latest twist in the seemingly interminable Android copyright legal wrangle between Oracle and Google is that the US Supreme Court has asked the US Solicitor General for the views of the Obama administration before it deliberates the issue further.

Google Glass Under New Management   Thursday 15 January

Google has terminated its Glass Explorer Program and sales of the current version of Google Glass will end on January 19th. Is this the end of Glass or a new beginning?

Flink Reaches Top Level Status   Thursday 15 January

A data-processing language being developed by the Apache Software Foundation has been elevated to top-level status. Flink is open source, has APIs for Java and Scala and, with specialized APIs for graph processing, it is being proposed as an alternative to MapReduce.

Register Promptly For BUILD 2015   Thursday 15 January

Registration for Microsoft's annual developer event opens on January 22nd at 9:00 PST, that's 17:00 UTC. Tickets for last year's BUILD sold out in just over 24 hours and they could well go even more quickly this time round.

The Core

The Perils of the C# Parallel For   Tuesday 20 January

Making parallel code easier to use is an important development, but making it easier also means you can use it without realising what you are getting into. Unless we can find a way of making parallel code both easy and safe you are still going to have to take care - even with the easy-to-use Parallel For.

Just JavaScript - Type And Non-Type   Thursday 15 January

What is the fuss about strong typing really all about? JavaScript doesn't make much use of type so what is it missing? What is more difficult to do in JavaScript than in a typed language? Are there things that are easy in JavaScript because it isn't strongly typed?