News

Google Files AI Patents   Wednesday 08 July

Google has just revealed the fact that it has applied for at least six patents on fundamental neural network and AI. This isn't good for academic research or for the development of AI by companies. 

BBC micro:bit Your Next Computer?   Wednesday 08 July

The BBC, with a group of industry partners, has created a tiny computer that they plan to give away to school children and then offer for sale. Would you buy one?

Android Material Design For Websites   Wednesday 08 July

Google has released Material Design Lite, a library of components and templates that enable developers to use its material design styling, introduced with Andriod Lollipop, on websites as well as in apps.

React 0.14   Tuesday 07 July

Facebook has released a beta of the next version of React, its open source JavaScript library.

Mozilla Plans Firefox Rebuild   Tuesday 07 July

Firefox has been slipping in the popularity stakes. The once popular browser is now down to a 12% share of the market. Can a complete redesign of its internals be a way to bring it back to its former glory?

Microsoft Offers Research Grants For HoloLens   Tuesday 07 July

Microsoft HoloLens opens up amazing opportunities for creating "mixed reality" experiences. Now Microsoft is offering incentives to academic reseach institutions in the United States to come up with novel ideas for what these experiences might be. 

Top Languages 2015 - Stasis But For Go And Swift   Monday 06 July

There are other language statistics surveys and not just the Tiobe index. The Redmonk six monthly language rankings are well thought-out and well implemented and they reveal something interesting.

Orion 9.0 Released   Monday 06 July

The latest version of Orion has been released with improved JavaScript language tooling features.

The State Of Driverless Cars   Sunday 05 July

A new TED Talk from the head of Google's driverless car program indicates that we might be closer to the big revolution than we think.

Microsoft Open Sources WorldWide Telescope   Saturday 04 July

An amazingly rich resource for professional and amateur astronomers has been open sourced by Microsoft and become an independent project as part of the .NET foundation.

MathML 3.0 Is An International Standard   Friday 03 July

The story of MathML is not a happy one. It is a good idea - create a markup language for mathematical equations - but for some reason people just don't seem to want to get behind it.  Will the new official status of MathML 3.0 make a difference?

ASP.NET 5 Beta5 Released   Friday 03 July

Microsoft has released ASP.NET 5 Beta5 as an in-place update to Visual Studio 2015 RC with new features, improvements, and bug fixes.. It is the update to the ASP.NET runtime rather than the Web Tooling features for Visual Studio and replaces Beta4, which shipped with VS2015RC.

Java 8 Lambdas & Streams MOOC   Thursday 02 July

If you are a Java developer who has heard about, but not yet mastered, Lambda expressions, which are a key new feature of Java SE 8 (JDK 8), a new hands-on MOOC, starting this month, will help you get up to speed.

Qt 5.5 Released   Thursday 02 July

Qt 5.5 has been released with a simpler product range, performance improvements and better cross platform support. It also introduces two new modules that extend its set of 3D APIs.

Windows 10 SDK Update   Thursday 02 July

The promised update to the Windows 10 SDK and tools is now available, but while it includes some nice new features it might not impress everyone.

The Core

Exploring Edison - In C   Friday 03 July

You have a choice of languages that you can use with the Edison, but there are big advantages to choosing C or C++ for bigger projects. If you know Python or JavaScript then you will find it very easy to make the switch. So let's do it in C.

Babbage's Bag

A Programmers Guide To Interrupts   Tuesday 07 July

The trick the computer uses in order to be so productive is to divide its attention between a number of tasks – and for this it uses interrupts. But what exactly is an interrupt and how should programmers think about this essentially hardware idea?