News

Largest Mersenne Prime Discovered   Wednesday 20 January

We now know that 2^74,207,281-1 is a prime and this is not only the largest prime of this form, a Mersenne prime, but the largest prime of any sort. Is this a discovery? After all, the number has been there all the time and it was always prime or it wasn't. Why do we do this?

Fear And Loathing in The App Store 15 - Apple Bans F.lux And Then Duplicates It   Wednesday 20 January

Back in November 2015 we explained how F.lux had been banned from the app store for violating the Developer Program Agreement. This wasn't good, but now Apple has implemented the same functionality as part of iOS 9.3. This pushes the boundaries of fear and loathing about as far as it can go.

Yahoo Releases Record Machine Learning Dataset   Tuesday 19 January

Thirteen Terabytes of anonymized user-news item interaction data has been made available for developers to use in machine learning applications.

Second Opportunity For Convolutional Neural Networks Class   Tuesday 19 January

A class that is the cutting edge of machine learning and artificial intelligence is being run for the second time at Stanford this trimester. It is also available online to anyone who cares to follow along, this time with videos of the live lectures.

Do You Have To Attribute Stack Overflow Code?   Monday 18 January

At the moment the answer to the question is "probably", but this might change very soon. 

Oracle Is DBMS Of The Year   Monday 18 January

Oracle has come out on top in the database rankings for 2015.

C# Joins PVS-Studio Line Up   Monday 18 January

Last month saw the release of the latest static code analyzer from Program Verification Systems. In addition to C and C++, PVS-Studio 6.00 will detect bugs in your C# code.

Modern Fireworks - 100 Drones Break The Record   Sunday 17 January

Fireworks are primitive. How can modern man still be lighting the blue touch paper and relying on smelly, smokey chemicals to produce a flash and a bang? Intel's CEO thinks it's time for something new. Enter 100 drones flying under computer control.

Hands-On Lego Robotics For Kids   Saturday 16 January

At CES 2016 Lego Education launched WeDo 2.0 an updated version of its robotics and programming kit for second to fourth grade students, that is the age range 7 to 12 years old. It looks like a lot of fun both for kids and their parents and teachers. 

JQuery 3.0 Beta Marks 10th Anniversary   Friday 15 January

jQuery has reached its 10th birthday and jQuery 3.0 has reached beta status. Having dumped the idea of a "compat" variant that would support older browsers there is now only one version of jQuery 3.0.

Google I/O 2016 Scheduled For May   Friday 15 January

Google's annual developer conference is being held on home turf  this year. It will take place at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, the city where Google has its HQ, from May 18 - 20.

Bitcoin - A Failed Experiment.   Friday 15 January

There are problems with the Bitcoin algorithm. Put simply, without changes to the block size it offers too little throughput for the number of transactions that users would like to make. Now a prominent Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, has left the project and provided a long and detailed critique of why Bitcoin isn't going to work. 

Microsoft Unveils Free R Server   Thursday 14 January

A free developer edition of Microsoft R Server, formerly Revolution R Enterprise, has been announced.

Cardboard Gets 3D Sound API   Thursday 14 January

This could be the year of VR/AR, but it might not be due to expensive hardware. It might be because of Google's half joke Cardboard SDK. Now we not only have generated 3D vision, but sound as well.

Nanodegree Plus Offers Guaranteed Jobs   Thursday 14 January

Udacity has just introduced what seems like an enticing offer to career-oriented potential students in the United States: Get hired within six months of graduating. or tuition refunded.

The Core

Getting Started With jQuery - Advanced Ajax jqXHR and Events   Monday 18 January

The jQuery approach to Ajax is built on the jqXHR object which wraps the XmlHttpRequest object that the browser provides. It isn't often that you need delve this deeply into jQuery Ajax, but when you do nothing else will do. 

eBooks

Investment Analysis   Thursday 14 January

How is it possible to evaluate investments that generate irregular cashflows? We explore how NPV can be used to make investment decisions.