News

Rust 1.6 Released   Wednesday 27 January

The Rust development team have released version 1.6 of the system programming language with a stable version of libcore.

IoT Poised To Reshape E-Commerce   Wednesday 27 January

The Internet of Things will fundamentally change the shape of e-commerce and will become an important revenue generator for a group of devs who are currently the worst off.

Marvin Minsky, Father of Artificial Intelligence Dies Aged 88   Tuesday 26 January

Marvin Minsky, one of the best known of the revolutionary thinkers of the early days of AI, robotics and computer science, has died of a cerebral hemorrhage.  News of his death was reported by MIT, where he had worked for over half a century. 

Minecraft Education Edition   Tuesday 26 January

Having recently acquired MinecraftEdu, Microsoft has announced its own Minecraft Educational Edition which will be available as a free trial this summer.

Let HERBIE Make Your Floating Point Better   Tuesday 26 January

A new tool from the University of Washington will take your floating point expressions and convert them into something that does the same calculation, but more accurately. This is worth knowing about.

Software Pioneer Edward Yourdon Dies   Monday 25 January

Ed Yourdon, a pioneer of Structured Programming methodology who was among the first inductees into the Computer Hall of Fame, has died from post-operative complications, aged 71.

OpenFace - Face Recognition For All   Monday 25 January

Face recognition, once the preserve of the few, the likes of intelligence and security services, is now made available to the masses as well, thanks to OpenFace.

Project Rider A Cross Platform C# IDE   Monday 25 January

Microsoft has gone open source crazy and you can now use C# under Linux or OSX as well as Windows. The problem is that Visual Studio isn't cross platform. So what do you use?

This Is Not The Robot Butler You Are Looking For - ATLAS Does Chores   Sunday 24 January

Ever since the Jetson's Rosy cleaned up for them, the children who watched grew up wanting one. A robot housekeeper would be a hit product and would sell without effort. What about giving a home to the awesome ATLAS? He has added cleaning to his repertoire ...

Sutherland's Trojan Cockroach On Show   Saturday 23 January

Ivan Sutherland’s Trojan Cockroach is on display at the Posner Center, part of Carnegie Mellon University until early May 2016. The exhibit features parts of the original robot and a history of Sutherland’s work together with rare and hard to find images of walking robots. 

Google Tensor Flow Course Available Free   Friday 22 January

An advanced level course in machine learning has been added to Udacity's catalog. Over the course of four lessons you'll get to understand and use Google's open source TensorFlow tool, which can be used for a wide range of parallel computations, including implementing neural networks.

ASP.NET Updated And Renamed   Friday 22 January

Microsoft has a new version of ASP.NET. To signal that its a fresh start both it and Entity Framework are being given a new identity.

Github Victim Of Its Own Success   Thursday 21 January

When it first appeared on the scene, Github was one of a kind and a true visionary amongst its rivals still using Subversion, Bazaar or Mercurial as their source control system.

The Tech Interview Process Lengthens   Thursday 21 January

Although there is no shortage of jobs for developers, the process of getting the one you want is a protracted business and far from easy. However impressive your qualifications and credentials, there is the hurdle of the hiring interview.

Brendan Eich Launches Brave New Browser   Wednesday 20 January

Brendan Eich, the man who invented JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla, has just launched a new browser called Brave. Is this a Firefox fork?

The Core

Exploring Edison - Bit Banging the DHT11/DHT22   Monday 25 January

In this chapter we make use of all of the ideas introduced in earlier chapters to create a raw interface with the low cost DHT11/22 temperature and humidity sensor. It is an exercise in interfacing two logic families and implementing a protocol directly in C. 

Babbage's Bag

The Memory Principle - Computer Memory and Pigeonholes   Friday 22 January

We discover why computer memory can be likened to pigeonholes and even include instructions for you to build your own memory device.