News

AlphaGo v Best Human - It's 1-0   Wednesday 09 March

Google's DeepMind AlphaGo program has won the first game in its match against legendary Go player, Lee Se-dol. OK, it may only be the first game in a series of five, but it is such a big step forward it is the AI equivalent of landing on the moon.

WebVR 1.0 API Proposal Introduced   Wednesday 09 March

WebVR is an experimental Javascript API that provides browser access to Virtual Reality devices, such as Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. Version 1.0 of the proposal includes improvements based on developer feedback.

Register Now For Google I/O   Wednesday 09 March

Registration for Google I/O 2016, its annual developer conference, is now open and you have until 5:00PM PST on March 10 (1:00 AM UTC on March 11 for those in other parts of the world) to apply for the most popular and eagerly anticipated Android event of the year. 

Celebrating International Women's Day 2016   Tuesday 08 March

March 8 is International Women's Day, something you have probably already noticed from today's, Google Doodle. This year's theme focuses on achieving gender equality, an issue that is important to the IT industry.

SQL Server On Linux!   Tuesday 08 March

The next version of SQL Server will be available on Linux with both cloud and on-premises versions on offer.

Open Source Mathematica Compatible Mathics 0.9   Tuesday 08 March

Mathematica is a big powerful math package, but what do you do when you can't justify its cost? Mathics is an open source math package that has just reached version 0.9 and it is a possible alternative.

March MOOCs   Monday 07 March

March is now in full swing and so are some of this month's MOOCs. Here are some of the ones we've noticed that are likely to be of interest to some of you.

Hack The Pentagon   Monday 07 March

The US Department of Defence is planning a pilot of a Hack the Pentagon bug bounty program in which it will invite vetted hackers to test its digital security.

Thunkable Forks MIT App Inventor   Sunday 06 March

Two of the contributors to the App Inventor open source project have secured $120,000 seed funding from YC to launch a commercial version called Thunkable. 

Kindle Instant Book Previews   Sunday 06 March

Amazon has been promising the ability to embed book previews on external websites for over 10 years. It's now possible and we already started to do so last month.

Epic Games CEO Finally Notices That UWP Apps Are A Walled Garden   Saturday 05 March

If you have been following news items in our "Fear And Loathing In The App Store" series you will know that I Programmer has long been worried by the moved to closed apps stores. Now it seems Epic Games co-founder, Tim Sweeney, has written about this aspect of Windows 10 in the Guardian, sparking a lot of discussion and some hysteria. 

Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon   Friday 04 March

Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure.

Yahoo Opens Up Flickr Deep Learning   Friday 04 March

Yahoo is making CaffeOnSpark available for use by open-source developers. The deep learning software is used by Yahoo to gain intelligence from massive amounts of online data.

New Products For Amazon's Alexa   Thursday 03 March

Amazon has launched two new devices Echo Dot and Amazon Tap that bring users the voices services of Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based personal assistant. 

Bitcoin Almost Crashed - But Lived To Crash Another Day   Thursday 03 March

Fears this week that the Bitcoin network had reached the widely predicted saturation point seem to be unfounded. However, the spam that probably caused the problem makes it clear that saturation isn't that far away.

Google Play Developer Policies Updated   Thursday 03 March

Google has updated its developer policies to make it easier for Android Developers to keep within the guidelines. The redesigned Google Play Developer Policy Center has an interactive menu and clearly spells out what isn't allowed. 

The Core

Exploring Edison - The DS18B20 1-Wire Temperature Sensor   Monday 07 March

The Edison doesn't have built in support for the Maxim 1-Wire bus and this means you can't use the very popular DS18B20 temperature sensor. However with a little careful planning you can and you can do it from user rather than kernel space. 

History

An Wang - The Man Who Might Have Invented The Personal Computer   Thursday 03 March

An Wang isn't a household name, but he founded a company that created the first affordable computers. Smaller and cheaper than the mini computers of their day, they could have been the first personal computers. But Wang insisted on calling them calculators.