News

No Glittering Prizes For Creative Robots   Wednesday 25 May

Can algorithms create "human-quality" short stories, sonnets and dance music sets? This was put to the test last week in a new variation on the Turing Test and the answer was a resounding "No".

TPU Is Google's Seven Year Lead In AI   Wednesday 25 May

Google has been doing some remarkable things with AI, but the speed of development is set to increase because it has the Tensor Processing Unit, TPU.

IoT Embraces Open Source   Wednesday 25 May

A Vision Mobile report in its IoT series about Open Source based on the findings of the 10th edition Developer Economics is now available and we have the highlights. Meanwhile there's still a few days left to take part in the April-May 2016 survey.

$100K Machine Learning Challenge   Tuesday 24 May

In partnership with Udacity, Chinese ridesharing company Didi Chuxing has announced a global machine learning competition to come up with a better ride matching algorithm using Didi’s published data sets.

XSS Hunter For Pentesting   Tuesday 24 May

XSS Hunter is a recently launched platform that makes pentesting for XSS vulnerabilities much easier to monitor and organize. Through it you can launch all kinds of XSS attacks, but where it really shines is when carrying out a Blind XSS attack.

Imagine Cup Earth Final Round   Tuesday 24 May

The winners of Round Two of the Imagine Cup Earth, a worldwide contest organized by Microsoft in conjunction with NASA for students aged between 6 and 18, have been announced. The deadline for Round Three is approaching, but there's still time to take part.

Agile Methods Specialization on Coursera   Monday 23 May

The latest addition to Coursera's ever growing list of developer-related Specializations is on Agile Methods. Two of its four courses start today, including Managing an Agile Team which is a brand new course. 

Visual Basic Reaches 25th Birthday - Microsoft Censors Campaign To Open Source VB6   Monday 23 May

Visual Basic was launched by Bill Gates at Windows World on May 20, 1991 and since then has gone through has fourteen releases. The pinnacle release, as far as many of are concerned was VB6, the final non-dot-net version. To celebrate VB's Silver Anniversary let's re-open the campaign to open source VB6. Update: May 23 

Google's Science Journal Android App For Experiments   Monday 23 May

We need to find good ways for young people to get started with real science and data. Google has produced an Android app that just might help - it sounds fun too.

Open Source Employment Trends   Monday 23 May

Open source talent is in high demand according to the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report, the 5th annual report from the Linux Foundation, produced in collaboration with Dice.com.

Can Robots Create Art?   Sunday 22 May

The RobotArt competition was started to explore the intersection of technology and art. For its inaugural contest fifteen teams from seven countries submitted over 70 different artworks.  The winners were announced this week with $100K being shared between the participating teams.

Android Studio 2.2 Preview Big Changes!   Friday 20 May

As this year's Google I/O draws to a close the Android Studio 2.2 preview was the star of the show. It brings really big changes to Android programming. 

Node.js Bridge For COBOL   Friday 20 May

The developer who came up with a way to run COBOL from within JavaScript has now added a way to run JavaScript in COBOL.

A New Version Of Raspbian Almost Solves WiFi Problem   Friday 20 May

The Raspberry Pi is a phenomenon that will be remembered long after it has passed and I guess so will its companion OS Raspian, but it is amazing how slowly it evolves - a measure of the size of the task and the small resources allocated to it. The latest version brings some interesting extras for users and programmers. 

Google Revamps Firebase As App Platform   Thursday 19 May

Google has shown off a revamped version of Firebase at Google I/O, with improvements that make use of various Google developer tools such as Cloud Messaging.

Google Takes VR Seriously - DayDream   Thursday 19 May

Google Cardboard was perhaps the biggest surprise in the VR world - a virtually no-cost VR viewer made from any Android phone. However. it left people thinking that perhaps Google wasn't completely serious about VR . Now we have several announcements at Google I/O that suggest otherwise. 

Google Home Your Personal Assistant   Thursday 19 May

Among the biggest announcements on Day One of Google I/O 2016, taking place in Mountain View, home to Google, is Google Home, a voice-activated product that brings the Google assistant to any room in your house. 

The Core

Remote C/C++ Development With NetBeans   Monday 23 May

NetBeans is a great IDE for working with C/C++ and it supports remote build hosts, which is a good way to work. The only problem is that getting it all set up is more difficult than it needs to be. Find out how it works and how to get started. 

eBooks

Introducing Java - Swing Objects   Friday 20 May

In the second part of our beginner's guide to Modern Java we find out more about objects by exploring the Swing framework with a simple hands-on example.