News

AI Beats Top Poker Players   Wednesday 01 February

 After a marathon match of No Limit Texas Hold'em against four of the world's best professional poker players, Libratus an AI developed at Carnegie Mellon by a decisive $1.77 million in chips. 

Bjarne Stroustrup Thinks He Has A Better Way To Do Generics   Wednesday 01 February

Bjarne Stroustrup is, of course, the inventor of C++. Over time he has added features to it and now he is proposing to add Concepts to make generics work like they always should have. 

Pythonroom Brings Coding to the Classroom   Wednesday 01 February

Describing itself as a book, Pythonroom is available to all, whether in a classroom or not. Needing just a browser to run, and so suitable for a multitude of desktops and mobile devices, it provides an ideal jump start for kids to start learning coding.

AI With The Best Online With Geoffrey Hinton   Tuesday 31 January

An online conference covering cutting edge topics in Artificial Intelligence with speakers including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio takes place at the end of April. Book your place now for a saving of 50%.

JDK 9 is Feature Complete   Tuesday 31 January

 JDK 9 is now feature complete, and the general availability date for Java 9 Standard Edition has been announced as July 27th 2017. 

Fear And Loathing In The App Store 17 - The Strange Case Of AdNauseam   Monday 30 January

Google has just banned a Chrome plugin and removed it from all existing installations. Using it can get your You Tube channel banned. Google really does not like this software. Why?

Mozilla Firefox Replacing Gecko With Servo   Monday 30 January

The time has finally come for Firefox to upgrade the aging Gecko rendering engine that served it for 20 or some years.The upgrade will enable Firefox to take full advantage of modern CPU's and GPU's, and result in lighting fast performance improvements on both desktop and mobile devices.

New Magazine for Computing Education   Sunday 29 January

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched Hello World a magazine about computing and digital making aimed at, and written by, educators. Issue 1 is available now as a print magazine in the UK and a downloadable pdf worldwide.

//No Comment - Rubber Band Input, RGB-LED Emotion & Cardiovascular Computer Interaction   Sunday 29 January

• Rubber Band As Input Device

• RGB-LED-based Emotion Display

• Cardiovascular Signals In Computer Interaction

Software Makes Cheap Dumb Robots Interesting - Bots_Alive   Saturday 28 January

A project to make spider robots come alive via your smartphone has already reached its initial target on Kickstarter. A bots_alive kit transforms the remote-controlled Hexbug Spider into an autonomous, intelligent critter for just $35.

Android Instant Apps Enter Live Testing   Friday 27 January

Last year at Google I/O the one of the most interesting announcements was the idea of an instant app. A sort of crossover between a native app and a web app. Now they are almost here with the start of live testing.

Top 10 From Around the Web - eCommerce Development   Friday 27 January

eCommerce, in particular Shopify and Magento, is the focus of this trawl around the web to bring you items of interest that you otherwise might not have found.

Bing Maps SDK Adds Cardinal Splines   Thursday 26 January

There's a new version of the Bing Maps web control with support for cardinal splines and multiple map support.

Early Bird Savings For SDD 2017   Thursday 26 January

The Software Design and Development Conference takes place from 15-19 May. Register by midnight on January 27th, to benefit from a significant discount whether you book for a single workshop, for the 3-day conference or for a 5-day pass.

//No Comment - Healing Data Loss, Android App Collusion Threat & Malware Detection   Thursday 26 January

• Healing Data Loss Problems in Android Apps 

• Android App Collusion Threat and Mitigation Techniques

• Monet: A User-oriented Behavior-based Malware Variants Detection System for Android

The Core

jQuery 3 - Function Queues   Monday 30 January

The jQuery function queue is probably one of the best ideas you will ever encounter, but it hardly gets a mention. The reason is that the problem it solves isn't an obvious one and neither is the way it is solved. It also doesn't help that function queues are usually introduced as a way to do animation - they are so much more.

Babbage's Bag

Grammar and Torture   Thursday 26 January

Computational grammar is a subject that is sometimes viewed as a form of torture by computer science students, but understanding something about it really does help ....