News

No Super Turing Machines   Wednesday 15 February

Every now and again you will read of a breakthrough claiming that some weird computer or other can solve NP problems in P. Putting this another way, we are presented with a super Turing machine capable of computing something that is non-computable. It usually turns out to be more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Microsoft MVP Deal Gets Even Worse   Wednesday 15 February

Microsoft is cutting back still further on the benefits it offers members of its Most Valued Professional (MVP) award program. Given the amount of work an MVP puts in for free isn't it time to end the exploitation?

Bitesnap - Applying Deep Learning to Calorie Counting   Wednesday 15 February

Bitesnap is a recently launched mobile app that uses photo recognition to help you control your calorie intake. To learn more, we interviewed Keith Ito, one of the app's core developers to discuss Bitesnap's revolutionary vision for the food sector as well as the technological infrastructure behind it.

UK Initiative To Increase Pool Of Cyber Security Professionals   Tuesday 14 February

The UK government has announced £20 million in funding for the Cyber Schools programme, a scheme to deliver cyber security training to school pupils aged between 14 and 18. The target is for 5,700 teenagers to be trained by 2021 and girls are being given extra encouragement to get involved.

RethinkDB Resurfaces With Linux Foundation   Tuesday 14 February

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has bought the source code to the recently mothballed RethinkDB NoSQL JSON database. It relicensed the code under the Apache License, and contributed it to The Linux Foundation.  

Android Wear 2.0 Launched   Monday 13 February

With the launch of Android Wear 2.0, we also have hard facts on the new models. Are they and the new features enough to make things interesting? 

ACM Celebrates 50 Years of Turing Award   Monday 13 February

This year the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is marking 50 years of its most prestigious prize, the A.M. Turing Award. The celebrations will culminate in a conference in June, to be held in San Francisco  and also streamed live online, exploring how computing has evolved and where the field is headed.

//No Comment - Super Resolution, Face Aging & Gender-From-Iris   Sunday 12 February

• Pixel Recursive Super Resolution

• Face Aging With Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

• Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?

Amazon Rekognition Can Now Estimate Your Age   Saturday 11 February

Amazon is the quiet one when it comes to AI, but it has a number of well-developed AI services that are worth knowing about. To attract your attention, its computer vision system Rekognition will now guess, sorry, estimate, your age. 

Android Things Dev Preview 2 Could Be What We Need!   Friday 10 February

Android Things is Google's attempt to get into the IoT world. The first preview wasn't impressive, but now we have Developer Preview 2 and it seems to fix many of the problems. This could be the IoT OS we all use. Updated: Still not fast enough.

Top 10 From Around the Web - CMS Development Resources   Friday 10 February

This round up of interesting posts from external sites has resources for those learning about and working with WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

Asus Tinker Board Withdrawn From Sale   Thursday 09 February

Asus made news a few weeks ago by launching a competitor to the Raspberry Pi - the Asus Tinker Board - but it has now been withdrawn from sale. 

Google Makes Data Studio Freer   Thursday 09 February

Google has removed a major restriction from the free version of Data Studio, its dashboarding and reporting tool. Until now, the free version was limited to creating five reports, but you can now create and share as many reports as you want. 

The Core

Getting Started With Google's Android Things - Preview 2   Monday 13 February

Google's Android Things is a new IoT platform. It is based on Android, but the documentation lags behind the software. Find out what it has to offer and how to write your first program, which is, of course, Blinky. On the way we find out just how fast and efficient it is in both Java and C++.
Updated for Preview 2.

Getting Started With QUnit Testing   Thursday 09 February

Testing JavaScript with qUnit is very easy and it rewards the effort you put in many times over. Find out how easy it is to add some tests to an existing JavaScript program.