News

Google Says HTTP Cookies Are Evil - Get Rid of Them   Wednesday 22 August

I have to admit that some might take issue with the title - but the latest proposal to ban HTTP Cookies is from the development team of Blink, the layout engine at the core of Chrome. It may not come to anything, but it is another example of the browser makers attempting to set standards which suits them. 

DARPA Launches $3 Million Subterranean Challenge   Wednesday 22 August

DARPA has launched a competition that's massive in the length of time it'll run and the prize money - $3 million is on offer! The competition is to invent novel approaches and technologies to allow warfighters and first responders to rapidly map, navigate, and search dynamic underground environments, and there's a virtual element as well as a physical competition. 

BackYourStack To Provide Open Source With Financial Security   Wednesday 22 August

Open Collective has come up with an new initiative that makes it easy  for companies to identify the open source projects that they depend on that also need funding and make a financial contribution. BackYourStack provides a new way for open source communities get paid for the work they do and become financially sustainable.  

COBOL To Java Explored  
Tuesday 21 August

There's an interesting write-up of the experience of migrating a COBOL system running on an IBM mainframe to Java on Linux. The data was taken from VSAM KSDS files to Oracle.  

Microsoft Takes Census to Determine What Bits of .NET to Port to .NET Core   Monday 20 August

Microsoft announced at Build this year that it would port existing platform-specific elements of .NET to .NET Core, but which bits? The simple answer of "all of it" doesn't seem to be acceptable and so it's time for users to tell Microsoft what is essential. 

Source Code Search Engine Adds Internal Page Indexing   Monday 20 August

Source Code Search Engine, an engine for searching web page source code, has added internal page indexing.  The search engine has also now indexed 300 million websites. The engine can be used to search for any HTML, JavaScript, CSS or plaintext in web page source code and download a list of websites that contain it. 

More Efficient Style Transfer Algorithm  
Sunday 19 August

Researchers from NVIDIA and the University of California, Merced have developed a new, more effective, deep learning-based algorithm for style transfer in order to make technique more widely adopted for achieving photorealistic results. 

Computing With Trains - Turing's Trains  
Saturday 18 August

It is amazing what is Turing complete. It seems that all you need is something to implement a universal gate and you're home and dry. But trains? Duplo trains in this case, have some powerful, almost hidden, computational abilities. Are they Turing complete? Of course they are. 

Microsoft Launches AI Idea Challenge  
Friday 17 August

Microsoft has launched a challenge for innovative, breakthrough AI solutions from developers, students, professionals and data scientists. Preference will be given for solutions developed on the Microsoft AI platform and with Microsoft services. 

Knuth Prize Awarded For Contributions To Computational Complexity   Friday 17 August

Swedish theoretical computer scientist Johan Håstad has been named as the recipient of the 2018 Donald E. Knuth Prize for his contributions to computational complexity theory. 

Language Ranking Almost Unchanged Over Time  
Thursday 16 August

RedMonk has published the latest of its twice-yearly language rankings for Q3 2018. The Top 10 remains virtually unchanged from Q3 2017 and shows only minor variation from Q3 2015.  Does this reflect a lack of progress or is it welcome stability.

F# 4.5 Adds Span Support  
Thursday 16 August

There's an update to F#. While Microsoft remains the main driver behind the language, the F# team at Microsoft says Version 4.5 has been developed entirely via an open RFC process, with significant contributions from the community, especially in feature discussions and demonstrating use cases. 

Professional Programmer

How To Crack Java Certification  
Monday 20 August

Java is, and is set to remain, the primary language for the professional programmer. There are 1.8 million Oracle Certified Developers and they earn more, 13.7% on average, than their non-certified colleagues. Here we look at the latest exams for Java Certification and how to prepare for them.

History

The SWTP Effect -The Microcomputer Revolution In The UK Thursday 16 August

In this third and final part of our look at the early days of the microcomputer revolution as it happened in the UK, we focus on the amazing and idiosyncratic SWTP family of computers which played the role in the UK that the Altair did in the US.