News

Visual Studio Gets Quantum Language   Wednesday 27 September

Microsoft has announced it is releasing a new programming language and computing simulator designed specifically for quantum computing, and the language will be included in Visual Studio. 

Firefox Developer Edition Goes Quantum   Wednesday 27 September

Firefox is toward the end of a complete overhaul and the first to benefit is the developer edition, now called Firefox Quantum. Fittingly the dev edition is a beta, which is why we are first. 

Azure Machine Learning Enhancements   Wednesday 27 September

Three new strands to Azure Machine Learning (AML) were launched at Microsoft Ignite this week. Also announced was the integration of AML with Excel bringing AI functions to spreadsheets. 

Komodo 11 With Revamped Code Intelligence   Tuesday 26 September

Active State has released the latest versions of it cross-platform Komodo IDE and its free open-source counterpart Komodo EDIT. Komodo IDE 11 now features Smart and responsive autocomplete and symbol browser for faster overall performance. 

Swift 4 Improves String Handling   Tuesday 26 September

There's a new version of Apple's Swift programming language with a better package manager and improvements to string handling. 

Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded IET Faraday Medal   Tuesday 26 September

Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, is the 2017 winner of the Faraday Medal is the most prestigious award of the UK-based Institution of Engineering and Technology. 

Fast Data Requires New Frameworks   Monday 25 September

Developers are adopting new streaming data frameworks and turning to microservices to meet the need to use data faster according to a report from Lightbend presented at today's Strata Data Conference being held in New York. 

Facebook Re-licences React To MIT Licence   Monday 25 September

Facebook has, very reasonably, given into pressure from all sides to change the licence of many of its open source project from the contentious BSD+patents to the more familiar and friendly MIT License. 

Wolfram 11.2 Improves Image Processing   Monday 25 September

The latest version of Mathematica and the Wolfram language have been released. Version 11.2 improves the options for audio and image processing, as well as adding more functions for mathematical computation, task handling and machine learning. 

Tetris On Game Of Life - A Great Achievement   Sunday 24 September

It is one thing to know that something unlikely is Turing complete; it is quite another to use it to build a computer and then implement something real. This is exactly what has just happened with Conway's Game Of Life with the construction of a computer to play Tetris. This is a remarkable achievement that should send your brain into a tailspin. 

Matternet - Life Saving Distribution By Drone   Saturday 23 September

The newly unveiled Matternet Station, together with Matternet's cloud platform and its autonomous M2 drones, is a viable solution for delivering small payloads where speed is essential. Its latest demonstration is in delivering vital medical supplies. 

Game of Codes Competitions - UPDATE   Friday 22 September

A "Game of Codes" online competition with $20K in prizes is underway, ending on September 24. There is still plenty of opportunity to win a $50 gift card and the number of points required to win one of 500 tee-shirts has been reduced to 5. 

WebAssembly Computer Vision Experiments   Friday 22 September

If you need convincing that WebAssembly is going to change the way we program web apps take a look at WebSight which shows that it is twenty times faster than JavaScript at a face detection task and twice as fast as asm.js 

The Discovery Of The Twitter Bursty Botnet   Friday 22 September

There is no doubt that bots are a growing problem, but perhaps it is a bigger problem than any of us imagine. Researchers have discovered a Twitter botnet with over 500,000 bots, and it isn't a simple one. 

Java 9 Finally Appears   Thursday 21 September

Java SE version 9 is finally released today, following what have seemed like endless delays. The main change to the new version is support for modules, aka Jigsaw.  

ImageNet Training Record - 24 Minutes   Thursday 21 September

One of the problems with neural networks is how long it takes to train them. Researchers have just smashed the training barrier by reducing the time to train ResNet from 14 days to one hour and have claimed a world record of 24 minutes for AlexNet with a lower hardware budget than used for the task by Facebook. 

The Core

Why Predix Uses Cloud Foundry   Monday 25 September

Predix is GE's software platform for the Industrial Internet, and it is designed to handle big data at an industrial scale. When deployed in the cloud it relies the open source cloud application platform, Cloud Foundry. 

How WiFi Works   Thursday 21 September

WiFi has freed the computer from being tied to a network connection by wires. If you think your tablet or smartphone is fun, imagine if you needed a wire to connect it to the Internet. But WiFi isn't just a dumb radio transmitter and receiver, it is a sophisticated computer in its own right and it deserves to be better understood.