A new robot dog is being put through its paces. The Unitree Go1 looks a lot like Boston Dynamic's Spot but with a base price of $2,700 it's a lot more affordable.

If you've not visited I Programmer before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's additions to Book Watch Archive and our Book Review of the Week. This week saw the publication of Programmers Guide To Kotlin, 2nd Ed by Mike James so that's where we start.

The 2021 Eckert-Mauchly Award has been awarded to Margaret Martonosi for contributions to the design, modeling, and verification of power-efficient computer architecture which have led to new fields of research.

The beta of Chrome 92 has been launched with improvements including web apps as file handlers and new JavaScript features.

Open Source Insights is a new project by Google that helps developers understand and visualize their applications' dependencies and therefore the vulnerabilities that come with them.

Apple has announced new developer tools and features during this year's WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC), including  Xcode Cloud, a new integration and delivery service built into Xcode 13, improvements to Swift, and developer-focused improvements to Apple App Store.

In the past, Stephen Wolfram has offered prizes for proofs that are in line with his particular way of thinking about the world. Now we have a prize for proving that S is all you need.

The results of HackerEarth's second survey are in and reveal that developers are negatively impacted by Zoom meetings and dislike the lack of  post-interview feedback. These results may not be surprising but they are interesting.

Browser extension are, rightly, perceived as unsafe and yet they seem to spread like wildfire. One limiting factor is that they tend to be browser specific. Now a new group with members from all the major browser developers, aims to create a common architecture to standardize future web extensions.

Amazon has added support for global clusters to its DocumentDB database. Amazon DocumentDB was created by Amazon for its internal use to be compatible with the MongoDB API without using any MongoDB code following MongoDB's move to a paid-for model.

Prosus, one of the largest technology investors in the world, has  announced that it is acquiring Stack Overflow for US$1.8 Billion. Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar described this as "tremendously exciting news".

The Angular team has announced a new Chrome DevTools extension and a change to the way feature requests are handled.

and a laser of course. It isn't a new idea but at last someone has given it a go and made some results available. You might be surprised what the biggest problem is.

This weekly digest is a summary of our news coverage together with the latest book review and additions to our archive of new book titles plus our latest articles. This week Harry Fairhead takes a hands-on look at the SPI Linux Driver for the Raspberry Pi for IoT projects and Mike James explains how a logical deterministic device like a computer can produce random numbers.

Hector Levesque of University of Toronto and Moshe Vardi of Rice University have been named as the 2020 recipients of the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award. They share the $10,000 prize, co-funded by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Google has opened submissions for two annual developer programs - the Indie Games Accelerator and the Indie Games Festival. These programs are designed to help small games studios grow on Google Play, no matter what stage they are in.

An implementation of Basic that is fully code-compatible with VB.NET has been released. Mercury adds multi-platform support and is feature compatible with C#.

GraalVM, the runtime that compiles Java bytecode into native self-contained executables has reached version 21.1.