News

The Virtual Evolution Of Walking   Wednesday 22 January

Simulated bipedal creatures can learn to walk naturally without any input as to how they should do it. They even learn to adopt different gaits according to the speed they are trying to move at. The technique is simple in theory but the difficulties are in the detail. A new video of a variety of virtual creatures learning is fun to watch as they slowly evolve and fall over.

Coursera Offers CS Specialization Certificates   Wednesday 22 January

Coursera has announced a new initiative whereby students who complete a series of course on a specific topic can earn a Specialization Certificate. There are four Computer Science options among the initial programs, including Data Science.

AI's Founding Father Marvin Minsky Wins Award   Tuesday 21 January

This year's BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone to Marvin Minsky, regarded as a founding father of the field of artificial intelligence.

ATMs Not Ready For XP Deadline   Tuesday 21 January

It is estimated that 95% of the world's ATM machines are still running XP and many banks and businesses are buying custom tech support agreements to give them some leeway in upgrading

Dart 1.1 Released   Tuesday 21 January

Just two months after the 1.0 release, Dart 1.1 is available with better performance, more features, and improved tools.

Silverlight Support Roadmap   Monday 20 January

OpenBSD Appeal For Funding Finds Sponsor   Monday 20 January

Until late last night OpenBSD was facing shut down through not having the funding to pay its electricity bills. It appears to have been saved from this fate by a Romanian Bitcoin billionaire.

JDK 8 Will Ship On Schedule Even With Bugs   Monday 20 January

The release manager for JDK 8 says Oracle will keep to the JDK 8 schedule and will ship on March 18, even if it still has ‘non-showstopper bugs’.

Robots Rescue People   Sunday 19 January

While the DARPA Robotics Challenge was underway most people were watching the big bipedal robots attempting their challenges, but over at the expo area there was a different view of how robots could help.

Google Mines Music   Saturday 18 January

Google's Big Picture Group specializes in creating interesting visualizations of complex data. The latest offering shows you just how the music has changed - unless it's classical music. 

Chrome Mobile Uses Proxy For Data Compression   Friday 17 January

Amazon's Silk browser and Opera have both made use of proxy servers to speed up web page delivery. Now Google has adopted the same idea and added it to Chrome on Android and iOS with estimated savings of 50%.

Online Computer Science Masters Pilot MOOC Opens   Friday 17 January

Georgia Tech's new online Master's degree in Computer Science program, OMS CS, developed in conjunction with Udacity and AT&T has started with around 375 students.

BUILD 2014 Sold Out - What Can We Expect?   Thursday 16 January

Tickets for Microsoft's Developer Conference sold out in just over 24 hours. The event is again being held at  the Moscone Center in San Francisco but is earlier in the year - its dates being April 2nd-4th. 

Intel Asks Us To Make It Wearable   Thursday 16 January

Intel's latest challenge is for designing wearable technology. It is offering more than $1.3 million to entice developers to join in a revolution in which personal computing is redefined and becomes part of who we are as digital technology becomes integrated with the physical.

Amazon Developer Portal Refreshed   Thursday 16 January

Amazon.com has opened a new-look portal that aims to help developers create Android apps for its Appstore and take advantage of its cross-platform APIs with the help of better tools and documentation.

The Core

Android Adventures - Getting Started With Android Studio   Tuesday 21 January

Google's Android Studio makes creating native Android apps very easy. You can get started in a few minutes and by the end of this article have your first working Android application. This ongoing series on programming Android, now up to part seven has been updated to the latest version of Android Studio.

Projects

Custom Projects In Android Studio   Thursday 16 January

Android Studio is developing rapidly. So rapidly that the documentation is getting well left behind. So how do you create a custom project or activity template? In particular how to you create a simple blank project type that doesn't use a fragment.