Developer News – Week ending March 9, 2018

Here are some of the developer news articles that appeared this past week.

Happy Reading and Happy Coding!

Mar 9 – TheVerge: Amazon adds follow-up mode for Alexa to let you make back-to-back requests – Follow-up mode works by letting Alexa continue listening for up to five seconds after an initial command. This is signified by the blue ring on an Echo speaker or other Echo device staying lit up.

Mar 9 – TechCrunch: Waymo and Google launch a self driving truck pilot in Atlanta – The pilot is being done in partnership with Google, another Alphabet company and Waymo’s former direct owner back when it was the Google self-driving car project. Waymo’s trucks will be hauling cargo destined for Google’s Atlanta-based data centres as part of the program.

Mar 8 – 9To5Mac: Tim Cook celebrates International Women’s Day as Angela Ahrendts named most inspiring woman by CNET – CNET has compiled a list of the 43 ‘women who inspire us,’ giving top billing to Apple’s retail head Angela Ahrendts.

Mar 8 – TheVerge: SXSW 2018: What to expect at Austin’s tech, media, and music extravaganza – For the uninitiated, SXSW is a kind of conference conglomerate. It mixes high-minded tech and entertainment industry speaking sessions with a long-running pair of music and film festivals.

Mar 8 – ExtremeTech: Microsoft Goes All In on AI at Its Annual Developer Day – Intel, and its Movidius VPU, were front and center as Microsoft launched an array of new AI-friendly development and runtime offerings at its Developer Day.

Mar 8 – Gizmodo: Intel Invented the Traditional SSD Killer of the Future, and It’s So Fast and So Expensive – Intel Optane 800P is super fast. Intel Optane 800P is super expensive. It is available in M2 form only, so don’t try, or expect, to plug it into a SATA port. Yet the Intel Optane 800P is hardly just another storage drive. Computing on the bleeding edge will cost you.

Mar 8 – Digital Trends: Oculus Rift re-enters virtual space after bad software caused a global blackout – “This was a mistake on our end, and we apologize,” said Oculus VR co-founder Nate Mitchell

Mar 8 – AMP Project: Standardizing lessons learned from AMP – Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel. This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible.

Mar 7 – RedMonk: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2018 – The relatively static nature of the top ten languages is interesting, certainly, in a technology landscape that is best characterized not by the high level of change but the increasing pace of same.

Mar 7 – Gizmodo: Watch This Machine Solve a Rubik’s Cube Faster Than My Jaw Can Drop – the bot relies on six Kollmorgen ServoDisc U9-series motors—often used in high-precision, high-speed robot arms—to manipulate the puzzle cube at blinding speeds.

Mar 7 – TheVerge: Oculus Rift headsets have stopped working because of an expired certificate – The file causing issues is called OculusAppFramework.dll and needs to be updated in order for the headsets and software to run as normal.

Mar 5 – Google AI Blog: A Preview of Bristlecone, Google’s New Quantum Processor – Google presented Bristlecone, a new quantum processor, at the annual American Physical Society meeting in Los Angeles. The purpose of this gate-based superconducting system is to provide a testbed for research into system error rates and scalability of our qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning.

Mar 5 – Ars Technica: LTE security flaws could be used for spying, spreading chaos – Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa conducting tests of 4G LTE networks have uncovered 10 new types of attacks.

Mar 5 – ZDNet: Cloud computing is eating the world: Should we be worried? – Data used to live on the mainframe; then it moved to the PC and the corporate data centre; now it has moved on again, into the cloud.

Mar 1 – DZone: 10 Classic Software Development Books for Programmers – a list of 9 classic development titles, which can often be found floating around in your engineering team’s book collection, or can be picked up second hand at reasonable prices if you aren’t able to buy them new.