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GitHub to devs: pick a license, we dare you
When Microsoft announced back in January that its flagship development tools Visual Studio and Team Foundation Service would play nicely with Git, it was a sign that the tool and its online manifestation GitHub had become part of the programming furniture.
Many supporters chalk that status up as a win for all things open source …
Dear Linus, STOP SHOUTING and play nice - says Linux kernel dev
A Linux developer has blasted the kernel's chief Linus Torvalds, taking him to task for his famous potty mouth and brutal putdowns of his lieutenants.
It's time for Torvalds to stop "verbally abusing" his programmers, Sarah Sharp told the fiery Finn, warning him she’s "not taking it any more". The USB 3.0 driver maintainer …
The Yawhg vs XCOM: Enemy Unknown. How small devs can win against the big boys
Game Theory As far as the recipe for a successful new gaming genre would go, the combination of an essentially text-based role-playing adventure with a beery party game would seem very wide of the mark. Crunching stats and hardcore partying hardly seem to go together.
Colour me wrong, however, for in Emily Carroll and Damian Sommer’s PC- …
Fedora back on track with Schrödinger's cat
Fedora 19, codenamed Schrödinger's Cat, follows the much-delayed Fedora 18 and the good news is things looks to be back on track. Not only is the release just a week away but it also sees Fedora returning to its core focus: building useful software for developers.
The Ubuntu Linux distro may be busy tricking out its new touch- …
Home Office opens up anonymised crime data API
Crime-conscious citizens can now view the raw data behind official stats website police.uk after the Home Office made the data freely available to download.
The police.uk site, which got off to a shaky start at its 2011 launch, offers policing and crime information for local areas, as well as a Google Maps-based visualisation of …
Firefox OS mobilises HTML5, without the added Steve Jobs
Review Do you want to build applications for Firefox OS? The first step is to head over to the Mozilla website and sign up for a developer kit.
Just kidding, there's no developer kit. There are also no developer fees and no new programming languages to learn. You can start building apps for Firefox OS today, using nothing more than …
REVEALED: Google's GINORMOUS £650m London Choc Factory
What would you do if you had a golden ticket that helped you avoid having to cough a big wodge of tax cash?
Well, if you were Google, you'd build a hulking great glass monstrosity as wide as The Shard is tall, smack bang in the middle of London.
The advertising giant has filed plans for a new £650m, 330m-long UK Chocolate …
Windows 8.1: Here at last, but is it good enough?
Live Chat The de-cloaking of Windows 8.1 at Microsoft's BUILD conference was greeted with cheers from attendees as the company finally confirmed changes following a major U-turn.
Yes, there's a Start Button but it's really no more than an onscreen version of your keyboard's Windows key. Metro loosens the ideological shackles: you can skip …
Microsoft partners seriously underwhelmed by Windows 8.1
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised a flood of touch-enabled devices to fill the market as he previewed Windows 8.1, but is the technology channel raring to snap them up? Not really, it seems.
Redmond's very own bald eagle last night said the "rapid release" upgrade - which comes with a revolutionary Start button - will blend " …
iOS7 headshaking interface revealed
Fanbois fond of whipping their hair back and forth will be pleased to know that hidden in the accessibility options of iOS7 is an interface driven by head movements, although some of the experimenters report being locked into a head-shaking paradigm.
The feature is clearly a beta concept, and aimed at those unable to use a touch …
Welsh gov beats off Canada to hand £1m to Nintendo dev
Game development firm OysterWorld is opening up a base in south Wales that will bring 60 jobs to the region in the next three years.
Wales beat out Canada as the site for the development, marketing and research centre, which will be backed by £1m from the Welsh government.
“Attracting a significant player like Oyster World, …
Mint 15 freshens Ubuntu's bad bits
Review Mint is a relative newcomer to the world of popular desktop distros, but it has recently started to take the GNOME and Unity-hating Linux world by storm.
The recent release of version 15, called Olivia, should help it secure a reputation as “the” alternative desktop. If you'd like a modern set of desktop tools without a …
Windows 8.1 start button appears as Microsoft's Blue wave breaks
Microsoft's Blue wave of Windows, tools and services updates has started breaking complete with an early glimpse of the Windows 8.1 start button.
The company revealed on Tuesday the availability of Windows Server and System Center 2012 RT, Windows Intune and SQL Server 2014 and Visual Studio 2013. MSDN subscribers had started …
Ed Iacobucci: Brains behind OS/2 and Citrix, nicest guy in tech
Obituary About a year before air taxi DayJet was scheduled to launch, Ed Iacobucci, who died last week, called me up to make sure I was thoroughly briefed on what he was doing and how it worked. We spent over an hour on the phone, no PowerPoints, no marketing pitch, just Ed explaining, making sure I got it.
It’s not normal for CEOs to do …
My Moto RAZR V3 wants a firmware hack. Any documentation?
A request from Reg forums, where dogged, a silver badge commentard, asks:
I've decided to do something about my old Motorola RAZR V3xx. I love this thing. The form factor is perfect. It's pocket size, it's damage resistant, it's HSDPA, it's easy to use, it never drops calls, it gets four days usage from its tiny battery without …
Google's JavaScript challenger gains better tools, performance
Hot on the heels of Microsoft's latest TypeScript release, Google has shipped the first beta SDK for Dart, its own JavaScript killer alternative web language, including bug fixes, performance enhancements, and an improved editor.
Like TypeScript, Dart is a language aimed at making it easier to develop large, complex web …
Foreign keys, JavaScript support on deck for MySQL Cluster update
Following more than 12 months of development and preview releases, Oracle has announced general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.3, bringing a number of important new features and enhancements to the open source clustering add-on for the MySQL database.
The really big news, according to a press release issued on Tuesday, is the …
TypeScript 0.9 arrives with new compiler, support for generics
Microsoft on Tuesday announced TypeScript 0.9.0, the latest version of its JavaScript killer alternative web language, which Redmond describes as the "largest update to TypeScript to date."
In addition to the usual assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements, this release includes a number of significant new language …
Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++
Stob Now it has been scientifically demonstrated that we Delphi users are the happiest of all programmers, proper significance can at last be attached to the rare woes that occasionally break through our Stepford Coder personas.
My test case: Warren Postma, a Delphi-head, was recently forced out of his comfort zone to repair a C++ …
Sony allows hacking of its unloved SmartWatch
Sony has opened the code for its SmartWatch and will allow developers to write their own firmware for the Android-powered device.
Sony's watch uses Bluetooth to connect to Android devices and sucks information from them so its 128x128 pixel screen can display nuggets of information like the arrival of new TXT messages or Tweets …
Red Hat to ditch MySQL for MariaDB in RHEL 7
In a surprise move, Red Hat has announced that version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will ship with the MariaDB database installed by default, in place of MySQL.
The announcement was made at the company's Red Hat Summit, which wrapped up in Boston on Friday.
MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that was launched in 2009 by …
Apple: iOS7 dayglo Barbie makeover is UNFINISHED - report
Well, this would never have happened under Steve Jobs. Apple sources have briefed a friendly tech blog that the much-mocked iOS7 makeover is still provisional. When was the last time Apple felt obliged to defend anything?
The Barbie-flavoured icons revealed at Apple's WWDC on Monday are merely a "mid-stride snapshot", according …
Java EE 7 melds HTML5 with enterprise apps
Oracle has announced public availability of Java EE 7, the first major release of the enterprise formulation of Java since the database giant took control of the platform in 2010. The last version shipped way back in 2009.
Support for HTML5 and related technologies is one of the key themes of this release. Among the new APIs …
Interwebs taunt Sir Jony over Apple eye candy makeover
Peak Apple What do we know today that we didn't know on Monday? Don't let Sir Jony Ive anywhere near your icons. Ive may be the world's most famous industrial designer, but his first attempt at creating a new look for iOS 7 has attracted confusion and mirth in equal quantities.
Here's some of the brilliance that inspired the sniggering …
Oz airline Qantas breaks own WinPhone app
The Qantas Windows Phone app, which featured at the launch of Windows Phone 7.5 and 8, is currently broken and doesn't allow users to generate boarding passes.
The app was shown off and/or mentioned at various Microsoft events last year and attracted development assistance from Redmond's Australian outpost. It even won an award …
PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)
Prime Minister David Cameron has made some baffling remarks on IT in a speech to the G8 Summit calling for greater clarity.
Speaking specifically on the subject of the UK's national curriculum and how vital it is to get "education right", Cameron told the confab:
We’re proposing more arithmetic and algebra in maths, more detail …
Tim Cook: Android version fragmentation is 'terrible for developers'
Before CEO Tim Cook handed over the iOS 7–introduction chores to other Apple execs at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference, he took a moment to slag Android and its OS fragmentation in an appeal for the hearts and minds of developers.
"This version fragmentation is terrible for developers, as many of you know," he told …
Microsoft buys InRelease for app building toolbox
TechEd Not entirely satisfied with its application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, Microsoft has paid an undisclosed sum to buy software deployment tools from InCycle Software.
The announcement was made at the TechEd 2013 customer and partner event that Microsoft is hosting in New Orleans this week. Redmond also teased a bit about …
How Microsoft shattered Gnome's unity with Windows 95
Feature There never will be a year when Linux conquers the desktop, because desktop computers are going to merge into tablet-style touch-driven devices and disappear. But desktop Linux was getting close, until Microsoft derailed it a few years back.
The GNOME project’s recent release, GNOME 3.8, served to remind me of the significance …
Google nuke thyself: Mountain View's H.264 righteous flame-out
Back in 2010, champions of a free web were ecstatic over Google's plan to seed the internet with a patent-free video. VP8 was going to crush the patent-heavy H.264, now celebrating its 10th birthday. Or so we were told.
In May of 2010, Google open-sourced VP8, the video compression codec component to the audio-visual WebM format …
Opera debuts Chromium-luvvin' desktop browser Next 15
The biggest change to Opera's browser in 17 years has debuted, with code for Opera Next released today for Windows and Mac.
Opera Software today announced the beta availability of a completely re-engineered version of its browser that rips out the old plumbing in favour of Chromium, the open-source code that's the basis for …
We gave SQL Server 2012 one year to prove itself: What happened?
Deep dive I reviewed SQL Server 2012, codenamed Denali, just over a year back and highlighted the major improvements in Microsoft's relational database. After a year in production, was I right, or have other features proved more important in practice?
I'm bound to agree with my last review, so I polled colleagues who also work with SQL …
Amazon expands Appstore reach, gives devs more user data
Looking to woo more app publishers to its Android Appstore and away from Google Play, Amazon has announced new tools that allow developers to track user engagement with their apps.
The new Engagement Reports announced on Friday provide a variety of metrics, including daily and monthly average revenue per device, average revenue …
Samsung, carriers tout first Tizen mobes for late 2013
TDC2013 You could be forgiven for thinking there's not much going on with Tizen, the Linux Foundation's open source mobile OS. It's been two years since the project was launched and there still are no Tizen devices on the market. But that's about to change – and there has been a lot happening behind the scenes, as well.
"Tizen-based …
Dev writes comments as limericks and other coding secrets
An anonymous developer has admitted to writing comments in code as limericks.
The confession can be found at codingconfessional.com, a site devoted entirely to divulgements of developers' depravities.
Here, for example, is the limerick chap's work:
“I write most comments in limerick It makes all my coworkers sick My comments …
Intel releases 'Beacon Mountain' Android-on-Atom dev tool
Indroid Inside Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery.
Beacon Mountain emerged over the weekend, promising “productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for apps targeting … smartphones and tablets.”
The software's in version 0.5 …
IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL
IBM is giving its COBOL environment a cloudy flavour with an update to the ancient venerable and unkillable language.
To the cool kids, COBOL probably looks like a zombie, complete with loose bits of decaying flesh. However it still accounts for a vast amount of operational enterprise code that's too expensive to replace all in …
Google's Native Code browser tech goes cross-platform
Google I/O At its annual I/O conference in San Francisco this week, Google unveiled a new version of its Native Client technology that allows developers to deploy binary code for web applications in an architecture-independent way.
With the original version of Native Client (NaCl), developers could write modules in C or C++ and compile …
Microsoft conceals job ad in Bing homepage
Microsoft are looking for a new Bing developer - but you'll need to be pretty smart to apply. Oh, and you can only use Internet Explorer, which rules a fair number of applicants out.
Visitors to the Bing homepage are currently greeted with a weird blue environment of some sort as the background to the search bar. But rich …
Oracle updates Java versioning to allow more security fixes
Seemingly borrowing a page from the old, line-numbered BASIC programs of the 1980s, Oracle has adopted a new version numbering strategy for the Java Development Kit (JDK) – one that skips numbers, in case Oracle has to go back and plunk in new code later.
Traditionally, Oracle has issued new patches for the JDK on a predictable …
Live Blog: Google I/O keynote
Google I/O At 7am this morning, the streets of San Francisco were thronged with developers lining up to get into Google's annual I/O conference.
Over 6,000 delegates have signed up for the show and they all want the best seats for the opening keynote presentation that will lay out Google's plans for the next year's developments in Android …
World Web Consortium warms HTML bed for forced DRM snuggle
The World Web Consortium (W3C) is pressing ahead with plans to standardise Digital Rights Management (DRM) in HTML, despite opposition to the proposal.
The W3C's chief executive Jeff Jaffe announced imminent publication of a first draft of the specification for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) on Thursday.
The draft is now here …
