John Weatherford writing on Medium (via Federico Viticci):
TL;DR: Apple has apparently, via some sort of collaboration with a university professor, published last week — during WWDC — a really solid-looking learn-to-code curriculum for Swift that is kind of on iTunes U but that is really on GitHub.
§Friday, June 26, 2015
Arik Hesseldahl reporting for Re/Code:
The move is the latest in a string of strategic partnerships that both companies have struck in recent months. Earlier this month Box reached a deal to allow Microsoft Office users to collaborate on documents via Box’s cloud services. And IBM has in the last year reached agreements with Apple to bring mobile devices and software to large companies, and to mine data from Twitter.
§Thursday, June 25, 2015
The new Test Drive website carries over the most popular demos from the old site.
A core focus of Microsoft Edge is delivering greater interoperability across browsers, so the web just works for users on any device and on any platform. The new Test Drive supports this goal by providing web developers with feature demos that demonstrate how to build interoperable code based on new web platform features. To make this process as easy as possible, we are excited to open-source all our feature demos on GitHub, so anyone can learn and reuse this code in any website (or contribute fixes!).
§Tuesday, June 23, 2015
To further read about Apache Spark, Sean Owen, from Cloudera wrote a post last March explaining the value added by Apache Spark:
The array of tools available to data scientists tells a story of unfortunate tradeoffs:
- R offers a rich environment for statistical analysis and machine learning, but it has some rough edges when performing many of the data processing and cleanup tasks that are required before the real analysis work can begin. As a language, it’s not similar to the mainstream languages developers know.
- Python is a general purpose programming language with excellent libraries for data analysis like Pandas and scikit-learn. But like R, it’s still limited to working with an amount of data that can fit on one machine.
- It’s possible to develop distributed machine learning algorithms on the classic MapReduce computation framework in Hadoop (see Apache Mahout). But MapReduce is notoriously low-level and difficult to express complex computations in.
- Apache Crunch offers a simpler, idiomatic Java API for expressing MapReduce computations. But still, the nature of MapReduce makes it inefficient for iterative computations, and most machine learning algorithms have an iterative component.
And so on. There are both gaps and overlaps between these and other data science tools. Coming from a background in Java and Hadoop, I do wonder with envy sometimes: why can’t we have a nice REPL-like investigative analytics environment like the Python and R users have? That’s still scalable and distributed? And has the nice distributed-collection design of Crunch? And can equally be used in operational contexts?
§Friday, June 19, 2015
Steve Lohr writes for the New York Times Bits Blog, following IBM’s announcement to put more than 3500 developers and researchers to work on Spark-related projects:
The Spark technology was developed at the Algorithms, Machines and People Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. A group from the Berkeley lab founded a company two years ago, Databricks, which offers Spark software as a cloud service.
Spark, Mr. Picciano said, is crucial technology that will make it possible to “really deliver on the promise of big data.” That promise, he said, is to quickly gain insights from data to save time and costs, and to spot opportunities in fields like sales and new product development.
§Friday, June 19, 2015
Swapnil Bhartiya writing for ITWorld:
There are two editions of LibreOffice available on the Mac App Store: LibreOffice from Collabora and LibreOffice Vanilla. While the Vanilla edition can be downloaded free of cost, LO from Collabora has a price tag of $10.
The paid version is targeted at the business and public sector and comes with three years of maintenance updates. There are many differences between the two versions, Michael Meeks, the vice-president of productivity at Collabora and a board member of The Document Format explained to me: “Vanilla is the latest ‘fresh’ code branch produced by volunteers at TDF. LibreOffice-from-Collabora is based on the LibreOffice ‘stable’ code branch with some featured back-ports, and is maintained long-term (3 years vs 6 months for Vanilla).’’
§Thursday, June 18, 2015
A very insightful article about the implication of this LLVM Intermediate Representation format on the future CPU in the Apple Watch, or in the Macintosh:
LLVM turns an app’s source code into Bitcode, and then turns that Bitcode into an executable app. This design makes it incredibly simple to add support for new languages (front ends), and for new CPUs (back ends). While Bitcode itself can’t run on anything, it can be transformed into any supported CPU architecture, including ones that didn’t exist when the app was submitted.
UPDATE: There is a thread at yCombinator from drfuchs that has some clarifications on what is feasible with Bitcode:
I managed to ask Chris Lattner this very question at WWDC (during a moment when he wasn’t surrounded by adoring crowds). “So, you’re signaling a new CPU architecture?” But, “No; think more along the lines of ‘adding a new multiply instruction’. By the time you’re in Bitcode, you’re already fairly architecture-specific” says he.
§Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Microsoft today announced a major reorganization among its top executives (via Brian Katz.)
§Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Following Facebook announcement to track the way readers scroll through their news feed, Julia Greenberg writes for WIRED:
Along with more accurately capturing what readers really care about, the hope among many journalists is that measuring the success of stories based on time spent may mean that their publishers (and Facebook’s algorithms) will start showing preference for high-quality stories that truly engage readers over throwaway clickbait that readers click on but quickly leave.
§Tuesday, June 16, 2015
“We are excited that a handful of private companies have chosen to pursue this effort,” SpaceX said in a statement. “Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.”
§Monday, June 15, 2015
Flipboard’s CEO, Mike McCue reacts to Apple News application, on the June 11th episode of the BBC Tech Tent podcast titled “Twitter Turmoil” (fast forward to 8’34’’):
“We’re clearly onto something at Flibboard. What Apple was showing is something that we actually shipped 5 years ago. In the world that we live in today, you have to be able to both work with companies and even when they are competing with you on certain fronts, that does not mean you don’t work with them, you still find opportunites to work with that. And in doing that, what you typically find are ways in which you can continue to grow, this is not a winner takes all situation.”
§Saturday, June 13, 2015
A masterpiece by Paul Ford, introduced by Josh Tyrangiel:
Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations. Now that software lives in our pockets, runs our cars and homes, and dominates our waking lives, ignorance is no longer acceptable. The world belongs to people who code. Those who don’t understand will be left behind.
Via Eric Florenzano
§Friday, June 12, 2015
On the “How Tesla will change your life” topic, Horace Dediu posts an article showing how the car market has been moving for the past century and why disruptive innovation comes from manufacturing processes and not from technology:
There is one more point. As Tesla has chosen to share its intellectual property and as Elon Musk has stated publicly, they welcome others to build the same cars they do. So by their own admission the company does not seek to disrupt. Disruption is a competitive stance.
§Friday, June 12, 2015
...full advantage of OS X technologies like OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch, Core Graphics, being fully optimized for 64-bit and multi-core processors, and supporting the Force Touch trackpad...
§Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Tim Urban had the opportunity to interview Elon Musk, Franz von Holzhausen and their engineers. He writes in a previous post about all the preparative work needed for the interviews:
The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:
- Automotive
- Aerospace
- Solar Energy
- Energy Storage
- Satellite
- High-Speed Ground Transportation
- And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion
The article is divided in three sections (the stories of energy including the effects of the greenhouse gaz on the planet, cars and Tesla), each worth the read by itself :
But with a goal as ambitious as “accelerating the advent of sustainable transport” and a victory condition as far-reaching as “half of all new cars being electric,” building one great car company isn’t enough. To bring Musk’s original idea to the next level, Tesla would need to scale itself. To do that, Tesla is building a line of cars so stellar that it’s going to change the public’s expectations of a what a car should be, and the whole industry will have to adjust to that new expectation.
And by solving so many EV1 problems for its own cars, it’s forging the path to an EV-dominated world for all the other companies too (a company trying to rise to the top of their industry would hold their innovation secrets close — but because Tesla’s goal is to transform the industry, in 2014, Tesla made all of their patents available to whomever wanted them).
§Friday, June 5, 2015
Species In Pieces won the “Website Of The Month” award from CSS Design Awards website in March 2015. Its Web designer Bryan James explains how he put together this demonstration of the power of CSS Masking in the browser:
In Pieces is an interactive exhibition of 30 of the world’s most distinct but, sadly, endangered species. [...]
In Pieces started as experimentation and tinkering in code, not a grand plan for an interactive piece to help conservation, as romantic as that notion sounds. I remember reading about the
polygonproperty of CSS’clip-pathin mid-2014 and learning of its amazing potential. A few months went by and I was surprised not to see it used much on the web, probably eclipsed by the attention given to SVG, canvas and WebGL. I felt thatclip-pathprovided an opportunity to dive into something untouched and explore what could be made from it. At the same time, creating a project in pure CSS felt (rather ironically) cutting-edge.
§Thursday, June 4, 2015
Matthew Panzarino reports for TechCrunch on Tim Cook’s speech on encryption and privacy at the EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in Washington. Tim Cook implicitly commented on companies (Google and Facebook among others) that collect data from their users, emphasizing Google Photos:
“We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.”
As a remainder, here is an excerpt of the license that applies to Google Photos:
When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).
§Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Joshua Topolsky writing for BloombergBusiness about Android M’s new context-aware assistant:
But secondly, it starts to show how Google can be an interconnecting layer between the apps themselves — a kind of neutral staging ground between one action and another. This is a sea-change for how we use our mobile devices and how mobile apps interact with one another.
§Tuesday, June 2, 2015
At Google I/O, the Google Cast product managers announced:
17 million Chromecast devices have been sold, with 1.5 billion touches of the Cast button, changing the way people watch TV. In the US, active Chromecast users are consuming 66% more content per day than at launch in July 2013. We see a 45% increase in YouTube watch time upon a Chromecast activation
§Monday, June 1, 2015
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