Microsoft releases Visual Studio and TFS 2013 Update 4 CTP 1
Keeping up its accelerated update pace, Microsoft has released the first community technology preview of Update 4 for Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013.
Microsoft TFS product unit manager Brian Harry announced Update 4 CTP 1 in a blog post, detailing primarily the big TFS improvements, including pull requests, trend charts and new work-management features. The update also adds several bug fixes for Visual C++.
Apple to add additional iCloud security measures
Following the recent hack attack where celebrities’ iCloud accounts were compromised, Apple is adding security measures to make sure such attacks are less likely, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The celebrities’ attack was due to a phishing scam allowing hackers obtained user IDs and passwords, and as a result Apple will now be issuing alerts via e-mail and push notifications to alert users when someone is trying to change an account’s password, restore iCloud data, or when a device logs into an account for the first time, the WSJ reported.
“When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece,” said Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to the WSJ. “I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.”
NVIDIA suing Qualcomm and Samsung
NVIDIA has filed a patent lawsuit against Qualcomm and Samsung, claiming the companies are infringing on its GPU patents covering technology such as programmable shading, unified shaders and multi-threaded parallel processing.
“Our patented GPU inventions provide significant value to mobile devices,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, cofounder and CEO of NVIDIA, in a statement. “Samsung and Qualcomm have chosen to use these in their products without a license from us. We are asking the courts to determine infringement of NVIDIA’s GPU patents by all graphics architectures used in Samsung’s mobile products and to establish their licensing value.”
NVIDIA is asking the International Trade Commission to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phone and tablets that contain Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphic architectures, and it is asking the U.S. District Court in Delaware to award damages.
CoreOS now available on DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean now supports Linux OS specialist CoreOS, allowing Web and mobile developers to deploy and experiment with Docker containers while taking advantage of CoreOS’ cluster-management service.
“We hope developers using our infrastructure are as excited as we are about the possibilities now available through CoreOS on our platform,” Mitch Wainer, cofounder and CMO of DigitalOcean, said in a statement.
With CoreOS, users can also deploy a cluster of servers configured to work with one another to ensure their app or website remains live and reduce the impact of a possible server failure.
“The easiest way to get started using containers, distributed systems and the next generation of infrastructure is now available to millions of developers on DigitalOcean,” said Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS. “Let the developer community go wild.”
LLVM 3.5 released
Version 3.5 of the LLVM compiler and code generator for C and C++ has been released. The main updates and features of the release include:
• All back ends have been changed to use the MC asm printer, and support for the non-MC one has been removed.
• Clang can now successfully self-host on Linux/SPARC64 and on FreeBSD/SPARC64.
• LLVM now assumes the assembler supports .loc for generating debug line numbers. The old support for printing the debug line info directly was only used by llc and has been removed.
• All inline assembly is parsed by the integrated assembler when it is enabled. Previously this was only the case for object-file output. It is now the case for assembly output as well. The integrated assembler can be disabled with the -no-integrated-as option.
• llvm-ar now handles IR files like regular object files. In particular, a regular symbol table is created for symbols defined in IR files, including those in file scope inline assembly.
• LLVM now always uses CFI directives for producing most stack unwinding information.
• The prefix for loop vectorizer hint metadata has been changed from llvm.vectorizer to llvm.loop.vectorize. In addition, llvm.vectorizer.unroll metadata has been renamed llvm.loop.interleave.count.
• Some back ends previously implemented Atomic NAND(x,y) as x & ~y. Now all back ends implement it as ~(x & y), matching the semantics of GCC 4.4 and later.
More information can be found in the LLVM release notes.
