Apple’s gotten into the game of teaching kids how to program. Last week at WWDC, the company announced Swift Playgrounds, along with the intention to teach programming classes at its Apple retail stores for free. And I’m here to tell you this is a terrible approach, a bad idea, and generally little more than a … continue reading
DockerCon ended in Seattle after three days of nearly nonstop container-related announcements. At the core of the show was the Docker 1.12 release, bringing with it better cross-container orchestration and management. Yet while Docker was announcing its own plans for the future, IBM, Microsoft and others were discussing their own ideas for Linux containers. Solomon … continue reading
At Dockercon today, many container-management and control solutions were demonstrated. Platform9 was one of those companies demonstrating at the show, and today it introduced Kubernetes to its managed OpenStack offering. Founded in 2013 by ex-VMware engineers, Platform9 is a combined hardware and SaaS company. While Platform9 hosts OpenStack for its customers in an external cloud, … continue reading
ContainerX this morning released its eponymous product, a multi-tenant container platform targeted at enterprises. The platform offers hosting of many varieties and types: public-facing, private-facing, containers, virtual machines and bare metal. Kiran Kamity, CEO and cofounder of ContainerX, said that he wants the platform to be a “vSphere-like product for the container market.” He said … continue reading
Net neutrality won a major victory in the United States yesterday as the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in a 2-1 vote upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to categorize Internet access as a public utility. Kit Walsh, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a blog post explaining … continue reading
Apple has indicated for some time that it was building more cohesion across its devices and platforms. At Worldwide Developers Conference this week, announcements to this effect were made, chief among them universal copy and paste between devices. Underneath these changes is a much more fundamental one that underpins all of Apple’s hardware. The Apple … continue reading
Mac OS X is now simply macOS. The 27th annual World Wide Developer Conference kicked off this morning in San Francisco, and along with the new branding for the operating system, Apple also unveiled new features for macOS and iOS, including the Universal Clipboard, desktop sharing across devices, and enhancements to Siri. macOS and iOS … continue reading
NVIDIA has two major markets these days: gamers and scientists. While the company unveiled its latest GPUs last month to the delight of gamers, today at the ISC Conference for high-performance computing in Germany the company unveiled a beta version of the new compiler for the OpenPOWER platform. The OpenPOWER Foundation, of which NVIDIA is … continue reading
It seems almost comical to think that artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming, or rather have become, full-blown buzzwords. First of all, according to the annals of science fiction literature, we should have already invented a smarter-than-human AI by now, and according to “Terminator,” we’re 19 years overdue for a giant, AI-based nuclear annihilation … continue reading
Salesforce fired up a brand new developer conference today in San Francisco. Executives and developers mingled to discuss the various Salesforce platforms and products, the highlights of which focused on numerous buzzwords: IoT, AI, and cloud-based containers. Alex Dayon, Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, detailed the platform’s features, particularly those for commercial mobile development. Customers … continue reading
With the release of Databricks Community Edition today, and the kicking off of the second day of Spark Summit in San Francisco, the Apache Spark project is a hot topic. Underneath the hood, the update brings many changes and improvements to the platform, and at Databricks’ Summit, these were discussed at length. To get a … continue reading
Companies like Amazon, Baidu, IBM and Microsoft were all at Spark Summit this week to discuss how they used the engine. Some of those companies even had new Spark-based products to show off. IBM, for example, introduced a data-centric development environment, which will be able to support machine learning with the R language thanks to … continue reading
