If there is one thing about making video games that best defines the state of entertainment software development, it is crunch time. If you’ve never met someone who worked in the entertainment software industry, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of crunch. At Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, both vendors and … continue reading
For years, Java has claimed type safety, but left variables out of the inheritance party. A new JDK Enhancement Proposal from Alex Buckley and Mark Reinhold aims to fix this problem in the language itself. There is, however, no timeframe for this addition to the Java language yet. JEP 286 is officially titled Local-Variable Type … continue reading
The two colleges are close enough to share a pizza parlor, but thanks to their collaborative work, maybe that pizza-delivery Web page will load faster for students at Harvard and MIT. Today, teams from the MIT Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Harvard, released a paper describing Polaris, a method of speeding up page … continue reading
Eclipse Che, the developer workspace server and cloud IDE, had its initial release this morning at EclipseCon. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said of the project: “Eclipse Che is rethinking the way IDEs are built and used by developers. It uses Docker, Java and JavaScript to create a more flexible and dynamic … continue reading
It’s no secret that computer security is a difficult area of expertise. At the annual RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, attendees were treated to a host of solutions to solve their security woes. As usual, however, software development is not the focus. Robert Griffin, chief security architect at RSA, agreed that developing secure … continue reading
Hortonworks, one of the three major Hadoop vendors, announced yesterday that it has been collaborating with HP to improve Apache Spark. The work has already yielded faster sort and in-memory computation for the project, as well as improved performance and usage for scalability. Hortonworks also announced the inclusion of Apache Kafka and Storm in its … continue reading
Integrations across the development tool chain have been Tasktop’s domain since the Eclipse Mylyn project kicked off way back in 2005. Since then, Tasktop has carved out a niche in offering robust, scalable integrations on the developer side of the ALM equation. Today, the company introduced further integrations on the operations end of the spectrum. … continue reading
For the food industry, a rude awakening has been taking place. Chipotle, the burrito-heavy fast food chain, has experienced repeated E Coli outbreaks from tainted products in its supply chain. In an industry often still tied to pen and paper, tracing the sources for tainted products can be a nightmare. That’s where software comes in. … continue reading
The modern software development warzone is clearly the mobile device. Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin, is a clear sign that that company intends to continue apace with its cross-platform mobile strategy, and also signals that other mobile platforms are just as important to Microsoft as its own largely failed mobile OS. Xamarin’s sweet spot has been … continue reading
Yahoo has released CaffeOnSpark, which brings the fruits of two University of California, Berkeley projects together: vision-focused deep learning framework Caffe, and Big Data processing engine Apache Spark. Without the aid of Spark, Caffe can process up to 60 million images per day. Those numbers come from benchmarks on a single NVIDIA GPU, so the … continue reading
IBM’s InterConnect 2016 conference kicked off today, with the company making cloud-based announcements for its product lines. Chief among them was a new partnership with VMware to bring virtual-machine-hosted applications into IBM’s cloud-based offerings. The IBM announcement was riddled with partnerships, many of which were focused on bringing the benefits of IBM’s cloud offerings to … continue reading
The database revolution happened a few years back, when NoSQL options stormed the world. Today, however, a second wave of innovation in data storage has been unleashed in the form of Apache Arrow. Arrow builds a standard for columnar in-memory analytics, and will provide a unified data structure, algorithms and cross-language bindings. The overall goal … continue reading
