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Flash! Servant of the universe

The great NAND flash price slump will accelerate the uptake of SSD storage, industry sources have predicted, with PCIe/NVMe SSDs possibly accounting for half of the market by the end of the year.…

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Source:: TheRegister

Microsoft has chosen “graphing mode” as the first feature to be added to the Windows 10 Calculator app after open-sourcing the project on GitHub. …read more

Source:: ZDNet

Microsoft’s programming language TypeScript has become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. Wired: TypeScript jumped from number 16 to number 12, just behind Apple’s programming language Swift in RedMonk’s semiannual rankings, which were last published in August. Microsoft unveiled TypeScript in 2012, and while it hasn’t grown as quickly as Swift — which has grown faster than any other language, ever since RedMonk started compiling the rankings in 2011 — TypeScript’s own ascendance is impressive, given the sheer number of available programming languages.

More and more applications these days use TypeScript. Google’s programming framework Angular, the second most popular tool of its type according to data released last year by the startup NPM, is written in TypeScript. So is Vue, an increasingly popular framework finding a home both among smaller companies and tech giants like Alibaba. But RedMonk doesn’t look at how many jobs are available for people skilled in a particular language, nor how many companies actually use the language. Instead, the firm tries to spot trends in developer interest by looking at how many projects on GitHub use certain languages, and how many questions are asked about those languages on the programmer Q&A site Stack Overflow. The idea is to get a sense of where the software development profession is heading.

of this story at Slashdot.

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Source:: Slashdot

The group wants to learn more about every aspect of batteries, from raw materials to recycling. …read more

Source:: CNet

Digital secretary responds to Commons Science and Technology Committee, sort of

Considering the state of political discourse in Britain, it comes as little surprise that the government has no idea whether it should follow allies and start banning certain foreign firms – most notably Huawei – from national telecommunications infrastructure projects.…

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Source:: TheRegister

When did computers arrive in schools? That should be an easy question to answer, probably in the years around 1980. Maybe your school had the Commodore Pet, the Apple II, or if you are British, the Acorn BBC Micro in that period, all 8-bit microcomputers running a BASIC interpreter. That’s certainly the case for the majority of schools, but not all of them. In early 1969 the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World visited a school with a computer, and in both technology and culture it was a world away from those schools a decade later that would have received those BBC Micros.

The school in question was The Forrest Grammar School, Winnersh, about 35 miles west of London, and the computer in question was a by-then-obsolete National Elliott 405 mainframe that had been donated four years earlier by the British arm of the food giant Nestlé. The school referred to it as “Nellie” — a concatenation of the two brand names. It seems to have been the preserve of the older pupils, but the film below still shows the concepts of its operation being taught at all levels. We get a brief look at some of their software too — no operating systems here, everything’s machine code on paper tape — as a teacher plays a reaction timer game and the computer wins at noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). One of them has even written a high-level language interpreter on which younger children solve maths problems. Of course, a 1950s mainframe with hundreds or thousands of tubes was never a particularly reliable machine, and we see them enacting their failure routine, before finally replacing a faulty delay line.

This is a fascinating watch on so many levels, not least because of its squeaky-clean portrayal of adolescent boys. This is what teenagers were supposed to be like, but by the late 1960s they must in reality have been anything but that away from the cameras. It’s a contrast with fifteen or twenty years later, the computer is seen as an extremely important learning opportunity in sharp opposition to how 8-bit computers in the 1980s came to be seen as a corrupting influence that would rot young minds.

Of course, these youngsters are not entirely representative of British youth in 1969, because as a grammar school the Forrest was part of the top tier of the selective education system prevalent at the time. There would certainly have been no computers of any sort in the local Secondary Modern school, and probably the BBC’s portrayal of the pupils would have been completely different had there been. In 1974 the Government abolished the grammar school system to create new one-size-fits-all comprehensive schools, one of which the Forrest school duly became. Following the vagaries of educational policy it is now an Academy, and there is probably not a room within it that does not contain a computer.

So what of Nellie? Because of the film there are plenty of online references to it in …read more

Source:: Hackaday

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tez. Trendalyzer. Panoramio. Timeful. Bump! SlickLogin. BufferBox. The names sound like a mix of mid-2000s blogs and startups you’d see onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt!. In fact, they are just some of the many, many products that Google has acquired or created — then killed.

While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products — because even though these products often don’t cost much for ongoing operations, they can pose a serious legal liability for the company — it’s rare to hear them spoken of after they’ve been shuttered. In fact, Killed By Google is the first website to memorialize them all in one place. Created by front-end developer Cody Ogden, the site features a tombstone and epitaph for each product the company has killed since it originated.

of this story at Slashdot.

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Source:: Slashdot

Using private info for funding decisions branded ‘toxic’

“Rich” and “granular” patient data from hospital and GP records could be shared with policymakers and researchers under new plans from NHS Digital.…

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Source:: TheRegister

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson tells Reuters that relying on platforms like Apple’s can be troublesome. …read more

Source:: CNet

Commentary: I came for Ricky Gervais. I stayed for the moving and relatable moments of human connection. …read more

Source:: CNet