Microsoft’s move to acquire Github isn’t all that surprising given that the company is a top contributor and has worked well with developers in recent years. Now can it keep Github the Switzerland of code? …read more Source:: ZDNet

2017 was the first year that smartphone unit shipments didn’t grow, according to a new Internet Trends report. “Shipments actually declined by 0.5 percent, as IDC noted in February,” reports The Verge. “In 2016, shipments were lukewarm at 2 percent yearly growth, but this downturn is significant.” From the report: Among smartphone shipments, Android and…

Website is popular for storing and sharing software code. …read more Source:: CNet

Bloomberg reports: Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Rakesh Mogul, a Cal Poly Pomona professor of biological chemistry, was the lead author of an article in the journal Astrobiology that offers the first biochemical evidence explaining the reason the contamination persists. To figure out how the spacecraft microbiome survives in the cleanroom facilities, the research…

[Isabelle Simova] is building Hoverbot, a flexible robotics platform using Ikea plastic trays, JavaScript running on a Raspberry Pi and parts scavenged from commonly available hoverboards. Self-balancing scooters a.k.a. Hoverboards are a great source of parts for such a project. Their high torque, direct drive brushless motors can drive loads of 100 kg or more….

New submitter DuroSoft writes: It has been over a year since Microsoft unveiled its open source GVFS (Git Virtual File System) project, designed to make terabyte-scale repositories, like it’s own 270GB Windows source code, manageable using Git. The problem is that the GNOME project already has a virtual file system by the name of GVfs…

Lego plus pinball equals a nostalgia dream come true with Benny’s Spaceship Adventure. …read more Source:: CNet

WWDC launches tomorrow and we discussed a few possibilities for this developer conference. More phones arrived and are being tested while Kevin continues to explore Chromebooks. …read more Source:: ZDNet

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a psychopathic algorithm named Norman, as part of an experiment to see what training artificial intelligence on data from “the dark corners of the net” would do to its world view. Unlike most “normal” algorithms by AI, Norman does not have an optimistic view…