Computers

Like 1080p before it, 4K is the new, ultra-high-resolution format that promises better detail and greater image clarity due to the huge number of pixels packed into your screen. It is true that the increased level of detail provided by 4K is theoretically indistinguishable to the human eye once you pass a certain distance from →

Last weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time”: Many media outlets were reporting that a computer programme pretending to be a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence on Saturday. The problem is that →

Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. The Agile Manifesto introduced the term in 2001. Since then, the Agile Movement, with all its values, principles, methods, practices, tools, champions and practitioners, philosophies and cultures, →

Soviet blockbuster computer game Tetris is 30 years old.  Tetris (Russian: Те́трис, pronounced [ˈtɛtrʲɪs]) is a Soviet tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984. It was the first entertainment software to be exported from the USSR to the US. The versions of Tetris were →

10 Articles Every Programmer Must Read web page is a nice collection of links to “What Every Programmer Should Know” articles worth to look at. You will see classic what every programmer should know article from topics like memory, Unicode, floating point arithmetic, networking, object oriented design, time, URL Encoding, String and many more. This →

Advanced research needs nowadays advanced ICT. It means typically fast signal capturing, fast networks and big data handling capabilities. CERN’s openlab has published a document explaining stuff it wants someone to invent so it can get the most out of the large hadron collider (LHC) and its other instruments. CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT →

Are you writing software that needs to be secure? Quite probably. Security critical programs include application programs used as viewers of remote data, web applications (including CGI scripts), network servers, and setuid/setgid programs.  Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO — Creating Secure Software on-line book provides a set of design and implementation guidelines for →

ModPlayerJS is a player that runs in your browser for .MOD music files (the mainstay of Amiga and PC sample-based music circa 1990). This worked for me in Chrome browser but failed to work on Firefox. A good example of MOD music and what the player can do is to play 1DASBOOT.MOD with it (compare →

A programming language familiar to all, BASIC, has turns 50 years old. This month, BASIC celebrates an anniversary reached by very few languages: 50 years of continuous use. Basic Turns 50 article looks back on 50 years of attracting (and repelling) new programmers. It’s difficult to imagine the computing world in 1964. There were no →

A port scanner is a software application designed to probe a server or host for open ports. This is often used by administrators to verify security policies of their networks and by attackers to identify running services on a host. The de facto standard for port scanning always has been the venerable Nmap program. The →