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Interview Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement. "I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money."Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.I feel that IBM has gotten everything it wants from the open source developer community now, and we've received something of a middle finger from...

The generative AI will change the way economy functions and businesses are run; it will be a game changer for in many verticals In a world driven by unprecedented technological advancements, there emerges a groundbreaking force that promises to reshape the very fabric of innovation: generative artificial intelligence. With its awe-inspiring ability to create, compose, and imagine, generative AI has surged to the forefront of scientific exploration, capturing the imaginations of researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists alike. From generating realistic images and synthesising music to aiding in drug discovery and revolutionising customer experiences, this cutting-edge technology possesses the potential to revolutionise...

During the period when social media was increasingly putting pressure on legacy media outlets, driving down their profits, a phrase crept into the national lexicon. “Learn to code.” While it was no doubt said in a derisive or at least humorous fashion by most, it carried an underlying assumption that most people accepted. Perhaps you should learn to code. That’s where the jobs of the future would be. But the period when that will be true may turn out to have a much shorter lifespan than anticipated. The rise of Artificial Intelligence and chatbot apps is already automating the work...

NEW YORK, NY—When Huffington Post writer Brutto Chalet discovered he was being let go earlier this year, he decided he was going to do what all Americans do when they lose their job: learn to code. There's just one problem: he suddenly realized the code he was working in was binary. "Excuse me, professor?" he said to his programming teacher. "Yeah, hi. Brutto Chalet, he/him. Did I hear you correctly? Are we only allowed to work in binary code? Are there non-binary options for us to work with?" The teacher said that they would just be learning to program atop...

The basic need is not that of changing all file names (multi commander has that in the menu) but that of changing the case of all the characters within a text that begin with http and end with html. The situational context (take deep breath) is of html files which used to work on a Windows server, but being now on a Linux server which are case sensitive - and with a unresolvable glitch (read on), then it seems that unless one can edit a server's httpd.conf then clicking on a link that begins with a upper case letter can...

America's STEM classrooms are devolving — wasting valuable class time with toys, barely applicable coding games, and victim-mentality nonsense.If you ask any administrator about the future of education, he’ll likely mention the blending of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: STEM. Indeed, it’s so attractive to schools, billions of dollars are spent every year by corporations, startups, and the U.S. federal government in an 1850s-style “gold rush” of gadgetry and glittering lights. To stand out from the competition and get into classrooms, curriculum developers, policymakers, and advocacy groups have begun to scam the education market by forsaking common-sense STEM principles in...

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d be having 15-hour workweeks by the end of the century. But by the time it was 2013, it was clear that the great economist had gotten something wrong.Welcome to the era of bullshit jobs, as anthropologist David Graeber coined it. Since the 1930s, whole new industries have sprung up, which don’t necessarily add much value to our lives. Graeber would probably call most jobs in software development bullshit.I don’t share Graeber’s opinion, especially when it comes to software. But he does touch an interesting point: as more and more processes are automated,...

Mzoudi was a liaison to al Qaeda, witness said. A man claiming to be a former Iranian spy testified Friday that Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to be tried for an alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks, was involved in the preparations to hit the World Trade Center. The witness, who goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, took the stand at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and claimed that Mzoudi, was "responsible for part of the organization" of the suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon. Zakeri testified Mzoudi...

COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it. It arose from a desire to create a language that could straddle the computers of the era. Each manufacturer had its own way of working, which, while OK if a company always stuck with one maker, made portability of programs or skills a tad tricky. If only there was, say, a COmmon Business-Oriented Language? Wouldn't that be splendid? Mary Hawes, a programmer of Burroughs machines, put forward a proposal...

Enough with "learn to code."  As this article points out, that's terrible advice.  Coding isn't beanbag, and if you don't have a problem-solving mindset, you won't be good at it.  It's like telling people to buy power tools and become home-renovators.  Having a tool doesn't inform you about when and how to apply it. What's the problem we are trying to solve here?  Is it to meet a need for more coders or to provide a way for unemployed people to earn a good wage?  I expect that it is the latter, so let's ask: do we need more software developers and software engineers?  We already have many...

Talk about girl power! Speaking at a Women’s History Month event, Ivanka Trump revealed she’ll be taking a computer coding class with her 5-year-old girl Arabella this year. Why? The First Daughter admitted she’s ‘trying to do her part’ when it comes to banishing gender stereotypes — and we are ALL about it! Leading by example, Ivanka Trump, 35, wants to encourage women and girls across the country to learn about computer science. And to show just how important it is for females to get involved in the tech field, the First Daughter announced that she and her daughter Arabella...

By Nahema Marchal | 2:58 pm, December 29, 2016 When the issue of “fake news” came to prominence at the end of this year’s election cycle, traditional media outlets were the firsts to engage in relentless finger-pointing. Journalists everywhere deplored the spread of misleading, lazily reported and, in some cases, totally fabricated stories that had been facilitated by social media. That’d be ignoring — of course — that in a competitive media climate where virality and accuracy go head-to-head, editors will often go for a catchier headline, at the expense of factual accuracy. And as one writer at HEqual noted,...

across the UK today as part of digital literacy initiative Almost one million school children across the UK will today receive their very own micro computer thanks to a “landmark” BBC initiative. Every Year 7 student in England and Wales, Year 8 student in Northern Ireland and S1 student in Scotland will be handed, for free, a BBC micro:bit computer specially designed to help pupils learn to code. The pocket-sized micro:bit is part of the BBC’s Make it Digital initiative, and aims to get schoolchildren and teachers alike of all abilities learn the basics of making computer programs by teaching...

“Coding is easy!” “Anyone can learn to code!” “Everyone should learn to code!” Hogwash. Learning to code is exceptionally difficult. It’s true that it has never been easier to attempt to learn to code, but trying and doing are two completely different things. As someone with virtually no computer science or mathematics background, diving into the world of programming has been an eye opening experience. If you haven’t studied computer science already, I guarantee that you are underestimating just how vast the domain actually is. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone interested in learning to code, (quite the opposite!)...

The Pentagon was tipped off in 2011 by a longtime Army contractor that Russian computer programmers were helping to write computer software for sensitive U.S. military communications systems, setting in motion a four-year federal investigation that ended this week with a multimillion-dollar fine against two firms involved in the work. The contractor, John C. Kingsley, said in court documents filed in the case that he discovered the Russians’ role after he was appointed to run one of the firms in 2010. He said the software they wrote had made it possible for the Pentagon’s communications systems to be infected with...

A few weeks ago, Google researchers announced that they had peered inside the mind of an artificial intelligence program. What they discovered was a demonic hellscape. You’ve seen the pictures. These are hallucinations produced by a cluster of simulated neurons trained to identify objects in a picture. The researchers wanted to better understand how the neural network operates, so they asked it to use its imagination. To daydream a little. At first, they gave the computer abstract images to interpret — like a field of clouds. It was a Rorschach test. The artificial neurons saw what they wanted to see,...

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game. And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for...

IÂ’ll be honest, when it comes to coding IÂ’m just about the last person anyone would consider asking advice from. DonÂ’t get me wrong, I find what programmers do to be both extremely interesting, and (of course) integral to our continued push for innovation in a digitized world, but studying the developers at my day job is like monitoring a team of archaeologists making sense out of hieroglyphics. There are countless people who feel the same way, which is unfortunate since development is a potentially rewarding career path, and one thatÂ’s constantly expanding. One of the stumbling blocks, as mentioned...

Last December, a man named Leo Grand created a ride-sharing app that ended up earning him a modest sum of money. This, in and of itself, is nothing unique. However, Grand was homeless, and had learned to code only four months prior to the launch of his app. A few weeks after the launch, he had made about $10,000. But today, Leo the Homeless Coder is still homeless. He has yet to touch a penny of his money. When his app launched, he was center of national attention. No one has followed up on Grand. Grand and his teacher Patrick,...

Have mercy: It looks like C# is staging a comeback. Have mercy: It looks like C# is staging a comeback.CodeEval has named its top coding languages for 2014, and we see a couple of interesting surprises. Year-over-year, C# was the second-fastest growing language. And Internet powerhouse PHP was the biggest loser, down 55 percent from 2012.We took a look at the trends from 2011 through 2013, and here’s what we found:By volume, Python and Java reigned supreme. But Java, as you can see, is something of an ailing giant despite the popularity of Android with consumers.When you look at...