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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...

"Learn to write software in 9 weeks? New coding boot camps promise to launch tech careers" _______________________________________________ SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn't want to go back to college to study computer science. Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more...

From WeWork Labs to General Assembly, there are a lot of incubators that give entrepreneurs a place to code during the day. There aren't many that offer sleeping arrangements as well. Three "hacker hostels" have cropped up in Silicon Valley, The New York Times reports. Coders, designers and scientists can spend the night packed like sardines in rows of bunk beds for $40. The hostels are all run by the same management company, Chez JJ, with accommodations in Menlo Park, Mountain View and San Francisco. Chez JJ was founded by 28-year-old neuroscientist Jade Wang and Jocelyn Berl. Wang had used...

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, let me suggest an idea that you might not have considered: You should learn computer programming. Specifically, you should sign up for Code Year, a new project that aims to teach neophytes the basics of programming over the course of 2012. Code Year was put together by Codecademy,* a startup that designs clever, interactive online tutorials. Codecademy’s founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, argue that everyone should know how to program—that learning to code is becoming as important as knowing how to read and write. I concur. So if you don’t know...

When posting to the message board at http://www.ksszfm.com/ the paragraphs are often strung together. My question here is how do I block and separate the paragraphs in my post? This message board could use some help if any of you freepers have time. There are some real anti-Christian bigots that often post vile messages.