Trying to decide which programming languages to study, whether prior to college, during it, or in continuing professional development can have a significant impact on your employment prospects and opportunities thereafter. Given this, periodic efforts have been made to rank the most important and popular languages over time, to give more insight into where’s the best place to focus one’s efforts. IEEE Spectrum has just put together of top programming languages. The group designed the list to allow users to weight their own interests and use-cases independently. You can access the and sort it by language type (Web, Mobile, Enterprise, Embedded), fastest growing markets, general trends in usage, and languages popular specifically for open source development.
The anonymity afforded by the network has led to the creation of numerous “darknet markets,” where people buy and sell illegal goods like drugs, malware, fake IDs, weapons, and more. These operations have been famously difficult to stop. But an international team of law enforcement agencies just executed an impressive takedown of two of the largest darknet markets. Law enforcement even ran one of the services for weeks to gather information on users. The darknet markets in question are , both of which have similar setups to the infamous Silk Road. That site was , landing founder Ross Ulbricht in prison for life.
The beginning of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is practically a love letter to Chuck Yeager. The excellent movie version features a sequence depicting Yeager as he test pilots the X-1 aircraft. Flying out of what would become Edwards AFB in California, Yeager became the first person to engage in supersonic flight. Now, a few decades later and with little prelude, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California has been uploading hundreds of videos from decades of bleeding-edge aeronautics research onto YouTube. AFRC is posting its legacy video footage so everyone can watch — including video of the X-1 in action. So step into your test pilot boots, kiddos, because we’re going supersonic.
The Raspberry Pi has proved itself to be a versatile little computer, and you can get them for pocket change. It’s a bit light on power, though. Now, Gigabyte is preparing to launch a similar device called the GA-SBCAP3350. Yeah, it really needs a better name, but this slightly larger micro-computer offers . The GA-SBCAP3350 measures 146 x 102mm, which is nearly twice the size of the at 85 x 56mm. Gigabyte’s board looks more like a PC motherboard, and in some ways it works like one. It is still much smaller than even mini-ITX form factor boards, which measure 170 x 170mm.
To date, the Volkswagen scandal over diesel emissions (and lying to the California Air Resources Board and the EPA) has mostly been contained to VW and, in a few cases, other brands Volkswagen Group owns like Porsche and Audi. But now it’s possible BMW, an entirely separate company, may have colluded with the various Volkswagen Group brands to fix the price of diesel emissions systems and other parts. VW admitted to “possible anti-competitive behavior” in a letter sent to the Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) in Germany, Reuters, Der Spiegel, . The cartel office is responsible for oversight and maintaining fair competition between manufacturers.
Blizzard has announced that it is ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista by October. Given that these operating systems were officially retired in 2009 and 2012, respectively, with no security or patch support from Microsoft (although the company did earlier this year), and the difficulty of continuing to test these operating systems, Blizzard’s decision makes sense. And in all honesty, it shouldn’t affect many people. Blizzard doesn’t release the same level of details about its end users than Steam does, but I suspect we can use one to get a feeling for the other. Steam, after all, also has a great many low-requirement titles that can be played on old hardware.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been sending back iconic and stunning photos of space for decades. But it just caught something particularly special on tape: early stars, from the beginning of the universe. And not only are they some of the earliest stars we’ve ever seen, their very existence confirms some of our theories about early star formation. Researchers more than 500 galaxies that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. NASA says this discovery sheds tremendous light (pun intended) on our knowledge of the earliest days of the universe — an era that, until quite recently, we knew little about.
Google launched Google Now just over five years ago as part of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It has evolved over the years to be smarter and more useful, but Google’s energies are now focused elsewhere. After the flop of Google Now on Tap, the company pulled back on the “Google Now” branding. Today, Google Now is officially being . It looks the same on the surface, but there are a few important tweaks. The feed is accessible in the app on Android and iOS. It’s also available on the far left home screen panel for Android users on the Pixel Launcher, Google Now Launcher, or a few other stock launcher implementations.
Intel and AMD have been locked in combat ever since Ryzen 7 debuted and put AMD back in the CPU race for the first time in six years. Both companies are prepping to release higher core count processors, but Intel is playing this game fairly conservatively, if recent rumors can be believed. According to VideoCardz , Intel’s upcoming Core i9-7920X will be a 12-core / 24-thread CPU with 16.5MB of cache. That works out to the same 1.375MB of L3 that other Skylake-SP processors have. But the reported base core clock is rather low, at just 2.9GHz. That’s 400MHz lower than Intel’s 10-core Core i9-7900X, which means the Core i9-7920X trades a ~13 percent base clock drop for a 20 percent increase in core count.
