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Slack is our favorite place for wasting time and sharing gifs collaborating with colleagues and peers, but right now (Wednesday 27 June) Slack is experiencing significant connectivity issues. It's not yet clear what the cause of the outage is, but Slack are aware of the issues and working to fix them. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1011965665610162177 At around 6.30am PDT, Slack posted a tweet: "We're investigating connectivity for all workspaces, thanks for your patience, we'll have updates shortly." Another update just after 7am PDT stated "our team is still looking into the cause of the connectivity issues, and we'll continue to update you on our progress." The best responses to Slack's outage on Twitter As you'd expect, with Slack down, people have been taking to Twitter. Fortunately for Slack, most of the comments weren't actually that unkind or angry. Instead, they've done what anyone would do - make funny jokes and memes. Here are some of the best from quick witted Tweeters in temporary exile from the messaging app: https://twitter.com/vboykis/status/1011971038597525504 https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/1011971643277758465 https://twitter.com/IrregularDave/status/1011974270598238208 https://twitter.com/joshua_eaton/status/1011970323841986560 https://twitter.com/jyarow/status/1011968697404153857 One user noted that now Slack was down, productivity might go up. The irony, of course, being that he was simply part of the wider exodus of part-time comedians and procrastinators to Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshNaylor/status/1011973603078918145 Some traditionalists thought that the outage might actually be a good thing for IRL interaction - once again, the irony of airing their thoughts in the digital environs of Twitter lost on them... https://twitter.com/TheMuse/status/1011972281491484672 https://twitter.com/tanzinavega/status/1011971069350162432   With Fortnite also facing a number of connectivity issues, some users were quick to draw parallels... https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1011970924000792576 https://twitter.com/minecoder/status/1011968053653880833 While the Slack outage is largely a carnival of memes and jokes, spare a thought for the Slack support team on Twitter. They're truly doing a hero's work. One Twitter user praised the Slack team's service on social: https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1011973761766080512 However frustrated the media and technology world's become with the Slack outage one thing's for certain - no one's talking about moving to Skype yet. Read next: Someone made a program to make it look like you’re typing on Slack when someone else is

In a world where tech innovators  are gradually revealing themselves as cynical corporate masterminds, we're lucky to have Akon. The rapper, entrepreneur, and philanthropist announced last week that he is planning to build a city in Senegal where you can only trade using Akoin, Akon's branded cryptocurrency. The plan is to build what's being described as a 'real life Wakanda', the fictional city in Marvel's Black Panther movie. [caption id="attachment_20338" align="alignright" width="200"] image via commons.wikimedia.org[/caption] Akon believes cryptocurrency can play a huge role in boosting economic development in Africa. During a panel discussion at this year's Cannes Lions festival earlier this month, he said that "blockchain and crypto could be the savior for Africa." He explained that cryptocurrencies would offer many Africans a level of independence and security for ordinary Africans. This has the potential to be hugely empowering, he argues. Akon Crypto City: Akon's cryptocurrency city Plans for Akon's cryptocurrency city - called Akon Crypto City - aren't fully fleshed out. At the Cannes Lions panel discussion, he's reported as saying "I come with the concepts and let the geeks figure it out." However, there are some details which you can find on the ICO Impact website. Akon Crypto City will, if everything goes to plan, be "built on 2,000 acres of land gifted to Akon from the President of Senegal" and located near Senegal's new international airport. You certainly can't accuse Akon of lacking ambition. According to ICO Impact's information the goal is "inventing a radical new way of existence." The Verge draws parallels between Akon Crypto City and a similar project in the Marshall Islands. In February, the small Pacific republic made its own cryptocurrency - called 'Sovereign' - its national legal tender. Thanks to the likes of Akon, expect to see cryptocurrency enter the international language of finance much more over the next few years. Perhaps don't expect to see Akon Crypto City too soon. It's going to take some time and energy to put everything in place for the project to even begin. That said, don't bet against Akon either. After the success of his incredible Akon Lighting Africa (which brought lighting to 6 million people on the continent) in 2014, it would seem he's a man unfazed by limitations.

Google recently came up with a new storage option for developers in its cloud. Cloud Filestore which is in its beta will launch next month according to the Google Cloud Platform Blog. Applications that require a filesystem interface and a shared filesystem for data can leverage this file storage service. It provides a fully managed  Network Attached Storage (NAS) service to effectively integrate with Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine instances. Developers can leverage the abilities of Filestore for high performing file-based workloads. Now enterprises can easily run applications that depend on traditional file system interface with Google Cloud Platform. Traditionally, if applications needed a standard file system, developers would have to improvise a file server with a persistent disk. Filestore does away with traditional methods and allows GCP developers to spin-up storage as needed. Filestore offers high throughput, low latency and high IOPS (Input/output operations per second). This service is available in two tiers; premium and standard. The premium tier costs $0.30/GB/month and promises a max throughput of 700 MB/s and 30,000 max IOPS. The standard tier costs $0.20/GB/month with 180 MB/s max throughput and 5,000 max IOPS. A snapshot of Filestore features Filestore was introduced at the Los Angeles region launch and majorly focused on the entertainment and media industries, where there is a great need for shared file systems for enterprise applications. But this service is not limited only to the media industry, other industries that rely on similar enterprise applications can also benefit from this service. Benefits of using Filestore A lightning speed experience Filestore provides high IOPS for latency sensitive workloads such as content management systems, databases, random i/o, or other metadata intensive applications. This further results in a minimal variability in performance. Consistent  performance throughout Cloud Filestore ensures that one pays a predictable price for predictable performance. Users can independently choose the preferred IOPS--standard or premium-- and storage capacity with Filestore. With this option to choose from, users can fine tune their filesystem for a particular workload. One will also experience consistent performance for a particular workload over time. Simplicity at its best Cloud Filestore, a fully managed, NoOps service, is integrated with the rest of the Google Cloud portfolio. One can easily mount Filestore volumes on Compute Engine VMs. Filestore is tightly integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine, which allows containers to refer the same shared data. To know more about this exciting release, visit Cloud Filestore official website. Related Links AT&T combines with Google cloud to deliver cloud networking at scale What Google, RedHat, Oracle, and others announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 GitLab is moving from Azure to Google Cloud in July

After releasing Firefox 60 last month, Mozilla has launched Firefox 61 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android devices. This release builds on Firefox Quantum, adding even more power to Quantum CSS by parallelizing the parsing step. This is especially beneficial to websites with large stylesheets and complex layouts. UI changes Firefox 61 now ships with an accessibility inspector that lets developers easily make pages for users with accessibility requirements. The new-look Console UI has been enabled by default for the Browser Console & Browser Toolbox. CSS variables now autocomplete with color swatches, allowing developers to see exactly what color value is stored in each variable The main toolbox's toolbar has also been redesigned. Highlights are better responsiveness for narrow and wide viewports with a new overflow dropdown and sortable tabs. The Network Monitor's main toolbar got redesigned to be more responsive on smaller viewports and visually aligned with the Console. It also includes a Throttling dropdown which throttles network speed to emulate various different network speed conditions. Performance improvements Tab management gets a boost in Firefox 61, with the new Tab warming feature which allows users to manage browser tabs more effectively. Tab Warming will watch the user's mouse cursor and start painting content inside a tab whenever the user hovers his/her mouse over one. There is also faster page rendering with Quantum CSS improvements and the new retained display list feature. Moreover, Firefox 61 now has retained display lists which means users can quickly access the pages they visit more frequently. WebExtensions now run in their own process on MacOS. They can now hide tabs and manage the behavior of the browser when a tab is opened or closed. Users are also provided a convenient access to more search engines. Users can add their favorite search engines to the address bar with the “Search with” tool. MacOS users can also share the URL of an active tab from the page actions menu in the address bar. Security Updates Firefox 61 on all four platforms have provided support for TLS 1.3, the latest version of Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS 1.3 brings major improvements in security, privacy, and performance. It only includes support for algorithms with no known vulnerabilities and is also able to negotiate a secure session within a single round-trip. Read the release notes for a complete list of updates. Mozilla has also released the Firefox 61 changelog specifically catering to developers. Firefox 60 arrives with exciting updates for web developers: Quantum CSS engine, new Web APIs and more Mozilla is building a bridge between Rust and JavaScript Google announces Chrome 67 packed with powerful APIs, password-free logins, PWA support, and more

Adobe had already been venturing into the AI domain by coming up with products such as Adobe Sensei. Now, Adobe has developed a product that is said to be using Artificial Intelligence for detecting images that are heavily edited or images that have been tinkered with. Adobe is aiming to create more products in the AI space in order to build trust among people in digital media. Adobe has been widely used for editing images that express artistic creativity. However, some people use it to their own unfair advantage by manipulating images for deception. But, with AI in the game, the image deception problem seems to be getting fixed. A senior research scientist at Adobe, Vlad Morariu, has been working on computer vision technologies for a while now to detect manipulated images. Vlad mentions that there are existing tools which help trace digitally altered photos. For instance, different file formats have metadata that store information about the image captured and manipulated. Also, forensic tools help detect the altered images by analyzing strong edges, lighting, noise distribution, and pixel values of a photo. But, these tools are not as efficient at detecting fake images. Source: Adobe Vlad’s continuous research led him to come up with three new techniques in Artificial Intelligence for detecting image manipulation. Splicing: This combines different parts of two different images. Copy-move: This involves cloning or moving of objects within a photograph from one place to another. Removal: In this, an object within a photograph is removed and that space is filled in. This has greatly cut down on the time it would take forensic experts to detect fraud images. Vlad also mentions how they have trained a deep learning neural network to detect deception on thousands of known, manipulated images. It combines two different methods in one network to enhance the detection process even more. The first method makes use of RGB stream to detect tampering. And the second method uses a noise stream filter. Although these techniques are not foolproof, they provide more options for controlling digital manipulation currently. Adobe might get its hands dirty in the AI world even more in the future by including tools for detection of other kinds of manipulation in photographs. To know more about Adobe’s effort in controlling digital manipulation, check out Adobe’s official blog post. Adobe glides into Augmented Reality with Adobe Aero Adobe is going to acquire Magento for $1.68 Billion  

This year Google I/O was filled with a lot of new announcements which have created a buzz in the tech world. One of them is the launch of Guess.js, a toolkit for building data driven user experiences. This project was initially conceived to improve the the user-perceived page load performance by using predictive analytics. The project then was merged with a similar unnamed project by Google which aimed at exploring data-driven approach for predictive pre-fetching of web pages. The combined product was named as Guess.js and the alpha version was released during Google I/O 2018. Primary features of Guess.js: It can be applied to different types of sites like single-page applications, framework-based static sites, static content sites, and enterprise sites. It works well with single page applications which are running Angular and React ecosystems with their default configurations. The fundamental principle behind Guess.js is to implement data analytics to improve user experience and aid in the design of better data driven UX and UI. Guess.js has a plugin for the popular build tool webpack. Together with Webpack, Guess.js is trying to implement a machine learning driven web bundling approach which has the potential to revolutionize the UX design industry. For framework based static sites, Guess.js plugin can be used in tandem with the static site generators. This plugin helps in evaluating the probability of the user clicking on certain links and based on that it loads the required amount of data. This intuitive approach helps the users get their desired content and also helps to reduce overhead dependency of the websites. Static content sites - will let people using WordPress, Ghost, and many other platforms to leverage the smart pre-fetching of Guess.js The overall approach and promise of Guess.js is revolutionary not just in the way it makes the apps and sites perform faster, but the overall way of automating the page loading procedure and the introduction of the data driven approach has opened up a completely new avenue for UX designers. Google updates biometric authentication for Android P, introduces BiometricPrompt API AutoAugment: Google’s research initiative to improve deep learning performance Google Flutter moves out of beta with release preview 1

In a switch that contains just a subtle hint of saltiness, GitLab has announced that it is to move its code repositories from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud on Saturday, July 28, 2018. The news comes just weeks after Microsoft revealed it was to acquire GitHub (this happened in early June if you've lost track of time). While it's tempting to see this as a retaliatory step, it is instead just a coincidence. The migration was planned before the Microsoft and GitHub news was even a rumor. Why is GitLab moving to Google Cloud? According to GitLab's Andrew Newdigate, the migration to Google Cloud is being done in a bid to "improve performance and reliability." In a post on the GitLab blog, Newdigate explains that one of the key drivers of the team's decision is Kubernetes. "We believe Kubernetes is the future. It's a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible." Kubernetes is a Google product, so it makes sense for GitLab to make the switch to Google's cloud offering to align their toolchain. Read next: The Microsoft-GitHub deal has set into motion an exodus of GitHub projects to GitLab How GitLab's migration will happen A central part of the GitLab migration is Geo. Geo is a tool built by GitLab that makes cloning and reproducing repositories easier for developers working in different locations. Essentially, it creates 'mirrors' of GitLab instances. That's useful for developers using GitLab, as it provides extra safety and security, but GitLab are using it themselves for the migration. [caption id="attachment_20323" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Image via GitLab[/caption] Newdigate writes that GitLab has been running a parallel site that is running on Google Cloud Platform as the migration unfolds. This contains  an impressive "200TB of Git data and 2TB of relational data in PostgreSQL." Rehearsing the failover in production Coordination and planning is everything when conducting such a substantial migration. That's why GitLab's Geo, Production, and Quality teams meet several times a week to rehearse the failover. This process has a number of steps, and each time, every step throws up new issues and problems. These are then documented and resolved by the relevant team. Given confidence and reliability is essential to any version control system, building this into the migration process is a worthwhile activity.

The undisputed leader of game engines over the last few years has been Unity. It brings .NET professionals and enthusiasts from across the globe under the gaming umbrella with its C# game scripting feature . Unity also boasts of a very active community and an even busier release schedule. Unity has been following a semantic versioning. Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next.  Unity have just released their 2018.2 beta version. Here are some exciting features you can look forward to while working in Unity 2018.2. Texture Mipmap streaming feature: If you are a game developer then saving GPU memory is probably one of your top priorities. Unity 2018.2 gives you control over which graphical map or mipmap you will load in the CPU. The previous versions used to load all the mipmaps at the same time and hence put a huge amount of load on the GPU. While this memory allocation helps in reducing GPU load, it does increase a little bit of CPU load. Improved Package manager: Unity 2018.2 comes with an improved package manager. The improvements are in the UI font, and the status of package label. It also now has the ability to dock the window and provides easy access to both documentation and the list of changes. Improvements in the Particle system: Unity 2018.2 beta comes with an improved particle system and new scripting APIs for baking the geometry of a Particle System into a Mesh. Unity now allows up to eight texture coordinates to be used on meshes and passed to shaders. Particle Systems will also now convert their colors into linear space, when appropriate, before uploading them to the GPU. Camera Improvements: Unity has come up with some major improvements in their camera and and the way it functions and renders the objects in the game to portray them like real life objects. Animation Jobs C# API: Unity 2018.2 has improved the AnimationPlayables by allowing users to write their own C# Playables that can interact directly with the animation data. This allows integration of user made IK solvers, procedural animation or even custom mixers into the current animation system. These features along with some other improvements and bug fixes are sure to help the developers create better and smarter games with the latest Unity 2018.2. To know more on the Unity 2018.2 features, you can visit the official Unity blog. How to use arrays, lists, and dictionaries in Unity for 3D game development Build an ARCore app with Unity from scratch Implementing lighting & camera effects in Unity 2018

Google has released the Android Things client library for making it easy for Android Things users to utilize Google Cloud IoT core. Last month, Google announced the developer preview release of Android Things, solidifying the chances of it becoming the official IoT platform for Google. Google IoT core is a complete managed service on the Google Cloud Platform. The client library will help the system to collect, process, analyze, and visualize IoT data in real time. It will provide powerful computer vision, audio processing, and machine learning applications, all on devices. It will also work with Cloud IoT Core, to push data into GCP for further analysis. The Android Things client library will also provide means for developers to easily connect to the IoT Core MQTT bridge, authenticate the device, publish device telemetry and state, subscribe to configuration changes, and handle errors and network outages. The client library completely handles the networking, threading, and message handling enabling Android Things developers to get started with just a few lines of code. Authentication and Security Android Things library provides a hardware-backed Android Keystore that ensures cryptographic key material is protected. The client library supports both RSA and ECC keys and implements the generation of JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for authentication with Cloud IoT Core. Device provisioning and Error handling IoT devices generally operate in poor wireless conditions in the real world. The Android things client library will provide support for handling errors, and for caching and retransmitting events later. The library's queue is configurable and replaceable for developers requiring custom offline behavior. Developers are provided with detailed control over which events to save and the order in which they are sent when back online. Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate for IoT notes that “The Cloud IoT Core client library is part of our overall vision for device provisioning and authentication with Android Things.” A more detailed report of notable features can be read on the Google developer blog. The library is also available as open source on GitHub for developers who want to build it themselves. Google has also provided a sample that shows how to implement a sensor hub on Android Things, collecting sensor data from connected sensors and publishing them to a Google Cloud IoT Pub/Sub topic. Getting Started with Android Things Top 5 Google I/O 2018 conference Day 1 Highlights: Android P, Android Things, ARCore, ML kit and Lighthouse Google updates biometric authentication for Android P, introduces BiometricPrompt API

Billboard.js, the reusable JavaScript chart library backed by D3.js, has released version 1.5.0. Billboard.js provides the easiest way to create a Billboard chart instantly. The new version comes with 7 major improvements and a hoard of additional bug-fixes. The new radar type chart support has been added to this version for better data visualization. You can use ‘radar’ type, by the set data.types option value. You can also customize these radar types to get a different variation of the visual data. Different radar types There is also a new way to customize and use axes tick’s text value using axis.[x|y|y2].tick.text.position. For this, you need to just set the position pixel for x and y coordinate value. Thereafter, every value is treated relatively as the original position. Billboard.js also features a new axis.[x|y].clipPath option which can be used along with tick’s text position option. Generally, the clip-path attribute makes sure that the axes elements are clipped to not surpass the actual axes area. However sometimes, the tick texts aren’t visible due to the clip-path attribute. This is where axis[x|y]. clipPath option comes to play. There is also improved lining for x-axis. Now the users can put the line on the exact position they want. For this, just put \n character where you want your chart to be lined when you bind the category names for data. Improved lining for x-axis Billboard.js also has a new tooltip.linked.name to allow linking charts to particular name groups. So for instance, four charts with two different name groups will be interacting with only the same linked name value. linked tooltip with grouped name Read the release notes for additional feature releases and bug fixes. Jae Sung Park, the creator of Billboard.js states that, the next release will feature Multiple Axes and Themed CSS file. Chart Model and Draggable and Droppable Directives Building Motion Charts with Tableau How to create a Treemap and Packed Bubble Chart in Tableau

The Linux Foundation has made Chinese tech giant Tencent a platinum member, it announced today (June 25). The move means Tencent now joins a small and exclusive group of tech companies, including IBM, Huawei, and Cisco, that are regarded as top level members of the foundation. For Tencent, the announcement is important because it underlines the organizations' strategic focus on open source. For the Linux Foundation, meanwhile, it's a source of hefty support. Tencent are now in a position to provide the foundation with even more support - technologically and financially. It has already, for example, announced that it will be contributing its open source microservices project TARS to the foundation. Expect more to follow. Given a (relatively) tough year for a number of Silicon Valley companies, and the increasing visibility of other Chinese tech giants Alibaba, perhaps we're seeing the start of a subtle shift in power from California to China. What is Tencent? Tencent is a Chinese company worth $500 billion. That's more than Facebook. It owns a huge range of digital services, including China's popular messaging app WeChat and the Tencent Video Service, China's answer to Netflix. According to analysts (and this Guardian profile) Tencent's services are used by "more than two-thirds of the Chinese population". From the Linux Foundation's perspective you can see just how important it is to have an organization of this size supporting it. It's worth noting that Tencent has supported the Linux foundation for some time. For example, it was one of the founding members of the Linux Foundation's deep learning project, which launched at the start of 2018. However, with Platinum membership, the company is putting itself in the middle of the emerging intersection between the open source and corporate tech worlds. What the Linux Foundation and Tencent said about each other Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation was enthusiastic about the announcement saying: “Becoming a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation clearly reinforces the importance of open source to Tencent, and its commitment to the open source community... As Tencent’s contributions to open source continue to accelerate, The Linux Foundation is thrilled to work more closely with the company to provide more resources and support to the community. We look forward to collaborating with Tencent to enable more innovation and development to spur the creation of new and exciting technologies in the days ahead.” Clearly, Zemlin's is keen to underline the importance of how Tencent can support the open source intiatives that the Linux Foundation works hard to cultivate across the tech landscape. Tencent's general manager Liu Xin was also, as you'd imagine, enthusiastic about the move. "We look forward to strengthening our relationship with the international open source community and promoting innovation in cutting edge technology" he said. "Together, we will help to build a welcoming and energized global open source ecosystem.” Read the press release. Read next Alibaba Cloud partners with SAP to provide a versatile, one-stop cloud computing environment

GitLab recently announced the release of GitLab 11.0 which includes major features such as the Auto DevOps and License Management; among other features. The Auto DevOps feature is generally available in GitLab 11.0. It is a pre-built, fully featured CI/CD pipeline that automates the entire delivery process. With this feature, one has to simply commit their code and Auto DevOps does the rest. This includes tasks such as building and testing the app; performing code quality, security, and license scans. One can also package, deploy and monitor their applications using Auto DevOps. Chris Hill, head of systems engineering for infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover, said, “We’re excited about Auto DevOps, because it will allow us to focus on writing code and business value. GitLab can then handle the rest; automatically building, testing, deploying, and even monitoring our application.” License Management automatically detects licenses of project's dependencies such as, Enhanced Security Testing of code, containers, and dependencies: GitLab 11.0 has an extended coverage of Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST) and  includes Scala and .Net. Kubernetes integration features: If one needs to debug or check on a pod, they can do so by reviewing the Kubernetes pod logs directly from GitLab's deployment board. Improved Web IDE:  One can view their CI/CD pipelines from the IDE and get immediate feedback if a pipeline fails. Switching tasks can be disruptive, so the updated Web IDE makes it easy to quickly switch to the next merge request, to create, improve, or review without leaving the Web IDE. Enhanced Epic and Roadmap views : GitLab 11.0 has an updated Epic/Roadmap navigation interface to make it easier to see the big images and make planning easier. Read more about GitLab 11.0 on its GitLab’s official website. GitLab’s new DevOps solution GitLab open sources its Web IDE in GitLab 10.7 The Microsoft-GitHub deal has set into motion an exodus of GitHub projects to GitLab

The race for cloud supremacy is getting interesting with every passing day. The three major competitors - Amazon, Google and Microsoft seem to be coming up with fresh and innovative ideas to attract customers, making them try and adopt their cloud offerings. The most recent dice was thrown by Google - when they announced their free Big Data and Machine Learning training courses for the Google Cloud Platform. These courses allowed the students to build intelligent models on the Google cloud using the cloud-powered resources. Microsoft have now followed suit with their own AI School - the promise of which is quite similar: Allowing professionals to build smart solutions for their businesses using the Microsoft AI platform on Azure. AI School: Offering custom learning paths to master Artificial Intelligence Everyone has a different style and pace of learning. Keeping this in mind, Microsoft have segregated their learning material into different levels - beginner, intermediate and advanced. This helps the intermediate and advanced learners pick up the relevant topics they want to skill up in, without having to compulsorily go through the basics - yet giving them the option to do so in case they’re interested. The topic coverage in the AI School is quite interesting as well - from introduction to deep learning and Artificial Intelligence to building custom conversational AI. In the process, the students will be using a myriad of tools such as Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Bot framework for pre-trained AI models, Azure Machine Learning for deep learning and machine learning capabilities as well as Visual Studio and Cognitive Toolkit. The students will have the option of working with their favourite programming language as well - from Java, C# and Node.js to Python and JavaScript. The end goal of this program, as Microsoft puts it perfectly, is to empower the developers to use the trending Artificial Intelligence capabilities within their existing applications to make them smarter and more intuitive. All this while leveraging the power of the Microsoft cloud. Google and Microsoft have stepped up, time for Amazon now? Although Amazon does provide training and certifications for Machine Learning and AI, they are yet to launch their own courses to encourage learners to learn these trending technologies from scratch, and adopt AWS to build their own intelligent models. Considering they dominate the cloud market with almost 2/3rds of the market share, this is quite surprising. Another interesting point to note here is that Microsoft and Google have both taken significant steps to contribute to open source and free learning. While Google-acquired Kaggle is a great platform to host machine learning competitions and thereby learn new, interesting things in the AI space, Microsoft’s recent acquisition of GitHub takes them in the similar direction of promoting the open source culture and sharing free knowledge. Is Amazon waiting for a similar acquisition before they take this step in promoting open source learning? We will have to wait and see.

Oracle has announced a major shift in the pricing structure for various offerings of Java. Currently, there are many offerings for the core Java language in terms of Java binaries, Java for desktops, commercial offering, among others. Java binaries are offered free for developers under the General Public License 2 (GPL 2). Java SE is offered, at an entry-level support, for $2.50/desktop for a month, or $25/CPU for a month. Under the free offering for developers, Oracle will provide OpenJDK builds (the backend that keeps Java running on any system) under the GPL + CPE license. To make the offering more flexible, Oracle is working on Oracle JDK which would support Java SE 11 (the LTS release) set to launch in September 2018. With Oracle JDK, Oracle is trying to make the offering of Java binaries simpler for the developers as it would be royalty-free for open-source development, testing, etc. For the commercial license, Oracle will be offering the Java SE Subscriptions combined with the technical support and access to all the updates that will follow the Java SE release cycle. Apart from the commercial offering, Oracle also has varied pricing for offerings through Oracle Academy. With the new Java SE Subscription, comes with a feature called Java Advanced Management Console. This feature will enable the license holders to identify, manage, and tune Java SE use in systems used across the enterprise. It also includes Oracle Premier Support, to enable support for Java across current and previous versions. Oracle, in their press release, mentioned the update in the subscription model is inspired by how Linux provides support for updates in the platform. It mentions "the subscription model for updates and support has been long established in the Linux ecosystem". By this new subscription model, Oracle ensures that anyone requiring the additional level of support for Oracle products can receive it with flexible pricing and still keep a balance between its open source and commercial offerings. For all the details on these subscriptions, you can visit the Java SE subscription FAQs. Oracle reveals issues in Object Serialization. Plans to drop it from core Java. 5 Things you need to know about Java 10 Oracle Apex 18.1 is here!

React Native, the cross-platform mobile development framework from Facebook is going under a complete rewrite with a focus on better flexibility and improved integration with native infrastructure. Why React Native 5 years ago when React Native was announced at React.js conf 2015, Facebook opened the doors for web developers and engineers who wanted to take their existing skill set into the world of mobile development. Since then React Native has been nothing short of a phenomenon. React Native has come a long way since then, becoming the 13th most popular open source project on Github. React Native came with the promise of revolutionizing the user interface development process with its core set of cross-platform UI primitives, and its popular declarative rendering pattern. Previously, there have been many frameworks which branded themselves as “Cross-Platform” like Ionic and Cordova, but simply put, they just rendered inside a web view, or an “HTML5 app,” or a “hybrid app.” These apps lacked the native feel of an Android/iOS app made with Java/Swift and led to a terrible user experience. React Native, on the other hand, works a bit differently where the User Interface(UI) components are kept in the native block and the business logic is kept in the JavaScript block. At any user interaction/request, the UI block detects the change and sends it to the JavaScript block, which processes the request and sends back the data to the UI block. This allows the UI block to perform with native experience since the processing is done somewhere else. The Dawn Of A New Beginning As cool as these features may sound, working with React Native is quite difficult. If there is a feature that you need to add that is not yet supported by the React Native library, developers have to write their own Native Module in the corresponding language, which can then be linked to the React Native codebase. There are several native modules which are not present in the ecosystem like gesture-handling and native navigation. Complex hacks are required to include them in the native components. For apps with complex integration between React Native and existing app code, this is frustrating. Sophie Alpert, Engineering Manager at Facebook, mentioned in a blog post named State of React 2018, “We’re rewriting many of React Native’s internals, but most of the changes are under the hood: existing React Native apps will continue to work with few or no changes.” This comes with no surprise as clearly Facebook cares about developer experience and hence decided to go ahead with this architectural change with almost no breaking changes. A similar move which was applauded was when they transitioned to React Fiber. This new architectural change is in favor of making the framework more lightweight and better fit into existing native apps involving three major internal changes: New and improved threading Model It will be possible to call synchronously into JavaScript on any thread for high-priority updates while keeping low-priority work off the main thread. New Async Rendering Capabilities This will allow multiple rendering priorities and to simplify asynchronous data handling Lighter and faster bridge Direct calls between native and JavaScript are more efficient and will make it easier to build debugging tools like cross-language stack traces. Along with these architectural changes Facebook also hinted to slim down React Native to make it fit better with the JavaScript ecosystem. This includes making the VM and bundler swappable. React Native is a brilliantly designed cross-platform framework which gave a new dimension to mobile development and a new hope to web developers. Is this restructuring going to cement its place as a top player in the mobile development marketplace? Only time will tell. Till then you can read more about the upcoming changes on their official website. Is React Native is really Native framework? Building VR experiences with React VR 2.0 Jest 23, Facebook’s popular framework for testing React applications is now released