New submitter androlinuz writes: Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development. In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform.

destinyland writes: Last week GitHub announced the ability to create templates for Issues and Pull Requests, in an apparent response to an open letter signed by 600+ project maintainers. "This is the first of many improvements to Issues and Pull Requests that we're working on based on feedback from the community," "wrote Ben Bleikamp, Product Manager at GitHub. The original letter, hosted in a "Dear-Github" repository, noted that "If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community..." But this week GitHub continued releasing new improvements, offering a new feature with to upload files directly into repositories without leaving their browser.

An anonymous reader writes: The milestone release FFmpeg 3.0 "Einstein" has been unleashed. For those who need a reminder, FFmpeg comprises several libraries and command-line tools (the main command-line tool being "ffmpeg") that encode, decode, transcode, and stream audio/visual data, etc. FFmpeg supports a multitude of codecs, filters, and container formats too numerous to mention here. FFmpeg is used by MPlayer, VLC, HandBrake, Chrome, and many other projects. Changes from 2.x to 3.0 include: a much better native AAC encoder, better hardware acceleration, and some API/ABI breakage. See this, this, this, this, and the changelog for much better descriptions of the improvements.

New submitter mmoorebz writes: The Linux Foundation is announcing new areas of focus for its Open Mainframe Project. The Open Mainframe Project is a collaborative effort launched six months ago as a focal point for the deployment and use of the Linux OS on the mainframe.

An anonymous reader writes: Wesley Allison Clark, a revered computer engineer whose work from the 1950s through 1970s underpinned the revolutions in personal computing, computer graphics, and the internet, died Monday. He was 88. Among other things, Clark was one of the two people (Charles Molnar being the other) who created LINC, the first mini-computer.

An anonymous reader writes: Back 'in the day' you could easily find books on NT, Windows 2000, or Slackware that went into painstaking detail about every functional aspect of the operating system (think Slackware Unleashed). They covered the interplay between BIOS, boot sector, crash dumps, every command-line option, etc. Past about Win 2000 I fell way behind focusing on finishing my EE degree. Now when faced with a complex issue, I just end up at Google, but would prefer a good comprehensive book on recent Win8/Win10 architectures. Any suggestions? Are these books all but limited to course-prep now?

itwbennett writes: Researcher Chris Vickery discovered that the Arlington, Virginia based child monitoring service uKnowKids.com had a misconfigured MongoDB installation that left sensitive details on over 1,700 children exposed for months. UKnowKids helps parents monitor their child's activities online, by watching their mobile communications, social media activities, and their location. And so the database stored 6.8 million private text messages, 1.8 million images (many depicting children), Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram account details, in addition to the children's full names, email addresses, GPS coordinates, date of birth.

An anonymous reader writes with this story at the BBC about the famously bad video game based on Steven Spielberg's ET, a game "considered to be one of the worst of all time," and on which some have blamed the collapse of then-powerhouse Atari. The game's sole programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, explains how it was that what must have sounded at the time like a sure thing turned into a disaster.

An anonymous reader writes: Cyanogen has announced a new integrated mobile platform designed to change the way users, developers, OEMs and MNOs build and interact with mobile devices. Their new platform MOD provides developers with APIs they can use to implement intelligent, contextually aware and lightweight experiences natively into the mobile operating system. It also allows users to extend the functionality of their devices.

snydeq writes: Stuffing bits in databases is boring, InfoWorld's Peter Wayner writes, so why not program everything around you? "The barrier between bits and atoms is disappearing, with programmers no longer confined to the virtual realm, in part thanks to the Internet of things becoming more real. Now we can do more than write ones and zeros to a disk: We can actually write code that tells a machine how to extrude, cut, bend, or morph atoms," Wayner writes in a survey of programming languages. "Rapidly developing domains such as autonomous cars, smart homes, intelligent office spaces, and mass customization require programmers to be savvy about how changes in data structures can lead to changes in objects. If the term "object-oriented programming" weren't already taken, it would be perfect."

Qbertino writes: Kotlin, one of the challengers to Java's VM, has been released in version 1. Kotlin is object-oriented, statically typed and comes with professional IDE support by Jetbrains — which is no big surprise, since it's the Jetbrains employees who developed the programming language that saw the light of day four years ago. Kotlin is already in real-world use and development will be moving into fleshing out the Kotlin feature set without breaking backwards compatibility. These features include planned support for JavaScript — which sounds interesting considering JS has gained quite some traction recently. Kotlin is FOSS and is released under the Apache license.

destinyland writes: LinkedIn is open sourcing their testing frameworks, and sharing details of their revamped development process after their latest app required a year and over 250 engineers. Their new paradigm? "Release three times per day, with no more than three hours between when code is committed and when that code is available to members," according to a senior engineer on LinkedIn's blog. This requires a three-hour pipeline where everything is automated, from committing code to releasing it into production, along with automated analyses and testing. "Holding ourselves to this constraint ensures we won't revert to using manual validation to certify our releases."

An anonymous reader writes: The popular Linux process viewer htop got a new major revision, and now runs natively on FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X. The author discussed the process of making the tool cross-platform earlier this year at FOSDEM. Htop also got some new features, including mouse wheel support via ncurses 6 and listing process environment variables.

Andy Nicholls has been an R programmer and consultant for Mango Solutions since 2011 (where he currently manages the R consultancy team), after a long stint as a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry. He has a serious background in mathematics, too, with a Masters in math and another in Statistics with Applications in Medicine. Andy has taught more than 50 on-site R training courses and has been involved in the development of more than 30 R packages; he's also a regular contributor to events at LondonR, the largest R user group in the UK. But since not everyone can get to London for a user group meeting, you can get some of the insights he's gained as an R expert in Sams Teach Yourself R In 24 Hours (available in print or at Safari), of which he is the lead author. Today, though, you can ask Andy about the much-lauded statistics-oriented free software (GPL) language directly -- Why to use it, how to get started, how to get things done, and where those intriguing release names come from. (The about page is helpful, too.) As usual, please ask as many questions as you'd like, but one question at a time, please.

An anonymous reader writes: In an epic smack-down, Simon Phipps examines a recent article by some VCs with an apparently strong track record in open source startups and finds the way they see the world makes them plain wrong about Red Hat, OSI licenses, Apache and probably everything else they talk about.

campuscodi writes: The Node.js Foundation has taken the Express Node.js framework under its wing. Express will be a new incubation project for the Foundation. IBM, which purchased Express maintainer StrongLoop last September, is contributing the code. Part of the reason for allowing the foundation to oversee Express is to build a diverse contributor base, which is important given the framework's popularity.

munwin99 writes: For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was 'what about network transparency?!' Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network transparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP.

v3rgEz writes: Running at over 50 sections and hundreds of subsections, Amazon AWS's terms of service are somewhat exhaustive, but there's one paragraph that might catch your eye. As of yesterday's update, Amazon has added a section that nullifies restrictions on the use of their Lumberyard game platform in the event of a zombie outbreak. Pre-apocalypse, the terms of service prohibit the use of the engine to manage life-or-death situations, but being able to spin up a zombie firefight simulator at a moment's notice might come in handy. You do have to wonder, though: Does Jeff Bezos know something we don't? Lawyers typically don't approve of Easter Eggs in legal documents.

An anonymous reader writes: In the largest study of gender bias [in programming] to date, researchers found that women tend to have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men, across a variety of programming languages. This, despite the finding that their pull requests are larger and less likely to serve an immediate project need. At the same time, when the gender of the women is identifiable (as opposed to hidden), their pull requests are accepted less often than men's.

New submitter FlipperPA writes: It has just been announced that the 2016 vintage of DjangoCon US will be held in Philadelphia at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from July 17th through 22nd. DjangoCon US is a 6-day international community conference for the community by the community, held each year in North America, about the Django web framework. From its humble beginnings in a newsroom in Lawrence, KS, Django now powers some of the better known web sites on the planet, including The Washington Post, Mozilla, Instagram, Disqus, and Pinterest. Considered by many to be the "batteries included" web framework for Python, Django continues to attract new developers across the globe.