In the Iron Man movies, Tony Stark uses a voice-controlled computer assistant called J.A.R.V.I.S. It manages the lights and security system in his home, helps him pilot his Iron Man suits, and even assists with his research. Some of this is still very much in the realm of science fiction, but not all of it. Inspired by the Iron Man movies, two Princeton students have built a J.A.R.V.I.S. for the real world.
Mozilla has teamed up with Unity to run its games on the Web without plugins -- but with an add-on.
Announced at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, the extension will ship later this year with the anticipated Unity 5.0. Powered by the Web graphics library WebGL and the JavaScript subset asm.js, the add-on update says more about game developer's faith in Firefox than anything else.
This weekend, the team behind the Popcorn Time movie torrent app announced they had stopped development of the program. Now a well known torrent source, YTS, claims they have taken up the mantle and will continue to work on the app.
Torrent Freak reports that Popcorn Time was written on the same API that YTS (formerly YIFY-Torrents) uses on their website. The statement from the site adds:
Why does it seem so easy to pirate today?
It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy than a "serial number/activation key." I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest.
Today, Epic Games and Mozilla are demonstrating how the Web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform for gaming by providing a sneak peek of Epic’s Soul and Swing Ninja demos, running in Firefox at near-native speeds. This video is the first glimpse of Unreal Engine 4 running on the Web without plugins.
GitHub is reaching out to developers with the formation of a program encouraging them to link to the popular code-sharing site.
The GitHub Developer Program offers resources to work with the GitHub API, which includes features like project management, authentication, and the triggering of code-testing when committing code to GitHub. "Really, almost anything you can do on GitHub, we open up an API for it," said Ryan Day, head of business development at the company.
Microsoft delivered the first service pack for Office 2013 on Tuesday, making good on a promise last year to ship the update in early 2014 and synchronizing its release with prior editions' initial service packs.
Office 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was accompanied by similar updates for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013, the two most important server-side products that tie in with Office in enterprises.
The new release proves controversial as Google tightens control over the browser to the anger of some users.
In terms of new features, version 33 is rather disappointing – despite debuting in the beta channel a few weeks ago, Google Now notifications have yet to make their way across to the stable channel. In fact, version 33 is little more than a bug-fix release, with 28 security fixes the only notable highlight.
VMware is teaming up with Google to bring Windows applications to Chrome OS machines.
The system will use VMware's Blast HTML5 technology to virtualise a Windows environment under Chrome OS.
With the rise in sales for the Google based operating system (OS), there has arisen a need to find a way to run traditional systems in a Chrome environment, and this represents an opportunity for enterprise users who are still tied to Windows XP, which is into its final two months of service life, to continue more or less uninterrupted without having to fear the threat of malware.
Microsoft reportedly is 'seriously considering' allowing Android apps to run on its Windows and Windows Phone operating systems.
That's according to The Verge, which has heard from sources familiar with Microsoft's plans that the company is mulling the prospect of bringing Android apps to both Windows and Windows Phone in order to win over new customers.
