News on computers in 2017

IBM's answer to Elon Musk

Although it has a major part to technological progress, and is probably the origin of the development of electric cars, more ecological, and that he also participates in the deployment of solar energy with its project of solar roof, there is a field where Elon Musk is very conservative, that of the artificial man. When he is spoken of about robots, he laughs at the video of a cat moving on a Roomba, and says "This is robotics?". Then he writes an open letter asking that robot killers be banned. In the face of artificial intelligence, he played the Cassandra and did not fail to denounce its dangers. When the president of Russia tells the press that the AI ​​leader will become the ruler of the world, he tweets:

Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of third world war.

On September 6, 2017, IBM announced that it will spend $ 240 million to open an artificial intelligence lab at MIT. Apparently not convinced.

Source CNBC. September 7, 2017.

Ring, the anti-facebook is available for download

What is an anti-facebook? It is a social network that does not collect your private data, does not make them accessible to third parties. And to do this it needs above all not to be centralized. And I just described Ring, launched by the Linux Foundation. A foundation a bit oriented France at the moment since the name of the version 1.0 of Ring is called: "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité"!
The principle is to have users communicate with each other through a distributed network. You can then exchange messages, pictures, videos and follow web surfers as you do on Facebook, without the disadvantages mentioned ... (July 28, 2017).

Swift, LLVM, Tesla

The creator of the Swift programming language and one of the authors of LLVM left Apple on 10 January to work on the autopilot of Tesla. He now just left Tesla ....

Tesla:

Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best.

Chris Lattner:

Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all.  I'm interested to hear about interesting roles... 

The dating site failed.

June 21, 2017.

Unity (the Linux GUI), it's over

This is officially announced by the Ubuntu distribution. It is on this distribution that is based Linux Mint (which also uses other interfaces, Cinnamon or Mate):

I took the view that, if convergence was the future (between desktop and mobile (N.O.T.T.) and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts.
In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation. And industry has not rallied to the possibility,.

So the distribution gives up the mobile market and the Unity interface designed for convergence, and from version 18.04 in April 2018, will come back to Gnome. It is certain that Mir will be also replaced by Wayland.
April 6, 2017.

Linux on Windows becomes a complete platform

With the Creative Update of Windows 10, the possibilities of Linux that was originally only a Bash shell, become more complete. It is possible to run Node, MySQL or Posgres, NGinx or Apache, as well as Java or even .NET Core!
You can compile a C++ application under Visual Studio and test it under Linux in Windows ... At command line or with an interface like Electron but not with the Linux desktop.
The main target, besides the developers of portable applications, are the disappointed users of Mac Pro that will be able to build iOS applications under Windows-Linux.
Graphical interfaces like Gnome or KDE do not work. This seems a disadvantage, but we can see here an opportunity to develop a new interface for Linux, based for example on Node.js!
April 1, 2017.

Dmoz.org, the last day

Before the official announcement, editors are warned that after February 28, 2017, AOL will stop hosting the directory. It one time was the reference directory of Google, which sometimes used manual descriptions made by editors for its own snippets in results pages.
AOL has never known how to use this source of information and has never made any effort to develop it.
February 28, 2017.

The closure date was postponed to March 14.
March 1, 2017.

RethinkDB, after 7 years, it's over (almost)

In 2009, the project was presented to investors with these three main points: 1) To address a broad market but made for specific users. 2) Find the talents. 3) Read The Economist regularly.
It seems that this is not the recipe for success, in fact the company has never been profitable, unlike others like MongoDB (700 employees, worth more than a billion). It chose a market oversupplied, that of open source, and created a product for an audience that is not a buyer. The market of databases is very broad in fact but that of the buyers is less. Here is how the team analyzes its error:
The product was created to be reliable, to have a simplified interface, to be consistent in all its aspects. On the contrary, the public wants a product that is available immediately when it needs it, which shows its speed in testing, which offers the precise functions that it needs.
When the product began to meet all these objectives, MongoDB was already popular and there was no reason to choose a lesser known product.
The source code of the database will always be available for download on rethinkdb.com, but without the resources of a team to develop it. If we face bugs, we must pray for contributors to correct them, which is less effective than having a paid team to do so.
January 18, 2017.

Updated February 6, 2017: The assets of RethinkDB have been purchased for $ 25 K. and given to the Linux Foundation, and the licence unfettered from AGPL to Apache License 2.0!
For those who would like to use it, as it has become more accessible, it is an alternative to MongoDB, a non-relational distributed database of documents, for real-time apps, very simple to use with good complementary tools.

Programming languages that become popular

This list is based on the TIOBE index, which is not necessarily perfectly representative of the reality but may serve to show the evolution in the popularity of languages ... In fact the index is based on searches done about the languages, and shows more interest in them than their use.

Langage	2016	2017
Java	1	1
C	2	2
C++	3	3
C#	4	4
Python	5	5
Visual Basic .NET	7	6
JavaScript	8	7
Perl	11	8
Assembleur	9	9
PHP	6	10
Delphi/Object Pascal	12	11
Ruby	10	12
Go	54	13
Swift	14	14
Visual Basic	13	15
R	19	16
Dart	26	17
Objective-C	18	18
MATLAB	15	19
PL/SQL	20	20

The languages whose usage increase the most are Go and Dart. PHP is the one that loses most in popularity. Ruby is also less used, so it is clear that they tend to be replaced on servers by Go and Dart.
To be compared with the popularity in 2014.

See also...