This week, 350 people will head to Microsoft’s Redmond campus to hear about C++, and in particular the C++11 update, from some leading experts, including Bjarne Stroustrup, Hans Boehm, and Herb Sutter. The event has sold out but the great news is that you don’t have to book a flight and find a babysitter for [...]A number of universities (primarily across America, but also including the UK’s Open University) are using the internet to open up their course materials to anybody who would like to study them. It means you can access lectures and notes from some of the world’s leading institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford. [...]The Babbage column in The Economist has published a short report about parallel computing, in the context of the water-cooled machines at Supercomputing ’11. The piece makes an interesting point about the way that supercomputing didn’t invent parallel computing, but it did turn the theory into practice and kickstart the cycle of innovation we see [...]Now this is a bit of a strange one. It appears that Microsoft has created an extension to Visual Studio that will assess programmers’ work for various “achievements” and then give them badges that they can post on their blogs, Microsoft’s forum, and other places. Microsoft does have some history in this area. It created [...]Dr Dobbs has published new research (PDF) which shows that 66% of software engineers don’t use a thread checking tool of any kind. You might not be surprised at that, but 56% of those surveyed said they considered parallel programming to be important, and a further 26% said it was critical. That suggests to me that [...]If 2011 was the year of the tablet, then 2012 could well be the year of the Ultrabook. It’s the latest device category, combining the best of the tablet with the best of the laptop computer in a thin, light and elegant design. The combination of high performance graphics and processing, touch controls, and mobility [...]Computer World dares to ask whether, despite the hype around them at CES, we actually need multicore processors on tablets and phones. The argument goes that since software hasn’t been designed for mobile multicore processors, there’s no real need for the hardware. That’s a bit chicken-and-eggy for me, because nobody’s going to create apps for [...]Arguably, the most popular parallel program any of us use is Google. It’s deceptively simple from a user’s point of view. You type in a few words, click (or tap) a button and wait for some results to come back. But in the background, there’s a lot of data crunching going on. When I think [...]The new issue of Intel Visual Adrenaline (PDF) is out now, and like many previous issues, it includes a case study showing how a games studio optimises its software. I find stories like this fascinating because they provide an insight into what goes on behind the scenes of creating a commercial-quality game, and often one [...]Earlier today, I blogged about SEJITS, a research project at University of California, Berkeley, for multicore programming. I thought I would dig a bit deeper into it, so I’ve read through the paper “SEJITS: Getting productivity and performance with selective embedded JIT specialisation” (PDF). It’s a really interesting model, and it could go some way [...]