Daily Dose: The End is Nigh - IBM Builds Cognitive Computing Chips

The brilliant engineers and scientists over at Cyberdyne Systems IBM introduced the "first computing core that combines digital 'neurons' and on-chip 'synapses' in working silicon." The chip demonstrates "synaptic plasticity", which gives it the ability to learn and use memory, much like our own brains! The cores of the chip can "mimic the event-driven, parallel processing abilities found in the brain with no set programming". Is anyone else as scared as I am?

HP Murders webOS

It only took sixteen months after its acquisition of Palm for HP to announce that it will be killing off its mobile operating system webOS and its related hardware. The announcement came today, where HP reported that it will "discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones." Even though it may seem like the end for webOS, the software could live on in the form of licenses to other companies, or including it in other hardware such as printers or even cars.

Co-founder of Android Split his First Bonus Check with Employees

Andy Rubin, co-creator of Google's Android, made headlines today when it was revealed that he split his first bonus check with his Android team employees. According to an article over at Business Insider, Rubin received a multimillion dollar check in 2008 for his work on Android, which he partially gave to the 100 or so employees on the Android team, who each received "between $10,000 and $50,000." Before Android, Rubin worked on WebTV and Danger Inc., both of which were bought by Microsoft.

PyPy 1.6 "Kickass Panda" Released

The latest version of the popular Python interpreter PyPy was released today, and it was dubbed "Kickass Panda". The latest version brings several performance enhancements, bugfixes, and improved support for Windows 32bit and OS X 64bit. One of the performance improvements is fast types, where "calls to types functions are seen and optimized by the JIT, and they are up to 60 times faster than PyPy 1.5 and 10 times faster than CPython." Check out the release blog for the full list of changes.

Protection and Methodologies of Security Vulnerabilities in Web Development

Thanks to tayyabzzz for today's top link!