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The Android development team took a break from adding major features to the Android Emulator over the last six months to focus on an initiative called Project Quartz, the goal of which was to improve the stability, speed, and performance of the platform. Now, the team is reporting the improvements it was able to make to the Android Emulator, which can now be experienced either by downloading the latest version of Android Studio or updating to the latest version of the Emulator in the SDK Manager. The first goal was to improve stability and reliability, which the team accomplished by fixing issues that were causing backend and UI crashes, updating the UI framework, updating the hypervisor framework, updating graphics libraries, and eliminating technical debt. Specifically, they moved to a newer version of Qt, its platform for building the user interfaces in the Emulator; updating its graphics rendering system gfxstream ; and adding over 600 end-to-end tests to the pytests suite. The ...

JetBrains has announced the 2024.3 releases of its AI Assistant and several of its IDEs. AI Assistant 2024.3 adds support for Gemini models, enabling users to now choose between models from Gemini or OpenAI, or use local models. The assistant also now offers advanced code completion, enhanced context management, and inline prompt generation.  “We’re excited to introduce the 2024.3 updates, which bring powerful new capabilities to our IDEs and JetBrains AI Assistant,” said Vladislav Tankov, director of AI at JetBrains. “By integrating advanced models like Google Gemini, OpenAI, and local models, and enhancing code completion with our Mellum model, we’re empowering developers to work smarter and faster. Other IDE updates are also designed to provide deeper insights into code structure, streamline debugging, and improve overall efficiency, ultimately enhancing productivity across our entire product suite.” The company’s Java and Kotlin IDE, IntelliJ IDEA , was updated with a Log...

ActiveState today announced it is rebranding and relaunching its product as an open source management platform to help enterprises manage open source complexities, ensure supply chain security, and streamline DevSecOps. The platform, which integrates with existing tools, aims to proactively manage open-source risks by providing tools for discovery, analysis, remediation, and governance.  It offers a centralized dashboard to track open-source usage, policy enforcement, and vulnerability management. The platform also ensures reproducible builds and streamlines upgrades, reducing the burden on developers. Scott Robertson, ActiveState’s CTO, explained that most people know of ActiveState for its management of open source dynamic programming languages. “That usually became the way they got introduced to ActiveState’s real core vision, which is helping enterprises manage open source, the complexities of open source at scale that included managing licenses, vulnerabilities and doing ver...

LaunchDarkly has come out with a new solution to help improve release confidence and reduce the risks associated with releasing new software. The new offering, Guarded Releases, establishes benchmarks for performance, latency, and availability for each stage of a rollout.  This enables development teams to more proactively detect and address issues before they become issues for customers, and allows for easy rollback to previous stages.  “Guarded Releases bring together real-time monitoring, automated recovery, error tracking, and user insights to resolve issues faster, elevate the user experience, and accelerate innovation,”  said Cody De Arkland, senior director of Product Incubation at LaunchDarkly. “With Guarded Releases, teams can ship, knowing each deployment is smarter, safer, and fully optimized for success.” It provides visibility down to the feature flag level, and can track key metrics, like latency or error rates, that are important when it comes to unders...

The  Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering  (ECE) is expanding its collaboration with Apple by joining the company’s New Silicon Initiative (NSI) – a program that aims to prepare students for careers in hardware technology, computer architecture, and silicon chip design. As part of the  Apple NSI program , ECE students will receive various types of support to enhance their skills in microelectronic circuits and hardware design. This includes scholarship and fellowship opportunities, along with expanded coursework for both undergraduate and graduate students. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to connect with Apple engineers through mentorships, guest lectures, and networking events. The expanded curriculum support will benefit integrated circuit (IC) design and tapeout-to-silicon courses that enable students to prepare for a career in hardware engineering across different focus areas, including circuit technology, electronic devices, c...

.NET 9 is now available, and with it comes a number of performance improvements and new functionality to support developers building with AI.  According to Microsoft, this release features over 1,000 performance updates, one of which is that the Server GC has been altered to adapt to application memory requirements instead of the resources available in the environment. This change has resulted in a 15% increase in requests per second compared to .NET 8 and a 93% reduction in memory usage.  “This change in approach has a profound impact in high core-count environments, where application memory is small or changes dramatically over time,” the .NET Team explained in a blog post .  In addition, the .NET 9 runtime added support for Arm64 SVE and Intel AVX10, and in this release, the JIT compiler received improved performance for Arm64, loops, PGO, and bounds checks.  .NET 9 also features updated Dynamic Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) to provide optimizations for m...

The data platform Snowflake is hosting its annual user conference, BUILD 2024, bringing together data scientists and developers and sharing new functionality across its platform that will enable customers to get more value from their data and build AI functionality on top of it. New updates across Snowflake platform enable greater collaboration, flexibility, and security First, the company announced several new capabilities for its flagship platform that will enable customers to better collaborate around their data.  The new Snowflake Internal Marketplace allows users to discover data, apps, and AI services created by different teams in the company. The marketplace also facilitates sharing of fine-tuned LLMs, which improves cross-team collaboration on generative AI use cases.  Listings in the marketplace benefit from AI via Copilot for Listings, an assistant that can answer questions on structured data to help users understand if shared data is relevant to them.  ...

KubeCon + Cloud Native Con is happening this week in Salt Lake City, UT, bringing together the Kubernetes community in one location, and providing the opportunity for companies in the space to launch new offerings and update their products.  We’ve collected the news announcements from those companies all in one place so you can stay up to date. Keep checking back here, as we will be updating this list as new news comes in.  Last updated: 11/12 at 9:45 AM ET Red Hat adds new AI capabilities for Red Hat Developer Hub Red Hat today announced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat Developer Hub, the company’s  enterprise-grade internal developer platform based on the Backstage project.  The new features are designed to help organizations, whether already implementing an AI strategy or just coming to grips with its possibilities, more quickly and easily harness the power of AI to deliver smarter applications and services to their customers and end-users. To h...

Elastic is implementing a new approach for storing vectorized data that will require 95% less memory.  Better Binary Quantization, or BBQ, is based on a technique called RaBitQ , which was developed earlier this year by researchers at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.  According to Elastic, the biggest differences between BBQ and native binary quantization are that: All vectors get normalized around a centroid  Multiple error correction values are stored Asymmetric quantization increases search quality without increasing storage costs The way that query vectors are quantized and transformed enables more efficient bit-wise operations “Elasticsearch is evolving to become one of the best vector databases in the world, and we see our users wanting to put more and more vectorized data in it,” said Ajay Nair, general manager of Platform at Elastic. “Better Binary Quantization is our latest innovation to reduce the resources needed to store vectorized data an...

Companies that are successfully maximizing their AI investments are seeing at least a 25% improvement in their revenue growth rate, according to a new report from IBM. The company surveyed 2,000 companies across the U.S., U.K, India, Japan, and Germany, and categorized 15% as AI Leaders who are ahead of their peers and the other 85% as AI Learners. According to the report, there are four key factors that contribute to the success AI Leaders are seeing.  Compared to their peers, AI Leaders: Are more aggressive with their AI investments Are more confident in their ability to access and manage their organization’s data Have a C-suite that is fully aligned with IT leadership on what they need to do to achieve AI maturity Can customize their AI efforts to achieve optimal value.  “We discovered that Leaders don’t mindlessly chase trends. Instead, they look for the intersection of opportunity, need and internal capabilities to develop an action-oriented roadmap. They fost...

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivers mail to almost 167 million addresses in the United States, and anyone who has tried to order something online has likely had the experience of not getting a package delivered on time (or at all) because the address was entered incorrectly or in a weird format, causing shipping delays. The USPS has a standard format it accepts, but it’s not standard around the world. Internationally there are over 200 different address formats used and more than 20 language scripts used to write those addresses.  Given the complexity of considering all of these different global formats, using a verification service like Melissa’s Global Address service can help ensure that all addresses are properly formatted based on where they need to go, which improves deliverability. John DeMatteo, solutions engineer I at Melissa , explained in a recent SD Times microwebinar that “fewer errors and returns equals more time to be working on other things, as well ...

Several high profile software supply chain security incidents over the last few years have put more of a spotlight on the need to have visibility into the software supply chain. However, it seems as though those efforts may not be leading to the desired outcomes, as a new survey found that only one out of five organizations believe they have that visibility into every component and dependency in their software. The survey, Anchore’s 2024 Software Supply Chain Security Report , also found that less than half of respondents are following supply chain best practices like creating software bill-of-materials (SBOMs) for the software they develop (49% of respondents) or for open source projects they use (45%) of respondents. Additionally, only 41% of respondents request SBOMs from the third-party vendors they use. Despite these low numbers, this is a significant improvement from 2022’s survey, when less than a third of respondents were following these practices.  The report found that...

  Tricentis , a global leader in continuous testing and quality engineering, today announced the expansion of its test management and analytics platform,  Tricentis qTest , with the launch of Tricentis qTest Copilot. The latest addition to its suite of generative AI-powered   Tricentis Copilot  solutions, qTest Copilot harnesses the power of generative AI to simplify and accelerate test case generation, allowing for greater test coverage and higher quality software releases. qTest Copilot is a generative AI assistant that automatically drafts test cases and test steps based on source documents and user requirements, offering considerable time-saving benefits when compared to manual approaches. Embedded into the newest version of the qTest platform, qTest Copilot combines Tricentis’ scalable and unified test management technology, with new AI-augmented features to allow QA and developer teams to greatly accelerate software delivery. Users can quickly create test cov...

Symbiotic Security  today launched the industry’s first real-time security for software development that combines detection and remediation with just-in-time training – incorporating security testing and training directly into the development process without breaking developers’ workflows. Backed with $3 million of seed funding from investors including  Lerer Hippeau ,  Axeleo Capital ,  Factorial Capital , and others, the company has introduced its software-as-a-service that works with the developer’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and enables them to develop software more securely. A  Ponemon survey  of 634 IT and IT security practitioners reported the top challenges to shift-left security were: a lack of integrated security tools (51%); an increase in work for developers (43%); too many vulnerabilities to fix (40%). These are precisely the challenges addressed by Symbiotic Security. “Traditional approaches to code security are broken, which ...

GitHub Copilot’s chat functionality is being updated to provide developers guidance on how to reword their prompts so that they can get better responses.  Microsoft shared that user feedback on GitHub Copilot indicated that some developers struggle with creating prompts, including understanding phrasing and what context to include.  “In some cases, the experience left users feeling like they were getting too much or too little from their interactions,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post .  In response to this, GitHub Copilot’s chat will now be a more conversational experience that can adapt to a developer’s specific context and needs.  For example, if a developer asks a question that is too vague, like “what is this?,” Copilot will now respond back saying that the “question is ambiguous because it lacks specific context or content” and will suggest some prompts that are more specific and will lead to better responses. In this example, the response included other sam...