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Since the five biggest tech companies – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook -- don't really care where their employees learn their skills , there's no reason to take out heavy loans or even time away from your current position to break into a well-paid career in the tech industry. And if you aren't sure exactly which field to pursue, you're in luck. The 2021 Google Software Engineering Manager Prep Bundle offers train-at-your-own pace courses across a wide variety of topics. Budding web developers can benefit from the "UI Design" and "JavaFX: Build Beautiful User Interfaces" courses. Or, if you'd just like to pump up your resume with a couple of impressive certifications, the "Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)" and "ISACA CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) 2021" classes can help you prepare. Are you fascinated by the way natural language processing is used for things like text classification, spam detection, neural machine translation, and … [Read more...] about Google Software Engineering Manager Prep bundle: Get this training package for just $40

Why it matters: As you can probably attest, modern wearables can be slapped on a wrist or slotted in an ear without a problem. But they’re not subtle enough, neither in their design or cost, to be part of everyday items like clothing, milk cartons, food packages, or bandages – Arm’s examples of places where their new "natively flexible" processor might belong. In a new paper published in Nature , Arm researchers explain how they ported a standard 32-bit Arm processor design onto a plastic substrate that they say is bendy. It’s more of a proof-of-concept than a working prototype, but it nevertheless demonstrates some significant firsts. Arm fittingly call their creation "PlasticARM." It uses metal-oxide thin-fin transistor technology (TFT) fabricated on a polyimide substrate. Polyimide is a durable type of thermoplastic that’s mildly flexible. Arm’s team wasn’t willing to put their processor’s flexibility to the test, but I would estimate that it lands somewhere between a … [Read more...] about Arm made a bendable 32-bit processor out of ‘plastic’

In the last decade or so of Ars, two pre-COVID news stories stand out to me as the "biggest"—the kind of stuff that captivates a general audience in the moment and will attract the eyes of Hollywood eventually. The first one happened back in 2013, when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified documents that showed the US had a secret surveillance program up and running that even monitored US citizens. To make the saga even juicier, Snowden ultimately had to flee the country for fear of legal retribution. Further Reading How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts The second story largely unfolded in that same year. A young libertarian named Ross Ulbricht pondered why in the United States you couldn't purchase drugs freely and openly on the Internet through some kind of one-stop repository like Amazon. Eventually, his Silk Road website sprang up and captivated the world... until federal authorities finally closed in on Ulbricht in a San Francisco … [Read more...] about Dread Pirate Roberts escaped development hell: Making

The world is currently a shifty place. Too many powerful people want humans to be paranoid. They want them to be suspicious. Sometimes, they even want them to wish and do each other harm. So I'd like to blame the whole world for this curious story of disturbingly managed e-commerce. Well, with Amazon at the world's controls. It's A Gift. Or Is It? It was just another day. The sun was shining. The pretty blue birds were chirping. All seemed normal, at first. Then I looked toward my doorstep, where lurked a package. Ah, an Amazon delivery, I thought. And then I paused. I hadn't been expecting an Amazon delivery, but perhaps my wife had. So I stepped to the door to investigate. It was a brown paper bag, but without any Amazon markings. It was a brown paper bag without any markings at all. On it was a small sticker that carried perhaps five random letters and numbers, and a QR code. On the sticker was no recipient's name. There was no sender's name, either. This … [Read more...] about The day I thought Amazon had sent me a bomb

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed Doctor Who to do something it hasn’t done in the modern era — dedicate an entire season to a single story. That’s the word from showrunner Chris Chibnall in a new Doctor Who panel at the online-only San Diego Comic-Con today. Oh, and did I mention we’re getting our very first fleeting glimpse at Series 13 in a teaser trailer? Hit that video play button above to watch it. We’d learned last year that the new season would just be eight episodes long, but Chibnall says it pushed the BBC to go big: “The big thing that we’re going to be doing this year is it’s all one story, so every episode is one chapter in a bigger story,” he says. More: There were two ways you could go: we’re just going to do lots of tiny episodes in one room with no monsters, or we could throw down the gauntlet and go “we’re going to do the biggest story we’ve ever done, we’re going to go all kinds of different places, we’re going to have all kinds of characters and … [Read more...] about Doctor Who’s 13th season is a single story, and here’s the first trailer