News briefs for March 8, 2019.
Microsoft has published the code for Windows Calculator and released it on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. Ars Technica reports[1] that "The repository shows Calculator's surprisingly long history. Although it is in some regards one of the most modern Windows applications—it's an early adopter of Fluent Design and has been used to showcase a number of design elements—core parts of the codebase date all the way back to 1995."
In other Microsoft news, the company's Skype team just launched Skype for Web, so you can skype from a browser instead of needing to install the app. According to ZDNet[2], "Skype for Web requires Windows and MacOS 10.12 or higher and the latest versions of Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. That means Skype for Web won't work on a Chromebook or on an Ubuntu or any other Linux machine, and nor will it work in the Firefox browser."
Google this week debuted Google Coral[3], a dev board and USB accelerator. Hackster.io reports[4] that both of these products "were built around Google's Edge TPU, their purpose-built ASIC designed to run machine learning inference at the edge." So this means that "with the ability to run these trained networks 'at the edge' nearer the data", developers are able "to put the smarts on the smart device, rather than in the cloud. Allowing them to build smart devices that uses machine learning without a network connection at all."
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin is coming to Linux. GamingOnLinux notes[5] that "While Steam only lists Windows system requirements, if you hop on over to the official site there's a Linux "tux" icon to show it will support Linux and the press release sent out by 1C Entertainment has also confirmed this." You can view the trailer