Technology

If you&ve been laying off the Pokémon GO for a while due to a lack of new monsters, prepare to be glued to your phone again. Niantic is now adding pokémon from the rugged Sinnoh region that first appeared in 2007Diamond, Pearl and Platinum games.

Of course, itnot so simple as a dump of a hundred new ‘mon into your area. The new guys are arriving in waves, likely meaning the most common sorts will start appearing today, while cooler ones and sets of themed critters will arrive over the coming weeks.

These are part of the Generation 4 set, but itnot clear yet which will be appearing first or indeed at all. Itentirely up to Niantic and you can be sure they&re going to mete out these little guys over several months, interspersed with other events — anything to keep you catching.

Everyone will probably have a Chimchar on their shoulder soon, because that sucker is cute, but ultimately everyone is going to want a Dialga. I get the feeling they&re going to be a regular feature at gyms soon. I for one will be working to evolve a Glaceon.

There are also some new evolutions, so don&t trash your mid-tier pokémon just yet. Magmortar, Electivire, Tangrowth and Rhyperior mean you&ll have a use for all that extra candy.

Update your app and start draining that battery, Trainer! And don&t forget that we&ve got Niantic Ross Finman at our AR/VR Session in LA this Thursday. Drop by if you&re in the area.

Arm-based chips are ubiquitous today, but the company isn&t resting on its laurels. After announcing its ambitions for powering more high-end devices like laptops a few months ago, the company today discussed its roadmap for chips that are dedicated to internet infrastructure and that will power everything from high-performance servers to edge computing platforms, storage systems, gateways, 5G base stations and routers. The new brand name for these products is ‘Neoverse& and the first products based on this IP will ship next year.

Arm-based chips have, of course, long been used in this space. What Neoverse is, is a new focus area where Arm itself will now invest in developing the technologies to tailor these chips to the specific workloads that come with running infrastructure services. &We&ve had a lot of success in this area,& Drew Henry, Arms& SVP and GM forInfrastructure, told me. &And we decided to build off that and to invest more heavily in our R-D from ourselves and our ecosystem.&

As with all Arm architectures, the actual chip manufacturers can then adapt these to their own needs. That may be a high core-count system for high-end servers, for example, or a system that includes a custom accelerator for networking and security workloads. The Neoverse chips themselves have also been optimized for the ever-changing data patterns and scalability requirements that come with powering a modern internet infrastructure.

The company has already lined up a large number of partners that include large cloud computing providers like Microsoft, silicon partners like Samsung and software partners that range from RedHat, Canonical, Suse and Oracle on the operating system side to container and virtualization players like Docker and the Kubernetes team.

Come 2019, Arm expects that Neoverse systems will feature 7nm CPUs. By 2020, it expects that will shrink to 5nm. Whatmore important, though, is that every new generation of these chips, which will arrive at an annual cadence, will be 30 percent faster.

For the longest time, GitHub was all about storing source code and sharing it either with the rest of the world or your colleagues. Today, the company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, is taking a step in a different but related direction by launching GitHub Actions. Actions allow developers to not just host code on the platform but also run it. We&re not talking about a new cloud to rival AWS here, but instead about something more akin to a very flexible IFTTT for developers who want to automate their development workflows, whether that is sending notifications or building a full continuous integration and delivery pipeline.

This is a big deal for GitHub . Indeed, Sam Lambert, GitHubhead of platform, described it to me as &the biggest shift we&ve had in the history of GitHub.& He likened it to shortcuts in iOS — just more flexible. &Imagine an infinitely more flexible version of shortcut, hosted on GitHub and designed to allow anyone to create an action inside a container to augment and connect their workflow.&

GitHub users can use Actions to build their continuous delivery pipelines, and the company expects that many will do so. And thatpretty much the first thing most people will think about when they hear about this new project. GitHubown description of Actions in todayannouncement makes definitely fits that bill, too. &Easily build, package, release, update, and deploy your project in any language—on GitHub or any external system—without having to run code yourself,& the company writes. But itabout more than that.

&I see CI/CD as one narrow use case of actions. Itso, so much more,&Lambert stressed. &And I think itgoing to revolutionize DevOps because people are now going to build best in breed deployment workflows for specific applications and frameworks, and those become the de facto standard shared on GitHub. […] Itgoing to do everything we did for open source again for the DevOps space and for all those different parts of that workflow ecosystem.&

That means you can use it to send a text message through Twilio every time someone uses the ‘urgent issue& tag in your repository, for example. Or you can write a one-line command that searches your repository with a basic grep command. Or really run any other code you want to because all you have to do to turn any code in your repository into an Action is to write a Docker file for it so that GitHub can run it. &As long as there is a Docker file, we can build it, run in and connect it to your workflow,& Lambert explained. If you don&t want to write a Docker file, though, therealso a visual editor you can use to build your workflow.

As Corey Wilkerson, GitHubhead of product engineering also noted, many of these Actions already exist in repositories on GitHub today. And there are now over 96 million of those on GitHub, so that makes for a lot of potential actions that will be available from the start.

With Actions, which is now in limited public beta, developers can set up the workflow to build, package, release, update and deploy their code without having to run the code themselves.

Now developers could host those Actions themselves — they are just Docker containers, after all — but GitHub will also host and run the code for them. And that includes developers on the free open source plan.

Over time — and Lambert seemed to be in favor of this — GitHub could also allow developers to sell their workflows and Actions through the GitHub marketplace. For now, thatnot an option, but it itdefinitely thatsomething the company has been thinking about. Lambert also noted that this could be a way for open source developers who don&t want to build an enterprise version of their tools (and the sales force that goes with that) to monetize their efforts.

While GitHub will make its own actions available to developers, this is an open platform and others in the GitHub community can contribute their own actions, too.

GitHub will slowly open Actions to developers, starting with daily batches for the time being. You can sign up for access here.

In addition to Actions, GitHub also announced a number of other new features on its platform. As the company stressed during todayevent, itmission is to make the life of developers easier — and most of the new features may be small but do indeed make it easier for developers to do their jobs.

So what else is new GitHub Connect, which connects the silo of GitHub Enterprise with the open source repositories on its public site, is now generally available, for example. GitHub Connect enables new features like unified search, that can search through both the open source code on the site and internal code, as well as a new Unified Business Identity feature that brings together the multiple GitHub Business accounts that many businesses now manage (thanks, shadow IT) under a single umbrella to improve billing, licensing and permissions.

The company also today launched three new courses in its Learning Lab that make it easier for developers to get started with the service, as well as a business version of Learning Lab for larger organizations.

Whatmaybe even more interesting for developers whose companies use GitHub Enterprise, though, is that the company will now allow admins to enable a new feature that will display those developers& work as part of their public profile. Given that GitHub is now the de facto resume for many developers, thata big deal. Much of their work, after all, isn&t in open source or in building side projects, but in the day-to-day work at their companies.

The other new features the company announced today are pretty much all about security. The new GitHub Security Advisory API, for example, makes it easier for developers to find threads in their code through automatic vulnerability scans, while the new security vulnerability alerts for Java and .NET projects now extend GitHubexisting alerts to these two languages. If your developers are prone to putting their security tokens into public code, then you can now rest easier since GitHub will now also start scanning all public repositories for known token formats. If it finds one, it&ll alert you and you can set off to create a new one.