From WeChat’s ‘Shake Girl’ to Quantum Assembly: Surprising Tech Stories

360 chairman Zhou Hongyi remarked that WeChat’s early breakthrough was the "shake girl" feature, which quickly attracted a loyal user base, and compared it to Facebook’s initial photo‑sharing approach for connecting male users with female classmates.

He also highlighted that quantum computing is still immature, noting a U.S. Department of Energy open‑source assembly language project at Sandia National Labs. Physicist Susan Clark’s team received a $25 million grant for the QSCOUT platform, which runs code written in the Just Another Quantum Assembly Language (JAQAL).

QSCOUT uses ion‑trapping technology, offering greater stability than the superconducting approaches of Google and IBM, albeit at slower speeds, and allows users direct control over the quantum computer’s operations.

Microsoft engineers contributed an integrity subsystem update to Linux kernel 5.12, adding IMA support for measuring critical data such as SELinux policies and kernel versions, plus four bug fixes addressing memory leaks and a missing static function declaration.

The 2021 Java Developer Productivity Report by Perforce surveyed over 850 developers, revealing that despite the rise of microservices, developers still face long redeployment times and inter‑service functionality issues.

Key findings include:

Application servers: Tomcat holds 66% market share, followed by JBoss/WildFly (19%), WebLogic (18%), Jetty (15%), and WebSphere (14%).

Frameworks: Spring Boot leads with 62%, while DropWizard grew to 8% and Quarkus to 6%.

Configuration: Annotations dominate with 75% usage.

Delphi, launched by Borland on February 14 1995 as a successor to Turbo Pascal, celebrated its 26th anniversary; its creator Anders Hejlsberg also designed Turbo Pascal’s compiler and led Delphi’s early development.

Embarrassing! Software Bug Keeps Hundreds of U.S. Prisoners Locked Up After Release

A prison official in Arizona reported that a bug in the ACIS inmate‑management system failed to calculate correct release dates according to Senate Bill 1310, causing eligible prisoners to remain incarcerated despite internal warnings a year earlier.