Wednesday, June 29, 2016

ASP.NET Core 1.0 released ==

Announcing .NET Core 1.0 | .NET Blog

".NET Core 1.0, ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0, available on Windows, OS X and Linux! .NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications."

"The Visual Studio team also released Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 today. You need that release to build .NET Core apps in Visual Studio."






Monday, June 27, 2016

DMARC: Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (for Email)



dmarc.org – Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance

"DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”, is an email authentication protocol. It builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols, adding a reporting function that allows senders and receivers to improve and monitor protection of the domain from fraudulent email.



DMARC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"DMARC is built on top of two existing mechanisms, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and  DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). It allows the sender of an email to publish a policy on which mechanism (DKIM, SPF or both) is employed when sending email and how the receiver should deal with failures. Additionally, it provides a reporting mechanism of actions performed under those policies. It thus coordinates the results of DKIM and SPF and specifies under which circumstances the From: header field, which is often visible to end users, should be considered legitimate."

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Flying cars: personal electric

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June 13 - 26, 2016. Subscribe now.

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories - Bloomberg

Zee : Funded by Google's founder, not by Google.

Zee.Aero's flying car concept would fit in a standard parking space

Zee.Aero develops flying car near Google X - SlashGear

Zee.Aero develops flying car near Google X

1000-core chip

World’s First 1,000-Processor Chip | UC Davis
"microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.
...KiloCore chip was fabricated by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology.
...each processor is independently clocked
...can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 Watts,
...executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor."

1000 processor chip

book: Procrastination Equation


The Procrastination Equation Book Cover
review: The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel | PhilosophersNotes - OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson

Interview: The Procrastination Equation with Piers Steel - YouTube

About the Book | Procrastination and Science
"How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done"
About the Theory | Procrastination and Science
"
"...we are more likely to pursue goals or tasks that are pleasurable and that we are likely to attain. Consequently, we are more likely to put off, to procrastinate, difficult tasks with unenjoyable qualities. Even more important regarding procrastination is the effects of delay. We like our rewards not only to be large but also to be immediate. Consequently, we will most likely procrastinate any tasks that are unpleasant in the present and offer rewards only in the distant future"

Temporal motivation theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Procrastination Equation | Psychology Today

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Curriki: K12 Curriculum Wiki (free & open)

Curriki | Inspiring Learning Everywhere
"Curriki’s mission is to eliminate the Education Divide – the gap between those who have access to high-quality education and those who do not – in the U.S. and worldwide. It’s online community of educators, learners and committed education experts works together to build and share quality materials that benefit teachers, parents and students globally.
  • Share what you learn.
  • Share what you know.
  • Share your content.
  • Together, we can make education more equitable."
Triangulation 253 Scott McNealy | TWiT

Curriki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The name Curriki is a portmanteau of the words "curriculum" and "wiki"."

Friday, June 24, 2016

A self-driving car built by a single person


George Hotz Is Taking on Tesla by Himself
"The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage"

Flying cars (personal electric)

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories - Bloomberg
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June 13 - 26, 2016. Subscribe now.

Google: ML-first business

How Google is Remaking Itself as a “Machine Learning First” Company — Backchannel

"If you want to build artificial intelligence into every product, you better retrain your army of coders. Check."

"For many years, machine learning was considered a specialty, limited to an elite few. That era is over, as recent results indicate that machine learning, powered by “neural nets” that emulate the way a biological brain operates, is the true path towards imbuing computers with the powers of humans, and in some cases, super humans. Google is committed to expanding that elite within its walls, with the hope of making it the norm."

AI, Apple and Google — Benedict Evans

Thursday, June 23, 2016

book:Black Hole Focus


Black Hole Focus Book Cover

Black Hole Focus by Isaiah Hankel | PhilosophersNotes - OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson

Isaiah Hankel | Brian Johnson

www.isaiahhankel.com/book

Takeaways from Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Can Create A Powerful Purpose For Their Lives – Corey Breier

Create Your Escape Plan | Create Your Escape Plan And Live The Life You Want
Sheep-600x331

Start with the end in mind: Isaiah Hankel at TEDxLafayetteCollege - YouTube

Isaiah Hankel - YouTube

New File Systems: Apple APFS, Windows ReFS

A Look at APFS, Apple’s New File System for iOS and macOS @ InfoQ
"According to Apple, APFS supports all of HFS+ features and improves them in several ways:
  • Contrary to HFS+, which uses 32-bit file IDs, APFS will support 64-bit inode numbers, which will allow to store over 9 quintillion files on a single volume.
  • Whereas HFS+ is bound to initialize the entire storage of a file system at once, APFS sports an extensible block allocator that enables lazy initialization of its data structure, thus hugely improving performance with large volumes.
  • APFS supports three models of encryption: no encryption, single-key encryption, and multi-key encryption to manage per-file keys and a metadata key.
Additional APFS features that improve on HFS+ are support for sparse files, improved TRIM operations, built-in support for extended attributes."

APFS also provides a few advanced features that put it in the same category as modern file systems such as ZFS,"

Introduction @ Apple
"Apple File System is a new, modern file system for iOS, OS X, tvOS and watchOS. It is optimized for Flash/SSD storage and features strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved file system fundamentals."




Wednesday, June 22, 2016

WebGL: Babylon.js, WebGL 2, WebVR

Babylon.js 2.4 | Coding4Fun Blog | Channel 9
"Canvas2D is a HUGE addition to babylon.js. It is basically an entire 2D accelerated engine available out of the box. Indeed babylon.js is a full featured 3D engine, but the need to handle 2D content is often encountered when working on games or complex applications.
Canvas2D in a non HTML feature, 100% WebGL based, developed to serve the purpose of drawing, animating and interaction with 2D Content."

Samples demonstrating the raw power of this new feature:
http://babylonjs-playground.com/#1BKDEO#15
http://babylonjs-playground.com/#OWCCR#7
http://babylonjs-playground.com/#15C96V#4
http://babylonjs-playground.com/#1N9RJY#1
documentation: http://doc.babylonjs.com/overviews/Canvas2D_Home



image

"Tony Parisi offers practical knowledge about creating WebGL content and deploying applications on a variety of platforms and devices, including virtual reality."

three.js - Javascript 3D library


AI, ML, Deep Learning: A Primer

AI is suggested to be "next big thing" after "mobile" and "cloud";
Microsoft, Facebook popularize this as "bots"

AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer – Andreessen Horowitz



Data Newsletter - O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, September 26 - 27, 2016, New York

Why 2016 is shaping up to be the Year of the Bot - O'Reilly Media



Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Tesla Motors += SolarCity ?

Musk takes $676 million bath on SolarCity bid
Tesla makes offer for SolarCity
"Tesla is making the pitch hard to investors saying it will be able to turn the two combined companies into a one-stop shop for consumers looking to go electric with their cars. The combined company could not only cross-sell cars and solar panel installations, but lean on each others' expertise in batteries and design and share retail space."



Monday, June 20, 2016

TOP 500 Supercomputers; Chinese microprocessors

Home | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites

China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips | Computerworld
"China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors."

"ShenWei SW1600, aka SW-3, is the third generation CPU by Jiāngnán Computing Research Lab. Operating at 1.1 GHz, it achieves 140 GFLOPS floating point performance from its 16 cores RISC architecture, 65 nm

The ShenWei series of microprocessors was developed primarily for the use of the military of the People's Republic of China. The original microarchitecture is believed to be inspired by DEC Alpha"




65 nm technology is not as energy efficient as 14 nm used by Intel chips.
A brute-force solution to prove a point.
Could be used for brute-force breaking encryption....


Sunday, June 19, 2016

Stack Overflow: The Architecture + ML

podcast: Herding Code 217: Nick Craver on Stack Overflow Engineering

Nick Craver - Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition
numbers per day:

  • 66,294,789 (+30,199,477) of those were page loads
  • 1,240,266,346,053 (+406,273,363,426) bytes (1.24 TB) of HTTP traffic sent
  • 569,449,470,023 (+282,874,825,991) bytes (569 GB) total received
  • 3,084,303,599,266 (+1,958,311,041,954) bytes (3.08 TB) total sent
  • 504,816,843 (+170,244,740) SQL Queries (from HTTP requests alone)
  • 5,831,683,114 (+5,418,818,063) Redis hits"
Logical Overview


server's memory: 768GB 


P2P Web: Microsoft's Thali project

Bluetooth/WiFi discovery + Node.js + Cordova + Pouch.db


Thali Project @ GitHub
"Postcard app which sends messages or 'postcards' across mobile devices equipped with Smart Bluetooth. Postcards can be added, updated and deleted and any changes will be automatically synchronized across devices."

Thali - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Thali is an Indian and Nepalese meal made up of a selection of various dishes. It simply means a round platter used to serve food. The idea behind a Thali is to offer all the 6 different flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy on one single plate"

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open

Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open

The Fathers of the Internet Revolution Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web - IEEE Spectrum

"Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, says today's Web has strayed far from the original dreams for the technology
...in the former San Francisco church that now serves as the headquarters of the Internet Archive, pioneers of the Internet and the World Wide Web joined together to call for a new kind of Web—a decentralized Web. It was a call for change, a call for action, and a call to develop technology that would “lock the Web open.”"


The Internet Archive, San Francisco.


Electric Truck by Nikola Motors

As a complement to Tesla Motors, not there is also Nikola Motors (to make Nikola Tesla :)

Electric Truck Startup Nikola Motors Claims $2.3 Billion in Preorders Before Prototype Is Even Ready - IEEE Spectrum



"US $375,000 hybrid electric semi truck, lease for $5,000 per month, but maintenance and fuel will be included at no additional cost for the first 1.6 million kilometers."
... compressed natural gas drive a 400 kilowatt turbine to generate electricity onboard. That electricity is fed into a 320 kilowatt-hour battery pack (triple the size of the pack in a Tesla Model S P90D"
Nikola Motor Company | Premium Electric Vehicles

"Low-Code Revolution": Salesforce, Microsoft

Leading the Low-Code Revolution - Salesforce Blog
"No longer is app development exclusively the territory of programmers. Now, visual app development tools allow non-technical employees to become “citizen developers” who can build apps without writing code.
...
A low-code platform allows non-technical developers to rapidly learn how to build apps with point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools. But does this mean that developers don’t need to code anymore? Are we seeing the end of code?
Not exactly. Visual app development tools can get you most of the way there when you’re building an app, but developers still need the flexibility to delve into code for complex customizations of logic, data integrations and UI. As business users get more involved in app development, the role of coders — and the definition of what it means to be a developer — will continue to evolve."

"Microsoft joined Intuit, Salesforce and others who offer "low-code" application development solutions with the announcement of PowerApps, a low-code solution that empowers information workers and “power users” to create line-of-business applications without writing heavy code.
Details of PowerApps, formerly known as Project Siena while under wraps, can be found here."


(requires "work or school" email account)


A never-ending quest to simplify "programming" is still missing a key component: simple shared "vocabularies", that is a common "semantic language platform" for both data and logic. 

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Backyard Data Science (Azure ML etc)


blog3.png

blog, tutorials: Backyard Data Science | Precision Guesswork While You Wait
by Buck Woody

podcast interview: Getting into Machine Learning with Buck Woody - RunAsRadio
"Buck Woody works on the Microsoft Machine Learning and Data Science Team, using data and technology to solve business and science problems"



Azure Data Lake


Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Kaggle: competitive machine learning (ML)

podcast interview: Competitive Machine Learning with Anthony Goldbloom @ NET Rocks! vNext

"How can competition teach machine learning? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle about competitive machine learning. Kaggle hosts competitions provided by industry and academia to find machine learning solutions on different data sets. While the competitive aspects tend toward only particular types of data sets, Anthony talks about how two very different machine learning algorithms - Gradient Boosting Machine and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks - have risen to the top. Want to learn machine learning in a hurry? Join a competition!"

Kaggle: Your Home for Data Science



Kaggle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"As of May 2016, Kaggle had over 536,000 registered users, or Kagglers. The community spans 194 countries. It is the largest and most diverse data community in the world."


book: Founder's Mentality


Founder's Mentality® - Bain & Company
"When companies miss growth targets, 85% of the time the reasons are internal. In The Founder's Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth, authors Chris Zook and James Allen explain why a "founder’s mentality"—an insurgent’s clear mission and purpose, an unambiguous owner mindset and a relentless obsession with the front line—is critical to sustainable growth"


Reigniting Growth @ HBR

Founder's Mentality

"1. Rediscover Your Insurgent Mission
 2. Obsess over Your Business’s Front Line
 3. Instill an Owner’s Mindset"

projector VR: Igloo Vision

Igloo Vision

"Igloo is the 360º projection company.
We create shared VR environments."

6M Arc Dome from Igloo on Vimeo.

Monday, June 13, 2016

NextVR: VR + Real-time Entertiment

NextVR
"NextVR has developed a custom lens-to-lens system for capturing and delivering
live and on-demand virtual reality experiences in true broadcast quality."

Microsoft += LinkedIn

Microsoft Corporation CEO's LinkedIn Corp Acquisition Letter
"This deal brings together the world’s leading professional cloud with the world’s leading professional network. ... LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business and an impressive network of more than 433 million professionals.
... this deal is key to ... bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes. Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world."

Diffbot: Web + WebKit + AI => global knowledge database ==

Another Stanford-related startup that could "change the world"...
"Semantic Web" vision may be realized after all, just in very different way, built by AI :)

very interesting podcast interview:
Using AI to build a comprehensive database of knowledge - O'Reilly Media

"Diffbot - a company dedicated to building large-scale knowledge databases. Diffbot is at the heart of many web applications, and it’s starting to power a wide array of intelligent applications.

… Roughly, what happens when our robot first encounters a page is we render the page in our own customized rendering engine, which is a fork of WebKit that's basically had its face ripped off. It doesn't have all the human niceties of a web browser, and it runs much faster than a browser because it doesn't need those human-facing components. … The other difference is we've instrumented the whole rendering process. We have access to all of the pixels on the page for each XY position. … [We identify many] features that feed into our semi-supervised learning system. Then millions of lines of code later, out comes knowledge."


More interesting interviews from this space
Topics - O'Reilly Media (new web site)

Startup Unleashes Its Clone of Google’s ‘Knowledge Graph’ | WIRED
google-knowledgegraphs-story

Diffbot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diffbot logo.jpg
Diffbot announced it was working on its version of an automated "Knowledge Graph" by crawling the web and using its automatic web page extraction to build a large database of structured web data.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Azure += Apache Spark

Microsoft bets on Apache Spark to power its big data and analytics services | TechCrunch

"Microsoft ... announced that it is making a serious commitment to the open source Apache Spark cluster computing framework. After dipping its toes into the Spark ecosystem last year, the company today launched a number of Spark-based services out of preview and announced that the on-premises version of R Server for Hadoop (which uses the increasingly popular open source R language for big data analytics and modeling) is now powered by Spark."

spark-logo-trademark

Thursday, June 09, 2016

.NET thread-safe collections

BlockingCollection Overview
"BlockingCollection is a thread-safe collection class that provides the following features:
An implementation of the Producer-Consumer pattern.
Concurrent adding and taking of items from multiple threads.
Optional maximum capacity.
Insertion and removal operations that block when collection is empty or full.
Insertion and removal "try" operations that do not block or that block up to a specified period of time.
Encapsulates any collection type that implements IProducerConsumerCollection
Cancellation with cancellation tokens.


Two kinds of enumeration with foreach (For Each in Visual Basic):

  • Read-only enumeration.
  • Enumeration that removes items as they are enumerated."
link from: .NET Rocks! vNext

Asus Zenbo $600 Home Robot

Asus Zenbo Attempts to Convince Us That We Need a $600 Home Robot - IEEE Spectrum

Your Smart Little Companion - Full version | Zenbo | ASUS - YouTube

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

"intelligent, real-time data applications"

podcast interview: a comprehensive overview of current trends in (big) data and AI

Ben Lorica on the emergence of intelligent, real-time data applications - O'Reilly Media

"Ben Lorica, O'Reilly's chief data scientist and host of the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast. Lorica talks about emerging themes in the data space, from machine learning to deep learning to artificial intelligence, and how those technologies relate to one another and how they're fueling real-time data applications. Lorica also talks about how the concept of a data center is evolving, the importance of open source big data components, and the rise in interest of big data ethics."

Artificial intelligence.

infographics: Cloud Hypervisor Platfroms

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Xen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If hypervisor is commodity, why is VMware still on top? • The Register
Is VMware headed the slow painful death of Novell – VirtualizedGeek

How Azure VMs Differ From Hyper-V Virtual Machines

Hypervisor 101: VMWare, VirtualBox & Hyper-V Infographic (a little bit dated)

Monday, June 06, 2016

visual data maps


Global inequalities in population, wealth, and religious origin shown in six maps. | Big Think

50% of Canada's 35 million inhabitants live south of the line, 50% north of it.
90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border.










maps game: GeoGuessr

Very interesting "location guessing" game, integrated with Google maps and street view:
view street view and guess the location.

GeoGuessr - Let's explore the world!

World

Sunday, June 05, 2016

free ebook: Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture

Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture - O'Reilly Media
By Mark Richards
Publisher: O'Reilly
Released: April 2016

"Right now, the microservices architecture pattern is a rising star in the IT industry. For many, these small, highly decoupled services are a welcome alternative to the big, expensive, complicated Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) style that came to prominence a decade ago. But just how different are microservices from SOA?"



The Evolution of Services with Juval Lowy @ .NET Rocks! vNext

The biggest cloud VM instances

AWS Launches Massive X1 Instances Targeting High Memory Workloads @ InfoQ
"AWS recently added a new instance type with nearly 2 terabytes of memory and 128 virtual CPUs. This is the largest virtual server available today in the public cloud, and is a target for memory-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA.
The instance specifications are:
  • 128 vCPU via four Intel Xeon E7-8880 v3 processors
  • 1,952 GiB of DDR4-based RAM
  • 3.84 TB of local SSD storage, capable of up to 126,000 random-read IOPS
  • 10Gbps of network bandwidth"
The x1 starts at $13.338 per hour for an on-demand instance. Customers can get that down to $3.732 per hour with a three year commitment (“reserved instance”), and a $98,072 upfront payment

Cloud ProviderNumber of Instance TypesMaximum RAM Available
AWS EC240 (current generation) / 55 (overall)1,952 GB
Microsoft Azure40448 GB
Google Compute Engine18208 GB
Digital Ocean964 GB
CenturyLink Cloudconfigurable128 GB
IBM Softlayerconfigurable64 GB
Joyent25110 GB
Rackspace19240 GB
SAP Solutions | Microsoft Azure
"...with purpose-built hardware that is specifically tuned for SAP HANA, you can scale your SAP HANA workloads up to 32 TB on multimode configurations."

Saturday, June 04, 2016

Deep Learning Trends @ ICLR 2016

Tombone's Computer Vision Blog: Deep Learning Trends @ ICLR 2016
"International Conference of Learning Representations, known briefly as ICLR 2016, and commonly pronounced as “eye-clear,” could more appropriately be called the International Conference on Deep Learning."

Amazon's secrets of invention

Amazon's secrets of invention: Jeff Bezos explains how to build an innovative team - GeekWire

"It’s not an experiment if you know in advance it’s going to work.
If you want to be inventive, you have to experiment a lot, which means you will fail a lot."


"Bezos admitted that invention is “very, very hard” because it requires expertise in a given domain area, along with the ability to refrain from being “corrupted by that domain knowledge.”

“You still need a beginner’s mind,” Bezos said. “So, you need all of that domain knowledge and expertise, but you still need to be able to step back and look at something as if it’s your first day on the job. That is so hard and some people are good at it, so you can select for that.”"


In annual letter, Jeff Bezos says Amazon is an 'invention machine' defined by failure - GeekWire

EX-99.1
"This year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales. Also this year, Amazon Web Services is reaching $10 billion in annual sales … doing so at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone."

Docker Architecture

video: A tour of Docker's components: Machine, swarm, compose, and more - O'Reilly Media
"Docker has grown from a convenience wrapper to encompass an entire architecture. Learn how Docker's major components are related to each other."

By Rick Fast

8 | Docker Best Practices & Industry Future | DevOps Dimension | Channel 9
Patrick Chanezon | LinkedIn

Unikernel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thursday, June 02, 2016

book: Lean Analytics


About – Lean Analytics Book
"The Lean movement has revolutionized how we create products and companies. It focuses on customer development, tackles the risky parts first, and focuses on finding real, unmet needs.
At the core of this is iteration—a cycle of learning and adapting that’s driven by data. Lean Analytics gives you blunt, practical advice and proven approaches for learning from the abundance of data all around you."