Monday, September 25, 2017

Microsoft Quantum Computing @Ignite

Microsoft places its bets on quantum computing | TechCrunch

"At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines."

Microsoft Quantum Computing - YouTube



Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella — Official Site

AI conf: "Skynet Moment"

Highlights from the Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco 2017 - O'Reilly Media

Our Skynet moment - O'Reilly Media

cloud: AWS EC2: Per-Second Billing

Microsoft Azure and Google GCP billing for cloud VMs is by minute, and AWS was so far by hour.
That did make dynamic creating and removing instances a bit tricky.

On the other side, AWS Lambda "cloud functions" are billed much more precisely.
So now this precision comes to AWS EC2 also.

New – Per-Second Billing for EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes | AWS Blog

"Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments.
Per-second billing also applies to Amazon EMR and AWS Batch

...
Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge."

(So for Windows VMs Azure still has an advantage)