OpenAI (!)

OpenAI

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."

Artificial-Intelligence Research Center Is Founded by Silicon Valley Investors - The New York Times
"The investors — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman — said they planned to commit $1 billion to the project long term, but would initially spend only a small fraction of that amount in the first few years of the project. But, Mr. Musk said, “Everyone who is listed as a contributor has made a substantial commitment and this should be viewed as at least a billion-dollar project.” The organization, to be named OpenAI, will be established as a nonprofit, and will be based in San Francisco.

Its long-range goal will be to create an “artificial general intelligence,” a machine capable of performing any intellectual task that a human being can, according to Mr. Musk. He also stressed that the focus was on building technologies that augment rather than replace humans.

OpenAI (@open_ai) | Twitter

Music to Code By: 10 tracks

Music to Code By
"Carl Franklin chose 25 minutes to coincide with the Pomodoro Technique of time management, popular with developers today. He also chose a "groove chill" approach. Real instruments combined in loops with melodic licks placed on top. The pieces change enough to not be boring, but not so much as to demand your attention. The first piece, Blue, is at 60 BPM (beats per minute) and the other two, Orange and Yellow, are at 80 BPM. According to research, music between 50 and 80 BPM is perfect for helping you focus, letting your brain generate those wonderful alpha waves."

There are free 4-minute samples for all 10 tracks.

Neo4j graph database and Cypher query language

Interesting interview, explains how Neo4j graph database was created.

Graph databases are powering mission-critical applications - O'Reilly Radar
"...with Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder of Neo Technology. We talked about the early days of NoSQL, applications of graph databases, cloud computing, and company culture in the U.S. and Sweden."

"... there’s exactly one point in time when you can take a new type of database to the market. ...
If you look back in history, we’ve really only been able to build database companies when there’s been a platform shift... Now, it’s very clear what the big platform shift is right now. It’s, of course, from whatever Web, LAMP stack, on-premise systems, to the cloud....When you have big platform shifts for whatever reason, good or bad, people re-evaluate their stack... (that is) why we have this explosion of databases..."

Another strong recommendation for Neo4j graph database, in this podcast interview

Building CluedIn with Tim Ward .NET Rocks! vNext

Query language of Neo4j is being open sourced...

Meet openCypher: The SQL for Graphs - Neo4j Graph Database

"The openCypher project already has the support of a wide community of graph technology players, including Oracle, Databricks (the company behind Apache Spark), Neo Technology, Tableau, Structr and a host of others."

   MATCH (cypher:QueryLanguage)-[:QUERIES]->(graphs)
    MATCH (cypher)<- ableau="" in="" match="" opencypher="" pache="" racle="" spark="" tructr="" u.name="" u:user="" where="">(cypher)
    RETURN cypher.attributes

Intro to Cypher - Neo4j Graph Database

Graph databases works best if they can "fit to memory".
With latest "huge size" VMs on Azure, this may be sufficient even for very demanding cases...
Maybe a new graph search engine :)

Announcing Neo4j on Windows Azure - Neo4j Graph Database

VM as containers, VMware & Windows Server 2016

Interesting presentation about "virtual machines as containers" with VMware.
By using quick "snapshots" VMs can effectively behaves as containers,
not only with Linux but also with other OSs, including DOS :)

Windows Server 2016 also comes with "Hyper-V containers" in addition to "Windows containers".

Exploding the Linux Container Host @ InfoQ
"Project Bonneville, how to create a shared Linux kernel for privileged containers, running containers without Linux, and VMware's dynamic resource constraints of a container host."

vSphere Integrated Containers - Technology Walkthrough - VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs


Windows Containers @ MSDN
"Windows Containers include two different container types, or runtimes.

Windows Server Containers – provide application isolation through process and namespace isolation technology. A Windows Server container shares a kernel with the container host and all containers running on the host.

Hyper-V Containers – expand on the isolation provided by Windows Server Containers by running each container in a highly optimized virtual machine. In this configuration the kernel of the container host is not shared with the Hyper-V Containers."

Hyper-V Server Technical Preview | TechNet Evaluation Center