Great progress on a hard problem of translating human languages...
and very little progress on what should be easier: translating between programming languages.
Even translating between .NET and JVM languages, that are using same byte-code, is rarely available and unreliable. An opportunity for Google (or Microsoft Research)?
The best hope may be JavaScript: there are compilers to JS for many languages...
Ideally, there should be "semantic" translation from human languages to computer code (and reverse)
And then from "functional code" to "nice code" to "fast code"...
Once automation starts, progress in SW will be much faster.
"Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site. The idea is to present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible, to demonstrate how languages are similar and different, and to aid a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another."
2.7 Zetabytes of data exist in the digital universe today. (Source)
235 Terabytes of data has been collected by the U.S. Library of Congress in April 2011. (Source)
Walmart handles more than 1 million customer transactions every hour, which is imported into databases estimated to contain more than 2.5 petabytes of data. (Source)
Microsoft has tested creating a single file of 5 PB no problem in Azure Data Lake
new tool: Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer (2016, JavaScript, Electron) "for OS X, Linux, and Windows (and it's free)" "Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer (Preview) is a standalone app from Microsoft that allows you to easily work with Azure Storage data. The Preview release currently supports Azure Blobs only. Tables, queues, and files are coming soon."Releases · Azure/deco (older open source version)
old tool: Azure Storage Explorer - Home (2014, C# WPF) "Azure Storage Explorer is not actively maintained and only receives updates about once a year. You may want to consider Microsoft's Azure Storage Explorer (a different tool) http://storageexplorer.com"
"the team divided the globe into about 26,000 squares of differing sizes based on how many photos from the data set were taken in the area. ... PlaNet is able to localize 3.6% of the images at street-level accuracy and 10.1% at city-level accuracy. 28.4% of the photos are correctly localized at country level and 48.0% at continent level,”
"Why are graphics better than text? Novice programmers are fighting two battles at once: the fight to translate their ideas into logical statements, and the fight to keep the syntax legal. Blockly makes it completely impossible to make a syntax error. There are no unbalanced parentheses, no unescaped strings, no missing semicolons. Blockly allows novice programmers to concentrate on the logic. ...
Blockly has been under full-time development at Google since 2011."
Go vs Node vs Rust vs Swift
Interesting... Even Python is apparently using LLVM to compile to native code (pypy).
Even .NET core is using LLVM for compiling to native code on Linux.
Apple's Swift language is created by Chris Lattner, same person who created LLVM.
And while Go and C# are still using GC even when compile to native code,
Swift is using reference counting, that is more predictable than GC.
Result: solid performance, so it may be a good language for sever and system programming also.
Even Rust is based on LLVM.
Lenovo aims to crack mainstream in July with new 'augmented reality' phone | afr.com "China's Lenovo Group is ready to break into mature markets this summer with the launch of its new smartphone which sports "augmented reality" features developed under Google's Tango project, its chief executive said on Tuesday. ... Project Tango combines 3D motion tracking with depth sensors to give a mobile device the ability to know where it is and how it moves through an area, creating the potential to use augmented reality features on the phone.
Augmented reality software then overlays text or graphics on the real-life image. It differs from virtual reality, which seels to simulate real-world views."
"Project Tango combines 3D motion tracking with depth sensing to give your mobile device the ability to know where it is and how it moves through space."
Samsung printers automatically re-order ink with Amazon Dash "Amazon didn't stop at handy buttons for its Dash re-ordering tech. Back in January, the company announced a collection of devices that leverage the system to automatically order supplies when you're running low. That lineup includes a number of printers from Brother that take care of ink refills when levels begin to disappear. Amazon has now added four Samsung printers to the fold, tapping Dash Replenishment to make sure you're able to continue putting ink to paper as needed."
"After purchasing one of the four Samsung printers, you can tell the device to monitor the ink levels and re-order from Amazon should the need arise."
CAT Announces S60 Rugged Smartphone with integrated FLIR Thermal Camera "The key feature of the Cat S60 is its miniature thermal imaging camera based on the FLIR Lepton sensor (with 80×60 active pixels). The camera, which highlights temperature contrasts, can be used to identify over-heating electrical appliances and circuitry (or just check which computer components are the hottest ones and measure their actual temperature using a special application), detect heat loss around windows and doors, spot moisture and missing insulation and even see in complete darkness... The Cat S60 smartphone is based on the octo-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 system-on-chip...the smartphone can withstand drops onto concrete from up to 1.8 meters (MIL Spec 810G) and can even be used underwater (up to five meters depth) for one hour."
LG has extenders to work as a camera, a music device etc.
The "only" problem with this logic is the price. It is likely that for less money one can purchase
a decent phone and decent laptop, or a phone and a camera.
Microsoft Azure IoT Hub Reaches General Availability "Microsoft has recently announced its Azure IoT Hub offering has reached general availability (GA)... Azure IoT Hub is one of the foundational services that make up the Azure IoT Suite. The Azure IoT Hub service provides bi-directional communication between devices and the cloud. Devices may connect through a local field gateway when internet connectivity may not be available on the device or when a device only communicates in unsupported protocols such as ZigBee or Modbus. The field gateway, in turn, will communicate with the IoT Hub Cloud gateway. Alternatively, if a device supports HTTP(S) 1.1, MQTT 3.1.1 or AMQP 1.0 it can natively communicate with the IoT Hub Cloud gateway. Device SDKs are available for C/C#, Java, and JavaScript/Node.js."
"Cloudcraft is entirely free to use! You can use it to create professional AWS visualizations and diagrams for any use, in both commercial and non-commercial projects."
hack.summit() 2016 A Virtual Event for Developers Presented by Pluralsight - February 22nd-24th, 2016 Featuring programming language creators, open-source contributors, and thought leaders
The largest virtual conference in history The largest programming conference in history The largest hackathon in history hack.summit() virtual hackathon ($150K in rewards)
Azure Newsletter February 2016 "Last month, Microsoft chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, announced that Microsoft Philanthropies will donate $1 billion USD in cloud computing resources over the next three years to 70,000 nonprofits and NGOs worldwide. Three initiatives are part of this commitment: serving the broad computing, storage, and software needs of the nonprofit community; expanding access to cloud resources for faculty research in universities; and reaching new communities with last-mile connectivity and cloud services. For more information, be sure to read the blog post from Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer."
page also features interesting text animation, by custom script using d3.js
How Microsoft Plans to Beat Google and Facebook to the Next Tech Breakthrough - Bloomberg Business "To break down the walls between its research group and the rest of the company, Microsoft reassigned about half of its more than 1,000 research staff in September 2014 to a new group called MSR NExT. Its focus is on projects with greater impact to the company rather than pure research. Meanwhile, the other half of Microsoft Research is getting pushed to find more significant ways it can contribute to the company's products."
DraganSr.js: How Microsoft Plans to Beat Google and Facebook to the Next Tech Breakthrough
Animation works in Chrome and Edge, does not in Firefox
"This is an ASP.Net project meant to run on Visual Studio 2015. It's mostly C# and TypeScript. In order to run it, you will need the following dependencies:
DocumentDB: This is where diagrams get stored. You need to point the web.config to your instance of DocumentDB (app settings)
Azure Active Directory: In order to design diagrams, the user has to be authenticated against Azure AD. To thest the app locally you will need to setup your own Azure AD application and configure the settings (Client ID, Tenant, Audience and Password) in the web.config for it
Azure blob storage: Setup an Azure blob storage and point the web.config (StorageConnectionString) to it."
c# - DateTime vs DateTimeOffset - Stack Overflow "If you ever need to modify a previously recorded DateTimeOffset - you don't have enough information in the offset alone to ensure that the new offset is still relevant for the user. You must also store a timezone identifier (think - I need the name of that camera so I can take a new picture even if the position has changed).
It should also be pointed out that Noda Time has a representation called ZonedDateTime for this, while the .Net base class library does not have anything similar. You would need to store both a DateTimeOffset and a TimeZoneInfo.Id value."
The eighth habit is "Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs." Voice is Covey's code for "unique personal significance." Those who inspire others to find theirs are the leaders needed now and for the future, according to Covey."
People can discover their voice because of the three gifts everyone is born with:
The freedom to choose
The natural laws or principles – those that dictate the consequences of behavior. Positive consequences come from fairness, kindness, respect, honesty, integrity, service and contribution
The four intelligences – mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.
The book talks of "5 Cancerous Behaviors" that inhibit people's greatness:
"Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces the book as follows: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better"
3 categories:
Purposeful Practice + 4% ("Flow", balance of skill and challenge + 4%)
1 million repetitions (to become excellent in doing something)
(top of the) icebergs (visible success is on top of huge invisible practice)
DoubleThink: yes can do it vs. what can go wrong, at the same time
Everyone can do it, "Mindset" is the key, getting better by practice vs. proving inborn potential
Black Box Thinking | Brian Johnson
All airplanes are equipped with "black box" for recording and analyzing "what went wrong" in tragic situations; result: extremely good safety record. Opposite: medical environment hiding and not improving based on data, huge number of people dying from preventable mistakes.
50 lb of clay = better art: (practice makes perfect) students with
goal to "do more" clay pottery produced much better results than
those with goal to "make best" possible pottery
"Marginal gains": small improvements in many details compound to better performance
"Practice 50000 times": examples from sports
"Cognitive Dissonance" Galileo example, when church refused to look trough telescope
Pre-mortems: "what-if" exercises, to avoid preventable mistakes
"The R programming language ... has become an industry standard for statistical analysis with nearly a dozen graphical interfaces as well as packages for various IDEs and text editors.
Commercial support for R is offered by Revolution Analytics, ... company recently acquired by Microsoft as part of their big data and machine learning initiatives. The result of this acquisition is support for R in the upcoming SQL Server 2016.
...With R running in the database, you eliminate the performance hit normally associated with moving the data from your DB server to your R server. ...
The gateway for this is sp_execute_external_script. This stored procedure allows you to pipe data from SQL Server to R using standard queries. An R variable, usually a data frame, can likewise be returned back to SQL Server upon completion of the R script.
... a plugin model for other scripting languages will be offered."
There is a similar integration for Oracle DB also:
"Oracle R Enterprise, a component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option, makes the open source R statistical programming language and environment ready for the enterprise and big data. Designed for problems involving large volumes of data, Oracle R Enterprise integrates R with Oracle Database. R users can run R commands and scripts for statistical and graphical analyses on data stored in Oracle Database."
"The AutoRest tool generates client libraries for accessing RESTful web services. Input to AutoRest is a spec that describes the REST API using the Swagger format.
AutoRest is developed primarily in C# but generates code for multiple languages."
"The only time people will ever give you their attention – where you don’t have to earn it, they just give it to you – is the first 30 seconds of a presentation.” Rule #1.5: "Attention span interlude" “Every six minutes, include something of high interest. That’s the length of the average human attention span.” Rule #2: "Know your 'shit'" “People connect with speakers who have passion – who are really in love with their subject. You inherit some of that love from them.” Rule #3: "Make it Epic" “Albert Einstein said, ‘Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.’ Quote powerful people. You can assume some of the power of those you quote.” Rule #4: "Be brief. Be bright. Be gone." “Avoid long and tiresome summaries.”
"Over the past 75 days more than 400,000 developers have signed up for the (free) program...
$300 in Azure Credits: enjoy $25/month in credits for 12 months to take advantage of Azure services for your apps.). That’s enough to run a D2 Windows Virtual Machine for 95 hours a month, or try out an A3 HDInsight Cluster for 24 hours. These credits can be applied on top of the free options offered by many Azure services. Learn more here"
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