With the introduction of the Pipeline, Jenkins added an embedded Groovy engine, making Groovy the scripting language in the Pipeline's DSL.
Here are the steps you need to take to set up a Jenkins Pipeline. You have to install a plugin, "Pipeline Plugin."
It turns out that GraphQL is pretty awesome. I didn’t always see it that way. The first few times I ran across GraphQL, I was pretty skeptical of its touted benefits because the cost of putting together a GraphQL system seemed too high. It also seemed to me that all the benefits of GraphQL could still be achieved by just creating a custom JSON DSL (query language using JSON).
For example, a “read” query might look like this in GraphQL:
Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that is starting to have a significant impact on businesses worldwide. Despite its abstractness and complexity, blockchain brings various benefits to industries, such as greater transparency and enhanced security.
However, it takes time to study the design and master specific programming languages for blockchain. Appropriate learning materials help shorten this process, which is why, since the emergence of Bitcoin, a barrage of popular online content has been released to explain how it works.
In this blog post, I'll explain how you can use GitHub and Jenkins so your BlazeMeter performance test automatically runs the most updated test data. This is an easy way to ensure your tests are always accurate and complete.
This new feature in the BlazeMeter Jenkins plugin lets you update many types of test data. Test data can be executable script files from any tool BlazeMeter supports: jmx, yml, Scala, etc. Or, configuration or data storage files for the main scripts, like CSVs and properties files.
The high profile implosion of General Electric’s (GE) ambitious digital strategy has caught the attention of many practitioners and IT leaders over the last few months. GE is an iconic business conglomerate with major operations in Aerospace, Transportation, and Power, along with a major financing arm. GE embarked on a massive digital transformation strategy a few years ago, with GE Digital ostensibly in charge of driving disruptive digital capabilities into the various business units. GE’s digital operation was touted as building software capabilities that drive business differentiators and ROI across aircraft engines/supply chains, transportation & power. GE also has been on record touting billions of dollars in cost savings attributed to this digital transformation, mainly due to fault tolerance and lower operating costs.
According to Reuters, GE expects to book around $12 billion in revenue in 2020. For perspective, GE’s total revenue in 2017 was nearly $124 billion.
In this article, we will explain how we can use Zuul, Hazelcast, and Docker for routing. Please refer to the block diagram below:
First, we create a Spring Boot REST service, app1, which has a REST endpoint/process. It will return the string "App1 processing." This will run on port 8080.
Video game company EA is slowly switching its business model to recurring subscriptions. The company just launched Origin Access Premier for $15 per month or $100 per year. This subscription is only available on PC.
This isn’t EA’s first subscription. The company first launched EA Access on the Xbox One. For $5 per month or $30 per year, you can download a play old EA games as part of your subscription.
EA Access doesn’t include the most recent games. But you can play the latest Fifa, Madden and Battlefield games a few months after their initial releases. Usually, EA Access games don’t include any DLC or extra content.
In addition to full games, EA Access lets you try new EA games for 10 hours. You also get 10 percent off on EA digital purchases.
In 2016, EA launched a similar service on PC for the same price. In addition to a collection of EA games, the company partnered with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and other game companies. You can find indie hits, such as The Witness, Oxenfree and Trine 2.
And now, EA is launching a more expensive subscription tier. With Origin Access Premier, you get new EA titles a few days before launch day. For instance, you’ll be able to download and play Madden NFL 19, Fifa 19, Battlefield V and Anthem when they launch in the coming months.
Subscribers won’t have to pay for DLCs, or at least not as many. Games included in the subscription are deluxe editions (Fifa Ultimate Edition, Battlefield V Deluxe, etc.).
In order to convince people to subscribe right away, EA is adding deluxe editions of Battlefront II, Fifa 18, Unravel Two, Fe or The Sims 4 right away.
Other companies have launched subscription services, such as Microsoft with the Xbox Game Pass and Sony’s PlayStation Now. This is an interesting shift as game companies are getting ready for cloud computing.
While many people still buy games on DVDs and play on gaming consoles, the industry is slowly going to switch to cloud gaming. You will launch a game on a server in a data center near you and stream the video feed to the device in front of you.
It doesn’t make as much sense to own a game if you don’t even run it on your console in your living room. By creating recurring subscriptions and putting together gaming libraries, companies can increase recurring revenue.tt
WhatsApp has added a much-requested new feature after it began to allow users to make group voice and video calls.
It’s been just over three years since the company, which is owned by Facebook, introduced voice calls and later a video option one year later. Today, WhatsApp counts over 1.5 billion monthly users and it says they make over two billion minutes of calls via its service each day.
Starting this week, callers can now add friends by hitting the “add participant” button which appears in the top right corner of their screen. The maximum number of participants is four and, impressively, WhatsApp said the calls are end-to-end encrypted.
That’s not an easy thing to do. Telegram, a self-professed secure messaging app, hasn’t even gotten around to encrypting its group messaging chats, let alone group calls.
On the encryption side, WhatsApp has long worked with WhisperSystems to cover all messages and calls on its platform from prying eyes and ears. That said, the relationship between the two become a little more complicated this year when WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton donated $50 million of his wealth — accumulated from Facebook’s acquisition of his company in 2014 — to the Signal Foundation, which is associated with WhisperSystems.
Acton quit Facebook last year — this year he encouraged people to delete the social network for its data and privacy screw-ups — while his fellow WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum joined him in departing in May of this year.
Like Acton, Koum was apparently irked by scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, although his on record explanation for quitting was to “do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee.” Each to their own…
Nintendo released its latest earnings report today and the headline is that the company has now sold nearly 20 million Switch consoles. The actual number is 19.67 million as of the end of June, so add July sales and the 20 million milestone is likely to have already been hit. Either way, it has easily surpassed its predecessor, the much-maligned Wii U.
Overall, the business recorded a 30.5 billion JPY ($275 million) operating profit, up 88 percent year-on-year, as revenue grew 9 percent to reach 168 billion JPY, or $1.5 billion.
The Japanese firm sold 1.88 million Switches in the most recent quarter, which is actually down from 1.97 million one year ago, although this quarter tends to be a slow one ahead of the holiday season. That slip was made up for on the software side as sales of Switch games jumped from 8.1 million last year to 17.96 million in the most recent quarter.
Nintendo has a bunch of new titles incoming — including Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and two Pokémon titles — while its Nintendo Switch Online service is due to launch in September so there’s plenty more to come. That said, Nintendo has some work to do if it is to hit its target of 20 million Switch sales during the current financial year.
Elsewhere, Nintendo said it sold 1.26 million of the NES Classic Edition when it was relaunched in June, while it sold 1.39 million Labo kits for the Switch.
The companies mobile gaming business continues to do well, grossing nine billion JPY, $81 million, in the quarter. That’s likely to spike when the company introduces Mario Kart Tour (huzzah!) and new title Dragalia Lost for mobile before March 2019. Although Nintendo suggested that the pipeline for new mobile games will slow once these two new arrivals are released.
There are a lot of exciting engineering practices gaining popularity internally at Alibaba Group and Alibaba Cloud. Some of these practices use tools and workflow that are effective in the massive environment of the Alibaba Group but would be difficult to replicate in the outside world. On the other hand, there are standard practices that we see all around. For example, on the issue of branch management, tools and habits both play important roles. Some of the tools and habits discussed in this article are unique to Alibaba Cloud, but organizations around the world can replicate the same for their benefit.
Alibaba Group has a lot of research teams, with various departments using different publication flows. The branch strategies are not necessarily the same across all of them, but from a broader perspective, they are still quite unified. Out of these practices, one popular pushing method and an associated branching method are collectively called “AoneFlow.” The thinking behind this set of work methodologies is unique and not frequently seen outside of Alibaba. This article will focus on these practices and talk a little bit about the issue of branch management.
A Dixons Carphone data breach that was disclosed earlier this summer was worse than initially reported. The company is now saying that personal data of 10 million customers could also have been accessed when its systems were hacked.
The European electronics and telecoms retailer believes its systems were accessed by unknown and unauthorized person/s in 2017, although it only disclosed the breach in June, after discovering it during a review of its security systems.
Last month it said 5.9M payment cards and 1.2M customer records had been accessed. But with its investigation into the breach “nearing completion”, it now says approximately 10M records containing personal data (but no financial information) may have been accessed last year — in addition to the 5.9M compromised payment cards it disclosed last month.
“While there is now evidence that some of this data may have left our systems, these records do not contain payment card or bank account details and there is no evidence that any fraud has resulted. We are continuing to keep the relevant authorities updated,” the company said in a statement.
In terms of what personal data the 10M records contained, a Dixons Carphone spokeswoman told us: “This continues to relate to personal data, and the types of data that may have been accessed are, for example, name, address or email address.”
The company says it’s taking the precaution of contacting all its customers — to apologize and advise them of “protective steps to minimize the risk of fraud”.
It adds it has no evidence that the unauthorized access is continuing, having taken steps to secure its systems when the breach was discovered last month, saying: “We continue to make improvements and investments at pace to our security environment through enhanced controls, monitoring and testing.”
Commenting in a statement, Dixons Carphone CEO, Alex Baldock, added: “Since our data security review uncovered last year’s breach, we’ve been working around the clock to put it right. That’s included closing off the unauthorised access, adding new security measures and launching an immediate investigation, which has allowed us to build a fuller understanding of the incident that we’re updating on today.
“Again, we’re disappointed in having fallen short here, and very sorry for any distress we’ve caused our customers. I want to assure them that we remain fully committed to making their personal data safe with us.”
Back in 2015, Carphone Warehouse, a mobile division of Dixons Carphone, also suffered a hack which affected around 3M people. And in January the company was fined £400k by the ICO as a consequence of that earlier breach.
Since then new European Union regulations (GDPR) have come into force which greatly raise the maximum penalties which regulators can impose for serious data breaches.
Last month, following Dixon’s disclosure of the latest breach, the UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, told us it was liaising with the National Cyber Security Centre, the Financial Conduct Authority and other relevant agencies to ascertain the details and impact on customers.
Of the 5.9M payment cards which Dixons disclosed last month as having been compromised, it said the vast majority had been protected by chip and PIN technology. But around 105,000 lacked the security tech so Dixons said at the time could therefore have been compromised.
It’s the additional 1.2M records containing non-financial personal data — such as name, address or email address — that have been revised upwards now, to ~10M records, which constitutes almost half the Group’s customer base in the UK and Ireland.
The spokeswoman told us the Group has approximately 22M customers in the region.
Chaucer wrote that “time and tide wait for no man.” With apologies to the “father” of English literature, we say that time and money wait for no entrepreneur. The deadline for saving big money on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on November 29-30, comes to an abrupt halt on Wednesday August 1 at 11:59 p.m. CEST — in just 48 hours.
Right now, early-bird pricing tiers start at €595 including VAT. That’s a sweet deal because, depending on the tier you choose, early-bird pricing can save you up to €700. When time runs out, you pay more money. Don’t get sucked out with the tide. Buy your passes today.
Disrupt Berlin 2018 offers two program- and value-packed days for startup founders, investors, marketers, tech-heads, designers and innovators. We’re busy lining up an incredible group of speakers — including founders, VCs, tech titans and rising stars — who will step onto the Disrupt stage and hold forth on the most pressing and interesting tech and investment issues of the day. Here are just a few exciting examples from our lineup:
We’re still accepting speaker nominations. If you have a fantastic candidate, by all means, send us your recommendation.
What incredible early-stage startup pitch competition helped launch more than 750 companies that have gone on to collectively raise $8 billion and produce 100 exits? Yeah, OK so it’s an easy answer. Startup Battlefield — with $50,000 cash and the chance for massive global media and investment exposure — is one of the most exciting elements of every Disrupt. Don’t just come and watch. Sign up to compete!
Our Disrupt Berlin exhibition hall — Startup Alley — always features hundreds of the best early-stage startups, and this year is no exception. Exhibiting in the Alley is a magnificent way to place your startup in front of media outlets, investors, accelerators, incubators, solo founders and developers. It’s prime networking territory.
Whether you’re a founder or an investor, you want to be as efficient about that networking as possible in your two days at Disrupt. CrunchMatch, our free, business match-making service, simplifies networking and saves you time. Last year, CrunchMatch generated a total of 888 meetings — and 97 percent of participants said they’d use the service again.
Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on November 29-30, and your chance to buy early-bird passes — and save up to €700 in the process — ends on Wednesday August 1 at 11:59 pm. CEST. Don’t make us quote Chaucer again. Buy your tickets now.
The essence of creating a pipeline is breaking up a single build process into smaller steps, each having its own responsibility. In this way, faster and more specific feedback can be returned. Let's define a true pipeline as a pipeline that is strictly associated with a single revision within a version control system. This makes sense. Ideally, we want the build server to return full and provide accurate feedback for every single revision.
As new revisions can be committed at any time, it is natural that multiple pipelines actually get executed next to each other. If needed, it is even possible to allow concurrent executions of the same build step for different pipelines. However, some measurements need to be taken in order to guarantee that all steps executed within one pipeline are actually based on the same revision.
In my previous post, Rule Execution with SHACL, I have looked at how SHACL rules can be utilized to make inferences. In this post, I consider a more complex situation where SHACL rules are used to classify baked goods as vegan friendly or gluten free based on their ingredients.
In my discussion, I will only concentrate on the definition of vegan friendly baked goods since the translation to gluten free baked goods is similar. Gluten free baked goods are included to give a more representative example.
If you haven’t heard of design thinking yet, odds are you will soon. Where business is concerned, design thinking is no longer something done just by the creatives of an organization, and it does not simply mean "build pixel-perfect wireframes." Design thinking is a holistic product design approach where every product touch point is an opportunity to delight and benefit our users.
For most of us, the word "design" serves up thoughts of iconic classics. The appeal of an architectural style (think: Craftsman) or the draw of a beautiful automobile (insert ride of choice!) While a car or home might be well designed from an aesthetic standpoint, they may not be well suited for the job they are built to do. Enter, design thinking.
Applications are now increasingly distributed, running on multiple machines and accessed by multiple users from all over the world. By bundling the application code, the application runtime, and the libraries, containers, and container orchestrators, we have addressed many of the challenges of building distributed systems. With container runtimes like Docker, we can deploy our applications on different environments. And with container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, we can scale our applications. We frequently have to break our distributed application into a collection of multiple containers running on different machines. This requires us to coordinate execution and facilitate communication among different containers. A scenario where this situation is encountered is when we compose a workflow using multiple containers. In this article, we will learn how to build such workflows using a container workflow engine, Argo, for Kubernetes. We will develop workflows for the following two examples of so-called "embarrassingly parallel" problems for which Kubernetes is the ideal scaling platform.
N-Queens using genetic algorithms
There are a lot of exciting engineering practices gaining popularity internally at Alibaba Group and Alibaba Cloud. Some of these practices use tools and workflow that are effective in the massive environment of the Alibaba Group but would be difficult to replicate in the outside world. On the other hand, there are standard practices that we see all around. For example, on the issue of branch management, tools and habits both play important roles. Some of the tools and habits discussed in this article are unique to Alibaba Cloud, but organizations around the world can replicate the same for their benefit.
Alibaba Group has a lot of research teams, with various departments using different publication flows. The branch strategies are not necessarily the same across all of them, but from a broader perspective, they are still quite unified. Out of these practices, one popular pushing method and an associated branching method are collectively called “AoneFlow.” The thinking behind this set of work methodologies is unique and not frequently seen outside of Alibaba. This article will focus on these practices and talk a little bit about the issue of branch management.
Although Hadoop and Big Data (whatever that is) are the new kids on the block, don’t be too quick to write off relational database technology. In this article, I’ll explain the differences (and benefits) of both solutions.
As much as the marketing hype would have us believe, Hadoop is NOT a database, but a collection of open-source software that runs as a distributed storage framework (HDFS) to manage very large data sets. Its primary purpose is the storage, management, and delivery of data for analytical purposes. It’s hard to talk about Hadoop without getting into keywords and jargon (for example, Impala, YARN, Parquet, and Spark), so I’ll start by explaining the basics.
A "thread race condition" is when two threads are trying to write to a shared resource simultaneously, and access to your shared resource has not been correctly synchronized. It is one of the most common problems that can occur when creating multi-threaded software and is notoriously difficult to debug since it might occur once every 10,000 times you run your program. Hence, using your debugger to sort out these types of problems in your code is like using a hammer and a saw to try to fix your car. To illustrate the problem, imagine the following rally taking place somewhere in an alternative universe, where thread synchronization is impossible, due to the nature of e=mc2+1...
The .NET framework contains lots of helper classes to make sure we have synchronized access to our shared resources, but the intricacies of using these classes, to make sure you are accessing shared resources (correctly) often makes your code much more verbose and difficult to understand. Littering your code with tons of "synchronization code" also makes it much less readable.
Gas leakage can become a disaster for any family. In India, where cooking gas is made available in steel canisters, this type of mishap can happen frequently. To solve this problem, we can make a gas leakage detection monitor with Intel Edison.
This project is easy, and we will only use a simple MQ5 sensor. So, let’s see how we can make a gas leakage detection monitor with the IoT.
Previously, I wrote a long-form post about merge conflict. This time, I'm going to mix things up with an FAQ on the subject. Many of these frequently asked questions could be their own standalone articles, but sometimes, it's good to have all the answers in one place so we get an overview of the landscape.
Without further ado, let's get going!
Neural networks and deep learning technologies underpin most of the advanced intelligent applications today. In this article, Dr. Sun Fei (Danfeng), a high-level algorithms expert from Alibaba's Search Department, will provide a brief overview of the evolution of neural networks and discuss the latest approaches in the field. The article is primarily centered on the following five items:
In part 1 of this article, we gave a brief overview of neural networks and deep learning. In particular, we talked about sensor models, feed-forward neural networks, and back-propagation. In this section, we take a closer of at deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recursive neural networks (RNN).
Hybrid mobile frameworks are gaining popularity. The appearance of React Native (RN) in 2015 opened amazing opportunities to build apps for iOS and Android using one code base. Hence, it allowed us to kill two birds with one stone and not rewrite the same code twice. Big firms such as UberEats, Discord, and Facebook moved to RN, an effective promotion.
Google didn’t stand aside; they noticed the tremendous popularity of RN. Therefore, Google introduced an alpha version of their own hybrid framework called Flutter in 2017. Flutter also became a very popular framework. The emergence of a framework similar to React Native lead to confusion over what to choose for hybrid mobile app development: React Native or Flutter?
JSX stands for JavaScript XML. It is used with React to describe what the UI should look like. JSX produces React “elements” in a familiar and easy manner. React doesn’t require using JSX, but you can find it helpful as a visual aid when working with UI inside the JavaScript code. It also allows React to show more useful error and warning messages. If you want to create a React element without JSX you need to write something like this:
var temp = React.createElement( ‘h1’, null, ‘test’ );
By using JSX, the above code is reduced to the following:
JWTs could be very useful in RESTful Web Services — not only for stateless authentication, but for all the purposes that require tokens — e.g. email verification and forgot-password. In this post, we'll discuss why and how to use the Nimbus JOSE + JWT library for creating and parsing JWT (JWE) tokens.
For code examples, we’ll refer to Spring Lemon. If you haven’t heard of Spring Lemon, you should give it a look. It’s a library encapsulating the sophisticated non-functional code and configuration that’s needed when developing real-world RESTful web services using the Spring framework and Spring Boot.
Most organizations currently have medium-to-complete footprints of Cloud and SaaS applications. Once an organization tastes the cloud benefits, the pace of adoption usually increases until only the core on-premise applications remain that have no relevant cloud substitute or the “payoff” for replacing with a cloud alternative is not justifiable. SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) providers deliver newer capabilities in less time-to-market, leading to faster innovation. The SaaS products further drive the integration platform to adhere to its faster release cycles, all the while, supporting business agility.
Some may ask,"How good is a feature that is configured in SaaS within 10 min but takes a few days to integrate that feature to another app?" An often-asked complaint, but valid!
At Platform9, we work daily with some of the leading enterprises across a wide range of industries – from Financial Services to Internet, Retail, Embedded, and more. A key question we get asked often is how enterprises can transition to becoming Cloud Native (CN) or Digitally Native (DN) businesses. The journey to becoming a truly software-driven, digital-native organizations requires enterprises to develop cultural practices and technology capabilities that support three main goals:
Cloud Management is a key aspect that organizations are looking at in order to simplify operations, increase IT efficiency and reduce data center costs.
Multithreading and concurrency questions are an essential part of any Java interview. If you are going for an interview with an investment bank, e.g. Barclays, Citibank, Morgan Stanley for an equities front office Java developer position, you can expect a lot of multithreading interview questions. Multithreading and concurrency are popular topics on investment banking interviews, especially on electronic trading development jobs where they grill candidates on the many tricky Java thread interview questions. They want to ensure that the candidate has a solid knowledge of multithreading and concurrent programming in Java, because most of them are in the business of performance which provides them a competitive advantage.
For example, high volume and low latency electronic trading systems, which are used for Direct to Market (DMA) trading, are usually concurrent in nature. Most of the time, they will focus on microsecond latency, which is why a good knowledge of how to effectively minimize latency and improve throughput is important.
Before we get started, here are some helpful links from Mule Documentation to get you introduced to building mule connectors.
What is Anypoint Connector DevKit?
I have a big update for JMetro this time. Version 3.8 brings the following new Fluent Design(FDS) inspired styles (dark and light) and updates:
I decided to, for now, switch focus off on the JMetro samples. I still styled the controls to look good and have a distinct appearance when they are focused, though. I’ve done this because the focus ring functions a bit different in Windows 10 than it does, by default, in JavaFX applications.
Progress bars are a common user interface component that usually look something like this.
In this article, we'll look at how you can easily recreate progres bars like this for your NativeScript apps, and learn a bit about NativeScript's layout system in the process.
Apache NiFi is a great tool for handling data flows, however, the flow development lifecycle has been slightly challenging.
The recent release of NiFi Registry, a sub-project to provide shared resources across instances of NiFi, initially provides the capability to manage versioned flows. As of version 0.2.0, NiFi Registry added support for persisting flow snapshots to Git, making it very compelling!
CSS frameworks are a real time-saver when it comes to quickly and efficiently create beautiful websites. Today, let's have a look at BuddyCSS, a promising newcomer in the world of CSS frameworks.
BuddyCSS is a relatively new CSS framework, created by French developer Loic Sciampagna.
I'm more of a spaces person than a tabs person when it comes to source code, and in Vim, I like to see the tab characters, so I have this setting:
This places a handy ⇥ character so that I can see the tabs:
Augmented reality and virtual reality often go together, as AR and VR technology looks similar and are frequently confused with one another. Though it looks similar, both are very different. The thing that differentiates it is the perception of human presence.
Augmented reality augments the real world by adding virtual technological elements. It takes the reality to one step up and ‘augments’ our current state of presence. Your most favorite “Pokemon Go” is the best example of augmented reality. It is a mix of the real world and the virtual world, allowing the individual to experience both the world.
Only a year ago, industry discourse around artificial intelligence (AI) was focused on whether or not to go the AI way. Businesses found themselves facing an important choice — weighing the considerable value that would manifest against the investment of capital and talent AI would necessitate. But that was yesterday.
Today, we have reached a critical inflection point. With their technology deployments hitting maturity, early adopters of AI have begun to realize incredible advantages — the ability to optimize operations, maximize productivity, derive insights and be more responsive to real-time market demands. The results are out for the world to see.
Welcome to the third part of this series. I'm glad you're still reading, as hopefully, this means you find this subject interesting at least. Previously we presented the first two components of MySQL InnoDB Cluster: Group Replication and MySQL Router and now, we will discuss the last component, MySQL Shell.
This is the last component in the cluster, and I love it. Oracle has created this tool to centralize cluster management, providing a friendly, command-line based user interface.
Threat modeling is becoming a more commonly used tool by software development teams as they integrate security into their development lifecycle.
Threat modeling was created to be a very tailorable tool. Teams are able to determine the processes that work best for them while negating other processes that they deem non-valuable.
From opening new revenue streams to launching new products and hitting the gas on productivity, becoming a data-driven company is the holy grail of modern businesses. Many have even called data "the new oil," an oft-used term that's become a cliche to some but is true nonetheless.
But for all the potential value data holds, many enterprises are still not achieving its full promise. That's why we conducted a survey, "The 2018 Data Value Report," to understand the disconnect between companies' data-driven ambitions and the reality on the ground. We asked 500 IT decision makers (ITDMs) about their data priorities, spending plans, expected ROI, and the obstacles they see to achieving those returns.
As multi-clouds become the norm, finding and addressing wasteful cloud resources jumps to the top of the list of IT concerns. Keeping cloud management simple, timely, and accurate requires a view into your application usage that is clear and comprehensive.
Hybrid clouds give organizations the ability to get the best of both worlds: on-premises for traditional apps and resources they want to keep close at hand, and in the public cloud to realize the speed, agility, and efficiency of cloud-native applications. The challenge is to maintain the optimal balance between public and private clouds to achieve your business objectives. Doing so requires a 360-degree view of the full application lifecycle.
Creating visualizations is an essential part of data analysis — whether you're just "looking around" a new dataset or verifying the results of your machine learning algorithms. Unfortunately, Java has fallen behind what the best visualization tools offer. Tablesaw's new plotting framework provides a platform for creating visualizations in Java for the entire analysis process, from the earliest explorations to the final presentation.
The framework provides a Java wrapper around the Plot.ly open source JavaScript visualization library. Plot.ly is based on the extraordinary D3 (Data-Driven Documents) framework and is certainly among the best open-source visualization packages available in any language. Plot.ly is so good, in fact, it is widely used in languages other than JavaScript, such as Python and R, which already had solid options for visualization.
Civil, the blockchain-based journalism organization, is casting its eye to Asia after it set up a $1 million fund that’s aimed at seeding 100 new media projects across the continent over the next three years. The organization has teamed up with Splice, a Singapore-based media startup which will manage the fund, according to an announcement.
There’s been a lot of attention lavished on Civil for its promise to make media work more efficiently using blockchain technology and its upcoming crypto token, CVL. The organization has raised $5 million in financing from ConsenSys, the blockchain corporation led by Ethereum co-creator Joe Lubin, and its ICO takes place next month with the goal of raising around $32 million to launch its network and actively onboard new media companies worldwide.
But the company is waiting around. Civil has already actively jumped into the media space — providing financial backing to the newly-formed The Colorado Sun — but the scope of the project in Asia is different in trying to kickstart a wave of new media organizations by giving them money to get off the ground.
Alan Soon, co-founder and CEO of Splice, told TechCrunch that it hasn’t been decided whether the financing will be in the form of grants or equity-based investments. Despite that, he said deals will be “pre-seed, micro-investments to help entrepreneurs take their ideas to prototype stage.”
Soon said that all kinds of media are in play, ranging from the more obvious suspects such as publishers, reporting websites and podcasts to behind-the-scenes tech like automation, bots and adtech.
Notably, though, he clarified that the beneficiaries of the fund will be under no obligation to adopt Civil’s protocol, the technology that will be funded by the upcoming ICO. Splice itself, however, has committed to doing so which will mean it gains access to the network’s content, licensing opportunities and more.
“I’m with Civil because I really believe in their values,” Soon added. “They want to do the right thing for this space.”
Struggling against competition from Chinese smartphones, Samsung Electronics posted a lackluster second-quarter earnings report with its slowest profit growth in more than a year. On the bright side, the Korean tech giant said its semiconductor business is doing well.
Operating profit rose 5.7% year-over-year to 14.9 trillion won (about $13.3 billion), representing Samsung Electronic’s slowest quarterly profit growth since the first quarter of 2017. Net income was 11 trillion won (about $9.8 billion), almost the same result Samsung posted in the same period a year ago. Sales revenue dropped 4% to 58.5 trillion won (about $52.3 billion).
Samsung blamed lower-than-expected sales of the Galaxy S9, its flagship smartphone, seasonality and competition from lower-priced handsets. Two Chinese companies in particular, Xiaomi and Huawei, have emerged as formidable rivals, putting pressure on Samsung in China and India.
As in previous quarters, Samsung’s semiconductor business posted strong performance even as its smartphones suffered. Samsung reported that second-quarter operating profit for its chips rose 45% year-over-year to 11.6 trillion won. The company said it anticipated strong demand for chips during the second half of the year thanks to demand from high density data centers. It expects smartphone and tablet demand to continue lagging, however, thanks to competition from lower-priced devices with strong specifications.
