Weekly Tech Roundup for December 7 2018

by Bincom Dev Center · December 7, 2018

I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them . — Isaac Asimov

Today’s technology is a booming market full of exciting and innovative products and new learning opportunities. With technology as a major consumer of our time and also an exciting experience in our world today, are you motivated to generate something new?
How do you come up with a great new idea? Check out these inspiring technology trend that might just inspire you to further develop your love for technology.

We also included some snippets from our daily knowledge development sessions, just to give you a little extra knowledge. After all, knowledge is never enough. Take your time and digest every one of them. The world is fast evolving and so should your mind.

Google’s Chrome browser will get better because of Microsoft

Microsoft has always used pop-ups, notifications, and warning signs to sway people away from installing Chrome on Windows 10. The software maker even performed battery tests to show how bad Chrome is for your laptop’s battery life. With the news that Microsoft is moving to the Chromium rendering engine for Edge, all of these comparisons and notifications are about to become irrelevant. Microsoft now has a reason to make Chrome run better on Windows.

Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 8cx, an ‘extreme’ processor for Windows laptops

The “X” stands for “extreme.” That’s what Qualcomm’s marketing department wants you to think about the new eight-core Snapdragon 8cx.It’s a brand-new processor for always-connected Windows laptops and 2-in-1 convertible PCs, and from Qualcomm’s perspective, it might seem a little extreme. Physically, it’s the largest processor the company has ever made, with the most powerful CPU and GPU Qualcomm has devised yet. Qualcomm says it’ll be the first 7nm chip for a PC platform, beating a struggling Intel to the punch, and the biggest performance leap for a Snapdragon ever. The company’s promising “amazing battery life,” and up to 2Gbps cellular connectivity

FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping

Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat app.

Facebook confirms the new shopping feature is currently in testing with a limited set of Pages in Thailand, which has been a testbed for shopping features. The option was first spotted by social media and reputation manager Jeff Higgins, and re-shared by Matt Navarra and Social Media Today. But now Facebook is confirming the test’s existence and providing additional details.

IBM selling Lotus Notes/Domino business to HCL for $1.8BState of Javascript.

IBM announced last night that it is selling the final components from its 1995 acquisition of Lotus to Indian firm HCL for $1.8 billion.

IBM paid $3.5 billion for Lotus back in the day. The big pieces here are Lotus Notes, Domino and Portal. These were a big part of IBM’s enterprise business for a long time, but last year Big Blue began to pull away, selling the development part to HCL, while maintaining control of sales and marketing.

This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house.

Duet Display 2 uses hardware acceleration to catch up with Luna Display

Duet Display is an app that lets you turn your iPad into a second Mac monitor. And the team behind it just released a major update that makes it much more efficient — it consumes less CPU resources and is now recognized as a true external display.

If you’ve used Duet Display over the past few years, you may have seen a change that made it worse, not better. At some point, Apple updated macOS and broke Duet Display’s method.

Duet Display had to use AirPlay as a fallback method. It made the app much less versatile as you were restricted to a handful of 16:9 resolutions with black bars.

8 Commonly Used Scalable System Design Patterns

Ricky Ho in Scalable System Design Patterns has created a great list of scalability patterns along with very well done explanatory graphics. A summary of the patterns are:

Load Balancer – a dispatcher determines which worker instance will handle a request based on different policies.
Scatter and Gather – a dispatcher multicasts requests to all workers in a pool. Each worker will compute a local result and send it back to the dispatcher, who will consolidate them into a single response and then send back to the client.
Result Cache – a dispatcher will first lookup if the request has been made before and try to find the previous result to return, in order to save the actual execution.
Shared Space – all workers monitors information from the shared space and contributes partial knowledge back to the blackboard. The information is continuously enriched until a solution is reached.
Pipe and Filter – all workers connected by pipes across which data flows.
MapReduce – targets batch jobs where disk I/O is the major bottleneck. It use a distributed file system so that disk I/O can be done in parallel.
Bulk Synchronous Parallel – a lock-step execution across all workers, coordinated by a master.
Execution Orchestrator – an intelligent scheduler / orchestrator schedules ready-to-run tasks (based on a dependency graph) across a clusters of dumb workers.

Making the Case for Building Scalable Stateful Services in the Modern Era

For a long time now stateless services have been the royal road to scalability. Nearly every treatise on scalability declares statelessness as the best practices approved method for building scalable systems. A stateless architecture is easy to scale horizontally and only requires simple round-robin load balancing.

What’s not to love? Perhaps the increased latency from the roundtrips to the database. Or maybe the complexity of the caching layer required to hide database latency problems. Or even the troublesome consistency issues.

Machine Learning / Deep Learning.

Like the weather, everybody complains about programming, but nobody does anything about it. That’s changing and like an unexpected storm the change comes from an unexpected direction: Machine Learning / Deep Learning.

I know, you are tired of hearing about Deep Learning. Who isn’t by now? But programming has been stuck in a rut for a very long time and it’s time we do something about it.

Lots of silly little programming wars continue to be fought that decide nothing. Functions vs objects; this language vs that language; this public cloud vs that public cloud vs this private cloud vs that ‘fill in the blank’; REST vs unrest; this byte level encoding vs some different one; this framework vs that framework; this methodology vs that methodology; bare metal vs containers vs VMs vs unikernels; monoliths vs microservices vs nanoservices; eventually consistent vs transactional; mutable vs immutable; DevOps vs NoOps vs SysOps; scale-up vs scale-out; centralized vs decentralized; single threaded vs massively parallel; sync vs async. And so on ad infinitum.

wonderful podcasts developers can listen to have fun

So I want to make an unusual post today, below, I will be dropping a list of wonderful podcasts developers can listen to for fun, education and knowledge generally.

According to Wikipedia, “a podcast is an episodic series of digital audio or video files which a user can download in order to listen to.”Without further ado, here is a list of three podcasts you can listen to…. and they are free

1. https://www.codenewbie.org/basecs BaseCS

Hosted by Vaidehi Joshi and Saron Yitbarek, the podcast is based on the former’s blog series on Computer Science concepts. It’s fun and educating.

2. https://www.codenewbie.org/podcast CodeNewbie : This one is hosted by Saron Yitbarek. She interviews new and experienced developers on their learning paths and career generally. I love it because you get to learn from other developers and their experiences.

3. https://syntax.fm :Syntax. Hosted by full stack developers, Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski, they dive deep in web development topics, explaining how they handle their work and about their own experiences.

About Weekly Tech Roundup by Bincom Dev Center

You probably already know that Bincom ICT‘s core is Best Use of Technology. This initiative is a compilation of some of the things the people at Bincom Dev Center found interesting during the week in review. Bincom Dev Center is the Training & Development Arm of Bincom ICT.

In this weekly publication, You will find various pieces ranging from ideas to trends, to random thoughts. They are here because we found them interesting. We also include some knowledge development pieces and where to get more information about the topic. We aim to publish an edition every Friday at 5:00pm (with exception of Holidays). We are working hard to keep ourselves updated and we think you should too!

Time for some Shameless Advertising:

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