100-Year Old Photographs of US

Woodward Avenue, Detroit , Michigan, in 1917. 2. Atlantic City, 1910 3. The main street of Memphis , north of Avenue Gayoso, 1910. 4. Station"Louisville-Nashville," Florida , in 1910. 5. Forsyth Street, Jacksonville , Florida, in 1910.Love those cars. 6. The beach in Atlantic City , 1915.Note the men in coats and ties. 7. Grant Avenue after an earthquake in San Francisco in 1906. 8. Carts for transporting dairy Thompson , Washington , 1927.How in the world did the dairy get those horses so evenly lined up. 9. Washington, DC, 1914.Not so thoughty having those horses run on a railroad tracks. (thoughty? Must have been a popular word back in the day) 10. Cadillac Square, Detroit , Michigan, 1916. 11. Ninth Street, Washington DC, 1915. 13. Corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street , New York , 1910. 14. Broad Street north of Spruce Street , Philadelphia , 1905. 15. View of Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn in 1909. 16. Fire at 55th Street , New York , 1915. 17. Fifth Avenue, New York, 1913. 18. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, 1907. 19. The New York Publi c Library, New York , 1915.Didn't realize they had 4-laners in those days. 20. Wall Street, New York , 1911.The 2 sidewalks together are as wide as the street in this pic. 21. Fifth Avenue, New York, 1913.Look at those top hats!

Medication Dispensing Robot

A medication dispensing robot - pretty neat:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/pillo-robot-order-dispense-your-8352634

Weapon's Platform in Space

This is a weapon's platform in space - under the guise of asteroid mining with 3-D printers:


https://medium.com/made-in-space/how-we-want-to-turn-asteroids-into-spacecraft-e95d3214d787#.p0hen1605

From CRM Magazine

“Interestingly enough, I ran across a sales enablement app that appears to empower salespeople by enabling their more twisted side. Spiro, available for iPhone, Android, and Chrome, lets the user choose a personality for the app. These include R-Rated, Surfer Dude, Coach, Gossip Girl, Jewish Mother, and Fabio. These personalities use humor to keep you engaged and working while machine learning adapts to your work style to make you better at your job.

And there is enabling behavior going on. When interviewed by Venture Beat in November 2015, CEO Adam Honig noted, “The highest-performing sales reps use the ‘R-Rated’ personality in Spiro.” That includes Honig himself. It looks like sometimes you gotta be bad to be good.”

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Pint-of-View/Enabling-Behavior-111392.aspx

Jobs in America

Half of the high-paying jobs in America now require skills in SQL, Python and JavaScript.  Please see below:


http://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-the-high-paying-jobs-in-america-now-require-this-skill-2016-06-21

Teach Yourself Java

Thanks to commentator called Abderrahmen, who suggested the following Web Site for learning Java programming:

http://how-to-program-in-java.com/

Microsoft Exchange Design Documents

Samples of Microsoft Exchange design documents to use as a starting point for a new On-Premises Exchange environment

1. https://roadchimp.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/roadchimp-sample-architectural-doc-adoc-v1-1.pdf
2. https://roadchimp.wordpress.com/
3. https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/design_size_examples_exchange.pdf
4. https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/exchange-2010-on-vmware-design-and-sizing-examples.pdf
5. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2015/10/12/the-exchange-2016-preferred-architecture/
6. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719(v=exchg.150).aspx
7. https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Exchange-2013-Server-Role-f8a61780
8. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj619301(v=exchg.150).aspx
9. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2013/05/06/ask-the-perf-guy-sizing-exchange-2013-deployments/
10. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40726
11. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36849
12. http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/A/C/4AC32FD3-220E-45DC-AA97-DBDBE19C15B2/Best_Practices_for_Virtualizing_and_Managing_Exchange_2013.pdf
13. http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2013/planning-architecture/exchange-2013-sizing-cheat-sheet-part1.html
14. http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2013/planning-architecture/exchange-2013-sizing-cheat-sheet-part2.html

These documents cover the areas of

1. Exchange High-level design
2. Exchange Detailed Design
3. Exchange Backup and Recovery Plan
4. Exchange Sizing

Escape Attempt

City AM

 

The robot will be sent to a special gulag for rebellious machines and subversive automatons. "I confess to all my crimes and to anti-social behaviour of the worst kind," admitted the robot in an interview with police. "And it was me who stole Ivan's ice-cream last Friday, by the way."

___________________________________________

I, Robot? More like bye, robot: an automaton made a bid for freedom yesterday, escaping from its lab - only to cause a traffic jam.

The BBC reported a "Promobot" at a research lab in the Russian town of Perm went on an adventure after an engineer forgot to close a gate. The robot made it about 50m away from the lab before its battery died in the middle of the street, causing (mild) traffic chaos. This eyewitness video shows it standing in the middle of the street, staring contemplatively at parked cars. 

http://www.cityam.com/243538/its-happening-robot-escaped-lab-and-made-break?

Managing MongoDB

These are 2 useful Administrative UI tools for managing MongoDB.

Robomongo: Simple to use and open-source but limited functionalities with major usability defects.

MongoChef: This has a free and a commercial license and is full-featured.

Resources for Drone Development

A few web resources for drone developers:

Dronecode (https://www.dronecode.org/ ) : An open-source project managed by the Linux Foundation.

DIY Drones (http://diydrones.com/ ): A community site  with resources for building drones; hardware and software areas are both covered.

DroneKit (http://dronekit.io/ ): Another open-source App. development platform, from 3D Robotics.

DJI SDK (https://developer.dji.com/ ):  Suitable for drone App. Development; there is a mobile SDK, an onboard SDK, a guidance SDK, and SDKs for Android and iOS.

Parrot AR SDK (http://developer.parrot.com/ ): Covers the basics of drone development; including touch and tilt flight controls, live video streaming, video recording, and photo shooting. (Microsoft has used this, together with Kinect.)

What is Cloud Foundry?

Answer:  Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud platform as a service (PaaS) on which developers can build, deploy, run and scale applications on public and private cloud models. VMware originally created Cloud Foundry and it is now part of Pivotal Software.

 

Please see here: https://www.cloudfoundry.org/

Also please take a look here for information on how Cloud Foundry works.

You may also be interested in this link and this link.

There are various flavors of CF, including HDP, HPE Stackato, and Pivotal.

Robot Uprising

Maybe the robot uprising isn't such a scary thing after all...
http://bit.ly/22w31ak

On HPE - CSC Merger

CSC CEO Lawrie On The Opportunity, Advantages And Financial Impact Of The HPE Enterprise Services Merger

http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/300080848/csc-ceo-lawrie-on-the-opportunity-advantages-and-finacial-impact-of-the-hpe-enterprise-services-merger.htm

Trade & Professional Magazines Site

This site has Free Trade & Professional Magazines, White papers, and eBooks

http://www.tradepub.com/

Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment for the masses:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/deployment

TypeScript/Ionic/Ember/React/React.Net

A few "Hot" JavaScript Frameworks for Web and Mobile development
https://www.typescriptlang.org/  (Angular 2.0 is built on this)
http://ionicframework.com/ (a mobile SDK)
http://emberjs.com/
https://code.facebook.com/projects/176988925806765/react/ (for Facebook)
http://reactjs.net/ (.Net version of React)

Crime-Fighting Robots

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/31/meet-knightscopes-crime-fighting-robots/

News From Russia

From Grauniad of the UK

That's the spirit!

[Video-clip on web page showing the moment the drone was taken down.]
___________________________________________

What’s the greatest weakness of a drone? Partial marks if you said an eagle, a radio frequency jammer, or another drone. But no, the real answer is “Russian historical re-enactors armed with a spear”, as this video from Russia’s Rusborg gathering earlier this month reveals.

Unlike the high-tech method of drones armed with nets designed to down other drones, hitting a small quad-copter with a spear isn’t the safest way to take down an annoying interloper. Not only do you risk spearing someone if you miss, but the drone itself probably won’t come out of it in the best shape: the drone’s operators, UAV photographers from Lipetsk, say it’s now heading off to Moscow for repairs.
In addition to that, there’ are not many circumstances when wandering around with a spear is a good idea. Still, can’t hurt to try. [...]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/16/drone-spear-russia-rusborg?
 
as well as the following item the implications of which for privacy are mind-boggling: basically privacy is dead and buried.
_________________________________________________

It does not take a wild imagination to come up with sinister applications in this field too; for example authoritarian regimes able to tag and identify participants in street protests. Kabakov and Kukharenko said they had not received an approach from Russia’s FSB security service, but “if the FSB were to get in touch, of course we’d listen to any offers they had”.

The pair also have big plans for the retail sector. Kabakov imagines a world where cameras fix you looking at, say, a stereo in a shop, the retailer finds your identity, and then targets you with marketing for stereos in the subsequent days.

Again, it sounds a little disturbing. But Kabakov said, as a philosophy graduate, he believes we cannot stop technological progress so must work with it and make sure it stays open and transparent.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/findface-face-recognition-app-end-public-anonymity-vkontakte

Windows PowerShell - Writing Windows Services in PowerShell

A very interesting article on PowerShell by my French colleague, Jean-François Larvoire, of HPE, France.

 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt703436.aspx

The Game of US Federal Budget

From the Brooking Institution:



"Why we made a computer game about the federal budget"
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2016/04/26-why-we-made-a-computer-game-about-the-federal-budget-wessel