published on 2019/10/31
.NET Teams are spoiled for choices nowadays of frameworks to build highly scalable distribution systems.
The mature Orleans framework has just released its 3rd version.
Distributed ACID transactions — multiple grains can join a transaction regardless of where their state is stored
A new scheduler, which alone increased performance by over 30% in some cases
A new code generator based on Roslyn code analysis
Rewritten cluster membership for improved recovery speed
Co-hosting support
Introducing Orleans 3
Dapr is new entrance
Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.
dapr.io
The framework that powers much of Microsoft online services is open source
Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform for packaging, deploying, and managing stateless and stateful distributed applications and containers at large scale.
Microsoft Service Fabric
Another mature framework
Akka.NET is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications on .NET & Mono.
AKKA.NET
And if you are looking for lighter footprint
Convey is a set of helper libraries that can be used independently of each other to help you to build your web applications and microservices, yet it is neither a framework nor a silver bullet. Convey does provide utilities to tackle challenges such as messaging, service discovery, load balancing, secure configuration, monitoring, distributed tracing and many more.
Convey
The best software platform in the world gets even better
published on 2019/09/24
We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 3.0. It includes many improvements, including adding Windows Forms and WPF, adding new JSON APIs, support for ARM64 and improving performance across the board. C# 8 is also part of this release, which includes nullable, async streams, and more patterns. F# 4.7 is included, and focused on relaxing syntax and targeting .NET Standard 2.0. You can start updating existing projects to target .NET Core 3.0 today. The release is compatible with previous versions, making updating easy.
DotNet
This is such an exciting release for a .NET Core focused company like SilverKey. We rely on this technology exclusively for our projects and we have seen ASP.NET Core advances leaps and bounds in terms of features and performance in every single release.
Our popular OSS project, Practical ASP.NET Core, a collection of over 300+ samples for ASP.NET Core, has also been updated with the final release of .NET Core 3.0.
Orchard Core CMS, another of our favorite software (it powers this website) has also been upgraded to run on ASP.NET Core 3.0 and now has reached Release Candidate 1 status.
The fall of MIT Media Lab
published on 2019/09/07
The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”
New Yorker
Technology is an integral part of day to day life of people and societies. There are grey areas where the benefits and harms of a particular technology or practice can be debated. However the moral case of accepting money from a convicted paedophile financier is pretty black and white. You simply don't accept any money or investment nor do any business with such individual.
It is a disservice to the victims of Epstein's crimes that MIT Media Lab accepted money from Einstein and a grave failure of imagination and moral rectitude for the illustrious institution.
published on 2019/08/24
Brazil has seen a record number of fires in 2019, Brazilian space agency data suggests.
The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) says its satellite data shows an 85% increase on the same period in 2018.
BBC
There is only one Earth. Let's not make in unlivable for the next generation.
This New Yorker cartoon is a poignant reminder
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
published on 2019/08/09
Uber set two dubious quarterly records on Thursday as it reported its results: its largest-ever loss, exceeding $5 billion, and its slowest-ever revenue growth.
The double whammy immediately renewed questions about the prospects for the company, the world’s biggest ride-hailing business. Uber has been dogged by concerns about sluggish sales and whether it can make money, worries that were compounded by a disappointing initial public offering in May.
NY Times
A cab hailing service is by nature a local business. A smaller business focusing on a specific locality will be able to compete and be profitable.
Uber investors are probably waiting for the advent of autonomous vehicle to arrive so they can get rid of the human driver component of the service and be finally able to achieve profitability.