Disclaimer

As more organizations are delivering innovation faster by moving their businesses to the cloud, increased security is critically important for every industry. Azure has built-in security controls across data, applications, compute, networking, identity, threat protection, and security management so you can customize protection and integrate partner solutions. 

We keep investing in security and we are excited to share exciting updates this week at Hannover Messe 2019. We are excited to announce that Dedicated Hardware Security Module Service (HMS) in UK, Canada, and Australia, Azure disk encryption support for Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) are generally available. Also Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage, the Regulatory Compliance Dashboard, and support for virtual machine sets are now generally available as part of Azure Security Center.

Git is a popular version control system. In Git, an atomic change of one or several files is called a commit, and several consecutive commits are combined into a branch. Branches are used to implement new ideas (features).

It happens that the idea is a dead end and the developer has turned the wrong way, so he needs to roll back to the original version. He should forget about the new branch, switch to the main dev or master branch and continue working. In this case, the "scion" will hang forever, as well as the desire to remove it. But how to remove the part of the history? This branch shows the efforts of the hard-working programmer, even if in vain. So it will be easier to report to the boss, because an unsuccessful result is also a result!

I hasten to rejoice that Git developers are going to introduce a new command to close such "homeless" branches in the third version. The current version is 2.21.0.

How to use this command, what benefits does it give and what do IT companies think? The article answers these and other questions.

The Imagine Cup 2019 competition is well underway with our second Regional Final wrapping up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands this week. Team Finderr from the United Kingdom took home the first-place title and a spot in the World Championship for their app solution to find lost objects with a smartphone. Congratulations!

Btree

Structure

We are now publishing .NET Core container images to Microsoft Container Registry (MCR). We have also made other changes to the images we publish, described in this post.

Important: You will need to change FROM statements in Dockerfile files and docker pull commands as a result of these changes. 3.0 references need to be changed now. Most 1.x and 2.x usages can be changed over time. The new tag scheme is decribed in this post and are provided at the microsoft-dotnet-core repo, our new home on Docker Hub.

Summary of changes:

• .NET Core images are now published to Microsoft Container Registry.
• Updates will continue to be published to Docker Hub, for .NET Core 1.x and 2.x.
• .NET Core 3.0 will only be published to MCR.
• Nano Server 2016 images are no longer supported or published.

It's 2019! Everybody thinks they know code splitting. So - let's double check!

What does code splitting stand for?

In short – code splitting is just about not loading a whole thing. Then you are reading this page you don't have to load a whole site. When you are selecting a single row from a database – you don't have to take all.
Obvious? Code splitting is also quite obvious, just not about your data, but your code.

Set-Up Players

It's been a while since my last appearance, but I'm excited to be back and to share something truly special with you. In this article, we'll explore my top 10 Google Sheets features that are guaranteed to boost your productivity, speed up your workflow, and make your data handling more efficient. So, without further ado, let's dive into these game-changing tools!

I always pay attention to assessing the complexity of programming in a particular language. Programming is indeed not an easy task and this is perceived as a fact and usually does not require any confirmation.

But the concept of “complexity” is akin to the term “heap”. For some, five coconuts is not so much, but for someone who ate one and “didn’t want any more,” this means that even one coconut will be too much for him.

The same goes for the complexity of programs. It seems that the constant increase in the complexity of programs is obvious to everyone and is observed in all areas of application of IT technologies, and programming languages themselves become more and more complex as they develop, but assessing “complexity” using numerical metrics is a problem. obviously a thankless task, but also “You can’t manage what you can’t measure...”

Typically, talk of “complexity” only implies value judgments without any numerical evaluation. And since I am personally interested in the issue of the complexity of programming languages, I decided to calculate the complexity of implementing the gcc compiler on some conditional “parrots”. What if we could see some patterns of difficulty changing over time?

S.B. Pshenichnikov

The article outlines a new mathematical apparatus for verbal calculations in NLP (natural language processing). Words are embedded not in a real vector space, but in an algebra of extremely sparse matrix units. Calculations become evidence-based and transparent. The example shows forks in calculations that go unnoticed when using traditional approaches, and the result may be unexpected.

The use of IT in Natural Language Processing (NLP) requires standardization of texts, for example, tokenization or lemmatization.

After this, you can try to use mathematics, since it is the highest form of standardization and turns the objects under study into ideal ones, for example, data tables into matrices of elements. Only in the language of matrices can one search for general patterns in data (numbers and texts).

If text is turned into numbers, then in NLP these are first natural numbers for numbering words, which are then embedded into real vectors is irreversible ed in a real vector space.

Perhaps we should not rush to do this but come up with a new type of numbers that is more suitable for NLP than numbers for studying physical phenomena. These are matrix hyperbinary numbers. Hyperbinary numbers are one of the types of hypercomplex numbers.

Hyperbinary numbers have their  own  arithmetic,  and  if  you get used to  it,  it  will  seem  more  familiar  and  simpler  than  Pythagorean arithmetic.

In Decision Support Systems (DSS), the texts are value judgments and a numbered verbal rating scale. Next (as in NLP), the numbers are turned into vectors of real numbers and used as sets of weighted arithmetic average coefficients.

Internet censorship is becoming an increasingly important issue worldwide. This leads to increasing of the "race of armaments" – in different countries government agencies and private corporations try to block various content and fight against the ways of circumventing of such restrictions. At the same time developers and researchers strive to create effective tools to combat censorship.

Scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and SRI International conducted an experiment in which they developed a special service for masking the use of Tor – one of the most popular tools for bypassing blocking. Here is the story about the work done by the researchers.

In this report we describe our implementation experience of a stopwatch system executing on an FPGA board. We programmed this device in the Quartus Prime II software environment by using Verilog hardware description language. The program is tailored to the Altera MAX 10 FPGA board, as well as uses a set of other peripheral devices for progress visualization purposes.

This is a step-by-step research of a clear and intuitive approach to validate custom data in .NET applications with help of the Minimal API filters and the FlatValidator.

If you are new to IT, the first thing I recommend is focus. Don’t try to learn everything at once. Instead, choose a field that increases your chances of landing your first job quickly.

They might sound complicated, but they are actually a fundamental part of the language. In this article, we’ll explore closures in a straightforward and practical way. Let’s clear up common misunderstandings. Walk through real-world examples. Nail those tricky interview questions about closures. By the end, you’ll see closures not as a hurdle, but as a valuable part of your JavaScript toolkit.