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Ecommerce Tech Trends 2020: Era of Immersive Technologies

Reading time7 min
Views1.3K


Technologies like AI, VR/AR, Cryptocurrency, IoT will take center stage in 2020 and also form as the backbone of tomorrow’s ecommerce tech innovation. Beyond the sales and revenue focused world of ecommerce, 2020 ecommerce tech trends will provide the capability to create new software solutions, mobile apps, and services that will lead to creating a richer and more satisfying shopping experience.
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Benefits of Microservices Architecture for Software Development

Reading time4 min
Views1.6K
From Netflix to Amazon, Twitter, and many software giants, everyone has started adopting the all-new architectural pattern for software development — microservices. Microservices is an architectural pattern for software development that is a collection of small autonomous units, built around business units.
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The Flight with a Dosimeter in the Pocket

Reading time3 min
Views2K
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The developer of personal dosimeters presented me with an interesting gift at one of Skolovo conferences in early 2011. It was a funny DO-RA gadget made in the form of an Easter egg and packed in a large cardboard box like a smartphone. Apparently, its designers new that their boss Viktor Vekselberg, chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, was fond of Faberge eggs. They made a plastic copy of the famous Easter gift of the Russian Imperial Court.

I found a dusty box with the DO-RA gadget just before a business trip to the United Arab Emirates. The device had no battery and was connected to Apple smartphones via a standard audio jack. It is worth noting that, starting with the 7th iPhone model, the Apple Inc. no longer releases smartphones with an audio jack considering it an anachronism. However, the abandonment of the quite utilitarian interface such as audio jack coincided with the release of expensive Airpod earphones. Well, it's their business to earn money on all sorts of restrictions.
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Habr — best articles, authors and statistics 2019

Reading time6 min
Views2.9K
2019 is coming to an end, and it's Christmas soon. It is also the time to grab all data and collect statistics and a rating of the most interesting Habr's articles for this period.



In this post the best articles and best Habr authors 2019 will be presented, I also will show some statistical graphs that I find interesting or unusual.

Let's get started.
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Chronicle of Rambler Group and Nginx confrontation (updated on 23 Dec, 12 p.m.)

Reading time3 min
Views6.6K


On December 12, it became known from Nginx's employee Twitter that the company's office was searched due to the criminal case under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'. The claim belong to Rambler Group was, although formally the complaintant is Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, to which the rights were transferred. The last-mentioned is related to the co-owner of Rambler Group, Alexander Mamut.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

Here is how the events unfolded.
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A Second Year of Q#

Reading time3 min
Views1K
You can see all of the release notes for the year here.

Remember How We Started


Our first release of our second year, 0.4, was a triumph! we got a customer request for a big integer type on January 1st, and were able to respond by shipping a new BigInt data type just 29 short days later!!! Remember, we’re outside Seattle, pretty far north, so our winter days are really short.

Our secret? We had started working on the BigInt type in December.

We also decided to change our release cadence for our second year of Q#. Our first year, we had shipped releases sporadically, when we had some major feature to share, or possibly just a fix to an annoying bug. For our second year, we moved to a more regular release cadence, putting out a new release every month. We hoped that this would make things more predictable for our users and easier for us to manage.

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Holographic Principle, new type gyroscope, information without light speed limit, teleportation of physical objects…

Reading time59 min
Views13K
Warning

First, all the objects and theories described in this article have the status of hypothetical at the moment. That is, the holographic hypothesis and string theories have not been experimentally confirmed many.

Second, a fundamentally new type of mechanical gyroscope with six degrees of freedom is proposed for experimental verification (base) of hypotheses. Of the two and three degrees of freedom mechanical gyroscopes known to science, this is the last of the possible types with the maximum number of degrees of freedom in the holonomic system (GYRO_6DoF).

Third, with the advent of the experimental base — the tops of the physical pyramid, string theories, and the holographic hypothesis, which is actually the foundation of the future Theory of Everything, are temporarily removed from criticism until the moment of practical implementation of the experiment and measurements.


Abstract

Even people far from physics know that the maximum possible data transmission rate of any signal is equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. It is denoted by the letter «c», and this is about 300 thousand kilometers per second. The speed of light in a vacuum is one of the fundamental physical constants. The impossibility of achieving speeds exceeding the speed of light in three-dimensional space is a deduction from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (SRT). Usually, when it is argued that SRT prohibits the transmission of the information above the speed of light, an implicit assumption is made that there is no other way other than to «bind information» to a photon and transmit it. However, there is another way. The well-known physical hypothesis — the Holographic Principle (a modern and widely used tool in theoretical physics) points to an interesting phenomenon: “Phenomena taking place in three-dimensional space can be projected onto a remote screen without losing information” — Leonard Susskind “The World as a Hologram ”[p. 3].

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Channel quality indicator for server WebRTC over TCP

Reading time5 min
Views2.7K


Publish and Play


There exist two main functions of WebRTC operation on the server side in the field of streaming video: publishing and playing. In the case of publishing, the video stream is captured from the web camera and moves from the browser to the server. In the case of playing, the stream moves in the opposite direction, from the server to the browser, is decoded and played in the browser’s HTML5 <video> element on the device’s screen.

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React benefits: A blessing for Businesses?

Reading time3 min
Views3.8K
Launched in 2013, React has been successfully used to develop 1,004,124 websites in the past 6 years. The Javascript library React JS is known for giving simple programming experience and improved performance.

It was released by Facebook to resolve the issues of coding and maintenance with their ads. It was developed with an intention to increase and manage Facebook ads traffic. React has successfully delivered the expected outcomes throughout its journey.
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Nginx's office is being searched due to Rambler Group's lawsuit. The complaintant press service confirmed the suit

Reading time5 min
Views17K
According to one of the employees Nginx's Moscow office is being searched due to the criminal case brought by Rambler Group (the official response of the company's press office to this issue and confirmation of claims against Nginx is below). The photo of the search warrant is provided as the evidence of the criminal case initiated on December 4, 2019 under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'.

Nginx search warrant


It is assumed the complaintant is Rambler, and the defendant is still an 'unidentified group of persons', and in the long run — the founder of Nginx, Igor Sysoyev.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

It is not clear why Rambler revised its 'property' only 15 years later.

Top 10 App Development companies in 2021

Reading time6 min
Views5K

The year 2020 is coming to a close as getting nearer to 2021. The end of 2020 will be the end of a decade in which app development proliferated, and in which software technology reached greater heights.


But as years come by, the importance of apps is only going to increase even further people begin to use technologies such as IoT, chatbots, AI/ML software in their daily lives.


App development includes more than just mobile apps. It also includes development for applications for other types of devices, such as PC, tablets, wearables, etc. However, the growth of mobile apps alone gives great scope for running profitable businesses in this space.



As per research by iResearch, revenue from paid mobile app downloads and in-app advertising alone reached $581 billion dollars in 2020, and reach almost near the trillion-dollar mark by 2023.

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How to cook RTSP on your website in 2020, or why the boars will not have a chance to run away

Reading time8 min
Views45K


RTSP is a simple signaling protocol which they cannot replace with anything for many years already, and it has to be admitted that they don't try really hard.


For example, we have an IP camera that supports RTSP. Anyone who has ever tested the traffic with a Sharkwire cable will tell you that first there comes DESCRIBE, then PLAY, and then the traffic begins to pour directly via RTP or wrapped in the TCP channel for instance.

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The color of the Moon and the Sun from space in terms of RGB and color temperature

Reading time17 min
Views3.6K
It would seem that the question of the color of the Moon and the Sun from space for modern science is so simple that in our century there should be no problem at all with the answer. We are talking about colors when observing precisely from space, since the atmosphere causes a color change due to Rayleigh light scattering. «Surely somewhere in the encyclopedia about this in detail, in numbers it has long been written,» you will say. Well, now try searching the Internet for information about it. Happened? Most likely no. The maximum that you will find is a couple of words about the fact that the Moon has a brownish tint, and the Sun is reddish. But you will not find information about whether these tints are visible to the human eye or not, especially the meanings of colors in RGB or at least color temperatures. But you will find a bunch of photos and videos where the Moon from space is absolutely gray, mostly in photos of the American Apollo program, and where the Sun from space is depicted white and even blue.

Especially my personal opinion is nothing but a consequence of the intervention of politics in science. After all, the colors of the Moon and the Sun from space directly relate to the flights of Americans to the Moon.

I searched through many scientific articles and books in search of information about the color of the Moon and the Sun from space. Fortunately, it turned out that even though they do not have a direct answer to RGB, there is complete information about the spectral density of the solar radiation and the reflectivity of the Moon across the spectrum. This is quite enough to get accurate colors in RGB values. You just need to carefully calculate what, in fact, I did. In this article I will share the results of calculations with you and, of course, I will tell you in detail about the calculations themselves. And you will see the Moon and the Sun from space in real colors!
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AI Robotization with InterSystems IRIS Data Platform

Reading time9 min
Views1K
Author: Sergey Lukyanchikov, Sales Engineer at InterSystems

Fixing the terminology


A robot is not expected to be either huge or humanoid, or even material (in disagreement with Wikipedia, although the latter softens the initial definition in one paragraph and admits virtual form of a robot). A robot is an automate, from an algorithmic viewpoint, an automate for autonomous (algorithmic) execution of concrete tasks. A light detector that triggers street lights at night is a robot. An email software separating e-mails into “external” and “internal” is also a robot.

Artificial intelligence (in an applied and narrow sense, Wikipedia interpreting it differently again) is algorithms for extracting dependencies from data. It will not execute any tasks on its own, for that one would need to implement it as concrete analytic processes (input data, plus models, plus output data, plus process control). The analytic process acting as an “artificial intelligence carrier” can be launched by a human or by a robot. It can be stopped by either of the two as well. And managed by any of them too.

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The Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Education System: Everything One Should Know

Reading time4 min
Views4.9K
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Artificial Intelligence refers to the theory of computer systems or human-made robots programmed with performing tasks as humans, such as learning, generalization, and reasoning. With this ability, AI has become a significant part of human lives. Similarly, AI and the education & tutoring web solutions are inseparable from being observed by the astounding inventions enabling machines to mimic human roles.
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СodeSide. The new game for Russian AI Cup

Reading time3 min
Views2.5K


The AI Cup community and Mail.ru Group in collaboration with Codeforces.com invite you to the real battle! Get ready for the sleepless nights and calloused hands — take part in Russian AI Cup, which is one of the most challenging and vivid artificial intelligence programming competitions in the world. Believe us, managers of this madness did their best to create the game you'd want to play.


To become part of the competition, you need Internet access, computer, creativity, and enthusiasm for being a part of this extraordinary Cup. By the way, you might need some coffee. Welcome!

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Dynamic CDN for Low Latency WebRTC Streaming with Stream Access Control

Reading time4 min
Views1.4K


In the first part, we have deployed a simple dynamic CDN for broadcasting WebRTC streams to two continents and have proved on the example of a countdown timer that the latency in this type of CDN is actually low.


In the second part, we have incorporated dedicated servers into the CDN for performing the task of transcoding in order to provide good broadcast quality to our viewers based on the devices they use and the channel quality. In this manner, all published streams in our CDN are available to all the viewers.


Now, assume that a company is starting to introduce its monetization strategy where a number of streams should be available for free and the rest on a subscription basis. Or, for example, webinars for in-house staff training are broadcasted simultaneously, but each subsidiary has a separate stream, and disclosing the sales techniques used in Southeast Asia to the managers from CIS countries is undesirable.

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AI-assisted IntelliSense for your team’s codebase

Reading time3 min
Views3.1K
Visual Studio IntelliCode uses machine learning to offer useful, contextually-rich code completion suggestions as you type, allowing you to learn APIs more quickly and code faster. Although IntelliCode’s base model was trained on over 3000 top open source C# GitHub repositories, it does not include all the custom types in your code base. To produce useful, high-fidelity, contextually-rich suggestions, the model needs to be tailored to unique types or domain-specific APIs that aren’t used in open source code. To make IntelliSense recommendations based on the wisdom of your team’s codebase, the model needs to train with your team’s code.

Earlier this year, we extended our ML model training capabilities beyond our initial Github trained base model to enable you to personalize your IntelliCode completion suggestions by creating team models trained on your own code.

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Dynamic CDN for Low Latency WebRTC Streaming with Transcoding

Reading time5 min
Views1.7K


In the first part we have deployed a simple dynamic CDN for broadcasting WebRTC streams to two continents and have proved on the example of a countdown timer that the latency in this kind of CDN is actually low.


However, besides low latency, it is important to provide good broadcast quality to users. After all, this is what they are paying for. In real life the channels between Edge servers and users can differ in bandwidth capacity and quality. For example, we are publishing a 720p stream at 2 Mbps, the user is playing it on an Android phone using 3G connection in an unstable signal reception area and the 360p maximum resolution that provides smooth picture at 400 Mbps is 360p.

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