Because it’s Friday: Powerpoint Punchcards

A “Turing Machine” — a conceptual data processing machine that processes instructions encoded on a linear tape — is capable of performing the complete range of computations of any modern computer (though not necessarily in a useful amount of time). Tom Wildenhain demonstrates the Turing-competeness of Powerpoint, where the “tape” is a series of punch-cards controlled by the animations feature:

Of the many things you can do with Power...point, but probably shouldn’t do, this ranks right up there.
That’s all from us for this week. See you back here on Monday, and have a great weekend!

Using the Payments Request API

The Payment Request API helps customer and sellers complete the checkout process more seamlessly. Whether you’re developing a website, a UWP app, or a bot, you can use the APIs to provide a faster and more consistent payment process. Watch the video and then learn more:

Making Decisions with Data – For Machine Learning Success, Follow the Lessons Learned in Embedded Analytics

Machine learning has been touted as a huge boon for businesses. Research by Infosys found that companies anticipate a 39 per cent boost to their revenues on average by 2020, from their investments in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

The prospects for machine learning involve adding smarter processes into applications that are used every day, in an effort to...

Make pleasingly parallel R code with rxExecBy

Some things are easy to convert from a long-running sequential process to a system where each part runs at the same time, thus reducing the required time overall. We often call these “embarrassingly parallel” problems, but given how easy it is to reduce the time it takes to execute them by converting them into a parallel process, “pleasingly parallel” may well be a more appropriate name.
Using the foreach package (available on CRA...N) is one simple way of speeding up pleasingly parallel problems using R. A foreach loop is much like a regular for loop in R, and by default will run each iteration in sequence (again, just like a for loop). But by registering a parallel “backend” for foreach, you can run many (or maybe even all) iterations at the same time, using multiple processors on the same machine, or even multiple machines in the cloud.
For many applications, though, you need to provide a different chunk of data to each iteration to process. (For example, you may need to fit a statistical model within each country — each iteration will then only need the subset for one country.) You could just pass the entire data set into each iteration and subset it there, but that’s inefficient and may even be impractical when dealing with very large datasets sitting in a remote repository. A better idea would be to leave the data where it is, and run R within the data repository, in parallel.
Microsoft R 9.1 introduces a new function, rxExecBy, for exactly this purpose. When your data is sitting in SQL Server or Spark, you can specify a set of keys to partition the data by, and an R function (any R function, built-in or user-defined) to apply to the partitions. The data doesn’t actually move: R runs directly on the data platform. You can also run it on local data in various formats

If software eats everything, are network engineers on the menu?
If you’re a network engineer, don’t rush out and learn a programming language. To compete in the new world of software-defined networking, it might be more important to start thinking like a programmer.

That was one of the ideas that emerged this week from an Open Networking User Group debate that generated healthy feedback from users in the audience.

Power BI Pride 2017: share your pride with the world!

It’s about pride – the pride you have as a Power BI customer, partner, or employee. It’s about pride in your work, and in the work of your fellow business intelligence experts. Last year we asked for insights on what you love the most about Power BI, and we shared some of your amazing responses at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit. Now we’re excited to announce that Power BI Pride is here again for 2017. This year, we wan...t to hear specifically about what makes any of the top 10 features of Power BI (as voted on by the community) special or impactful or useful for you. To participate, create a short video of yourself talking about one of the top features and submit it to us by May 14, 2017.

Inventory and Store System – Part 5.2 (Finishing the Inventory & Buying Equipment) | .GAME

In this episode, we are going to pick up where we left off by wrapping up the logic for displaying items in the players inventory. First, we will fill up the inventory slots with existing items that the player has, then we will populate their currency. After that, we’ll make it so that the player can buy items from the merchant by hooking up an onClick event via code.

Note: After this v...ideo was recorded I created a few icons. You can get them off of the GitHub repo here.

Your car will eventually live-stream video of your driving to the cloud
As self-driving cars become more advanced with a greater number of onboard computers, sensors, cameras and WiFi, the amount of data is expected to balloon, providing automakers, insurers and others with rich information to harvest.

A single autonomous car could generate as much as 100GB of data every second, said Barclays analyst Brian Johnson, in a note published Wednesday.