Continuing on the container theme, this Stephen O'Grady post (which includes the below graphic by way of @cra) highlights the importance of unifying across upstream communities and technologies in order to create platforms that are useful to and consumable by ordinary enterprises. (The Twitters and Facebooks can roll their own. You probably can’t–or at least shouldn’t.) This is one of the things that we’re doing with OpenShift (CICD, containers, container orchestration, etc.) whether you’re talking developer-oriented use cases or ops-oriented ones.

This article loses no small amount of credibility with the first sentence. There is very little about Siri’s operation that I’d describe as “capably handling natural language queries.” Alexa does better in the voice recognition department but, like Siri, it breaks down pretty quickly once you leave the domain of precisely-worded incantations to perform specific tasks.

That said, as I was discussing with Lew Tucker at the last Linux Collaboration Summit, I’m somewhat hopeful that AI virtual assistant could be a real killer app within a relatively short period of time–by which I loosely mean software that will be able to perform purely digital tasks with the ability of a marginally competent, if not particularly imaginative or inventive, human virtual assistant. (More on this thought to come.)

I can slightly buy the idea that a lot of political data journalism is about predicting horse races rather than getting at deeper truths–whatever those may be. However, the mostly anti-data argument isn’t helped by: “It’s like predicting what moment a ship is going to come into port. You could expend enormous effort on timetables, fuel efficiency, weather forecasts, and barnacle fluid dynamics, or you could just wait until the dang thing arrives.” 

I can imagine a great many reasons why I might want to optimize the timing of supply chains and other processes whether or not a pundit can or not.

This is a piece that I wrote for opensource.com that discusses open data and how you might use some of that data.

Catch up on the latest OpenStack happenings in Opensource.com’s weekly open source cloud roundup.

To this I add, continuing the container theme that dominates this issue, that on the server side the container ecosystem has emerged as another way to virtualize applications even though containers started life as “operating system virtualization.” In effect, much of the dream of application virtualization has been achieved or is being achieved–even if it doesn’t look much like the original vision of app virtualization from a technology perspective.